My Agenda For Old School RPGs and D&D

 Where Did This Come From?

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine. He argued that D&D would benefit from having a prescriptive agenda in the vein of many of the modern RPGs (and indie RPGs especially) on the market.  The agenda would prescribe exactly what the activity of "playing D&D" would entail, and from his perspective, result in much more clarity in the hobby.  Instead of the incredible variety of interpretations people have on what it means to "play D&D," the variety would be much less on playstyles are much more in the vein of flavorings, setting material, and supplements.

It's a double-edged sword, and an issue that I want to tackle in another article sometime.  For now, though, I'd like to show what my agenda for Old School Gaming is.  By reading it, people know exactly what to expect from the style of play I enjoy running and playing in, and perhaps we can have discussions on how your agenda compares to mine.

The A-A-Ron Old School Agenda

The best way to do this, I believe, is to present this with the principles I use to make this work.

1. The System Is The Beginning

The rulebook is the starting point, but it's not the border of our territory, nor is it sacred.  The territory will be filled with new rules, rule adjustments, and unwanted rules will be expelled.  The idea that you must play a game as it's written before you start making changes is a well-meaning fallacy.  While it often takes running a game as it's written to understand what was intended by the designer and how everything works in tandem, a talented game master can understand the intention and decide whether or not they believe that intention has merit in the game they wish to run.

The players should be spoken with about changes as they unfurl, your reasoning for the changes, and a projection of what the change should do to enhance the game.  Players will disagree with these things from time to time, but having the discussion will yield greater perspective on what they care about with the game.  This may, in turn, help you decide how to shift things moving forward.

2. Impartiality Is Your Aspiration

To be completely impartial to the efforts of the players is damn near impossible... without using procedures to keep yourself honest.  "How deadly is this trap they just tripped?  Will they encounter anything on their way out of the dungeon?  What do they encounter, and how deadly is it?  How readily do they find more supplies?  What is their likelihood of success in this endeavor?"  There is a reason that old school referees use such things as wandering monster checks, dungeon turns, exploration turns, charts upon charts to help them make an environment come to life without letting their inward desire to see the players succeed (or fail) get in the way.  The truth of the matter is that the less tools and prep work a referee is using, the less you can trust how impartial they are.

There will be times that players dive their noses into the gaps of your prepared material.  You've got two options at that point: approximate using plausibility that is faithful to the environment, or lay some fresh bricks.  Laying fresh bricks is dangerous; your subconscious may lead to you biased outcomes.  While the former is preferable, the latter will happen from time to time.  The important thing is to acknowledge that impartiality is an aspiration, not a status.  Unless the only thing that players can do is on their character sheet (which sounds more like a board game with roleplaying than a true roleplaying game), a referee WILL have to make snap-judgments.. which are inherently prone to partial adjudication.  Aspire to be impartial. This should go without saying, but.. NO FUDGING.

3. The Players Push The Boundaries

Even in my most restrictive game, my Old School Essentials Public Game, players still find ways to expand the territory.  Part of the reason that this is inescapable in my style of play is due to the fact that plausibility is so important.  For a player to say "I would like to spend some time doing this" and me to say "actually that's not in the book and I don't feel like making that part of the game because it affects the balance I want" would be ludicrous.  As long as the players are not violating the agenda of the game or ruining the fun of other players, their characters are characters within a world that is meant to represent some form of a plausible world, which necessitates that dedicating time to do things means that they may be able to incorporate an unexpected element into the game.  Rather than pushing against this, referees should embrace this, and watch as the territory expands in front of their eyes.

4. The World Is Greater Than The Characters

This is probably one of the most important old school play principles.  It's completely understandable that players get attached to their characters and want to continue playing as them.  It's understandable that players wish to write elaborate histories for their characters, and use those histories to reinforce how they perceive their characters' perspectives to be.  But the referee cannot allow this attachment to cloud their judgment.  The world is what informs plausibility for the referee.  Prep, procedures, and tools keep the referee honest.  When the characters make poor decisions and the world would see them killed, it is the referee's duty to pull that lever without hesitation.  When the players propose backstories that conflict with the world, the referee is obligated to correct them.  When the players suggest character arcs for their player, the referee should tell them that this probably isn't the right game to explore arcs, and they should expect to be disappointed when things don't carry out the way they planned.

5. The Game Is Greater Than Any One Player

When a player finds themselves in the position that their character's perspective would lead them to do something that would cause problems for the group, it's time for an out of character discussion.  We need to decide where we as a group wish to take a stance on this, and give the player an opportunity to make an informed decision.  This could be that the player has meta-knowledge but believes that they should act against it because their character would not have that knowledge (the troll vs fire scenario).  This could be that the rest of the group seems set on doing something that violates a character's principles (the uptight Paladin scenario), or even as much as deciding how resources should be split within a group.  The dilemma needs to be discussed as adults, a standard should be determined that everyone can go by, and then the player can decide how to make their character act moving forward.  There are times when one's perception of their character's fierce adherence of principles muddies their view of how a real person would behave.  When in doubt, the integrity of the game must be the highest priority, and that can mean that a player needs to allow for characters to pick their battles.

