If you play old versions of D&D or so-called old-school D&D clones, your character needs gold because the rules say that gold confers power. If you are a fighter, you get physically tougher and more dangerous if you carry gold out of caves. If you are a wizard, you learn more spells by doing the same. If you are a cleric, your deity loves you more for the gold you haul to the surface.
The game stalls if you don’t get gold. And that doesn’t make sense.
This complaint is as old as the game itself.
Note
that the reason for getting gold is not greed. It is part of game mechanics. You need it to advance
(become more powerful). Your Lawful Good paladin
and your pious cleric and your ascetic monk all need to get loot to become more advanced in prayer and kung fu.
Gary Gygax knew the objections. In the Players Handbook (1978, p. 106), he provided this defense of XP for GP:
Gaining experience points through the acquisition of gold pieces and by slaying monsters might be questioned by some individuals as non-representative of how an actual character would become more able in his or her class. Admittedly, this is so, if the existence of spell casting clerics, druids, magic-users, and illusionists is (unrealistically) granted; likewise, dwarven superheroes, paladins, elven thieves, half-orc assassins, and the like might gain real experience from altogether different sorts of activities. This is a game, however, a fantasy game, and suspension of disbelief is required. If one can accept the existence of 12’ tall giants, why not the rewarding of experience points for treasure gained?
He goes on to say that real training takes place during a character’s “off hours.”
This passage shows that already by 1978, within four years of the birth of D&D, the rationale for experience points had come under pressure by the oldest "old-school" players. Gygax admits right here that it doesn’t actually make sense.
Unfortunately, Gygax’s defense of XP for GP itself makes no sense, either. Giving XP for GP is not unrealistic in the same way that 12'-tall giants and magic spells are unrealistic. XP for GP is a feature of game mechanics used to give structure to the progress of the character, whereas the presence of giants and magic spells in the fiction of the game is a genre feature that has nothing to do with mechanics per se. The mechanics exist to support the fantasy, not the other way around. They are not unrealistic in the same way.The presence of half-orc assassins and magic swords make perfect sense in the fiction of the game, whereas gaining power through pure loot does not. Any stupid mechanics could be justified by Gygax’s argument. “Hey, it’s all imaginary, so anything goes!” People make the same argument about hit points: “Just a fiction, after all. Once you have wizards and ogres, reason no longer applies.” But these are not comparable examples of non-realism.
Gold for training?
Some D&D players who follow this rule insist that the treasure itself doesn’t confer power-ups. The treasure is used to pay for training! It is training that raises your level. Some early games required gold to be spent for level-ups.
I have always wondered about this. Who are these trainers? Who are the lucky individuals who get paid thousands of gold pieces for teaching fighters how to fight just slightly better while jacking up their ability to take a beating (hit points)? Who are the people training the wizards in exchange for thousands of gold pieces?
Are they former adventurers? Then being an adventurer becomes a pyramid scheme. Just sign up for a dungeon expedition, bring back the gold, and pay another former adventurer, so he’ll teach you how to get more gold, and eventually, maybe, you can be like him one day, charging novice adventurers gold to train them to go into the dungeon!
Did you really enter the dungeon and risk your life with terrifying monsters and lethal traps so you could pay for fighter, cleric, or thief school? You need tuition for Hogwarts and you couldn’t get a scholarship?
Two articles appeared already in the October 1977 issue of Dragon addressing the problem and confusion about level-ups.
According to one of them, you get XP for GP spent. As this article advocates, fighters literally can get experience and level-up by spending their treasure on sex with prostitutes and drunken revelry. Needless to say, this is another kind of experience than what is normally required for gaining powers, but I suppose it is an attempt to recreate Hyborian or Nehwonian fiction.
The same
issue of Dragon had another article suggesting special rituals to rise in level.
This shows that even the meaning of character levels was unclear to many early
gamers. In those days, level-class combinations came with mysterious titles like Superhero, Waghalter, Courser, and Keeper. Players wanted to know what that meant.
Well, we could give Gygax’s best answer: it’s all imaginary, so shut up and play!
Or we could use our imaginations to come up with something that makes sense. Practically every other adventure game, besides D&D, has done this. They already did so in the actual old-time period that players falsely imagine as an orthodox old-school of true and pure and correct D&D.
The early rejection of XP for GP
Plenty of gamers in the 1970s had rejected the XP for GP rule. This includes players of D&D before Gygax tried to create an “international standard” of rules that would stand the test of time like chess. (This was one of the two main reasons for AD&D’s existence.) Dave Hargrave, an influential West-Coast gamer, published his Arduin D&D rules (1977), rejecting the XP for GP convention. Tunnels & Trolls included XP for GP in its original 1975 release, but within four years that was gone. Here’s what Tunnels & Trolls said by 1979:
Once upon a time experience points were given for treasure and magical items found and carried off, but no longer! Properly speaking, cash is its own reward, and there is no reason why a character who stumbles across a diamond worth 10,000 GP, picks it up and walks off, should get 10,000 experience points. He has not especially earned the points, nor learned very much from it, and shouldn’t get the level bonuses … that usually go along with them.
This
reflects the consensus of the actual “old school” of gamers and game designers,
if we leave aside TSR, not the self-appointed “old-school” pundits of today who scold young gamers for not imagining their games right.
Other
early games like The Fantasy Trip: In the Labyrinth (1980) and DragonQuest
(SPI 1982) do not even mention experience points for gold. They give
experience for success. Treasure was spent on training, but XP was given for
success in the “mission.
