Madicon 22: BattleTech– Trial by Fire!

A Jenner mugs a Zeus!

I blew into the early morning time slot a few minutes late. The two players were brand new to the game, though, so I didn’t feel too bad about grabbing a soda from the drink machines while they set up and went over the rules.

The guy that blogs at The Rhetorical Gamer was running the game. As much as possible I tried to bite my tongue and let him do all the teaching. But… it is a totally classic game. There are so many cool things about it, so many rules, tactics, things that have happened…. You can very easily overwhelm the new guys. I probably did. But hey, it was Trial By Fire, so we might as well have just jumped in.

The Panther is forced to come out from his cover….

We divided up the mechs for our side. I offered to take the wimpiest one and they went with that. I didn’t want to be too pushy and make them do everything I thought was best. But at the same time… I wanted them to have enough information that they could make informed decisions throughout the game. At the early stages of the game, they ended up holding their position in cover while I charged in. I was hoping to draw enemy fire and maybe even make an opening for them. (I remembered the Jenner to be a fairly serious threat back in the day….)

This turned out to be a major tactical error, though. We missed an awful lot. One guy never hit at all the entire game. When we did hit, the only place we landed a decent concentration of damage was in the center torso. As we started  crunching through the internal structure, we never got any criticals, either. This ended up being the proverbial tough row to hoe.

Getting in our last licks before the opposing mech could leave the board…!

Meanwhile, the one of the first hits I’d taken had caused an engine hit. Did that ever make me wished I’d overheated my mech already! I just lurched along after that contributing only a shot or two each turn… until I got into a decent enough position that I could unload everything. This hit next to nothing and promptly shut my mech down.

Did I mention that we were playing novice mechwarriors? I tell you, that extra penalty on the to-hit rolls that we had made it really tough on us. To make matters worse, though, we lost initiative far more often than we expected to as well. That pretty well sums up our game, though: we did really good except when it came to making to-hit rolls, rolling criticals, and winning initiative. Doh!

But you should have seen that enemy mech when he finally made it back to base. His center torso was blown wide open with maybe one or two strands of myomer fibers still holding it together. (I’d really like to have a better strategy if I was going to try this again. Maybe if we had ignored taking cover altogether and  got into short range a little quicker…. But then, maybe that mech would have just clobbered us! So who knows….)

At any rate, a couple of new players got walked through the basics of BattleTech. And they got to do it with a really nice set of models, too. It was a good game. It was just enough to whet my appetite, though. I don’t think I’ve seen the last of this game system…!

The Isle of Dread: A New Campaign Frame After Much Death

(SPOILER WARNING: If you intend to play the Isle of Dread, you probably shouldn’t read any further!)

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“If the PCs unknowingly venture into an area they’re not prepared to handle, they should suffer the consequences, including death.” — Justina’s Player

Here’s the score:

1. Last I heard, you are chomping at the bit to go back into the ruins and try to find that giant pearl, because trudging back to the ship empty handed is too much for your pride. But some of you want to have all sorts of third level characters just magically appear in the village next to the dungeon. Sorry… that’s not happening. If you want a brand new, balanced party that starts at level three you can have it… but not there. If you want to go back into the ruins for loot, you’ll do it with your surviving 3rd level characters and the all-new complementary first level warriors from the village that I already promised to you. (Oh yeah, there’d also be that first level “shaman” that you wheedled out of me.)
2. There is also the entire freaking Island to explore, of course. Also… the treasure map that… uh… someone (??) has indicates that there may be something potentially valuable to the northeast of your position. (This was not clear to Justina at one point so I am making it crystal clear now. He/she thought the ruins was where the X is on the map– not true!) Maybe you’d want to use this village as a base while you look for other potential adventures that you could have. Who knows what could be out there….
3. Replacement ~3rd level characters are back at the ship if you insist on them… but of course it took y’all ~20 days or so to make it to the central plateau. No telling how many people will get eaten by dinosaurs on the way back. Heh.
4. The above three options are the most obvious ones off the top of my head. If it doesn’t cross your minds to even consider what else you can dream up to do… then… well… you may not understand just how much autonomy your actually have– not to mention the lengths I would go to accommodate it. Not that you should feel guilty if you don’t go off on a random tangent– straight ahead old school treasure hunting is perfectly legitimate goal. But #1-3 outlines “the box.” I remind you that you’re free to think outside of it. But it’s also your responsibility. I’m not going to spell out every possible option or goal that you could set for yourself.

