OD&D Gygax and the DMG: What is a Dungeon Master For?

[Thomas Shey]

Who says they deal with those encounters? IIRC, the real world chance of a ship not making it to its destination was pretty high.

Given the frequency and type of those encounters, the chance approaches nil if using them.for any time beyond a couple day's travel. That doesn't describe any real world trade process, land or naval. There was no benefit high enough to justify it. (And of course even begs the question what stops some of those encounters from just waltzing into "the town".

 

[Thomas Shey]

Monster treasure has to come from somewhere...

Less flippantly, they hire adventurers to protect them. And travelling in large enough numbers will likely dissuade many of the monsters and bandits from attacking.

Bamdits and lower end encounters, sure. But the moment you need to cut through a mountain pass, I'd not care to bet on your odds given those tables.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Another thing to keep in mind about early D&D, whenever Mike Mornard was asked about game theory or design, he usually resorted to just saying "We made stuff up that we thought would be fun." (Which I think was the slogan for his kickstarter even.) Inference goes that if something wasn't fun, you'd make something new up, and if that wasn't fun, you'd discard it for something else just as quickly.

If you are under impression that I'm going to consider that a reason not to think about how the tools as presented are going to be used and how that would work out, I have to disabuse you.

 

[conankeep]

Given there was no obvious place but the town, a dungeon and the wilderness in OD&D, any trade was likely going to be going through the frontier.

exactly the wilderness that's what OD&D tables simulate, and who are you going to trade with in the wilderness?
that's my point.
If the trade is to be done it's not in the same direction where the players are going
[and even then often historic merchant caravans resembled a war band]

 

[BenjaminPey]

The 1E DMG is full of what I consider to be really bad advices (among some good, some endearing, some inspirational and some just boring stuff), but "THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER" really takes the cake. Really, it sounds like he wants your own made-up world to take precedence over the fun and, quite frankly, the well-being of your fellow players, like our games are more important than them. I'm quite happy we collectively made some progress from there and that most games and players today recognize that the proper hierarchy is, the players (among which there might be a DM), then the game, then far and away the rules.

 

[Mannahnin]

The 1E DMG is full of what I consider to be really bad advices (among some good, some endearing, some inspirational and some just boring stuff), but "THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER" really takes the cake. Really, it sounds like he wants your own made-up world to take precedence over the fun and, quite frankly, the well-being of your fellow players, like our games are more important than them. I'm quite happy we collectively made some progress from there and that most games and players today recognize that the proper hierarchy is, the players (among which there might be a DM), then the game, then far and away the rules.

You do need to bear in mind the context, though. I don't think he's arguing against fun here at all. He's talking about aiming for long term campaign enjoyment, and for supporting the fun of other groups and DMs as well as your own. He's assuming multiple DMs in the local community, and that players and maybe characters will be moving to and from different DMs' tables/dungeons. This goes along with his advice on starting money & equipment on page 25, on time in the campaign on page 37-38, and placement of treasure and magic items on pages 91-93. Where, for example, he frequently advises not to be too generous, to keep the players hungry for more, which he believe maximizes how long the game remains exciting and satisfying.

With that in mind, more charitably, I would interpret those more like:

The game as a whole = Everyone's fun and future enjoyment, not just today's. This includes things like making consistent rulings, being fair, and not being either a "Monty Haul" or a "killer" DM, thus "spoiling" or traumatizing players who will then carry over unreasonably generous or harsh expectations both to future sessions and to other tables and players/DMs.

Your campaign next = The same, but at the smaller scale of just your ongoing campaign world and the games you run in it, which aren't expected to always be for the same players.

Your participants = the folks at your table for any given session.

I was able to infer a lot of this from a pretty young age, reading the DMG, but it's become increasingly clear over time as I learned more about the wargaming and RPG clubs where Gary and a lot of people were playing in the 70s and into the early 80s, at least. Reading Gary Alan Fine's sociological work Shared Fantasy a few years ago vividly illustrated what a lot of players and groups were like, and contextualized Gary's advice.

 

[overgeeked]

Studying the history of trade, especially things like the Silk Road, is a great way to add a bit of verisimilitude.

 

[Gus L]

From my reading of the rules, the holes in such, wording of old modules, D&D histories including the Blackmore video that came out, and the stories of Mike Mornard over on RPG.net, my thoughts are that the entire war game aspect of D&D was not the game they were exploring and interested in interacting with.

I think this is a point I should have stressed more in my hermeneutics of OD&D above... I am utterly positive that by the time people like Mike Monard and Rob Kuntz were playing campaigns regularly it had shifted to the dungeon game described in old accounts...

Back to dungeon levels, according to Mike Mornard, there was a room on Gary's 1st level that was way above 1st level, a room full of trolls. Outside of it were the bodies and bones of dead adventurers. 1st level parties were supposed to take note and stay away. As said in Dungeon Crawler Carl "Look for the clues. There are always clues."