A better defense of XP for GP
DM David provides a rationale for the XP for GP rule far better than that of Gygax. He says it’s fun and realistic.
You can’t argue with fun. There is no better reason to play anything. Fun is the goal. If XP for GP is what you like and it gives you fund and the rationale is not an issue for you, then there’s no argument. Go forth and delve for gold, and may your character get more hit dice!
As for realistic, however, the idea is that gold is the most realistic motivator. Who doesn’t want to get rich? But the realism of human greed does not address the problem that so many gamers have with XP for GP. What’s unrealistic about it is not that people want gold, but that they become more powerful by getting gold. Gold is a realistic character motive, not a realistic rules rationale for character advancement in lethal power.
In
this way, the GP = XP rule does not support the fantasy of fiction that D&D’s
designers were emulating. It undermines the fantasy of fiction to such an extent that it has created a new style or genre of fantasy. It is now a feature of generic fantasy captured by games like Munchkin and in video games. If you play
Sonic the Hedgehog, you roll through monsters and dodge obstacles to get gold rings. The
more you get, the more powers you get. Sonic gets XP for GP.
Why are your characters greedy?
Sometimes
imagination gets stuck in game rules. You need adventurers to be motivated to
go into your dungeon. You put treasure in the dungeon, perhaps following arbitrarily
designed treasure types accompanying monsters, and you need those player characters
to risk their hit points to come and get it. So... I know! All the characters are greedy! That explains it.
Why do they need to be greedy? Because of XP for GP. Why do you give XP for GP? Because they're greedy.
Fantasy got stuck on rules.
DM David already pointed the way. Greed is a realistic answer. What he doesn’t point out is that the greed of player characters need not be tied to the rule XP for GP. They’re two different things.
If you want greedy player characters, it is very easy to come up with reasons. Off the top of my head, here is a list of reasons your character may want quick gold pieces besides level-ups or tuition at training camps and Adventurers’ Guilds.
- To pay a huge debt.
- To pay for a wedding.
- To impress somebody.
- To pay for an army.
- To pay off attackers.
- To pay for parties and debauchery.
- To buy more land.
- To buy back ancestral land.
- To ransom someone important to you.
- To pay for transit to a distant place or another world.
- To buy magical equipment, alchemical equipment, or the like.
- To pay for a magical medical treatment.
- To retire in comfort eventually.
- To buy a rare magical item.
- To buy a seafaring vessel.
- To invest in trade.
- To buy a rank or office.
- To cover a gambling habit.
- To pay taxes.
- To buy that castle in the hills.
- To satisfy a pathological avarice.
The so-called “Old-School” gamers today go crazy for random tables. If it’s really too hard for your players to imagine what makes their characters so greedy that they would risk their lives, without a rule that says XP = GP, then make a table of results like the one I just listed and require them to roll for their descriptive Greed attribute.
Readers, please chime in and add your own ideas to the “Reasons to Be Greedy” list. Then you too can drop the XP for GP rule and focus on fun instead.
Other reasons to go into dungeons
I’m
looking forward to using a modified version of Gillespie’s Barrowmaze with my
home system, which has super-fast, and random, character creation. As part of my preparation
for a multi-session megadungeon, I drew up a list of possible motives for
characters. Only one of them (number 3) is pure greed, although all may be connected with greed one way or another.
- Searching for somebody. Somebody important to you (or to somebody who recruited you) has disappeared in the vicinity of the Barrowmaze. Your goal is to find that person.
- Hired adventurer. Somebody (perhaps another player character) has offered you pay to accompany an investigation of the Barrowmaze. Will you get a cut of the loot, too?
- Treasure. They say the Barrowmaze contains hidden treasures, money and magic. You want some of that!
- Research. You study magic, ancient lore, or both. Ancient tombs offer you enough for your research that you are willing to risk your life to discover their contents.
- Mission. You have heard of the evil of the Barrowmaze and you hope to drive it back or destroy it, in the name of a lord or a deity or all that is good.
- Something to prove. A peculiar personal motive drives you to enter the Barrowmaze. Perhaps you enjoy deadly risks, or you want to demonstrate your prowess or bravery, or you are seeking fame.
- Hiding. You are afraid and you need to get away. You are going somewhere that the law, or some other inimical force, will not find you or pursue you.
As
for experience points, I have dispensed with them entirely. You really do not need XP at all.
Epilogue: Gygax drops XP for GP
By 1992, Gygax had left D&D behind and created a game called Dangerous
Journeys, which, as far as I can tell, was a flop. It is a
game replete with obscure abbreviations and shows few, if any, novelties
besides its peculiar terminology that so obviously tries to escape the lingo of
his earlier game. Thus you have HP, Heroic Persona, for PC, Player Character.
When
it comes to character advancement, Gygax was giving Accomplishment Points to
players just for showing up and playing their characters’ personalities. He
gives this example (p. 303) of distribution of rewards for play:
Here's An Example: Alyssa's player has been sure to attend every session of the game that she could and has projected her lively personality at every opportunity. The GM decides that she deserves to be classified as an "active" player for that adventure. The actual mission itself, however, didn't go quite so well, as two of the other HPs were killed by foes, and the remainder of the party had to be rescued by Other Personas, having nothing left of their expedition gear save the clothes and equipment on their persons. They did, however, succeed in destroying the altar of the EPs' deity (albeit by the skin of their teeth), and their adventure is thus classified as a "marginal victory" by the GM. Furthermore, the GM decided that this particular scenario counted as "long." As the base for "active" is 5, the bonus for "marginal victory" is 2, and the modifier for "long" adventures is 2, Alyssa would, at most, receive an additional 14 AP/Qs ((5 + 21 x 2 = 14) for that adventure. Note that had her player missed a session or two, her rating for participation might only have been "moderate." For information on spending AP/Gs, see page 134 of Chapter 1 1
In summary, Gygax was now rewarding players of his game, the product of his mature years of game design, for showing up, playing a role, success in the mission, and length of scenario. He does have a rule about spending money to raise your character’s SEC (Socio-Economic Status), but that’s not a level-up.
