This is a retelling of my recent Sword & Wizardry during a day of gaming with my friends. See part 1 here.
Descent into the Depths of Level 1
As we set up for the game, we took a bunch of Hero Clix minis to act as our miniatures to represent marching order and determine relative position of PCs during combat.
I also opened a brand new Graph paper notebook I bought at the local supermarket and gave it to Vince.
Vince: What’s that for? I need to keep a diary or something?
Chatty: No, you are now the group’s cartographer. Try not to fall in a pit of flame. Now you start climbing down a 20×20 circular staircase that opens into….
Boy is describing a room’s dimension hard when you lost the touch. It’s an exercise in clear communication to get the cartographer to represent semi-faithfully the dungeon room the party is in. I also had to refrain from grabbing the map and do it myself many times.
The first room was shaped like a pillared chapel hall. Where the altar would be, stood a gigantic bestial statue holding a large Bronze bowl instead. The bowl was filled with fire burning without any noticeable fuel. The room had 3 exits.
Being visceral D&D players, they started sifting through the rooms looking for traps. Orvat (Franky’s Fighter) used his grappling hook to check the floor for traps (He would throw his hook forward and real it in repeatedly).
Classic!The game was already a success in my mind.
After rapidly rolling a bunch of dice for nothing and telling them there were no traps on the pillars, a few PCs started investigating the bowl. At a certain point, they attempted to shift the massive bowl in the statue’s hands (Rolling Str checks, d20, play under ability).
Of course, the gaming notes had nothing to say about this, but in my perception of classic D&D, PC effort must be answered with a proper reaction from the DM. (That’s actually the core lesson I got from Reading Tracy and Curtis Hickman’s XDM book)
ChattyDM: Okay, so as you shift the bowl a few degrees counter clockwise. Suddenly the flame goes out! And so does all your torches and lanterns!
Ah yes! Harmless but unnerving… had the adventure come with a random encounter table, I’d have played one right there!
After light was restored, the PCs shifted the Bowl back, re-lighting it, and walked to the eastern door.
One up? No, one down!
Always remembering what light source was used around the map maker (something I had to get used to doing again after 20 years) the players checked the door for traps. When satisfied (or convinced that spending more time on it was useless), Orvat opened the door. The room was filled with cobwebs and featured a crumpled skeleton and a dessicated corpse.
Using is trustworthy grappling hook shtick, Orvat managed to grab both bodies and drag them out without disturbing the Giant Spider resting over the door (I ruled that it would pounce on a 1-2 on a d6, the core mechanic of S&W). In fact, with that technique, Orvat scored the room’s only treasure, a measly 6 gp from a leather pouch.
Great fishing Franky!
After that Orvat stepped in the room, only to be surprised by the pouncing spider. After missing him (because of his Ring Mail), the Spider kept the initiative and made a beeline for the second player in the marching order…
Anne: Guys, I think it wasn’t wise to place the 1 hp Elf in second place.
Vince: No S#17!
The spider bit, dealt exactly 1 hp and injected it’s weak poison, which promptly killed poor Ortec.
Woot, 1st PC death within 30 minutes of playing, I’m good at this old school D&D!
The Spider was rapidly dispatched with a good swipe of an axe. Mufti, great charitable cleric soul that he was, promptly took all of Ortec’s possessions under the cover of his religious duties to the dead.
DM Note: I have it on pretty good authority that the #1 source of loot for level 1 PCs is what they can grab when a fellow PC bites the dust. This is so classically cool.
Length of combat? 5 minutes, number of deaths? 2.
Upon further exploration of the room, I described a moving cocoon stuck near the ceiling. Once the players took it down, nearly skewering it first for safety, the players opened it to reveal a groggy Elf (Fighter mode) named Ubvid.
Chatty: That’s Vince’s new character by the way.
Party: That was fast…
Yup, Vince was back in the game with a new PC before they were ready to leave the room. That counts for a lot in a fast and furious RPG like S&W seems to support.
Spiky Portcullis
So the PCs then ventured South, where they entered a room whose only other exit was blocked by a portcullis.
DM note: As I mentioned before, I was running this adventure blind, reading each room as the PCs entered them. I even made jokes that the room was loading whenever I stopped the adventure to catch up. Fortunately every description was short. In this particular case, I described the Map’s feature before reading the text. In the room, the portcullis is a trap sprung when the PCs went deeper in the dungeon. Instead of doing a retcon, I went with it, assuming that another dungeon denizen triggered the trap before.
The PCs pooled their resources together and 3 of them lifted the portcullis (40 STR points needed) while the 4th one Spiked it open.
Ahhh! Iron Spikes, what can’t they do?