6. The Players Deserve Transparency

The referee should be transparent with their players.  This does not mean that the players should know everything that's behind the scenes, but when the dice decide their fates, they should see the roll as much as is humanly possible so that they know the fate was honest.  There are some things that referees have little choice but to keep concealed so as to not influence the players' decisions.  Search or listening checks are probably the most obvious, as the players know that if they roll a failure, they should probably check again.  When it comes to wandering monster checks, attack rolls, damage rolls, saving throws, durations, etc... I roll them publicly.  Even if there's a chance that the players' knowledge that the creature failed their saving throw can potentially influence their decisions going forward, it's more important to me that the players SEE the roll so that they can know I'm not pulling their feet out of the fire or pushing them into it.

The Old School D&D Agenda, Specifically

Now I'm going to narrow it down to how I'd say the agenda for old school D&D should be.  This includes all of the aforementioned in the Old School Gaming Agenda, but also includes what "playing D&D" is to me.

1. Rags to Riches.

Players should run characters that are motivated adventurers.  While the specifics behind the motivations vary, the truth of the matter is that they want to grow in power and wealth, for one reason or another.  The Fighters aspire to become local rulers, the Thieves to become wealthy guildmasters, the Magic-Users to become masters of the arcane (and fucking hell is that expensive), and Clerics to advance the cause of their deity through pious works, donations, and the quelling of the deity's adversaries.  It's a race to reach Domain Play, and once name level is reached, the PC is either retired to become a figure of great status in the world, or the play evolves to meet the demands that Name Level PCs would require.

2. Humanocentrism.

The world that is being explored is one that we perceive through the lens of humanocentrism.  The various species and cultures in the world are all primarily explained through their relationship to human civilization, and secondarily explained in how they relate to one another.  Humanocentrism is what makes demihumans strange and nonhumans a threat.  It provides the players with a framework by which they can make a million assumptions about your setting and likely be correct, which avails us of the issues that arise from a completely foreign world.  We don't need to spend hours explaining the place in the world a halfling has, the historical use of halflings in D&D settings through the decades has laid that foundation for us.  In turn, we can dive into what really matters: the game.

This, of course, does not mean that it should be absolutely impossible to have a player character that is nonhuman or of the monstrous variety, but they would be an incredibly bizarre sight with extreme exceptions as to their circumstance.  They would be met with apprehension or hostility at best, violence at worst by those unfamiliar.

3. Cosmological Alignment Is Important

If you wish to know my full thoughts on alignment, I did another entry called "In Defense of Alignment" in which I detailed my feelings.  I feel that with Humanocentrism and Cosmological Alignment combined, there are even more added assumptions and every action has even more added weight that the players can navigate with their characters.  Cosmological Alignment provides a framework that explains just why Clerics get involved in raiding crypts, why deities are so involved as to rubberstamp miracle usage to hundreds or thousands of people in the setting, why it's not only excusable to have a scorched earth mentality when encountering creatures of Chaos, but necessary.  If a player decides to play a Chaotic character, they should realize that their character may be slaughtered by the rest of the party if their actions seem to be aiding the side of Chaos in the cosmological conflict.

4. Resources Matter

Resources are what give the game tension because we aren't running D&D in the modern sense, that is, the sense of a tactical combat simulator that we are expected to win or a well-spun narrative worthy of publication.  Old School D&D is a game of overcoming obstacles through clever use of resources, risk taking, and ingenuity.  Sometimes, the obstacles are insurmountable with the resources we have at our disposal.  We take these failures, we learn from them, and we prepare for them better next time.

5. Risk Vs. Reward

If the players aren't constantly evaluating the risks of the actions they are about to take, there's a good chance that their characters will die or they won't be sufficiently rewarded.  If that's not the case, then the players are not being challenged enough and you should revisit what tools you're using.  Every mechanism at your disposal should be aimed at providing risks that can be taken for increasing rewards.  If a group of players is urging another player to have their character flee, but that player wants to take a risk and try to grab some extra gold before they leave, you're doing it right.  XP for kills is an okay vehicle for this, but XP for gold is by far the best vehicle I have seen.  Put them together, and baby, you've got a stew going.

6. Venturing Into The Strange And Unknown

D&D isn't about going to the local supermarket and slaying goblins that have taken it over, though hiring PCs to take care of crises is not the worst thing I've ever heard of.  D&D is about stepping into the wild, uncharted world where every step is potentially treacherous and there are treasures and vicious creatures that the characters may know absolutely nothing about.  The sense of discovery is a strong part of the feedback loop of playing D&D.  This is something that has been lost on the modern generation of gaming, where it's expression much more than discovery.  Player maps, torches, question-and-answer exploration has been replaced with roll-to-get-the-answer, problem avoidance character builds, and story arcs.  If the players are going off into the wilderness and creeping through the dungeon, you're playing D&D.  If the players are handling problems in towns or getting drunk in the tavern, you're roleplaying with your D&D character, but you aren't really playing D&D.

I'm not at all disparaging the urban-style game.. I run lots of urban-style games.  Check out my Cha'alt posts if you don't believe me.

7. D&D Is Not Epic

Probably my most controversial stance, but one that I believe is true nonetheless.  D&D is not about epic heroes.  D&D is not about saving the day, being destined for greatness, or having epic Avengers style battles inside spinning hollowed-out meteorites with fetal gods.  D&D allows a formula in which players can accomplish incredible things with their characters, but they do so with the understanding that they very well can (and probably will) die in the act.  The scale remains gritty, even if the tools grow in size and number.  A Magic-User of incredible power can easily fall in a 10' pit of snakes and die from a snakebite.