So much for XP for GP. Even Gygax knew that it made no sense.
Well, 40 or so sessions into my first campaign using gold for XP, I can mount a reasonable case for the defence. First, in a game with seven or eight players, it provides easy book-keeping for the GM. Never mind whether you succeeded or failed - just divide the loot/XP yourselves. When you're playing every day, that removes a minor headache ("How should I allot experience?"). That said, were I starting the campaign again, I would insist that money should be spent for XP rather than merely hoarded.
ReplyDeleteSecond, it provides the players with plenty of motivation and keeps them engaged. Yes, it's mechanical and unrealistic, but because loot tends to be worth more XP than monster-killing, it encourages innovation and non-combat approaches.
Third, it keeps the PCs established as *adventurers* along a sort of Robin Hood/Treasure of the Sierra Madre/Blood Meridian axis. Not generally nice people (especially if they move along that axis, as kids tend to ...), but fairly close to their fictional and real-world analogues. Other reward systems cater to other motivations, of course.
So while it many not make much sense, it *works*.
And I think you can rationalise gold as XP pretty well, especially if it has to be spent. I agree with you that 'carousing' systems don't seem terribly satisfying. But training (as a broad category) works for me.
Magicians have to pay for obscure grimoires, admittance fees for exclusive libraries and rare spell ingredients. And the more powerful they get, the more expensive it is to progress. Mandrake root is one thing, but salamander spleen is quite another.
Clerics have temple and charitable donations - or sacrifices (which by definition must be valuable).
Thieves might have guild fees, expensive training in obscure or occult arts, and more refined and specialised tools of the trade.
And then there are fighters. If we assume that fighters are receiving training in a broad range of weapons, and that there are specialist fighting schools of the sort known in medieval and Renaissance Europe, then we can assume that it's an expensive business. One-on-one training in any martial art tends to be both expensive and effective if the trainer's good. And we could reasonably assume that the higher a fighter's level, the more expensive training he's going to require to advance. In any combat sport, you can improve very quickly for a short while if you're fit and strong, but the refinements come with time and tuition.
Now, all of that could be achieved as part of an adventure. And it might be great to be questing for spell ingredients or seeking out a master swordsman. But gold spent for XP allows it to be kept 'offscreen', which is helpful when characters are following different paths and rather a neat little system for advancement.
JC, I was hoping you’d chime in. Everything you say makes perfect sense. If it works, then keep doing it! What I have to say is in no way meant as a deterrent from your doing what works for your group. It's rather about rationale for a fundamental game feature and its mismatch with character motive.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that XP for GP simplifies book-keeping for you, because I find any book-keeping at all to be tedious. If I don’t use XP at all, then playing is the goal, not a certain amount of XP to get the next level. In other words, there are no XP requirements, so there’s no book-keeping for any reason. And I can build the need for cash and treasure into the story in endless ways, training or otherwise.
I also am fascinated by the result that XP for GP has encouraged creative problem solving. But I also wonder if character motives by themselves would not do the same thing.
I do also wonder who the trainers are. Why aren’t the trainers raiding the dungeons instead? In a world with grim equivalents of Hogwarts and master swordsman trainers, there’s an immediate answer. Partly, then, it depends on how many or how few the adventurer-types are in the fantasy world, an issue with other ramifications, I suppose.
Part of my point about motive was that one can have not-very-nice roguish picaresque protagonists without the XP for GP convention. The motive and the mechanic need not be connected, as they address different things. It is convenient, I’m sure, when they go together.
It’s great to hear that you have a nice long-running game for a nice large group. I can only dream of that! Maybe I need to stock more gold in my dungeons... :)
Oh yes - like so many of your posts, this one is very much in line with what I *really* think but compels me to play devil's advocate. ;) I mean, I've long disliked levels and character classes (along with AC and massive HP totals), but, increasingly and somewhat begrudgingly, I can also see that they do work in their way.
DeleteMy own approach to experience would be to dole out a certain number of points after an adventure, which players could then apply to their stats (most RPG characters find it harder to get stronger than it actually is in real life, I think!), HP or weapon skills. In a D&D-ish system, you might get three points for a big adventure and apply one to your STR, one to your HP and one to some specific skill.
As to why the trainers aren't raiding the dungeons: this is an easy one, surely? Quite apart from not having to risk their lives, they're also getting most of the loot that adventurers lug out! ;)
At some point during the 80s I read a good justification for GP=XP. It must have been in Dragon magazine, but I have no idea which issue.
ReplyDeleteThe idea was that the XP for the treasure recovered was supposed to represent the difficulty by which is was acquired, and act as a sort of catch-all for the myriad actions taken to get it: bypassing traps, devising clever strategemata, dealing with NPCs, &c &c. This assumed that treasure found would be commensurate with the difficulty of the encounters, so a lone kobold shouldn't be wearing diamond rings on all fingers. The Treasure Type tables were adequate for keeping things reasonable. The vagaries of the dice would sometimes put a less-impressive monster as the custodian of fabulous wealth, but you might also find a barrow wight guarding a mere 1000cp. Over the course of a campaign, it would all average out.
