Have Folks Forgot T$R???

There is much wringing of hands, clucking of tongues, and vapours regarding statements by Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks planning to move D&D to a live service model and supposedly away from physical book format. "Books will always be an important part of D&D," Cocks said. "It will always be kind of like a special totem that you can collect."

Gamers, we have been here before!

In the giddy and impetuous 1970s by the time I started gaming had evolved into a free-for-all here on the West Coast. While we imported D&D and Judges Guild, we also had local third party publishers Arduin and Chaosium, plus our annual San Francisco Bay Area D&D convention, DunDraCon, and from the south in Los Angeles the amateur press publication Alarums and Excursions, all to add D&D flavor and crunch to our campaigns. 

Then, in the early 80's T$R started to clampdown on what was becoming a nation-wide phenomenon. T$R ceased licensing "official" ruled 3rd party material to publishers like Judges Guild (Goodbye Wilderlands). Then started licensing their D&D intellectual property on action figures, electronic games, coloring books, and, my personal favorite bloat, "Player Packs" (you would get your ass kicked or at least taunting a second time if you showed up at our game with a "Player Pack"). What capitalistic bullshit designed to separate imaginative youth from their likely small amount of discretionary income for something completely unnecessary and useless.

Here's what we did that you can do too... get yourself a set of rulebooks and a group of players and play the wheels off that version for twenty years! And there are always ways to add new material someone might pickup, even from subsequent newer editions. David Hargrave (author of the Arduin Grimoires) famously wrote, "The numbers don't matter - only the ideas!"

Something the early publishers somewhat understood is that once players possess a set of rules, they don't need to purchase anything else (the need is purely convenience). You have tools to produce anything you desire for your game. Subsequent iterations of D&D have been attempts to fine tune the experience and make D&D more accessible to a greater number of players. If some industrious DM with ducats wants to purchase online retail material at any price, that DM must find a way to bring that to the game table - and our game tables, in-person and online, are already limitless. We have always found a way to play.

And don't forget about what happened with 4th edition. Rebellion against the 4th edition conceits jump-started a revolutionary renewal of older version games and the Old-School Renaissance line of supremely imaginative merging of tropes. Say what you will of Peter Adkison, but he did the D&D gaming community a fat gift insisting Hasbro honor the Open Gaming License and System Reference Document (anyone needing a reminder of T$R's position on D&D IP pre OGL check out this historical essay "Spinning in Circles: A History & Analysis of TSR’s Copyright Policies"). In 2023 Ryan Dancy, former business head of Wizards of the Coast role-playing department during the development of 3rd edition and the OGL, lead the charge with the gaming community that eventually ended Hasbro's public effort to make a new version of the OGL.

HASBRO MUST HAVE PLAYERS, but those of us who game at D&D are like no other because we are not passive consumers of gaming content. We are all of us creators in the games we play, using our imaginations every game in battles of good vs. evil, evil vs. good, powerful vs. the downtrodden, powerful vs. the more powerful, and so on. Navigating the underpinnings of humanity and its malcontents is what we practice every. single. game.

The rules are mere language in the experience of D&D, not the experience itself.

Get your set of rules, attract your band of players, then fuck-all to Hasbro. They are at our mercy.

"Siege the DM!"

 

A new screen I assembled for our B/X-AD&D retro-clone "Advanced Labyrinth Lord" game. Player facing art is all Steve Zeiser except mid-right piece, "Witch Grave Ossuary," by Evelyn Moreau.

The first three interior chart pages had a layout by Shane Mangus (Shane's blog is http://swordandsanity.blogspot.com/ however, its private...). The last page I just really needed a "Monsters Experience Points Table" handy, then just some random others.

I printed each of the eight 8.5"x11" pages using glossy photo sticker paper then repurposed an underused 5e screen. You can download a PDF of the pages here. 

Out of the Annulus and into the Spire

 

(We use an old CSWE map for Future Sigil.)

    As the 3 adventurers return from Astral jaunt to final piece of the Rod of Seven Parts, and also discovering the psionic-suppressing Annulus on the way, a Dark Man awaits – and is holding onto Raspatan’s Astral cord. The Dark Man yanks Raspatan’s chord causing Raspatan and the Dark man to fall back, disappearing into the breach in a wall of the Decantur Room. 

    Fog-like shadow elves move into the room through the breach, followed swiftly by several blood-sucking creatures, and then still more shadow elves. 

