Actual Play: OD&D, Greyhawk and a touch of Arduin

I ran OD&D today. It seems odd, given a wide array of systems – including clones – to still use the original booklets to run games. I did recently give Lamentations of the Flame Princess a whirl, and it's a fine clone. And yet I now feel like OD&D is my "home" system.

(The picture above is of dice inked by Lou Zocchi. I was using the tiger eye beauties above as my primary d20s, using a d6 as a control die. There's just something to it.)

The game used Dyson Logos's Dellorfano Protocols Map. I loaded it with an adventure that had some plot behind it, a portal leading to Cykranosh (the Clark Ashton Smith name for Saturn), a few other CAS references, a few monsters, and a couple of interesting tricks. It was a ball to run.

Using OD&D plus Greyhawk as a basis winds up a lot like AD&D lite, or an alternate version of B/X D&D. But I like this particular iteration's quirks the best. It was how OD&D was really played, and it hits a sweet spot that attempts to add more detail or systematize things wind up missing. There is a comfort level to it, but a big factor is that it doesn't feel as much like somebody else's game. That's the main weakness, in my opinion, of the various clones.

As a side note: I think the best thing that you can do for your D&D experience is to run original D&D, no supplements, at least once. It's like a Zen cleansing moment for D&D: you just get to focus on the dungeon crawl itself. My love for OD&D I think stems from that. Everything I add, I choose to add, for a specific reason that I understand.

I also used the Arduin Grimoire, which I've been consulting for its quirky-as-hell critical hit table for a few games. It's a frickin' riot in use. One of the PC hobbits got a result of "eye" against a bandit with a dagger, and the damage was enough to kill the bandit straight out, so I described the hobbit getting up on top of the bandit and jamming the dagger home. I'd actually like to see a book like Arduin but designed by a person with better rules-sense than Hargrave, and less of the stupidly complex charts like individual weapon damage by number of enemy HD.

And of course the Ready Ref Sheets were in hand. It's another product I love but would appreciate a new version for. I'd like a to-hit chart closer to the one in Iron Falcon, which has additional gradations by level, and a fresh dungeon searching table. And of course various and sundry other charts.

My feeling is that D&D is an intensely personal game, being a creature of imagination. So it's naturally going to wind up as a kitbash game, where you take from the variants and other games out there and construct your own. Other people have talked about how they're running an "OSR Frankengame" and I think that's educational. The best thing the OSR has done is put out an awful lot of material for kitbashing. No one piece is a sine qua non, but there's plenty out there to tune a game just the way you want.

Percent Liar

(That's Lying Cat, familiar to fans of the comic Saga.)

I was looking at Arduin for a completely different post idea, and it always brings me back to the funniest statistic in that book: % Liar. Early printings of OD&D put this instead of % Lair. Rather than go along with the errata, Dave Hargrave made this a statistic of its own. The Air Shark, the first monster in the list, has a % Liar of "Too stupid to." And that, my friends, is Retro Stupid.

But % Liar is an interesting idea for a social mechanic (the kind of thing people always say OD&D doesn't have, even though it does). It fits with the aleatoric approach to the game, where random chance is allowed to determine certain key factors. Having a % chance that a monster will lie to you is a perfectly reasonable mechanic given the way that Contact Higher Plane has a veracity percentage to determine whether the result is true or not.

What interests me is that it creates an expectation that some monsters will be more trustworthy than others. Say a goblin has a 50% liar rating while a gnoll has a 30% rating (using the actual % Lair column just for a moment). The trustworthiness of the gnoll is an interesting bit of setting-building. What is it about gnolls that makes them less likely to lie? They are considerably more reliable than a coin flip, which is what the goblins are, but there's still a real chance that listening to them will land you in hot water sooner or later.

There's even a sort of gambling aspect that could emerge from this; once PCs find a particular monster is fairly reliable, they could try to tap the well just enough, pressing their luck that this won't be the time the liar dice come up against them. The lies can also be subtle twisting of the truth, like the rumor about a trapped maiden in Keep on the Borderlands that is designed to trick PCs into "rescuing" the medusa.

