When we played the first session of Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set/Expert Set (1981, styled “B/X”), I didn’t present any. I had gravitated to northeastern Africa via the dungeon map I wanted to use, which in turn affected my monster picks (crocodiles, baboons), but there wasn’t any context or presentation in play about it. I chose the leading image after playing the first session, when Nils was having none of this “it’s just a fantasy town” nonsense and asked what the architecture was like.
The guys I’m playing with (Filip, Nils, and Neo in the first session) have been through some intense system-aware play, also as they’ve moved into their older teens: 3:16, EABA, and most recently The Mountain Witch. Their standards for the most basic possible play, for everyone at the table, are considerably higher than those presumed by the B/X text, which is frankly written for a single adult to manage, via DMing, a gaggle of distracted twelve-year-old boys.
Orienting regarding the text begins with publication history. This diagram shows that there is no “first edition” D&D, especially not as a cultural or play phenomenon. By my count there are five distinct core rules texts, and “basic” is a specific reference, preceding “expert,” inside a particular line, and has no relationship with “advanced.”
[During the Williams ownership phase, imagined as a page of its own to the right, both lines continued: at the top into a nearly-entire system reboot for Advanced D&D 2nd edition, and at the bottom, into four more boxes to complete levels 1-30 and a series of consolidations that would end with The Classic Dungeons & Dragons Game in 1994.]
Regarding personal history, it may interest you to know that I never once saw a copy of B/X in the wild and was unclear about its contents until about 2010. As a young/mid teen, I’d played Holmes (1977), the reprinted Gygax et al. (1978), and AD&D (1977-1979) in varying combinations and stepped away from D&D sensu lato around 1981. I bought and briefly played Mentzer (1985) when I was working at a neighborhood center in the mid-late 1980s.
For a big sector back then, however, B/X was the primary D&D, so I’ve been preparing to play it for a while for my own education. Also, the guys wanted to “play some D&D” and I have no interest at all in 5th edition, so this is what we chose.
Preparation
I’ve said many times at the past that early D&D made no sense to play prior to 4th level for the characters, but that was strictly in reference to Advanced D&D, which is a completely different game. Although still a bit tough on them, this system is by contrast functional from the start. Here are the notes and then the sheets for our starting fellows, at which point, too, I had prepared nothing much beyond some scribbles.
Quick footnote: Neo changed his dwarf character’s name to Gromlim before play started.
My preparation stayed with the instructions in Basic, glancing at a couple of things in Expert but not planning to implement them fully until and unless we get to 4th level characters.
An important aspect is to start with a dungeon and expand outwards through later development, as we ask questions like “what’s ‘town’ anyway” and travel elsewhere (these instructions are common to many contemporary games, especially AD&D and T&T, and heavily implied in RuneQuest).
Here’s the archeological evidence for my dungeon preparation, with some attention to the instructions. It’s all Basic content except for the crocodiles, and I also dropped the cube to three hit dice as per the text’s instructions for doing so.
You can see that I skated considerably on situational context/content – no idea why the noble elf guy had quested into the vicinity, no idea what the cultists wanted or did besides worshipping a pool full of goo, no idea who the undead even were … the only NPCs I had a good feel for were the baboons, in that they knew the cultists were killing and goo-ing people and actually were trying to warn the characters away from the place, non-lethally, for their own good. (They aren’t above eating someone who insists on being a doofus and trying to kill any of them, but it’s not their primary goal.) I had some usable details, like the water’s placement, to serve as my foundation for filling in content as needed after the first session, but as you will see, the players outstripped my laziness right from the start.
