Dungeons & Dragons White Box 26

Moving on from spells, finishing the Men & Magic book with this post.

MAGICAL RESEARCH:

Both Magic-Users and Clerics may attempt to expand on the spells listed (as applicable by class). This is a matter of time and investment. The level of the magic required to operate the spell (determination by referee) dictates the initial investment. Investment for 1st level is 2,000 Gold Pieces, 2nd level is 4,000 Gold Pieces, 3rd level is 8,000 Gold Pieces, 4th level is 16,000 Gold Pieces, 5th level is 32,000 Gold Pieces, and 6th level is 64,000 Gold Pieces. The time required is one week per spell level. For every amount equal to the basic investment spent there is a 2076 chance of success, cumulative. An investment of 10,000 Gold Pieces in order to develop a new 1st level spell, for example, has a 100% chance of success after one game week.

The level of the spell researched must be consistent with the level of the Magic-User or Cleric involved, i.e. the character must be able to use spells equal to or above the level of the one he desires to create.

Once a new spell is created the researcher may include it in the list appropriate to its level. He may inform others of it, thus enabling them to utilize it, or he may keep it to himself.

As writing, it's a comprehensible rule, which is saying a great deal at this point. And the structure offers a reasonable benefit to the imaginative player: if you can think of a spell that you feel ought to be in the list, here is a bit of agency permitting you to add that spell. I'm completely in support of this idea. As I've said, spells must come from somewhere within the game setting... and it's therefore reasonable that players, too, have every opportunity to place themselves right there along with personages that would later become part of the game's lexicon: Leomund, Mordenkainen, Tenser, Bigby, Otiluke and so on.

As game design, the rule fails. It is perhaps not the time to say so. I've focused on the system's shortcomings, what it's failed to explain, what it's failed to include, where the flaws in design occur... and arguably, there's no flaw in design here. I see no reason why this rule shouldn't work as written.

My issue is that it fails to provide a meaningful obstacle between the designer and the newly acquired spell. True enough, the first imposed limit is, "can the player think of a spell?" There's nothing in these rules to explain parameters on spell design, focus, level, or what the spell ought to include, or — gawd help us — maybe something about what "duration" or "range" means in the context that they're used. But if the game writers can think of spells, it stands to reason that some players also can. Some are liable to be good at it, if they wish to be. Most, I suspect, wouldn't know where to start. I've had only two spells designed by players in my game setting, and after the fact, after they had the spells, they discovered there wasn't much occasion to use them. And after 50 years of published spell design, most of what's out there now is splitting hairs with regards to benefit. However, let's push all that upon a shelf, as it's not what I want to address.

Two hurdles are proposed: cost and time. Time isn't a hurdle at all. "Game time" passes instantaneously if so desired. Players don't have to physically work to invent the spell, there's no skull sweat or careful pouring of bowls into vials that needs doing; the players snap their fingers and say, "we let six weeks go by." That's the same as letting one week go by, so increasing the number of weeks is meaningless. And since the players don't run their characters long enough to effectively age, there's no upper limit that's approached in spending six weeks. Now, if we said the spell would require six years, that might be something. The player might look at their 33 y.o. character and wonder how many years, really, they can expend in this kind of research. 

Consider a real time cost: Pasteur worked on germ theory from the 1850s to the mid-1880s. Lister needed 15 to 20 years to refine and overcome scepticism regarding his antiseptic surgery. Herschel spent 50 years of disciplined observation to develop stellar photometry, create a catalog of double-stars and revisions to instrumentation. Wallace spent 8 continuous years collecting specimens and 7 years refining his ideas; Darwin needed 22 years to reach the point Wallace had, when he received Wallace's letter in 1858 and realised they'd come to the same conclusions. Cuvier needed 5 years of relentless examination of living and fossil animals, then another 12 years of lectures, work and dissections to achieve his 1812 work, Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe. Lyell's work in geology starts in 1818 as a student under Buckland; he needed 12 years to achieve Principles of Geology, then he spend another 38 fixing the errors in it; a process that still goes on.

Yet a mage proposes to invent a spell that produces an unprecedented manipulation of reality, neatly packaged for instant use — along the lines of a death spell or control weather — in six weeks. Most people can't even learn to drive from scratch in that amount of time. Six weeks isn't "research." It's a long vacation.

That leaves the other obstacle: gold. But this isn't a scarce resource, either. From 1975's Blackmoor, the high priestess Toska Rusa is described as controlling wealth equal to ""17,000 gold and hundreds of gems and pieces of jewelry worth an additional 70,000 gold pieces." The Temple of the Frog includes a jewellery adorned pulpit valued at 100,000 gold, a chest in the company office containing 3,000 platinum, thirteen gems valued at 1,000 gold each and a personal treasure of 16,000. This just begins to show that five-figure hauls of treasure were part of the time-period's design culture.