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It is not my view of this island that characters can necessarily respawn there ad infinitum. Unless you come up with a different vision/goal, you are conquistadors. You’re here to pillage and loot and then GO HOME. That’s part of the reason why I was originally pushing that XP would only be awarded to the folks that make it back to Specularum. Two reasons for that: civilization is the only real home base… and this extreme lost world wilderness location does not provide the fame aspect of the leveling up process. (I have ruled that Justina, Han Yolo, and Steve Erwin will get XP before next session, though. I’m not going back on that agreement– mostly because I’m curious what you guys will do with access to the second level cleric spells.)

Now… there is some objection to the wimpy first level villagers that now make up the bulk of the party. There’s a few reasons why I think you should embrace this:

• They may be what it takes to get your surviving party members back to the ship. In a conquistador scenario, they are a HUGE windfall. Not having them at all could mean that Justina and Han Yolo are effectively stranded to die of some random disease. If they made a run for it back to the ship by themselves, who knows what their chance of making it back alive would be? Probably not very good. Show some gratitude to an otherwise stingy dungeon master!
• “But that’s no fair,” you say. “We didn’t know something bad would happen when we killed off most of our party and our new-found Rakasta buddies.” Well yeah, sorry if you didn’t see it coming… but death is already fickle and all-too-likely. You were going to lose characters no matter what. But face it… you lost more because you were careless and you took your matériel for granted. Okay, so you had no idea a dungeon master could be so cruel. The “No Fair Do Over” characters are back at the ship.
• If any of the tribesmen survive to level two… that is a significantly cool accomplishment. I’d think it would be awesome if you actually did it. I don’t know what your exact odds of doing this comes out to, but it’s there. Adventure around the plateau and see if you can pull it off if you want. You’d risk losing your now-fourth level characters in the process, or else improve your chances of making it back to the ship. Who knows what the best course of action is– or if there even is one at this point.

It would be pretty darn useful for continuity purposes if either Justina or Han Yolo actually did make it back to the ship. (And I know this has been a low-treasure high-death game… but do not underestimate the value of the exploration you’ve done and the intelligence you’ve gathered.) BUT… that’s my assumption. However… I haven’t heard anything to make me think that you guys think that would be awesome. In fact… maybe it is that you… dread… the onerous trek through the wilderness. Maybe the thought of taking a twenty day journey back the ship and then backtracking back to the plateau again– maybe that sounds just completely silly, dull, and pointless. If you genuinely feel that way… let me tell you. Maybe you don’t really want to play “The Isle of Dread.” If you want to do unlimited respawn with a town that is very close to a massive dungeon such that you would not ever have to play out very much in the way of hexcrawling… then what you actually want to do is play Stonehell Megadungeon. Just sayin’!

So… that last bit is the reductio ad adbsurdam that explains why I am so stingy with the concessions you’ve been asking for here and there. At some point, you can make so many modifications to the implied campaign structure of this adventure that you’re not really playing “The Isle of Dread” anymore. If you genuinely want to play a different type of game, that’s fine. There’s a reason why there is a big campaign setting map included with the module. I know I need to be flexible juggling the desires of the players and all that, but I’m not going to tinker with the parameters of this scenario until it is functionally identical to every other adventure you’ve played. The Isle of Dread is its own place. It has its own distinctive qualities and if we’re going to play it, I intend to preserve them.

Which leads us to option five: We could just rule that Justina and Han Yolo made it back to Specularum only to get killed in a bar brawl before they could get another expedition together. Your new party would have their log, so you’d know everything you already know and you can take another stab at the adventure with that information more-or-less intact, but out of date by a few years. This gets your balanced, full-strength party in place without violating my precious sense of narrative coherence. It would also preserve the island as being a remote, treacherous location that you cannot adventure on indefinitely. Option six would be the same as five except that you would do something else for a while on the mainland and then tackle the Isle once you think you have enough levels and magic-items to do it. If that is the case, then I can place both Stonehell and The Darkness Beneath on the campaign map and you can take your pick of those two megadungeons.