Session 1
Thoughts on the play experience
- This game, as with the related titles, does not include attribute rolls. If you’re smart enough to know, then you know, agile enough to do it, then you do it. In this case, Intelligence differed greatly between Nils’ smart thief Seth and the other two rather doltish characters; there are many examples, but note these especially
- During the stirge fight, I say “you didn’t know” and “you do know” in quick sequence, which in audio-only makes no sense, because I’m speaking to Filip and Nils respectively
- Nils’ character’s head is sort of my portal for data, as with the deductions I provide “into” it when they are traversing the upper walkway; however, this was more syncretic than it sounds because Nils indicated nonverbally that this kind of observing and thinking is what his guy was doing
- And as a contrast, although Neo’s dwarf Gromlim is generously described as challenged, he is basically an observational genius regarding architecture and dungeon-y design relevance, so I did the same for those variables more or less constantly upon arrival there
- Sides-initiative vs. individual initiative turned out to be pretty easy; same concept throughout all of early D&D shares the concept that you do sides-based initiative when sides are fighting as teams, and then “zoom in” on individual ordering when paired or subset-group outcomes are independent
- The specific procedures for the zoomed-in ordering differ greatly across AD&D, Holmes, and B/X, as do the time-units for a combat round
- If/when Basic and Expert are distinctly different for a given thing, then at present anyway, I’m using Basic; however, if Basic offers options, we consider them fully, e.g., individual weapon damage instead of universal 1d6
- For perspective, the range of individual weapon damage in this system is much more narrow than the crazy wide spread across AD&D weapons
- Each player feels their way into their character, so that the flighty Elduin (rattled by nearly being killed), the keen and cautious Seth, and the lit-stick-o-dynamite Gromlim all take shape, including quirks of dialogue.
- You can see them working out how stupid is stupid, i.e. the dial spins a bit for them as we go along
- Laughed out loud during editing the inadvertent intrusion into the baboons’ hidey-hole (dialogue among players only): “Get out of there!” “Will we attack?” “No!” “… What?” as the players were entirely aware of the different degrees of information and different attitudes among their characters
- Note the casual, shared narration authority, e.g., Nils providing sound effects upon my sound effects for the first splattered stirge
- Play seems to get hitchy when combat starts at the “baboon door,” but that’s because Neo had to step out for a phone call, so we’re just waiting for him to get back, hence the chat about baboon capabilities and possible options for the characters out in the corridor
- I didn’t get my monsters’ morale checks right; I’m used to doing them only when things go badly, but this phrasing has them every round, with penalties when things go badly
- Having prepared for five characters and playing only with three, it’s a minor miracle that Filip’s guy lived through the stirge fight
That led to a window into the ordering system, which I think is flawed compared both to Holmes (1977) and to Mentzer (1983/85). It might even be a writing and editing artifact because I have a hard time believing anyone actually designed and played it as written.
- Given sides-based initiative, you conduct full missile, magic, movement, and melee for a whole side before the other side gets to do any of it – which makes neither fictional nor strategic sense
- In Holmes, you go side-then-side for each of these phases, which I think is what Moldvay and Cook must have intended, and didn’t quite write right, unless they were just dumb (which I don’t think they were)
- There are no instructions for parsing these things for individual initative ordering, although the implication is that each “guy” would have these steps in full, per go, which is not quite as nonsensical but is also conceptually 100% incompatible
- I ran into a specific difficulty when Gromlim’s individual initiative preceded the baboons’, when he intended to withdraw from the fight; the rules specify a reactive strike when you withdraw, but they also permit full movement and other activity before the other side does anything, so I went with the timing intead of the reactive strike; I kind of think I should have granted the strike, but I want to call out the instructions as contradictory
No setting, fine, but we need situation
Not to put too fine a point on it, the players were having none of this lazy sketchy “dungeon only, no reason” bullshit and played as if I did in fact have the responsibility to play everything contextually. At one point I say “can’t we just go into the dungeon?” which was a joke, but it’s also a little plaintive as I realized I couldn’t skate at all, not even the little bit I’d allowed myself.
As planned, but more quickly and a bit shame-faced, I put some content-work into session 2, including regional maps.
It’s probably not clear from those pages, but the scribbles correspond to content in my head about the noble elf questing guy, the contrasting two cultures of western swamp and eastern forest elves, the undead in the dungeon, the modern-day cultists, conditions and relevant people in town, and related matters. It’s true that the dungeon was already its own little situation in strictly tactical terms, but now we have a somewhat bigger situation with a backstory in which the dungeon is embedded.
I made sure to have a real answer for Nils regarding the town!
And finally, some reflection/reminders to myself regarding the system.
SESSION 2
See the associated comment for discussion.
SESSION 3
See the associated comment for discussion
6 responses to “The architecture in this town”
I quite enjoyed the PLAY. It felt familiar and it sounded as if everyone had a good time. I will just throw in some thoughts.
1. No real mention of alignment and play did not seem to suffer or require explicit mention. Did the players each choose a different alignment on purpose? Are baboons smart enough to communicate in “Neutral”? Likely not.
2. Even in my earliest play, people needed a “why” for being at the dungeon. Something more than adventure for the sake of adventure. None of the early available examples, B1 or B2 give you much in that regard.
