Blog Series "A Historical Look at the OSR — Part II"

[Admin Pete]

The blog Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design did a about the history of the OSR that started in Feb 2021 and concluded in mid December. Here is the second post and I will be reading it with you as I just found it but have not read it. I have no doubt, but that it will be vastly superior to the "history" published by the infamous Shannon Applecline. Nevertheless, I expect to disagree with parts of it. and once I read it I will comment and I hope that you do too.

A Historical Look at the OSR — Part II

[hengest]

Another fine entry in this series that I am going to try not to rush through.

The author's remarks on the origins and effects of skill systems are entirely worthwhile, and I look forward to hearing more serious responses to them.

I actually find these posts exciting--I loved reading this clear description of what happened with skill systems and ability checks.  Loved it!  Hard to say why...I suppose because it presents the information, which always seems murky to me, in plain language with explicit references to publications from the time (and interviews and so on).  It really injects the narrative into you!

[The Semi-Retired Gamer]

This series of blog posts is fascinating to me.  I'm enjoying the read.  

[1] - "Fanatical game hobbyists often express the opinion that DUNGEONS & DRAGONS will continue as an ever-expanding, always improving game system. TSR and I see it a bit differently. … Americans have somehow come to equate change with improvement."

[1] - This still rings true to me.  Change just for the sake of change is almost never a good idea.  People get burned out on the edition treadmill if they try to keep up.  Imagine if AD&D would have continued to evolve with a natural evolution over the years with small changes being made after years of play bringing to light when changes truly needed to be made.  A hypothetical 2nd edition of AD&D could have made some changes and additions such as UA material and the most popular stuff being used from Dragon magazine also.  Maybe the Bard would have evolved into a more traditional class?  Maybe the NPC classes in Dragon would have been included in the 2E DMG.  The 2E Monster Manual could have been like a greatest hits collection from the original, MM2, and Fiend Folio.  The point being that this would have been a natural evolution of the game and, I believe, led to a much more satisfying version of 3E for the old timers.   

[2] - On the problem with skills - "The most common such design error is “roll to play”. If the players don’t make their Etiquette skill check, the key NPC won’t help them; if they fail their Lockpicking roll, the door to the dungeon won’t open."

[2] - I much prefer a simple that gives the DM guidance but generally leaves it up to them and their group.  Sure, go with a x in D6 chance of success modified by the case presented by the player; maybe the character's background will help?  Maybe the character was raised by his uncle and his uncle was owed a favor by the local bishop?  in return, the character was taught the finer points of etiquette, religious practice, or whatever.  Not only will this argument lead to an increased chance of success but the DM could tell the player to make a note on his character sheet adding this to his back story and such so they can reference it later during play.  No need to go through a large list of skills trying to cover any "gotcha moments" before play has even began.

[The Semi-Retired Gamer]

Part II obviously has someone that is TRIGGERED in the comments.   

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Jan 8, 2022 11:42:31 GMT -5 The Semi-Retired Gamer said:

Part II obviously has someone that is TRIGGERED in the comments.   

That was a melt down! An example of a skill Nazi!

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Jan 8, 2022 5:15:49 GMT -5 The Semi-Retired Gamer said:

This series of blog posts is fascinating to me.  I'm enjoying the read.  

Maybe the character was raised by his uncle and his uncle was owed a favor by the local bishop?  in return, the character was taught the finer points of etiquette, religious practice, or whatever.  Not only will this argument lead to an increased chance of success but the DM could tell the player to make a note on his character sheet adding this to his back story and such so they can reference it later during play.  No need to go through a large list of skills trying to cover any "gotcha moments" before play has even began.

My caveat is that when a player wants to throw in some background on the fly to explain why he could do thus and such is that it cannot contradict earlier stuff unless he has previously told me out of game that he is lying to the other players about certain things in his background that did not substantially effect outcomes, in the way this would.

For instance, I had one player who unfortunately had to move quite a distance away, that told me his character was EVIL, but that would be slowly hinted at until it was fully revealed, he intended to take about two years to out his character as a bad guy. A lot of what he told them was going to be untrue, but no in ways that would be obviously discovered in the short term.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Jan 8, 2022 5:15:49 GMT -5 The Semi-Retired Gamer said:

This series of blog posts is fascinating to me.  I'm enjoying the read.  

[1] - "Fanatical game hobbyists often express the opinion that DUNGEONS & DRAGONS will continue as an ever-expanding, always improving game system. TSR and I see it a bit differently. … Americans have somehow come to equate change with improvement."

