Teach Me Your Old-School Ways

[KesselZero]

Dear Grognards,

How do you play old school? I understand the elements of the style, but I don't really know where to start in practically DMing in an old-school way. For example...

*How do I make a dungeon more than just a bunch of fights? I was reading through Keep on the Borderlands the other day and to my young eyes it just looked like a big list of how many monsters are in each room. I understand that old-school play includes a lot of concepts about the PCs dealing with various monster factions, those factions interacting, monster groups reacting to the PCs by changing their tactics, etc. I loved reading about Tucker's kobolds, but not being a career military man, I don't have any idea where to start with monster tactics. How do I adjudicate monster faction squabbles? How do I adjudicate monsters building barriers and throwing oil and wear pots for helmets?

*How do I run a hexcrawl? If I put one interesting thing in every hex, how do I adjudicate whether the players find that thing? It seems to me that a hex of any size could be broken down into smaller hexes ad infinitum until the PCs are moving their speed-per-turn on a 1:1 scale map, but that would take forever. How densely populated should my hexcrawl be? How often should random encounters occur? Etc. etc. etc.

*How do I keep track of all this information, like Bad Guy Plan Timelines and NPC opinions of the PCs and monster faction wars and so on?

*What sort of balance is sought? A lot of the Caves of Chaos seems to hinge on whether fights draw the attention of nearby monsters or not. In somewhere like the kobold area (I believe it's entrance A) how does this not just lead to dogpiling on the PCs?

*I'm sure I have more questions that I'll think of later.

But yeah. I'm fascinated by the old-school style, but stymied about how to put it into effect practically. All you old-schoolers and revivalists, give me practical advice!

 

[S'mon]

The main thing is to roll lots of dice. Set a probability for stuff to occur, defaulting to a 3-in-6 chance, then roll.

Second, while you should throw adventure hooks, events and stuff at the PCs - whatever occurs to you - a sandbox works best when the players are the main driving force. Tell them they're adventurers seeking gold and glory (XP) and then let them decide what to do, and how to do it.

My Yggsburgh sandbox campaign is heavily detailed online, with all the play sessions logged. You might find looking at it useful: S'mon' s Yggsburgh Blog (edit: NSFW)

If you read the accounts you will see that after the initial 'bang' of the highwayman ambush, the main driving impetus for the campaign comes from the PCs, especially the PCs Garrick and Morganna. They seek out adventures - deciding which missions to take on - get involved in Yggsburgh society, court fair damsels, etc. Note the use of rumours, how they sought out the Wanted Lists for lucrative bounties posted at the Yggsburgh Jail, and how their involvement with high-status NPCs led to further adventures.

Edit: The Yggsburgh book by Gary Gygax details in depth a sandbox of 30x50 miles, the Eastmark, full of bandit gangs, dungeons, monster lairs, NPCs et al. It's still fairly inexpensive to purchase new online and I'd thoroughly recommend it to see a master sandbox designer's final work.

 

[grodog]

How do you play old school? I understand the elements of the style, but I don't really know where to start in practically DMing in an old-school way. For example...

*How do I make a dungeon more than just a bunch of fights? I was reading through Keep on the Borderlands the other day and to my young eyes it just looked like a big list of how many monsters are in each room. I understand that old-school play includes a lot of concepts about the PCs dealing with various monster factions, those factions interacting, monster groups reacting to the PCs by changing their tactics, etc. I loved reading about Tucker's kobolds, but not being a career military man, I don't have any idea where to start with monster tactics. How do I adjudicate monster faction squabbles? How do I adjudicate monsters building barriers and throwing oil and wear pots for helmets?

On the dungeons design front, I would check out the forum on Knights & Knaves @ KNIGHTS & KNAVES ALEHOUSE • View forum - Megadungeons! and the thread on Dragonsfoot @ Dragonsfoot • View topic - Megadungeon mapping Lots of good info/learning there.

If you have access to old White Dwarf magazines, there were two very good articles on monster tactics worth checking out in WD#38.

You may also get some mileage out of the Old School Primer @ http://www.lulu.com/shop/matthew-finch/quick-primer-for-old-school-gaming/ebook/product-3159558.html (it's free), some articles from Knockspell magazines (specifically "Megadungeon Adventuring Tactics" in KS#4), and by reverse-engineering the players advice info at the back of the 1e PHB (before the appendices).

 

[Jacob Marley]

If you really are interested in learning the various techniques and methodologies used, I would advise you to check out some of the fantastic blogs out there. Many of these bloggers have gone into great detail about how they construct their dungeons/hexes and how they run their campaigns. My personal reading list includes: Grognardia, Howling Tower, Monsters and Manuals, Playing D&D with Porn Stars (some content here may be for adults only), Raven Crowking's Nest, Really Bad Eggs, The Hydra's Grotto, The Sandbox of Doom, and The Tao of D&D.

