Chesterton's fence part 2: idiosyncratic gems in B/X D&D

The strangeness of B/X D&D

Yesterday I began a discussion of how G.K. Chesterton's precautionary principle (to paraphrase: "don't tear down a fence until you understand why it is there in the first place") can allow us to run better games and write better house rules while not missing what the systems we run have to offer in their rules-as-written form. Today I'll continue by talking about a few ways in which this applies specifically to old-school D&D.

The RPG I'm currently running, Old School Essentials, is a much better organized but otherwise identical clone of Moldvay and Cook's 1981 Basic/Expert (aka B/X) D&D. It's a great system - considered by many to be the most concise and playable incarnation of D&D ever written*. 

B/X is also extremely idiosyncratic by the standards of newer editions, containing many rules that seem like oddities to someone who has mainly played 5e. To name a few: "Elf" and "Dwarf" are character classes (character racial heritage and vocation/class are combined instead of being picked separately, also called race-as-class), characters earn XP mainly from recovering/stealing treasure rather than combat or completing story objectives, different classes have different XP requirements to level up, and character attributes are determined entirely randomly rather than being picked by the players via point-buy or slotting an array of rolled numbers into the desired stats. 

Those familiar with newer editions of D&D will recognize that precisely none of the rules I name above have survived to 5e (in fact, none of them made it past 3e). Why is that? Were the original designers of Basic D&D just not quite sure what they were doing? Are the newer editions more perfectly evolved games and the older editions relics we can simply discard? Well, no. They're different games. In fairly stark contrast to some systems whose edition changes are more or less "upgrades" (see: Savage Worlds), each edition of D&D is very much its own thing, chasing a very specific sort of play experience. Different groups will prefer different editions, and each version of the rules tends to be good at running different types of campaigns.

In my (anecdotal) experience, few people who play B/X (I here include those who play the myriad of retroclones that are basically B/X with some house rules) play it entirely rules-as-written. Indeed, hacking the game is a favorite practice of the group of people (collectively known as the OSR, for Old-School Revival/Renaissance) who play these games, other "old-school" versions of D&D, and games inspired by them today. There are about as many versions of old-school D&D as there are GMs who run it, and it tends to lend itself very well to changing and hacking and experimentation. None of the rules I mention at the start of this section are sacred cows in the OSR (though XP for treasure comes close), and they are often bent, discarded, or molded to suit the user's taste. 

As someone who moved from 5e to B/X and has come to look at many of the latter's idiosyncrasies with fondness, I'd like to briefly discuss two of these odd rules, and why after understanding what they add to the gameplay experience, I've ultimately decided they're not only worth keeping, but a vital part of what makes the game special.

Race-as-class

As someone whose favorite D&D character has long been the doughty Dwarven Cleric, wielding mace and shield and holy magic, my first reaction to the idea of folding race and class into a single choice was to look at it as a simplifying design choice that may make things easier for new players, but doesn't really make for a better game. And indeed, both the original (pre-Basic) D&D and all editions of Advanced D&D allow players to choose race and class separately (albeit often with more restrictions than the current edition). 

However, on closer examination this mechanic offers more than mere simplicity in character generation. An underappreciated asset of the race-as-class approach is in the way it absolutely weaves archetype and worldbuilding into the core mechanics of the game. The reason you can't be a Dwarven Cleric in B/X rules-as-written is that Dwarfs simply aren't participants in the same organized vaguely-Catholic-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off religion implied by the Cleric class in D&D. Dwarfs aren't just short bearded Scottish people, they're different, maybe even alien. In the world implied by B/X D&D, it's enough to just say an adventurer is a "Dwarf" or an "Elf". The melding of race and class has significant worldbuilding implications. 

Modern D&D settings almost always imply a cosmopolitan mishmash of a world where everyone is more or less fundamentally human, they just might be humans with pointy ears and a +2 to INT, or short bearded humans with a +2 to CON. Part of this is a chicken-and-the-egg change in the types of fantasy worlds we associate with D&D-type games, but part is certainly mechanically driven. There are no racial class restrictions or level caps in 5e, because as far as the mechanics are concerned, everyone is basically the same aside from bonuses to a few attribute scores.