The PCs continued southwards…
(Sorry to keep those short and sweet, I’m prepping my Friday game at the same time, I hope you enjoy them!)
Image Credits: Wizard of the Coast
Ah yes.. The pain of describing a rooms dimensions and having someone else carting it.. Like you I got so damned frustrated and sometimes it would take too long, finally I just draw it out for the players as we play, and I describe it.
Hang a dry erase board on the wall and use that, really nice, works well. Then when battle happens, transfer, quickly, to the battlemap.:)
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Love the technique for bringing the new PC into the party. Very nicely integrated into the situation with the giant spider!
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PM was kind enough to remind me that I forgotten how his PC looted the Elf’s body before it started growing colder. I edited the post for great justice!
Interesting, the mapping thing was always a problem for me too. I always wanted to make complicated corridors, and it really screwed up everything when I had to help the mapper out.
IT’S NOT MY FAULT DWARFS ARE EFFICIENT IN THEIR WORK
Sounds like someone forgot to get a mirror (or shiny polished buckler) on a stick to check rooms (and ceilings) before entering. It helps if the stick is also a spear incase you need a weapon real quick.
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It’s interesting to see what different gamers find enjoyable.
I for one would be apoplectic with frustration as either DM or player if someone in the party insisted on checking every 5′ square of a room with their grappling hook before doing anything.
The whole “random and completely arbitrarily placed traps” aspect of earlier editions of D&D was something that never really gelled for me.
@wrath: The Payoff of this whole thing is when the party realizes that they have mistakes in the map and corridors seem to go through rooms. 🙂
@Walkerp: I had a flash from World of Warcraft where a low level quest asks you to recover people captured by spiders. The introduction of Vince’s second character came organically. Strangely enough, he also inherited the job of map maker.
@Zzaechov: Given that most of my players started late in 1e AD&D or during 2e’s reign, I found them to be quite resourceful and got many of the classic D&D tropes early.
@Colmarr: Do note that I didn’t ask Franky to roll anything with his Grappling hook trick. At a certain point, we both assumed that he was doing it all the time and I would tell him if it triggered anything.
Also, do note that the dungeon was designed by Chgowiz, who, while a 100% old school gamer, actually made a dungeon that was consistent, including the traps in it.
@ Chatty. Fair enough, although the pedant in me feels the need to point out that pt 1 (you both assumed he was always doing it) and pt 2 (the consistent dungeon) seem diametrically opposed.
If the dungeon was consistent and realistic, there was no need for him to always be doing it.
It’s part of the reason why I like the “design honesty” of 4e. Earlier editions seem to say “You need to take this seriously and step by step” but everyone actually playing them knows that becomes mind-numbingly boring and downright unfun.
4e simply comes out and says “Don’t really worry about checking for randomly placed traps. We know they’re not fun so they’re not there. And if they are there, don’t worry about it because it’ll be more fun dealing with the consequences anyway.”
Disclaimer: Of course, there are always exceptions, both in terms of whether there should be random traps (Tomb of Horrors, anyone) and whether they’re fun.
I think you know my style well enough to know that I let it go like that because Franky was having so much fun being clever. As you’ll see later, the trick produced quite hilarious (and useful) results.
All players came into the game with preconceived notions of what old School gaming was like, myself included, and I let the players indulge theirs while I had my own brand of DMing fun, like making stuff up to surprise and worry the players.
That being said, I liked the experience for different reasons than those that make me like 4e… In fact I’m designing this week’s game as I write these.
I do indeed, 🙂
My last post was more a comment on game systems than a comment on your game.
@Colemarr: To which I say, indeed I agree. Many old published adventures I would never play again… And I would intensely dislike to play with an old school DM that used dungeons based on the worst tropes of the genre. Playing with Chgowiz was very refreshing ans he embodied the ‘Say Yes’ mentality.
Which proves, once again that the Master often makes the game.
Chatty,
I seem to be saying this a lot today in many different places. But while you can use any ruleset to play any game, different rulesets are better for different things.
(The actual Maxim I use when counseling Setting Design is, “Make sure the Ruleset you choose matches the game you want to play, because eventually the Setting and the game will match the System.”)
Your latest posts are merely perfect, spot on examples of this. This old school romp epitomizes the thoughtful, fun dungeon crawl mentality. It also, whether you realize it or not, is just as illustrative of the drawback of this system, which is that due to the very lack of exact rules per situation, the need for an agile-minded DM and players is greater here than in other systems.
Keep it up. I’ll keep reading.
-LV
Hey Chatty, Thanks for a enjoyable play-by-play of your session. I’m kind of new to DMing. You said you describe rooms and have your players draw them out. I’m working with the WOTC Dungeon Tiles in a 4e game. Should I lay down the tiles when the players are in exploration mode, or should I reserve them only for combat encounters and narrate rooms when the pc’s are exploring?
