The Infamous OD&D Caller

I was going to start posting a series on alternative corridor generation for random dungeon creation, but then I was reminded about a recent forum discussion on the caller.

There's not a lot of information about what a "caller" is in the original three booklets. Callers are mentioned in a play example on pages 12-14 of Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. The book doesn't say what a caller does, but in the example it's things like "We're going downstairs," "Three of us listen at the door," "Two of us throw our weight against the door while the others get ready for combat." Based on that example, some people have come to the conclusion that OD&D is a bad RPG because it deprotagonizes players. The caller decides what everyone does, and the other players just have to shut up and do as they are told.

Why on earth would an RPG do something like that?

Why would players roll up characters, give them a name, and buy equipment if they weren't actually going to do anything from then on? Why wouldn't OD&D instead be a one-on-one game where one player controls an entire party?

Some people have thought of that line of logic and thus ask for clarification on what a caller is, or why the rule exists. But the short answer is: it's not a rule. It's just a convenience. Somebody tells the referee what everyone is doing. It doesn't mean there is no discussion among the players, or that a player can't disagree with what someone else says they should do. The example in U&WA skips over what other people are saying, because it's supposed to be an example of how the referee moderates what's going on. Players aren't supposed to worry about that section at all.

The Fantasy Trip was published only a few years after D&D. It's not D&D, but it has some D&D features, including a tradition of using a caller. Perhaps D&D should have had something more explicit, such as this passage from In the Labyrinth, the TFT campaign guidebook.

"CHOOSING A LEADER. Ask the players if they want to designate a leader. They don't have to — but if they do, you can assume their party is a little quieter as they travel. If they DO choose a leader, you will speak to the leader when asking what the party does (at least until a combat situation, when it's likely to be every man for himself). Of course, a player can always have his figure DISOBEY - and for some figures, this would be quite in character." (TFT:ITL, p. 33.)

This makes it sound more like a rule, but even here, it's aimed more at the referee than at players. What do referees do when players don't designate a caller or leader? They should treat the party as being a little noisier. That's it. There's no other rules in that paragraph.

Even this glosses over the fact that there are different levels of caller/leader. Some groups might just have someone make decisions on which direction to go and nothing else. Others might have the leader assign tasks to each character, although the player of that character decides how to obey, if they obey at all. In practice, I don't think I've ever seen any GM ask who would be the caller, nor have I seen players make a formal decision on who would be the caller. It was always informal. The GM would ask, "What are you going to do?" and someone would reply, "We go left." If no one said otherwise, that person was the caller.

The only hard rule I'd use is: what players say to each other happens in the game world, while what players say to the GM is happening in the real world. That means that if people are arguing over which way to go, their characters are arguing, too, and therefore monsters can hear them. This means extra wandering monster rolls.

Things like a caller saying "We go left," or a player asking "Do I understand what the goblin is saying?" do not happen in the game world, so monsters can't overhear them. They basically happen outside of time.

Vancian vs. Non-Vancian

One of the questions that was not on the top ten troll questions list was "Vancian or non-Vancian magic?" Why, I'm not sure; it certainly gets asked enough. Many fiercely defend the Vancian system, but there's a significant number of people who vilify Vancian magic and will only play with non-Vancian magic systems -- by which they always mean "spell point systems". Which is not only short-sighted, but ironic, since Vancian magic is, technically, a spell-point system.

Consider this: spell point systems assume that you have a pool of spell points, which you spend to cast spells. When you are out of spell points, you can't cast any more spells. Pretend, though, that there are two kinds of magic, say Divine and Arcane, and each has its own independent pool (I played a version of D&D once that had "Piety Points" and "Magical Conductivity points".) That's still a spell-point system, right? It just has more detail.

Now pretend that you have six kinds of magic instead of two, with six pools of spell points.  You cannot trade points across pools, but you can have access to all six pools, and be able to cast spells of each of the six types.

Let's call those six spell pools ... "Level 1 Spells", "Level 2 Spells", and so on. That is exactly what is happening.

Perhaps it's the added complexity of having six pools of points that bothers the non-Vancian advocates. However, I've seen many single-pool spell-point systems that do not keep the spell costs simple, but instead have unique costs for each spell. This is what happens in the Fantasy Trip magic system, or its descendant, GURPS Magic. You have to look up each spell to find out what the spell point cost is. It's not a flat cost based on spell level, such as you see in the Microlite 20 spell point system. That, in my experience, is way more complicated than Vancian magic. So I really don't see why the non-Vancian proponents object so vehemently to what is, in essence, just another spell point system.

Elegant Rolls IV: The Fantasy Trip

One of the things I've been thinking about from the very beginning of the elegant rolls series is how, instead of using a d20 for a "roll under ability score" mechanic, you could use the mechanic from The Fantasy Trip, with a view modifications, to create something really elegant.