My chief concern in all of this has been to reasonably and impartially present this classic module to you as a change of pace from whatever else it is that you normally do. I am not necessarily trying to steer you one way or the other… but I do hope this explains why things have been done the way that they have been. It’s not my job to continuously throw resources at you which you then spend like drunken sailors until you manage to systematically clear out every stinking hex on the island. It’s your job to take the resources that you do have and then see what you can accomplish with them in the context of a situation that is rapidly evolving.

Gaming Notes May 19, 2013… with guest Kyrinn S. Eis

This is Gaming Notes, the weekly news-magazine about all kinds of games and the home of Space Gaming News, Designer Spotlight, and Blog Watch. This week’s special guest is Kyrinn S. Eis, the designer of Porphyry.

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Space Gaming News:

Star Fleet Universe (ADB) The latest update on upcoming releases — “Origins is looming. It’s only 29 days away as I write this, and none of the new products are ready. Captain’s Log #47 is the highest priority, and that (at least) will get done…. It remains to be seen if the rules problems in ACTASF and the production problems with the 2500s have fatally wounded those product lines. We’re basically going to have to reboot them to make them the success they should have been…. Over the next two years, SFB will get X2, F&E will get Minor Empires, FC will get X-ships and go beyond the Borders of Madness, Star Fleet Marines will get a third (armored cavalry) and fourth (monsters) module, new RPG books (Orion Pirates, Feline Empires, Gorns) and new game engines will be done, the long-awaited expansion deck for SFBF will happen, Starmada needs another couple of books, and more Starline 2400-series miniatures will be done. Those won’t be the only products released for existing lines.”

BattleTech (Board Game Geek Geeklist) Games Where You Become Emotionally Invested with the Game’s Universe — “I had such an attachment for my pilots, that I started writing fan fiction about them.”

Star Frontiers (Delta’s D&D Hotspot) SciFi Saturday – Ship Index Cards — “I also shrank the Basic Game Combat Table onto an index card. Print out a page of these, and then you can basically run the entire game from your stack of index cards.”

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Designer Spotlight:

Jeffro: Okay, I’ve looked over the sample that’s over on Lulu. First off… it looks gorgeous. It sounds like the setting is much more serious than Gamma World, much farther gone than Car Wars, and unsettlingly creepy what with all the weird magical fallout that you’ve engineered into it. It’s almost like… you’ve managed to preserve the insane post-apocalyptic ethos of eighties gaming while adapting to more current sensibilities. Did you specifically set out to accomplish something like that or did this game’s comcept simply emerge from the ether unbidden?

Kyrinn S. Eis: The game’s first session was actually a D&D pick-up/one-off game with G+ folks. It was decided before that there would be no standard fantasy RPG races, and other tropes were to be toned down. I decided to run this as a post-apocalyptic setting, and drew inspiration from fleeting and half-remembered concepts from “The Night Land” novels by William Hope Hodgson. H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreamlands,” too, was an instant influence — I’m a very visual thinker — as well as Rodney Matthews’ depictions of various book covers, etc.

Duke Barclay’s PC was a cleric of Finnian, and he was sent out from his cloister by his master, and the other PCs were henchmen sent with him on his mission to reach civilised lands top the south. Their cloister was one of the remaining towers of the Barrier of Elysth, once used to try and contain The Burn when it had touched down upon Porphyry. These intrepid travellers made their way through the blasted heath and mossy rocks until the vast pine forests were encountered across a broad and strong river or tributary. A PC was lost in the crossing and the player soon left the game. The two remaining PCs made their way to forsaken Ownys, rich in un-looted goods, but crawling with Burn cultists, mutants, and cannibals. A bungled burglary attempt resulted in the cleric’s unconsciousness and the end of the first session. I remember telling them that I liked the game and planned not to write anything down for it. I failed. Within a week I had a large amount of kernel of the setting sketched out and ran the first Tunnels & Trolls 5th edition session with at least five players.

Jeffro: So… you framed up just enough of a setting to get a game off the ground… and then your brain inexorably continued to interpolate the reality of it in the aftermath. Nice. It sounds like an extended journey through wilderness was fundamental to your games’ sessions. This is something that seems to have fallen out of favor over their years as games have shifted towards focusing on large, set-piece MMORPG-style combats and/or six scene fully-plotted narrative arcs. How did your players react to having such a wide open set of choices…? Did this style of play impact Porphry’s overall design…?

