What was Greyhawk like?
More than the specific floor plans or monsters, the play experience is what made the essence of Greyhawk Castle and the City of Greyhawk .
"Old School Delve" is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
In general the ideas that the GM presents to the players, the level of mystery and challenge, and the sense of lurking danger or looming threat tend to appeal to me. I like to be captivated by action and problem solving, explore, and if there is some fun roleplay in the process, so much the better. [35]
Agency: Players created the story through their actions, there was no predefined "plot"
The story developed by the GM reacting to the actions of the players. This was supported by the non-linear structure of site-based adventures, with no larger overarching plot to adhere to, and based on Gary's insight that imposing a story on the players is depriving them from the ability to
make meaningful decisions, that is at the very heart of role-playing.
Although he was a storyteller, there was no effort to thread a plot through his dungeon. Keep in mind that this was the dawn of role-playing and some concepts of 2020 gaming weren't known then. It was entirely find the monsters, fight the monster, and take his treasure. [30.2]
In those early versions of the game there was no thought of story line or major villains to be over come. It was all fight the monsters, defeat the monsters, and grab their treasures. [30.3]
After the industry had moved to painfully boring railroads of level-adequate battle challenges, player agency is one of the key concepts that the "old school revival" rediscovered.
Challenge: Mistakes could be deadly
Gary believed in palpable
danger for excitement, and that rewards achieved against tough odds were more satisfying. The world was not calibrated to present only winnable encounters -- and how could it be so? Respect the game world, as real and dangerous and exiting.
If you wanted to survive, you needed every trick in the book: think, be cautious, be stealthy, keep moving, hire help, work together, and most importantly: pick your battles and run away if the opposition is too strong. If you played badly, you had it coming.
While for low level characters life was cheap, once the players were more invested in their characters, and of higher level, Gary provided means to help the players not losing them, from raise dead to wish spells -- and these were a good way to sap some of the surplus treasure from the party.
There was a constant escalation of new tricks and traps vs new tactics to work around them. After characters began listening at doors regularily, Gary invented ear-worms that would bore into your head from the door. The players countered with "Ear Trumpets" to protect themselves. He then ruled that you had to take of your helmet and mail coif, which would take time and leave you vulnerable in case of attack.
Some of the dungeon chambers were filled with surprises. There were creatures hiding above the doors, there were creatures looking like tables and chests, and there were surprises in plain sight that would attack as we moved in the rooms. It got so that I would say upon entering any new area, “Gary, I look up, and down, and all around the area before I walk in. That stopped a lot of ugly surprises from happening. [30.2]
"Until the wretches conceived of ear trumpets, those marvelous little grubs surely did stop all that vile listening with ears pressed to doors so as to avoid nasty surprises the DMs wished to spring on the PCs." #193
For this to work it was crucial that the GM be impartial and fair. As a GM adjucating fairly in devising ever new challenges in "competition" with players refining their tactics is a subtle step from antagonism, and led to the bad name of oldschool play being antagonistic and deadly. Maybe Gary was able to do it, but from my experience, it is hard to remain impartal as a referee if you represent one of the two sides. And anything hard is not going to translate well to a broad audience.
Characters were much weaker than in later editions of the game. They lacked superhuman feats and abilities, outside of Magic. The style was much more like Conanesque Sword & Sorcery.
While I agree that there also must be deadly encounters for the world to be believable, as the world cannot just evolve around the player characters. In my experience is that winning easy fights takes much longer than most GMs imagine before it gets old, so provide a wider margin of safety.
Immersion: Theatre of the mind, ad hoc rulings and suspense
There was nothing to detract from imagining your surrounding. In spite of coming from a tabletop battle background, there were no miniatures and no battlemat. Neither were there soundtracks (with rare execptions) props. Flow and action even trumped the rules, as Gary would rather make up a chance for something based on experience, knowledge and his judgment, than interrupt play by looking up rules.