None of this is to say that if you're running B/X you can't have a cosmopolitan setting. It's quite easy to separate race and class to get that "unrestricted" feel (Basic Fantasy RPG and Old School Essentials:  Advanced Fantasy both do this quite well), and many GMs who run B/X or one of its clones do exactly that. But if you want a setting, perhaps, where maybe the only Assassins are Elves, or maybe Dwarfs are the only people with Clerical powers? It's every bit as easy to just create an "Elven Shadowblade" class or a "Dwarven Stonesinger" class to tack onto the default B/X offerings of (essentially) "Elven Spellblade" and "Dwarven Fighter". You could also take the route I currently take, which is to allow demihuman characters (what B/X calls non-humans) to "multiclass" into human character classes, keeping some of their unique benefits (better saving throws and keener ears, mostly) in exchange for getting a slightly slower start on leveling.

Race-as-class, despite the name, isn't really saying humans are the only fantasy race with any variety in adventuring professions (even though that's true of the setting implied by the core B/X rules). Rather, it's a different way of setting up character creation that is, yes, simpler for new players... but also does significant worldbuilding work for you if you're willing to leverage it. 

XP for treasure

For as long as D&D has existed, players have wanted to gain XP. Throughout the editions, it's always been the main metric judging how they "make progress" in the game, and is thus one of the main incentives the GM has for motivating player behavior. Fundamentally, when designing incentive structures you should incentivize the behaviors you want to see. In the context of a game, you want to see players doing things that match with the theme of the game, so that's what you should incentivize... and here's where we get to B/X being a fundamentally different game than its successors. 

Since 3e (or so), D&D has been a game primarily about fighting monsters. That's what you earn XP for doing, that's how you make progress in the game, so that's what the game is about. At least until 5e where there's a bit of a "or you can just advance whenever the story says" loosey-goosey cop-out offloading that work from the game designers onto the individual GMs... but I digress. B/X is a game about treasure-hunting because that's how players gain XP. It's not like XP actually represents anything specific in the fiction of the game. Diagetically, it hardly makes any more sense for the magic-user to get better at casting spells by stealing a golden statue from a forgotten temple than it does for him to get better at casting spells by killing 100 orcs. 

Realistically simulating how an adventurer improves at their craft has never really been the point of XP as a mechanic (see Gygax's note on p. 85 of the AD&D DMG). The point of XP in D&D has always been to incentivize the behaviors the game is designed around. In new D&D, that's making progress in the story and/or killing monsters. In old-school D&D, that's recovering treasure from dangerous locations by whatever means is most effective - could be violence, could be subterfuge, could be convincing the leader of the goblins that the Great Green Goblin God wishes them to steal the orcs' treasure and bring them to the party, who are of course the emissaries of the GGGG. 

The 5e GM needs to make a special ruling for the players to be rewarded for such a cunning plan - "OK, I guess I'll give you the XP the module would've given you for killing the orc chieftain even though you didn't fight him". The B/X GM (and the B/X players) know that it doesn't matter how the party got the treasure, what matters is that they got it and they will be duly rewarded with the currency the players actually care about (XP, not ingame gold, if that wasn't clear). 

Ultimately, it's pretty easy to turn B/X into a combat-centric game or 5e into a plunder-centric (or anything-centric) game... but I find the starting point of B/X to make for a much more compelling game. XP for treasure does seem odd, at first glance, to the GM coming from a newer edition - but it serves a vital purpose in shaping the play experience.

Idiosyncratic gems

Both of those idiosyncratic rules (and several more besides) could probably (and probably will at some point) fuel a blog post on its own, but for now I'll leave it at this: Almost without fail, whenever I pick up the oddly shaped rock of some strange B/X rule, there's a gem underneath. (pearl? worm? not sure how well this metaphor is working...) Not always, mind you. There are certainly a few design decisions in the game I think are simply wrongheaded. I will never, ever use the "two-handed weapons always lose initiative" rule from B/X, for example. But the vast majority of the time - there's a reason for the fence, and once I see what that reason is I often find myself nodding thoughtfully rather than reaching for the Sawzall.

Of course, I still have my 6+ pages of house rules for B/X. Chesterton's fence need not be left standing forever - simply pondered for a time. :)

In conclusion...

First off, I want to apologize to my high school English teacher (should he read this) for the title of this heading. Won't happen again.

Phew! That was kind of a long one, huh? I don't anticipate most posts being quite this verbose, but I think the meandering took us to some interesting places, at least. While I definitely intend to try to share plenty of more immediately gameable content, I'd also like to put out a series like this now and again - bit more "thinky" and philosophical, still related to RPGs but synthesized with some outside concepts. At least, if people like this sort of thing. Let me know what you think down below!