3. What is it about baboons that made them compelling enough antagonists for D&D and Runequest? I don’t remember baboons being a cultural thing around the time of the various games’ creation.
1. They did consider alignment carefully during character creation, including combing the Basic text, and I think the players applied it precisely and consistently. Neo latched onto the idea of playing a nigh-indestructible little wild card, very different from his cerebral characters in non-rolled systems, Nils typically favors aloof characters who get un-aloof sometimes, and I think Filip might have fancied the idea of the high-minded elf, a bit of a noble.
2. Agreed!
3. I don’t know! This was long before the events in Kenya in 1984 which codified a raft of baboon-esque straight to video horror flicks. National Geographic? The extensive coverage in the Time-Life books? Maybe an episode of Wild Kingdom (at a guess, I can’t recall a specific one)? Fun fact: Jim Fowler came to my grad school Zoology department to give a seminar, and everyone, world-class faculty down to first-year grad students, fell all over him with squee, me included.
Oh, I missed a somewhat hidden question: the baboons can’t talk, being limited to “simple screams and sounds” to communicate. The simplest interpretation regarding alignment languages is to say that although a tree may be Neutral, it cannot speak the Neutral alignment language because it cannot speak or understand language at all, and the same goes for the baboons.
(shifting now to pure coffee-shop talk, with the chasm of blowhard bullshit yawning near) I suppose one might say they speak Neutral, except that their version is made of screams and sounds. In which case, if a Neutral-aligned character tried to communicate with them, arguably they might find a way, perhaps more intuitively than grammatically, and of course limited to the perspective of what baboons know and understand. The distinction being that a character of another alignment would have no chance.
You and I have discussed this before, with the conclusion, I think, that the whole construction of alignment was a mess across the authors for the texts in my diagram, let alone the play-cultures, and must be very text-specific if we care to apply it. You’ve also helped me learn that Basic/Expert itself seems to have struggled, in its inception, regarding whether it was to accord with AD&D or not in many variables, and alignment seems to have been a special sore point.
(back to the reality of a table at play) As I see it and as I’ve decided to play it, alignment language as such is a crazy outlier in the otherwise rather straightforward B/X construction. The three alignments in this case are very general, entirely psychological (e.g. not metaphysical), and prescriptive rather than dynamic. They are wholly misnamed, as they are clearly “good/decent/fair,” “pragmatic,” and “irresponsible, selfish/evil,” nothing to do with any Moorcockian or Andersonian law or chaos whatsoever.
Therefore the notion of an alignment language in this context is pure nonsense and seems to me a gratuitous bit of stretched sticky taffy between the developing Gygax/AD&D texts and the Holmes-to-Moldvay transition. I’m inclined to ignore it, or at the very least, merely afford some generosity to similarly-aligned entities trying to communicate when they don’t share an actual language.
I think that makes sense. Maybe a mere “Okay I get a feeling we are of similar psychological outlook.” or some such. Thanks!
SESSION 2 (the audio recording is added to the main post)
We began with Theo and Arvid finalizing their characters prior to entering play, and sure enough, a classic sterile alignment debate arose. It is absolutely and specifically due to the rushed and out-of-step process. This did not happen during the earlier process with Nils, Neo, and Filip, in which we were going slowly, making up characters simultaneously by the steps, when I had time to pass around the famous alignment picture and everyone could settle into their decision as they continued to get their character on paper.
It wasn’t a great beginning, laying the groundwork for a specific kind of free-associative blather that I think of being distinctly D&D, as if everyone were six. I can’t even imitate it. It lasts from just after the start of part 1 and about halfway part 2, interspersed with play. I let well enough alone until about halfway through, when clearly it was escalating and I was getting ready to say Shut Up Now, Play or Go Home.
On the plus side, although you can’t see it, a lot of decision-making byplay between Arvid and Theo was more interactive with the other players than it sounds, both in the town and at the campsite outside the temple entrance. A lot of what they encountered was directly due to what the other characters had done, and this was acknowledged via many exchanged glances and body language. But that has its downside too, shown by Theo pushing back on it when he thought their player-knowledge was messing with his decisions, which was also true.
I listened to my own signal that my actual participatory play was slipping. When the stirges got initiative, the characters didn’t have time actually to place the horse as a victim as planned, and the horse, not being stupid and totally fed up with these people, bolted during the next flurry of action. But I missed saying it and thus realized that I was too busy managing people and not able to play my guys, in this case the horse.
