How Do I Fix Slow Leveling?

In the last year or so I’ve run around 20 sessions of old school D&D using the OD&D, Labyrinth Lord, and Sword & Wizardry rules. These systems are all basically the same game, differing only in fairly minor ways. They all share the basic experience / leveling system, where characters gain experience points (XP) by killing monsters and getting treasure, and the resulting XP then lead to level advancement. As a DM I have been doling out XP by-the-book.

My steady campaigns are having problems with this system, however. It’s taking a really long time for my players to level-up. Much longer than average, based on this discussion at Dragonsfoot. In fact, it took over ten ~4hr sessions for the players in my Labyrinth Lord game to get to 2nd level. Ideally, I’d like to aim for the optimal-fun target of leveling up every four sessions or so. I think the characters deserve it, really. After 15 sessions the LL game has seen three major locality-based “chapters”. They’ve been through a lot and rocked real hard. I feel they should at least be 3rd level by now. It would also be more fun for me as a DM if they got tougher faster, so I could start throwing different kinds of challenges at them besides wheezing goblins and diseased monkeys.

Leveling is happening slowly because:

1. My players are showing minimal enthusiasm for killing monsters and finding gold for its own sake. They like achieving goals, roleplaying, and exploring. So do I, for that matter.

2. I’m stocking treasures based on recommendations in Moldvay’s Basic Set book. I am even being more generous than the book. Still, the pickings are meager.

3. There’s still a lot of monster murder going on, but by-the-book monster XP values are low and the party size is big enough that very little XP result from slaughtering gaggles of giant rats and mumbling stink-eyed psychopaths.

First of all, I should say that I really like the old school concept of experience leading to leveling. It’s clean and simple and fun for players. I think “levels” are cool for both aesthetic and practical reasons, and I have no desire to house-rule a more modern and sensible character customization system. Given this, I am now considering these possible methods of speeding up leveling in my campaigns:

1. Give out more treasure. I’ve been trying this, and it’s working. But now the players are loaded with more cash than they know what to do with. The sweet little angels have actually started donating their gold to charity because they can’t carry it all! It’s kind of ridiculous, actually. To get to 4th or 5th level they’ll start needing wheelbarrows of holding for all the treasure.

2. Give out more XP for gold and monsters. This could be a good solution, but it still doesn’t address the fact that my players, bless their tender hearts, aren’t highly motivated by burglary and murder.

3. Use something like the 4e system where players advance after a certain number of combat encounters. This is appealing for its simplicity, but again, the focus on killing to advance doesn’t jive with the atmosphere of our exploration- and RP-heavy games.

4. Use Lord Kilgore’s roll-to-advance rules. Read them HERE. With this system each player gets 1 XP per session. After each session each player rolls against a class-specific value, modifying the role with their total XP - make a good roll, you level! Nice and clean. Pretty appealing actually.

5. Allow characters to level based on the number of hours they’ve been playing. For instance, maybe characters could level for every 12 hours of gaming. I’ve never heard of anyone doing this, but it seems like it might work pretty well. Has anyone tried this before?

This is one of the oldest and most worn-out topics in D&D, but it’s still highly relevant to anyone running an old school D&D campaign. It would be a big midstream switch for us to move to a new level advancement system. I’d be curious to get input from anyone else who has confronted this. What have you tried? How has it worked? What would you recommend?

Beasts Creep From the Cloud Mines

We had a nice ~2hr Labyrinth Lord session last night. This was the 14th session in the campaign. Sadly, this campaign has significantly slowed in the last several months owing to real life issues among various participants, including childbirth, illness, the holidays, etc. Damn, we're old people! Last year we were gaming at a decent clip, playing pretty regularly every two weeks. Now it’s like once every month or two. My wife (who plays in the game) and I are expecting a baby July 16, so I suppose this will slow things down even more for a while as we make time for a new kind of adventure.

Session 13, which I never posted on, saw a mostly different party of players explore the first level of the cloud mines on the game-day after the group from Session 12. There was only one PC overlapping between sessions 12 and 13 – the cleric Philina. I thought it would be a fun experiment to have two separate parties indirectly interacting in the same world, yet having little or no direct contact – a bit like in the movie No Country for Old Men where the villain and protagonist never directly encounter each other. There’s nothing novel about this, but I’ve never personally tried it before.