The Fantasy Trip -- Melee, Wizard, the advanced versions of both, and In the Labyrinth -- used 3d6 by default. Roll under an ability score (there were only three;) the highest possible roll is a fumble. The mechanic has two "lapses of elegance": there are little modifiers to add or subtract from your target score, and the critical success is the lowest possible roll, instead of an exact match with your ability score. Those are easily fixed. But more importantly, aside from a few modifiers, difficult or easy tasks add or drop dice; a parry or dodge increases the number of dice that the attacker rolls to 4 or 5 dice, for example. In the Labyrinth added Talents, which generally drop a die from the roll. As it so happens, one of the "classic" D&D lines, BECMI I believe, included ability checks that worked almost the same way: roll 3d6 under an ability score, or 4 dice for difficult tasks, 2 dice for easy tasks. It's this dice trick that's key to making a more elegant system.

Here's my modified version of the TFT mechanic:

1. Roll 3d6 under ability, 4 dice for unfavorable situations, 2 dice for favorable situations. An Expert drops one die, a Master drops 2 dice. Add 2 dice if task is difficult even under perfect conditions or completely outside character's experience/training.
2. Exact Match = critical success, All dice matching on a failed roll = fumble (all 6s = automatic fumble, regardless of skill.)
3. Higher is better for opposed rolls; having a higher class level counts as a favorable situation.

If an ability is a class ability, that counts as "Expert" (name level counts as "Master".)

If the roll is less than 2 dice, don't bother to roll.

For combat, wearing any armor at all or using a shield adds 1 die (these are cumulative.) Low AC (2 to 5) also acts as a damage cap. Use standard damage rolls. For Ascending AC, use opposed rolls: attacker rolls under Dex, defender rolls under AC, highest wins.) For ranged attacks, treat short and long ranges as favorable/unfavorable situations.

My Experience with Miniatures

Several of the OSR bloggers also like miniatures, and do routine posts about their latest acquisitions or constructions. I've commented before that I don't use miniatures, but I thought I'd do a personal history post about why I don't use them. So, forgive the following; it won't have any useful information, just autobiographical stuff.

I've mentioned before that my first experience with D&D didn't even involve a book. I was taught by a friend who learned to play in his math class at school, and all we had were mimeographed tables. What I didn't mention is that we also weren't playing with minis or counters of any kind, nor did we write down marching order or attack positions on scratch paper; it was pure arena of the imagination.

In '77 or '78, I saw an ad for Holmes Basic in a magazine and managed to talk some money out of my mom to order it. After getting that, I saw a couple other things on the product list in the back and got the PHB and Metamorphosis Alpha. There was no game store in the town where I lived, and I didn't see Dragon Magazine for a couple more years, so I didn't see much about minis, other than occasional references to "you can use miniatures if you want to".

I eventually gleaned more information about miniatures and realized I didn't want to get into them at all; I was always low on cash, so miniatures seemed like too expensive a hobby to dive into. Plus, I've never been too good at small manual hobbies (didn't do too well with a couple model kits I bought,) so the whole painting side of minis seemed too much like frustration waiting to happen. I did actually get some minis at a garage sale once (an AD&D dwarves set, as I recall,) but never used these even for marching order.

On the other hand, I did use counters and hex battle maps when I bought Mêlée and Wizard. My friends and I played that a bit; not as much as D&D, but we got several sessions in, including a 12-hour marathon. Later, when I was in my GURPS phase, I did some of the Cardboard Heroes-style paper minis. And aside from the fact that these didn't really seem to add much to the game for me and the more detailed combat rules weren't really giving me any pleasure, I found one annoying aspect to using counters was transportation and organization; they were an extra thing to keep track of, and the really small counters like those for dropped weapons tended to get scattered and lost. I kept finding tiny cardboard swords on the floor of my apartment for a couple years after I stopped using counters.

For a while, I did still toy with the idea of at least using visual aides. I practiced rendering overhead terrain shots in Bryce 3D, thinking I might print a set of full-color geomorphs, but this seemed like too labor-intensive, in the end. And it would still be extra stuff to transport and keep track of. This is also why, if I ever have a sudden windfall, I don't see myself changing my mind and getting a bunch of pre-painted minis, or paying someone to paint them for me. I usually travel to someone's house or to a store to run a game, and I travel by bus. Some of the prefab dungeon components look nice, but they would be even bulkier, plus the assembly and disassembly time would annoy me.

So, I know from personal experience that I just don't enjoy minis. Which is why my rules suggestions tend towards abstract movement and combat. Maybe at some point in the future I might consider doing those Bryce-style geomorphs, or maybe Sketchup-style, but as images stored on a tablet device instead of printed cards.