Sorry, I can't actually say I know this; I couldn't give two hoots about what Blackmoor has in it, I just need an early example of adventuring logic (this one from 1975) to give a sense of how the designers of the White Box viewed treasure. So the above was lifted from the internet. If it's wrong, I wouldn't know that. I do know that later modules, like KotB, offered masses of treasure even in adventures designed for 1st to 3rd level parties. The point being is that the 64,000 g.p. for a 6th level spell research could be acquired several times over just from one adventure.

As a DM, I don't give this kind of treasure and still my players, over a year of play, casually accumulate several hundred thousand gold pieces, which they basically bury until they have something to spend it on. This is because if a combined party of five character all need around 250,000 each to reach name level, by the time they do so that's going to accumulate half or more of that amount times five at the end. The players are required to do so. That's what the rules ask.

Even if you charge players 100 g.p. per level per month, as the AD&D handbook demands, in two months of game time players can justifiably collect a dozen times that much... easily enough to account for six whole weeks of time spent sitting around waiting for the mage to invent a new spell.

All this makes the spell invention rule meaningless. Money is hay, time is air, the players are thus rewarded once in experience gained, again in the wealth itself, and a third time with increasing their power over and above the levels they advance. It's just not an effective obstacle as written.

BOOKS OF SPELLS:

Characters who employ spells are assumed to acquire books containing the spells they can use, one book for each level. If a duplicate set of such books is desired, the cost will be the same as the initial investment for research as listed above, i.e. 2,000, 4,000, 8,000, etc. Loss of these books will require replacement at the above expense.

Apparently, the term "spellbook" hasn't been invented yet.

As before, this is more or less fair as a written rule. A little more clarity could be added as regards to what physical purpose the books serve — does the mage physically read from the book to cast the spell? We haven't proposed the concept of "memorisation" here, though I understand that Vance, of whom I've not read so much as a sentence, even quoted by someone else to my knowledge, incorporated this into his literature. But since Vance doesn't exist in the White Box at all, and his name and his works isn't quoted here, there's no reason to assume he has anything to do with it.

Many games, particularly boardgames, include features that exist solely to remove money or power tokens from the player's possession. Having to pay to get out of jail, or $75 for luxury tax, or 10% of cash on hand to a maximum of $200 in Monopoly all exist to ensure that with a run of bad luck, a player who seems to be winning can be overcome and made to fall further back in the player ranks. These setbacks aren't very effective in Monopoly, or most boardgames, because if they are, they create disenchantment with the game. My mother used to bitch because every time the family played the Game of Life in the 1970s, she always landed on the space that made her pay $150,000. She probably didn't actually land on it more than twice or three times, but she had a fluid memory for such things so that it always seemed to be something that befel only her and no one else. A lot of people view board games this way, as I learned later playing such games with adults in non-chain coffee houses in the 1990s. When those still existed.

It's called a "sink" mechanic. It's there to bleed off accumulated advantage... in this case of the mage, who gets the most powerful spells and later becomes the most powerful character class. So, naturally, mages have to pay a fee to be mages that no other class has to pay... "because." But here, it doesn't even work for that purpose.

The resource has to be scarce to matter, and we've already established the gold isn't, and the whole thing can be sabotaged by a decent-minded jointly supportive party merely deciding, "Okay, let's everyone kick in a fifth of the mage's spellbook." There, fuck you Gygax, the mage pays the same everyone else does, it's a cheap "pay the game tax" feature and it doesn't mean anything. The mage isn't punished, everyone is. And to no real purpose.

The presence of the sink exposes the deeper flaw in early D&D design: the rules assume adversarial scarcity in a cooperative game. Sinks have meaning when the players compete against each other, as in board games. The don't mean anything where the players work conjointly toward a shared goal. Gygax writes gold costs as though every player exists in a vacuum — a single character footing single-character burdens. But the moment the rules give players the ability to act collaboratively, the economics dissolve. An economic sink that can be trivially collectivised is not an economic sink. It’s just a tax on the solitary player in a system designed for groups.

Since the books are accounted for in the silly weight table scheme on page 15, they aren't even an encumbrance problem. Essentially, pay to play, then forget, because the DM will so long as the silly things are still on your character sheet.

That's the end of Men & Magic. We pick up with Monsters & Treasure on page 3.

Most of this is self-explanatory for the readers, so we can skip it. I'm going to get a complaint out of my system, however, so we can just move on.

In professional journalism, and this applies as much to the United States as Canada, it's not appropriate to capitalise game terms as though they were proper nouns, which are names used for an individual person, place or organisation. Animals, for example, are words, not titles. We would write "spotted owl" or "prairie rattlesnake." There is no precedent in any style guide that would dictate that it was proper to capitalise both words in "Heavy Horse" for example, or "Large Insects," both of which are real world examples. Thus, "gray ooze" shouldn't be capitalised, nor should "Dwarves" or "Elves," since we wouldn't in publishing terms write "Human" with a capital H. It doesn't matter, except that once again, it's evidence of how truly ignorant and lacking in the sense of finding someone who knew how words work when deciding to publish this work.