Last night’s game primarily took place outside the forest village of Penelia, in the pine-shadowed coven grounds of the Penelion Sisterhood (of which Philina and Merryn are young members). Some of the translucently-skinned ape creatures the party encountered in the haunted cloud mines two days earlier had tracked the players back to the village and attacked them at night. This nighttime battle was won by the players with no casualties, but it lead to a sense of urgency because terrible and lethal things were now creeping forth from the cloud mines and killing innocents (one of the young sisters was slain in the night as the party fought the beasts - a very sad scene actually). The second half of the game was mostly detectivish problem-solving roleplaying, much of it taking place in an early morning Sisterhood council. Hypotheses were discussed, strategies proposed, and experiments were conducted on mysterious items previously recovered from the cloud mines (most of the players are scientists in real life).

At the end of the session the party packed up and headed back to the mines. They’ll dive in during the next session on Friday (hopefully - unless we have a baby before then)!

Should DMs Tell Players What They Need To Roll?

I am currently running two D&D campaigns – one using the original D&D whitebox rules, and one using Labyrinth Lord, which is a clone of the early ‘80s Basic/Expert Sets. In the Labyrinth Lord game I usually DON'T tell players what they need to roll to hit an opponent in combat. I allow them to deduce how tough their opponent is by whether or not their die rolls produce an effect. In my whitebox game I usually DO tell the players what they need to roll to hit.

I have noticed something interesting happening in the whitebox game. With each die roll there is a certain heightened tension where everyone is gathered around the table with bated breath, watching the die, hoping it will come up nice. It's like playing craps in Vegas. If a hit comes up there are cheers and high-fives, if it's a miss there are groans.

Contrast this with the Labyrinth Lord game, where each die is quickly thrown and then followed by a short discussion of what the opponent’s armor class might be. A somewhat more cerebral gaming experience, to be sure.

As an experiment, in our last whitebox game I switched over to the “secret to hit” roll. The cheers were instantly replaced by the armor class deduction discussions. Very interesting.

I made a post at the OD&D Discussion board asking other DMs if they tell players what they need to roll to hit an opponent in combat. Twelve people responded. Only ONE person said they regularly share this information with players… Lo and behold it was James Raggi who said:

“Such secrecy bugs me, as it serves no purpose other than to give me more stuff to keep track of and I'm not so interested. I just tell the players their opponents' AC, and they tell me if they hit. I figure anyone locked in combat will have a pretty good idea of how difficult it is to damage their opponent anyway.”

One of the twelve respondents, Finarvyn (the OD&D forum administrator), said he sometimes tells players what they need to roll:

“Often I'll not tell the players the first time they encounter a monster, but after they hit a time or two I'll share that information to save time.”

TEN of twelve were all very adamant about not telling players what they need to roll. I think these views were summed up nicely by howandwhy99:

“Never. Or for any roll. It defeats the entire design of the game, if a referee does this. IMO it is the purpose of the game for the players to figure out what works and how through play.”

It is interesting to note that the original 1975 TSR character sheet had no AC / To Hit chart (or saving throws, armor class, or hit points for that matter). This implies a gaming style where the DM kept track of most target numbers:

Image from The Acaeum.

Contrast the 1975 character sheet with the 1980 character sheet (what I use for all my games), which clearly states the "TO HIT ROLL NEEDED", along with savings throws, etc. This implies the players should have and use this information:

Based on my own thoughts, and input from the OD&D Forum posts, I tried to summarize arguments for both styles of play...

Arguments in favor of telling players:

• It seems reasonable that a PC could quickly surmise its opponent’s toughness
• Vegas-like excitement for rolling a target number
• AC/To Hit chart on old TSR character sheets implies this should be open knowledge
• Faster and easier
• Makes it harder for DM to fudge

Arguments in favor of secrecy:

• The player, not the PC, should surmise its opponent’s toughness by deduction
• Your roll model Dave Arneson said "Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!"
• Adds a fun mystery element – players need to track rolls to infer opponent’s AC
• Makes it easier for the DM to fudge
• The first TSR character sheet did NOT have AC/To-Hit chart (for those folks who want to keep it "Oldest School")

I enjoy playing both ways, so for a time I'll probably try Finarvyn's model and switch back and forth depending on the situation. For weird, new, or mysterious opponents keep it a secret. For common stuff like goblins let them know. We'll see how it goes!

