I’ll stand by that claim even though we lost three (3) characters in the dungeon. This post is the sequel to The architecture in this town, playing B/X at Spelens Hus. I’m trying to catch up with the editing as we’ve played six sessions total at the time of this writing.
Session 4
This session represents the transition into generally coherent dialogue about actions and attention to whatever is going on. It’s kind of bumpy considering fatalities and making new characters, and the recording is short because I cut out most of the paper-shuffling dialogue in getting that done.
Shortly into this session, I realized that my play of multiple cultists across different games had messed up. Over in Drakkar och Demoner, their morale checks were crucial, but here, not only was their ideology different, but I’d included both berserkers and acolytes, two rather different “monsters,” … and berserkers, whom they were currently fighting, never check morale. But unfortunately I was accidentally playing these foes as if they were the cultists in the Drakkar och Demoner game and checking morale appropriately but mistakenly as for acolytes … which at this point, had become too plot-significant to reverse once I’d realized it. Arguably even berserkers might have paused a moment at the sight of their slaughtered and rapidly-deliquescing deity, but that’s definitely a retcon excuse following an outright mistake.
Our conversation in the comments of the initiial post about baboon alignment, alignment language, and intuitive understanding, turned out to be relevant. By the time there was any chance to talk, the single Lawful player-character had just been killed, so our newly-introduced Lawful baboon had no one to talk to.
We were all pretty jazzed about the new monster character in the group … until I decided that shooting arrows into a melee is a very bad idea. B/X has no text about it, and I’m strongly influenced by both TFT: Melee and D&D ’77 (Holmes), in which doing so poses great risk for one’s friends, so I adapted Holmes’ rules for it on the fly … and unfortunately, that was the end of the baboon.
Session 5
We’re finally out of the dungeon, after some negotation with crocodiles and stirges, leaving the less-dangerous but numerous acolytes hiding in their main cult room there.
In case you think I’m stingy in this dungeon, there is in fact a real haul in there, but it’s in the closed-off room full of elf zombies where the baboons and the cults have never gone, rightly recognizing that there may be considerable risk. The hell of it is that Qiris Boldshine was totally correct that ancient elf treasures of great cultural importance and possible positive social impact are right here.
However, notions of “safely back in town” don’t apply. I reviewed my sketchy notes about the place, realizing or deciding that the cult really isn’t secret, as it’s effectively taken over the town functions as a trap for travelers to get funneled to the temple. My thinking is essentially to repudiate the Serpent Cult model (see my criticisms in Pear pimples for hairy fishnuts): the cult is caught in its own trap because in order for the town to function at all, they can’t crack down fully on the citizens who are least loyal and most ready to rebel.
It was very easy to assign persons and functions to locations, including the previously-established cult house, the fanciest place which is now kind of a cult-gang center (the big complex to the left), the supply depot near where we had the horse guy previously (the “store” in the game mechanics sense), and the smithy, which necessarily needs water.
Here I observed a striking upgrade in engagement and interest, based on personalities and priorities. I’ll say, they weren’t robotic in the dungeon, but character play tended to get diminished by the constant “can I,” murky table-talk, and the ease at which characters were assassinated.
Session 6
Now well and truly here in town, I decided to go active with all the available elements. I just could not stop looking at that big, round, aqua green oasis pool. “Tentacles,” it said to me, “Gelatinous coiling tennnntacles …” I created a composite monster out of the gelatinous cube, the rock python, and the water elemental, especially the control rules for the latter.
Theo couldn’t make it at the last minute so I pulled one of the classic desperation moves which fortunately was not all that unlikely given the fiction of the moment.
Difficult reflection
I’m not enjoying B/X very much, in contrast to the AD&D game last year, or for that matter any play of Tunnels & Trolls or Mörk Borg. Or at least not the thought of playing adventure after adventure. A minor feature in all these games is the need, for a while, for overly directive GMing; it originates in making options clear but grows into steering and staging, and sometimes basically instructing players what to do. In the other titles, I accept that it’s a phase to be cleared as soon as possible, but in this case, it seems to be getting more and more necessary about more and more things as we go along.
Listening to us play, I hear and remember the fun, but it’s about “moments” and although there are plenty … that’s all there is. I tagged this post with “fruitful void” to indicate that nothing like that seems to be occurring, but instead, a cycling loop of do this in order to do this.
Some other features I don’t really like aren’t deal-breakers, but given the more fundamental issues, I’m kind of glad I don’t have to tolerate or tweak them in the future:
- Clerics being basically useless, including have no (zero) spells at first level, instead of front-and-forward hell on wheels as they are in D&D ’74 and AD&D.
- I mean, if any game ever needed healing spells out of the gate, it’s B/X, and they don’t get any.