    The party, deciding they must rest and that their Protection from Evil 10' Radius spell will not last long enough, exit Decanter Room only to find they are back in future Sigil where a 200’-wide path of magic destruction has blasted through to the Church of IT. The Church, they see, is now surrounded by scaffolding with 4 huge pipes at the corners belching forth pitch black columns of smoke 1000’ high. 

    The crest of the church displays a huge symbol of a left hand with an eyeball in its palm. For 100 yards surrounding the church is a field of the dead. Bodies there have chunks of flesh disintegrated by floating softball-sized Spheres of Annihilation. 

    Many Sigil residents have surrounded this killing field, but fear of death keeps them back. Weird Salt Mephits fly overhead to irritate the crowd as a Green Slaad Emissary encourages everyone to pledge their fealty to the soon-to-be God Vecna. The party moves to the lodgings at the elf mistress and learn of earthquakes and deadly green hail. Heading over to Al Samaran the disturbing news from Al is Vecna’s possible ascent to godhood – within Sigil – will destroy the Multiverse!

Is 5th Edition OSR? (Part II)

(Design by Thaddeus Moore)

Considering the AD&D (1e) experience that comprehensive rules actually guided DM rulings, we can the second "Zen Moment" of player skill over character abilities. Common examples for player skill over character abilities are pouring water over a floor looking for hidden cracks, or a PC tapping the floor ahead with a 10-foot pole to trigger any pit traps are rather quaint, but sort of a sophomore effort. Our game had graduate-level dissertations taking on vague descriptions by Gygax and turning the volume way up as if around were no parents.

To the extent player skill enhanced play over character abilities that most often translated into players understanding the idiosyncrasies inherent in the comprehensive rules and applying those idiosyncrasies in different and interesting ways, such as:

• Using a water-breathing spell with a character's mouth and nose submerged into the opening of a waterskin to keep out poison gas.
• That light spells are not visible to creatures using infravision because the spells emit no heat.
• Using 1st level Cleric Sanctuary spells instead of invisibility (especially in cities) so that anyone attempting to strike or attack that character had to make a saving throw versus magic first.
• Permanent polymorph into imaginary, but beastly, humanoids with owl wings and gills under our arms.
• Many spells such as 3rd level spells fireball and lightning bolt scaled up by caster level so would come to do double, triple, or more damage still while occupying the original level spell slot. (This accounted a lot for 1e magic users getting so imbalanced at higher levels - picture a 9th level wizard with up to three 9 hit die fireballs every day - kaboom!
• Gygaxianisms such as "... the magic item gains +5 on saving throws against attack forms in its own mode" was the source of many considerations. Apart from Gygax only providing a couple examples of "mode," what about the list of saving throws, were the saves versus included on the ITEM SAVING THROW MATRIX (1e DMG pg. 80) the only saving throws where magic items get saves, or should it apply to any time an item must make a saving throw?

So this is not the sort of parochial knowledge that are often used as examples of "player skill," rather the supremely skillful 1e AD&D player had pedantic knowledge of the rules bending towards favorable outcomes for their character or the adventuring party.

Another area touted as player skill is resource management. Setting aside food and water rations (both old school D&D and 5th edition have rules for daily physiological needs of the PC), the main resources that require management are spells and the primarily spell subset of healing.

A big complaint from grognardlings I consort with are the rates of recovery from short and long rests. The argument goes that it is simply not realistic a short rest provides characters the essential approximation of cure wounds, while a long rest returns all hit points to the full maximum. A closer look at how we actually played 1e AD&D reveals an absurdity how adventuring parties managed their health through spells and rest.

Natural healing sans magic in 1e AD&D was absurdly time consuming. The original rules from the AD&D 1e DMG provided a mere 7 points per week, and after the SECOND week of healing a character could add their constitution bonus (if any). In our game we upped the number for natural healing to 1 plus the Con bonus, but even then it was a chore because a character must take total rest - no combat, spell casting, or similar activity. (It's kind that 5e provides an out for this, rather than ruining the entire rest 5e only adds a little more resting time after sleep interruptions that involved combat, spells, or similar.)

That meant adventuring parties had to rely on healing spells to keep their hit points up.

I kid you not, there were deadly dungeons where we would adventure for as little as 10 minutes (game time) before we would be looking for a secure place to shelter, rest, and recover spells and hit points. Before someone discovered rules defining sleep periods, we even had spell casters resting 2 or even 3 times per day to regain spells! 

As a result, is it any wonder folks were reluctant to play clerics? Basically clerics, other than turning undead, had to load up on cure wound spells, then bounce around during combat to help PCs to whom the dice were not being particularly kind. Medic!