I never liked the training costs in the DMG. It was nice for PCs to have something to spend money on, but the amounts seemed make sense from a rules perspective rather than making sense for the setting, especially for the non-magical classes. According to the DMG, an exemplary 6th level character needs to spend 9000gp to train for 7th over the course of 1 week. That's enough to field a mercenary company of 100 heavy footmen (+ 10 sergeants + 5th level captain) for 10 months. If the student required two weeks of training, you could also have 10 20x20x30' towers built to house your army. The laziest trainer, with a single exemplary student training for 2nd level, receives 1500gp -- enough to field the above company for about 6 weeks, or 62.5 times the the common heavy foot soldier's yearly income -- for a single week of work. I suppose you could carry these rules to logical extreme, and have a game world where the trainers do need to hire large mercenary contingents to protect them from the predations of character parties who are after their hoards of gold...
Greetings, AIE! Of course, as you know, there have been many discussions about this issue over the decades. The recurrence of the discussion demonstrates that it's an abiding problem, like hit points (which come up today regularly in a debate over healing rates). My take on it is that the problem is not how to distribute XP, but XP themselves, as well as the character level mechanics.
DeleteYou're right about treasure types. They were indeed supposed to be a solution to Monty Haul gaming, which really rubbed Gygax and other TSR designers the wrong way. One of the reasons that Gods, Demigods & Heroes (the final OD&D book) was published, according to Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (pp. 566-7), was to demonstrate how over-inflated some D&D PCs had become (more powerful than gods). Deities with AC and HP would provide a yardstick. At TSR they had an idea of the official power-scale in games and they were really trying to regulate it for the sake of transferring characters from game to game, making a D&D standard.
One *can* rely on treasure types to even things out, which is what they are for, except that the number of PCs (and shares of XP) is not taken into account well by treasure types. Or one can just forget about all that, play the game, and give the same gradual increases to player character power that the Referee already intended to give, anyway, pending survival and success or failure at this or that.
As it is, all DMs are already quietly planning the pace of the characters' level-ups to begin with. Otherwise they could not plan a fun campaign in advance by setting challenges appropriate to the level of the PCs. It used to be that danger corresponded directly with dungeon depth, giving players some say in the risks they took, but as that is hard to support with story sense more than a few times, the whole mess of Challenge Ratings has evolved to reflect that Referees do indeed plan challenges according to the level of PCs, as Gygax (for example) said they should.
If Referees are already planning how long it should take to go up a level--by placement of monsters or treasures or both together, according to some scheme arbitrarily cooked up in the '70s--why not just plan to give level-ups at certain stages of gradually diminishing frequency, pending certain general conditions, and cut out the intricate calculations?
As it is, the XP for GP rule rewards PCs whose friends get killed. A bigger share for the few! As the satirical game Munchkin puts it, in its tagline: "Kill the Monsters. Steal the Treasure. Stab your buddy."
Another way I think of it is this. The XP total required for going up levels is just an arbitrary number. One could divide the number of XP required by 10, divide the value of all treasure by 10, and attain the same results. (The same would have to go for other sources of rewards, like killing.) It would make for a more realistic economy, too.
This problem is not just for D&D and its clones, of course. When The Fantasy Trip (a superior game to D&D, in my view, and great for solo play) was being re-edited for republication, Steve Jackson revised the experience rules to include more of a reward for in-game participation and lively play. Some cranky old TFT gamers were clearly pretty upset by that because it seemed to deemphasize the tactical focus of the rules. In D&D, if you take away the power reward for the gold, it's a similar response.
You can't please everybody. My choice as Referee is to discard the pretense and illusion of XP and pace character advancement by my own fiat, based on both how the players do and on the same kind of sense of pacing I use when I modulate the action of the game.
Now, when it comes to solo play, I imagine XP are more important, but that's another issue.
Dividing everything by 10 would make for a much more sensible game. I prefer games where the PCs are kept wanting.
DeleteIn my experience, the Treasure Type tables account for varying party sizes in the same way combat XP does, in that smaller parties can't go as far as larger ones before their resources are depleted, and have fewer opportunities to get treasure.
GP=XP can reward you for getting your friends killed, but if the adventure is pre-written and/or your DM is not going to fudge, that will make it harder to go on after each loss, and could wind up killing the whole party.
When I used to DM all the time, I never used the tables to place treasure when preparing a dungeon, and very seldom even when I was running an extemporaneous adventure. I did have one friend who liked using them, so when it was just the two of us playing (he'd run 3-6 PCs) they'd see a lot of use, but otherwise it would just slow things down. For all my other social games, XP were awarded by DM fiat, or else the party would gain levels when the DM felt it was time.
You're absolutely right about solo play though. The treasure tables are the only way my PCs will advance at a normal rate. In the games where XP awards are based on GM arbitration, I seldom give my PCs enough.
I'll get the unpleasant part out of the way first:
ReplyDeleteThe """so-called 'Old-School Gamers'""" that you seem to have such a low opinion of tend to spend most of their time making games & content for games, much of which is wild & unorthodox enough that it'd make ol' Gygax foam at the mouth if he were alive to see it.
Taking a quick scan through your blogposts, you, personally, seem to be far more obsessed with the past than a lot of the modern old-school scene is.
With that in mind, your condemnations don't come off as witty & incisive, just sneering and hypocritical.