This would work well with a two-column rumor table, where one side is true rumors and the other is false, misleading ones. Say a goblin has a 50% chance to be lying; you can roll it organically. If you roll a 1-10 on a d20, you check the corresponding entries on the "lying" table. If you roll 11-20, you check the "truth" table. Gnolls only check "lying" on 1-6. This lets the referee make the lies more varied; for instance, lies 7-10 might be more outrageous, as creatures prone to lie more often will have a tell. So lying rumor 6 might be that the room beyond the statue is empty, when it's actually an ogre's lair, while lying rumor 10 might say it is a dragon's lair.

NPCs could also have a % Liar. We could base it on their alignment; Lawfuls may only have a 5% chance, while Chaotics could be 40% or higher. In general it seems apt to align the percentage to alignment without getting totally out of hand, thus giving a game use to alignment aside from the ever-controversial alignment languages.

Obviously this system places a bit more of a premium on magic and items that help to detect lies versus truth. Finding out about the reputation of various creature types is also a highly useful piece of knowledge, as detailed above. If players know that it is more useful to negotiate with gnolls than goblins, it adds a new strategic dimension when they encounter the more "honest" creature type to parley instead of fighting.

Sure it's a typo, but why not ride it out and add an interesting dimension to D&D?

Special Abilities Tables

California in 1975-79 is an interesting place in the early history of the roleplaying game. It brought us Alarums & Excursions, Warlock, Arduin and Runequest – and as a result, the biggest and best documented locus of non-Gygaxo-Arnesonian gaming from our hobby's dawn. It was a place where pre-RPG entertainments had laid fertile soil for gaming, as documented in Playing at the World; Coventry and SCA and different life experience all added up to a scene which was totally different from that in the upper Midwest.

One of the things that we can look at historically from this period is the idea of a special ability table: a chart where dice are rolled to give each PC some distinctive characteristic. It's not exactly revolutionary, but it was one of the earliest common house rules.

The Arduin Grimoire features such a table in its early pages, or rather, one for "warrior" types, one for "magical" types, a third for "religious" sorts and a fourth for "secret" types. Each has a percentile dice roll, and options that follow from it. Many are bonus/penalty combinations, such as a warrior's "+1 with norningstars, whips, bolos and slings, -2 with all swords." Others are pure negative, like a magical type's "-1 on all character abilities, -3 versus all spells or magic." (Hargrave always underlined the word "all".) Some are all positive, like "Taught by a true weaponsmaster, get +2 with all western weapons." And some are just odd, like the magical sort's "Flesh tastes so bad to monsters they spit you out 95% of the time."

Arduin's chart is just plain odd, but it's a good illustration of something that was popular at the time. Most of Hargrave's abilities are just pluses or minuses, with some minor bit of rhyme or reason behind them, but others are backgrounds. These are sometimes imbalanced (a religious type can get "Mountain man. plus 2 to strength, agility and dexterity. Climb as a thief.") but nevertheless add a bit of appeal to the characters.

The AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide has a "Secondary Skills Table" that is used to determine background skills for player characters; the difference is that it doesn't really add much to the characters other than to say that they have an unspecified skill. It does seem to be in a similar vein to the California tables, though nowhere near as wild and wooly as they were. 18% of results give no skill at all.

What I like about the idea, if not the execution, of the old tables was the idea of leaving characters up to chance. Much like 3d6 rolled in order, a bonus ability that isn't known in advance is a good method of generating characters who will make you think a little outside the box to define who they are.

The potential I see for them is that, if you generate a really high quality list of minor modifiers (say, for instance, bonuses and penalties within the D&D system – saving throws, all those checks rolled on 1d6, etc – you can create an interesting incentive to be a human: just declare that only humans get a roll on this chart. Demihumans have the special abilities allotted by the system in the first place.

