Two Vicars and a Myrmidon Walk Into a Tavern...

For every little typo and copywriting error, for every bizarre and mercurial choice found in the old D&D tomes, there is someone out there who thinks it is both 

1. intended that way, and 
2. better because of it.

Don't get me wrong, I love delving into the material for new insights, but sometimes someone just wrote down the wrong number, or picked one at random. Even TSR's brightest minds had deadlines to meet.

However, today I'm going to try to pitch the idea that the B/X level titles are secretly pretty awesome. I'm going to talk about how level titles are horribly misunderstood, and then demonstrate how they are an extremely useful tool for both the DM and the players. Hopefully by the end of this article you will be excited to use them when creating and running your own B/X D&D campaign!

Yep, I'm talking about these.

Wrostward Session 1

The last campaign began with the party opening the door to a dungeon. I didn't start them in a tavern, or traveling in the wilderness, but in front of the entrance to B1. The first roll they made was to open the door to the dungeon. It's a great way to start any campaign -- I'd recommend it to anyone running B/X for the first time, and it's probably how I'd do it nine times out of ten.

But... that's not what I did for my first session of the Wrostward campaign. I started them in the hideout of a secret covenant, with their memories all fuzzy as to how they even got there, and gave them a tour of this weird underground lair. Then they found out the leader of the covenant is a dragon, and the dragon gave them their first mission as new recruits.

Wow! Sounds like every terrible cliché I've ever tried to avoid for the past decade. So what gives?

I know this group pretty goddamn well. Of the 4 players, three of them I have now played with as a fellow player through many 5e campaigns, and as their DM in a 5e campaign and multiple OSR campaigns. I know they have no problem with a slow start, and I have no doubt they will trust me when I try something new, even something slow and unorthodox. If I had all new players, or was trying to teach 5e babies for the first time, I would have never done things this way. It's all about knowing your players, and in this case, I know them well enough to know they'll be fine with this. And likewise, they trust me enough to see where this is going.

Oh, and as for the fourth player, who is brand new to this kind of thing, well... At least they got to meet a dragon. I know I'd feel just a bit cheated if I played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time and didn't encounter either of those things.

At any rate, in a few more sessions, the world is going to REALLY open up, and the players will have many strong plot hooks to choose from. They can investigate any of them, or none at all. Honestly, they can ignore them all and never come back to any of this stuff. I'm going to let them choose the story and the narrative. The only stipulation is: if you want to level up, you have to get treasure, and to get treasure, you have to go into a dungeon.

And when they aren't doing that, when they're mucking around above ground talking to NPCs and hanging out? That's fine, they can do that as long as they'd like. They just won't be getting any XP for doing that. They're not getting stronger.

But their enemies are.

Evolution of the Previous Campaign's Hex Map

Note: This entire post was an old draft I've had sitting around since early 2020. I went ahead and took a few minutes to finish it and post it. At the time I wrote it, I was still running the game and used the map below. Even though I'm doing a (sort of) different thing now, I thought this would still make a fun postmortem, so I've gone ahead and edited it a little and posted it.

 

Current Version of Regional Map

It has taken me almost three years of tinkering, remixing, and revising in Hexographer to get the map pictured above. Even now, I make monthly tweaks to the map, and large swaths of it are still a work in progress. This is the map that I used as of the most recent session of my campaign, but the story of how I got here is a long one.

Descending Back to Basic

Before starting the previous campaign, I did a lot of playtesting by running one-shots for my friends before eventually settling on using Old-School Essentials with the optional rule for ascending AC. During this time I actually went through a couple of different systems, making minor tweaks as I went. The timeline went something like:

Swords & Wizardry -> B/X -> Basic Fantasy RPG -> Old-School Essentials

For the new campaign, my intent is to go back to B/X as our core system. The biggest change will be going back to descending armor class, which I haven't done since our earliest playtests. My players were 5e babies back then, and either didn't understand descending armor class, or thought it sucked. My reason for going back to it for the new campaign is twofold:

1. Virtually every player falls into one of two groups: either they get super into the rule set, learn how it works, and will completely understand and adapt to it; or they won't pay any attention at all, and just constantly ask me "how that works again" at every turn, no matter how easy I make it. For the former players, if I change to descending armor class, they'll quickly adapt to it and not have any issues. For the latter group, they'll always ask how it works, but they'd do that anyway, even if I made it as simple and modern as possible. So the reality is that it doesn't really matter which one I use, the same players are going to 'get it' and the same players are going to 'not get it'.
   
