Early D&D - Thoughts on the first roleplaying games

My first roleplaying game, back in about 1983, was a slim blue book titled Dungeons & Dragons. This was what is now called the Holmes edition of Basic D&D. It wasn't actually written by Garry Gygax, none of the editions of Basic D&D were, he delegated them out to other writers while he focused on his magnum opus Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

Holmes D&D was super bare-bones, but an incredible eye-opener for me at the time and I've been in love with roleplaying games ever since. I went on to get all the Advanced D&D books and read and re-read them compulsively.

Soon after my brother and I picked copies of RuneQuest II and Traveller and moved away from D&D, but it was the first and I'd like to re-visit the early editions of Basic D&D as they are still seminal influences on the hobby. I read through them recently and it was a very interesting experience that I think is still very relevant to game design and play today.

Basic D&D is a very striped down game, and particularly in the Homes edition. You really don't get much in the way of advice as to how to play the game at the table, so the game very much relied on cultural transmission of player or Dungeon Master to player. I think this was a key motivator for many of the early authors of rival RPGs. They couldn't really see how to play this thing, needed to fill in a lot of the gaps in the rules, and ended up throwing out the few rules that were there in the process.

The next edition of Baisc D&D was written by Tom Moldvay. This is by far my favourite edition of basic D&D. I only read it a few years ago, and boy did I miss out over all those years.

Unlike Holmes and the later Mentzer edition, this version of the game has a spirit of fun, collaboration and generosity threaded all the way through it. Want your character to be able to ride a horse, swim or navigate a ship? Just write it into their background. It still has some oddities, the alignment rules are flat out unplayable, but it has a secret twist hidden in the GM advice section at the back.

The paragraph is titled “There’s always a chance”. If no other rule covers something a player wants to do, they just roll a D20 and try to get under an appropriate characteristic. There you go, simple extensible heroic roleplaying adventure rules as easy as you like. Interestingly The Black Hack  is a great recent lightweight OSR game based on the same mechanic and now has an excellent Second Edition.

The next edition of Basic D&D by Frank Mentzer came soon after. It added a lot of advice on how to run a game, but also squashed down some of the openness and exuberance of the Moldvay edition. I wish I'd come across Moldvay Basic D&D back in the 80s. I doubt I would have picked up on it's merits as much, I was very excited by the explosion of more flexible and capable game systems of the time. Sill, it's an interesting taste of what might have been.

The Burglary Move in Monster of the Week

One of the playbooks in the roleplaying game Monster of the Week is The Crooked, a former criminal that now uses their larcenous abilities to battle supernatural monsters. I recently played The Crooked in a run of the game GM'd by Blake Ryan under the auspices of the Gauntlet online roleplaying community.

As my character's signature criminal move I chose Burglary, here's the move text:

Burglar. When you break into a secure location, roll +Sharp. On a 10+ pick three, on a 7-9 pick two:

• You get in undetected
• You get out undetected
• You don’t leave a mess
• You find what you were after

This came up in the game when we broke into a house looking for clues about the were creature we'd tracked down there. The problem I hit was that although you make the move when you first break into the house, you pick things that affect future events like getting out undetected. How do you reconcile that with playing through or describing the burglary itself?

This move is great if you want to resolve the whole scene with one roll and it's done, but in the game we wanted to play through the burglary and have the character react to what he found. Fortunately PBTA games have a mechanic that allows that - hold. Here's a reformulation of the move in this way:

Burglar. When you break or slip into somewhere you’re not supposed to be, roll+Sharp. On a 10+ hold 3, on a 7-9 hold 2. During the intrusion you may spend your hold 1-for-1 to do the following without having to make another move:

• Get in clean.

• Avoid or disable a trap.

• Avoid detection until danger passes.

• Have exactly the right tools or equipment.

• Clear up evidence of the intrusion.

• Get out and clear.

I had a chance to test this out when I ran a fantasy PBTA game I'm working on and it worked really well.

How smart are humans, really?

I've been thinking about why so many intellectual tasks humans perform are so hard for us, particularly compared to computers. In the past we compared ourselves to other animals and decided we are clearly superior to them intellectually. There's really no contest between humans and any other animals in terms of problem solving and physical creativity.

Nowadays we have something else to compare ourselves to, computers. A computer with the right program can do many things fantastically better than we can, such as perform millions of complex calculations in just a few seconds. On the other hand if you present a computer program with a problem or situation it's not designed to deal with, it's typical response is to either crash or just produce useless output.

