More Adventure Gamer Than Not

Friend of the blog EOTB at Chronicled Scribblings of the Itinerant Overlord spotted my post the other day about "classic adventure gaming" and was kind enough to respond, providing some very helpful background.

First, I'm not a podcast listener - the voices in my head don't like competition - so I missed the whole development of "classic adventure gaming" by EOTB and friends. I'll let EOTB take it from here:

And this gets to the reason for starting up the podcast - we want to reach people who aren't playing any form of "D&D" but love the idea of hanging out with their friends to explore lost tombs, find fabulous treasure, and cross swords with personal nemeses. But because D&D has been around for a long time now, with significant social media reach outside the membership of the hobby, when many of those people hear the word "role-playing" they think "an adult version of tea party".

Because that is what they read, see, and hear.

And often, they're just not interested in that. You can get all of the adventure I listed above in other media, with zero tea party. There's no reason at all to play D&D if you don't like tea party. You can play video games as a group, remotely. You can meet up somewhere and run a 40K scenario. You can get your fill and never have to risk sitting across from someone telling you that unless you are willing to repeat that in character, it never happened at all and they won't consider it valid for play. Or your funny quip that made everyone laugh, yeah...the DM insists your character said it too. (emphases in the original - BV)

So, I'm the epitome of "a little knowledge yadda yadda" in this.

EOTB's point is that many people who might be receptive to imaginary adventures with friends around the dining table equate "roleplay" with "playacting" - it's his assertion that this was never the intention of the creators of the hobby - I mean, OD&D bills itself as rules for "fantastic medieval wargames campaigns" - and "roleplaying" has come to means something quite different from my humble concept of simply "making decisions as your character." "Classic adventure gaming" is an concerted effort to unburden the hobby of a phrase that can be self-limiting.

"Adventure gaming" isn't really something new, actually; this has bubbled up in various forums and the blogosphere over many years - but this seems to be an effort to gain wider acceptance, particularly in differentiating CAG from whatever it is the OSR's become, and in light of the diversification of the hobby: "story games," "narrative games," &c. Fortunately for me, I'm not the only person with questions about to what extent charaterisation plays in CAG, and EOTB addresses that as well:

But now after explaining further why we arrived at the stance of rejecting the term roleplaying completely, let's get to the meat of BV's question:

"This is the essence of Develop-In-Play rather than Develop-At-Start gaming. Old-school and roots gamers tend to be speak in terms of "story" as an emergent property arising from actual play rather than one planned by the referee - story is something seen in hindsight - and from my own experience, so is characterisation. The more decisions I make for my character, the more subsequent decisions are likely to reflect a consistency and a coherence with what came before. My characters develop interests, habits, and quirks that build on those experiences and ambitions and "my guy" becomes someone else altogether, very different from where the campaign started. I don't know if EOTB's concept of CAG necessarily excludes or proscribes this."

The short answer is: there's nothing about this that is outside the bounds of CAG, at all.

Every time I create a character it is essentially myself as that class type. But as BV says, the character, by virtue of interacting with the game world, often becomes a variation of myself that is different than all the other variations of myself I've played before. I might never bother giving the guy a name (I do name some of my characters) but he's still different than EOTB-6106 and EOTB-5114. He's made different enemies, developed different habits and often would handle the same situation differently than another character of mine would.

But he also might not. He might handle it exactly the same. And that's the point: I don't care if he winds up different or the same as some other character. He's not why I'm playing, what happens with him as a character per se is some sort of happy accident, and it might be nothing worth remembering. Because I'm not here to develop a character, I'm here - me, EOTB-0001 - to explore tombs, find treasure, cross swords, and kick ass. He's the tool I use to do it, just like a good hammer. Nothing about the hammer is my hobby, however. It's rather incidental to the point even if I truly appreciate a great hammer.