Further reading on Chesterton's fence: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/

*For more on the lost "Basic" (as opposed to "Advanced") line of D&D systems, see this rundown. The newer systems most will probably be familiar with - 5e, 4e, 3.5e, etc. - those are all descended from "Advanced" D&D, which ran parallel to the "Basic" version of the game for many years before TSR folded and Wizards of the Coast decided to end the Basic line and rename AD&D simply: D&D.

Chesterton's fence part 1: RPG house rules and Savage Worlds

Chesterton and his fence

"Chesterton's fence" refers to a principle articulated by the writer G.K. Chesterton, who said in his 1929 work The Thing:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

I find this to be an enormously useful concept that applies (at least in part) to almost any arena. By my recollection, I first encountered the principle in music theory class, when the teacher responded to my inquiries about why there were so many rules of composition by saying "you have to know what the rules are before you can know when it's OK to break them." These days, I apply the principle most often in my job as a mechanical engineer, where my first instinct when looking at an underperforming or problematic system is to say "well obviously the designer made a mistake here and we should clearly do X, Y, or Z to fix this obvious deficiency." Sometimes I'm right. Very, very often... I'm wrong - and often spend more time than is necessary digging into the problem, eventually circling around to the same suboptimal (but maybe good enough) solution the original engineer arrived at. This "small c" conservative principle is also often brought up in politics, most often by "large C" Conservative thinkers but (in my humble opinion) also very useful for those who take a more Reform-heavy view... at least if they want to be effective in their reforms.

It's worth noting that the Chesterton's fence principle does not state that one should never make changes. Taken at face value, it doesn't even state that making changes is generally less preferable than leaving things the same. The principle simply states that one should endeavor to understand an existing system, particularly the rationale behind said system, before making changes to it. 

House rules in RPGs

This brings us, dear reader, to the subject of tabletop RPGs and house rules. Yes, I haven't forgotten what this blog is ostensibly about (not yet, at least). Most people who run RPGs (generally I'll just use the generic term Game Master/GM) loooove us some house rules. Arguably, the entire plethora of OSR systems is an outgrowth of the very simple fact that GMs adore bending and tweaking the rules of our games to suit our own preferences.

I am no exception:

• Within a few months of starting my first campaign (5e D&D's excellent Lost Mines of Phandelver) I had developed a 5 page-long modular ruleset for long-term injuries, replacing 5e's death save system with a d20 x d4 table for wound severity/location, along with accompanying rules for permanent wounds, long-term injuries, and healing. My players quite liked it, so I'd call that a success. 

• To support the continuation of that campaign in the Savage Worlds system as the characters journeyed to mysterious Hot Springs Island, I wrote several self-contained rules modules - conversion of the HSI monsters and hazards to the Savage Worlds system of course, but also 3-1/2 pages of rules to make Savage Worlds more closely resemble old-school D&D (for use with HSI, an OSR setting), a slot-based encumbrance system to replace the default Savage Worlds encumbrance rules, and a zone-based movement system combining the abstraction of theater-of-the-mind combat with the tactics of miniatures play (that last one wasn't a hit, my players just found it confusing rather than tactical).

• Lastly, I currently maintain a 6-1/2 page (and counting) collection of house rules for my Old-School Essentials open table campaign, keeping with the time-honored OSR tradition of hacking old-school D&D into exactly the shape I most prefer.

I love me some house rules, is what I'm saying. I'd anticipate, in fact, that a healthy percentage of the posts on this blog will consist precisely of me presenting a specific house rule or set of house rules for a system, then discussing the reasoning behind it. 

But do you know why the fence is there?

Ah yes. As much as we naturally want to bend and tweak our games, Chesterton and his fence offer a valuable counterpoint to those natural GM instincts for excising every aspect of the game we don't like and replacing them with our own homebrewed concoctions. There is absolutely nothing wrong with changing and reforming systems, whether they be high pressure gas distribution networks, governmental policies, or RPG rules... but reformers would do well to understand the systems they purport to improve before diving in. They'll get better results in the end.

Using some examples from my two favorite RPGs, Savage Worlds and Basic/Expert D&D, I'd like to highlight why, in the midst of all our homebrewing and houseruling, we would do well to take a step back and assess the intentions of the fence's builder every now and again.