Nevertheless it seems likely that, eventually, we will learn how our brains work and figure out how to build a truly intelligent machine, or Artificial General Intelligence. So then the question is, compared to all possible intelligences how smart are we, really?

Some things that seem like they should be fairly obvious have proved to be complete mysteries to us for a long time. It seems to take enormous effort for us to make seemingly small incremental intellectual steps. For example it took mathematicians hundreds, even thousands of years to develop techniques and theories that you can teach to a student in a few hours. If these techniques are so simple they can be taught in a few hours, why did it take many thousands of mathematicians many hundreds of years to figure it out?

The conclusion I've come to is that, objectively speaking in the grand scheme of things, we are incredibly dim. Let's establish the lowest individual intellectual threshold for developing a technological civilization and call it 1.0 on the scale. For a species to achieve advanced mathematics and science it needs enough individuals with intelligence quotient 1.0 or higher. How smart are we on that scale?

Well, in evolutionary terms we only just barely developed a technological society. In the grand sweep of the development of our species and life on earth, we practically did it yesterday. Since I think we'd expect a species to develop technology soon after becoming capable of doing so, in fact the capability and achievement are in a kind of feedback loop with each other, I think it's clear that as a species we only just barely cross that threshold.

So, it seems to me that in the domain of technologically capable intelligences, we are just barely on the lower bound of the scale. After all, how much have we really evolved, as a species, since the development of behavioral modernity ~30k years ago? A sobering thought. Furthermore our progress as a species is driven by those at the forefront of thought and invention, people like Pythagoras, Galileo, Newton and Einstein. They're the ones pushing forwards the bounds of our achievement. The rest of us are along for the ride. So really only the smartest of us have crossed the threshold of intelligence necessary to achieve a technological society, and most of us are riding on their coat tails.

Minimalist Roleplaying - World of Dungeons and it's hacks

World of Dungeons and it’s descendents are a really interesting phenomenon. The game started as a kickstarter bonus for the Dungeon World RPG, and is just a handful of pages.

It’s true WoDu itself in particular is so minimalist it’s just barely playable, but then that’s also true of the earliest versions of D&D. I think Breakers, the first WoDu Turbo game, was a real watershed. It’s a much more complete game, ditches the legacy stats and has an up to date and highly functional character sheet design. It even comes with a handful of monster stats. Leading on directly from this is Rovers from Aviatrix Games, a really awesome Traveller mini-clone, complete with starship design system and a world creation system in just a few pages. Rovers completely floored me, next time I feel like running Traveller, or a Firefly or Dark Matter inspired game this is what I’m reaching for. Yes you get less than in any edition of Traveller, but terseness and simplicity are by themselves incredibly valuable attributes.

Another game I can’t pass by without comment is Streets of Marienburg. It seems to bypass Breakers mechanically, but it still one of the most complete WoDu hacks out there, even including a mini setting! Character Generation is appropriately expansive for a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying inspired game, and it has a nice mini magic system.

Breakers was still quite minimalist, but focused on a specific premise that made it feel much more complete than WoDu. Rovers and Marienburg though both bring a lot more to the table, fleshing out the game with extra options and mechanics that add flavour, and focus on a specific setting or activity but still in a super stripped-down way.

My one caveat about all of all these games is that you really need to already know how to play an RPG to really make them sing. That’s absolutely true of WoDu itself. As a kickstarter stretch goal for Dungeon World it was aimed squarely at people who already knew how to not just play RPGs, but PbtA games specifically. Breakers, Rovers and Marienburg take a little more space and effort to provide a more complete package. Still though, they rely on a lot of existing knowledge and experience in the reader. That’s not a bad thing though, why repeat a lot of ‘boiler plate’ introduction to roleplaying stuff unnecessarily? It just means they're not great as introductory games by themselves.

One niche these games fit particularly well is that they are pretty easily adaptable for a new setting. If you want to adapt WoDu or Marienburg to a new fantasy genre it's pretty simple to do. Similarly Rovers is fairly easily adapted to your favourite SF setting. This is a lot more work for the heavyweight, 'complete' PbtA game systems.