There is a wealth of knowledge out there in the blogosphere. If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask and I'll try to answer them insofar as how I run my games.

 

[KesselZero]

Here's a specific question for you wonderful people to chew over. What does the workday of an old-school dungeoncrawl look like? If you're exploring for the sake of exploring, which is what gets my motor running about this old-school thing, then there isn't a clear goal you're working towards. So how do you know when it's time to call it a day and make camp or head back to town?

Along those lines, how do you manage time in the actual game session? The West Marches hexcrawl/sandbox notes explicitly say that players are expected to return to town after each venture into the wild, and any who don't make it back are stuck out there until the next time they can get together and make their way home. How do you think this is managed? Halfway through the night does the DM just say "We're at the halfway mark, time to start thinking about heading home?" Or is there an expectation that the party can just say "We've had enough, we head back the way we came" and barring anything weird like disappearing doors or one-way passages or wandering monsters they just make their way safely back to town? What if they don't? I tend to have a core group of 4 or 5 players with a varying fringe of whom 1 or 2 will show up at any given session. I can't very well let the core get stuck on level 6 and make the one fringe player fight his way down there, but handwaving and saying "You find your comrades in the dungeon" really ruins the purity of the exercise for me.

Thanks for all the great links and advice so far! Oh, regarding the "roll lots of dice" comment-- do you mean that in a hexcrawl, it's essentially random whether a party finds the hex's main feature when they pass through it? That makes sense to me, as long as it has the corollary that once they've found something they can always find it again (unless it's a wandering wizard's tower or something).

 

[grodog]

Here's a specific question for you wonderful people to chew over. What does the workday of an old-school dungeoncrawl look like? If you're exploring for the sake of exploring, which is what gets my motor running about this old-school thing, then there isn't a clear goal you're working towards. So how do you know when it's time to call it a day and make camp or head back to town?

This is where reverse-engineering the PHB advice, and Matt Finch's KS#4 articles would really come in handy (and perhaps the Old School Primer, too). Basically, your players will set their own agendas if they're successful, and once they feel that they're in so far that getting out is soon going to be a problem, they'll start to work their way back to the surface (assuming of course that they're smart ).

Along those lines, how do you manage time in the actual game session? [snip] Halfway through the night does the DM just say "We're at the halfway mark, time to start thinking about heading home?"

I definitely wouldn't do that, although I might say something like "Hmmm, it's 11pm, and we're only playing until midnight." Too much more, and you risk starting to unduly influence their decisions.

Or is there an expectation that the party can just say "We've had enough, we head back the way we came" and barring anything weird like disappearing doors or one-way passages or wandering monsters they just make their way safely back to town? What if they don't?

In a campaign (vs. a convention game, or a tournament), I definitely roll the WM all the way home, and the PCs may-well find themselves ambushed on their way home, too, if they haven't been careful about entering the dungeon stealthily in the first place....

 

[S'mon]

On returning to the surface - a typical 1e wandering monster check rate is 1 in 6 per 30 minutes, and PCs returning to the surface are not mapping, so move at x10 speed per 1e RAW. Ergo there should not usually be more than 1 dungeon wandering monster check on the way out. A newbie dungeon is probably close to a base town or similar. If it's deep in the wilderness, hopefully the mid-level PCs have established a forward base where they can rest.
In my current Pathfinder Beginner Box game I've been using smallish published dungeons, what typically happens is that the PCs return to the surface without a check, if they return to town they're ok, but if they camp in the wilderness I roll to see if they're attacked by wilderness monsters or by dungeon denizens wandering out. The battle may occur at the start of *next* session, though. Between dungeons/between most sessions the PCs are in town and I advance time by real world time = game world, as Gygax advises in the DMG. Eg the PCs' first dungeon was on 12/M2, and their second dungeon on 11/M3, both in-game and real-world.

On rolling lots of dice - yes, if you have a dense sand box with small hexes then default to rolling a d6, hex encounter triggers 50% (3 in 6), possibly as low as 1 in 6 if you use 1-mile hexes and every hex has a feature. You normally don't want something triggering every mile, or it will feel cluttered and the PCs will never get anywhere. Around 1/6 miles or 1/8 miles is good.

However if your sandbox is sparse (nothing in most hexes) or the hexes are large, like my 15 miles/hex Wilderlands sandbox, I recommend that the encounter auto-triggers, you can always add in more stuff later.