Onto the constructive part:
It's a fair point that XP=GP doesn't make a whole lot of sense, fictionally. I'd argue that *any* kind of XP system doesn't make a whole lot of sense (why does slaying 10 dragons make me better at lock-picking?) but awarding XP for GP recovered definitely feels intuitively "unrealistic" in a way other XP systems don't.
There are two good justifications for XP=GP: mechanics & aesthetics.
On the level of mechanics, it gives players a concrete, tangible goal that doesn't force a certain play-style. XP for killing monsters makes you fight monsters, XP for roleplaying makes you roleplay, but XP for treasure allows you to take any path you want so long as there's a big pot of gold at the end. It essentially attaches a "scoring system" to an adventure. It doesn't make any sense in the fiction, but it doesn't have to: it's a rule designed for D&D as a *game*, not D&D as a world-building exercise.
On the level of aesthetics, having greed & treasure be the end-goal enforces a kind of picaresque, grubby, tomb-raiding vibe that can be a lot of fun and a welcome change from the high-fantasy heroics that dominate the modern D&D scene.
Notably, I think that XP=GP very emphatically *doesn't* work outside the defined space of a dungeon-crawl or similar adventure. Every time my players have moved past dungeon-crawling and into larger-scale sandbox play that's less tightly focused on the dungeon-crawl format, I've inevitably ended up ditching XP=GP.
The idea that XP=GP is *necessary* for good gameplay (regardless of the focus of the game) is a weird & bad form of OSR orthodoxy, but the idea that XP=GP makes for good, fun, tactically interesting dungeon-crawls is definitely one that has been borne out in actual gameplay.
I appreciate both your critical remarks and your take on XP = GP.
DeleteI think it’s fair to say we agree about the latter. As you say, XP = GP is fine for a dungeon crawl of a certain type. It supports a certain aesthetic. Agreed. I am quite familiar with it. You say you would not use XP = GP for other kinds of games. The same goes for me.
You also perceive that there is “a weird & bad form of OSR orthodoxy,” which supports my impression of some of the OSR scene, something I have addressed on and off in a number of entries.
I will point out that I was not condemning your game or anybody’s game. If you would, please re-read the paragraph in this entry beginning “You can’t argue with fun.” That’s my attitude about games: have fun! Or look at my response to JC. But there’s no harm in thinking about the rationale of game mechanics and how they got that way, which is something I like to do. Game bloggers have been talking a lot about experience points, so I joined in.
Now, about your criticisms. I can take ’em. But let me try to bridge the gap. I will write a blog entry for that purpose, because others may have the same negative impression as you.
You have encouraged me to clarify. Thank you!
Deletehttps://lichvanwinkle.blogspot.com/2020/06/what-this-blog-is-about-bit-more-about.html
You seem like a generally personable & well-meaning individual, and I'm happy that you're open to constructive criticism!
DeleteNot to belabor the point, but I do think I should maybe state with more precision *why* I felt like your comments were misaimed.
A lot of your output seems to conflate the trends & play-styles of the *actual* old-school gamers (Gygax & Co.) with modern OSR enthusiasts, and this might be true of some wings of the OSR scene (maybe people who are super into OSRIC & call other people FOEs or whatever), but in general the OSR scene is so sprawling, diverse, & weird that this critique comes off as a bit out-of-touch.
Like, I don't know what things were like back in the early days of the OSR scene, but at this point an "Old-School gamer" can mean anything from "someone who only plays AD&D 1e by the books and has a shrine to Gygax in their bedroom" to "someone who likes Caverns of Thracia and wants to run it in their homebrew system that uses d66s and is about psychic lesbians from outer space going on adventures."
Your critiques of XP=GP and other "old-school" features from the perspective of realism or whether or not they reflect the dominant tropes of fantasy fiction are valid, but they're attacking these topics from a completely different angle than most people in the modern scene.
The things I said about XP=GP (mechanics & aesthetics) aren't my personal justifications or beliefs about this subject, they're practically the orthodox explanation for XP=GP within the scene.
*Nobody* these days is making arguments from realism for XP=GP, so when you have a blogpost pointing out that XP=GP is unrealistic, honestly pretty much every "Old-School gamer" I've ever talked to would probably agree with you. So including snipes at these old-school enthusiasts in the middle of the post just comes off as... kinda out-of-touch and misaimed?
Similarly, with your critiques of Gygax: they're valid! They're fine! But, again, lots of people in the scene freely and openly express negative opinions of Gygax's work & attitudes. I have seen people outright say the words "Gary Gygax sucked," and they weren't crucified as OSR Heretics.
In general, if you're willing to describe the OD&D vs. AD&D split as "Arnesonian vs. Gygaxian" D&D, then the vast majority of the modern OSR scene falls into the Arnesonian wing, seeing as B/X & B/X-descended retroclones are arguably the most popular and successful games amongst OSR fans.
People *like* the free-wheeling, anything-goes nature of early D&D, and generally aren't fans of efforts to codify everything into strict rules. People will talk endlessly about the """DIY ethos""" of the OSR scene--the idea that you can and should hack, modify, change, remove, or add any rules or concepts that you want to these games to make them your own.
And, again, this might not be true of *everybody* in the scene. The "OSR community" has fractured somewhat over the years, especially after certain events last year surrounding a certain very divisive figure in the community. There might be enclaves of dudes squirreled away in some forums or sections of the blogosphere chatting about how Ascending AC is the tool of the devil.