Class and Level Systems

In keeping with yesterday's table comparing ability score names across multiple early system, I thought I'd do the same for other terms common to class and level systems. I dropped RuneQuest and Traveller from this chart, since neither has classes or levels. I've added Rolemaster, since I at least remember RM used the terms "class", "level" and "experience points". However, I don't remember for sure whether it had the terms "hit dice" and "hit points", and my knowledge of Tunnels & Trolls terminology is kind of hazy, too.

I used to run TFT, so I was able to be more definitive with that column. TFT had experience points, but these are traded to increase ability scores, so TFT is a class system, but levels are only implied. Similarly, TFT tracks damage against total hit points, but total hit points = ST.

D&D	T&T	TFT	Rolemaster
Class (3)	Class (3)	Class (2)	Profession (20?)
Fighter	Warrior	Hero	Fighter
Magic-User	Wizard	Wizard	Magician
Level	Level	n/a	Level
Experience Points	Experience Points	Experience Points	Experience Points
Hit Dice	n/a	n/a	Body Development Points
Hit Points	(CON)	(ST)	Hits

Again, shaded cells in the same row indicate the terminology is identical. I'm pretty sure T&T used the terms "class" and "experience points" and had concepts that matched the others, but I'd like confirmation, as well as confirmation for Rolemaster, if anyone has that information. Basically, I'm looking for:

• Did that system use the concept?
• What was the concept's name?

I've restricted individual class names to the primary combat and magic classes, since the others jump around quite a bit. I don't remember how many classes Rolemaster had in the main book, or what the names were; I think my friend who ran Rolemaster actually only bought individual supplements (Arms Law, Claw Law, Spell Law) anyways.

Ability Score Name Comparison

Here's a table comparing the names of the ability scores across five early RPGs: Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, RuneQuest, The Fantasy Trip, and Traveller. These five games all have a 1970s version (TFT wasn't complete until 1980, but Melee and Wizard were published in the '70s.) All the shaded cells in the same row match in name and basic function; I also use an asterisk in these cells to show that the name is repeated. The double-asterisk for TFT's Charisma indicates that the name is the same, but it's not an ability score; it's a talent instead.

D&D	T&T	RQ	TFT	Traveller	Rolemaster
Strength    (STR)	* (ST)	* (STR)	* (ST)	* (STR)	* (STR)
Dexterity    (DEX)	* (DEX)	* (DEX)	* (DX)	* (DEX)	Agility (AGI)
Intelligence    (INT)	* (IQ)	* (INT)	* (IQ)	* (INT)	Reasoning (REA)
Constitution    (CON)	* (CON)	* (CON)	n/a	Endurance (END)	* (CON)
Charisma    (CHA)	* (CHR)	Appearance (APP)	** (talent)	Social Standing	Presence (PRE)
Wisdom    (WIS)	Luck (LK)	Power (POW)	n/a	Education (EDU)	Memory (MEM)
--	--	Size (SIZ)	--	--	Quickness, Intuition, Empathy, Self-Discipline

I am unsure about some RuneQuest entries, because the names of Basic Role-Playing abilities change depending on the version. Some BRP systems use Charisma, just like D&D and T&T. I also forget whether Call of Cthulhu replaced INT with EDU or whether EDU was an additional ability; I don't have my CoC book handy to check.

I don't remember the ten ability score names from Rolemaster, but they were so divergent from the names in these five systems that I'm rejecting Rolemaster as an outlier. (Edit: Added RM stats, courtesy Guy Fullerton's comment below.)

The first five rows work pretty much the same across all five systems (not so sure about Traveller, because I only played briefly and never had the original books, but the concepts are obviously very similar to D&D's stats.) The sixth row is unique for each system, and only RuneQuest has the seventh ability.

The conclusion I draw from this is: since Tunnels & Trolls, RuneQuest, The Fantasy Trip, and Traveller did not have the benefit of the OGL and yet were not the target of a lawsuit (and since all but TFT exist in some form today,) the concepts behind the first five abilities are not intellectual property, and neither are their names.

DR

There's a thread on RPGNet that asks: "How would you like armor to effect damage?". Personally, I wouldn't like armor that effected damage, unless it was armor that caused damage to attackers. I'm reasonably OK with armor that affects damage.

But seriously, since I've been re-reading excerpts of The Fantasy Trip recently, I was reminded that I'm OK with damage reduction in TFT because I link the concept mentally to that game but prefer D&D and descending armor class because it puts a conceptual limit on armor effectiveness. The natural tendency of most people is to think of 0 in a game as the lowest number possible, even if a few people are prone to push the limits into negative numbers. If you use descending armor class and no subtraction, in theory there would be no armor better than AC 0. For ascending AC or armor that reduce damage, there is no "best", because you can just keep adding numbers to existing ACs or DRs to create even better kinds of armor.

