The Thieves' Guilds of Minaria

The poor thief has been the subject of many debates and contentions since his incipient introduction in Supplement I: Greyhawk. The most common complaint falls upon the low starting ability of the thief class. It is true, with most special abilities starting at 10% to 15% chance of success, the thief can hardly feel "special," but is instead discouraged from risking his neck on his dubious skill set. In fact, these scores only improve to an even 50% somewhere around 7th level in most editions of Dungeons & Dragons, when the thief's fighter and magic-user compatriots are well on their way to obtaining the defining features of those classes. The other common grievance is that the thief class is either unnecessary or even inimical to a proper Dungeons & Dragons play experience. When the thief was introduced to Original Dungeons & Dragons, he largely co-opted and made exclusive certain adventuring abilities that all dungeon-delvers had previously shared. Common skills such as climbing, trap-finding and lock-picking were suddenly the sole prerogative of the doughty thief, who seemingly had no other function in the game than to encompass all of the competencies once enjoyed by the original adventurers. Instead of stealing treasure, thieves had stolen adventuring proficiency from the other characters.

Feeling the acute loss of fundamental dungeoneering capabilities, some referees qualified these "new" thief skills with the superlative: as Robert Fisher suggests, perhaps all classes can move quietly, but only thieves can move utterly silently. Yet, this approach does not address basic skills like lock-picking or trap-finding—talents that adventurers previously benefited from but were now bereft of. It also did not confront the relatively low chances of success of novice thieves, which rendered their skills prohibitively futile. Other house rules diminished the great difficulty of these dice rolls by granting significant bonuses for easier challenges—a rusted lock or a crude trap door, perhaps. This latter method only solved the clumsy low-level thief by effectively ignoring the rulebook, creating a balanced skill progression where a thief always faced challenges relative to his skill and therefore had comparable chances of success regardless of level (perhaps the very antithesis of early Dungeons & Dragons).

So what is to be done about these dual problems—the loss of common adventuring abilities from other characters and the relatively ineffective ability of the low-level thief? In Minaria, thieves are a vital part of the party, and any party that enters the dungeon without at least one or two in tow is in severe danger. Of course, any character has the same ability to explore the tricks and traps of the mythic underworld—I listen to their descriptions, look at their character sheet and then let them try their luck on a single polyhedral die (perhaps 3 in 8, or 5 in 12, or 2 in 6 and so on). I will even let the player pick her favorite lucky die and then adjudicate the odds for that die type. This approach demands that the referee give a clear description of the terrain and the player gives a clear description of her action, but this action is open to any and all characters (thieves included). However, if the players cannot figure out the trap by asking questions, or if they get a close guess but botch the roll, only the thief has a second layer of defense. Here, the thief's training and skill competency kicks in, and after failing the earlier attempt the thief can make a free, back-up saving roll on the Thieves' Abilities table. These bonus odds are on top of the regular effort, and are a second chance that can rescue the party regardless of whether they have figured out the trap. Played a different way, the party can skip the initial roleplaying and just have the thief roll the ability check. If this is successful, the trap is automatically described and bypassed and the adventure continues without pause. If this fails, the party must take a closer look at the trap and roleplay their attempt to manually disarm it.

At later levels, when thief skills become very high, it is likely the party will increasingly rely on the latter method—making initial recourse to the thief skill to see if the roleplay element can be dispensed with and more exciting parts of the dungeon can be accessed more quickly. At earlier levels, however, the party will enjoy the grittiness of dealing with traps and tricks more directly. Still, all characters should have a chance to open locks, remove traps, pick pockets, move silently, climb sheer surfaces and hide in shadows, at least when they describe a reasonable strategy and have character scores to support it. When the dice turn against such dungeon-delvers, however, thieves have a second chance to catch their fall. Sometimes, the narrated attempt will be unreasonable, and the referee will simply have to say No. Even when such practical constraints limit normal classes, though, thieves should still get their chance to snatch victory from defeat. By allowing thief skills to operate like an extra safety net for dashing heroics, thief characters are encouraged, not discouraged, from using their abilities.

Every Fighting-Man is Unique

I am not aware when it came about, but at some point a vicious rumour crept into our collective understanding of Dungeons & Dragons. This rumour subtly, surreptitiously put forth the notion that the original game, in its basic, open-ended template form, was somehow too limited. There weren't enough monsters, there weren't enough classes, there weren't enough powers or abilities. The original game, so this shadowy speculation would have you believe, just didn't have enough stuff.

