Teach Me Your Old-School Ways
- Thread starter KesselZero
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Exactly. You can see this in some other games. Ever seen an old Classic Traveller published scenario? GDW (the publisher) wouldn't even put in baddies to fight, like you'd see in a D&D module. You'd basically get a location and maybe some stats on a particular equipment or NPCs important to the scenario. The rest was up to the GM.
For example, the Classic Traveller scenario called Annic Nova gives the GM deckplans for a strange starship, but not much else. It would be like getting a neat dungeon complex but no monsters or humanoids to fight. It was up to the GM to decide why the ship was where it was, and it was up to the GM to populate the ship the way he needed to.
So...the scenario becomes very, very, flexilble and customizeable to a campaign.
The GM could envision a ship full of robots, and the PCs discovering her. Or, maybe the ship is crewed by an enemy star kingdom.
These are two very bland ideas--the sky, and the GM's imagination, are the limit.
Let's bring the focus back to D&D. Yes, many old school adventures are just underground mazes with a different type of monster in each room. There's hardly any story to be had.
Well, you've got to think of that adventure module as you do what I wrote above about the empty starship. TSR, as a publisher, has given you a framework to build upon. It's up to you, as GM, to make the thing interesting.
Why is there a couple of vampires in a cavern room right next to an umber hulk?
Take that and make it interesting. In my first game, as I described above, the GM set up a war between the hobbies and the gobbies, and as my character and part approached, we were caught in the middle of it. THAT was the scenario the that GM decided to play.
He could have done something else. He could have taken the Ogre that's in the Caves and made him a warlord with a growing humanoid army--the population of the Caves being that army, and the Caves being his HQ.
Whatever makes sense to you, is what you do. Whatever fits into your campaign is what you do.
Story, in most old school adventures, is left to the realm of the GM. All the publisher is providing is a number of obstacles for the player to over come.
EDIT:
Look at all the color my original GM brought to the Caves scenario. No where does it talk about the gate guard, but he thought it would be interesting to to start the game there, at dusk, having to convince this guy that my fighter wasn't a threat and that he justed needed a bed for the night.
In the old days, there wasn't a skill and a throw to make. We didn't have a Diplomacy skill. Most sitations like this were just roleplayed out. Dice throwing was usually reserved for combat or as a last ditch reaction to decide something. Most of the time, the DM just reacted to what the player said his character was doing.
That scenario with the gate guard could have gone a lot of ways. What if I hadn't, in the GM's estimation, convinced the guard to let my character in? Maybe I'm stuck outside, having to make a camp--maybe being attacked in the middle of the night by bandits or having to face a randomly rolled encounter.
The entire game could change as the circumstances change.
It's up to the GM to judge those circumstances and let the game proceed in the most interesting fashion.
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Blackwarder
Adventurer
Here is a question, how do you hendle traps? Does the characters are always considered to be looking for traps? do them move more slowly while doing so? etc.
Warder
Warder
Take a look at THIS. That's worth reading for the example featuring traps alone.
I do it, even in 3.x E, as it says in the linked document. Olde School.
Nobody is looking for a trap unless someone says that they're looking for a trap. And, if they are looking for a trap, then I want to know how they're doing it. Are they just moving slowly, keeping their eyes open and other senses tuned? Are they probing the ground ahead of them with a 10' pole? What?
As GM, if I know a trap is n the area, I'll decide how it works.
It wasn't until 3.x E that published scenarios started explaining to the DM exactly how traps worked. Before that, the trap would be indicated with the damage it does, but usually with no or little indication of how it worked. For example, the text might read that a chest is trapped with a dart trap that does 1d3 points of poison damage.
It was up to me, as GM, to decide how that trap worked. Maybe there are little pinholes around the lid of the chest were a dozen toothpick sized darts shot out. Most of these either miss the target or don't penetrate armor, so they collectively do the damage of 1d3 poison.
Or, maybe near the embedded lock on the chest, there's a single needle juts up unexpectantly from right next to the lock. If anybody is picking the lock, the trap will be sprung, giving the lockpicker a save. Failure means the needle stung the thief's hand, doing 1d3 poison damage.
The GM's imagination is the limit on how traps work--especially if we sart talking magical traps.
When playing through the traps, I just GM the player's actions like I would anything else.
The differnce, I've noticed, between this type of "Old School" play and 3.x E+ games is that traps are no longer roleplayed and are just rolled. "I've rolled a 27 on my Spot check. Do I see a trap? I do. OK (rolls dice), my Disable Device check is an 18. Am I past the trap?"
I don't think that's as near as fun as roleplaying through the trap scenario as described in that article I linked above.
Blackwarder
Adventurer
O.k, I read it and I remember something like that from 15 years ago when we played 2e but how do you keep it from becoming tedious?
Warder
Warder
Ah, the magic question.
