Regarding the first D&D class, the Thief

Before Dungeons & Dragons (1974) there was Chainmail, Gary Gygax's miniatures wargame released by TSR in 1971. As a wargame it had various types of fighter units, and its fantasy supplement included many spells that would make a reappearance in D&D three years later. It was on this foundation that Dave Arneson built his world changing Blackmoor campaign.

The Blackmoor campaign would be world changing, but in 1974 that was hardly a foregone conclusion. What was already established though in 1974 was that Arneson's house rules fundamentally changed a Chainmail player's viewpoint from "omniscient general" to a limited first-person viewpoint in the form a single player character, while simultaneously expanding the possibilities of the game's milieu from fixed set battles to everything imaginably achievable by a fantasy hero within a fantasy world. Combat between player characters and their fantastic foes then became a sub-game within a much larger game.

Combat would not be the only sub-game in D&D however. Dave Arneson's other great contribution to the game was the idea of the dungeon delve itself. Exploring the dungeon became "the other subgame", and rules such as movement rates (which were in Chainmail, but adapted to dungeon environments), range of vision, equipment and encumbrance, surprise and wandering monster tables, etc. etc. were developed to faciliate a rules-based interraction between the players and their environment.

What is so interesting (to me) about the dungeon delve experience however is what rules were missing. In fact most interractions between the players and their environment was not mediated by rules but solely through the DM by means of open ended questions, answers and player actions.

PC: "What do I see?"

DM: "The hallway proceeds in front of you beyond the range of your Light spell. A large flagstone about 10' in front of you is obviously about 1" lower than the rest of the floor."

PC: "Can I poke it with my 10' pole?"

And so on. It is free form, open ended, and subjective. If the players prodded locked doors or booby-trapped idols it resided solely with the DM's discretion as to whether or not the task was performed with the level of skill and care necessary to avoid nasty blowback. Many a PC died due to their player not having demonstrated sufficient attention to whether the floor the PC was walking on contained a pit trap.

But then came Supplement I: Greyhawk, and a class not existing in the Chainmail rules but made specifically for D&D - the Thief. In fact, I would say that the Thief was the first D&D class, as the others were really Chainmail classes ported over to D&D but only half "converted" to the D&D game. Unlike the Fighter, Magic-User and Cleric the Thief not only had HD, to-hit advancement saving throws compatible with the combat rules (even if he sucked at combat), but he also had codified non-combat skills directly applicable to a game of dungeon exploration. Unlike the 10' pole users the Thief's player interrfaced with the dungeon through rules:

Thief: "What do I see?"

DM: "The hallway proceeds in front of you beyond the range of your Light spell. A large flagstone about 10' in front of you is obviously about 1" lower than the rest of the floor."

PC: "Ok, I'm going to roll for Find Traps."

And I think this is why many old school gamers have a problem with the Thief. The Chainmail classes were designed for wargaming, and so the only D&D sub-game where their players could interface with the world using codified, more or less complete rules was combat. When it came to D&D's dungeon exploration sub-game they were required to interract with the world solely through role playing, but the Thief wasn't. The Thief class was interracting with the dungeon exploration sub-game in a new way, and, more importantly, in a manner that the other class's players could not match or meanigfully participate in.

Was this a good change? Obviously the answer to that is subjective, but I think the enduring popularity of the Thief class as one of "the Big Four" classes through all editions of D&D rules after Supplement I is strong evidence that the majority of players want to interface with the dungeon exploration sub-game (particularly its sundry traps, deep pits and locked doors) through a ruleset that's at least semi-objective and condified. So from a "wisdom of crowds" point of view I feel confident saying it was a good change.

But it could have been better. In my next post I will argue that Supplement I should have presented not just the Thief, but also a unified Skill System and rules for "converting" the Fighter, Magic-User and Cleric to being fully integrated D&D classes.

D&D's Various Skill Systems

A perennial conversation within the D&D community is on the necessity and worth of various Skill Systems (apart from the PC's skills at melee combat and spellcasting). I think this quote from Dragonsfoot (third post down) is mandatory reading for anyone who has an opinion on the matter:

I am firmly in the camp that D&D does not need a skill system. As mentioned before, the DM can adjudicate a fair outcome for any action the PC takes even if it is not specifically covered under the class skills. The tools are already there, (attribute checks, saving throws, "to hit" rolls, common sense, etc...) and because there are infinite possibilities for players to try different things under a variety of circumstances, you will need to use those tools in many cases regardless of the presence of a skill system. Any class/skill system only gets you so far. They simplify the common mechanics, acting as a baseline for resolving many of the actions that are likely to take place in the game. They are are not designed to be an all encompassing umbrella for every single possible action a player takes, nor should they be. The game will often step outside the box of class or skills and there the DM is free to use creativity to resolve the action in a fair and fun manner. What skill should there be for kicking a table on its side for cover in a barroom brawl? or swinging down from the balcony on a tapestry into a knotted melee below? or rigging some pans on a wire to a door as an alarm against entry? or snatching a pack from a rushing river before it is swept away over a waterfall?

Emphasis added.

Anyone who wants to design a Skill System for D&D must first ask themselves: what in-game world-vs.-PC interractions am I trying to describe? What sub-game is this rule designed for? Is it supposed to function at the role play level? Within the combat engine? Am I introducing a new sub-game? Will everyone be able to participate in this game as fully as they do in role playing and combat? Etc.

D&D is a free form game where the player characters can go anywhere and do anything, to the limits of their resources and abilities. There is no possible way you can develop a simple, short and easy to implement skill system that can address all possible scenarios (which is why univeral mechanics are stupid). Or did you think saving vs. paralysis is really that similar to managing a banana plantation? The best system I have seen for addressing "everything else" is AD&D 2E's Non-Weapon Proficiency system (a.k.a., Secondary Skills in rule sets written by E. Gary Gygax), but precisely because it's really just a soft gloss on "other stuff PCs know" that is heavily dependent on DM adjudication. It's no combat engine.

