Campaign News September 9

PLAYERS & CHARACTERS

We have no changes to the player roster since the last newsletter, but I have dropped the "1478" from the web site name, making it simply "Erin" since we're all now into Dec 1480 and Jan 1481.

I'd like to give you all the heads up that I will be seeking a vote on rules in the next month or two. We've agreed to play AD&D "by-the-book" in this group, but "the book" doesn't cover all of the situations we have run into during play in an unambiguous way. As a result, there have been a number of rules extensions and interpretations that the referees have been following to cover these. It is essential to our style of play that we all agree on those rules, hence the upcoming vote.

Some of you may feel unqualified to vote, or unsure about the rules interpretations. Most of these have already been brought up in Discord, though feedback has been fairly limited. Nevertheless, discussion and debate is more than welcomed. It's criticism and debate that will help us refine these rules into a game we all want to play. In the next newsletter or two or three, I'll present the rules that are up for confirmation, rejection, or refinement.

SCHEDULE

Our next scheduled game is a Thursday, 17 Sep. I'm soliciting feedback for next year's schedule. If there are particular days of the month that don't work for you, or others that would be more convenient, please let me know. The Wednesday, online session for example, has been dropped from the 2027 calendar since it was never used in 2026, but I have feedback from one player requesting it be included. This is the kind of feedback I'd like to have.

 

TIPS & TRICKS

The Flow of Time in Erin

YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.

        - Gary Gygax, Dungeon Masters Guide (TSR Games, 1979) p. 37.

One of the central rule constructs in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is time-keeping. Pages 37 - 38 of the Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG) summarizes most of the rules concerning time, although like the rest of the rules in this game, many parts of the rules are scattered throughout the books. The author apparently expected readers to read the entirety of the rule books with perfect retention. In all capital letters, as Gygax does in these books for emphasis, he wrote the strident admonishment quoted above.

During play sessions, time is tracked in days, hours, turns (10-minute chunks), rounds (1-minute chunks), or segments (6-second chunks), depending on the activity in which the characters are engaged. For example, time spent in the relative safety of a settlement resting, information gathering, shopping, hiring, and so on is typically tracked by days. Hit points are recovered by healing on a per day, or per week, basis, so counting the segments would make no sense. For some quick activity in a settlement, such as stopping briefly to change horses, time might be counted in hours as it is part of an overland journey which is tracked by the hour. Hourly tracking of such travel is usually necessary, because the terrain through which the characters travel may vary and the type of terrain, as well as its degree of civilization, affect whether or not a random encounter might occur during each period throughout the travel day, and what that encounter could be. Time in the dungeon is tracked in turns, and in rounds during combat, occasionally segment tracking comes into play in special circumstances such as surprise and spellcasting in the midst of combat.

While carefully tracked, time in the session is also elastic. Mere moments might be spent resolving the results of days or weeks of character time in the game world, or half an hour resolving a few minutes of a complex combat. Such elasticity is normal and expected during a session.

Most D&D tables pay at least lip service to in-session time-keeping as described above, some more strictly than others, perhaps. At our table, the referees track time in the session as carefully and correctly as they are able, understanding that sometimes mistakes are made. Players should always correct the referee when he or she makes any sort of error, time-keeping included.

Outside of the game session, time flows for characters at the same rate as real world time, tracked in days. Although many tables ignore this rule, it is explicit in the rules of our game. Though somewhat buried in an example, the rules state, “it is best to use 1 actual day = 1 game day when no play is happening.” For this reason, it is imperative that players get their characters to some place of relative safety, or articulate some plan for self-preservation, before adjourning a session of play. A character left in the dungeon at the end of a session with a couple hours of lamp oil, a few days rations, and no orders to somehow exit or hole up, is unlikely to be alive when the next session is played if that is a week or two later.