Well, there's a secret tool you need. Not every group has one, and like most things, it gets better with age.
This tool? It's called a good GameMaster gifted telling a good story.
GMing a good game isn't about sticking by the numbers and making sure everything is done the same way every time. If the game is getting boring, then the GM should do something about it.
Sometimes, when you walk into a town, and you want to make trade with the local merchant, this brings up a roleplaying encounter. This could turn into a long, enjoyable encounter, full of character, as the player and the GM play their parts roleplaying the situation.
Then again, when the characters are moving across country, and a player wants to stop in a town to buy a third waterskin, the good GM does not lock the game into an out of place roleplaying encounter that slows down the momentum of the sessions. What he does is say, "OK, you guys popped into this town. Fern bought his waterskin. It was 3 silvers--remove that amount on your sheet, Charlie. It was good to get out of the dust for a night and sleep in a bed. But, now, that town is hours behind you. You're back on the road, and up ahead, you see a heard of cattle crossing the road. But, as you get closer, it's not cattle, you recognize, it's...."
There, the GM just skipped over a type of encounter that he previously roleplayed.
Thus, it's the same with playing traps. Many times, you'll be in a dungeon exploration mode, so playing it out as it says in the document is probably what you'll do.
But, nothing locks a GM into that kind of play.
Mix it up.
A good GM keeps his finger on the pulse of his game.
If the GM starts a trap-like situation as described in the document, but looks across the table at the bored look on his players' faces and realizes that this is the third trap of a similar nature that party has encontered in the last hour of gaming, then go back to the dice. "It's a trap, like you saw in that previous room, except this one lifts up instead of sideways like the other one did. Roll your disable device. OK. Success? You did something like what you did before and stuck a spear in the cog you found secreted in the wall. Let's move on."
Good DMing is like good story telling. There are ebbs and flows, highs and lows, and it's always (or should be) dramatic and gripping.
What's the short version of the answer to your question? You GM should always strive to make your game exciting and intriguing. He should use whatever methods or tools he has at his disposal to get his game there.
That, really, is the essence--the mantra--of the old school DM.
EDIT: Yesterday, in my game, the PCs made it back to their village. They had been gone almost two weeks. No one knew what had happened to them, and many feared them dead. They were just kids, after all, 14 and 15 years old.
But, they returned, proud heroes, with a kidnapped little girl in tow and stories of how they saw the dead walk and a demon fly through the air.
We spent a month in town. I quickly described many events without roleplaying that much. I made that call because I knew we would get into a roleplaying quadmire if I kept the entire time at town in that type of pace. I needed to skip over time quickly, and even doing it that way, it took a real hour to play.
I would drop into bits of roleplaying, but then quickly move back into zoomed out scenes, describing what happened from a macro level. There was the homecoming, where everybody was glad to see them alive--that was a macro scene. Then, I dropped into roleplaying for a moment as the village elder, with the entire clan gathered around, said something to the effect of, "These you see before you are no longer children. They are men. Adults. They have proven themselves, warriors, now, of the Blue Fox Clan!" Then, I moved just as quickly back into macro scenes with, "And the crowd went wild, with much saluting and slapping you on the back. You're heroes in the eyes of your own people."
Things went back to normal, and the two characters went back to work. Once is a smith, the other, a trapper. So, we rolled several weeks using the crafting rules, to bring some wealth to the PCs. One of the players wanted to buy new clothes--his had been worn thread bare by the previous adventuring. That encounter, I roleplayed, with village trader bargaining with him. Once that was done, though, I just did the rest of the buying as selling quickly, because I felt a second roleplaying encounter would bog the game down.
So, really, that last hour of the game yesterday was played mainly in macro scenes with short moments roleplaying added in, not unlike a montage sequence in a movie.
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Blackwarder
Adventurer
Libramarian
Adventurer
Not necessarily in the dungeon, but give them a rundown of the basic system concepts before play, one of them being wandering monsters, if they've never played pre-3e D&D before. 1/6 chance every 2 or 3 turns is a pretty subtle effect to expect them to pick up on in play. Even moreso than WM, I would encourage you to explain to them that secret doors exist, and the mechanic for searching for them is you spend 1 turn of time for a 1 or 2/6 chance to find any that are there (of course you can obviate the roll if they describe how they are searching in a way that would logically cause them to find it). Again not in play when they're beside a secret door, but just before play say that secret doors are a prominent "thing" in old school D&D land. Use your judgement and adjust to taste of course, I've just developed this rule of thumb that when you have a situation or decision point that involves and rewards creativity from the players, it's going overboard to hide it from them as well. The thing about hidden stuff in particular is players don't get punished immediately for missing it, like they do if they hit with with a poison needle because they didn't search for traps, so it's harder for them to learn from the experience.
If they're sticking together yeah.
Not really actually. I have a custom DM screen for AD&D with that table on one of the panels, so it's pretty easy to consult it.