2. OSE does ascending armor in a really weird and frustrating way. Outside of OSE, the easiest way to convert back and forth between the two is to subtract one of them from 20 to find the other, since you are rolling a d20 to attack. It makes AC 3 becomes AC 17, it makes a +1 to hit stay a +1 to hit, and so on. This makes it so that an unmodified roll will hit the same ACs in both directions. For whatever Gygaxforsaken reason, OSE has AC 3 become AC 16. This seems like a minor, innocuous change at first, but it actually has some pretty frustrating ramifications. First of all, Normal Man now has a -1 to hit instead of just rolling a d20 straight. This feels weird and bad, because the entire to-hit matrices of D&D are so clearly and evidentially scaled to what a normal man can do. It's true that this means you don't have to give the level 1 players a +1 to hit (and that's possibly why OSE does it), but they'll still get a bonus at higher levels and they'll likely have a bonus or penalty to Strength/Dexterity even at level 1, so an extra +1 hardly makes a difference. Secondly, this makes monsters attack bonus really ugly and inelegant. Instead of monsters getting a +1 to hit for every hit die they have, they get... a +1 for every hit die beyond the first one. So instead of a 3HD monster getting a +3, they get a +2. This, more than anything, is the big deal breaker for me, because it makes converting modules a gigantic hassle when it really doesn't have to be.
   

That was quite a rant and I could keep going, but the bottom line is that OSE adds ascending armor class as an optional rule, but implements it so incredibly poorly that I can't in good faith recommend using it. It caused more than a few headaches when I was bouncing between modules from all sorts of different systems -- something that wasn't an issue running descending armor class, or even running BFRPG (Basic Fantasy only uses ascending armor class, but gets it right).

Seeing as we are back to descending armor class, I don't really see a great argument against using B/X. My personal 3-ring binder will have those Moldvay, Cook, and Marsh books in it, and I'm going to be telling my players that we're playing 1981 Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons. However, the OSE books are staying at the table for people to reference, because at the end of the day, there's not really any difference, and my players will only be using the rulebook to create new characters and level up. At least that's the idea, but that requires a nice little handout of house rules to really make it work. Fortunately, that's next on the agenda.

The Adventure Continues

My last post on this blog was on January 25, 2020. A few weeks after that day, I had my last in-person session before my state went into full lockdown. For a few months, our group transitioned to online play, but eventually we stopped playing when our lives went back to normal. I've recently decided to reboot the campaign, and have been working on it for the past few months. The goal is to provide a small pamphlet of house rules with all the information they will ever need on it. The good news is that it's coming along nicely, but the bad news is the document keeps growing. At a certain point you have to stop and ask yourself if you're just rewriting the entire system from the ground up. Right now I think my answer is still "no". I'm still using the same classes with all the same abilities, saves, spells, restrictions, etc. So at the very least, the core rulebook will be used for new character creation and level up.

The current goal is to write a document that covers everything the players would ever need to know. So instead of flipping through large rulebooks, they can flip through a small handout, only needing the rulebook to create a character or level up. Ideally, the players wouldn't need to reference anything, and can just ask the occasional question, with the rules being simple enough to remember most of the time. But if they need to look at something, I'd rather it be a short handout than a lengthy book that gets passed around.

Right now my primary focus is getting the rules solidified so we can start playing within a month or so. As soon as we start playing again, I'll start posting more content here. This new campaign is going to be a radical departure from anything I've done in the past, and I'm excited to share some of the details.