- The default order-and-action sequence, which as I wrote earlier, I cannot see as anything but mistaken or badly-edited writing, because it’s genuinely nonsensical.
- Several potholes for odd micro-rules, many of which relate oddly to other rules, like the complicated and generous halfling stealth vs. pretty much useless thief stealth.
There’s a deficit on our end to be sure. As with any and every role-playing game, I and everyone playing have to attend and create in synergy with the quantitative and otherwise formalized procedures. I do observe the curious “it’s D&D” blindness or blankness that seems to descend on people among the player, but it’s mainly my failure.
For example, in session 4, when we replace two killed characters with suddenly-discovered prisoners of the cult right there in the dungeon, it’s completely my job as DM to provide a lot of information they must have about Qiris Boldshine and the first excursion into the temple, and I didn’t. Without that, the whole situational “meat” is diminished and devalued, or to put it less technically, the players don’t have content to work with which they really need, in order actually to play rather than merely to react to this or that sudden threat.
In playing some dialogue toward this end, I realized how tiring it was to have to inform one group of players what they should be asking as well to inform the other group what they should be answering. Although that might have been OK for an isolated moment, I realized that I’m feeling that way about everything in play for this game, and that to correct this would grade into a full game design effort for effective preparation. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and arguably I did go that far for AD&D, but I have to think a while about how to do it for B/X, and probably in doing so, start over and try again some other time.
Session 7 (final session)
The recording didn’t work. Play was only about an hour and is easily summarized: Theo’s character failed his paralysis roll and perished; Arvid’s new character was smart enough to concoct a monster-jelly killing potion from the materials in the poolside building + all that copper for the necessary electrical conducting; the crew accepted accolades and some mundane but real rewards from the decent townsfolk. As Arvid put it, “That was anticlimactic,” and I agree.
8 responses to “Towns are scarier”
The problem of needing to tell players what to do and where to go is something I think about a lot. In this family of games where the player characters start very tabula rasa and are more or less assumed to be rootless vagabond fortune-seeking survivalist adventurers of whatever level of skill and power seem to share this problem. They all seem to be very clear on what an Encounter is. But then kind of struggle on how that relates to an “adventure” as a whole other than being an organizing box for encounters. And they’re all almost totally silent on how an “adventure” in any way impacts anything larger than itself. So, you’re constantly forced to say, “Well there’s an adventure, here, here, here or here. Take your pick.” in one way or another.
I tried to mitigate this somewhat when I ran The Black Sword hack by starting with a loud information dense crisis that happens in the player characters’ presence. While this left the door open for multiple ways for the players to engage (or not) it still felt like just an attempt to mask, “You need to do SOMETHING about this limited range of things otherwise there’s no game.”
The only time I ever felt like I didn’t have to constantly do that was when I ran that lunch-hour D&D 5e game for co-workers. I gave them strong direction for the FIRST adventure (“there’s a mysterious disease coming from the old silver mine, helps us!”) but then what I did was deliberately put 2-3 things in each adventure that (a) had little to do with the actual adventure site and (b) I didn’t even really know what they were about/for other than some idle daydreaming. And I also put a lot of effort to note down anything the players didn’t find/deal with in an adventure site.
This meant that after the initial hand-holdy adventure players would follow up on things that sparked their curiosity that I would then work up into an adventure. I would also bring back undeveloped/explored stuff from previous adventures. Sometimes I would even do both simultaneously for a single adventure.
This worked really well. I never had to inject “fresh energy” into the campaign but it also had a strange hydra effect where there was constantly more and more and more “stuff”. After two or three years of this, it was A LOT. When that company finally went under and I went in to clear out my desk area there were more stacks of papers and file folders and notebooks related to D&D than my actual job.
So, I feel like there has to be some kind of middle ground between “go hear, go there” and uncontrollable content growth. Note: It was around this time I noted that a feature of Sorcerer/Trollbabe/Circle of Hands/S/lay w/ Me was a deliberate process for “breaking” between each situation, stepping back and clearly starting anew but with clear procedures for how to refresh the process.
Whoa, whoa, topic swerve. I’m not disputing your point but it’s dived away from what I’m talking about. A lot.
I’m not talking about going from one situation to another. As a rule, I think that if people object to being at or in a given situation, then something is wrong at a very basic and probably fatal level at that table. I similarly think that the decades-old topic of “oh no, how we do naturalistically arrive at this new sitution I’ve prepared, they have to choose to go there, but they have to go there,” is sterile and of little interest. It’s not a problem unless something else, very big, much deeper, is a problem.