During games, cross-talk was discouraged: the party caller did most of the talking, and other players only talked if they had something to contribute. If the players chattered too much, they’d miss what the Disembodied Voice was saying, and that would be, as Mike put it, “suicide”. “You could feel the tension in the room,” he added. [29]
The second important aspect was that Gary rarely looked up rules in the rulebook. Firstly, the rules were light anyways and did not cover many cases, and secondly even if they did adjucating without stopping play to look up the detail rule kept the action going. This rules-light approach allowed all participants to just imagine and describe what they wanted to do, without being restrained by rules mechanisms. Anything was possible, you just needed to trust the GM to give a fair estimate of success.
Digging around in rules books is much the same as having the film break or the TV station experience transmission difficulties during an exciting program...a loss of the unagined participation. #7881
[T]he only time [Gary] consulted the rules was when he gave out experience points for killed monsters and treasures. He made moving through his dungeon come alive. We could easily imagine the sights, sounds, and even the smells as he described the chambers and the corridors. [30.2]
Lastly: Gary used a lot of mysterious noises early on, without direct monster conflict, to create an atmosphere of tension. The first level key has an entry for "rustling". The DMG Appendix I has a whole list of mysterious noises and sounds. I did not realize this may have a had a significant effect on play atmosphere, until I saw this post by Rob Kuntz, where he describes unnerving Gary with the noise of mysterious footsteps:
If it had instead been an encounter with goblins, for instance, this “physical” encounter would not have fashioned itself as anxiety in fantasy immersion terms but primarily in game terms only, and then only briefly as the mind moved to focus on the combat and statistics side through immediate evaluation of circumstances. [...] Both Gary and I immediately recognized, and separated, the game parts from the immersive world, the latter which we concentrated on. [...] So the Gygax and Kuntz credo was: Always keep your players guessing; and the best way that is accomplished is to always keep them at the edge of doubt through rising and falling anxiety.
Random encounters in combination with encounter distance provided another way to have the players hear noises instead of just another tedious combat. The goal of encounters was mostly to encourage action. Players could never know if a noise was just that, or a last second warnign before something horrible materialized.
Improvisation: adventures made up from whole cloth
While this may not have been obvious or visible for the players, apart from map and extremely
skimpy encounter keys per level, all the detail of the adventures was
made up on the spot by Gary. In wilderness adventures and city adventures, all of it was "winged". This had a lot of advantages over pre-written detail: you needed no time to look it up, you could respond to the interestes and ideas of the players, and you could calibrate the challenges to their strength.
In the original campaign run in Lake Geneva, much of the refereeing was done "seat-of-the-pants" style, and encounter areas were not fleshed out much beyond quickly jotted notes. [7]
Just in case some reader here thinks it odd to create on the fly as Rob and I usuall are want to do:
The main difference between formal creation of material and doing it as one serves in the role of GM is spontaneity, that allowing the material created on the spot to better suit the player group and the situation at hand. Otherwise one must set forth the material to be played and recite it more or less verbatim, forcing the group to its mold. The creative demand is much the same, but the free-style method usually allows for more enjoyment by all participants. I recommend it to all GMs able to manage such playing style #4664
Megadungeon: devling for treasure, not logic
I think these three are the main pillars of the old school style of play. However, specifically in the Greyhawk Campaign, there were others that strongly must have shaped the experience of play. The first is that the piece de resistance, Greyhawk Castle, was a Megadungeon. It does not really matter that much, which Megadungeon. All Megadungeon Campaigns, by their form of a huge dungeon complex that is getting more dangerous the deeper you get, and that you venture forth and dive into from a nearby home base such as the City of Greyhawk, and that are too large to be cleared or even fully explored, will lead to a specific play experience that differs strongly from other forms of play.
For the most part, early on it was treasure and experience points hunting. Nobody cared too much about how logical the dungeon was, or how the monsters lived there. And since
treasure gave experience, the foremost goal was treasure, not killing.
