Campaign News May 5

For the first time since the Leader Board came online more than a year ago, the "high score" character has changed. Calvis Mulroney has been unseated from the top position by Finnan Fitzpatrick. Now, technically, Finnan is 13 days into the future from Calvis, so it's possible, from the characters' timeline perspective, that Finnan never surpassed Calvis. From our perspective as players, however, it has irrevocably already come to pass.

PLAYERS & CHARACTERS

If you took a look at the Leader Board, you probably already noticed that the characters' location and date is now displayed there. The header of the table also indicates the real world date at which those times and places were true. This gives players an easy way to be sure of their characters' current dates. If it was 13 May 1480 for your character on 2 May 2026, then today, 5 May 2026, your character is on 16 May 1480 unless you played that character in-session after 2 May 2026.

[As a side note, you may notice that I am now following Strunk and White's Elements of Style guidelines for date formatting. I strongly believe the world would be a happier place if we all memorized and followed the rules in that little, 85-page book!]

SCHEDULE

With the onset of baseball season, we no longer have anyone defaulting to Saturday play. We also have no players currently defaulting to the Wednesday, online games. As such, the only games that are automatically played right now are the second Tuesday of the month, and the Thursday of the week following that Tuesday game. Our default players for both of those games are Andy O, Barry F, Cole W, and Sterling B.

If you won't be able to join one of your "default" session dates, or would like to join a session you don't normally attend, please let the refs know ASAP.

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.

TIPS & TRICKS

Character Progression – Part II

Overview

Characters in the game go through a number of stages in their development, and the path they follow will vary, of course by player choice, but also by class. Each of these steps is a sort of "quantum leap" in capability.

Characters hit their middle levels at 4th or 5th level, depending on their class. For example, the fighter’s ability to command troops takes a significant leap from 3rd to 4th, when this increases from 30 men and 3 sergeants to 80 men and 8 sergeants plus 4 lieutenants each of whom could command as many as another 30 men and 3 sergeants. Thus the 4th level fighter could control a force 200 men and 24 officers! On the other hand, a 4th level magic-user isn’t much more powerful than a 3rd level, but at 5th level his newly gained access to spells like fireball, haste, and dispel magic changes the game for him.

Getting Out of the Dungeon

Although dungeon-delving can still offer challenges for mid-level characters, the rewards are proportionally lower for them than when they were low-level characters. As all characters advance in level, the amount of experience points required to advance in level increases geometrically, but the treasure found in deeper levels increases only linearly. The increased number of gems and jewelry that might be found do improve the likelihood of an unusually valuable treasure being found, but the more reliable treasure option (which is still quite chancy) is hunting creatures in their lairs where treasure hoards described by the treasure type table can be found. The dungeon regulates encounters for characters, keeping them in an expected difficulty range and usually providing those challenges in small enough doses that players can pull their characters out of harm’s way when their endurance wanes.

Mid-level characters have more endurance and are able to take more direct control of the challenges they face by employing their improved abilities instead of relying on the structure of the dungeon. Frontal assault with a large force, infiltration by stealth or deception, and magically bypassing defenses are tools that mid-level characters can employ as they see fit in their pursuit of treasure. For players, there is an increased cognitive load in order to plan such things. Players also need to proactively seek out opportunities their characters can exploit. It is possible for players of mid-level characters to simply engage in a “hex crawl” sort of activity, using the wilderness like a dungeon to simply see what’s there. They may in this way happen across a lair, but it is apt to take much more game world time than a “dungeon crawl.” There are only so many encounter checks in a day, and only so much likelihood of such encounters being a lair. Another consideration is that wilderness encounters are not regulated in challenge level like dungeon encounters. The party may find themselves in over their heads quickly, or wasting time on encounters not worth their time.