In our game there are several players, and even more characters, and they aren’t all played in the same sessions. Because of that, and coupled with the elasticity of time within sessions, characters end up being in different times. The rules are clear that characters who have extra time, called “slack time” in our game, because other characters have gotten ahead of them, are permitted to accelerate their time, or “fast-forward” as we call it. A player may choose to fast-forward a character in order to catch up with another with whom the player would like to play his or her character in a session for example. Likewise, a character tied up with level training, or healing, or some other time-consuming activity might fast-forward through it, provided that character has sufficient “slack time” to do so. It is only characters being played in session who have the benefit of truly elastic time and may therefor advance the time “horizon” for the campaign. The DMG suggests that there is a limit to how far that horizon might be advanced, but leaves it to the referee to quantify: “Being aware of time differences between groups of player characters will enable you to prevent the BIG problems. You will know when the adventuring of one such group has gone far enough ahead in game time to call a halt.” At some point the referees in our game will need to decide on a standard for this, and input from all of the participants is invited to inform that decision.

Gygax articulates the reasons for such time-keeping quite well:

The time lines of various player characters will diverge, meet, and diverge again over the course of game years. This makes for interesting campaigns and helps form the history of the milieu.

You may ask why time is so important if it causes such difficulties with record-keeping, dictates who can or can not go adventuring during a game session, and disperses player characters to the four winds by its strictures. Well, as initially pointed out, it is a necessary penalty imposed upon characters for certain activities. Beyond that, it also gives players yet another interesting set of choices and consequences. The latter tends to bring more true-to-life quality to the game, as some characters will use precious time to the utmost advantage, some will treat it lightly, and some will be constantly wasting it to their complete detriment. Time is yet another facet which helps to separate the superior players from the lesser ones. If time-keeping is a must from a penalty standpoint, it is also an interesting addition from the standpoint of running a campaign.

Beyond the general case of time-keeping articulated above, there are exceptions. When the referees take time to process orders, as they sometimes do, characters must not pay a penalty in lost time for that. In cases where this happens, the characters' time is advanced only as the processing of their orders catches up with those orders' time requirements. The burden on referees is to ensure that orders processing is completed in a timely enough fashion that characters are caught up to their time line far enough ahead of sessions that their players have a reasonable opportunity to issue orders for the rest of the time they have between the completion of their characters' orders and the start of the characters' next session.

As complicated as it is, this does all get easier to keep in one's head with practice!

 

 

 

Campaign New August 31

I'm returning to the old newsletter format today.

PLAYERS & CHARACTERS

Summer has been surprisingly eventful in terms of player activity despite that half of the scheduled sessions have not been played by anyone, and a couple of the usually more active players have suffered reduced availability. I'm very happy to report that Amy B, Monica R, and Scott B have joined us, Josh L has created a character in anticipation of re-joining us, and Alex W plans to join us as soon as he is able. Sadly, John S has decided to retire from the game.

The time gap between the least and most advanced characters' timelines has narrowed to 45 days after peaking at 80 days. The geographic gap has widened however, with characters as far flung as Waterford, Castlenoe, and the Mountains of Mis.

In a fascinating turn of events, the last session saw the first overt player-versus-player actions of the game, one character picking the pockets and leaving for dead her comrades in the dungeon after a near total-party-kill.

I've previously asserted that while AD&D is ultimately a competitive game, skillful play at the lower levels is cooperative. The last session may be the exception that proves the rule. I'll withhold further analysis and discussion for the time-being, but this may be a very interesting and informative case study to improve our understanding of early competitive play in AD&D.

SCHEDULE

The next scheduled game is Tuesday, 8 Sep.

Please remember that you are invited and encouraged to bring new players to the table with you any time. You are likewise invited and encouraged to request impromptu or ad hoc games at any time. I will always have characters on hand for use and adoption by any player. Barry has indicated that he may be available for ad hoc sessions on some Wednesdays, so reach out to him if a Wednesday night game might work for you. Also let me know, because if I'm available, I'll be interested in playing, or possibly refereeing if Barry can't.

TIPS & TRICKS

The Role of Simulation

Perhaps the defining characteristic dividing games like AD&D from games like chess and tennis is "tactical infinity," the allowance within the game to take actions not explicitly described by the rules. I touched on this last April using the iron spike as an example. The only rules around the iron spike are that it costs 1 copper and weighs 1 pound. There are no other rules and just one suggestion about what a character or monster might do with it, and that is to anchor a piece of rope. In our game, characters have successfully used an iron spike to hold a portcullis up and a door closed.

