The article contains Godwin's reflections on being "soft-hearted enough to want to see the PCs survive and do well" to the point that he "was no longer playing the AD&D game. [He] was shooting fish in a barrel." I must confess that I was very surprised to see an article like this appear in an issue of Dragon published in 1985, since my recollection of that time was of an era when being "soft-hearted enough to want to see the PCs survive and do well" was not just increasingly commonplace but de rigeur.
Intriguingly, the first "tip" Godwin passes along as a result of his past failure is "Feel free to fudge." Though he introduces this tip with a story of how he pretended to roll low on an attack that would have killed a PC, he is quick to point out that fudging rolls "doesn't have to be in favor of the players." He adds that it is the referee who is the final arbiter of what is and is not true in his own campaign. Never let an errant dice roll or players quoting chapter and verse from a rulebook lead you to think otherwise.
Tip two is "Just because it's in a module doesn't mean it's so." In particular, he's talking about the strength of opponents and the amount of treasure and magic items. I must admit I find this tip odd, because, even in my worst letter-of-the-law days of gaming, I never felt that the contents of a module was sacrosanct. However, Godwin claims that he did think they were and it took him some time to realize that it was acceptable to alter what was written in adventure to suit his own campaign.
Tip three is "Be exceedingly stingy in handing out magic items." This tip is apparently near and dear to Godwin's heart, because he discusses it at length, providing lots of examples of magic items he feels are exceedingly powerful, or at least problematic if the referee is not careful. To be fair, he's not opposed to placing powerful magic items in the hands of PCs; he simply thinks the referee needs to conscious of the potential for mischief such items bring with them. This is a fair point and many an inexperienced referee commits this mistake.
Tip four is "Don't let your players have a continuous commune spell." By this he means that the players should be kept in the dark as often as possible, since knowledge is what gives the referee his edge -- including the properties of magic items. Godwin stresses the limits even of spells like identify and encourages the referee to take full advantage of it.
Tip five is "Do not allow a character to become more powerful than a chugging locomotive." Here he's talking specifically about ability score inflation, both through magic items and spells.
Tip six is "If they wish for the moon, don't let them have it." I'm actually surprised that, in 1985, there was still a need to talk about all the delightful ways wishes can be used to turn the tables on the players, but apparently there was.
Tip seven is "No, you can polymorph your henchman into Odin." You know, I had no idea until very recently that polymorph was apparently such a troublesome spell for a lot of D&D gamers. I honestly don't recall a single time it's ever given me grief as a referee, since the spell description I remember is pretty clear about its limitations.
Tip eight is "Be careful playing with fireballs." Sure.
Tip nine is "Be reasonable in awarding experience points." Godwin here encourages referees to use the "equivalent hit dice" system from the Dungeon Masters Guide, which is an oft-forgotten element of AD&D. It basically compares the value of the characters' levels against the hit dice of the monsters they defeat and then adjusts the value of the XP gained up or down accordingly. The system is intended, like its rough equivalent in OD&D, to put the breaks on gaining easy experience points through killing much weaker foes in large numbers. Again, this has never been a problem for me personally, but I fully support slowing the rate of character advancement.
Tip ten is "Go easy on the poor deities." That this needed to be said at all is sad.
Tip eleven is "Beware the many-headed hydra." Here Godwin is discouraging allowing one player to play more than one character in an adventure at the same time. That's just common sense.
Tip twelve is "Avoid an adversary relationship with your players." Godwin notes that it's inevitable that referees and players will be at odds, since players are always trying to pull fast ones on their referees:
It would be a wonderful world if players were so conscientious and so willing to risk their characters for the sake of a good time that they never looked at the Dungeon Masters Guide, the modules, or even "Dungeon Master advice" articles (such as this one) in magazines. It would even be nicer if they did not look up monsters in the Monster Manual, FIEND FOLIO Tome, and Monster Manual II whenever they confronted them. Maybe you can forbid this sort of activity during the playing of an adventure, but you can't control what players do on their own time. And never underestimate the ingenuity of players. I once had a player justify looking in the Monster Manual during play by saying that his character carried around a bestiary in his backpack!Despite this, try and make it clear to your players that your iron-fisted rule is all in the name of fun, to ensure that the game remains challenging for all.
That's a lot to digest, but I think it provides a fascinating snapshot into at least one slice of the hobby back in 1985. Some of it comports well with my own recollections, while other parts of it feel like the author is describing a game in an alternate reality. I suspect this reaction will be true for a lot of my readers as well.