5th edition deals with hit points in a way that avoids uncharacteristic pauses to sleep in the middle of dungeons (Did Conan take a nap exploring the Temple of Thulsa Doom?), and at the same time frees up cleric to be more than the fantasy doctor. Anyone who objects to this faster natural rejuvenation of hit points on the grounds of "realism" has probably blocked out the nappy times of yore, or had a DM who freely supplied healing potions, or probably never gamed a cleric.

This repetitive resting phenomena was not limited to divine casters either. On the offensive side once a high level wizard had gone through their 3rd and 4th level offensive spells they too were sent to time-out to sleep and get them back. Ha, that is why we often had elven mages. They could sort-of be aware during their meditation (not asleep) and were often counted in our old games as part of the watch.

Post Script: Death Saves! 

Our old parties used negative 10 + Con Attribute Bonus as the number of hit points below 0 at which a character dies. 

The "old-school" way our parties ran was that constitution somehow figured into when character death occurs. So I was initially dismayed that 5e did not look to Con as toughening a PC versus dying. This death save stuff made character death so rare. But in actuality character death was rare in our old games. When a PC dropped below zero and there were other living adventurers to fight, the critters often left alone dying heroes. 

Losing a hit point per round when you often had as many as 13 or even 14 negative hit points to go before becoming croaked meant a lot of time to be saved by magic or binding wounds. Typically character death most often occurred due to massive damage, and 5e retains that. Con in 5e IS factored into character death as high Con provides extra hit points to the maximum (and Con's extra hit points also lengthen the number of hit points before 0 is reached).

All that said, my "old school" proclivity resists things that "standardize" disparate characters, so my inclination would be to somehow modify either the number of Death Saves or the Death Save itself. My recent personal favorites are death and dismemberment tables which are sort of like death saves and critical hits all at once and factors in the actual number of hit points below zero.

Is 5th Edition OSR? (Part I)

(Design by Thaddeus Moore)

The Old School Renaissance movement found solid footing in D&D RPGs shortly after D&D 4th Edition was released in 2008. During that time Matthew Finch (OSRIC, Swords & Wizardry) wrote “A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming” based on 0e, the original edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Finch described the “Zen Moments” of Old School gaming generally as:

• First "Rulings, not Rules" - Letting game referee use common sense to decide what happens or a roll if there is some random element in what a player decides to do;
• Second "Player Skill, not Character Abilities" – A player doesn’t just rely on a character sheet and must use a player’s skill to tell the referee where to look, what to touch, or what a player character is saying or experimenting with in order to gain advantage; 
• Third "Heroic, not Superhero" - Emphasizing the heroic rather than the super-heroic in keeping the game on a human-sized scale becoming a feared or powerful character over time; and 
• Fourth "Forget 'Game Balance'"- That game balance is not important because the fantasy world, with all its perils, contradictions, and surprises is not a “game setting” which somehow always produces challenges of just the right difficulty for the party’s level of experience, The game is a story with dice growing out of the combined efforts of the referee and the players with both being just as surprised by the results.

Let's start with #1 “Rulings, not Rules” because, other than the initial several months of our intro to D&D through John Eric Holmes’ "Basic Set," our group played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Homes' Basic incorporated rules from OD&D, but was only set for character levels one through three for players to learn D&D concepts. The progression was for players to graduate to Gary Gygax's AD&D (1st Edition). Now the stated purpose Gygax's "Advanced" D&D and divorce from Dave Arneson was to make a rules-heavy system intended to cover any conceivable situation ostensibly to arbitrate disputes at tournaments. In practice that meant ...

We. Had. Rules. For. Everything.

Initially there was the modest-sized 126 page Players Handbook with rules on abilities, species, classes, alignment, hit points, languages, money, equipment, armor, weapons, hirelings, henchmen, time, distances, spells, encumbrance, movement, light, vision, surprise, traps, initiative, communication, combat, damage, falling, healing, obedience, morale, mapping, experience, morale, mapping, poison, psionics, and the Known Planes of Existence.

This was 1978 so no DM’s guide yet, so we supplemented our game with Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets (50 pages) rules for social level, city encounters, crimes/trials, advertising, esxchange rates, gems, beggars, binding wounds, guards, repartee, more poison, construction costs, item enchantment, resurrection results, swimming, sea monsters, melee tables, underwater encounter tables, rules on wishes and limited wishes, more on hirelings, income, civilization technology levels, population density, caves, lairs, ruins, prospecting, flora, fauna.