I kinda suspected this, from the way EOTB wrote about refereeing non-player characters - " . . . the knowledge, goals, abilities, resources, and quirks of the NPC or monster they are running . . . " - but it was great to have it confirmed so clearly here: "The acceptable roleplaying floor for an individual participant must be zero so that people who aren't into that can relax and have fun. The ceiling can be whatever each group determines." (emphases in the original - BV)

And that becomes an important part of expectations setting at the start of whatever campaign a referee wants to run. I was upfront with prospective players for my new Flashing Blades play-by-post campaign that it's a "social megadungeon," in which the "rooms" are non-player characters and the "passages" the web of relationships between them - there's treasure to find, swords to cross, and even tombs to discover, but the main modus of exploration in this campaign is talking to people. This is in no way precluded by CAG, of course, but it's imperative to make clear what "adventure" means in the context of this campaign: duels, affairs, intrigue, sure, but also career advancement and social climbing, and if zero roleplaying is the floor, then a player should also understand that the ceiling is quite a bit higher than if I was running a good ol' fashioned dungeon crawl and leave room for others to explore and enjoy that space as well.

As for me?

With "roleplaying = playacting" as a starting point, I'd reject that term, too, and I can relate to how that perception of the hobby could be seriously off-putting to potential players who just want to imagine themselves, say, swashing bucklers in the gardens of Fontainebleau.

Playing 5e with the Cabin Kids and their friends years ago reminded me so much of my own experiences when I was introduced to D&D. 5e is a gawdawful mess of a game and I was throwing stuff out right and left because once the kids had their stats and classes, bought some gear and figured out their spells, they were ready to roll. Backgrounds? Backstory? Fuck that, I'm a ranger with a bow, let's go kill a dragon and find some treasure! And yet, as we played, personalities emerged, tiny bits of backstory crept in here and there - I think there's a certain amount of inevitability to this when you hand creative people an imaginary world to mess around in.

Me, I start every character, every game with some variation on the same basic motivation: "Out there is a fortune, waiting to be had! You think I'll let it go? You're mad!" Get rich, or die tryin'. Let's go kill a dragon.

So I'm more adventure gamer than not.

Make Mine . . . Adventure Roleplaying?!

Friend of the blog EOTB at Chronicled Scribblings of the Itinerant Overlord recently outlined the precepts of classic adventure gaming (CAG), defined thusly:

It is the style of gaming presumed and presented in the 1E PHB and DMG which was common before a playacting style of "roleplaying" grew into a new normal. It rejects the term "roleplaying game" or "RPG" because today those names firmly convey implicit expectations running contrary to practices of successful adventure gaming.

I've liked the phrase "adventure gaming" as a description for the hobby since I first encountered Tim Kask's regrettably short-lived Adventure Gaming magazine decades ago, and a lot of what EOTB and friends write hits hard for me, in particular:

Adventure gaming is campaign based; the idea of one-shot games is foreign to adventure gaming. A game world exists and persists apart from any group of characters. When combined with the expectation that players grow in mastery of a set of rules, a single set of rules is used for very long periods of time (if not indefinitely) so that players gain enough time in a single ruleset to understand it thoroughly as opposed to a superficial understanding.

Nobody is trying to tell a story. A GM writes places and situations; if a future is written, it is the future of what will happen in that location or what those NPCs will accomplish if the players choose not to engage with it or them at all. No attempt is made to pre-determine the course of what will happen if the players decide to engage with that content. Because the GM has determined the goals, resources, abilities, local geography, and "personality" of any NPCs at a location, they have all the tools necessary to react believably and distinctly to whatever actions or plans the players may devise at the time of contact.

Should their plans and luck dictate such a result compared to the preparations and abilities of their opposition, players are allowed to "win" situations convincingly and without artificial tension or danger imposed by the GM. Conversely, the game is generous with 2nd chance magic so the GM need not prevent bad plans and poor play from reaping a whirlwind.

Player agency is paramount. The burden of what course of action is taken is on the players, not the GM. Adventure gaming is not well-paired with a table made up entirely of passive players, regardless of how excited a GM may be to try it. Many tears occur when a GM attempts to run an adventure game with players who really want the GM to tell them what they will be doing tonight, with players making only minor decisions through the course of the evening but otherwise seeing if they can succeed at the goal a GM has set before them. It is tailor made for groups having a minimum of one player who likes to make decisions. Not everyone has to be a decision maker if the rest of the group is comfortable with allowing a minority of however many to perform the role a GM performs in typical roleplaying campaigns of deciding what the group's course of action will be for a gaming session.