So the next generation of more "advanced" games came out, promising more things for the throngs of adventure-hungry players to do by promising game rules that were packed with more stuff. Ironically, on the other end of this history (some thirty years later), we are now flooded with such games—enough to stack from floor to ceiling in a dusty, unvisited brick-and-mortar gaming store. We certainly have enough adventure, yet, we have very few players hungry for adventure. What went wrong? What was it that originally enchanted those players, who came from every walk of life, and made them so esurient?

Today's games have naturally attracted a very different, and far less diverse crowd (which is unfortunate, not only because we lose perspective and creativity, but because many of the so-called "gamers" are individuals that no one in their right mind would like to spend an afternoon with). The excessive influx of systems, mechanics and rules to our Saturday afternoon scenarios naturally caters to rules-obsessed types, and the move away from free-form, communal decision-making and storytelling alienates people who didn't sign up for this level of commitment. But there is also a delightful agility that was somehow lost in this sad transmutation.

I believe that earlier adventuring aficionados truly understood that the original game was merely a template. The apparent limitation, for example, to choose one of three iconic character options (Fighting-Man, Magic-User or Cleric) belies the fact that these choices were never meant as more than basic blueprints from which characters were built. Looking in the three little books, for instance, one finds extremely few limitations: ability scores have next to no impact on the game, the rules allow dual and multi-classing, and any character can attempt any action. There was essentially an adventurer, and different options determined what access he or she had to different equipment and spellcraft.

One of the rarely highlighted aspects of the original game in particular is the concept of level titles. This dizzying array of honorifics is typically understood as a strict progression, one to the next, so that a Hero becomes a Swashbuckler or a Sorcerer becomes a Necromancer or a Bishop becomes a Lama. Yet, as we can see, this progression is not altogether coherent (why should a Catholic Bishop become a Tibetan Lama, exactly?), which may have led many to simply discard level titles entirely. At my table, I encourage my players to really make level titles their own, however, and use them to define their characters.

Maybe Toki, a Japanese Fighting-Man character, starts off as a Veteran. By level two, I encourage him to describe how his Fighting-Man is different, and soon he takes the level two title "Sohei" (or warrior monk, becoming an ascetic mountain warrior). During level two, I allow him to track monsters through the woods or navigate untamed mountains. By level three, the campaign has taken another turn: Toki takes on the role of a pirate and starts swinging from ropes and intimidating his opponents.

Customizing level titles is an excellent way to show your players that the archetypal classes are merely base templates from which characters are developed. I do not believe a party with 14 Fighting-Men should feel like a party with 14 Fighting-Men. The fact is that the Fighting-Man class, like the other classes, is broad enough to contain every sword-swinging hero one could dream up. Each character should be different and unique, and the rules of the original game are just open-ended enough to allow that. In reality, there is nothing more alienating than bringing a new player to your table and telling him that his character concept has to fit within your game's hard boundaries and strict definitions, and this is one of the main reasons that this hobby lost its diverse player community: we stopped asking people to bring their own creativity and ideas to the table.

SUPER OD&D

Marv made an interesting comparison over on the Goodman Games boards. To me, Dungeon Crawl Classics is like a Super OD&D (in the tradition of Super Mario Brothers games). Indeed, it has many similarities to the three little brown books of the original game, yet it makes thewy additions and expansions to that base as well. The first volume of that game alone shares basic assumptions about the social scale of experience levels, the power of classes, the protected niches of characters, the nature of magic.

Take magic, for example. Via Chainmail, the magic system in the original game is highly unpredictable, where magic-users can cast a spell only to find their spell miscast without benefit (and lost), cast successfully (and retained for future use) or caught somewhere in between, in limbo until the next turn. DCC takes this basic principle and adds much more detail, so that miscast spells might also transform the caster into a hideous creature, or successful sorcery might prove unexpectedly powerful. Add in supernatural patrons and character-specific spell manifestations and you have a magic system that is built from the same basic foundation as OD&D, yet with much more muscle to it.

Similarly, the progression of power for fighting-men is modelled directly on OD&D. While later "advanced" editions of the game weakened the fighter, introducing the "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" quandry, it is important to remember that this problem is entirely foreign to the original three little booklets. A ninth level fighting-man was simply nine times more powerful than when he first started out (similarly so for magic-users). He fought as nine men, with nine attacks (each the strength of one man's strike). While his "advanced" cousing, the fighter of AD&D was reduced to two or three attacks a round, the DCC warrior returns to native soil in a unique way, making three attacks, each strike the strength of three men (for identical output to the OD&D fighting-man, but with less dicing). Add in critical hit charts, fumbles and mighty deeds, and again you have a robust and powerful addition to the original game.