I should think of a way to end this reply, but I feel like I've said everything I wanted to say, so ... hope you have a nice rest of your day!
Thanks, Josie. I said myself I am out of touch, so I can't deny it! In catching up on what I have missed, I have been reading a lot about "OSR" gaming from sources more than a year ago as well as talking to current self-identified "OSR" gamers, so, while out of touch, I am not clueless. But what you say helps me to understand another point of view.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you're pretty sure that everybody has moved on from OSR pre-2019 and it's now more about... other stuff. But my impression is that the things I say still "might be true of some wings of the OSR scene," as you put it. The question becomes what they represent, and whether they still think like that now. You might say that's not the "real" OSR scene, but I have seen enough gatekeeping discussions about "what really counts as OSR" to know that I'm not dreaming this up.
It *is* beyond doubt that the term OSR started from a distinction between "old style" gaming and "modern" gaming, and encouragement to go back to the supposed old style. It seems like it might be interesting for self-identified OSR gamers today, who maybe were not part of it in, say, 2012, to look into that along with me.
Ultimately, if you tell me you are an OSR gamer and the "R" of it, Revival or Renaissance of the Cool Original Way is no longer the issue, I will just say I believe you! But that used to be the issue not many years ago (by my scale of time), and the Internet is our witness.
I do wonder, as a recent returnee, why you guys would still call it Old School Revival if the scene has fractured and scattered and morphed into something else and has disavowed some of its former leaders, as you say.
Anyway, you and I seem to agree completely about one major thing under discussion. There is a huge difference between what OSR enthusiasts are doing and what the originators of the hobby in the '70s were doing. I mean, that's one of the points I have been making. At the same time, some things are eerily repeating themselves.
On another point, I'm not telling people not to give XP for GP in this entry. I'm thinking about how it got to be that way and whether there is a fun alternative, and also talking about my preferences. It's a conversation that has been going on since the '70s. It's fun to think about.
For example, JC, who responded before, told me that he likes to do it that way and he enjoys it. I didn't scold him for that, because that's his game. Why would I object? If anything, I highlighted "A Better Defense of XP for GP." Half of this entry is about how to keep the treasure-hunt working if you want to jettison XP entirely.
Well, I do thank you for your thoughts. It's nice to have somebody to have an exchange with about this stuff.
Right, it's fair to say that "OSR" has lost some of its meaning as a tagline. Some people have proposed that it might even have two entirely separate meanings: Old School Revival (referring to people who are interested in straight retroclones), and Old School Revolutionary (referring to stuff like GLOG & Into the Odd that take some design cues from the old-school style but end up in a place that's wildly different from the original game).
DeleteSome people have even tried to come up with replacement words, though admittedly a lot of that has more to do with politics (rejecting the Howardian "slavering, genetically degenerate sub-humans kidnapping buxom maidens" legacy that people sometimes tend to attach to "old-school" aesthetics).
Personally I think the whole notion of the "OSR Movement" or and the debates about the definition of True OSR are ridiculous and pointless. The word OSR essentially persists because of momentum, because it's useful for marketing, and because despite all the aforementioned fracturing it's still a useful heuristic to identify people who tend to like a certain style of game: if I pop into a group of self-described "OSR fans" and say "hey wanna play some Moldvay Basic? I'm running Caverns of Thracia" I guarantee you somebody will be interested.
Admittedly my perspective on this is also biased by provincialism: ever since G+ got shut down, there's been somewhat of a "diapsora" of OSR content, & my primary engagement with the community is through the OSR Discord server which very much is populated by the "non-traditional" wing of the scene. Maybe out in LotFP World (wherever that is, if it even still exists) or on Dragonsfoot the discourse is substantially different.
I will say, though, that I'd be very surprised if people in those communities were genuinely arguing that XP=GP is realistic. I'm pretty sure everyone these days more or less agrees that it's a purely game-y abstraction designed to foster a certain style of play.
What you say is quite interesting to me. I wonder what the other "OSR scenes" are besides the Discord server that you mention and Dragonsfoot. I never heard of them. I do know about the OSR Pit.
ReplyDeleteI had suggested there that the OSR label could be dropped and replaced by "Fantasy Role-Playing Games," an old and quite inclusive name. For those who already got the OSR tattoo, it could stand for Omnes Semper Regulae, Latin for "All Rules, Always!" meaning that every game system and variant is included.
XP=GP was never about realism, agreed, and gamers who use it aren't after realism, of course. The lack of rationale, however, is why players started disliking it and rejecting it from the beginning. And I mean the beginning, for example with Tim Kask, who was basically Gygax's secretary and the covert co-author of AD&D. He said he didn't like how XP worked. Pretty much every other '70s game dropped the gold > power-up rule.
What I'm really thinking about here, though, is the history of the idea of realism in fantasy role-playing games. I will have an entry about that sooner or later and it will definitely be completely irrelevant to most gamers! There are at least two different kinds of realism at stake, and they usually get mixed up. One is verisimilitude in the setting, "real" for the fantasy. The other is realism in mechanics, that is, rules that seem believable and in that they support the fantasy. That's something I was trying to distinguish here in the discussion about XP and GP.
Thinking about it critically doesn't mean that I'm saying people's play is invalid. People should do what is fun for them. I still think it's fun to experiment with alternatives, or just to think about it.
I think that dropping the whole "old-school" idea altogether is a bit of a "throwing the baby out with the bath" situation, though?
