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More Gygax’s Finches
In a previous Gygaxian naturalism post I gave some thoughts on D&D implications of allopatric speciation. This is what people usually have in mind with evolution, where two populations are physically separated and so diverge genetically, especially if the two environments differ. For instance, a storm blows finches from the mainland to an island which both has a different climate than the mainland and presents a barrier to gene flow.
A more unusual form of evolution is sympatric speciation and its companion of disruptive selection. Sympatric speciation occurs when there is divergence despite no geographic barrier to gene flow. Disruptive selection is when selection promotes extreme forms and weeds out intermediate forms. The two are connected since disruptive selection is one way sympatric speciation can work.
As with last time, let us consider the orc, but this time by contrasting them to goblins. Orcs and goblins are both nocturnal humanoids. They both live in dungeons. And WotC era D&D lore notwithstanding, we can assume they have a common ancestor. If orcs and goblins were to develop into different species via allopatric speciation, they’d have to be geographically separated but that doesn’t fit with them having the same geographical range (i.e., they appear on the same random encounter tables). So we need a sympatric speciation explanation and that means disruptive selection.
For disruptive selection to work, we need to see less survival and/or reproductive success for intermediate forms. So really this means big orcs and small goblins should survive and have lots of babies but medium goblin-orcs should die young and/or be last asked for a dance at the dungeon winter formal. Let’s suppose that for the goblin and orc population that fitness basically reduces down to martial prowess. The more dwarf and elf skulls males collect, the younger they marry and more extramarital pairings they attract. So why would you be a badass as a 4′ tall goblin or a 6′ tall orc but not as a 5′ tall intermediate form?
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Right-skewed dice
As I’m guessing was true for many of you, my first introduction to probability theory was pages 9-10 of the AD&D DMG in which Gygax explains how rolling one die (including d100) gives you a uniform distribution but summing multiple dice gives you a bell curve. Ever since, it has been a basic principal of game design to distinguish between when a uniform distribution is desirable (e.g., action resolution) and when a bell curve is better (e.g., character abilities). Appreciation of uniform distributions (each value is equally likely) vs bell curves (moderate values are most likely) is all well and good but in probability and statistics there is a third major type of distribution that RPGS usually ignore: right-skewed distributions (low values are most likely). Note that in statistics “skew” means the direction the “tail” of the distribution is pointing. So on a right-skewed distribution, most cases are low (left) and it’s rare to have cases that are high (right).
There are a lot of things in life and even in fantasy worlds where low numbers are the most common values. The typical scroll should be low level, the typical orc war party should be small, etc. Alas, we generally don’t model this. I had this thought while reading Shadowdark and seeing the rules for generating rival adventuring parties. When it comes to level, you simply roll d6. I thought, huh, that’s weird, shouldn’t 1st and 2nd level parties be more common than 5th and 6th level parties?
I thought about it all day and came up with some pretty complicated mechanics and then realized there’s an incredibly simple approach.
Choose a die size that captures the range you want. Roll multiple dice and keep the lowest. The more dice you roll, the more right skewed the probability distribution will be.
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Shadowdark review
As a Kickstarter backer for Shadowdark I have read the PDF and my bottom line is it’s a really great game that skillfully synthesizes many different ideas and mechanics. If you were turned off by the hype, don’t be. I see it as a really well executed effort for what it intends to accomplish. I suggest you consider if you’re in the market for that type of game, and if so check out the free quickstart guide. My own feeling is that in some ways it is what I’d been waiting for, but explaining why requires a digression.
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Gygax’s Finches
The dungeon is a strange environment. And I don’t mean that just in the mythic underworld sense, but in the sense of Gygaxian naturalism. One of the basic issues is where do the monsters come from? For undead and demons and such the answer is basically “magic,” which settles the issue. Often these undead or demons or elementals or constructs were “stocked” by a necromancer or summoner who may or may not himself remain in the dungeon as the final boss lich. Similarly, we can imagine a mad wizard sending some lackeys to pick up an order for roper spores, stirge eggs, and a gelatinous cube starter culture at ye olde home and garden center. Of course the entire conceit of a mad wizard funhouse dungeon is don’t ask how it works, did I mention the wizard was insane, Bob’s your uncle. Let’s put such deliberately stocked dungeons aside and engage in the Gygaxian naturalism of thinking through how monsters might naturally occupy the ecological niche of the dungeon in the same way as we explain how the common raven came to occupy most of the northern hemisphere or the California mussel cling to every other salt-sprayed boulder from Alaska to Baja.
First, let us consider the simple case of monsters that are found in both dungeons and the wilderness. For instance, the orc is found on low-level dungeon tables and almost every wilderness random encounter table in OSE, Swords & Wizardry, and OSRIC. For a monster like orcs, it’s easy to explain how they got to a particular dungeon: they occupy lots of ecological niches and so even if two dungeons are separated by forest, or hills, or mountains, or first forest, then hills, then mountains; no problem, orcs inhabit all those places. Orcs are what biologists call generalists and it’s pretty easy to explain how generalists spread from place to place which is why some generalists (e.g., the common raven, the brown rat, people) have an enormous range. Generalist monsters like orcs that are found frequently above and below the surface might even form a single breeding population, but maybe not.