Kyrinn S. Eis: That journey was fairly brief, subsumed in the course of a few hours of play, but a large portion of the campaign, most of it, I dare say, was wilderness or surface urban exploration. Actually, I think there were only two or three underground portions: a mythic underworld akin to that of the Aztecs, a foray under the streets of Ownys, and at the end of the campaign, north of Ownys once the Burn Cult was wiped out. That last one was true delving, and felt the most disconnected from what had come before it. Of the hours in the Playtest campaign, the vast majority had the characters experiencing the rigours of overland travel, the foul weather, constant vicious attacks, etc. Even the urban sessions (many of them) of Ownys the characters were slogging through the ashfall of winter (in place of snow), and much in the way of murder and mayhem.

The campaign was entirely PC-driven, based on their interest in following up on rumours, repaying debts, utilising contacts, taking advantage of contacts or their reputation. Mercantile adventurism played a part in two or three portions (beginning, middle, and end), and was actually the way the game started. Hiz Eruk from a Black Ship hired two PCs to produce weapons and shields for a young prince’s birthday party. When the party arrived, they found that the party was actually a ritual to determine the right of succession. Backing the existing prince with a poisoned and enchanted sword guaranteed his place upon the throne.

I made a conscious effort to fill the world with very Pulp-inspired locales, and enough of a latticework of interrelation for it to hang together as a whole, while being very conscious to make it wide open enough that you folks could make it your setting without concern of it violating canon or holy writ. There is a lot of flavor without there being anything like a chronology or other absolutes apart from Tsanzel Metal, Arcane Inks, the Serefolk/Hiz Eruk, and the Beastfolk. The cursed and magic items are all flavor-filled, but could easily be replaced or added to without throwing the setting.

Jeffro: Ah, the Beastfolk…! I almost hate to mention it, but they bring to mind the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I can’t tell you how cool those independent black-and-white comics were when they first came out– though I was more of an Adolescent Radioactive Blackbelt Hamsters fan at the time. The Palladium T.M.N.T. and Other Strangeness Role Playing Game was pretty innovative back then, with martial arts, a point-buy system for animal abilities, and psionic powers. All of that went away with the advent of the movie franchise and the Saturday morning cartoon. Given that almost freakish chain of developments, how did you go about making animal type characters cool again in your game? (Maybe this particular sub-genre has lain fallow long enough that it can make a comeback again…?)

Kyrinn S. Eis: I grew up with Aesop’s Fables, cartoons, wildlife shows like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and pets. Animals are always going to be cool. I often prefer the company of animals over people. That said, I don’t really pay attention to trends, and haven’t ever gone in for the TMNT cartoons, nor read many after High School (an artist friend was heavily into them). I owned a lot of the supplements and know the system, but I’d say that Ken St. Andre’s Monsters! Monsters! is of much greater and earlier an influence than TMNT. In it are Chinese Foxes, Tsathogua, Chinese Demons (bat creatures), Snollygosters, Snarks, and other non-human, animaline creatures as playable races. Porphyry never strays far from Tunnels & Trolls  ’Canon’, as it were, and where it does, by not including standard monsters and Kindred, it preserves the ‘Other’ aspect from the aforementioned product’s ethos. I will say, however, that the all-animal mutant Gamma World Cryptic Alliances: Zoopremiscists, and The Ranks of the Fit have more to do with my treatment of the Beastfolk than anything that came afterwards.

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Blog Watch:

Cthulhu (Los Angeles Review of Books) To Understand the World Is To Be Destroyed By It: On H.P. Lovecraft – “Both during his lifetime and immediately afterward, other authors made use of Lovecraft’s ideas and creations in their own stories and novels. Lovecraft’s generosity with his own creations ultimately gave them a longevity that other, better writers’ ideas and characters did not have.” (Hat tip to Akratic Wizardry.)

GURPS (RPG Snob) Thoughts on GURPS and Skill Levels — It may be that a lot of the recent… er… grappling with tempo and pacing issues in GURPS combat are in fact due to the recent trend of increasing point levels for starting characters. If you are a fan of the grittier 150 point game, this is one reason to stick with it…!

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (Dungeon Fantastic) PC Tips for my GURPS DF Game (inspired by the OSR Primer) — Well, you can sit around scratching your head and wondering why your players don’t get it. Or you can post something like this to the front of your GM Screen. Allons-y!