Even the social scale of characters in DCC is reminiscent of the original game, where a first level warrior is no mere soldier. Roughly speaking, a first level character is already the hero of the townships, an unlikely local that rose to unexpected prominence for his deeds. His tales will be told in the few villages of the valley for several generations. A level two character is the celebrity of a major city, well known by all but the unsophisticated. By third level, an adventurer has already rose to the prestige of a conqueror-king or slayer, whose legend will endure. This is far removed from the scale of power in later games, but is actually perfectly in line with the concepts found in OD&D.

More comparisons can, of course, be drawn with the other volumes, but this is just what comes to mind while paging through Men & Magic. I am curious how this plays out over longterm play, but I suspect the pace and style of DCC would be very reminiscent of the original three little books. Of course, it was always a design goal of DCC, it seems, to start at 1974, but only go backwards from there, instead of forward into the future.

Admiring the DCC Warrior

So it has been a few days since the pre-order electronic copies of the Dungeon Crawl Classic Roleplaying Game went out. With some time to really let the game sink in, I have been coming more and more to admire the Warrior class. For those who were not fortunate enough to preorder, DCC has seven roles to select from: Cleric, Thief, Warrior, Wizard, Dwarf, Elf and Halfling. The Warrior is DCC's answer to the swordsmen and champions of fantasy literature previously described by the Fighter of Advanced Dungeon & Dragons.

Of course, that class was always rather lumpy and assymetrical in power and ability at different levels—something which you either loved or hated. This created a marked difference in the feel of low-level play (characterized by extreme lethality) and high-level play. With mundane armaments, a first level fighter would likely die upon his first wound. By ninth level, the same fighter would withstand nine or more wounds from an equal opponent. While toughness progressed linearly, the ability to inflict harm did not. The attempt to bridge this gulf in low and high-level play came to one extreme in Dungeon & Dragons 4th Edition, which made the relative deadliness of combat scale perfectly over all 30 (!) levels. Without a doubt, this was even less satisfying than the gap of previous editions, as now nothing changed at all as characters gained experience and supposedly progressed.

I was curious if the new Warrior of Dungeon Crawl Classics had addressed this issue, so I decided to crunch the numbers and find out. One thing that stood out immediately is that the scale of characters in DCC is very different. There are only 10 levels, but each level means a lot more than in any edition of D&D. The result is that low level DCC characters are noticeably more resilient in comparison. While a zero level DCC character is weaker than even the humble Fighter of AD&D, by the time that DCC Warrior reaches Level 1, he is more powerful than his peer, taking an average 3 sword strikes to bring down (a nice, well rounded number in my opinion).

High level characters also seem tougher than their AD&D compatriots, at least at first glance. The average 10th level Warrior has 68 hit points (compared to the Fighter's 53), while weapons cause the same damage in both games (1-8 points for a longsword, for example). However, high level DCC Warriors can really dish it out using the simple "Mighty Deeds" mechanic. To give you an idea, a 10th level Warror will make three attacks a turn, each one hitting as hard as three sword strikes on average, and each attack having a 20% of achieving a truly nasty critical hit (the average critical at that level is +3d12 damage with a free follow up attack if the attack drops the victim, but instant death results are common). It gets even more ugly for a dual-wielding warrior.

The end result is that, armed with mundane weaponry, a fight between identical high level Warriors will be over in about three to four rounds. Again, there is the nice symmetry with the number 3, yet the perfect scaling of Dungeon & Dragons 4th Edition is avoided. High level fights are very different than low level fights, as they should be, with multiple attacks, tactical Mighty Deeds, critical strikes and so on. Such duels are much more flashy, fast moving and narratively surprising, while low level fights are more nail-biting, gritty and personal. Interestingly, this is attained without giving the Warrior a single new ability (in fact, the Warrior does not gain any new abilities as he levels).

On a related note, while their are no rules for resurrecting the dead (unless you count the gruesome and temporary "Replication" spell), there is a chance for your character to survive a lethal encounter. A fallen character will take time to bleed out. If he is not rescued and does bleed out, the party could recover the body within an hour and might find that he's actually still alive. Life is neither cheap, nor death completely avoidable, which gives just the right feel for pulp fantasy.