For instance, the orcs of the Misty Mountains at some point migrated from Mordor, crossing Rohan on the way. Or maybe vice versa, I don’t care enough about the canonical answer to read Encyclopedia of Arda, let alone the RotK appendices and the Silmarillion. The point is you can imagine orcs in Middle Earth having spread much the same way as human beings here on Earth. Human beings and zebras both evolved in an African grassland environment but we eventually reached the grasslands of South America and the zebras didn’t because we could also occupy the many diverse ecosystems between Kenya and Argentina. Once orcs are spread out enough over a wide enough range, you might get linguistic / ethnic / cultural differences among orcs in different areas, just as human beings show a lot of diversity, but how the orcs got there is not tricky.
The much harder problem is what about monsters that only live in the dungeon. The carrion crawler, gelatinous cube, rust monster, purple worm, cloaker, cave fisher, drow, duergar, and svirfneblin are all what biologists call specialists. One thing about specialists in real life is they tend to have limited range because even if there is another cozy dungeon a hundred miles away, you can’t get here from there. So a cave fisher in Temple of Elemental Evil might do very well by its offspring to lay its eggs in The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, but it is so hyper-evolved to live in a dungeon that it has no way to leave a dungeon in the Yatil Mountains, cross a few hundred miles of farms and forest, and settle in to another dungeon on the far side of Veluna.
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OGL 1.2 reactions
The following is my entry for the main free entry text block at the beginning of the OGL 1.2 “playtest” survey. As such, the second person “you” is WotC. Note that one function of the “playtest” is to kill the momentum of backlash to WotC. If we all publicly post our feedback, that will keep the issue salient, which it needs to remain since I am highly skeptical they’ll get the survey results and say “the people have spoken, we are reissuing the OGL 1.0a and adding the word ‘irrevocable.”
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OGL trouble
Like all of us, I’ve been paying close attention to the OGL revisions. I am not a lawyer, intellectual property or otherwise, but I have studied media industries, and so have some thoughts on all this. I see three basic questions:
- What rights could you defend in court?
- How likely are you to have to defend those rights?
- How will the community and industry respond?
Let’s take them in turn.
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Rifts Atlantis for D&D and OSR
Rifts is a post-apocalyptic giant robots firing missiles at demons game, which isn’t exactly the kind of thing you think of for OSR or D&D, but Rifts: Atlantis is readily adaptable to the OSR. Atlantis has relatively little of the fascists and giant robots world-building that characterizes most of Rifts but rather is sword and planet with a hint of Lovecraft. That sort of thing seems anomalous from the high fantasy perspective that dominates D&D now, but it characterized a lot of the Appendix N literature and was a strong theme in old school D&D and OSR, from “Expedition to Barrier Peaks” to Hyperborea. The Rifts rules are pretty different from D&D so Atlantis is not exactly ready to run out of the box as OSR, but it has great potential as adaptation material for a major faction in your campaign world. I’ll first give a synopsis and then some ideas on adaptation.
The basic premise of Rifts: Atlantis is that an interdimensional alien confederation has established a territorial base for slave raids where they capture people and then sell them off in other dimensions, often after altering them with magical tattoos or magical parasites. The alien confederation are led by truly inhuman Lovecraft type entities, then about a dozen types of more or less humanoid aliens, and finally actual people at the bottom of the org chart. Much as real world empires are usually named for the numerically small nation at the top rather than the more numerous but diverse peoples they rule, the aliens are called the Slugorth even though only the handful of Lovecraft entities are actually Slugorth in the limited sense.
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Thieves’ Guild as Stationary Bandit
Among the most familiar tropes of D&D is the thieves’ guild, one of many ideas D&D inherited from Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. In a lot of D&D-related material (e.g., Gygax’s Saga of the Old City) you get the sense of the guild as, well, a guild, where apprentices train under master craftsmen to achieve journeyman status. At first glance this is a ridiculous concept, based on a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the sense that everything in the middle ages was based on guilds, so why not thieves. However on reading Anja Shortland’s Kidnap, I changed my mind and came to see a thieves’ guild as an institution that is both realistic and eminently gameable if you move away from the idea that they’re constantly picking pockets.
Kidnap is a great book and if you enjoy this post I highly recommend you read the whole thing. I read it as a social scientist and it’s a very good scholarly work. However non-academics who just want ideas for intrigue and adventure will find plenty of gameable hooks beyond what I’ve summarized and riffed on here. The central thesis of the book is that the kidnapping insurance markets and their associated negotiators at Lloyd’s of London are awesome and governments are a bunch of amateurs who mess things when they ban ransoms, pay ransoms much higher than is standard, or both. However, I want to focus on a secondary point in the book, which is the role of a “protector,” an issue heavily inspired by Olson’s stationary bandit model.