However, that being said, while the AD&D 3.x Skill System was a step down from Non-Weapon Proficiencies in design quality (it was a gory mess bleeding across multiple sub-games), the AD&D 4E system was an improvement from there (even if it was a huge change in direction from the OD&D through AD&D 2E era). The designers of 4E realized that dungeon, wilderness and urban adventuring could be rule-mediated sub-games apart from roleplaying. The Skills thus defined how players interacted with these scenarios, and most of the bases were covered. This was the logic of the Thief Skills and the Ranger's tracking ability generalized to all classes.

But even 4E does not have a single "skill system" which mediates all player interraction with the world. Fighters and Barbarians can "open locks" with their war hammer, and a Wizard with a Knock spell. Further there are skills quite outside the skill system, such as the Wizard's ability to scribe scrolls (a rule descended all the way from Holmes Basic D&D). And there are many more, in the sense that the characters have a "skill" that allows them to accomplish an in-game effect.

D&D doesn't, and never had, a skill system. It has many, and as long as D&D is a roleplaying game, where players can attempt any action within their resources and abilties, that will always be the case.

The stupidity of Universal Mechanics

There has a movement among role playing games for the last decade to tout a "universal mechanic" to resolve all actions which cannot be adjudicated fairly through role play. The entire "d20 revolution" was based on this, as is Castles & Crusades' SIEGE Engine. This is a really dumb idea.

Good role playing games operate at many levels. The two most frequently encountered ones are in persona role playing (where you resolve issues through role play and group consensus) and combat. D&D 4E has introduced Skill Challenge Encounters, and there are many others of course. But each game-level must be its own game with rules well tailored to that game in order to perfect the "fit" between rules and player action. Could you imagine if my chess variant tried to use a universal mechanic to adjudicate both the chess moves and the Street Fighter matches? Neither chess nor Street Fighter would be improved thereby. So it is with any other games-within-a-game. The developers at Rockstar Games certainly understand the need for well designed sub-games.

The problem with the universal mechanic is that it places a serious limitation on the types of sub-games a given rpg can incorporate. Classic D&D could never have incorporated rules for small team combat, wrestling, mass combat, naval warfare, dominion management, multiverse wanderings, and spellcasting if it had insisted on a universal mechanic. And if D&D 4E shows us anything, it's that when you try really hard to make universal mechanics work, many things get lost while what remains ends a bland melange of actions that all feel exactly the same.

Do not fear bespoke mechanics. They're what makes each level of a game interesting.

UPDATE: Just thought of something:

Dear Old Schoolers,

Answering every "How should I resolve situation X?" question with "Roll an attribute check" or "Roll percentile dice" is a universal mechanic (see above for why that's bad). Sometimes, if situation X comes up often enough, it's advisable to develop a bespoke mechanic. Especially if the players can reasonably expect their characters to get better at situation X as they level up. That's not a betrayal of Gary Gygax's legacy, it's just good sense.

Thanks,

IR

Of Games & Sub-Games

Many games, such as chess, have just one level. But you could imagine a chess variant where each time a player moves a piece the two players resort to a Street Fighter bout to determine which chess piece takes control of the space. In this chess variant chess is "the game" and Street Fighter is the sub-game.

Most role playing games have a number of sub-games, but to know what the sub-games are you first have to identify the "highest level" of the game. In my chess variant the highest level of the game is the chessboard, and we know this because when Street Fighter concludes the player's attention returns there. So I propose that the highest level of a game is "the gameboard to where the player's attention returns when all temporary distractions are resolved." Using this definition I suggest that "the game" of Dungeons & Dragons is the in persona role playing of the life of an adventurer, from birth to death (even if childhood is either hand-waived or handled with a paragraph or two of back story). What is so fascinating about this is how few rules there are for D&D's primary gameboard. Almost all of the rules in D&D deal exclusively with sub-games, particularly combat. There are a number of rules which effect the primary level of D&D, such as rules for aging, but for the most part it is free form play mediated only by the participating group's ability to form a consensus as to cause and effect within the game world.

I think this is why D&D lends itself to so many worlds and settings (official and homebrew), and why it became as popular as it did. The core game has almost no rules at all holding it back, and what few there are (such as aging or equipment price lists) are so ancillary to the real action that they can be ignored or rewritten as needed.

This is probably also the reason so many people think D&D is about combat encounters the way Diablo is. Due to the "invisible" nature of D&D's core game (it is not written anywhere, but can only be experienced through play) many have mistake the D&D's most prominent sub-game for the game itself.

Pale Imitations

There are no new ideas. A concern of mine I have had for some time was voiced by James Maliszewski at Grognardia almost a month ago:

in the old school movement, the shadow of Gygax (and, to a lesser extent, Arneson) looms every bit as large as does that of Lovecraft in the realm of cosmic horror fiction. The shadow of TSR itself is similarly impressive and rightly so. ... I see a danger in the way many old school products use past products as explicit models, right down to the trade dress, typeface, and layout. ... The same holds true not just for presentation but for content [and] the conflation of elements intended to support content with the content itself.

Indeed. OSRIC has provided a valuable service by producing an open content reference for publishers looking to explicitly develop for AD&D 1E, but games that claim to be new (I'm looking at you, Castles & Crusades) are anything but. They have passed up a perfectly good opportunity to bring a game with old-school feel to today's gamers by confusing the spirit of old school play with specific mechanics which have long been known to be sub-optimal.

The first post

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