Here's a specific question for you wonderful people to chew over. What does the workday of an old-school dungeoncrawl look like? If you're exploring for the sake of exploring, which is what gets my motor running about this old-school thing, then there isn't a clear goal you're working towards. So how do you know when it's time to call it a day and make camp or head back to town?

Along those lines, how do you manage time in the actual game session? The West Marches hexcrawl/sandbox notes explicitly say that players are expected to return to town after each venture into the wild, and any who don't make it back are stuck out there until the next time they can get together and make their way home. How do you think this is managed? Halfway through the night does the DM just say "We're at the halfway mark, time to start thinking about heading home?" Or is there an expectation that the party can just say "We've had enough, we head back the way we came" and barring anything weird like disappearing doors or one-way passages or wandering monsters they just make their way safely back to town? What if they don't? I tend to have a core group of 4 or 5 players with a varying fringe of whom 1 or 2 will show up at any given session. I can't very well let the core get stuck on level 6 and make the one fringe player fight his way down there, but handwaving and saying "You find your comrades in the dungeon" really ruins the purity of the exercise for me.

Thanks for all the great links and advice so far! Oh, regarding the "roll lots of dice" comment-- do you mean that in a hexcrawl, it's essentially random whether a party finds the hex's main feature when they pass through it? That makes sense to me, as long as it has the corollary that once they've found something they can always find it again (unless it's a wandering wizard's tower or something).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

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[KesselZero]

In a campaign (vs. a convention game, or a tournament), I definitely roll the WM all the way home, and the PCs may-well find themselves ambushed on their way home, too, if they haven't been careful about entering the dungeon stealthily in the first place....

So this starts to get into the question of monster tactics. Would you be willing to shed some light on your decision-making process for how smart you have monsters act, and how wise they are to the PCs' methods? Your ambush example is a good one, since there are a few decisions you need to make. How do you decide if the PCs were being stealthy enough? How do you decide if there were any monsters around to hear them clattering down the stairs or whatnot? And how do you determine (and this point seems key) that the monsters decide to set up an ambush, expecting the players to return via the same path home, rather than just jump out and attack them then and there, or follow them secretly through the dungeon, or hide in fear, or some other tactic? I'm sure all of these things are judgment calls, but I'd be very curious to know what sorts of factors you take into account and how you weigh them. Thanks!

And also-- I'm hitting the "you must spread XP around" limit for you guys, but be it known that I'm really, really enjoying and appreciating this thread and all the help.

 

[KesselZero]

On returning to the surface - a typical 1e wandering monster check rate is 1 in 6 per 30 minutes, and PCs returning to the surface are not mapping, so move at x10 speed per 1e RAW. Ergo there should not usually be more than 1 dungeon wandering monster check on the way out.

Is that 30 minutes of table time or 30 minutes of in-game time? If the latter, how do you track in-game time?

Between dungeons/between most sessions the PCs are in town and I advance time by real world time = game world, as Gygax advises in the DMG. Eg the PCs' first dungeon was on 12/M2, and their second dungeon on 11/M3, both in-game and real-world.

This is interesting, and not what I would have expected. What's the reasoning behind this? (By the way, I clearly need to get copies of the old 1e books since they seem to be full of answers to my questions.) Does this have a specific impact on healing and other resource management? (The only healing rules I have off the top of my head are 3e and 4e, but in 3e at least spending a month in town between delves would be a huge boon to a cleric-less party, as non-magical healing is 1 hp per day.)

On rolling lots of dice - yes, if you have a dense sand box with small hexes then default to rolling a d6, hex encounter triggers 50% (3 in 6), possibly as low as 1 in 6 if you use 1-mile hexes and every hex has a feature. You normally don't want something triggering every mile, or it will feel cluttered and the PCs will never get anywhere. Around 1/6 miles or 1/8 miles is good.

However if your sandbox is sparse (nothing in most hexes) or the hexes are large, like my 15 miles/hex Wilderlands sandbox, I recommend that the encounter auto-triggers, you can always add in more stuff later.

This makes sense from a game perspective, as there's surely an ideal rate of discovery for hex encounters that keeps things moving without having nothing happen at all (the 1/6 miles or 1/8 miles you mention). It does have the curious effect, though, that the larger an area you pass through, the more likely you are to find something in it, which is of course not at all like real life. I think as I put together my hexes I'll go for smaller and denser so there's a high rate of passing things by. This feels more realistic to me and also increases the replay value of the area. I'm assuming there are standard rates of travel written down somewhere? I think I worked out the 4e rate of overland travel to be about 4 6-mile hexes per day, which is then modified by terrain type. EDIT: Because it was about 25 miles per day, not because 4e has anything to say about hexmapping.

How about wandering monster rates in the wilderness?