The Mid-Level Game

Characters generally are well-served by acquiring henchmen early in the middle game. Part of a henchman’s loyalty rating is based on length of service. They are expensive, in that their upkeep (100 gold per level per month) must be paid by the character employing them, and they expect half-shares and occasional magic item gifts, not just “hazard pay.” They are far more durable than mercenaries, however, and can advance in level. Usually only 1st level characters are attracted as henchmen, so gaining their service earlier, rather than later, means that they are more apt to be into the mid-levels themselves by the time their employer reaches “name level.” They can be sent off on independent missions as well.

The middle game is a time of transition for the character, balancing “commando” sorts of operations with a team of other players’ characters and independent activities which in some cases work against some of the interests of the character’s comrades. It’s a time when the player needs to develop a fairly deep familiarity with the specifics of the game setting. The skillful player will be looking forward to the next phase of play when his or her character is building a domain, focusing on finding the character’s physical and political place in the world. In the third part, I’ll share more of my thoughts on that phase of play which may further illuminate the preparatory steps.

Frankly, it is the mid-level play which separates the serious and casual players most clearly. Success in the middle phase will come incredibly slowly to the passive or casual player without a great deal of luck. For the serious player, it will be a longer slog than the lower levels are likely to have been, but also, for this player, that pace allows the development of a deeper connection between the player’s character and the setting itself. It allows the player time to acquaint him or herself with the setting sufficiently to enter the third phase of play as well, if he or she hasn’t yet advanced a character so far.

Because the somewhat generic experience of the dungeon which dominates low level play is a much smaller part of mid-level play, there’s no specific prescription for character success. Player skill is a greater factor and it must be applied more broadly.

Conclusion

In my experience the AD&D mid-level game is much like the middle game of chess. In chess, the middle game is where I’m most apt to fail. I have a pretty good understanding of openings, specific ones as well as general types and approaches. The end game in chess becomes fairly mechanical, but the middle game is where the widest branching of possibilities exist. This is true in AD&D as well.
One has greater freedom of taking the game in any direction between 5th and 8th level than at any other point in the game (with caveats I hope to elaborate upon some day).

The only keys I can see to winning in the early game are giving careful attention to the game world, perhaps checking one’s lower level ambitiousness, and thinking proactively, both cooperatively and independently. 

Campaign News April 17

The circumstances of the campaign and conduct of the last session present a good opportunity for me to show examples of a couple of key concepts to how we play our game.

TIMEKEEPING

I've written a couple of explanations of our 1:1 time-keeping method in the campaign news in the past. It seems like everyone gets it, but I thought it might be useful to see what it looks like from the referees' perspective:

 

Time in the game world can run faster or slower than real world time during a game session. For example, it might take 20 minutes or more to play through a combat that lasts only 4 minutes in game time. Likewise, it might take less than 5 minutes of real time to play through two day's travel. Typically, a session will cover 2 to 12 days of game world time during the 4 or 5 hours we play it.

When characters are played in a session they advance their own timeline to however far game play took them. The character(s) furthest into the future create "slack time" for the characters not played. This is time that those characters are entitled to use however they like--we don't want one character to rob another of time since it is an expensive and useful resource.

Orders for downtime activities need to be issued proactively. For example, a player cannot say on game date July 25, 1480 that his character has spent the past week in level training even if the character had been otherwise idle during that time. Such orders start for a character on the game date the they are given, and so this character will be occupied in that training starting on July 25 and done on August 1. Characters with slack time may use that right away, but if not, they become unavailable for session play until that date is reached.

In the last session, played this past Tuesday, April 14th, the session ended on game date July 22, 1480. That was 3 days ago and you can see above that two of the characters that were played in that session are now at July 25, 1480, 3 days later in the game and in the real world. The other character played in that session, Shay McFarland, is executing post-session activities that take a week to complete. Because Shay's activities are happening between sessions and he has no slack time available, he is in "time jail" working on those activities until game date July 29, 1480.