Kidnapping for ransom is difficult because it assumes you have a place to keep the hostage, a way to safely collect the ransom, can credibly commit to releasing the hostage and seeing them to safety, etc. All of that assumes a monopoly of force in a territory by a faction she abstractly refers to as a “protector.” This can be a state, a mafia, a rebel army, or a tribal clan. In fantasy, it would be a thieves’ guild in an urban setting and pirates, bandits, or some type of rogue state in a hexcrawl. The thing is, the protector doesn’t want to kidnap you. They want you to pay protection money against being kidnapped. Kidnapping for ransom as a direct revenue generating activity is for amateurs. Pros use kidnapping as an enforcement mechanism for extortion. In equilibrium (economist-speak for “when things settle down”), nobody will get kidnapped and everyone will pay protection money. And it’s not just kidnapping — an effective protector will keep those who pay protection money free from other types of criminal predation, and indeed, will use theft and vandalism as escalating enforcement tactics against those who refuse to pay protection. So you shouldn’t think of being in the thieves’ guild as like Oliver Twist making his quota of thefts for Fagin, but as like being a property tax assessor, but for the mob. A truly powerful thieves’ guild would hardly ever commit any thefts.
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Hexcrawl compatibility
[Update 1/2/2024: added Knave 2e]
[Update 11/25/2023: added Beyond the Wall and Seven Voyages of Zylarthen]
[Update 6/26/2023: added AD&D 2e]
[Update 4/21/2023: added Shadowdark]
We are often told that the great thing about OSR is that all of the materials are mutually compatible. The idea is that it doesn’t matter if it says D&D, AD&D, OSRIC, Swords & Wizardy, or Old School Essentials on the cover of the module — regardless you can run it with any of the above with minimal conversion. This makes sense as these editions all have similar rules for a) combat and b) dungeon exploration and most modules are mostly about a) combat and b) dungeon exploration. However what about other play styles? The hexcrawl dates back at least to X1 Isle of Dread published in 1981, but it is increasingly popular now with OSR hexcrawls like Hot Springs Island, Hideous Daylight, and Dolmenwood being esteemed for their creativity and design. Likewise hexcrawl theory is an active topic on the OSR blogs (e.g., the October 2022 Glatisant has four links to hexcrawl theory posts). So the question is, can OSR hexcrawls boast the same mutual compatibility as OSR dungeons? If I buy a hexcrawl that says OSE on the cover, can I trust that it will run OK using Swords & Wizardry? If I write a hexcrawl, is the decision of which edition to identify it with as incidental as it would be for a dungeon?
A hexcrawl is about exploration and resource management relevant to wilderness travel. In many editions, you face random encounters as a function of time, and these random encounters can be brutal. This makes travel time a key issue since the slower you travel, the more danger you face and more resources you consume per unit of distance. Moreover, encumbrance also plays a role since if you’re carrying a lot of gear or treasure, this slows you down. And finally, a good hexcrawl should encourage travel through favorable terrain by giving differential penalties in terms of speed and getting lost by terrain types. There are other mechanics that could be relevant to hexcrawls (e.g., resource management magic like goodberry), but the big one is how fast can you travel, through what terrain, and will you get lost. And it turns out these vary a lot between editions, as shown in the following tables. Note that I ordered these by “family” of rules, with all the B/X varieties together, all the AD&D varieties together, etc. “Miles/day” is for an unencumbered human on easy terrain. I include road travel time as a special case given that systems inspired by B/X tend to have a 1.5x rule for roads. I describe terrain and lost rules as “vague” if it’s a blink and you miss it “DM may adjust” in the middle of a paragraph type rule.
Edition Miles/day
cross countryMiles/day
roadTerrain
modifiers?Lost
rules?Castles & Crusades 2mph 2mph vague no DCC 24 24 vague no 5e 24 24 yes yes Five Torches Deep 10 + STR mod 10 + STR mod yes no Shadowdark 12 12 yes yes AD&D 30 30 yes yes AD&D 2e 24 24 yes yes OSRIC 24 24 vague vague Hyperborea 24 24 yes yes ACKS 24 36 yes yes Basic Fantasy RPG 24 32 yes yes Beyond the Wall 20 20 yes yes Labyrinth Lord 24 36 yes yes Lamentations of the
Flame Princess16 24 yes yes Old School Essentials 24 36 yes yes Worlds Without Number 30 60 yes no Crypts & Things 12 12 no no Seven Voyages of Zylarthen ~ 15 ~15 yes yes Swords & Wizardry 12 12 vehicles yes White Box FMAG 12 12 vague yes Knave 2e 18 18 yes yes It turns out that a simple question like “how far can you walk in a day under ideal conditions” varies from about 10 miles to 60 miles! The 60 miles figure for Worlds Without Number is an outlier, but B/X-inspired games in general include a generous road modifier, and so games based on B/X tend to have maximum distances per day more suited to a bicyclist than a pedestrian. If the characters are traveling cross-country, it’s not as bad, but even for cross-country travel B/X, AD&D, and d20 style games still tend to let you travel twice as fast as do OD&D style games. One implication of this is that Swords & Wizardry may be similar enough to Worlds Without Number that you can run a dungeon written for one using the other, but for hexcrawl purposes, you’ll need to rescale the map.
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