@LV: I have a feeling that Old School D&D must have been horrible on creatively challenged and over-organized gamers. In fact maybe some of the horror stories of yesteryear came from such groups (6 binder set of Houserules, Novel-Sized setting notes, drop-dead slow-search-all-5′-squares crawling…)
@bonHomme: In 4e, especially for a new DM, I wouldn’t worry about doing that. Lay the tiles down (if the dungeon fits tiles 100%) and let the players have their fun moving all over the plce.
Personally, I usually end up drawing the map and only laying tiles during fights.
I recommend against going old school and asking the players to map out the dungeon, unless you think they would have fun doing it.
@Chatty,
All those DM’s that actually used random assignment? That’s where they came from. Random Treasure and monster placement? Same thing.
Don’t make fun of my binder! (Of course, it’s a wiki now…)
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I remember drawing out my first map (In Search of Adventure) in one of my first games at a friends house in 1978. The DM’s maps were top secret and mapping them out based solely on verbal description was part of the game (as we saw it). The DM didn’t correct errors – if you screwed it up, that meant your party got it wrong and was probably lost (which I did and we were). Once we extricated ourselves — I remember keeping that scribbley map for months afterward — we felt like we really had accomplished something! hehe.
I have to say that, as someone who started playing in 1980 but hasn’t played as much recently, drawing the maps as the DM describes them to you was a HUGE part of the game. As Hosidax says, “The DM didn’t correct errors – if you screwed it up, that meant your party got it wrong and was probably lost (which I did and we were).” While we did a lot of roleplaying, when we entered the dungeon, we went into exploration mode, and to explore properly you needed a map of the dungeon.
It’s also interesting to me that this mapping, which I equate with D&D a great deal, does not exist anymore AND I’ve not given that fact too much thought. Hmmm…
I think that mapping didn’t so much disappear as it stopped being a potentially fun exploration task and became a tool to help the Dm describe the dungeon. Much like the early Auto-mapping features of CRPGs that appeared in the mid to late 80’s.
Thing is… if your group wants to start exploring again, giving them the onus of mapping is perfectly fine.
RE: Mapping
Detailed mapping appeals to certain player types and is anathema to others. Players who have a strong penchant for exploring nooks and crannies (like myself) love it. Guys who want to “get to the good part” absolutely hate it. It’s also very much a skill for both the DM and the player that must be practiced fairly regularly in order to do it quickly, accurately, and efficiently. There are tricks to speeding it up, though.
If you have a relatively simple template to describe simple room layouts, that helps. For example, I always phrase directions as “60 feet long” and “40 feet wide” to describe how far ahead the room runs, and the distance between the left and right walls, respectively. If you take two minutes to explain this to the mapper, it makes life much easier in every subsequent room.
I also recommend ridiculously simplifying the shapes of complex rooms and mostly just giving the size of the area they occupy. For example: “It’s a ‘T’-shaped room, about 60 feet long and 40 feet wide. You are entering at the base of the ‘T’.” For a simple “Where the crap are we?” map, they don’t need to know how wide the stem of the “T” is, or about the fillets that blunt the corners, or about all the little alcoves along the side walls, or about the nave behind the altar. You can mention that stuff when you get into more detailed description, and the mapper can adjust his map then, if he wants. Even with odd-shaped squiggly caverns, I try to just give a general length and width. It’s easier for everyone that way.
Third, its really not necessary to map everything in exacting detail. This map (http://almy.us/image/dungeon.jpg) of the computer game Zork is one of the most useful, accurate, and attractive maps I’ve ever seen, and it doesn’t even have a scale. This kind of “flowchart” map – with simple circles for rooms, lines for connecting passages and doors, and zero consideration for absolute position or scale – is entirely adequate for any purpose the PCs might have, other than tracking down secret doors.
Another suggestion for DMs that want to encourage this sort of thing is to provide in-game rewards. For example, in the town outside my mega-dungeon, there is a painter and scribe named Tabitha who does a lucrative trade in maps of the nearby ruins. She buys from the cartographers, then sells copies of the map to other explorers. She pays the PCs pretty handsomely for a copy of any map they draw, and shells out more for one that’s obviously well-made. Plus, selling her your map is a form of Map Insurance in the case of a TPK: New characters can simply go to her and buy the fruits of a dead party’s exploits.
Amazing map Rob, it looks like something out of the Voynich manuscript (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript).
“She buys from the cartographers, then sells copies of the map to other explorers.”
And that is pure genius!
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The map is pretty epic. I wish I could take credit for it, but I only found it on the Interblogs.