Barry could still play Shay in a session before July 29, 1480 / April 21, 2026, however the other players would need to agree to advancing their characters' time, losing whatever time they have between their characters' current date and July 29, and incurring whatever upkeep expenses and health checks are required during that period.

TACTICAL INFINITY, BY-THE-BOOK PLAY, AND THE IRON SPIKE

One of the most interesting and attractive features of AD&D, and TTRPGs generally, is that "anything" is possible, that players enjoy "tactical infinity." For example, the game rules mention a piece of equipment, the iron spike, which costs 1 copper and weighs 1 pound. Using a spike to anchor a piece of rope is mentioned as a possible use for the spike and it is described as one of the main tools used in dungeon expeditions. There are no other rules and few other mentions of the iron spike in the rule books.

In our last session, a player wedged an iron spike into the wall to hold up a portcullis to allow passage through a portal which otherwise would require a successful bend bars/lift gates roll to pass through. The referee had to decide if such a use was 1) permitted by the rules, 2) in the spirit of the rules body as a whole, and 3) sensible in the game world which generally obeys the natural laws of the real world. As referee in this session, it seemed pretty clear to me that this use of the iron spike met all three criteria easily. In doing so, I have committed us all to coming to an agreement for or against that ruling that will be predictably repeated regardless which of us is the referee in the session.

Ideally, we would codify and record all of these little rulings, but there are so many, so small and so specific, that this isn't always practical. As players and referees both, good sportsmanship dictates that we should all be helping each other to remember and follow all of the rules and rulings. Our aim is a clear, understandable system we can all follow, but also one which can be extended and modified as we learn more about the game during play.

Campaign News April 9

My apologies for the long gap between the last news and this. A lot has happened over the past 5 weeks!

PLAYERS & CHARACTERS

A look at the Leader Board will show significant character progression, but there is even more progress than is visible: two of the 2nd level characters are about to make 3rd level and one of the 1st levels is on the verge of 2nd level.

Where & When:

 

SCHEDULE

There is more than a month between the future-most and furthest-past characters and they are in the same physical location. This is likely to necessitate a reckoning with some combination of "time jail" and "fast-forwarding" to avoid time paradoxes. The Tuesday players will drive how this is reconciled prior to the next session, April 14. Anyone with slack should be prepared to lose that game world time, and issuing downtime orders to use it productively before it's lost is highly recommended!

TIPS & TRICKS

All characters training for 3rd level, and many training for a level or two above that are very likely to find themselves in the position of having enough XP to train for the next level, but not enough gold to pay for the training. This is because characters typically earn 1 XP for each 1 gold of treasure recovered, but the amount of gold required to train is equal or greater than the number of XP required for that training eligibility. The chart below highlights the levels, by class, where the training gold is equal to or greater than the incremental XP requirements for the next level.

 

This situation is aggravated by the fact that once a character has acquired sufficient XP to train for the next he cannot earn any more XP until he has trained to that next level. Besides the typical activities which gain a character treasure and XP, there are two options for paying for training: performing a service for the tutor or taking out a loan. The rules provided for both of these possibilities are quite thin.

 

"The tutor might possibly accept some combination of gold and service" is all we get from the rules. Rules which rely on the referee's judgement as heavily as this are useless for a playable game. They reduce game play to unstructured make-believe. I don't have a solution to this, but I'm inclined toward "service" taking the form of months of service in exchange for a predetermined reduction in training costs, like 1 month per 500 gold reduction per level of the trainee, which would put the character in "time jail" for the period without the possibility of fast-forwarding the character's clock. A minimum of 500 gold per level might be additionally required. In any case, this is something for us to decide as a group, not just one referee's ruling. Let's discuss it in Discord!

 

Loan rules are only slightly more developed than the "service" rules, however the like-minded players and referees at Demon Idol have interpreted and extended the book's scanty rule in a way that I suggest we adopt wholesale.

 

This game is as much yours as mine, however, and I'd like to debate these ideas with you and discuss any other suggestions and thoughts you have.