However, I have other things I like to talk about, things which my wife isn't as keen on...I think you know where this is going, right?
That's right, it's a gaming post.
I'm an old-school gamer, just like I'm an old-school reader and an old-school writer and an old-school pretty much everything you can think of. I've even thought about getting my old desktop computer back up and running as a writing machine; it ran Windows 95, but if the hard drive's degraded and I have to reinstall, I've got DOS and Windows 3.1 on 3.5" floppy disks, as well as Microsoft Works. Yeah, that's old-school. It died shortly before I moved in with my then-fiancée, and has just been sitting under the house ever since. And it survived the Great Flood of two months ago, so that's a bonus.
Anyway, back to gaming. I'm firmly of the opinion that Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition, is the greatest game ever created in the history of mankind. Controversial in some quarters, I know, but I'll stick by it, and here's a list of reasons why:
1. Heroic characters, but not super-heroic. Even high-level characters are going to risk death going into a dragon's lair, because a well-played 1E dragon is just nasty. The 2nd edition dragons are frightening to even look at, because they're about twice as tough as their 1e counterparts. Third edition? Forget it; you're not even killing a baby dragon in that game, unless the DM is helping you. Of course, from what I've seen lately in games, that's exactly what a lot of DMs do; PCs in more modern RPGs have a likelier chance of catching COVID-19 in the game world than they do of getting killed.
2. Following up from the first point, mortality is a thing. There's actual risk of your character dying in 1st edition. It's not quite as lethal as Moldvay/BECMI at low levels, since clerics actually have healing spells at 1st level, but man, it's no walk in the park. Beginning players will learn quickly that pretty much everything you run into underground is likely to kill you, including the walls, floors, ceilings, and furniture. And your character doesn't have healing surges or a 15-minute workday to make it easy. If you leave, when you come back there will be something there to replace whatever you were fighting before.
3. It doesn't take long to get started. A 1st edition character can be rolled up in less than fifteen minutes. Maybe a wee bit more if you're a magic-user, but even then, you're just seeing a few extra dice rolls to determine your spells. A fighter can be done in five minutes if you know what you're doing. No feats, no optimization tactics, and no complicated backgrounds; just roll the dice and git 'r done. A character creation session can be part of the first adventure. And then you meet in a tavern and talk to the mysterious stranger who has something for you to do...
4. Sandboxing. No, I don't mean punching the beach. A sandbox, as pretty much every old-school player knows, is simply a setting where the characters have a lot of free rein to go where they want and do what they want. It's a big switch from the modern style of 'adventure paths' and long, plotted-out campaigns that use railroad tracks to get the players from one adventure to the other. In a sandbox, the DM gives you a few hints as to what's out there, and you decide what your characters are going to do. Do you want to go explore that ruined castle and its environs? I hear there's a lost treasure buried there. Or, you might be feeling brave and go to that village that is complaining about ogre raids. For the experienced and foolhardy adventurers, there's a rumor that a dragon lairs in the mountains to the north, sleeping on a Smaugian bed of treasure.
5. Game balance? What game balance? In an old-school game, don't assume that you can take on anything you encounter. Sure, your group of rag-tag beginners can handle a small squad of kobolds, but that carrion crawler is going to mess up your day, because half of you are going to be paralyzed by the time you take it down...if you got lucky. And you can bet that waiting around for your friends to start moving again is going to bring the wrath of something nasty down upon you. Old-schoolers learn the very important adage, 'He who lives and runs away, lives to fight another day.' Someday your characters will be tough enough to take on a band of marauding ogres, but that is not this day. Step back, and find some giant rats to kill instead.
6. The game is complex enough to satisfy the more detail-oriented gamer, but it doesn't bog down into endless rule-checking. Much of what a game needs is in the core books; the rest can be just ruled on at the spur-of-the-moment, if you don't have it at hand. That's another skill that old-schoolers develop, the skill of just ruling on the fly instead of arguing about how the rule is worded in the Complete Psychopath's Handbook compared to how it's written in the Dungeon Master's Guide to Arguing with Rules Lawyers. Just get on with the game, because the point is to have fun.
7. Realistic ecology. "Realistic? In a fantasy role-playing game?!" Yep, I said it. What do I mean by realistic? Obviously, I don't mean that it's exactly like our own world in medieval times. We didn't have magic, dragons, or dinosaurs running around in 12th-century Europe. No, what I mean by realism is that monsters are given a frequency rating: Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Very Rare. Some are also classified as Unique, but I'm not discussing them just now. Those frequencies are very, very important. Why? Because some creatures simply don't appear in large numbers, or else the world population would have been reduced to zero from everything getting eaten.
Here's an example of this: I've put together a spreadsheet that includes every monster I could find for 1st edition from the first boxed set to the advent of 2nd edition in 1989. If your characters are wandering around a wilderness forest, and your DM rolls an encounter, there's a 65% chance that you're going to run into something like a bear, a giant beetle, giant centipedes, wild boars, rats, birds, wolves, large spiders, giant toads, ogres, orcs, and even a werewolf. Those are the common critters. There's only a 4% chance that you're going to run into something really exotic, like a cockatrice, a red dragon, gargoyle, ghost, or a vegepygmy (I still remember them). And since there are so many more monsters that are ranked as 'very rare' as opposed to 'common' ones, the odds of encountering a particular very rare creature is less than 1 in 90 at best. And that's if you get the 4% chance to encounter one in the first place.
So, what does that mean? It means, quite simply, that most of the 'very rare' creatures are going to end up, essentially, being unique. The odds of encountering more than one of them are slim at best, and Slim's walking out the door. So, unless an encounter is planned out by the DM, random determination isn't going to favor finding the really out-there critters. And I like it that way; it makes for a more sword-and-sorcery game, where you encounter more mundane opponents most of the time, making the very rare encounters more exciting and challenging.
One of the reasons I like writing fantasy so much is, of course, because of this game. It's inspired me for nearly four decades now, and I'm going to keep writing it for as long as I can. If you want to see how I was inspired, check out The Chronicles of Meterra: Arrival, on Amazon, available in e-book or paperback format.
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