Just a little something that's been percolating. I think it has potential, and I think it could be disastrous, or gonzo fun – all depending on the execution.

Reading Arduin, part 1

So, in the interest of doing more for this blog, I've decided I'm going to read and comment on aspects of the original Arduin trilogy. My editions are the three-book reprints done a few years ago by Emperor's Choice, which I will note had the unfortunate effect of mis-paginating the reprint text by a page (so that page 1 faces page 2, rather than page 2 facing page 3, and so on). The newer reprint, I understand, puts Hargrave's somewhat random tables and notes in a more coherent order, which may be contrary to the spirit of the whole exercise, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The book starts with a dedication to the player characters of Arduin, rife with names stolen from Moorcock and Tolkien; it is a tribute that Hargrave found his fantasy world through. He continues with a guarantee to answer any inquiries personally; his home address is printed in the book as a guarantee. It's nothing really that far afield, but it underscores the fact that it was a very personal work, for all its oddness and quirks (which we'll get into).

Actual rules text starts off with a page of notes on overland travel procedure. There is an implied re-write of the reaction chart, with the most aggressive result being a "screaming attack upon your party." This is not in the shape of a table, although there will be plenty to come; it's described narratively, with a separate listing for intelligent foes, who exercise more caution. We also find out that Hargrave was using Dexterity to determine who goes first in combat, describing that a fighter may hit an enemy just before it is struck by magic, which then does its work on the weapon. The procedures are straightforward enough, and there is an offhand reference to using "other roleplaying games" for random encounter charts (i.e., D&D), but an admonition to make your own.

Page two breaks with Gygaxian tradition and instructs the referee not to give experience points for gold or treasure. Instead, the experience rewards are given on a chart, scaling from 50 (figuring out a trap, casting a minor spell, any generally uncalled for or dangerous act) to 400 (dying and coming back). Rewards range from acquiring Satan's pitchfork or nuclear weapons (350) to going down to 1 HP (100), and focus mostly on magic items acquired and spells cast, with combat only coming when you beat a monster worth 4x your hit dice or more.

The next two pages (the book now flips to landscape format, which will happen often enough) run experience charts for Arduin. Unlike OD&D, which capped out with 11, these take characters up to 105th level and beyond. The actual math in the charts is interesting, because it takes quite a different tack than D&D. Where D&D keeps raising numbers by factors of 2 for a number of levels, Arduin prefers to add a new level whenever the total for 3rd is reached, up to a point around or after 10th level, when the number doubles. Somewhere around 20th level it gets doubled again (although the charts stop listing individual levels and go in increments of 5, then 10). It works out that a fighter in D&D with 240,000 XP is 9th level, but in Arduin they are 27th level.

Arduin's experience tables are interesting. Because points come much harder, (although it isn't clear whether standard monster XP is accrued) it makes a certain degree of sense that levels come more easily. Not having run that much at higher levels, I'd be curious to see their impact, although I certainly wouldn't use them with 1 GP=1 XP. There are also more classes listed than are presented in the book. They are: Thief, Slaver, Techno, Courtesan, Assassin, Alchemist, Rune Weaver, Saint, All Outlaws, Warrior, Cleric, Monk, Mage, Illusionist, Druid, Singer or Bard, Ranger, Normal, and Barbarian. The classes in the first Grimoire are Trader, Psychic, Barbarian, Rune Weaver, Techno, Medicine Man, and Witch Hunter. The Trader, Psychic and Witch Hunter all have XP tables with their descriptions. Given the classes that were in D&D use at the time, that leaves us with Slaver, Courtesan, Alchemist, Saint, miscellaneous Outlaws, and Normals without explicit description.

The "Singer or Bard" class is particularly noteworthy. The Bard class from the Strategic Review (reprinted in Best of Dragon #1) is implied, but the "Singer" part actually refers to a class published in the first two issues of Alarums & Excursions, which filled the gap prior to the TSR version.

