Two Things from last Friday's Pathfinder Game

I ran my Pathfinder game last Friday, and had a good time. The last few sessions have taken place on a forsaken island with a temple to my campaign's Earth God and Storm Goddess, who would be relatively friendly to the PCs, but it has long since been abandoned and become the home of wererats. They've explored a lot, spoken to a couple of guardian spirits, and discovered a valuable ally. Next time, they're likely (but by no means guaranteed) to purge the temple of the remaining wererats and be able to go home (as the island was quarantined due to the "mysterious plague" of lycanthropy).

My players said two things that warmed my heart at the end of the session. One was how it wasn't a typical "go to the evil temple and prevent the ritual" scenario that they had originally expected. Now, I've run that scenario before, but the thing about this one was, other than a character interaction that tipped them off to the island's existence and location, I didn't really have a story to present to them. What did happen happened because they were exploring their environment, and I don't know if it should even be called a story, but whatever it was, it was entertaining to my players and me, and that's what was important.

"The first thing you have to do is come up with a compelling story."--I've seen this advice pop up, in one form or another, on countless forums and blog posts, and while it might yield good results some times for some people, it is by no means necessary. Some games, like Capes, In a Wicked Age, or Fiasco, are purely plot-driven, but they also operate on a very different set of assumptions and play very differently from traditional RPGs, to the point where some people prefer to call them "story games" rather than RPGs. But D&D can be an immense amount of fun without having to follow some kind of three-act structure intended to mimic Hollywood movies. (By the way, all three of the above are very fun games, and I recommend you check them out; but for the sake of this discussion, I'm just pointing out that D&D does not need a story, however loosely you may define that term.)

I won't try to convince you that I've never plotted any more than I'd try to convince you that I've never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as  possible. --Stephen King, On Writing

The second thing was, I mentioned that I had another game in the works, one based on 1st edition AD&D/OD&D, and that I'd cobbled up a few rules from different sources for resolving things without requiring feats, skill systems, or other stuff that clutters up the modern character sheet. They seemed to be interested in it. The way I've set up my campaign, I almost never have a full set of stats for any but the most important/likely to be encountered NPCs, and don't have a lot of my locales written up in game-specific terms, so they can be swapped from one game system to another with minimal effort. (I do write up stats for the encounters and locations that immediately surround them, but that's at a different stage of game prep from world-creation, and happens between games based on where they go.)

They were interested. That surprised me, because they were very interested in Pathfinder itself, and because the experiences I've had with two of them before indicated that they liked d20-style games, replete with all the skills and feats and crunch that post-D&D 3.0 games entail. But I should have known better, because I know they are also playing in a Fate-based game at the moment.

So I'm going to email them the list of house rules I've accumulated and let them decide whether or not they want to go OSR with this game. I'm up for it either way, but I'm not-so-secretly hoping they take the bait and go for it.

cheers,
Adam

Abstractions

If combat is broken off, the fleeing party must accept an attack without any return on his part, the attacker adding +2 on his die roll for hit probability, and the armor class of the fleeing party can not include a shield. (J. Eric Holmes on what would later become known as the Attack of Opportunity, Dungeons & Dragons, p.21)

One of the common criticisms of OD&D is that the combat system isn't realistic, and the common rejoinder to that is that D&D combat is abstract.

That's a perfectly good reply, too, in my opinion, and it reflects D&D's roots in earlier games like Chainmail and other wargames. In those, pieces often represented units of 100 men or more, and the attack/damage resolution was necessarily an abstraction, due to the aggregate nature of the unit. D&D simply evolved from that perfectly adequate system by dividing 100 men by 100, giving us the abstractions of Armor Class and Hit Points.

Nonetheless, there is abstract and there is Abstract. We don't talk about Triangle units hitting Squares and knocking off three points from the Blue Column; it's swords and axes hitting goblins and manticores and knocking their h.p. down. And dividing up an aggregation to derive the individual suffers from the "average family" problem, where every household has 2.73 children. So even in the early days, there was some desire to add a little bit of verisimilitude to combat, as evinced by the quote above.

Of course, combat was never the sole activity in the game, nor even the central one, despite what some might say, so it makes sense that it be dealt with on a level that reflects how much time and effort it should occupy. But weighed against this is the reality that in combat, more than any part of the game except maybe traps, your character can go down due to a bad die roll, and that giving the players more fiddly bits to twiddle can give them a feeling of control and fairness even when their hero meets an untimely end.

I mention all of this because I like Armor Class and Hit Points for the abstractions they are, but for me, the right level of detail is a moving target, and I sometimes find myself wanting more. I'm not thrilled by how complicated the rules have become on that score, however. I prefer my tactical flash to be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Something like this is a good start; a collection of easy-to-state and easy-to-adjudicate rules. Although I don't agree with all of them, this kind of thinking seems more elegant than all of the cumulative bonuses and multiple attack feats of later editions. So I'll be asking about this kind of thing in the future, and offering some suggestions of my own from time to time. I hope you'll find them useful.

cheers,
Adam