Dungeons & Dragons White Box 11

The last post was not that popular. I'll try to cool it down.

As before, page 17 lacks any text so we'll just deal with it as a whole. And just to keep a nice face on it, the less that's said about the art here, the better. Thank gawd there was a label.

Time and time again I've tried to carry forward the use of "veteran," "warrior" and so on as standardised names for class-level states. Once upon a time I had every lable from every class in the original Players Handbook memorised, but in my games the players just wouldn't buy in. After a while I gave in and said "2nd level fighter" like everyone else. I thought it was a good idea. No one else I ever played with thought so.

The 5+1 HD for the swashbuckler is odd, but not really a big deal. It's a bit out of place that the previous page ceased to give experience for the 11th level wizard... but here we have wizards above 11th. The same is true of the lord, which needs 240,000 x.p. How much does the lord, 10th level need? No idea. It's just hole after hole after hole with this content.

It's one reason I don't think we can dump this all on Gygax's shoulders. True enough, I recognise his prose style, but there are at least three different recognisable styles in this work; and the experience discrepancies between page 16 and 17 are a case in point. Page 18 discusses experience but doesn't settle this question; page 19 has a heading, "Levels above those listed" and this doesn't address it either. Yet it makes it clear that there are 13th level patriarchs and 17th level fighters. How much experience does it take to get there?  Not actually said. You and I know... we've played other games and we have other versions to pull from. What did someone who didn't know the makers personally do in 1975?

Is it worth hammering at these deficiencies, page after page?  Perhaps not. But look how many there are. I can't write one of these posts without finding four of them. And so far, we're on page 17. There are 108 pages altogether.

A sensible person would just stop. When I used to talk on my blog about how shit this set was, I got all kinds of pushback, telling me I didn't understand, I didn't appreciate what it was, I wasn't properly respectful, a whole host of things. But exactly how does one just ignore this many errors? If your grocery store made this many errors in pricing, organisation, labelling of things and so on, you'd find another grocery. If your maid cleaned your house with this level of attention, you wouldn't tolerate it. If your boss treated your paycheque this way, don't pretend you'd just overlook it. I really love the game of D&D, and I want it respected. Is it so much to ask that we just admit what plainly visible here?

Experience Points: Experience points are awarded to players by the referee with appropriate bonuses or penalties for prime requisite scores. As characters meet monsters in mortal combat and defeat them, and when they obtain various forms of treasure (money, gems, jewelry, magical items, etc.), they gain "experience." This adds to their experience point total, gradually moving them upwards through the levels.

Gains in experience points will be relative; thus an 8th-level Magic-User operating on the 5th dungeon level would be awarded 5/8 experience. Let us assume he gains 7,000 Gold Pieces by defeating a troll (which is a 7th-level monster, as it has over 6 hit dice). Had the monster been only a 5th-level one, experience would be awarded on a 5/8 basis as already stated, but as the monster guarding the treasure was a 7th-level one, experience would be awarded on a 7/8 basis thus; 7,000 GP + 700 for killing the troll = 7,700 divided by 8 = 962.5 x 7 = 6,037.5. Experience points are never awarded above a 1 for 1 basis, so even if a character defeats a higher-level monster he will not receive experience points above the total of treasure combined with the monster's kill value.

Only Gygax would see this as eminently logical. Tell me honestly: any of you out there ever played this rule?

It takes a certain dissonance to assume that all monsters with more than 6 hit dice are made alike, or that a "dungeon level" can be fabricated to such perfection that a mathematical calculation can be practical in dispensing experience to players who will — should we try to explain this rule — likely not react that well. Even if we want to do the math, it's additional time spent dragging the momentum of the game down, while the DM patiently performs long-division twice, once to get the ratio right and then to distribute the final number to the party. Thank gawd the calculator was invented by 1973. Though the affordable version just barely so (the TI-30, Oct 1972). It's possible that invention gave Gygax the motivation to invent reasons to use it. Just as we now invent reasons to use new apps.

I don't know what to say. Anybody want to argue that this isn't just ludicrous enough that we can't just move on?

It is also recommended that no more experience points be awarded for any single adventure than will suffice to move the character upwards one level. Thus a "veteran" (1st level) gains what would ordinarily be 5,000 experience points; however, as this would move him upwards two levels, the referee should award only sufficient points to bring him to "warrior" (2nd level), say 3,999 if the character began with 0 experience points.

Granted. I imposed a rule like this in my campaign also. My only contention is the word "adventure" here because it suggests that a whole narrative series of events must occur before experience is given. Chances are, though, that he means one combat, just as any of us might. It's an ill-defined word, but given that no glossary is attached to this work, and the words are used interchangeably as though we came out of the womb with the knowledge of how to interpret them, this is the best we have.

However we frame this, we must admit that there have always been some — and yes, going back to the 1970s — who could never play this game because they couldn't get past the books. They didn't have the imagination to fill in the gaps, or surmise that it probably took either 360,000 or 480,000 x.p. to become a "10th level lord." Not everyone is that clever. And true enough, we've pointed out that these books expected you to have a brain in order to play; they assumed you had made sense of the rules of Tractics and Napoleonics, so you could manage this. But after the game became popular, the consequence was that a lot of "not-brain" people got involved, and wanted to join the rush, who also thought dragons were cool and liked the art of the Dragon Magazine and who didn't see why they shouldn't also belong just because the rules couldn't be pieced together rationally.

There's a problem that arises with that and maybe you're familiar with it. If people can't play a popular game "right," or even remotely related to some kind of right that maybe you're familiar with, there's nothing to stop them from playing it wrong. I don't mean a little bit wrong... I mean totally wrong. As in, um, assuming the game is about pretending to actually be the character and speak in purplish language, while getting rid of the rolls altogether, and experience altogether, and limitations altogether, and so on. Once the rules are loose enough, and once there's no clear standard for what "right" looks like, players can take the game anywhere. And where a game is popular, those who "don't get it" far, far outnumber those who do. They show up in droves for game cons and tournaments, they start whining that the system doesn't work the way they want it to, they complain about how boring the combat system is and "why can't my character be a minotaur or a dragon" and a thousand other questions that, eventually, ripped this game into tiny pieces that are mostly incomprehensible outside a single game group.

I can go to the remotest parts of the world and set up a chess board and play anywhere with anyone... we don't even need to speak the same language. But I can't play the game that's being played at the next table at the nearby gamestore, when we all speak English. Maybe the rest of you don't see that as a problem. I do. And it's a problem because a group of students and ex-students felt so lazy they couldn't define the words they casually threw around in a text, while inventing unbelievable nit-picky math problems that had to be solved just so. That doesn't see a little bit, um, stupid?  Like not knowing whether to put the cart behind a horse or a sheep?

It's evidence that they DID have the room to clarify these things. They COULD have taken the time to do so. They had room for Gygax's bullshit. That could have been cut and replaced with a two page glossary, hardly an out of place thing at the time. For all I know, there's a glossary somewhere in these books. When I find it, if I find it, I bet the definitions there won't fit the use of the words here. We've already seen multiple examples where the same word means different things.

See, I would pull it back. But it's really hard for me to turn a blind eye to this stuff. I love this game too much.