Horror in the Cloud Mines

PENELION - Session 12 - Labyrinth Lord

This is the first time I’ve taken a group of players through the cloud mines. It seems to have gone quite nicely, although some aspects of the adventure induced a bit of timidity in the group. The cloud mines are basically an upside-down floating labyrinth, the individual levels of which are separated by cables that can be transversed by enclosed cable cars. Each labyrinth level is an independent swaying, creaking, levitating enclosure that is attached to the ground hundreds of feet below by a cable. The cloud mines float in a thick opaque mist that induces fearsome hallucinations unless special precautions are taken. Several of the floating levels act as distilleries that extract magical fluids from the opaque vapours – hence, the cloud mining. These distillery levels have large complex glass machines with apparatuses extending deep into the vapour banks outside the enclosures.

PCs: Philina (level 2 cleric), Chipwich (level 2 thief), Syeth (level 2 MU), Alia (level 2 fighter)

NPCs: Merryn (level 2 cleric)

Return to Penelia: The party has now relocated to the small deep-forest hamlet of Penelia, home of the animist Penelion Sisterhood, to which Philina and Merryn belong. The sisters tend to a large ancient owl living in a Venusian-sized tree to the west of the hamlet. Unrest in the southern range of the forest led the matriarch of the Sisterhood to urge the party to investigate a haunted glen in the mountains foothills to the south. It has been observed that troupes of small blue-skinned eyeless humanoids have been traveling in and out of the glen in recent months. This glen was the site of a massacre eons ago, and those who enter the glen return insane or are lost forever.

The Glen of Opaque Vapours: The party finds the entrance to the glen and camps out nearby to keep watch through the night. Shortly after dusk a man runs out of the glen and Alia catches up with him on her horse. The man, Hyne, says he’s an explorer as well, and gives some background about what he knows is in the misty glen. For reasons that are mysterious, a floating cloud mine has been constructed in the vapours by a Cinnabar Witch. There are apparitions in the vapours that will drive you mad if you look at them. Hyne has built a pair of fine-slit blinder goggles that aid in traversing through the vapours. The party heads back to town for the night, and some role-playing with Hyne, the party, and the locals ensues. The next day the party agrees to return to the mines with Hyne, and they hire local craftsmen to make slit-goggles for the whole party.

Through the Vapours: The party returns to the glen. As they follow a footpath deeper into the mists, the vapours begin to take a scarlet hue. Rotten figures shamble about the group, threatening mystic fear. Philina uses her blessed bandana (magic item from several sessions previous) to resist the fear. The group finds a stone structure with a ladder leading to a platform. There is an enclosed wooden car on the platform attached to a cable leading directly up into the blood hued vapours.

Into the Cloud Mine: A crank moves the car hundreds of feet up the swaying cable until a thud halts the car’s movement. The party exits the car through a hatch in the ceiling and find themselves in a wooden room – they are in the entry chamber for the floating cloud mine. The group explores this level of the mine (I’m not providing too many details here…) and finds living quarters and mangled corpses of the eyeless blue men – mineworkers apparently. The group is attacked by, and barely defeats, a gaggle of horrific wild beasts – large chimpanzee-like creatures with transparent skin - that appear to have invaded the cloud mine. The group eventually finds some special glass goggles that prevent the hallucinations of the vapors. They also find a shrine to a Cinnabar Witch and a cable car leading to a distillery level of the mine. Two members of the group make a quick trip to the distillery level, take some vials of red sticky vapour distillate, which they conceal from Hyne, and return to the party on the first level. The group then leaves the cloud mine and heads back to Penelia.

(NOTE: I still owe players a recap of Sessions 4-11)

 

Map - Bisbee & Penelia

Here is the area map for Bisbee / Penelia. The old Outdoor Adventure map wasn't really doing the trick for me, so I made a new more detailed locality map using Hexographer.

The party in our Labyrinth Lord game has moved from the coastal town of Bisbee and is now based in Penelia. I'll aim to post a brief report on all the has happened over the last 10-15 sessions. Next game: Tuesday night.

Labyrinth Lord!

Labyrinth Lord game from last week. Fighting rock goblins on the ledge of a tower in a vast underground cavern...