I think we sometimes forget, living in the Information Age today, what a bubble we really lived in back in the early gaming days. I know I’m a much better DM since returning to gaming in 2017 than I was in the 1980’s, party due to wisdom but mostly due to access to sites like this one and Dragonsfoot that have greatly increased my knowledge of the game.
ReplyDeleteJim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteExcellent advice!
I blame the introduction of hit points. In the original game, hit dice were (roughly) limited to a character or monster's level, and a tough monster to kill was one that required simultaneous, total HD hits in a round of combat. Combat was very quick, and even a 12HD monster (like an earth elemental or something) demanding 12 simultaneous dice rolls of 6 (or 5 or 6, or even 4, 5 or 6 depending on bonuses!) could receive them from a party of 5 superhero-level (4HD/4th level) PCs - with a very reasonable chance of victory.
ReplyDeleteEven in combat where both sides get "stuck on misses" for a while, it would still resolve in under 5 minutes, because you would just roll, check, roll, check, roll check, etc. in most melee encounters.
It was the risk of "death within one round" and "death in any combat encounter" that drove the risk-reward nature of adventuring, creative problem-solving, and brisk pace.
Under those combat circumstances, "fudging" was inconceivable - the dice were the mechanic of resolution, the dice created the storyline, and the referee adjudicated that process. I know Gary fudged as often as it suited him, and I'm sure his creative energies were well-suited for a sort of "guided group story" but though OD&D allows for that to a degree, it is written with the assumptions of wargaming: how does one fairly adjudicate simulated warfare?
Moreover, having the monster manual - even at the table -was no advantage even at the tail-end of OD&D. This is because OD&D did not keep monsters secret. "A troop of (rolls dice) about 30 skeletons rounds the corner. Roll for surprise." The first thing the players would find out is how many HD the things had. For a lich or something, they'd know the dude (or worse, dudes! In their lair in a random wilderness hex!) obviously had magic spells, and maybe a guess at which ones.
Rules knowledge and good-faith adherence to them, as best understood, was the guiding principle for an efficient good time. Because encounters - whether parlay, retreat, or combat - were just one key part of a larger game of resource management and roleplay - a game of creative, narrative trade-offs, if you will - all of this late-stage advice was avoided, or at the very worst ameliorated.
Wandering monsters were world-generating enrichment: Chainmail + the 3 books + Judges' Guild + '78 MM needed no secrets. After all, even if you never read the rules, as a player it became pretty obvious that a wandering monster roll "hit" of 6 (or 1, or whatever it is) in the open wilderness would result in a nifty pack of lycanthropes on a second roll of 5, and then a subsequent roll of 3 specifies that it is wereboars.
After all there were less than a dozen monster types. One or two sessions in and most players would know the type rolls, and by a few more would remember most of the common in-type rolls. This is because in OD&D the surprise is not in the rules, but in the rolls.
The minute that HP are added as a proxy, the surprise of rolls is instantly diminished. As you advance in levels, the increase in HD monsters effectively means there are larger and larger pools of hit points to attrit, rather than an increasingly challenging lottery of matched dice rolls.
In OD&D the average number of rounds of combat at 1st level (roughly, on average 5-7 rounds) is not significantly less than at 10th level. Even when you do have to increase the number of rounds (due to a string of misses), resolution game time is not significantly longer. Hit points changed all of that.
Moreover, players were "in the dark" because the referee was in the dark. Even the earliest, railroadiest competition modules were loaded with random rolls - for number appearing, for treasure, rumors, weather, morale checks, reaction, saving throws, etc.
In the summer of 1985 I'd just finished 7th grade, was about to turn 13, and was often playing AD&D 1e with my best friend around the corner or alone in my room drawing dungeons or reading the DMG and issue #99 of Dragon Magazine and this article was everything.
ReplyDeleteI just looked at the part about wishes. This quote lives rent free in my head all these years: "An analogy: If you ask for 'another beer' in Germany, the waiter will ask what is wrong with the first one and, if there was something wrong with it, why did you drink it? The idiom is 'Still one, please.'"
Reading over what you wrote reminded me that I have pretty much embraced this entire article in my current AD&D 1e campaign, the first since 1985. I've always wanted to do everything the right way and the DMG and articles like these which seemed to speak from authority really inspired me.