Dungeons & Dragons White Box 28

I was sent an alternate copy of the White Box set to the one I've been using... but while I appreciate that there is a variant out there (and probably not just the one), this version has the benefit that anyone can follow the link and examine the version for themselves. So I'm going to continue using this one. I last left off on December 1st atop page 6, discussing the unlikelihood of five or so adventurers fighting more than a hundred bandits and just winning, when most likely the defenders would be grappled and hauled to the ground. That post got no comments, so I'll assume the argument wasn't popular.

There are details left about bandits I didn't address, so I'll start with those here. I'd like to use a screen shot of the text rather than writing it out, because it allows the demonstration of something odd.

Does it not seem odd that the creators provided information listed as "composition of force," but they also felt compelled to include "armor class" and "movement in inches" as separate lines, only to tell the reader to look at the paragraph immediately below? Did they suppose that if they'd only included "composition of force", which lists armour class, the reader would think, "but what about armour class? Shouldn't there be a separate line referencing where I find the paragraph I'm looking at."

I'm curious about it... did they not see the issue? Did they do it deliberately to fill space?

Too, why are the armours in the composition of force in brackets? Why is it not "short bow or lightcrossbow, leather armour"? A short bow is a piece of equipment, armour is equipment... why not just list all equipment in the same way.

It's not quibbling. I'm merely incomprehensible about the logic in the writer's heads as they laid these things out in this way. It's just weird.

BERSERKERS: Berserkers are simply men mad with battle-lust. They will have only Fighting-Men with them as explained in the paragraphs above regarding Bandits. They never check morale. When fighting normal men they add +2 to their dice score when rolling due to their ferocity.

Armor Class: Leather Armor.

Movement in Inches: 12"

Hit Dice: | die + 1/man.

Alignment: Neutrality.

Berserkers, of course, are an institutional part of the game and as such are defacto expected. I've run them, I have no problem with them. An issue with things that do calcify, however, is that the question stops being asked, why or how does this battle-lust manifest? From what? We assume they're ordinary people most of the time, that this is only a condition of being in battle... in which case, how do I encourage it as a player, either in myself or in others? Is it a strictly social phenomenon, something associated with groups like Vikings or Mongols? Is it taught to children? Where the Ottomans able to wrest it out of Christian children who were raised to be Janissaries? Can it be imposed magically? Why isn't there a potion of beserking, or a spell that causes fighters to berserk? (haste isn't the same thing). Why is the phenomenon not known or addressed at all?

It's an interesting concept. I know of nothing in 1st edition that addresses it, though I haven't looked at the Barbarian class from the Unearthed Arcana in more than 20 years. 4th edition treats it as an inherent part of the barbarian class, with rage a controllabel, repeatable combat state with triggers, durations and consequences. 5th makes it an explicitly psychological and physiological state, with uses per day, exhaustion, focus... as something that requires focus to enter. But there's still little interest in how it's produced. Historically, culturally, even mythically, berserk rage is contingent: ritual, drugs, trauma, social conditioning, religious belief. None of that is expressed in the game's rules. I wonder why not.

BRIGANDS: Same as Bandits except +1 morale and Chaos alignment.

Curious. If half of bandits are chaotic (see above), how is the chaos alignment of a "brigand" different than the chaos alignment of a bandit? Aren't we just saying that brigands have  +1 morale and much be chaotic? But since morale derives from the emergent property of loyalty, cohesiaon, expectation and shared risk, how is it that a group of "chaotic" persons have a higher morale? Logically, given the definition of chaos, brigands ought to be less stable, more "chaotic" by definition... except that "chaos" does not mean what you think it means. It's not a description of behaviour, it's a club you belong to.

DERVISHES: Dervishes are fanatically religious nomads who fight as Berserkers, never checking morale, with +1 on hit dice, and otherwise as Nomads (below), except they will always be led by an 8th-10th level Cleric and are Lawful in alignment.

Just to beat the drum, if you're a 7th level cleric, you can't gather dervishes together under you? Do they just know you're not high enough level?

I'm such a nit-picky bastard. Why give the heading "Dervishes" if the first word you're going to say after the heading is "Dervishes?" Why not write, "DEVISHES: berserkers who are fanatically religious"? This says that they're berserkers who, except for being berserkers, they're nomads. Which is a wonderful linguistic architecture that goes a long way around the barn to keep from saying, "Berserker Nomads are..."

Moreover, since chaotic doesn't mean "behaves chaotically," how is "lawful" even relevant at all. The books themselves grant no meaningful characteristics to these alignments, so why not just ditch the thing altogether. Ah, but I digress. Dervishes belong to the "lawful club." 