Tearing down fences in Savage Worlds

If you spend much time on the subreddit for the Savage Worlds generic RPG system, you'll notice an interesting trend. With astonishing regularity, newcomers to the system will post questions that go something like "I'm reading through Savage Worlds, and while I think the system looks really interesting, I was thinking about replacing the wound system with hit points / removing exploding damage / eliminating the Shaken status effect / giving everyone a Wild Die / decoupling Skills from Attributes. Thoughts?"

Anyone familiar with Savage Worlds will recognize that most of these changes would fundamentally alter the core gameplay experience of the system. It's not that they can't be made - just that making them willy-nilly without understanding the implications has the potential to greatly change the feel of the system, often not for the better. And, indeed, the vast majority of the replies to questions like this are some variation on "don't." or "try playing the system rules-as-written before you change it." Inevitably we then see the proverbial backlash to the backlash as others retort "stop telling people they're playing the game wrong" or "way to discourage a new player by gatekeeping."

Is this gatekeeping? I would argue no. Savage Worlds is a weird system. The best adjective I can use to describe it is "cinematic," but that's fairly imperfect as it conjures up images of narrative-first games such as Powered by the Apocalypse, when Savage Worlds is really an interesting blend of traditional, narrative, and unique RPG ideas. It's very much "its own thing", and the system creates a really fun play experience at the table. Note: the key phrase there is "at the table", because there are a lot of rules in Savage Worlds that just seem weird at first glance:

"Wait, you're telling me all damage rolls explode (roll again and add if you roll the highest value on a die, repeat as many times as that happens)? Doesn't that mean a mighty hero could be instantly killed by the smallest goblin even if he's at full health? That's dumb; I like the system overall but I think I'm gonna take that rule out when I run it."

Savage Worlds is full of these kinds of rules - they sound quite strange at first glance, and a novice to the system (particularly one coming from other, dissimilar RPG systems) might think the game would be better off without them. What our imaginary novice GM above doesn't realize, though, is that although exploding damage means a mighty hero could theoretically be instantly killed by the smallest goblin, players can spend Bennies (a metacurrency in Savage Worlds) to "soak" incoming damage before it happens. Additionally, taking too many Wounds will Incapacitate you but won't kill you unless you critically fail a Vigor roll (read: snake eyes on 2d6). Also, due to the way Toughness and Damage interact in the threshold-based (rather than attrition-based) wound system of the game, certain extra-tough baddies would never be damageable without exploding damage dice. Removing exploding damage from the game without addressing all the other mechanics that depend on and feed from it will result in some things simply not working.

The novice Savage Worlds GM who just starts taking down fences, drastically modifying the system without understanding it, will end up running a game where many of the underlying systems are fundamentally broken. They probably won't enjoy the experience very much, and will conclude (incorrectly) that the game just isn't all that fun. This isn't to say people shouldn't modify the rules - not at all. But the oft-given advice to "try the game rules-as-written before changing it" is, far from being an exclusionary mantra, a vital piece of advice for anyone looking to see what really makes Savage Worlds fun. There's just something about Savage Worlds that comes alive at the table, that creates a unique experience hard to conceptualize just reading the rulebook.

To be continued...

I originally intended to roll right ahead into a discussion of some of the unexpected gems to be found in the more idiosyncratic rules of Moldvay and Cook's 1981 Basic/Expert (aka B/X) D&D, and how the principle of Chesterton's fence can help us not to prematurely discard that which we don't understand, thus missing its value... but this post is already edging towards 10 minute reading time territory, and I'd prefer that anyone checking this blog out for the first time doesn't immediately run into a novella, so I will see you all tomorrow for part 2. Thanks for reading!

Merry Christmas, have some injury rules for 5e!

Whatever today is for you - a celebration of the birth of the Messiah, a cultural holiday centered around family/food/gift-giving, or just a day off work - I wish you a Merry Christmas.

Here's a stocking stuffer for ya... an alternate set of rules for adjudicating death, dying, and permanent injuries in 5e D&D. These are often called "death and dismemberment" rules by dint of the fact that they add some gray area to the binary alive/dead dichotomy of D&D's default system of hit points. Do you want the characters in your game to end up as old, grizzled adventurers with eye patches, hook hands, old head wounds leading them to occasional fits of berserker rage, or premature retirement after one too many arrows to the knee?* Try these out and let me know how it goes! 