During late 1978 we added rules from the Arduin Grimoire Trilogy. 3 booklets of about 100 pages each (The Arduin Grimoire, Welcome to Skull Tower, and Runes of Doom) with additional playable species, classes, monsters, spells, and magic items. Tables for critical hits, fumbles, character's eyes, hair, weight & height, techno weapons, guilds, brawling, diseases, weather, and more.

We initially used the 3 Oe D&D supplements Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry. However, these pamphlet booklets were superseded in 1979 by the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. 

Even though our game had already hard-wired much of our rules prior to the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide that would persist for decades (in particular the insane way we figured "speed factor" prior to the DMG explanation), we did lock into the DMG's clarifications of spells and abilities in addition to rules on character aging, disease, encumbrance, loyalty, morale, acquisition and recovery of spells, airborne travel and combat, combat underwater, plane travel, vision, experience, climate, economics, languages, construction, spell research, divine intervention, random treasure, random encounters, and buying/selling magic items.

A ginormous aspect of our D&D game related to our explosion of rules is that we regularly rotated games refs. So our dependence on some sort of canon version of rules for just about everything was how we made the game fair. And, other than players who originally started with the OD&D booklets, AD&D 1e is a huge aspect of how more players experienced OSR before it became OSR.

Game designer Anthony Huso best describes the purpose of this type of Old School D&D in his article:  "Rules over Rulings: Consistency in DMing"

I respect the rules because they are the foundation of my game. They are agreed upon, even if a few of them are not perfect. They are predictable and therefore viewed as fair. Implementation and adherence is also consistent ... Shields are broken. Spell books are destroyed by fire. Characters perish in the wastes without water. And the rules do not care. The rules are unrelenting and therefore shoulder the blame when characters die ... Rules should be memorized whenever possible or allocated to handy screens. They should not be searched for during a game unless doing so is minimally intrusive. It is the DM’s burden to know the rules front and back and to hew closely to them. 

I have always ran a sandbox campaign. Characters could run in whatever direction they please and that ends up being how the details from any setting I'm using gets built. I was often and rightfully so accused of "making it up as I go along" but extremely rarely was I ever accused of not following the rules (ha, except the hour-long buzz kill argument over whether the rules for sword damage during subdual attacks also applied to regular attacks - that was a doozy!)

The rules were essentially comprehensive and our players trusted the rules probably mostly because everyone knew them front and back, including our home-brew interpretations (sorry Dr. John PhD), and the rules essentially appeared to cover most all aspects of the reality within the game.

Splendid Isolation

(My original Judges Guild Judge's Shield (1977), DM view.)

Almost always I have used a dungeon master shield. 

• In 1978 I picked up the original first published Judge's Shield by Judges Guild. This was really made for OD&D using the Greyhawk supplement, but it worked for our D&D gane until the Dungeon Masters Guide was released around the summer of 1979. (I made a canary yellow Advanced Labyrinth Lord screen in honor of my old and worn Judges Guild screen.)
• During this period of the late 70s through the 80s is was also common for Dungeon Master's to just use gatefold record albums. This did not provide any helpful tables, but did hide the DM's notes and often the record albums were chosen for their trippy art.
• Later (not sure when) I acquired or most likely shared the T$R AD&D (1st Ed.) Dungeon Master's Screen. This is probably the most classic and well known screen, even had a separate 2-panel screen just for psionics!) 
• When I restarted our game with new rules in 2004 I used the Ver. 3.5 D&D Deluxe Dungeon Master's Screen which was my first landscape paneled screen (my older screens basically had panels in portrait orientation). I really enjoyed being able to see over the screen better without having to stand up.
• When I developed a 3rd Ed./AD&D hybrid rules we used in our game starting in 2012 I found the original 3rd Edition DM screen from 2000 and just clipped a whole bunch of alternate tables on top the screen.
• During 2018 when we switched to a modified 5th Ed. I used Dungeon Master's Screen, Reincarnated (2017) which was the first screen I used in game play that was hardbacked instead of cardstock (4th Ed. had the first landscape/hardback screen I ever purchased, however we never ran our campaign in 4th Ed.). This was a superb improvement, especially when players in our game "sieged the DM" by launching volleys of dice attacks. The hardback screen repelled dice attacks where the cardstock screens often fee. I ended up over time covering this screen in stickers.
• When we switched to Advanced Labyrinth Lord retro-clone in 2019 I made the aforementioned canary yellow Judges Guild tribute screen.
• I also created homemade ref screens for Arduin games I've run for Green Hell in 2022 and a more generic Arduin screen in 2023. And also made a little mini-screen for Lamentations of the Flame Princess off of art for a future screen that hasn't yet been published.
• During 2024 we first started our new 5th edition campaign I used the 5e screen from the 5e Wilderness Kit (the screen art is very cool), then when the 2024 revision books were released switched to the 2024 standard screen.