NOMADS: These raiders of the deserts or steppes are similar to Bandits as far as super-normal types and most other characteristics go:

If they're desert dwellers, where are they getting the wood for lances from? Moreover, I've watched an awful lot of documentaries about various desert peoples reaching back to the ancient Babylonians, and I've never encountered these lances spoken of here. A "lance" is not a weapon used in the Bible, which is largely about desert people and includes quite a lot of words about fighting. Note there's no slingers here; slings are made from animal hide and stones, so they're pretty easy to make in the desert. But nope, no slings. Desert dwellers don't use "shock mounted weapons" when they fight; the fight across distances, since everything is flat and there are few obstructions. The kind of horses that are bred by desert dwellers aren't large enough to use shock tactics, because water and food are scarce. Desert warfare, by contrast, overwhelmingly favours missiles, harassment, mobility, and attrition. Javelins, bows, slings, and light spears dominate precisely because they are cheap, replaceable, and compatible with dispersed fighting.

In addition, as throughout the system, the things depicted are not given any social, economic, cultural or motivational weight. Why do they exist? They exist to be nomads and to wait for players to arrive so that a fight can occur. This is as deep as the game gets in worldbuilding.

BUCCANEERS: Buccaneers are water-going Bandits in all respects except composition of their force.

Composition of Force: Light Foot = 60%; Light Crossbow = 30%; and Heavy Crossbow (Chain Mail) 10%, crossbows are heavy.

PIRATES: Pirates are the same as Buccaneers except they are aligned with Chaos.

I adore the "bandits on water" explanation... but most of all, that the "composition" does not include anything about ships at all. At all. It's stunning that the thing they need to get around in is not considered a necessary part of their description. The sea, the ships, navigation, logistics, crews, boarding tactics, ports, piracy as an economic activity, even the basic question of how these people move from place to place, are all treated as extraneous, because none of that fits cleanly into the inherited combat taxonomy. The omission tells you that the presence of peoples here are designed to fight like those ancient colosseum battles where they'd flood the arena, float ships on it and then portray a "sea battle" for the crowd. The sea is a backdrop that the DM wheels in to give the players a new "flavour" of battle, before the curtain call and the next bit of scenery is shoved to the fore.

CAVEMEN: Cavemen fight as 2nd-level Fighting-Men, armed with weapons equal to Morning Stars. They have no armor but get 2 Hit Dice. They have -1 morale. Alignment is always Neutrality.

Which, yes, means this.

The assumption, of course, is that in 12,000 years of human advancement between the beginning of the Neolithic period and the Medieval, all the technological advancements that humans have imposed still mean that a well-fed, armoured, metal-wielding fighter of the 13th century is weaker by half than an untrained, uneducated cro-magnon, while the weapon that fighter is using is no better that a club wielded by such. This assumption is based on the idea that civilised persons are soft, indulgent, decadent, while pre-history specimens are healthier, tougher, even super-human. Which, I'll just throw in because it's fun, was a central basis for much of Nazi-science, lingering around still in the 1970s and even today.

Yes, for shits and giggles, I just called Gygax a Nazi.

Apart from that, though, the notion that humans have been weakened by culture was a strong motif in the mid-20th century, coming from lots of sources that weren't actually Nazis. It's an inherited myth, especially in pulp fiction, survivalist fantasy, and certain pseudo-anthropological traditions. D&D did not invent it, but it adopts it here without hesitation or explanation, because it assumes the reader already understands this to be true.

That's the last human, so a good place to start. This same collection was re-imposed in AD&D... but what matters is how completely useless the list is for describing the vast majority of human beings. We have no mention of villagers, rural peasants, traders, soldiers, artisans, labourers... who apparently don't make good combatants and therefore are unimportant in setting or game terms. Yet most of the interactions the players are going to have is with these people, as they pass through villages, talk to rustics, buy ale from barkeeps; deal with guards or sidestep human run armies; get towers built or wagons fixed or armour made; or hire porters to carry goods and ditchdiggers to lay ditches.

The list is not merely incomplete, it is structurally obstructionist: if a human being is not already weaponised, organised for violence, or reducible to a morale modifier, they simply do not exist as a rules concept. The "men" in the White Box are encounter widgets. The game assumes that the Dungeon Master must supply an entire social and economic substrate from on their own, without help, while the rules enumerate only the types of people designed to be killed in the wilderness. Note that none of the groups named have anything to do with society. Soldiers are a logical addition if fighting is what matters — but soldiers can't be fought in isolation, in the hinterland, far from civilisation's prying eyes, so it doesn't belong in the list with nomads and buccaneers and bandits, who exist where other people do not. You cannot kill a dozen soldiers on a road without having just declared hostilities against something larger and more coherent than the party. Therefore, soldiers, as a "monster," do not exist.

We'll continue into other humanoids with the next post.