TSR How Did I Survive AD&D? Fudging and Railroads, Apparently

[Voadam]

"Frequent combat" means either a) you're all happy fighting a war of attrition and are thus all willing to roll up new characters on a regular basis or b) you're doing something wrong, as combat should be the last resort.

Last resort comes up a bunch.

In Moldvay Basic expect a wandering monster roughly every two hours of exploration with actions like checking for traps taking a 10 minute turn each.

"Besides the monsters which live in rooms, characters may encounter monsters which wander about the dungeon. These monsters are known as "Wandering Monsters". At the end of every 2 turns, the DM should check for Wandering Monsters. To do so, roll 1d6: a result of 1 indicates that the party will encounter a Wandering Monster in the next turn."

The example of combat in Moldvay Basic on B28 is triggered by a random wandering monster encounter a party of four PCs level 1 and 2 are checking out a room when a secret door opens and 12 armed hobgoblins come in. They try try talking with a good approach which they get an ad hoc +1 on the reaction roll, which does not work with the reaction roll going against them. They then bluff which again does not work as the reaction roll goes against them, then initiative is rolled and they fight and a PC dies round 2.

Just like on the example of play on B59 the thief Black Dougal thinks to check for traps before opening a chest and uses his class ability doing his class job, but dies because of the mechanics because failed check traps roll then failed save.

Death is mechanically easy in low level old D&D even when doing stuff cautiously.

 

[Theory of Games]

Linear adventures and campaigns (like most APs) work best when player and PC goals are aligned, and when both can feel good about what they're doing. Greed and altruism both tend to be good motivators, the latter is why we get so many "save the world" plots. Coercion is a bad motivator, eg "Save the World from the Giants or we kill you" in G1-3. The reason being that the players & PCs would often rather target/defeat the coercive force than do what the coercive force (& adventure) wants. And especially at high level the PCs often really should be able to defeat the coercive force. But "Against Geoff" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Only if you presume your players literally never care about anything other than grabby-hands wealth-acquisition.

I don't choose to play with such players, and I would never run games for such players.

Greed is only a useful motivator when players never have higher motivations than it. As soon as they do, greed loses its luster fantastically quickly.

What the character wants trumps what the player wants. You're playing a role, remember? If you're at the table, chances are you know what you're playing and why from a personal perspective. What motivates your character is very often a different thing because they are living in a different world and have had different experiences. The term "adventurer" means the character is seeking adventure and hoping to acquire wealth along the way. If you aren't playing those sorts of characters, I wonder why you're playing AD&D at all.

 

[CleverNickName]

That "player vs. DM" mentality has been baked into the hobby since the 1970s. We're seeing less of it these days, thankfully, but it's far from gone.

 

[Emerikol]

I started playing with AD&D 2nd edition back in 1990. Like many, I got many rules wrong at first (and probably continued to do so for years), but by the mid-1990s I had become a player in a regular campaign and was developing great memories. I would look back to those memories of the cornerstone of my life in RPGs, even today, as nostalgia makes me think of lasting campaigns, great character arcs, memorable villains, and emotional payoffs.

<snip>

Was this the “proper” way of playing back in the day? Is this why OSR products are considered meat grinders? Because we were all cheating (by today’s standards)?

I'm still an old school style player though I'm not pure OSE. More like C&C or my own homebrew.

I don't remember fudging in my games. I think that is a choice and I think people who wanted a different style of game fudged to make it that way. Me and my players wanted a GAME first. Meaning success is not guaranteed and accomplishments are earned and are hard at times. Death is real and bad things can happen like levels getting drained or someone getting turned to stone.

Here are some old school things I believe we aim for in a game.
1. The adventure while broadly of appropriate level doesn't mean the bad guys won't learn from their defeats and adapt.
2. Combat is to the death and the dice fall where they fall.
3. Preparation is important. Pack what you need to overcome the challenge. Think about it.
4. Success is often driven by good gameplay than character levels or special powers.
5. The world is a big place full of a lot of good and bad people. The PCs are never without equals. Those equals of course grow rarer at higher levels.
6. The DM's design of the world happens ahead of the players showing up to place.
7. The DM designs a broadly plausible world that makes sense and is consistent.
8. And yes the DM's rulings are final.

 

[Emerikol]

No, we shouldn’t go back to it. We should take what we like from these adventures, if anything, and improve them. 2e adventures and particularly Ravenloft 2e adventures were written in a very clumsy way that took railroads to a whole new level by eliminating player agency. You don’t have to remove the linear aspects entirely, particularly for a one-off game, but you can at least give agency back to the players.

With the BBEG of that adventure, he’s a Rakshasa with powerful illusion spells at his disposal. Was the adventure really trying to tell me that he couldn’t have an illusion that would likely protect him from an insta-kill? Heck, throw the 2e version of Stoneskin on him if you really don’t want the crossbow to kill him on the first hit. Completely within the rules, no DM fiat needed.

The hobby because of it's popularity and longevity has fragmented in terms of style. No style is bad if people enjoy the style. Personally I prefer the old school style but I'm sure many prefer what is being offered today based on sales of 5e. So live and let live. There is no best or better style. There is the style you like and you want to play.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There's a fourth possibility as well:

(d) the disease is merely serving as a doom-clock to keep the party moving, perhaps more quickly than they otherwise might, and is a side piece to the actual adventure. For example they think they're going out after the cure and their odds are very good of finding it, but the real adventure will reveal itself during this process e.g. finding the cure draws them in to Castle Amber or Ravenloft or somewhere else they then have to complete an adventure to get out of.