How can players imagine innovative things to do with spells and equipment, and how referees decide how such innovation should be handled? A lot of modern gaming writing will recommend things like "the rule of cool" as the best way to handle situations that the rules don't cover. Those games have different objectives than ours. In our game, on the spot rulings that a referee needs to make for situations not covered by the rules are governed by two principles: 1) consistency with the existing rules of the game, and 2) consistency with our understanding of how the world works. That second principle is essentially simulation: imitating in the game what could happen in the real world. We do that instead of making a ruling that "creates epic moments" as one modern game writer put it, because we are interested in fairness and predictability rather than story.

The reason fairness is important to our game, and not so important to modern expressions of the game, is that our game is competitive and our referees are also players. There are characters in our game who have played at times with me as their referee and with Barry as their referee and there has been zero difference in what rules were used and how they were applied. Likewise, I have played characters that Barry has refereed, and Barry has played characters that I have refereed. Eventually those characters may be rivals for lands and resources and it's important that neither of us has had any unfair advantage.

The reason that predictability is important to our game is that it allows players to innovate actions. Not every action is on the table, for example, a player suggesting his or her thief climbs up the backside of a giant in the middle of combat to gain a backstab bonus. While arguably "cool" and "dramatic," it is also unreasonable once one carefully pictures the maneuvers involved. In this case, it also violates the rules as the giant would certainly be aware of the character climbing his back if such a thing made any physical sense. Players are constrained by a "reasonableness" that comes from a shared understanding of how things work. It is at least as much a burden on the players as on the referee to think this through, lest they waste their valuable session time asking if their character can shove the elephant into the pit, or some such nonsense. On the other side of that coin, practical innovations, such as carrying a potted plant into the dungeon in order to use some plant-affecting spell in a place in which plants aren't normally found is perfectly possible.

Campaign News August 3

We had three new players join in July, and there are two more who've expressed interest in joining as well. It seems like a good time for a refinement to the definition of how this group plays AD&D and why we play it that way. I'll start with my favorite quotation from the Dungeon Masters Guide, from the afterword in Gary's all caps emphasis:

BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE.

Paraphrased: rules first, setting next, players and referees last.

Why Rules First?

1. Rules generate the campaign setting in which the characters operate. 

The random encounter tables, for example, tell us if, when, and what the characters run into crossing a wilderness. The encumbrance and movement rules tell us how long it takes the characters to cross that wilderness, and terrain tells us how frequently there's a chance they might run into something, and what sorts of things they might run into.

The random encounter tables tell us all, referees included, what's actually in the world. They enable and require referee creativity, not stifle it. The referee is forced to make pieces he or she didn't expect to hold, fit together and conform to the rules and established precedent.

The rules allow the referee to be just as surprised as the players by what happens next. This allows all the participants explore the setting together instead of being led through places and events that the referee has already thoroughly explored. 

2. Rules ensure fairness.

When everyone is following the rules to the best of their ability, the referee is just another participant in the game, with no more power than anyone else at the table. 

Following the rules means that the referee can't simply decide that the characters will or will not win a fight. It means that players can evaluate the risk-reward tradeoff consistently. This allows players to improve their skill at the game, which improves their enjoyment of it. It means that the players' choices matter. It means that the referee is unable to manipulate the circumstances. It means that players can look for ways exploit the rules to their advantage and not worry that the referee will override them.

We all keep getting better at the game as we keep playing the same game as defined by those constant rules. 

3. Rules deepen immersion in the world.

Time in the game world matters. The characters' upkeep expense, resource consumption, and hireling wages are all applying time pressure on the players to execute efficient plans, and adjust intelligently when those plans are thwarted by the dice.

Risks are real and calculable. All of the work and time put into one's characters is at risk in the session, and it could all be lost.

Learning more about the rules and the setting provides advantage, both cooperative and competitive. 

How players use their characters' downtime between sessions builds more campaign setting and creates more disparity between who knows what.

Because the world persists between sessions, it becomes more solid and real.

The rules give structure to the activity, making it a game and not merely playing pretend.