Friday, May 7, 2021

Random Roll: DMG, p. 191

The City/Town Encounters Matrix on p. 191 of the Dungeon Masters Guide is quite well known, almost entirely due to its harlot sub-table. As amusing as that sub-table is, today my focus is instead on another one that I think offers a great deal more insight into Gary Gygax's conception of the game and its implied world. 

The Encounters Matrix includes two separate dice roll columns, one for daytime and one for nighttime. During the daytime, the most common encounters are with beggars, city guards, laborers, merchants, tradesmen, and similarly mundane individuals. There's nothing at all surprising in this. Indeed, I imagine that most of us, if asked to come up with a random encounter table for a broadly medieval fantasy city, would have come up with something quite similar to this. 

However, during the night, the Encounters Matrix paints a very different picture of an AD&D city. Suddenly, giant rats (and wererats) are more common, as are assassins, bandits, thieves, and the aforementioned harlots. Now, there's also a chance – a small one, to be sure – of encountering demons, devils, doppelgangers, and many forms of undead (up to and including a lich!). These results paint a very different picture of the city, don't you think? 

Remember that OD&D carried the subtitle of "rules for fantastic medieval wargames campaigns" (emphasis mine). Though naturalism was an important part of Gygax's conception of the implied setting of the game, he never neglected the fantastic. The City/Town Encounters Matrix reflects this, since it makes it clear that, when the sun sets, cities undergo a kind of transformation, becoming much more dangerous – and weird – places, Giant rats emerge from the sewers, thieves and ruffians prowl the alleyways, and demons and undead monsters lurk in dark, forgotten corners. It's a wonderfully compelling vision and a reminder that Gygax was, above all, a fantasist.

Another aspect of the Encounters Matrix worth mentioning is the following sub-table, intended to determine the race of individuals encountered:

No doubt what strikes anyone viewing this is that nearly 70% of all encounters are with humans. This should be no surprise to anyone familiar with Gygaxian humanocentrism, but it's still amazing to see it in such stark terms. Just as amazing, I think, are the percentages of the various demihumans. Dwarves, for example, represent slightly more than one-quarter of all demihumans encountered in a city (and nearly 10% of all characters whose race is determined by this table). Half-elves are just as common. Interestingly, elves and half-orcs are equally common, each representing a little more than 15% of all demihuman encounters (and 5% overall). Gnomes and halflings, on the other hand, are quite rare.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Gygax's chosen percentages, they do paint a picture of the kind of fantasy world he envisioned. Humans are far and away the predominant race, with dwarves and, unexpectedly, half-elves being distant seconds. The greater appearance of half-elves relative to elves suggests that half-elves have a better opinion of humans than do their elven kin, who would seem to keep to themselves. Half-orcs, though not common, exist in much larger numbers than I would have expected, which suggests a few things about orcs and their place in the setting. That both gnomes and halflings are highly unusual implies the Wee Folk keep to themselves, or perhaps that their numbers overall are few. Regardless, there's more detail to be gleaned from the City/Town Encounters Matrix than one might expect.

27 comments:

  1. Interesting. Was Gary's vision of a city, mundane by day but stalked by wererats, demons and undead each night, emulating any fictional city in pulp fantasy or myth? Or was this more about a game offering an interesting variety of foes for the players?

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    1. I imagine that Lankhmar was a huge influence on Gary's imagination of a fantasy city.

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    2. Agreed, that encounter table reeks of Lankhmar. The place had a serious rat problem, and pretty much originated the whole idea of an organized Thieves' Guild.

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    3. Came to say the same thing. It follows suit from the OD&D encounter tables in which the City matrix sent you to only two possible subtables: Men and Undead (with equal likelihood).

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    4. Ha. That sounds like the city encounter matrix for Sarnath rather than Lankhmar.

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    5. Amending my previous comment, the table literally references "Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber" under the description for the Wererat encounters. So yeah, explicit as can be.

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  2. I actually find that the table in the screenshot above almost makes demi-humans too common. Three out of every ten people encountered being non-(or half-)human seems like something that would maybe be the case in a melting pote type metropolis, but not in a majority of the cities of Men.