This might relate to your point c above, but it could also just be a means of (in theory) preventing the 5-minute workday approach.

I would be....more than a little suspicious of using it as a "death clock." Yes, that has the legitimate purpose of ensuring that the party keeps moving. But that could also extremely easily be just a clever way of disguising pretty blatant railroading.

As for the Castle Amber thing, that's just using one hook (cure search) to trigger another (Castle Amber). Whether that is crappy "you get no choices but I will deceive you into thinking you have choices" behavior, or perfectly acceptable "alright, we've closed one leg of this journey, a new one now begins" is wholly dependent on how it plays out. As noted, it's not really railroading if genuinely nobody ever desires nor attempts to depart the rails. Maybe that's because they tacitly know and are on board for this short trek of railing before getting off to explore, maybe it's because they're just too caught up in the moment, who knows. Any reason is fine, the players have still exercised their choice to embrace the game on offer.

Railroading occurs when you pretend that players can exercise choice, while actually denying them choice. That's it.

Context matters, and so does frequency: is this disease business a one-off for this adventure only (in which case it's probably OK no matter what) or is it, or something similar, a feature of almost every adventure in the campaign (in which case it's very likely bad)?

I very much disagree that a single use is nigh guaranteed to be legitimate. That is simply not true. There's a quote from Garak of Deep Space Nine fame which is very relevant here. He (a Cardassian) listens to the story of the boy who cried wolf, and Dr. Bashir concludes with:

B: "The point is, if you lie all the time, no one will believe you."
G: "Are you sure that's the point, Doctor?"
B: "Yes. What else could it be?"
G: "That you should never tell the same lie twice."

Instead, I would say that the way that it is used tells us a lot. Because the tool itself is neither good nor bad... it's just very, very easy to use it for a bad reason. Like a tool of violence (assault rifle, IRL longsword, etc.) where it has little to no utility function but extremely high violence potential. It's not that these things are inherently bad, they aren't and can't be. But they have few legitimate uses and many, severe, bad ones.

Hence, if the players get why you're doing this and (tacitly) agree it's legitimate, or if they're so swept up in the moment that it never occurs to them to do anything else, then cool. They're clearly on board this train, they aren't being railroaded, they're being transported to where they want to go.

It's when the players don't actually agree and aren't actually swept up in it...but the DM uses tools like this to coerce their agreement out of them, no matter what...that we have a problem. And that can absolutely happen even if the DM only uses any particular tool once and only once per campaign.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What the character wants trumps what the player wants. You're playing a role, remember?

How is that possible? The character is words. The player is alive. If the player decides the character is wrong and needs to change, how would you police that, even in principle? If the player decides they're done with the game, how could the character tell them no?

This is a completely nonsense statement. The character cannot trump the player any more than a manuscript can trump its author.

If you're at the table, chances are you know what you're playing and why from a personal perspective. What motivates your character is very often a different thing because they are living in a different world and have had different experiences. The term "adventurer" means the character is seeking adventure and hoping to acquire wealth along the way. If you aren't playing those sorts of characters, I wonder why you're playing AD&D at all.

No, that's not what "adventurer" means.

It can mean someone in it for money. But the word only requires that you're seeking out exciting new experiences:

M-W: "someone who seeks dangerous or exciting experiences : a person who looks for adventures" (it liars examples of profit-seeking...but one of them clearly is not what D&D "adventurers" do, since it's venture capital)
Collins: "An adventurer is a person who enjoys going to new, unusual, and exciting places."
Dictionary.com: "1. a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures." (Lower-down meanings reference profit, but again, the point is that greed is NOT required nor even the primary sense.)

Adventurers seek out adventures: going to new and exciting places, meeting people, trying new foods, facing danger and feeling thrills, solving mysteries, etc., etc. Greed is not even slightly required.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

How is that possible

I don’t know, but I expect Stephen King wrote a book about it.

 

[Bedrockgames]

How is that possible? The character is words. The player is alive. If the player decides the character is wrong and needs to change, how would you police that, even in principle? If the player decides they're done with the game, how could the character tell them no?

This is a completely nonsense statement. The character cannot trump the player any more than a manuscript can trump its author.

You are taking the idea way too literally. No one honestly believes their characters are living breathing entitities with a will of their own that trumps the players. But people do often try to treat their characters as living breathing people, and prioritize the goals of their character, over their own. It is just one way to approach role-play.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You are taking the idea way too literally. No one honestly believes their characters are living breathing entitities with a will of their own that trumps the players. But people do often try to treat their characters as living breathing people, and prioritize the goals of their character, over their own. It is just one way to approach role-play.

Okay. That is still the player choosing to model the character. They are still the one deciding how the character responds to events over time. For example, a traumatic event. The player chooses whether the character responds to that event by breaking down, or by being galvanized. Both responses are valid for literally anyone ever, and few people ever get to choose whether they are left broken by a horrible event or emboldened to fix things (whatever that might mean, good or bad).

This idea that the character has total control and the player is simply along for the ride is hogwash. It may be very obvious what the modeled character would do. That model is still run by, and dependent on, the choices of the player. Nearly constantly, in fact.