Six Good Reasons Why the Pak Didn't build the Ringworld

This post is commentary on an issue in the expansive science fiction universe created by Larry Niven. Larry wrote dozens of short stories and novels over many decades all set in Known Space, a science fiction ‘future history’ which included a fictive past history of our galaxy as well. His stories and the development of Known Space were hugely influential on other science fiction authors and his ideas pop up all over the place even today. The authors behind The Expanse TV show and book series cite Larry as a major influence, for example.

This article examines the origins of the Ringworld, a vast and ancient megastructure explored by the characters in several of Larry’s novels. It originated as a post to the Larry Niven mailing list many years ago.

In particular theory popular among fans of the books and raised by characters in the novels, that the ring was constructed by a species called the Pak. I’m not having it, and here’s why.

The Argument For

The theory that the Pak built the ring goes something like this. Pak Protectors are incredibly intelligent and industrious. They have very advanced technology and are capable of large scale engineering projects, especially when large numbers collaborate. The latter requirement, large scale collaboration, is tricky because generally speaking protectors only care about their own bloodline descendents. However sometimes, when a protector’s bloodline is wiped out, they manage to adopt the whole species as their bloodline. Such protectors are known to have worked together for the long term benefit and survival of the Pak as a whole.

So the idea is that a gang of childless Pak protectors built the Ringworld as a giant home for their’ species’ unintelligent breeder stage, literally a vast breeding ground, left the whole thing on automatic then went away. They did this in the galactic vicinity of Earth because Pak had visited Earth before, so they came here first then set up shop not too near but not too far away to build the Ring. Certainly the ring is populated by the evolved descendents of Pak breeders.

The Argument Against

If Pak protectors had visited Earth, they would know that Pak breeders left on their own will tend to evolve away from Pak normal form. Since the Ring contains maps of several other worlds near Earth, populated with sentient aliens, the Protectors must have visited those worlds too.

What do we know about Pak protectors? They are fiendishly intelligent, rabidly xenophobic and obsessed with the genetic purity of their species.

1. The idea that Pak protectors would suddenly decide that their non-sentient, essentially helpless breeder stage is better off without protectors to look after them is ludicrous. They'd also know that the breeders would mutate from studying the Earth breeder colony. Letting that happen is simply unthinkable to a Pak protector.
2. The Protectors would have known about the Kzin, Grogs, Humans, Martians, etc. and rather than wipe them out, as Brennan-monster and Phssthpok wiped out the Martians on Mars, they brought them to the ring and gave them a nice cozy home to live in, right next door to the breeders, and within spitting distance (in ring terms) of the command centre for the entire ring under the map of Mars. Yeah, right, good move!
3. The theory presupposes that the Ringworld engineer protectors found the records of the failed Earth colony and followed its path in secret. If it was a secret, why did they leave records of the Earth expedition in the great Library on Pakhome for Phssthpok to find? Suppose a protector decided to go on some fool errand to rescue the Earth breeders with a load of thallium oxide, or suppose a Pak family decided to conquer Earth for itself? The ring would have a planet full of protectors from Earth right on it’s doorstep!
4. Pak protector technology doesn't use automated control systems. Phssthpok flew all the way from the galactic core on manual, without so much as a rudimentary autopilot. They just don't trust automatics, yet the ring is completely automated, from the flup dredges and recycling system, to the attitude control jets and the meteor defense laser.
5. Why only build one ringworld. When you finish one, why not just build another, and another, and another. You've got something better to do? Suppose there are other ringworlds out there, would they let this one alone, knowing it's packed with a trillion potential protectors of radically different bloodlines?
6. Who keeps killing off the protectors that sporadically get created on the ring? Somebody must be doing it. Why are there any attitude control jets still in place? If I were a new protector on the ring, the first thing I'd do it put a bunch of juvenile breeders of my species on an attitude control jet ramship, with one adult and a time released store of tree-of-life. Launch the ramship and let the timer release the tree-of-life and turn the adult into a protector. When it wakes up it’s already on a fast trajectory away from the ring. It’s mission is to establish the species on new worlds away from the ring, helping guarantee the long term survival of the species whatever happens on the ring. It's simply the optimum survival strategy.

So I really don’t buy the idea that protectors of any sub-species designed and built the Ring. It doesn’t work like any known Pak technology, requires that they behaved in radically un-Pak like ways and took risks that would appall any right-thinking protector. It also requires that they assume that other Pak protectors would also behave in extremely non-Pak like ways. I’m just not buying it.