A GM accepts that world building and location/scenario writing is a parallel but separate hobby to the game itself. GMs enjoy worldbuilding for its own sake. There is no feeling that time spent devising locations and NPCs is "wasted" if players do not interact with it. Instead, because the GM has written out the effect of players not engaging with that content at all, the game world changes accordingly and seems to the players to move even where they've not personally intervened.

Music to my ears, truly.

I do hang up a bit in a couple of places, and let me make clear right from the giddyup none of my hang-ups are meant to disagree with or cast aspersion on the precepts of classic adventure gaming presented here. Rather, my hang-ups reflect the ways in which personally I'm not a "classic adventure gamer."

My personal conception or ideation - I'm loathe to call it a definition - of roleplaying is, "Making decisions as your character." If your character is a game-world avatar of you sitting at the table, as in CAG, then that still fits my concept of roleplaying. So does the "playacting style" EOTB describes as it's practiced and advocated for by many in the hobby. From where I stand, roleplaying isn't strictly deep-character-immersion or "talking in funny voices." "My guy" is a perfectly valid approach to roleplaying for me.

That said, I find that while I start generally somewhere in the vicinity of "my guy" - random generation, optimising what I can where I can, handwaving backstory - I rarely stay there for long. For those familiar with the history of GDW's En Garde! the game started strictly as tabletop fencing skirmish rules but over time and repeated play, the players started to think of their characters as existing in the setting, and wanted to know more about their lives. From this came rules for military service, carousing, mistresses, and gentlemen's clubs. That fits my concept of roleplaying to a tee, and indeed it slots in with CAG as well, which reinforces for me the notion of En Garde! as one of the earliest adventure games.

From my own experience, making those kinds of decisions for my character - what to pursue and how to pursue it - suggests a nascent personality which influences subsequent decisions. While I start off an adventure gamer, as I play the campaign I'm prone to make decisions less based on my own logic sitting at the table and more from the perspective of the imaginary character in the imaginary setting, their experiences, their ambitions, their place in the game-world. As I make more and more decisions as the character rather than as a player, that's when a backstory may emerge, in dribs and drabs, further coloring how I think of, and think as, "my guy."

This is the essence of Develop-In-Play rather than Develop-At-Start gaming. Old-school and roots gamers tend to be speak in terms of "story" as an emergent property arising from actual play rather than one planned by the referee - story is something seen in hindsight - and from my own experience, so is characterisation. The more decisions I make for my character, the more subsequent decisions are likely to reflect a consistency and a coherence with what came before. My characters develop interests, habits, and quirks that build on those experiences and ambitions and "my guy" becomes someone else altogether, very different from where the campaign started.

I don't know if EOTB's concept of CAG necessarily excludes or proscribes this. Consider the following:

There is no expectation players will act at the table as if a game were not occurring; players are expected - not discouraged - to use what the modern hobby mistakenly disparages as "metagaming". A player who knows that fire prevents trolls from regenerating but declines to use it because "my character doesn't know that" is roleplaying instead of adventure gaming.

Conversely, GMs must not metagame - because a GM has perfect knowledge, they must limit themselves within the knowledge, goals, abilities, resources, and quirks of the NPC or monster they are running at the time in order for a functional game to occur. This is almost the exact opposite of how most roleplaying games view the player-GM dynamic, and an example of how character-first roleplaying flipped the playstyle in a 180 away from how early games ran. (emphasis added - BV)

I agree with the idea of "metagaming" as presented here: I tend to think of anything in the rules as within the realm of knowledge of the player characters, but I also tend to violate one of the principles of CAG EOTB sets forth - "Because a GM is comfortable with highly experienced players, rules tinkering for tinkering's sake, or perhaps to artificially reintroduce an atmosphere of player uncertainty due to ignorance, is discouraged." - in that I will switch things up to create surprises or new challenges, such as introducing trolls that are vulnerable to salt rather than fire, frex.