[1] - This still rings true to me.  Change just for the sake of change is almost never a good idea.  People get burned out on the edition treadmill if they try to keep up.  Imagine if AD&D would have continued to evolve with a natural evolution over the years with small changes being made after years of play bringing to light when changes truly needed to be made.  A hypothetical 2nd edition of AD&D could have made some changes and additions such as UA material and the most popular stuff being used from Dragon magazine also.  Maybe the Bard would have evolved into a more traditional class?  Maybe the NPC classes in Dragon would have been included in the 2E DMG.  The 2E Monster Manual could have been like a greatest hits collection from the original, MM2, and Fiend Folio.  The point being that this would have been a natural evolution of the game and, I believe, led to a much more satisfying version of 3E for the old timers.   

IMO they should have stayed with OD&D and have promoted open ended sandbox play. They could have published materials that reinforced and complimented that play style. They could have printed a lot more supplements and rules grab bags, all noted as optional. They could have hired Dave Hargrave, published Arduin as a setting, and the Grimoires as supplements. The guys that did the Warlock version, those could have been published as OD&D supplements. They could have went a long time with supporting old school gaming IMO. Holmes made a start for them, but quite frankly if they could have had someone on staff to reorganize it like, say for instance, Delving Deeper, but leaving in the ambiguities and occasional vagueness that were part of the magic would have been good. Then around 1982 they could have published three or four different flavors of OD&D, while keeping the total length about the same and split into three books, with a supplement or two specifically for that flavor.

Jan 8, 2022 5:15:49 GMT -5 The Semi-Retired Gamer said:

[2] - On the problem with skills - "The most common such design error is “roll to play”. If the players don’t make their Etiquette skill check, the key NPC won’t help them; if they fail their Lockpicking roll, the door to the dungeon won’t open."

[2] - I much prefer a simple that gives the DM guidance but generally leaves it up to them and their group.  Sure, go with a x in D6 chance of success modified by the case presented by the player; maybe the character's background will help?  Maybe the character was raised by his uncle and his uncle was owed a favor by the local bishop?  in return, the character was taught the finer points of etiquette, religious practice, or whatever.  Not only will this argument lead to an increased chance of success but the DM could tell the player to make a note on his character sheet adding this to his back story and such so they can reference it later during play.  No need to go through a large list of skills trying to cover any "gotcha moments" before play has even began.

Yeah, I don't like skills and the rolls for everything. Some things they are going to fail at, it just means they will have to come back and try it again later. Maybe come back to that door when they have a Knock spell in hand to use.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

He says:

While it might appear to be a no-brainer, I think an essential—and often overlooked—element of game design is asking the question, "what sort of gameplay does this rule actually create?". The answer always trumps what the rules text actually says or the intention behind it, and is why so many apologist arguments based on "but that's not how it's supposed to be done!" fail to convince despite the empirical truth behind them. When faced again and again with the natural outgrowth of a rule, at a certain point the logical response is to acknowledge that that's the reality, regardless of intention, and either reword the rule to better get what you originally intended, or acknowledge how it's actually being played in the wider environment and reinforce that.

It is a no-brainer and referees have a keen sense of this in a very practical way, it is the one of the reasons referees tinker and modify the rules, it is to get what you want and intend in game play.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

He says:

It wasn’t until 1985, when TSR’s dire financial straits combined with Gygax’s accumulated backlog of Dragon magazine articles to produce Unearthed Arcana (UA), that we saw a major new rules supplement. This sourcebook introduced a host of changes, mostly dubious, but while the material within it was perfectly capable of unbalancing campaigns,[1] it was not due to an alteration of the game's central design philosophy but because much of the material was poorly playtested. In other words, most of UA is perfectly old school in tone, just bad.

Just so, lack of playtesting and refining of those new rules was the problem. This is where they most missed having Arneson as part of the company. No one was better at playtesting rules than Arneson, he was a master at finding flaws in rules and exploiting weaknesses in them. TSR would have made money paying Arneson to play test and refine things before they were released and Gygax himself was better at using others ideas, than starting from scratch with his own.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

He says:

The Death of the Old School — Skill Systems

He is wrong here IMO, modules were the Death of the Old School, Skill Systems just nailed the coffin doors shut.

plus the clear shift in module design in 1984 and Dragon’s insistence that all material going forward would use the UA rules when relevant, eventually led players to refer to this late period of 1st edition’s life as 1.5 edition (or 1.5e). A major element of this new quasi-edition was that the three non-UA books all fielded D&D’s first (non-thief) skill system: the non-weapon proficiency (NWP) rules

and

System-wide skill systems (as opposed to those associated with a single class, like skills for the thief, which debuted in 1975's Supplement I: Greyhawk) were an early game design innovation.