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    1. I would imagine that, in the same way that modern cities are frequently separated into ethnically-based neighborhoods, a fantasy city with different species would do likewise.

      So, while it would seem high taken as a whole, chances are there are only certain areas that the demi-humans live (possibly even being relegated to ghettos)

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    2. Only certain entries on the City/Town Encounter Matrix have a chance of being demi-humans: assassin, city guard, cleric, druid, fighter, illusionist, magic-user, ranger, ruffian, and thief. The rest are always humans or are monsters. By day the only monsters met will be lycanthropes (generally in human form).

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    3. "The greater appearance of half-elves relative to elves suggests that half-elves have a better opinion of humans than do their elven kin, who would seem to keep to themselves."
      That's true. The Racial Preferences Table in the PHB shows that elves are neutral toward humanity, while half elves are tolerant of them. Humans mirror those attitudes.

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    4. ” Only certain entries on the City/Town Encounter Matrix have a chance of being demi-humans”

      Of course. Didn’t take that into consideration. Fair point!

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    5. Noteworthy that (despite the extensive sub-category chart) you'll also never encounter a demi-human sex workers - or a male one who isn't in the "management" end of things. Gary's grasp of the subject appears to have been pretty vanilla even for the time period, despite knowing a whole lot of words for prostitute. I suppose we'll have to rely on Shadowrun for Elven camgirls and troll gigolos.

      Even more amusingly, the "Drunk" sub-table produces some remarkable commentary on sobriety in AD&D. You will never randomly run into a drunken goodwife, and all of the many kinds of harlots are teetotalers. Paladins and pilgrims are never inebriated. Rangers don't partake of devils' brew either. Monks are stone cold sober, raising the question of how one practices drunken fist style. And perhaps most baffling of all the exclusions from the table, you will never encounter an intoxicated Bard.

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    6. The goodwives would be from solidly bourgeois (or up-and-coming bourgeois) families, so they'd only get pissed at home. A slovenly trull might be drunk (why be so slovenly otherwise? Poverty probably produces the cheap trollops). Bards are into getting _others_ drunk; one can't play well when you're tipsy ("An' now I wanna [hic!] play "L-, Lurv Pot'n Nummer Nine" [proceeds to drunkenly cast the reverse of Neutralize Poison then falls onto passing patron]").

      Those labourers, though, are _really_ into getting good and stoned (small blame).

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    7. It's perhaps also worth mentioning that fully half of all "Drunk" encounters will be with wine-sodden bums, which explains why beggars as a separate category are excluded from the chart.

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  3. These also seem to mirror Tolkien's Middle Earth demi-human populations, with humans being predominant and dwarves being common, while elves and halflings are rarely encountered outside their homelands (for entirely different reasons). Was Tolkien the first to have dwarves and elves (mythologically often the same type of creature, and typically unfriendly to humans) mingling together with humans in a cooperative society?

    These proportions have always been my campaign default, but I can't say now whether that was Tolkien's influence or Gygax's.

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    1. My impression of Tolkien is that he did not have humans, dwarves, and elves "mingling together...in a cooperative society". Instead, each race pretty much stayed to itself, doing little more than trading at a distance with other races.

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    2. Mostly, yes, but there were exceptions. Hobbits and humans mixed in Bree. And dwarves of the line of Durin were semi nomadic laborers throughout the west after Smaug took Erebor. Half elves were not limited to those of Beren and Luthien'slibe, either; Aragorn encountered a half elven knight in Southern Gondor.

      Remember, we see Middle-earth mostly at the end of the Third Age, when the West is vastly depopulated, dwarves and elves greatly reduced in numbers, and even human populations are isolated from one another. In previous eras from myth and legend it is known that humans, dwarves, and elves mingled far more often.