Game Design (Lewis Pulsipher) Giving Victory Points for Fighting Battles — “Now if you see a game design as just a collection of mechanics devised to allow certain things to occur, you might see awarding VPs for fighting as just one more mechanic.  If a game is abstract, this point of view is easier for me to understand.  But a non-abstract game is modeling some reality in some sense, and that’s when this VP-for-fighting mechanic becomes an obvious kludge.”

Adventure Design (Semper Initiativus Unam) Integrity, the Living Dungeon and Module Design – “What Gary had on his paper, that’s what was written in stone about his world. The rest was a living thing that came about in play through memory and winging it.”

Policy (Jeff’s Game Blog) How many commandments have you broken? — I think Tolkien fretted over the fact that orcs were irredeemably evil in his last days. Still, it’s weird to see something like that turned into corporate policy.

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Apropos of Nothing:

How David Weber orders a pizza — I read a dozen books in the Honor Harrington series, often starting the next one immediately upon finishing a novel. But I gotta say… this nails it.

Rules Of The Most Complicated Board Game Ever – Risky Settlers, Knights and Allies of the Lords of Dominion of Earth, Pandemic Edition!

How To Plan Your Life, When You Can’t Plan Your Life — “You follow this Act, Learn, Build Repeat model until you have a job, your own business, or have achieved your goal. It’s not career planning. It’s acting your way into a future you want. How do we know this approach will work? Because it already has.”

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Note: You can find “Jeffro” on Google+ here. Add me to your circles to receive notices about each new blog post! If you cannot stomach the recent improvements to the Google+ interface, you can alternately get email updates with the “Follow” button in the right column.

Nothing Sacred: Separation of Concerns in Role Playing Games

“There’s some kind of weird six armed statue on the dais. It’s about four feet tall and it looks like it’s made out of some kind of metal.” This was it. The epic climax of my adventure. Half the party had died to make it this far, and a trail of bodies was strewn across three levels.

“How heavy is it? Can we carry it?” That would be Ogbar the dwarf’s player– only interested in one thing.

“You can’t tell how heavy it is just by looking at it,” I said… perhaps a bit too smugly. “I dunno, though… if it was made out of brass or something, a couple of you could haul it out of the dungeon. It’d slow you down because you’d have to stop and rest every ten minutes or so.”

“Thief! Check it for traps!” Ever since getting hit by that crossbow bolt while looking for secret doors, Flinderflaff the elf had been noticably more careful. Heh.

“Yeah, okay. I check it for traps,” said the thief’s player.

“Yeah, but how do you check it for traps,” I asked. “Describe your actions!”

“Well… I walk around it and look it over very carefully. I keep my distance, though. I don’t want to come any closer than one foot from it.”

“Okay. You see nothing special about the statue.”

“Fair enough,” said Ogbar’s player. “I’m going to sort of tip it over to see if it comes off the dais without us doing any stone work. Thufir, give me a hand with this, will ya?”

Thufi’rs player nodded in assent.

“Okay, Ogbar…. You grab the statue and give it sort of a shove… and yes, it does tip over. It doesn’t seem overly heavy. Not for you, anyway. But before Thufir can pick up the other end of it… you notice that the statue begins to glow with a dull cobalt light.” At this point, I picked up an oversized twenty-sided die and rolled it in front of everyone. It was a seven! “Huh. That’s weird. Your hands have gone numb.”

“Wait, what did you just roll? Was that a saving throw?”

“Well….”

“I’ve always rolled my own saving throws.”

“But, well–”

“That’s not right!”

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Sometimes things happen like this that make me realize just how big of a cultural gap there is between me and some of the players in the games I run. In the first place… the rules at best govern what goes on in maybe twenty percent of what we do at the table. And secondly, most of the rules that we have are there for one reason only: so that when I say, “you’re dead,” you starting rolling up a new character instead of kicking the table over. Role playing rule sets are, if anything, a solution to the long standing cops and robbers problem. (And you do realize, of course, that if things get to the point where you’re making saving throws that it’s pretty well game over for you anyway, eh?)

Never mind, for the moment, the absolute absurdity of anybody insisting on being able to roll their own dice. Sure, it’s a courtesy of the game master to let the players to do that. And yeah, gamers love their personalized dice sets. Role players especially are superstitious as hell. But at the end of the day, the only reason you get to roll your saving throw is that it’s fun. You hold that swirly D20 in your hand and think about all the stupid stuff you’ve done in the game… and everyone is watching to see how this plays out…. It’s just stupidly fun.