DeleteLike, regardless of my personal opinions about Gygax & Arneson or what have you, if I am playing by-the-books Moldvay & Cook Basic/Expert (or OSE or any other retroclone), isn't that inherently kind of old-school by virtue of the fact that the ruleset was written in 1981?
While the OSR scene has very much diverged and drifted from the pure devotion to early rulesets that was exemplified by many early retroclones (though even then, Castles & Crusades would appear *very* not-OSR to modern purists), there's still undeniably some lineage to "old-school" ideas and procedures that persists within the scene, which is responsible for a lot of the shared features that give modern OSR games their identity.
It's possible to acknowledge that early gamers came up with some pretty interesting ideas that are worth preserving without being slavishly devoted to any particular historical version of the game.
I think the best way to view "OSR" and the "Old-School" moniker is less as an exclusionary barrier keeping out unorthodox forms of gameplay, and more as a focus on including certain mechanical & aesthetic features that have fallen out of use in the modern scene but might be qualitatively superior for delivering a certain style of game (speaking personally, I used to *hate* dungeon-crawling until I was introduced to old-school procedures like wandering monsters, exploration turns, & XP=GP).
I am aware that some people very much use it as an exclusionary term, though. I just think those people are dumb.
I am all for preserving early, interesting ideas! Part of my ongoing emphasis is that the OSR does not represent most of the early, interesting ideas--only a sliver of them. (Again, nothing against the OSR aesthetic per se, just the notion that it represents what it was like then.) For example, Tunnels & Trolls and Chivalry & Sorcery are more "old-school" than Moldvay Basic. The D&D that predates those games is basically incoherent. Moldvay Basic (the set I started with in 1981) is late by comparison with RuneQuest. While it's clear that self-identified OSR gamers have become more eclectic in their tastes (Troika!, Knave, Mothership), there's a lot of genuine old-time games, "the other old school," if you like, that are not selected for revival. I think OSR is a side-effect of the OGL.
DeleteI'd like it to be true that people didn't use OSR as an exclusionary barrier. I'll give a toast to your idea that those people are just dumb!
There are also a fair number of OD&D clones, though I will concur that 3LBB OD&D is pretty incomprehensible. I only bring up B/X because it's A) popular, and B) undeniably an "old-school" ruleset.
DeleteI think there's actually a fair amount of overlap between OSR fans and RuneQuest fans, though it's somewhat harder to make content for RQ because of the expansive setting (and probably also copyright issues). It's something I've personally wanted to get into for a while, but I don't know where to start with Glorantha. There's also some fringe interest in Traveller, I think.
OGL probably has a lot to do with it, yeah. I do think it's also fair to say that people focus so much on reviving D&D because D&D is just insanely popular.
It's possible to do RuneQuest without Glorantha! That's how I used it when I first played it (in the 3rd edition by Avalon Hill, 1984, which was divorced from Glorantha). Glorantha's not my setting, though, and RuneQuest is not my system of choice, either.
DeleteD&D sure is popular. There is that! Doesn't hurt to have a giant company, Hasbro, ultimately responsible for marketing it.
In February of this year, the Hasbro CEO said that D&D revenues grew for the sixth straight year and that they are "on plan to double Wizards of the Coast coast revenues over five years from 2018 to 2023."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_of_the_Coast#2020%E2%80%93present
They want D&D to grow... a LOT.
Yeah, 5e is *obscenely* popular, though I'm not sure the degree to which that spills over into the OSR scene. A lot of people view 5e's ridiculous market share as an actively bad thing--I doubt people are specifically picking up OD&D & Moldvay & stuff because of WotC/Hasbro's marketing.
DeleteWell, I bet a lot of people come to OSR games via 5e. So the bigger Wizards/Hasbro gets, the better it is for Moldvay's old game.
DeleteI'm sure there's some spillover, yeah. I think there's essentially a three-step cycle which goes:
Delete1) Person gets super into whatever the current edition of D&D is.
2) Person starts to chafe at the limitations of the current edition of D&D, and starts to try to massively overhaul it (often futile-ly).
3) Person eventually goes and posts on some online board about their efforts to massively overhaul D&D, gets directed to the existence of other games, at which point they usually get super into either storygames or OSR stuff (or rarely the kind of ultra-crunchy RPG like SR 4e or GURPS that used to be all the rage) & then declaim the inferiority of the current edition of D&D forever more.
So insofar as this is usually what seems to happen, I'm not really sure how much 5e's popularity impacts the OSR scene.
I guess you could say that, since most people are already familiar with the rules for 5e or 3.5 or whatever the current popular edition is when they get into OSR stuff, it might lead to people focusing more on Old D&D specifically since it's an easier transition.
Well, I can tell you that's also how it was in '81, '82, '83, except we chafed at the limitations of AD&D and Moldvay Basic and moved on to... well, every other game! Eventually, GURPS was may go-to for a long time, but I tried everything I could. For a long time I ran Warhammer 1e, Call of Cthulhu, and many other games.
DeleteIt's fun to see how my son is in love with 5e. I still wonder whether he will stick with it or move on or become disenchanted with gaming.
I started out with 3.5, my regular group moved on to 5e with the playtest, I briefly dabbled in Pathfinder, and I've also played some Shadowrun 4e, a bit of GURPS, and a few storygame-y things like Blades in the Dark and Scum & Villainy with some friends who were very into those kinds of games. I actually got into OSR stuff through The Black Hack, though ultimately I'm a B/X gal at heart.