Yup - asymmetrical encounters. Always a good thing - and really good in megadungeons. Interestingly I think this is something that gets a bit lost in Gygax's published module design, as so much of it is tournament stuff (or just has his name slapped on to someone else's dungeon as a co-author).

On to wilderness, yes, the wilderness was supposed to be high level zone.

I resist this impulse (and I see you do as well in some ways) ... I don't really think in OD&D that anything is supposed to be anything, and I like to respect the degree of obvious interest that early designer had in "simulating" (or simulating within reason to create a better game) a world. I think a lot of the things like "Wilderness Tier" are more of a result of rules accumulation - where 50 years of D&D may be trying to (and succeeding often) in finding ways to justify these rules from the Braunstein and First Fantasy Campaign eras ...

I personally do think that with due respect to the old rules and due appreciation for the nostalgic pull of old can make changes to OD&D that make for a better dungeon crawl. In some ways this is one of the odd paradoxes of the old OSR ... perhaps also part of its demise ... that OSR play is both trying to understand old mechanics and play them using modern table conditions... Old mechanics being themselves subject to revision from basically day one - meaning OSR designers, especially revivalists, found themselves creating something fundamentally new.

I wonder of course what other new versions of OD&D we'll all be able to invent by recontextualizing the old building blocks ... this being in my mind what happened with TSR D&D as well - and leads very naturally to contemporary traditional games like 5E and modern playstyles.

.... Oh and I absolutely agree that OD&D era Gygax wanted everyone to make the game their own - the spirit of the Blackmoor intro if pretty much this (and parts of the DMG) ... though the intro is pretty catty about Arneson as well.

 

[Thomas Shey]

exactly the wilderness that's what OD&D tables simulate, and who are you going to trade with in the wilderness?
that's my point.
If the trade is to be done it's not in the same direction where the players are going
[and even then often historic merchant caravans resembled a war band]

"In the Wilderness" and needing to cross the wilderness are not identical statements. As characterized in the statemetn Gygax made, there is no "other direction" in the default setup he's depicting. As I said, it appears the default play sphere he assumes is a tight space with a dungeon of some sort, a town to support players having somewhere to go when retreating from same, and the wilderness. In fact the discussion of the GMs map pretty strongly implies the players don't even know anyting else about the area before they start (how the town got settled in the first place and how it survives contact with the surrounding threats is not discussed--I suppose it could be coastal, though I'm not sure dealing with ocean encounters is much better, though I don't think those are discussed significantly until Blackmoor).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I want to clarify my position here a bit, as it probably comes across as my just bashing OD&D, and that's probably not coming across well especially since I admit details have sometimes gotten foggy about it over a half century (which is the last time I played OD&D; I never played AD&D and didn't really have anything significant to do with the game again until the AD&D 2e days, and then not seriously and face to face until D&D 3.0).

I think even given my lapses here, there was a pretty good, albeit limited focus on dungeon crawling, and then a lot of other material that seems to fail on both simulation and game test grounds unless you apply a lot of other considerations to it that are not discussed in the booklets. The Wilderness encounter tables just fail out on almost any usage (barring possibly the idea they're only intended for an upper-level experience after people have largely exhausted the dungeon experience that seems to be the primary focus). Even given the evasion and fleeing tables @Mannahnin helpfully pointed me to, doing the numbers on that suggests its only a matter of time before parties that aren't pretty large either because of multiple character usage or significant number of henchment/hirelings in the classes (and of at least moderate levels, and that somewhat begs the question where they come from since those same encounter tables only have a very limited number of those in potential encounters of pretty limited levels--anything above 4th level in a classed opponent was pretty rare, and as such you have to wonder where they come from as hirelings) are going to run into an encounter they don't manage to escape and probably aren't going to defeat.

So in practice its a little hard to see what function the undifferentiated (in terms of the encounter tables that distinguished intensity of opposition as compared to just terrain) encounter tables served. I realize people wave around the reaction tables, but even if you accepted them as a default usage (if that was the intention, it was as best I could determine, routinely ignored, probably because it was such a blunt object in terms of not factoring in the nature of the opponents it was applied to and their situation), they still are going to not help in a fair number of cases.

Honestly, back in the day when I saw it in use, the only reason it didn't lead to some TPKs was that I saw very large parties pretty commonly (as I said, 10-12 PCs plus a couple support personnel) which allowed for multiple spellcasters who could sometimes turn the tide, and the fact that by moderate levels the treasure tables would statistically toss up some fairly brusk items (staves, intelligent weapons, some of the more beefy wonderous items). Run into that with smaller parties (even once with the small side army of low level supporters) and I can't help but think the results would have been much grimmer.