Knowledge-Check Cheat Codes

* This post was written a year ago. I've fallen off the blog, but here I am getting back up again.

This will be a bit of a rant. Since coming back to role-playing I’ve largely played with modern, new-school players – people who began playing with 3e or later. Although there have been a handful of playstyle discrepancies I’ve had to work around, the one that drives me nuts more than any other is what I refer to as knowledge-check cheat codes.

The best I can articulate this phenomenon is when a player asks for a chance for their character to know something that they as a player don’t know, and that their character doesn’t have an in-game reason for possibly knowing. This isn’t, “Can my dwarven fighter, who grew up in the mines, tell us the value of these gems?” or “Is there any way being an assistant pig-keeper before I became an adventurer help me identify these tracks?” These are reasonable, in-game justifications which I as a referee can deem acceptable on their face or call for a roll.

The type of play that I object to is when a player requests to roll for things like: “I want to roll to see if my high Intelligence would let me figure out this riddle,” or “Can I roll to tell if the NPC is lying?” or “I want to make a check to figure out this monster’s vulnerability.” Leaving aside the big no-no of players requesting to make a roll rather than waiting for me to call for one, my issue with this type of play is that it’s intended as a shortcut around the obstacle of the mysteries in the game. Rather than role-play, use player skill, or hire specialist NPCs, the player would rather trust to a high stat and dumb luck than to interact with the adventure.

I realize this style of play has probably always existed to some degree, but since returning to gaming, I’ve noticed it more. Modern systems, like 5e, have these kinds of mechanics built-in with player-side checks for Insight, Investigation, Arcana, and History. These innate powers give characters an objective, true answer to any question they have like a kind of divination spell on the order of Know Alignment or Locate Object. It seems to not just support, but encourage this kind of play.

I realize as a referee this is all under my control, but I get tired of constantly fighting it. The other night, one of my players (a good friend) was getting frustrated by the taunting interrogation the undead antagonist was using against him during the fight. He wanted to know if his character could determine an underlying pattern to what she was saying to him. Playing Basic Fantasy, I told him to make an Ability Roll using BF’s optional rule. He rolled a 20. I told him, “You put it together that her taunts are focused around something you are physically carrying on your person which is hampering your combat ability.”

He didn’t feel this answer was adequate considering he rolled a 20. What I didn’t tell him was that the reason his attacks weren’t effective was because his paladin was carrying a cursed dagger and necklace he stole off an altar of a death cult four rooms ago. That’s the information that he thought he deserved. One of the other players figured it out for him. He was still griping about it at work today, commenting, “I guess it’s just different DM-ing styles,” which felt like he was inferring I was being unfair.

He explained that the fun part of the game to him was rolling crits and feeling like it was possible to win, not necessarily through player skill, but through lucky dice. When he can't figure something out, he wants the option to enter cheat codes. It’s an approach that is fundamentally different than mine, one I’m not sure is reconcilable. My favorite part of the game is in the mystery of the unknown and the risk involved in the discovery of those secrets through interaction and role-play. My friend’s preference is to circumvent all of that with powerful characters and lucky dice. This style of play shortcuts what I feel is the central part of role-playing, the back-and-forth dialogue between a referee and the players.

I’m trying to objectively assess my own bias about modern play styles and wondering if I should just loosen up a bit. I’m not one of those simulationist wargamer grognards who expects players to have a working knowledge of battle tactics and combat formations. I think one can find a middle ground, and I hope I can find mine while still finding people I can play with.

OSR Deadliness and 3d6 Straight Down

I've seen some recent discussion in forums about the deadliness of OSR games, both from a positive and a negative perspective. Critics of the OSR claim that the inherent deadliness of these games are a barrier to immersive play since it is hard to get attached or bond with your character knowing any random encounter could take them out. Another argument goes even further, maintaining that systems like this are inherently antagonistic towards players, turning them into grist for the GM's murder mill, meat on an adventure conveyor belt of the GM's design. Such systems, it is said, strip away player agency and rob them of a chance to build the epic stories they wish to partake in.