But maybe there are reasons that I might want to roll something like that myself. Maybe I suspect that certain players have loaded dice or else are fudging die rolls– maybe I just want to be one hundred percent sure of this roll’s authenticity. Maybe I don’t want to go through a big production of asking a player to look something up on their sheet and rolling a die. Maybe there’s some stuff going on that I want to be more discreet about. Maybe I just want to make a real quick roll to keep the game going…. Or maybe… just maybe… you have a huge misconception about what we’re doing. Maybe we all think we’re playing this thing called “Dungeons & Dragons,” but in actuality, we’re both bringing radically difference assumptions to the table about how this works.

So… let me make myself perfectly clear…. The rules aren’t there for you and they aren’t there to protect you from me. And even if I were one of those mythological “abusive Dungeon Masters,” rules cannot afford you any protection anyway. (“Rocks fall; you die.” Q.E.D.) If the rules could protect you from me, then we wouldn’t be playing a role playing game anymore. It’d be either a straight up tactical wargame or else some kind of board game. What really holds the game together is a loosely enforced separation of concerns. The players and the referee are each responsible for different things– and the individual player and the party as a whole each have their domain as well.

With that in mind, here are ten meta-rules that take precedence over anything that is spelled out in the actual rule sets:

1) Play the game I’m running, not the game you think this is. If something goes wrong or else something doesn’t work out quite like you expected, you will feel a strong temptation to blame it on the rules. Don’t do that. You’re probably focusing on what other systems emphasize anyway.

2) Quit making rulings. Focus on imagining exactly what your character is doing. (I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a veteran player explain to a new person that they shouldn’t even try something because of their interpretation of the rules… or even because of the rules in some other edition of D&D! In a lot of cases, I would have just said, “yes” to whatever they were suggesting in order to keep the game moving and reward out-of-the-box thinking.)

3) Don’t tell other people what to do with their combat turn. Sure, there are times when the party could conceivably hash out a game plan before battle; that’s cool. But in the heat of battle, you’re just not going to have time for a full-on committee meeting. Of course, explaining a new player’s options in order to be helpful is different, but the “help” should be given in a spirit of preserving their individual autonomy.

4) Likewise, if your character is not in the same location as another party member and they’ve found something cool or dangerous… then step back and let them play it out without your interference at least until your character gets into their vicinity.

5) If you’re dead… then please just be quiet about everything the surviving party members decide. Really. Go roll up a character or something. It’s part of the suspense to slowly be losing the creative input of other players over the course of a session.

6) Some players get hung up on who knows what and which players can communicate with which other characters. For the most part, I am happy to hand wave all of this and just assume that the entire party knows everything that is discussed at the table. In an immediate situation, who knows what may matter a great deal… but after it is resolved, it’s safe to assume that the party has hashed out the ordeal even if they have to pantomime it.

7) If rules and rulings are the domain of the referee, then deciding what your character does is yours. I will not stand in your way– even if it will kill you or set the campaign on an unsustainable course. Player autonomy is sacrosanct.

8) Strategy and tactics are therefore the domain of the players. It is bad form for a referee to tell players the finer points of these things directly. Divulging “what might have been” or even slightly more efficient solutions to known problems really kills the magic of the game for some reason. (I’ve never heard anything good come of it.)

9) Death, then, is the only real way that I have to signal that your tactics aren’t effective. Sure, a lot of deaths are just stupidly random… but others are flat out your responsibility. And even the random ones are something you have to be prepared to manage. Instead of begging for more resources or more character options, try to think about what you could have done differently.

10) If I’m running a classic module that has unique monsters in it, it is an extremely bad idea to announce their true names and then start iterating through everything you can recall about them. Anything that smacks of this brazen, meta-gaming, spoiler-ridden attitude makes me want to kick the table over!

The B/X Sequence of Play for Combat

“So the set of rules we play by is the shared cultural set of rules passed down through the generations, and not the ones written on the booklet inside the box.” – The Campaign For Real Monopoly (via Noble)

Normally when I’m running a game, I just do initiative by sides. When it’s time for the players to attack, I just go around the table and have them roll to-hit and damage. I usually can’t even see the die rolls from where I’m sitting. They just holler stuff out while I frantically make notes on the status of their foes. Usually these combats end pretty quickly– either the players cast one of the “we win” type spells or else the monsters fail a morale check. (Alternately, the party is surprised and loses initiative on their first turn and then is almost completely wiped out… but that’s another story.)

