Wilderness as a dungeon

Here's a thought: Treat city streets as corridors of a dungeon that players must move through and map. Of course, since they're outdoors they move at a faster rate - 10 yards per turn of mapping, or 100 yards per turn not mapping.  They can accurately map out a city, and the DM can explain it, by walking down the streets and noting intersections and important buildings along the sides. Of course no one does it this way, because it's too cumbersome.

Traps in the wilderness are way more natural to my imagination. Snare traps hidden under a pile of leaves, pits dug into the ground and covered with moss, spikes dug into the ground, nets in tree canopies, razor wire across barks, bear traps in the ground. These are all great traps that have actually been used in the real world. It's gruesome but the fighting in Vietnam and WW2 in the Pacific have many examples that can be used for inspiration.

Wandering monsters actually have a reason to wander in the wilderness. In a dungeon, it's assumed that they're aimlessly walking about, or occasionally stalking the players. In the wilderness, they could just be going somewhere. In the case of orcs and goblins, they can actually be an organized band on patrol. Maybe they're actually a unit marching to a destination and run into the players by accident. Maybe they're camping and taking a rest. Maybe they found the players' tracks, and are actively following the players. Maybe the players accidentally walked into the territory of a large predator. All of these create encounters with a purpose.

Wilderness travel, for small scale exploration or town activities, should be measured in terms of hours. The conversion is simple, 60 yards for every hour of travel in an unknown wilderness, if mapping carefully, so a character with 12" movement can cover 720 yards per hour.
Without mapping, that's 7200 yards per hour, or roughly 4.09 miles per hour, which is about average human walking speed IRL.

Also, moving over the hex map - Give the players a large radius of sight, but don't reveal the whole map. Have the players move with natural directions - orienting towards a landmark, or a compass direction, and setting a distance. Reveal hexes according to the players' sight radius, or multiple hexes at once. Obviously this technique is meant more for VTT that handles line of sight for you.

House rules for AD&D

Source books

Core Rules only. No UA, OA, Survival Guides, or other nonsense.
 

No Psionics, Bards must follow the requirements to level in Fighter and Thief first. We will be using the Weapon vs. Armor class tables, and by the book bean-counting encumbrance

- Stats are 4d6 drop lowest, arrange to taste.
   - if you don't like your stats, you must reroll a full set of 6 stats

- Worn Armor refers to armor on the body only. Gloves, Boots, Helmets and others must be worn separately.
- A shirt can only hold 100 gp weight. To carry any more you'll need to carry sacks, backpacks, belts etc.
- Riding a mount allows characters to fight as a cavalry class. Your mount does not gain secondary attacks for you.
- If you fire a ranged missile into a melee, you have an equal chance of hitting any engaged combatant
- Characters must drink an unknown potion entirely to determine its effects.

Phased Combat

I use phased combat where each side moves in order per phase. Combat rounds are 1 minute long and are broken up into 10 segments of 6-seconds each. The phases are:

Surprise

Initiative

Movement

Missile

Melee

Players have to declare their actions before initiative is rolled and combat phases are resolved.

Multiple Actions During Combat

If a player wishes to perform multiple actions, then every action is broken down into segments of 6-seconds and added up, to a total of 10.

For example, if a player wishes to move, drink a potion,sheathe one weapon and draw another, and attempt an attack, then first the segment of initiative is added to the distance moved (Movement rate x 1' foot per segment), then any number of segments for extra actions like drinking or switching weapons, then the weapon speed factor is totaled up. If the result is 10 or less, the player is successful in performing all actions. If it is less, the player cannot finish all actions.

Surprise

Every player will roll surprise for themselves.  Generally, characters will be surprised on a roll of 1 or 2 on d6. 

If there is a Ranger in the party, he will be surprised on a roll of 1, and any monster he is attempting to surprise will be surprised on 1-3 on d6.

Initiative

The party caller will roll initiative at the beginning of each round of combat, and the DM will roll for the monsters. The lowest die wins, and the die score indicates the segment of the round that the party acts on.

Movement Phase

The party that won initiative can move first, and the party that lost can follow. Movement rate x10' is the number of feet that a character can move in combat.

If a character is engaged in melee at the beginning of movement phase, they may choose to make a fighting withdrawal or a retreat. A fighting withdrawal disallows the use of an attack in that round. A retreat allows a character to flee at 10x his normal speed, but exposes them to rear attacks.

Missile Phase

This phase encompasses the firing of missile and thrown weapons, and of magic spells and magic item discharges.