Just had to get that out of my system.

As near as I can tell, "number appearing" does not appear anywhere else in the three books, while the sole note to it, explaining it's presence here, merely says, "Referee's option: Increase or decrease according to party concerned (used primarily only for outdoor encounters)." Which means, essentially, make up any number you want. Back with with the 15th post, this comment gave to suggest that these numbers have some meaning, but it's plainly clear that they don't. What's more, from later game examples of these monsters appearing in modules and such, the numbers given here are never used, nor are the commensurate ones that appear in the 1977 AD&D Monster Manual, either, which reflect these but do not ever seem to apply in game.

The numbers plainly do not exist for a party of 5 characters entering the first level of a dungeon to encounter, quote, "30-300" orcs, which would be a ridiculous over match for the party. From 1981, the Keep on the Borderlands (again, with the 1977 Manual stating 30-300), the "Orc Lair" (B) has a "watcher" by himself, then 4 orc guards, then a common room with 12 male orcs, 18 females and 9 children, then a single leader in the orc leader's room. That's 18 one-hit dice orcs and 27 others whom the rules state, "do not fight." We have to include the orcs form the other orc lair (C) to get all the way up to 30.

On a sand-table at 1:20 scale, "30–300 orcs" might represent a company or battalion in the wilderness. In a 10-foot corridor that five PCs are meant to explore, it's nonsense.

The second note, to the "move in inches" column, reads, "Number after slash is flying speed. Creature may "charge" also and get bonus to normal move." We've discussed flying before. Here, it's time to discuss the speed that's actually needed to get a creature, as opposed to a mage with a spell, airborne.

The table states that a hippogriff's normal movement speed is 18"... double that speed would not provide enough lift of air over and above the wings to allow that creature to obtain or sustain flight. That is, if we don't want to just say that it has "magical wings," in which case, jeebus, couldn't the magic be a little more fucking magical?  The attack speed of a cheetah is 31 meters (34 yards) per second, if you'd like something to compare with. That's over land.

If we take something considerably lighter than a horse mass for a hippogriff, and handwave the square-cube problem and just approximate it (there's no way I'm doing the math with you slavering bastards around, since you'll rip me a new one if I try), then the cruising speed in flight of a hippogriff has to be in the realm of 25 to 45 mph. That's way slower than a cheetah, about 70 mph. In game terms, this is, at the bottom end, about 240" per turn. That's basing its speed on a condor, as a real world example.

You'd think that magic would accomplish at least what real wings would.

And why, pray, are flying creatures the only ones who can charge?

The third note reads, "See separate paragraphs regarding each monster for various possibilities." This note applies to two monsters: dragons and lycanthropes. The former because there are white, black, green, blue, red and golden dragons (why "golden" if not "reddish" "bluish" or "greenish"?), and the latter because there are werewolves, wereboars, weretigers and werebears. These are copied here in the order they appear in the lists on pages 12 and 14, where the writers have never heard of "alphabetical order," something a grade four student making a list would automatically do.

But the more annoying problem this highlights is that if, in a game, you're tossing a bunch of gnomes at the party, you have the description of the monster on page 16, but all the stats on page 4. This was a deliberate design choice, and is employed with every monster, including with dragons and lycanthropes, because we still have to jump back to the above chart if we want to know the creatures AC, move, hit dice, % in lair (if we even use it) and type or amount of treasure. As a dungeon master (note, small letters, NOT a proper noun to me, even if the company does choose to trademark it with capitals), this is extremely annoying and aggravating, on levels that are hard to describe. I don't have enough to do when running a game without having to flip back and forth through a paper-bound book because the writers can't put the damn stats together with the creature description.

Efficiency is and has always been a disaster where D&D is concerned. Even when collections of tables were slammed together at the backs of books, the separation of these tables from a brief explanation of these tables in such gatherings just repeats the problem. There never was any logic to the AD&D DMG or Players Handbook, we just got to know where things were through a lot of repetition over a long period of time. While at least the 1977 Monster Manual was alphabetical, there are large sections in that book where sub-alphabetical lists are placed under other monsters, which breaks up the clean logic of the work. One reason that DMs have said it's impossible to know all the rules is because "the rules" never occur as a straight, rational list, as they might with any other game, but are always folded into"bricolage," a pile of notes, half-rules, digressions, war-gaming leftovers, marginalia, folksy commentary, play examples and obstructing artworks. Procedures are never easily at hand, they have to be excavated; the mechanics are forever a jumble of tables that occur scattered throughout three or more books, without any sense it seems (for example, combat rules appear in the Player's Handbook that aren't addressed at all in the combat section of the DMG), under headings they have nothing to do with; the indexing is atrocious; words like "evil" aren't defined at all, and wow, does that problem EVER apply to later AD&D, which constantly uses terms (role-playing, personae, milieu, healing, hit points, experience) frequently without ever addressing how these terms actually fit into the game's setting or design. There just there, to be assumed, to be reused, and never to be defined.

This is far enough today.