The whys and hows of the monster population in the gloomy labyrinths were unimportant to all concerned. The sense of danger in mentally exploring a lightless maze filled with perilous traps and fell creatures of unimaginable sort was far more important [7]
Intensity: Lots of players in a persistent, shared world
I mean it. Back in the Greyhawk Campaign, there was A LOT of play. There was so much playing going on, that Gary ran two sessions on some days, and later enlisted Rob Kuntz as a Co-DM to help. This must have been a much more immersive experience. Groups could count over 20 players on weekends. This left little time for long arguments, acting or detailed rules.
Because groups were so large, and to streamline actions, each group had a "caller" who was the one to tell the GM, what the group was doing.
The actions of these groups were persistent. If one group slew monsters, plundered treasure or destroyed a wall, the monsters would be dead, the treasure gone, the wall demolished for the others. If you wasted time, some other party might take advantage of you and get to the treasure first. This experience must have made it feel much more a real place to the players, than a typical "adventure" that just provides a story around the characters.
We play with a handful of friends once a week, with a single group. So this part may be the hardest to replicate, if you have a life outside of role playing games.
Variety: Sci-Fi and Weirdness
To avoid tedium and boredom, instead of switching to another game, Gary ran "extradimensional" adventure moduels like Alice in Wonderland, or employed cursed scrolls that sent the players into sci-fi worlds like Barsoom or Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure, or even to contemporary New York City, for a change of pace. This was supported by the
light and abstract rules system. While you might be able to bring back "magic wands" in the form of laser pistols that had a limited number of charges, he never introduced gunpowder to the main campaign.
As a matter of fact we did dungeon crawls until DM and players alike were sick and tired of them, mainly because the large number of players at each session made almost any other sort of adventure very difficult. As the players dropped out, the adventures shifted to outdoors settings, town adventures, action in a tavern, etc. [35]
I have mixed genres since the OD&D game was published. [35]
Exploration and combat over role-playing
Unsurprising given the wargaming background of most players, the predominant dungeon setting, and the large groups of players with using a "caller", most of the time in the inital campaign was spent on exploration and combat, with little role-play.
Later as groups got smaller, and play shifted more to city adventures, more negotiation, investigation and intrigue was possible, but the players were still pretty uninterested in playing a character (and often there was no clear distinciton between player and character). As more retainers and henchmen were handled, this then started to get into character a bit more, to keep appart whom one just had talking.
So I think this part was not essential for the experience. You can play old school in character.
Mapping was part of the challenge
"His games featured a lot of mapping of dungeons. As the heroes explored, one player had to draw what Gary described on graph paper. Part of the game was trying to figure out when a passage was gently sloping. Ideas like pouring some water on the ground and seeing where it trickled help, until Gary started having water seeping into the floor's many cracks." [29]
Gary did not draw the map for the players, he described the rooms and they had to figure it out and draw it. There also was a "no walkie-talkies" rule - only who had a copy of the map could actually look at it for describing their actions. Some people decided to not map at all, because due to all of Gary's strategems such as sloping corridors, teleporters, elevator rooms and so on, it was easy to be mislead. Gary also modified maps beween sessions, see the dungeon design guidelines. If he felt it made for a better adventure, Gary even changed levels on the fly during play.
All that said, mapping was a chore, and today nobody does it for a reason. Even Gary started to drop it and change his level designs from pencil-thin wall labyrinths with dozens of small rooms most of which were empty to fewer and larger rooms and more "white space" on the map. When I tried to play oldschool with my modern day players, they bitterly objected and compained against this.
A lot of magical treasure
Also never doubt that Gary was not a Monty Haul referee. He had to be because he had to play test all of the magic items he put in his rules. He had no idea what a Deck of Many Things or a Portable Hole would do to his campaign world. So his wondrous dungeon was liberally sprinkled with magical treasures. [30.2]
Gaining lots of treasure is something I always favored. To keep it moving I encouraged players to have their PCs hire many retainers, troops, build a castle, etc. When that failed to keep them seeking more wealth the trainig costs and other cash-draining devices were added into the game. #5255
This led to the myriad ways Gary devised to strip characters of their riches again: having to pay premium to get petrified or polymorphed characters restored or magic items identified by the striped mage, having dead characters raised from the dead, having fireballs destroy and consume magic items, and so on.