Firing a missile weapon into an existing melee will result in a chance of hitting any combatant in that melee. The long length of the combat round presupposes much movement, positioning, feinting and striking, so it is not possible to accurately aim at an opponent in an engaged melee from an advantageous "angle" for very long.

It is not possible to fire a missile weapon when an opponent engages you in melee. If a character were to try, he would be struck by a melee attack and lose his missile attacks for the round.

If a spellcaster attempts to cast in melee, the casting time of the spell will be compared to the weapon speed factor of the melee combatant to determine who strikes first. If the spellcaster is struck before completing the spell, the spell is lost.

Melee Phase

Weapon Speed Factor is only used to determine first strike on simultaneous initiative. Melee combat is always resolved at the end of a combat round.

Creating a story with Mythic GME

I’ve had this idea for a Swords and Sorcery type game story for a while, but I could never really pin down enough details to start writing. Maybe I should use the Mythic GM Emulator to play it out, as a method of writing the story.

Scale is the most important thing in a campaign

Everyone is familiar with the scale of dungeon exploration - tens of feet in ten minute increments, but there's little guidance for any scenarios beyond that. Scale up your maps for outdoor movement, but let players describe their actions naturally, as if they were making normal decisions in an urban environment - where they want to go, what they want to see. Outdoor movement, especially in a city, should be in increments of hours - from half hour, to full hour increments, to eight hour "working days", and so on.

The D&D rule books only talk about overland movement in terms of days, and that's only good for macro scale adventuring, or mass army campaigning.

Playing D&D as written feels like playing a Final Fantasy game, where dungeons and towns are the same scale, but you instantly switch to a "world map" scale where your little character avatar is just so much bigger now. Altering time and movement scales removes that disconnect, and allows players to stay immersed through the eyes of their characters, and lets them make decisions naturally, without worrying about metagame issues such as hexes per day or treating time in a city as if it were frozen.

For that matter, combat while adventuring in the overworld shouldn’t be a Final Fantasy style instant switch back to dungeon scale. When players are talking as if they could only see what's through the eyes of their character, the DM can easily narrate that they see some wandering creature in the distance and what that creature might be doing. The players can then make natural decisions about how to approach or avoid, and engage in combat without just standing in front of it and hacking away, but by negotiating the environment between themselves.

Turn Sequence vs Gameplay Loop

D&D 5e expressly mentions a gameplay loop in the "how to play" section of the introduction to its rules, and describes it as:

1. The DM describes the environment.
2. The players describe what they want to do.
3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions.

Contrary to this, BECMI describes a "turn sequence", using terminology similar to wargaming. The BECMI books actually use several different turn sequences to describe different activities, but here's an example of the most general one:

ORDER OF EVENTS IN A GAME TURN
1. Wandering Monsters: DM rolls 1d6 (Normally checked every 2 turns)
2. Actions: Caller describes all party actions (movement, listening, searching, etc.)
3. Results: If —
    a. a new area is mapped, the DM describes it.
    b. an encounter occurs, skip to ORDER OF EVENTS IN AN ENCOUNTER.
    c. something is discovered (secret door, item, etc.), the DM announces the results.
    d. no encounter occurs, the game turn ends; return to #1.

OD&D actually has no explanation of its game turn. It refers the player to the Chainmail game for the combat sequence and Outdoor Survival game for wilderness travel, and only discusses special considerations that occur while playing. It only explains how to play through an example. AD&D does the same thing, but doesn't make reference to the previous games.

Links

http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/2008/07/od-awarding-experience.html?m=1

https://harbingergames.blogspot.com/2020/04/if-your-torches-burn-for-only-one-hour.html?m=1

http://steamtunnel.blogspot.com/2009/12/in-praise-of-6-mile-hex.html?m=1

http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2012/03/contents-of-hexes.html?m=1

Cool resource for random generation, including rules for solitaire games: https://osricrpg.com/wizardawn/
Click a rule set then click “Dungeon Door”
The thing I like best about it is that it tells you the container first, before revealing the contents. It could be 1000 gp, or it could be a poisoned dart trap. Very useful for solo play, as you can choose to take your chances without knowing the result beforehand.

The GoldBox games!
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/unlimited-adventures-20y
Needs the more. All the more

Thoughts on grid squares

In AD&D, three characters can fit in a space 10 feet wide. Technically, this means that 9 characters could crowd together in a 10’x10’ square.

This has heavy implications in combat.

 - Crowded 3 to an area, characters would not be able to use weapons that have a space required greater than 3’.

 - Firing a missile into a crowded 10’ area could hit any target randomly, as accurate fire would be very difficult. 

 - Within that 10 ft. sq. area, characters in combat would not be statically staring at each other but constantly moving and jockeying for position.

