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.

What everyone says about Level Titles

• "They are useless."
• "They serve no mechanical purpose."
• "The titles don't make any sense."

Wrong, wrong, and... sort of wrong.

It's certainly true that they've got a few issues. Magic-user becomes a Necromancer a full level before it's even possible to know Raise Dead. The Thief upgrades from a Burglar to a Cutpurse. Truly, as Tim Kask has said, many of these titles were just synonyms the writers had to endlessly pump out every time a new class came out. There's not a whole lot of rhyme and reason to some of the choices.

Few titles have sparked as much discourse over the years as Veteran, with some people not liking the idea of a brand new character being called that. Others see them as a person who has already experienced combat, and point to hireling promotions and random encounter tables to support 1st level fighters as Veterans (more on those random tables later).

And who doesn't relish the idea of finally becoming a full-fledged Wizard at 9th level? Imagine having to explain to peasants for countless grueling sessions that, "no ma'am, I'm not a full-fledged wizard yet. Just a Conjurer of minor incantations." Having Wizard be a title that is earned through long-term play and used by the most elite magic-users is great flourish.

But does any of this justify players using all the level titles? Probably not. But what if I told you, the level titles aren't necessarily for the players...

Level Titles as Stock NPC Factions & Enemy Types

Ask yourself how many times you have seen one of the following happen in a D&D game:

• An NPC dies because the party got them into combat and grossly overestimated their ability.
• A PC dies because they picked a fight with a much higher level NPC, not realizing how powerful they were.
• The party have no way of knowing whether or not the local Cleric is capable of casting a high level spell for them.
• The party has no idea how powerful an NPC is, and how they would fair against them.

I'm assuming almost everyone has experienced at least a few of these. In addition to this, how would a DM handle the question, "what level is this NPC?" I would wager a guess that most DMs don't freely tell the players what level everyone is, and even if they do, that doesn't explain how NPCs would describe themselves to the characters in-universe.

Level titles solve all of these problems. Behold!

• "He is able to fight, but he's only an Apprentice."
• "The Lord asks you to leave his hall immediately."
• "The church is run by an Elder."
• "A local Warlock leads a band of Footpads in an ancient underground lair just outside of town."

Having NPCs called by their titles adds a lot of hidden depth and diversity to populating the world; for magic-users especially, it creates 9 distinct sub-factions. For clerics, it's more like a hierarchal structure, which makes sense for them. For thieves and fighters, it's basically 9 different enemy types, but they're kind of like the enemy types in early video games where Bloblins are just Goblins with a few extra hit points and a blue palette swap.

Just think about it for a minute. It makes a lot of sense.

Or let me put it another way: as soon as your players are told that all Necromancers are 8th level magic-users, they will know to respect Necromancers. There's no ambiguity, no wondering whether they are level 2 Necromancers or level 10 Necromancers. They're 8th level, because Necromancers are 8th level. It says so in the book.

"But I don't WANT my players to know what level they are!" That's fine, you don't have to tell them their title. It's information the DM can give to the players, on a need to know basis.

"But these titles are still useless for the players!" Useless when applied to their character, sure. But when they hear about a group of Sorcerers in a cave nearby, all they need do is check the book to get a good frame of reference for how powerful a Sorcerer is (i.e. a Sorcerer is a 7th level magic-user). They can now make an informed choice on whether or not to confront them.

"What about Name Level?" I think for player characters, the only title that really matters is name level -- that's when you become an important historical figure in the milieu, and can go build castles and hand out quests and stuff. If you retire, you'll become a named character in the world like Robilar or Tenser. However, Name Level is equally important for NPCs -- the game is telling you that NPCs of 9th level or higher deserve to have given names, because they're the real movers and shakers of the campaign world.

Is there any proof or is this armchair blog speculation? To be honest I haven't done a deep dive into Chainmail and OD&D level titles, but I had this epiphany while working on my B/X game and I want to get back to working on it soon rather than reading more TSR entrails. I will say, at a cursory glance the B/X books would seem to agree with me:

All taken from 1981 Basic

Most people are probably familiar with these "monsters", as they appear frequently when rolling on the random encounter tables. They are of course just 1st level NPCs, using the level titles as their "monster" name. NPC Parties are also made up of these guys, but can have higher level versions in the party. My interpretation is that the higher level characters also go by those titles, e.g. "led by a Swashbuckler." Interestingly, Veterans can actually be second or even third level even without a leader, while the others are always 1HD. Like many areas of B/X it is open to interpretation, but I'd probably call the Veterans with 2HD "Warriors" and 3HD "Swordmasters" if it ever came up in actual play (and it might not -- remember, it's up to the DM to dole these titles out as information whenever appropriate).

There is no Apprentice to represent thief, perhaps because the word "apprentice" gets tossed around to mean "magic-users following a more powerful magic-user" a couple times across the books. Bandit seems to be the NPC thief equivalent, breaking with the conventional level titles. If 1st level thieves title was "Bandit", this would make a lot of sense and be in line with the other classes and their respective NPC variants (and the use of the word "apprentice" in the books would be far less confusing). It would also make Bandits a lot easier to defeat, giving them 1d4HD instead of 1d8. I'd honestly be curious if there are people out there that already run them as such. At any rate, I'm not sure why they don't match the 1st level thief's title, but my guess is that it relates to how thieves were shoehorned into the core components of D&D around this time period. Again, without diving deeper, I can only speculate.

Borg didn't bother writing down his title because he heard they were silly and pointless.

Borg, where's your title?! As you can see here, Borg did not write down his title. Apparently it's not important enough for a player to do so. There is but one other character sheet shown to us in B/X:

Morgan "Giga-Chad" Ironwolf thinks titles are great, but are tools the DM uses to create a milieu.

It would seem that even the legendary Morgan Ironwolf didn't bother to write down her level title. So we have to ask, are these really for the players? I think the long standing answer to this question has been, "Yes but they are pointless fluff that people didn't even bother using by 1981."

I want people to rethink them. Level titles aren't for the players, they're tools for the DM. Furthermore, they are useful descriptors for the players to have as a frame of reference. The levels of NPCs can be doled out to players in-universe without breaking kayfabe. Imagine, instead of magic-users hiding in the caves, and magic-users hiding in the forest, you can have Conjurers hiding in the caves and Warlocks hiding in the forest. Not only does that add depth to the milieu, but it conveys information to the players that they can use to make informed choices.

Which is made all the more sad by the various retroclones insisting they be dropped completely. Basic Fantasy has no trace of them, Labyrinth Lord doesn't bother. Even Old-School Essentials -- purported to be a completely faithful recreation of B/X -- shuns them away to a completely useless page as if it's embarrassed by them, saying only that they can be "used for inspiration". I guess Gavin was too busy reading the entrails on Thief's remove trap ability to notice the real purpose and value of level titles. Then again, maybe I'm the one reading entrails...

Next time, I'll do a follow up post talking about how level titles are going to be used in my Wrostward campaign. Let's see if we can make sense of these so-called Necromancers that can't cast Raise Dead!