Not innovation, but degradation of game design.

However, even the best of them come at a cost. They add more rules to the game, imposing a comprehension tax that makes it take longer to learn (and to leaf through the book during the game when you're in search of a rule). And, as with any character option added, they make characters take longer to create, as players want to go through everything available and make informed choices.

That's high cost, they slow the whole game down from character creation to game play and they provide an endless source for those most evil of men - rules lawyers - to argue and debate and bring every game to glacial slowness if not a complete halt. A very high price indeed.

And let's be clear here, IMO you should never be leafing through the book during the game in search of a rule, NEVER. Make a ruling and continue on, don't break the players immersion in the game, for such a poor reason.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Now he gets to the crux of the matter:

But to understand why they matter from a specifically old-school perspective, it's important to realize that, when a player wanted to do most anything in the game prior to this point, they usually had to negotiate with the DM for how to do it: was it possible, if so what would it entail, how long would it take (for time was a vital currency in old-school play) and finally, how would it be resolved mechanically (e.g. roll 1D6, 2D6, 1D20; Gygax favoured percentile). A player would a) in general have to describe what they were doing (even if often this was just a very brief description), and b) tend to leave things that were assumed to be outside their grasp to NPC specialists (“why would I know anything about alchemy?”). Tasks were arbitrated on the fly by the DM, with those that came up often enough typically given answers that progressed to the status of house rule. Each group could handle things in their own preferred fashion.

This is the faster, quicker way to play, the old school way to play. And IMO FWIW, if a player wanted to do alchemical stuff (as one example) learn about it outside the game, let the ref know you are doing that and then bring that new knowledge to the game. In game, that character spent a year as an apprentice to an alchemist.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

He says:

With skill lists, even if optional, players tend to look to these as official implementations and want to use them in that fashion, greatly reducing the scope of rulings.

Skills also almost inevitably shift the playstyle to what one might call button-based gameplay. Players no longer feel the need to describe what they’re doing, because the relevant skill check (or its kissing cousin, the attribute check) allows a shortcut. To pick one example, every old-school ruleset back to OD&D had a basic X-in-1D6 roll search method for secret doors, but this existed side by side with a narrative approach to actually finding the door that could entirely obviate the need for a roll; see p. 13 of The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures and pp. 97 and 99 of the 1st edition DMG for a good example. As time went on, the roll aspect came further to the fore, while the narrative angle retreated to the background. B/X was happy to run with a declaration of intent followed by a roll (p. B21 and B60), as was Mentzer, largely ignoring the narrative element. Eventually we wound up with a universal application of “I make a Search check”, with the narrative element abandoned entirely.[5] This broad tendency is so powerful that even with there being a caveat right in the rules of “X roll shouldn’t take the place of roleplaying or logic”, you still have people just shortcutting to rolls, because people are naturally lazy.[6] To return to the question I opened with, "what sort of gameplay does this rule create?" Here we see a mechanic slowly but surely changing the face of play.

Skills killed roleplaying and converted the games to rollplaying. Here is something else that happened, it killed player creativity, but removing the element of the player needing to have the ability to think and along with modules, the players started to lose the ability to make decisions, because all the thinking and decision making was taken out of the hands of the players by the designers of the rules and of the modules.

I do not think it is because people are naturally lazy, I think it is a direct result of dumbing the game down at the same time our educational system was being dumbed down. Let's face it, governments do not want people as citizens who have critical thinking skills and decision making skills. No, not a conspiracy, just a consequence of authoritarian thinking. 

And it did change the face of play and in a drastic manner. Skills and all that comes from them are New School gaming and I want nothing to do with New School gaming, nothing about it is fun for me.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

He says:

Good or bad effects on play by the concept aside, this all assumes that the skill system was well constructed. However, in these early days of RPG design, the pitfalls of these systems were easily missed, and mistakes were made. There is a sort of cobra effect present in many skill systems, in that rules designed to increase variety and player options actually wind up reducing them. Before NWPs, the general principle of D&D was “assume competence”: it was presumed that players could survive in the wilderness, ride a horse, start a fire, and other typical adventuring tasks. Generally, there was a broad swath of everyman knowledge and abilities related to adventuring (the PC realm) and then everything else (alchemy, deep lore, crafting, etc), which tended to be shunted off to the NPC realm.

Virtually every rule change to D&D from NWPs on that were allegedly "intended" to increase variety and player options, did in fact reduce options, 2E was notorious for this and smart tables dumped a lot of the rules in the interests of moving the game along. Even in 5E which is an improvement over 3E, the time required to create new characters is still obscene. As another example, from the time that melee rounds were split into segments, most notoriously in 2E, combat was slowed to a crawl and what used to take 20 minutes could now take hours. 3E was notorious as well for combats that proceeded at glacial speed. I play in a 5E game and combat is very slow and it takes forever to play out a combat.