 - A character fleeing combat from such cramped conditions would obviously be open to attack from another.

 - it forces you to look at the “space required” stat on the weapon chart and think in real world terms about the space, reach, and formation of the combatants, treating each 10’ sq as a miniature sandbox for the combatants to fight in.

I feel like this was the intent of the original rules but was never used or implemented correctly, and designers and players abandoned it going forward. Basic D&D and beyond use 5 feet squares with the assumption that characters would attack from adjacent squares. Contrary to that, I think in AD&D you must attack from within the same square as your opponent (unless your weapon has a reach of greater than 10 feet)

I’m going to rescale all my maps to 10 feet squares and tell my players that they must be within the same square as their opponent to attack. 

D&D solo as a board game?

Just play Advanced Heroquest instead. It does everything that D&D does, but in a more solid system that’s not so heavily reliant on the GM, and has better tables for generating content.

The most frustrating part of playing D&D solo is handling room descriptions.  In purely random play the rooms are either completely bare, or you have to waste time rolling on a table to stock the room with non-gameable content. When playing with a module, it really depends if the room key is split out into player only read aloud text and DM only information, and how well both are written. Sometimes the player read aloud text does not have enough information to spur meaningful choices, and sometimes through no fault of the writer it’s just easy to glance at the GM description anyway. It feels easier to just read the whole text of a room key at once, but in doing so you won’t really be playing the game.

So to solve this problem I have this idea, to tie the game more closely to the board. Almost every module comes with an empty map with numbered keys. Instead of moving my characters abstractly through the dungeon, I’ll select an actual 10’x10’ area per character, move them to that location, and see if anything is there. This necessitates moving the characters through an actual space in the dungeon. Then I’ll flip over to the room key and see what is in the space around each character. If they tripped a wire or pit trap, fell into an ambush by a monster, or discovered treasure or secret door, all would be resolved after my characters first moved into the area ‘blind’.  If I do not look into the right area, or do not do the right procedure to find the hidden element in a square, then I miss it and lose the treasure, fall victim to a trap, or lose surprise to a monster ambush.

This is contrary to the way live RPGs are played and denies me information that I should “know” before entering an area, but on the other hand it is playable and keeps the fun of discovery for myself.

AD&D has more in depth rules for dungeon crawling than any other edition. The sections on movement and searching, lockpicking, and listening at and forcing open doors are the most helpful here. These procedures are tightly coupled with the time scale, so it’s important to keep an ‘adventuring clock’ to track rounds and turns, or a sheet to check them off as they go by. Accurate tracking of time allows the player to coordinate the characters’ actions in a standard way.

For random dungeon generation, this means not stocking the dungeon until after the player characters have moved through it. This incentivizes checking squares, because to do so otherwise puts me at maximum risk for falling for a trap or a monster ambush.

In the case of traps, if I choose a PC to check a square for traps, and if he hits the chance of triggering the trap, then he detects and avoids it and I can mark it on the square for all PCs to know. If I want the PC to do something else, like check for secret doors, and I roll that he gets hit by a trap, then he falls victim to it.

Expert rules printings differences

Cool post showing the differences (with pictures!) https://waynesbooks.games/2019/10/28/which-becmi-dd-rulebook-do-you-have/

What is a roleplaying game?

A role-playing game is one where a referee presents the player(s) with a hypothetical scenario, the players respond to the scenario and say what actions they would make within it, and the referee adjudicates the results of those actions.

 We do this all the time in our everyday lives, but a roleplaying game provides a set of rules to help the referee structure the game, and manage the chances of success and probable outcomes. In most roleplaying games the player(s) will take on the role of a character or person outside of themselves, and state actions as if that character were doing it.

Many different role-playing games reflect different settings, focuses, and styles of play. For example, Dungeons & Dragons concentrates on Medieval fantasy adventures, while Vampire: the Masquerade chooses modern urban Gothic horror, and Apocalypse World focuses on post-apocalyptic science fiction. Some role-playing games are 'rules heavy', and have a lot of rules that strictly define actions and outcomes, while others are 'rules light' and have a simple set of rules that focus on free-form play. Some take their cues from the war gaming hobby and involve a lot of dice rolling, math and combat, while others focus on a more narrative style in creating collaborative fiction.

It is an immersive hobby that can involve the use of miniature figures, battle maps, pen and paper and dice, or could be just one where a group of people get together to create collaborative fiction. However you choose to play a role-playing game, the most important thing is that you and your group are having fun and enjoying this unique experience.

(every other definition of an RPG I've ever seen has gotten too involved with technical details or comparisons with other gaming hobbies, or misses the point entirely.)