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    3. @Geoffrey

      In addition to what James added, I meant "mingling" and "cooperating" in comparison to mythological elves/dwarves, which often disliked or even preyed upon mankind, and didn't generally live in what we would consider a "society," isolated or not. :)

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  4. If nothing else, that table makes me feel much better about my lifelong tendency to favor playing humans or Dwarves in fantasy RPGs. Honestly it'd be all humans (and an aberrant giff in Spelljammer way back when) if I hadn't gotten an itch to play a series of related Dwarves from family Krakarok in various campaigns over the years. Think I've done six of them now spread over three generations worth of siblings, cousins, and uncles and spanning everything from AD&D to 13th Age, with stops in 3.0, 3.5, and 4e.

    There were a couple of muls and a half-giant in Dark Sun, but that setting's such a freak show I don't care to include in in the tally any more than I would my Talislanta characters.

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  5. Question: what have people done to determine the actual chances of an encounter using the city environment table? We know what the chances are for an encounter in every other kind of terrain but not cities.

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    1. DMG p. 190, Gary says to "Check for encounters every three turns as normally, or otherwise as desired."

      I've never been able to find reference in the AD&D books as to how a dungeon encounter occurs... I assume it was like in OD&D, thus a roll of 6 on d6 every three turns rather than every turn.

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    2. The "every three turns" thing is how often the check is made; I'm asking about the chance for an encounter in cities at all eg on pg. 47 of the DMG, there are listed chances of an encounter depending on the population density of the surrounding area: 1 in 20 for areas of dense population all the way to 1 in 10 for wilderness areas.

      Using a d6 to check for wandering monsters in dungeons seems to be the default, as per OD&D and the DMG on pg. 98, but I'm not really happy using it for cities as it seems too frequent an occurrence to be used there.

      I've used d20 and d12 for encounter checks in cities, but I've always wondered if I was just missing something.

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    3. I've been amused to note that Gygax in the Introduction to the DMG (p. 9) has several paragraphs on the nuances why you may want to ignore random monster rolls, culminating with, "Wandering monsters, however, are included for two reasons, as is explained in the section about them." -- but no such section exists. (!)

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    4. Dominus, as the wilderness checks are made in a completely different manner, with number of checks depending on location and frequency depending on density (and never measured in turns but in hours), I assume the "as normally" after "three turns" refers to the traditional dungeon method, as I mentioned, as checks in the dungeon are done with the d6. And as cities are far more dense than a wilderness, a d6 check every three turns (half hour) seems completely appropriate.

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    5. Delta: could be he was referring to the PHB, pg. 103.

      James: Well, cities are denser in the sense that there're more inhabitants per measured area than the wilderness, but look at the odds for a "wilderness" encounter in an area that's relatively dense with people: 1 in 20; I take that as meaning the vast majority of the time, people the party sees won't take an interest in them as everyone's too busy to do so (or trying to keep out of sight, in the case of "actual" monsters). In areas where there is no "civilization", the odds of having an encounter are doubled to 1 in 10. In a small area like a dungeon, a 1-in-6 chance of a wandering-monster encounter (triple the chance of a wilderness encounter) seems appropriate for such a small area filled with creatures _very much_ interested in having an encounter. One-in-six strikes me as too high a chance of someone deliberately running into the PCs in a city for the above reasons.

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  6. Sorry for barging in late, but knowing a bit how Mr. Gygax figured things, for the Halflilng and Gnome scarcity, there are two explanations, methinks. 1) With respect to size, it is probably quite impossible for a Halfling or a Gnome to wander in the streets of a city and not being either shoved aside or roughed up just with the movement of the crowd. With Dwarves, becsause of their broad shoulders and their extremely stocky body frame, they are less likely to be jostled about when going to and fro in a city. 2) Halflings and Gnomes, if you go back to the archetypes as designed and deined in the AD&D MM (pp. 50 and 46 respectively) they point to a mainly pastoral burrowing kind on the one hand -- which is actually in direct line with the Tolkienesque universe origin of that 'race' -- and a mainly miner burrowing (and living with burrowing mammals at least) kind on the other hand, means that you might either a) not find them above ground much or a) find them in a cityscape more in tune with their native environment. Adding to that, Halflings, with the exception of the Stout variety, shun water, and since many Human cities are built near, on or in the middle of bodies of water, this makes Halfling city slickers something of a rarity.

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