Then we have the concept of cursed items. Gary loved to expose his players to cursed items; way too much if you asked me. [30.2]
The procedure for sharing this treasure that the players came up with:
As the DM I left it up to the players. Generally they took all treasure as property of the party, then at the conclusion of an adventure divided it in shares according to the total number of levels of the PCs involved, counting half of any multi-classed PCs levels only as addition the the higest sngle class one, i.e. a F/T/MU of 8/4/10 levels would get 4+2+10 shares of the loot. #384
Magic was always selected by high d% roll, each player getting a roll for each level of his or her PC--in the above example 16 rolls saving the highest. Picks then went from highest on down. Many a tie of 00 rolls occurred. In such case the top scorerers rolled off for order of picks. #384
NPCs are people, too
Assume that you’re speaking in character. We entered the dungeon with a lot of hirelings: we had hired a dozen bandits last session, and this session we hired half a dozen heavy footmen. At three people per rank, our expedition filled about twenty feet of 10-foot-wide corridor.
Our party was so unwieldy that the wizard joked about letting the dangers of the dungeon doing our downsizing for us. The hirelings heard him, and they were not happy. A few bad reaction rolls later, and my bandit followers abandoned us in the dungeon.
We should have foreseen this, because Mike’s NPCs tended to join into our out-of-character strategy conversations. When we lost a heavy footman, and we were discussing whether it was worth it to get him resurrected, the other heavy footmen weighed in strongly on the “pro” column. [29]
Gary views on what made for the original play expereince
Asked later about what made up the spirit of play of original D&D, Gygax came up with this list (with "comic book superhero" he refers to later editions of D&D that gave characters feats to give them effectively superhuman abilities):
- Absolute authority of the DM, rules lawyers given the boot
- Rule books seldom used by a competent DM
- Action and adventure in play
- Swords & sorcery, not comic book superhero genre material
- Group co-operation paramount for success
- Freedom to extemporize and innovate for all participants
- Reliance on archetypical models for characters
- Fellowship of those participating [6 #7878]
When asked what was needed to have a successful campaign:
- Pay attention to what the player group finds most interesting, and provide adventures that reflect this preference.
- Do not let the rules get in the way of play; be the arbiter of the game so that the adventure continues on without unnecessary interruptions, and the immersion of the players in the milieu remains complete.
- Do not make the group face impossible challenges, and keep the rewards as reasonable as possible (that is modest), so that there is always someting more to seek after.
- Well developed villains are usually very compelling to players, and the longer these antagonists remain alive and thwarting the PCs, the more exciting the adventures.
- Mix up the adventure settings so that play is not always in the same dort of place. A town adventure leads to a wilderness trek, that brings the party to a subterranian setting for example. From there they might have a waterborne or earial mission. [6 #6966]
When asked what made a game session enjoyable
I'll take a stab at the five elements that make a game session enjoyable:
1. Good personal relationships between all the participants.
2. Subject matter that interests the whole group.
3. Able GMing, including animated participation by that one.
4. Able play, role-assumption, and roleplaying by the players.
5. A sense of danger from the environment, but knowledge that clever play will likely overcome all hazards, #2025
And finally, his view on the real rewards of a role playing campaign:
As for the rewards of an RPG campaign, I believe they are more related to group interaction and discussion after play sessions than to some vague theory related to story telling. After the group completes a campaign story, their discussion of events, and recounting them to other players outside their group, seems to me to be the most cherished reward, other than those special victories or acquisitions gained by their own game character ;) #6073
If the session was compelling, there will be a lot of thought between the end of that adventure chapter and the beginning of the next. I know that applies to me too #6929
I’m still not sure what player skill is in OD&D, and I still think it has something to do with battle tactics, trapfinding procedures, and gaming the DM. But I’m also starting to think it has something to do with respecting the gameworld as a world. Monsters learn. Henchmen want riches and safety. PCs can’t communicate telepathically. And if you’re a dwarf fighter, sometimes your best course of action is to hit something with an axe.
[References: see Greyhawk References]
No comments:
Post a Comment