The good news is that when the characters were finally united, everything clicked – you can hear the exact moment when Theo kind of put his head back together and said, “But what’s going on? We don’t want to go in there, the baboons don’t want us to go in there, can we just go forward?” allowing me to fold Nils into interacting instead of everyone kind of popping off randomly.
I’m on record for years and years, with dozens if not hundreds of play-examples, saying that character separation is no big deal. However, here, it seems to be a real factor. I think it’s a matter of process rather than fictional subject or game system: it’s fine if you proceed fully through character creation with brief but straightforward definitions as you go, and then proceed fully into play, possibly with a real time-lapse transition. Otherwise there’s a chasm waiting for you which may or may not be specific to D&D and adjacent material, but whatever it is, it’s real and it’s bizarrely specific.
I thought I’d share my thinking on torches and stirges. I figured they might be held off by torches held specifically to deflect them for a single round, which means when the characters returned to the lower passage and mentioned using their torches again, I was thinking, “that won’t go well,” but rolled no encounter which would have indicated the return of the “patrol,” exactly as Filip wisely suspected.
There’s an interesting diversion moment of joking table-talk making fun of dwarven architecture expertise, which I present as the exact opposite of the irritating and play-destructive blather earlier. Note that every person at the table contributed and was appreciated by everyone else. It’s a good example of fucking around which was fun, about a minute long, and although “disruptive” in a purist radio-play sense, not at all any problem for play.
For the fight with the cube, I used a quick-sketched map which was very effective. Everyone was clear on exactly where everything and everyone was throughout.
However, yet again, I forgot about the damn morale checks – would have been very important for the cube, especially, although that wouldn’t have helped Glomrim.
SESSION THREE (recordings have been added to the post)
Baboonery. No, it’s not in the rules. But as we realized at the end of session 2, the baboons really are the most viable instantly-added player-character candidates in the situation. We’re using the straight-up monster block with the monster resolution rules; I didn’t translate him into a fighter or whatever.
Social thoughts. The game continues to be difficult, although better than the previous session. I think you’ll easily hear that the first half-hour or so is very scattered, and that perhaps we shouldn’t have continued for another round at the end, as a couple of people got way too invested in the newly-named NPC cult member. All that said, major credit for something important: not even a breath or hint of weaseling, ever. No one is trying to leverage murk for advantage. Filip called the expiration of Elduin’s Shield spell on himself.
Speaking and doing. Movement – missile – magic – melee is screwing me up in a way Holmes doesn’t. I see it as an inviable middle ground between big-round, essentially collective resolution (T&T, AD&D) and one-by-one move-and-act resolution. There are viable hybrids: Holmes and AD&D, different as they are, share the priority of the “bigness,” finalized at the end of the round, with zoom-ins as required, each narrowing the scope of the T&T-type process in different ways; The Fantasy Trip combines side-based initiative and movement as distinct from individual action order. However, B/X seems to me to create a weird impossible-to-fiction routine which is neither forward-linear nor retroactive, and non-adjustable. I can see why its optional rule shifts to one-by-one resolution which – including artifacts of its own – was taking hold across most of role-playing at that time. The players kept advertently grading into doing that, and dragging me with them, when they launched into action while we are trying to establish movement, which incidentally never happened when we played Tunnels & Trolls.
Honey, I shrunk the corridors. This is one of many reversals in rules, which are definitely due to playing too-similar games at once. These squares are supposed to be ten feet (three meters) wide, but I accidentally halved it down the size of squares in Drakar och Demoner. So our cultists were suddenly squeezed for space when they didn’t have to be. Another example is forgetting whether I was rolling over or under regarding Morale. Also, I don’t know what I was thinking about Morale in writing the post; it works just as in other games and isn’t routinely rolled per round.
Dead guys. It mut be said of Glomrim, doughty as he was, that he walked face-first into an acid pseudopod and must be recognized as a non-tactical constantly attacking nutbar, and they tend to die in my dungeons a lot. Whereas Elduin, hanging onto his last hit point by his fingernails, died bravely and with dignity when the time came.
Everyone seems fine with ongoing play, even long-term. Someone at some point, seeing that full-on party mortality is a viable outcome, wondered how it would continue, and I said, “Well, we begin a new situation somewhere else on the map, with totally different characters, and more-or-less common knowledge includes what happened to those guys who found that abandoned temple. Sucks to be them.”