Level limits follow this. For a game that gets up into 105th level, Arduin doesn't expand the more traditional demihuman level limits too much. The highest numbers are 15th level (Mermaid Mages, Titan Psychics, Gnorc (sic) Warriors and Insect Thieves). Almost every race is on the chart, some with unlimited levels in a few classes, others with almost no classes to be a part of. There is a riotous diversity here - from Hargrave's originals (Saurigs and Phraints, lizard and mantis men respectively), to his hybrid Kobbits and Gnorcs (though not Knoblins) and everything from Titans and Giants down to most types of animals, where Hargrave helpfully explains "Obviously, normal insects and animals are not smart enough to do much of anything, but there are were-creatures and other types that fit the bill, so these guidelines are meant for them." Were-creatures were extremely prolific in early Alarums & Excursions, with one were-fox mage, Brilliant Jade, being a prominent character in several campaign stories, so it's not surprising to see them here. Cave men and Amazons are their own races, with quite restrictive level limits; there are also Uruk-Hai, an indication of Hargrave's tendency to crib bits he liked quite shamelessly from other sources. Personally, I think it'd be interesting to have a cat mage with a human familiar, but that might just be me.

That's just the first five pages of Arduin. It's intriguing, and I do have to say I enjoy the idea of some of the different possibilities open here, but it'd take a bit of doing to get them into a D&D game without upsetting the whole apple cart. Next up will be more race info.

Thoughts on Arduin

Geoffrey McKinney's recent post on the OD&D forum (read it here) talks about some of the strangest and most infamous of old-school games, the original Arduin trilogy. I've had the books for months and read them off and on, and I occasionally get the desire to just rip off big chunks and run with them in D&D. I still have the sort of eyes that read the reduced typeface of the original trilogy, although I may be tempted by the allure of a single hardcover volume (available here) in the future.

Arduin was marketed as its own game, to a certain extent, but fundamentally it was David Hargrave's house rules for the original D&D game. It's interesting to look through it, almost to the point where I think it should be required reading for people talking about OD&D in this day and age. Like most gamers at the time, Hargrave cheerfully embraced the OD&D supplements, hacking and modifying away at bits of them rather than taking the very modern stance of embracing "just the original 3 rulebooks." It's also rather accurate as a snapshot of the kind of thing that gamers, at least the sort who wrote in to Alarums & Excursions, were doing at the time: there are charts for character special abilities, critical hits, a mana point system, and concerns about all those areas where OD&D wasn't really clear.

But beyond that, Arduin reflects certain realities about the time that OD&D was out that weren't true about the subsequent period. Hargrave was very conscious that he wasn't writing eternal rules down to the ages. His tone is constantly that of one participant in the larger conversation about how to do things – albeit a participant who'd gotten himself a bully pulpit by publishing his rules as a supplement. And this was the reality of the gaming scene at the time: TSR was regarded as having a great product, but nobody was poring through the works of Gygax for hidden pearls of wisdom; his ideas were regarded as nothing more than one way to do things. What I think people miss is that this is the context of the publication of AD&D as we know it. Into this volatile stew of gamers taking D&D off in varied and colorful directions, in which Tunnels & Trolls was considered about as good as the "real thing", Gygax launched a set of hardbound rule books that really solidified a lot of the play culture to come afterward. But the AD&D books have every mark of being birthed in this ongoing milieu; the game was then wrenched out of it by sudden fad status, and the idea of a set in stone "D&D" replaced it.

Arduin, because it's back in print, serves as a living reminder that the game wasn't always that way. Even if you don't embrace a single thing from its rules (although how anyone can pass up air sharks is beyond me), the more important thing is to look at the original D&D game as it was seen in its early days. Sometimes I think that the best thing we can do in the old-school renaissance is to create a dozen or two Arduins, reinterpretations of D&D that expand on the wild possibilities in the game rather than constraining ourselves to trying to understand and appreciate what Gygax managed to put into the first three D&D books ever published.