Of course, while it's possible for bad GM's to run their OSR games this way, I don't think it's inherent in the systems or psychologies of OSR games themselves. For me, as a GM or a player, I like the feeling and flavor of terror. Not terror in the cheap, slapstick horror movie manner, but terror in the sense of life or death stakes. I want to feel unnerved and not fully in control of the story or the outcome of the adventure. If I feel that my player is always going to survive, I'm not going to be as invested because the stakes aren't very high.

I realize my take on this is not the majority opinion. It seems like a lot of players are simply looking for a stage to express themselves through the avatar of their player. That's a completely valid way to play; it's just not for me. However, because a lot of people don't want to feel that sense of terror that I like, the very idea of a game that threatens the lives of their characters automatically becomes something antagonistic.

Modern gaming's solve for this perceived anti-player bias has been a carefully designed system of balanced encounter challenge ratings, and quick character level-advancement with escalating power bloat. This gives only the very fool-hardiest of player a real chance to die by never pitting PCs against something stronger than themselves and giving them an arsenal of special abilities and video game-like combos to defeat the enemy. I could (and still may, someday) write an article on the OSR's combat-as-war versus the New School's combat-as-sport. Instead, what I wanted to focus on here is that first-step in character generation: the rolling of ability scores.

Ability scores are more than just stat blocks that help determine success or failure in encounters. Theyare the foundational pillars of what defines a character. In some ways there is no more effective spring board for character background than the ability scores. They also have a lot influence over a character's chance of survival at low levels before a character gains a lot of special abilities, spells, skills, feats, or magical items. With this in mind, how these scores are generated matter.

In Old School D&D (Basic Fantasy, in my case), ability scores are generated by rolling 3d6 straight-down the line: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma, giving scores ranging between 3-18. Simple right? Well, even in the rules of the old game, there are a host of secondary options all of which have an effect for how strong, smart, wise, agile, etc. your character is. Some of the popular options include rolling 4d6 and dropping the lowest die, rolling six columns of six stats and picking the best, or starting with a base of 8 in every stat and allotting a pool of points wherever desired. There are also methods and rules for freely arranging the scores, evenly swapping a certain number of scores, or dropping one score by two to bump another up by one. All of these methods are usually employed to boost the numbers of player's scores. They don't guarantee superpowered characters, but they greatly decrease the likelihood of truly low scores (but it's possible).

In my current Basic Fantasy campaign I'm running pretty close to RaW. I had my player roll 3d6 straight down and I allowed them to swap a pair of scores as long as one those scores was an intended prerequisite. If the player rolled below 9 in all of the first four (Str, Int, Wis, Dex) I had them re-roll because they wouldn't technically qualify for any class. Also, if the net of their modifiers was negative, they could also re-roll. I like Chris Gonnerman's fix for this, which is to subtract all the scores from 21 which turns the negatives to positives and still creates a balanced character.

I'm pretty happy with this method given my GM style, but something caught my eye when I was perusing my old copy of the original AD&D PHB. On page 9 it mentions that characters without at least two ability scores above 15 risk a low chance of survival. This gave me pause for a couple reasons. First, because I never remembered this from back in the day; and second, because this statement implied that it was recommended (in fact, Gary uses the word "essential") to use a method of generating ability scores that would produce at least two exceptional stats. The deadliness of Old School all of the sudden seemed not so deadly. I finally understood why my PCs were never as studly as the pre-gens in the old modules. A quick scan of the scores of magic items handed out in those adventures also makes those Old School slug-fests not as scary.

I guess what I've decided is for now I will stick with my 3d6 method and my rare magic item games while understanding that my players will need to be extra careful in combat and run often early on if they hope to live. This also means fewer monsters beaten which means fewer XP, which in turn means a longer time before they level up and gain more power. I've hit upon a good XP method that not only rewards for combat and treasure, but also for exploration, clever play, and role-playing. But that's for another post.