Anyway, when I first start playing a new rule set, I am often extremely careful to attempt to play as much by the rules as is possible. But especially with some of these older rules sets, I’ll start coming up with rules of thumb to keep things moving and hand waving other stuff… and then after a while I’m making lots of rulings based on what I’ve been doing rather than the actual rules. For instance, I’ve been ruling that magic users that lose initiative and take damage during a turn cannot cast spells. I have no idea where I got that rule other than that I just suspected that there had to be some sort of substantial justification for the legendary tactic of targeting the magic-user first. The thing about this sort of thing is that when I go back and look at the rules they have almost nothing to do with what I actually do at the table.

So… let’s go back through this and see what’s actually there.

1. Morale Check — This is a signature component of the Moldvay ruleset and I strongly encourage everyone to use this component of the system. It shortens the combats tremendously, makes encounters far more believable, and goes a long way towards differentiating the various monsters.
2. Movement — I don’t tend to use miniatures lately, so this generally doesn’t come up. Note the bit there about “meleed” opponents only being able to move defensively. That would be at best at half speed going backwards. This is a mechanic that would allow fighters to move forward and pin their opponents by “basing” them. Pretty cool. Also note that if the magic-user opts to move, he just kissed his spell-tossing ability goodbye for the round!
3. Missile fire — Nothing surprising here, but note that when the movement rules are omitted, then the range modifiers on page B27 are going to be forgotten as well. Cover is something that I have rarely applied, so be sure to note the guidelines on page B26.
4. Magic spells — Given the extreme limitations on the number of spells that can be cast in a day in Moldvay, it’s no wonder that spells automatically hit. What’s more, there’s no saving throw on some of them. The example of combat on page B28 has the party forming a “defensive line across the room” in order to stay out a Sleep spell’s area of effect, but I don’t see anything in the rules that would nail down quite how that would have to work. (I wonder if that is an artifact from earlier editions of the game.)
5. Melee — A lot of times in the past, I have ruled that melee attacks are effectively random in terms of who they effect. This maybe makes some sense when you’re not using miniatures, but I don’t see anything in these rules that would imply anything like that. (Where could I have picked that up…?)

So here’s the thing. Why is there such an elaborate sequence of play like this when we just do initiative by side anyway? I’m not seeing a lot of reasons here right off. All I can really come up with is that if melee happens after magic, then spells will get let loose before the party can know what they heavy hitters will do. Is that really worth not being able to just go consecutively around the table? I dunno….

What really stands out to me is that these combat rules are undeniably miniatures rules. This is interesting more for the fact that in the mid-eighties, I don’t recall anyone playing with these rules even close to as they are written. Indeed, none of us would be able to afford miniatures until after we graduated college. Never mind that we’d maybe never obtain the requisite skill and patience in order to actually sit down and work them up. Of course, these rules as remembered will always be much closer to the loose, lean, simplistic form of play that seemed to spontaneously emerge on playgrounds at elementary schools all over North Armerica right around 1983 or so and which just so happened to be reflected in computer games like Zork and Ultima II.

Is playing correctly something that would even be worth the effort? Well, with a game that was utterly opaque for as long as this one was, it is arguable that it cannot ever be played “correctly.” It’s part of the attraction. Certainly there are dozens of better explained, more tightly designed games of this sort that will effectively go unplayed for all eternity. I have to admit, I take a special pleasure in playing by the more child-like rules. They not only signal that a session played with them will be focused far more on exploration, pretend, and what we now term as resource management, but they also make what is ultimately an obscene gesture at the thirty years of design and development that have occurred within role playing games since the release of Moldvay and Cooke’s B/X rulebooks.

My retro-hipsterism is short lived however, as there are still the seeds of more current styles of play within those old rules. Most notably, there are optional rules not only for d20 style attribute checks, but also for individual initiative rolls modified by dexterity bonus. (So much for being a purist.) At any rate, if there is one case where I will attempt to apply the sequence of play explicitly as written, it is in the unusual case where the two opposite sides roll the same number for initiative. Sure, it doesn’t happen very often, but it is the one situation where the exact sequence of the five “M’s” suddenly take on a lot of significance.