So what is the deal? I often have DMed without a shield, in particular by the 1990s when I knew the AD&D (1st ed) rules like the proverbial back of my hand. We also did a lot of "theatre of the mind" style games without miniatures and adventures were built out of imagination in real time improvised off simple maps and small sets of notes.

For me at least I enjoy having a wide variety of tables and notes for situations that might come up during a game. I am also often translating scenarios from different rules editions so want to make adjustments on the fly. Also cool and provocative player-facing art on a screen helps set the vibe a little.

And I guess I do like DMing from the far side of the table, away from the door, where a screen provides some privacy when I get up to pee and still have my maps and notes somewhat hidden. Unless someone wants to obviously sneak a peak.

Ha. mostly though, if I am being honest, when I am furiously going through a variety of materials trying to find that note or rules section or piece of a dungeon I am hacking for my campaign, it really is best for my players not to see that.

Attuning Fork (or I Almost Started Loving Myself Again)

But, nah, so probably the most significant 5th edition rule that grates on my OSR sensibilities is magic item attunement. 

The idea that certain magic items and their wielder to "form a bond" before the creature can use the item's magical properties is just a little to cozy. I can close my eyes and see Cyberpunk cybertech. (Should there be magic attunement psychosis?) And, as others have noted, the rules are pretty vague on what actually happens during the 1-hour short rest required to bond with such items - the time must be spent "focused on only that item while being in physical contact with it..." This takes away an opportunity to secure a magic item requiring attunement and using it during the battle during which the item is acquired. A total buzz kill.

The universal rule of a 3-item limit, for all creatures (except Artificers), seems inherently meta pox. Ugh. I understand that the 3-item rule only applies to certain magic items and for particular reasons unrelated to an items power, multiplicity of effects, or how interesting the item is (See Sword of Spirit's exhaustive look into the 2014 5e attunement, Reverse Engineering the Real Rules of Attunement, on EN World). 

The 2024 revision Dungeon Master's Guide no longer deigns to disclose a basis for when a particular magic item should require attunement. We can look back at the original 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide which informs (DMG, 2014, pg. 285):

Decide whether the item requires a character to be attuned to it to use its properties. Use these rules of thumb to help you decide:

1. If having all the characters in a party pass an item around to gain its lasting benefits would be disruptive, the item should require attunement.
2. If the item grants a bonus that other items also grant, it's a good idea to require attunement so that characters don't try to collect too many of those items.

Number 1 can be dealt with in other ways such as limits on the number of uses or the time between uses, or having the item be restricted to certain classes, species, etc. This is kind of silly as a reason because even with attunement items granting "lasting benefits" could be passed around.

That makes the reason that makes sense is to prevent stacking which we all know was quite out of control in 3rd edition. Which means keep attunement, but without being needlessly cumbersome.

Here are what I've culled as modified rules of attunement:

Attuning to a magic item that requires it may be by an Action that is not automatically successful.

The consequence for failure is you can perform attunement via a 10 minute Ritual-like focus and contact with the item. (You may always perform attunement via 10 minute Ritual-like focus and contact with the item.)

When an attempt is made to attune to an item, you must make a difficulty check according to the item type where bonuses to that roll correspond to your character attribute most closely related to the item's function and the check adds your proficiency bonus.

The DC is 10 for common items, 12 uncommon, 14 rare, 16 very rare, 18 legendary, and 20 artifact.

If the check succeeds, you attune to the item. However, if you fail, you must perform attunement via 10 minute Ritual-like focus and contact with the item. Some magic items (e.g. Artifacts) may present unique consequences for failure. 

NOTE: If you have already attuned to 3 items or more there is disadvantage on the check. Your successful check with 3 existing attuned items results that a random pre-existing attunement (that is not a cursed item) ends.

Attunement ends if:

• You no longer satisfy the prerequisites for attunement.
• The item has been more than 100 feet away from you for at least 24 hours.
• If you die.
• If another creature attunes to the item.
• If you voluntarily end attunement by a 10 minute Ritual-like focus and contact with the item unless the item is cursed.