Perverse incentive - The Original Cobra Effect

A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result that is contrary to the intentions of its designers. The cobra effect is the most direct kind of perverse incentive, typically because the incentive unintentionally rewards people for making the issue worse.[1][2] The term is used to illustrate how incorrect stimulation in economics and politics can cause unintended consequences,[2] and is an example of the proverb "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

IMO a lot of the time - it is made worse because of bad intentions. But the biggest cause of a perverse incentive is the inability of people to think things through before they make the decision to do whatever it is.

Read about the Cobra Effect, a lot of examples have been provided. We have seen numerous examples of the Cobra Effect in 2020 and 2021, but those are censored at this time, but may be listed in a few years.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

He says:

These weren’t exotic implementations, either: Fire Building allowed one to literally start a fire, with the natural follow-on assumption that if you did not have that skill, you couldn’t start a fire--otherwise, what’s the point of the skill? For the general skill list, Cooking, Dancing, Fishing, Gaming, Horsemanship, Hunting, Small Water Craft, and Swimming were some of the skills listed.

I am sorry, but why would you go adventuring if you could not start a fire, or ride a horse or cook or fish or hunt - at least as a fighting-man. If you look at the skill lists, then every PC should have gotten about 10 each with slightly different ones per class as a default and then been allowed to choose the number allowed by the rules. But even then the competence level in 2E for example was pitiful even at 8th level you were still pretty incompetent in the skills you had.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

He says:

The Death of the Old School — Universal Task Resolution
One of D&D's few outright design failures is in its attitude towards ability scores: that it has always warred between having attributes randomly determined in some fashion and the vital importance of attributes in general.

It was not always this way. OD&D core (1974) placed very little value on attributes. No class or race required a set score minimum to play. Only Charisma, Constitution, and Dexterity had any class-independent mechanical effects at all, and these were weak compared to modern effects, as you can see.

It only became a design failure when the rules were re-written to make attributes even more important than they were in real life. Until sadly real life followed suit.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

He says:

From the release of Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975) onward, however, attributes starting granting higher bonuses to more things and being required to access more of the available classes. In Greyhawk, Strength and Intelligence received non-class dependent effects, to match Dex, Con and Charisma, while the effects of Constitution were increased. The supplement was also the first to introduce demihuman level limits based on their attributes. For example, Elves, originally limited to 4th level as Fighters, could now become 5th level if they had Strength 17, and 6th level with an 18.

It's not necessary to detail every change in the old-school rules that increased the importance of ability scores: it's enough to understand that ability score creep started early, culminating in AD&D. This led to increasingly convoluted rolling methods to “randomly” generate scores while still ensuring high enough values were generated to keep players happy, Unearthed Arcana's infamous Method V being the best example.[12]

Let's be clear, Greyhawk was the first departure from old school rules, these changes were not old school when they increased the importance of ability scores. Ability score effects replaced what would have otherwise been done with magic and have been less restrictive.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

He says:

The ability score check, where one tries to roll equal to or under their ability score to succeed at something, was first seen in proto-form in Dragon #1, in an incredibly convoluted fan article that was promptly ignored forever.

We started using ability score checks in 1975, but only used them when it was not obvious that the you could or could not do something. For example: character with a DEX of 3 and a STR of 3 wants to leap 25 feet, go ahead and try but you will fall to your death; character with a DEX of 18 and a STR of 18 wants to leap 25 feet, go ahead and try, you have a 60% chance of making it, if you shed your armor, weapons and pack.

[Vladimir, The Dark Prince]

Feb 20, 2022 16:22:18 GMT -5 The Perilous Dreamer said:

He says:

The ability score check, where one tries to roll equal to or under their ability score to succeed at something, was first seen in proto-form in Dragon #1, in an incredibly convoluted fan article that was promptly ignored forever.

We started using ability score checks in 1975, but only used them when it was not obvious that the you could or could not do something. For example: character with a DEX of 3 and a STR of 3 wants to leap 25 feet, go ahead and try but you will fall to your death; character with a DEX of 18 and a STR of 18 wants to leap 25 feet, go ahead and try, you have a 60% chance of making it, if you shed your armor, weapons and pack.

 A lot of things are pretty obvious that they will not work. So no need to roll at all unless the player just won't take no for an answer. OK you have a 0.01% chance of doing a standing backflip in full plate with your DEX of 3 and a STR of 3, so roll a 1 on percentile dice twice.