DeleteI think what appeals to me about Basic is A) the tight focus on including procedures to actually enable a specific style of gameplay (dungeon-crawling, which I could *never* get right while I was playing mostly 3.5 & 5e), and B) it's super easy to homebrew & hack for it.
Speaking of something you touched on earlier (verisimilitude vs. realism in mechanics), it seems like you might be triangulating on the notion of associated vs. dissociated mechanics, which I only have a vague understanding of because I'm not some Game Design Big Cheese, I mostly just pick this stuff up via osmosis.
The general idea is "associated mechanics" are ones that reflect the reality within the fiction of the world the game is happening in, and "dissociated mechanics" are ones that exist solely on the level of the rules.
So, for instance, Magic-Users being able to prepare 2 Fireball spells each day is an *associated* mechanic, because if you went up to a wizard in D&D-world and asked them how many Fireballs they could cast, even if they didn't use the specific language of spell-slots & spell levels they'd still be able to tell you that they would be only be able to manage two Fireballs before needing to rest.
Conversely, XP=GP is a *dissociated* mechanic, because if you went up to a person in D&D-world and asked them "how does one get better at fighting," they would not tell you "oh, it's easy, just acquire some gold and you magically get stronger & tougher!" (though I suppose you could have a fantasy world where XP=GP is a literal, in-fiction phenomenon).
I feel like there are probably some blogposts about this that might be interesting to you! I can't really personally point you to any because I don't spend a ton of time reading blogs (I honestly stumbled on this one purely by chance)
Thanks, Josie. I will look into that. As for whatever chance led you this way, I'm glad for it, because I have enjoyed hearing your perspective.
DeleteI'm a little tired and the wine is slowly getting to my head, but I have some thoughts after reading all the comments to this post - and if you don't mind, I'm just gonna post them unorganised before the sandman comes.
ReplyDeleteThere was mention of various "sub-scenes" of the OSR. You already know about the Pit and the Discord; those seem to be the most "inclusive" in terms of mechanics (i.e. there OSR includes everything from Mothership through Troika! to AD&D and all the homemade hacks and whatnot). You mentioned Dragonsfoot, which seems to be focussed on AD&D 1st and 2nd edition. There's also the Knights & Knaves Alehouse where people chiefly discuss AD&D 1st edition and OD&D (these are *the* OSRIC guys, mostly). There's also a dedicated OD&D forum (odd74 on proboards), where you can find a lot of hacks and interpretations, and BFRPG also has its own vibrant community. The various MeWe groups seem to be lacking in lively discussion on the gaming front; I don't know anything about the Facebook groups. Twitter is really bad for discussing things because of its very design, but there obviously are people using it. There's also osrg on 4chan, which is both fascinating (because of their puritanical reverence of OD&D; but Cavegirl also rose to fame there first) and disgusting (because it's 4chan after all).
RuneQuest is defitely doable without Glorantha - and it's especially true with regards to its "modern" incarnations which are RQ only in system (i.e. Legend and Mythras, or OpenQuest if you wanna go light on the rules). Legend itself is 100% Open Game Content and costs $1 on DriveThruRPG. Mythras is by the same authors, I believe; it has more content and is a little more complex, but they are at least as compatible as B/X and AD&D.
As for XP=GP, I can't really add anything that either wasn't in the post or in the comments. It's a stupid idea on paper (something I surely would've laughed at had I encountered it in my teenage years), but it's remarkably clever at the same time. Very gamey, but, c'mon, we're fighting slimes and rust monsters, and there's a reason my current character is called Milvur IV!
Ynas, thank you for sharing all that interesting information! Perhaps readers who come along here may find it useful, too.
ReplyDeleteI think you're missing the biggest pro's of GP = XP. That being, it's a morally neutral goal that any kind of character can pursue. You can have paladins and warlocks and rogues all agree that more gold is good, because it's an asset that can be put towards any of their goals. In this way, you don't need to design an adventure specifically appealing to the paladin or the rogue, they will both be OK with it.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't realistic, but it does provide a crucial game function of giving all the players a united goal: if you got "realistic" XP for doing things your class was good at, everyone would be careening in different directions; the rogue would need to make heists and pick locks, the fighter leading warbands, the wizard conducting duels, etc. This way everyone's on the same page.
Lastly it gives the players a concrete in-game way to assess their reward if they take on a certain task. In modern games where the DM might give you some amount of XP for beating a quest, you have no idea what you get til you're done, and the PCs in-game have no idea they got any XP. But with GP = XP, the player and character are aligned.
And by design, it encourages a certain kind of Conan-esque game.
Only thing I am not sure about is at higher levels where you need a billion gold to level...
Hi, mAc Chaos. I appreciate your perusing this old post and taking it seriously. I had to reread it to remember what I wrote here. I don’t disagree with you seriously, but I could quibble. Wanting to get rich is not a morally neutral goal. Compared to killing families of creatures, it seems less bad. The post, though, is about *why* PCs are greedy (why they want money money money), and greed *is* a moral issue. I’m not judging. I said, it’s fun for the game. I offered a bunch of reasons for PCs to be greedy: the motivations behind the motivation to get gold. My focus in writing this was on finding reasons for the PCs to be greedy, since that’s what is required. There’s the side issue, which comes up in some of my old posts, about Gygax’s strange rationale for some of his and Arneson’s design choices after the fact. I do agree that a common goal is useful to keep a group together, and that it provides a transparent way for players to assess their progress. Absolutely. But again, this post was about the in-game rationale, not the mechanical rule for the sake of play. I use treasure to motivate players and their PCs in my games, too.
Delete