It's not blazingly fast rules light play, it's a bit "rules-y" if you know what I mean, but we find that it's worth it. I say out loud the modifiers I'm using so it's not like complete dead air space while I'm computing the result.
It takes some practice to use it well. The different states don't always mean the same thing, you look at the reaction and then integrate it into what you already know about the situation, right. The point is not to completely take the DM judgement out of the equation, but nudge the DM into making NPCs act more interestingly and unpredictably.
Last session the PCs were exploring a haunted house rumored to have alchemical gold when the hired men-at-arms balked at descending into the basement, while the walls and stairs are all moaning creepily.
They all passed their checks as Obedient or better, largely due to the PC's 17 Charisma (Charisma is certainly not a "dump stat" here), except for one who got a Disloyal (she's been a problem before -- the PC would like to get rid of her, but in a way that doesn't affect his other employees' loyalty). She starts telling the other men-at-arms the PC is a weak leader, and why are we working for a wage when we can strike out on our own and each get a full share of treasure.
One man-at-arms rolled Fanatical loyalty, so he won't brook this kind of disrespect without a Morale check. Fight On, so he slays her and throws her down the stairs.
We're all like O_O. Ohh AD&D
No problem at all.Thanks!
grodog
Hero
Stopping to check for traps generally means that the party has halted completely, unless they're simply tapping with a 10' pole a few feet ahead of where they're walking. And if tapping's all they're doing to check for traps, any other traps will basically be found the old-fashioned way: by setting them off
Tapping is also easy enough to work around, since most pits were only triggered 2 in 6 or 3 in 6 by walking on them (so they may open under the second or third ranks of PCs, even after tapping)---and may have minimum weights before they'll trigger too (letting lighter halflings or gnomes cross over, then opening under the dwarves or humans). And tapping probably isn't terribly quite either... 
Checking for other traps takes time, and can be done only by thieves or dwarves (or a cleric with Find Traps, or a magic wand of secret doors and trap detection, a magic sword that detects traps, etc.), and generally it takes a full round to check a door for traps and a full round to check a 10x10 area for secret doors (DMG p. 97), so I've usually allowed 1 round to check a 10x10 area for traps too. In a large room, that can take awhile....
Matt's follow-up on the Primer appears in Knockspell #4 and it's worth buying (and you'll find other good articles in the issue too).
That said, this is where the DM and players have to adapt to a more "campaign dungeon" approach to dungeon exploration vs. the traditional "module sized" dungeon approach. That is, that a true mega-dungeon is never meant to be beaten*---there will always be more levels, more monsters, and more traps, tricks, enigmas, wandering monsters, hidden sub-levels, encounters, and set-piece "special" encounters than the PCs (and perhaps the players) can ever successfully "finish." Therefore the players (and their PCs) need to define their own goals and victory conditions as they explore, on an expedition-to-expedition basis. And, ideally, each expedition will provide more potential areas to explore, threats to remove, enigmas to puzzle over and solve, etc.; this eventually becomes a self-fulfilling cycle, to some degree, if the PCs are successful.
* Whereas a module-sized "lair" dungeon can be fully-explored and beaten, with some patience, since most TSR dungeon modules were just two levels deep---even larger dungeons like G3 and WG5 were 3 levels, and B4 was several (but they were all relatively small).
This is also where the DM needs to help make the players realize that the dungeon itself is as much the enemy as its inhabitants. The monster and trap threats are quite real, but getting cut off by moving walls or portcullises, being teleported or dropped via a chute to an unknown level and needing to find your way back to familiar ground (this is where mapping really becomes critical), running out of light sources/air/food/water/etc. These are very real threats, and when you're exploring, they become strong factors that help to drive why encumbrance rules were created, why light sources matter, why faster movement rates are important, etc. These factors all necessitate players to make choices: about how much loot they can haul out (which in turn is balanced by how good their ACs are), and when they are getting close to topping off on loot, that's a good signal to start heading back to the surface---who wants to leave any loot behind, after all? And being able to "mark" and secure areas for future exploration is quite useful too: if your party detects some significant treasure--and danger--beyond a particular secret door, but is low on resources and doesn't want to risk a potentially deadly battle, then they can wizard lock the door and hope that it'll still be untouched when they return (or use similar means to try to insure that their "claim" isn't jumped). And to be able to even make that determination requires PCs to memorize augury or divination, as well as other utility spells like detect magic, find traps, gust of wind (very useful for blowing poison gas away, or bringing some breathable air into a lower-than-floor area that's saturated with heavier-than-air gasses). And of course those take the place of hold persons, silences, neutralize poisons, lightning bolts, magic missiles, etc. Choices and balancing, choices and balancing, choices and balancing....
FYI, there are a number of good threads on ENWorld tagged with "mega-dungeon" that may also potentially interest folks who like this one.
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