Instead, I’m talking about playing inside a given situation. That is the whole point of the “Story, Story, Story” workshop and its predecessor, the course “Situation and Story:” how to reference whatever is relevant to the immediate scene, specifically those things which are not immediately observed in that scene. This skill may be exercised by everyone in play and varies widely by person, by procedures (system), by moment, and by the circumstances of that scene. But if it’s not there at all, there is no situation, merely an array of encounters which (no matter how complex, or story-structured, or full of A/B menu options) is necessarily not play.
I also want to emphasize my point that I am running into this effect or problem in playing this game and not in playing Mörk Borg, Tunnels & Trolls, D&D ’77, D&D 4E, or old/original RuneQuest. The latter games’ potato-chip characters boom into personal jet-engines of play fast and consistently, deaths and all. By contrast, there’s something particularly bland or circular baked into B/X which can probably be table-designed out of it, and I can speculate pretty well what I’d try to do toward that end, but I haven’t found it in application yet.
One final point: let’s get away from focusing exactly on texts as if they make us do things. I’m not going to blame a text if we, at the table, can’t get our shit together.
I took a step back to reflect on this and I think I see my initial misunderstanding.
I can see how certain properties of some of those titles lead to characters that blossom. I had similar experiences with The Black Hack in play.
I’m curious, though, if you can identify any properties of D&D ’77 that contribute to that blossoming compared to B/X?
I don’t know. I’m wary about identifying some specific dice mechanic or improvement procedure, to say, “There, there it is.” I don’t think the features I’m perceiving are reducible to that level of the rules, and I’m holding out the possibility that my perception is itself not yet confirmed in the first place. Until I get a better confirmation, which would require a lot more play, then I can only stick with the perception I raised in the post with the big sticker “my perception as of such-and-such a date” on it.
My workshop Two Roads is designed to clarify this and many related topics, especially since it’s not merely some curiosity limited to this or that iteration of the D&D IP. It’s significant in terms of foundational hobby presumptions and expectations regarding play, and, as I claim in that workshop, the foundation is not reducible to a single text but is more like a telephone game hybrid of AD&D (1st) and B/X at the tables, magazines, and RPGA.
But I don’t lay down the smack on either system as this is that and it is this way, because I’d rather raise the questions and have people work them out without my oversight. On my own time and context, I’d rather be playing other games at this point.
I wasn’t thinking of something as granular as individual rules. But I also understand not wanting to overthink it.
Regarding the Cleric at 1st Level. This is something that I have never conceived of as a problem. Is it inconvenient? I would not even say that. I have always taken it as part of the fiction: a cleric needs to prove themselves by surviving to the next higher tier in their cult, i.e. 2nd level. I do think it is a clumsy way to keep the cleric as less of a spell caster than a Magic User and can think of better ways to do that. My impression was that was the intent in terms of system.
While I think it is intentional, I certainly do not think that the designers envisioned it as a “hard core” mode, which the modern OSR has embraced.
I do agree that the Action Sequence is muddled, at best. Full use of it requires reading the associated fiction pieces in the text and even that does not make it entirely clear.
As I said, these particular rules aren’t primary issues for me, merely preferences, or if I really hated them, we’d just change them. I’m pretty sure the guys are ready for us to shift to a more Holmes-like initiative system, for example, but I wanted to give it a fair shake throughout our game first.
You know I’ve been working my way through understanding B/X for a while now, and in part, with your help, finally figuring out that B and X are actually different publications rather than a sequence, which is somewhat obscured by packaging. X, for example, is really levels 1-6. I’ve already mapped out spreadsheets for rules differences in a fashion that’s useful to me – but no such picky deconstructionism is really going to mean anything until I get a solid slug of play into me. This game was a first try at it.
I’ve added the recording for session 5. As it turned out, we closed play after session 7, so I’ll add the rest here as I continue to edit. (June 7: session 6 added; session 7 recording is lost, see ccommentary in post)
I’d really like people to review D&D as habits and culture, in detail if possible. This BX game is a spooky example, because these players do not have a long cultural history of “D&D-ness” as training, and yet everything we talk about it that old discussion is present in this experience.
There are a variety of murky, uncertain, disruptive, distracted behaviors, all of which are instantly recognizable when I describe them; they’re not exotic. All of which have a tiny kernel of function, and therefore when I mention them everyone starts bleating excuses based on that kernel. But yet they are more common per person, more widespread across persons, and taken to a constant and murk-producing degree … only when we are playing something tagged as D&D.
In the older discussion, the “tag” is important because in that discussion we were talking about our game Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is definitely not Dungeons & Dragons if you get to know the rules, but its retroactive OSR label identifies it as “a game like that” in people’s minds, for which “that” is an unstated but apparently very known, overwhelming thing.
In the current game, none of the behaviors I’m criticizing are typical for these players, and here they are, producing them like a factory gadget when Curious George nudges the berserk switch. I’d like to know why they have the same unstated, known, overwhelming cue to do it as older and more D&D-embedded people.