Revisiting the Origins of the Experience

I ran the pink box about two weeks ago, good ol' Moldvay basic. For those around the table who didn't have access to the plundered artifacts of my pernicious youth, Goblinoid Games' excellent Labyrinth Lord suited their character creation and reference needs perfectly. In fact, I'd say the two are almost identical, with the exception of a few spells and monsters and the prices of equipment.

How did it go? Fifty percent party kill.

You know what first-level characters don't look like? This.I had taken one of Christopher B's excellent one-page maps and thrown a few cursory details at it, taking several of the pink box's suggestions to heart: A variety of critters occupied this dungeon. That is, I didn't construct the thing laboriously with a careful plot and a monomonstrous tenant. This wasn't "the goblin cave," nor was it "lair of the lizard men." In my brief setting sketch, it was a mountain-bound dwarfhold that had recently been infested from below by all sorts of nefarious critters. It was a nice enough scenario, feeling enough like a story to lend the delve purpose more than just bashing away at whatever came the party's way.

Four players participated, using first-level characters. I would have liked more, but as busy as we are these days, someone always has a lunch meeting. The intrepid adventurers didn't bother with hirelings or retainers, either. To be honest, I think it skipped their minds. At least half of them weren't alive when these rules were first published, and the other half play current games or incarnations of D&D, so the fact that you all but need dragon fodder at low levels slipped their mind.

We played for only an hour, but it was certainly enough to see the rules in operation. I enforced encumbrance, the recommended time-elapse increments, and light source bookkeeping. The exploration didn't happen quite as I'd have liked it to, but I always have this problem during dungeon crawls: I draw a little more or a little less on the map than what the players would probably see in that time increment. In fact, this was a core divergence from the pink box as written -- we used minis to represent movement and location, and we used them with an assumed scale equal to that of 3.x and 4e D&D. As written, the basic rules assume a much more painterly experience, with the DM describing what the players see and the woestricken mapper interpreting the DM's narrative onto graph paper. I ran it the opposite, adding rooms and hallways as the party progressed. No harm, no foul, really, but it did feel more tactical than the quasi-fairy tale feel that I remember my old RPG sessions having when I was but a rusty scuppernong.

I don't know what a rusty scuppernong is, either.

This is what gaming art looked like in 1981, and I really wanted to recapture some of that nostalgia and wonder.Anyway, I also used the morale rules as written, and two rooms worth of goblins panicked and ran before any member of the party took a single point of damage. One goblin ran into a room that harbored a double-handful of skeletons -- and that's where two members of the party met their unfortunate ends. Of course, the party had no cleric and the magic-user had already used his solitary magic missile on a goblin earlier, so nine skeletons were bound to give them estimable trouble.

Some highlights of the experience:

• In practice, the magic-user mirthfully waded into combat after using his sole offensive spell, which I was glad to see. It ended up killing him, of course, but the point is that he was participating.
• The comparative simplicity of the combat rules made running the conflicts a breeze. Tactical movement was just a question which monster to which players stood adjacent -- movement had no impediments or circuitous routes concocted to avoid opportunity attacks. People just moved where they wanted and tossed dice, and it was fun.
• In preparation, I liked reading all that vintage advice that showed the roots of the hobby, and evinced how the designers wanted the game to be played. Treasure, for example. The designers recommend that some monsters have no treasure, and that large troves of treasure exists in other places. Effectively what this does is encourage the PC party to choose their fights. They don't have to kill every monster in the joint, because treasure also gives experience, and because if they do fight every monster in the joint, one of those monsters will have a lucky attack and murder at least one of them. The morale rules help them almost as much as combat, ensuring that some of those monsters will run away and thus spare them precious hit points. It becomes much more of a resource management game than I'm used to thinking about, and the suggested narrative is actually more dramatic than the old gray pink box usually gets credit for, in that you're supposed to go into the lair and slay Grendel and his mother, not every goddamn rat in the cave and Grendel and his mother and the poor crazy Dane down the well. It's actually noteworthy how closely CRPGs emulate this, in retrospect.
• Random treasure was fun. I can see it getting frustrating over the long-term if you somehow end up as "that guy" and always dice the least possible treasure rewards, but it was fun to laugh about in this short, controlled session.

Some lowlights:

• Mapping and movement. My fault.
• Not enough distinguished the PCs from one another. The magic-user was effectively a fighter after using his trick. The dwarf was a fighter. In fact, given the old-school way in which we rolled characters, the players were statistically most likely to roll fighters, because they might be unable to qualify for anything else.
• The monsters felt too similar to one another. Obviously, this changes past first level, but the only things really distinguishing goblins from skeletons were a single hit point and no morale.
• Playing purely randomly was fun, but didn't really scratch that campaign or "amateur thespian" itch. Again, this all occurred in a very short window, but I wanted to feel more like an actual story was taking place and not just a loose paragraph of justification tossed in at the opening of the action. Character progression, NPCs, meeting a "named" antagonist, etc., all would have contributed to this, but such a short session, while evocative of the overall gaming experience, didn't really have enough of a chance to blossom in my imagination as greatly as I would have enjoyed. This isn't a failing of the game, necessarily, but it does indicate that this isn't an endeavor to be casually undertaken. You have to invest in the fun and let the feeling flourish.