You can, of course, set an upper bound. Arbitrary numbers don't work so well, but limiting all ratings to single digits works because it appeals to simplicity. Of course, 3e screwed this up by setting "no armor" to AC 10. If you are going to use ascending AC, the worst possible armor should be AC 0, since you would then have "zero armor".

TFT's damage reduction, fortunately, assumes that unarmored characters have 0 damage reduction and the numbers go up from there.

GURPS Is Not The Fantasy Trip

Over in the comments on the post about the scarcity of non-D&D games in the Old School Renaissance, JDJarvis raised the issue of whether GURPS is the new and improved Fantasy Trip system. I still have my copies of The Fantasy Trip books, and I played a lot of GURPS, too, so it may be surprising that I disagree completely: GURPS is not The Fantasy Trip. It is clearly related, but they aren't as close as people think.

The most obvious thing to say first is that GURPS cannot legally be a new and improved Fantasy Trip. Steve Jackson designed The Fantasy Trip for Metagaming Concepts as a work-for-hire. It began as a man-to-man medieval wargame, Melee, which drew from traditions of board games instead of from miniatures wargaming. Wizard was added as a fantasy spell dueling companion, and then Howard Thompson saw the possibility of creating a cheap competitor to D&D, so he asked Jackson to expand it into an RPG. When Metagaming went under and Jackson moved on, he was unable to get the rights to TFT, so he designed a new man-to-man medieval wargame called simply Man-to-Man. GURPS is descended from Man-to-Man, not The Fantasy Trip.

Low Wizardry

I've made reference before to a set of Microlite20 mods to transform M20 into an emulation or near-clone of a non-D&D old school RPG, specifically the rules designed by Steve Jackson for Metagaming circa 1980.* I called this set "Lowlite6" or "LL6" to reflect that it is d6-only for damage and resolution and that it's perfect for a low fantasy feel: only two classes (guys who use magic and guys who don't,) but either class can dabble in the forte of the other, and spells are more limited and practical.

Well, that's why I've been quiet. Randall Stukey, who's been putting together PDF releases that include all the versions and mods of Microlite20 that he's aware of, stated that he had forgotten about my mods, but could include them in the next cycle (he's thinking of doing one update a quarter, I think.)

So, I've already had two mods finished, but needed to do the talent-based spell system. It's been kicking my ass with the formatting, until I realized that Google Docs supports tables within tables.

So, here is the Microlite20 Low Wizardry mod, draft version. Also of interest:

• Microlite20 Variable d6 mod
• Microlite20 Low Talents mod

Still to come: example talent/spell lists for the Low Talents/Low Wizardry mods and a Lowlite6 core mod that links these three together with miscellaneous rules for the complete pseudo-clone.

*This sentence is vague because, since these are Microlite20 mods, they must be released under the OGL instead of Creative Commons. One of the provisions of the OGL is that you cannot use a trademark without written permission from the trademark owner. This is why things like Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry use circumlocutions for "D&D" instead of just saying "D&D". One could argue that the old school RPG Steve Jackson developed for Metagaming can't possibly be a trademark, even if the game itself is still under copyright, because it's been out of print for 20 years and no company exists to lay claim to the trademark. However, I'll stick to the example Randall set for Microlite74.

TFT Notes

For those interested in The Fantasy Trip (mentioned yesterday,) I wrote some rule mods for Microlite20 to make it play more like TFT.

• M20 talents
• M20 variable d6 resolution

I'm not sure how far I want to develop a TFT-like version of Microlite20, but at least this gives an idea of what I thought needed simplifying in TFT.

The Fantasy Trip

People have been talking about The Fantasy Trip on a couple blogs, Beyond the Black Gate and Grognardia. Mainly, they've been talking about a letter from Metagaming boss Howard Thompon, in which he says:

"I think the system is better than D&D, but not by a huge margin. All the material in Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard didn't need to be added at all. More spells and weapons fine, more detail of combat, no."

And in the next paragraph:

"My feeling is that in the extra two years of work TFT got longer instead of better."

This, as well as his speculation about what the market wanted as far as complexity, has sparked some discussion about whether or not the market really wants simpler games. GURPS, the more complex descendant of TFT, sells better than TFT ever did. AD&D existed alongside BECM for a while, seems to have won out; D&D 3e is even more complex and did well, and despite the claims of being simpler than 3e, its combat system is definitely more involved than TFT: Advanced Melee.

My own thought is that "the market", for whatever reason, is dedicated gamers. Dedicated gamers like the more involved rules systems. Casual gamers form a much smaller market, so rules lite systems do poorly. There's more to it than that, but that's enough.