More to the point, if the referee can be expected to create characterisations for non-player characters, monsters, and the like, and hold to them, perhaps the intent is not to limit players from doing the same so much as it is to not lose sight of playing the game. Hopefully EOTB may weigh in on this in a future post.

As I said, as things stand, while I'm very much a roots gamer, I wouldn't label myself a classic adventure gamer as styled here. Perhaps "adventure roleplayer" is more my speed, because after weeks or months or, ideally, years of playing, "my guy" is rarely just my avatar any longer.

Loot!

A dozen years ago Desert Scribe at Super Galactic Dreadnaught posted about "non-standard treasures" in the Holmes edition Dungeons & Dragons sample dungeon and B2 Keep on the Borderlands and B1 In Search of the Unknown. The posts are effectively a guide to looting the Caves of Chaos and Quasqueton, and I loved them so much that I said in the comments I wanted to do the same for Flashing Blades, a game with its own actual, literal booty table (FB core rules, p. 28)!

Years passed.

And at long last, here we are.

Clothing

coat, gentleman's, cloth-of-gold	50 £
hat, cloth-of-gold	15 £
suit, gentleman's, cloth-of-gold	100 £

Decorative Items

chandelier, Venetian glass	500 £
chess set, silver and gold pieces	250 £
goblets, crystal	150 £
idol, Inca	100 £
lilies, white, 1 doz.	1 £
rose, red	1 £
tapestry, medieval of knights jousting	100 £
tea service, gold-inlaid with silver utensils	75 £

Functional Items

blowgun, genuine Caribe Indian	10 £
book, Da Vinci manuscript	1000 £
books, library set	100-200 £
bow, genuine Caribe Indian	20 £
chamberpot, silver with coat of arms	25 £
dog, hunting	70 £
falcon, hunting	60 £
longsword, fine quality	100 £
parrot, exotic talking	50 £
racket and ball, tennis	10 £

Jewelry

crucifix, jeweled	200 £
earring, gold pirate hoop	5 £
gem, Constantinople Emerald	10,000 £
gem, Constantinople Emerald (wax forgery)	1000 £
gems, bag of	1000 £
medallion, Knights of the Golden Fleece (melted down)	120 £
necklace, Inca	60 £
ring, small gold	25 £

There are a lot of items described - Delft tiles, marble statues, cherry bon-bons - in the various FB adventures which aren't ascribed values. This is a missed opportunity, one I may have to take up at some point in the future!

More Pseudoskills

In our new campaign, one of the players created a pseudoskill for his character, an unconventional healer using the Physician skill house rule.

Chemist + Physician = Paracelsian Medicine

Not gonna lie, I was pretty excited to see this idea of creating specialty skills out of the standard skill list take root in another player's character.

Here are some additional ideas for pseudoskills.

Oratory + Bargaining = Negotiation
I created this one for my own character, a smooth talking Student of Law, and used it to help his landlord get an investment loan to become an olive oil merchant. Negotiation is the polite or refined form of hustling, as represented by the Bargaining skill.

Oratory + Literacy Master = Poetry
Oratory + Seduction = Sonnetry
This one was also for my character - I wanted to make poetry a thing for him, a part of his Occitan heritage. These are pretty self-explanatory; one normally doesn't take check marks for Literacy, but a character pursuing this as a pseudoskill should be permitted to do so, using Wit as the defining attribute.

Oratory + Theology = Preaching
The ability to deliver a rousing or edifying sermon or a moving eulogy, this is an obvious choice for priests and ministers.

Theology + History = Hagiography
Hagiography is the "lives of the saints" - this is useful for identifying the connection between a saint's name and a location or an organization, similar to the Heraldry skill, or for invoking the proper patron for blessing an activity.

Horsemanship + Polearms = Jousting
Jousting was still a thing in early modern France; frex, jousts were held as part of Louis XIII's coronation celebration and appear in Richard Lester's 1973 epic The Three Musketeers. This could be a remarkable alternative to rapiers and pistols as a dueling challenge!

Magistracy + Pilot = Maritime Law
Magistracy + Heraldry = Salic Law
Two more areas of legal expertise, the law of the sea and the law of noble succession.