Click on picture for PDF link

There are many versions of these types of rules floating around the internet; this is my take on the concept. In this ruleset, instead of making death saving throws upon dropping to 0 hit points a character rolls 1d20 for wound severity and 1d4 for location. Possible results range from instant death, to loss of limb, to temporary wounds, to an adrenaline surge restoring the character's hit points and bolstering their spirit. I also include rules for healing from temporary injuries, with or without the aid of curative magic. They're fully compatible with (and written for) 5e, but many of the concepts could be easily lifted into your system of choice (probably vastly simplified if you're running a lighter system like B/X).

My wife's Paladin, the first player character to die during my career as a GM (yep, she was a Dwarf), went out in a blaze of glory thanks to this ruleset, and she wasn't even (all that) mad. The probabilities in the wound table are tuned to give relatively equal weight to death/permanent damage, temporary wounds, or no lasting damage when reaching 0 hit points - but it would be fairly easy to tune them to adjust lethality to your taste.

As the PDF says, my rules (particularly the table layout) are heavily inspired by Lloyd Neill's One Death & Dismemberment Table to Rule them All. He also has an entire series of blog posts gathering and discussing many versions of these rules from around the internet; highly recommended if you enjoy reading alternative versions of house rules and the like.

Quick warning/disclaimer, these rules do involve some talk of, well - dismemberment and head wounds and such. I think it's all relatively PG-13 (and there are no illustrations), but do be aware, dear reader. 

Coming up this weekend... a discussion on the nature of house rules, and why we can sometimes benefit from taking a little time to ponder the wherefore of fences.

*I know, I'm sorry...

Welcome to "The Dwarf Died Again," a blog about old-school D&D (among other things).

Howdy! I'm Matt. I enjoy playing, talking about, and pondering tabletop RPGs - mainly old-school D&D and Savage Worlds these days, though I enjoy a lot of different games.

A few weeks ago I realized that between all the various places I discuss RPG theory and design (mostly Reddit and Discord these days), I probably string enough thoughts together and write more than enough words to fill a blog post every few weeks. I know I'm getting to the whole "start a blog about old-school D&D" thing a decade or so late by some estimations, but hey - the game I'm currently running turns 40 years old in a few weeks, so who's to say we won't still be playing it decades hence? I may not have been a participant in the halcyon days of Google+, but at least for the foreseeable future I hope to add Blogger to the list of places I talk to people about RPGs in my spare time (at least until our mighty tech overlords - may their code always be kind and merciful - shut that down too).

A few years ago when I was transitioning from "guy who grew up on 2e AD&D via the Baldur's Gate games but never played in person, then bought the 5e Starter Set in college but never touched it" to "guy who's starting a D&D group and trying to learn how to GM after getting into The Adventure Zone", how-to-GM blogs like The Angry GM and Sly Flourish were absolutely invaluable. As I started broadening my horizons beyond D&D 5e and learning about the history of the game, I found blogs such as DMDavid and B/X Blackrazor to be great and interesting reading. And as I spent way too much time thinking about the intricacies of design, the nature of the game, and (especially) how to tweak the game to my liking, I'd turn to Bastionland, Ten Foot Polemic, Coins and Scrolls, LLBlumire, Necropraxis, Methods & Madness, Zadmar, and many, many others for ideas.

RPG blogs are great, is what I'm saying. The RPG blogosphere (do people still use that word?) is a vibrant network of folks sharing ideas, musings, and stories. Said network has magnified my own enjoyment of this hobby by at least a factor of 2. It's for that reason the first thing I did when setting up this blog was populate my blogroll over there to the right. Seeing an interesting post title on a sidebar while perusing a favorite blog, clicking on it, and discovering an entirely new perspective is a unique joy of consuming content in this medium.

I'd love it if even a few of my musings in this space help someone run their game better, learn something, or just spend an enjoyable lunch break reading about something interesting before getting back to work. I can't say at this point how often I'll post; I imagine it'll probably vary quite a bit as my workload (both at work proper and of the more family-oriented variety) does. I have roughly 10 titles  sitting in my "posts" box at the moment just waiting for elaboration, so I've no shortage of ideas at least.

In any case, that's it for now! Thanks for reading, and I hope you get something useful from the thoughts and musings to come!

But what about the name?

Oh, that? From my first campaign running 5e's "Lost Mines of Phandelver" to my current campaign running "Stonehell" in B/X, the bulk of player character deaths have been Dwarfs*. Don't ask me why, they're generally the most survivable characters by the numbers, it just... happens.

* Dwarfs or Dwarves? I think it depends on how much you like Warhammer. Feel free to weigh in though: https://www.strawpoll.me/42338698