Fighters have always been my favorite class to play, and I am happy to see that they get a good treatment in DCC. Often their chance in the spotlight it stolen by Magic-Users and other more specialized classes, especially at higher levels, but the simple addition of rules like Mighty Deeds and specialized critical hit charts mean that Warriors will continue to be the central characters right up to the end of the game. Furthermore, the careful attention to pacing at each level implies that there was an impressive amount of care, concern and playtesting put into Dungeon Crawl Classics, which bodes very well for potentially running long term campaigns with this game.

Appendix S: Extra Swords for your Warriors
Dagger: Lawful, +1, Int 8, urges to enforce the law, death dealer to warriors (Fort save DC 1d20+10 or instant death), light at will (20').
An unnamed dagger used to overthrow a tyrant long ago.

Longsword: Chaotic, +1, Int 7, urges to punish interlopers and those who interfere and to slay lawful dragons. +1d4 dmg vs lawful creatures, 20' darkness, strength +4.
Barbspite: A sword forged by the hags of Drearmore to aid a fanatical and corrupted hero in his self-destructive quest.

Longsword: Neutral, +1, Int 5, urges to live alone as a warrior hermit, +1 critical range vs clerics, speak thieves (druid) cant.
Sword of the old ways: Hammered by druids to resist the new faiths, the sword of the old ways drives the wielder to withdraw deeper into the wilds to avoid the encroach of foreign civilization.

Dagger: Lawful, +2, 12 Int, Empathical drives wielder to punish murderers and slay chaotic creatures. Unerring throw vs Serpents, +1 dmg vs men, detect magic (1/day), detect water (1d8x10'), Thunder Blade, Supreme willpower.
Blade of Sph't: Created by the underground dwellers of Shokassam to mercilessly hunt down the cult of snakemen that was hiding in the desert and raiding, torturing and sacrificing their people. The hero used the thunderous booming of the dagger to draw out their avatar - an enormous cobra.

The Sage

Here is my final optional class for pulpy campaigns: the sage. Also, check out the wanderer and the rogue if you missed them.

Sages: Living on the very border of civilization and wilderness, the reclusive sage is a lifelong student of ancient lore. These eremites have unlocked the secrets of the empyrean and learned how to transcribe both arcane and divine magic into precise formulas. Sages prepare and cast spells exactly as a magic-user and they may also transcribe cleric spells into their spellbook, although due to their peculiar celestial equations they cannot prepare the same spell more than once at a time. Sages have the same restrictions on equipment and magical items as magic-users, but are far more bookish and will only pick up and use a weapon or magic item when pressed by immediate and dire necessity. Otherwise, sages fight, save and require the same number of experience points for each level as magic-users do. Additionally, sages have a superior ability to know fragments of ancient lore, and any elaborations a sage makes on such a piece of knowledge has a chance of being fairly accurate.

	Dice for Acc	Fighting	Spells & Levels
Sages	umulated Hit	Capability	1 2 3 4 5 6
Recluse	1	Man	- - - - - -
Hermit	1 + 1	Man + 1	1 - - - - -
Hedge Wizard	2	2 Men	2 - - - - -
Wise Man	2 + 1	2 Men + 1	2 1 - - - -
Shaman	3	3 Men	2 2 - - - -
Savant	3 + 1	3 Men + 1	2 2 1 1 - -
Augur	4	Hero - 1	2 2 2 1 1 -
Scholar	5	Hero	2 2 2 2 2 -
Magus	6 + 1	Hero + 1	3 3 3 2 2 -
Philosopher	7	Wizard	3 3 3 3 3 -
Sage	8 + 1	Wizard	4 4 4 3 3 -

The Wanderer

Another optional character class for pulp swords & sorcery games, I present the wanderer.

Wanderers: Considered dangerous savages by society, wanderers hail from the utter ends of the world. These wild men have shunned the ways of civilization for the laws of the wilderness, and have learned how to survive on their own. Relying on their own prowess, wanderers are mistrustful of sorcery and may only use one magical item at a time. They may use any weaponry, but are limited from wearing armour heavier than chain mail. Due to the raw fury of their attack, wanderers gain a bonus to all damage they inflict equal to half their level rounded up. Otherwise, wanderers fight, save and require the same number of experience points for each level as fighting-men do. Wanderers have a superior ability to traverse natural obstacles, navigate difficult terrain, track enemies and survive in the wilderness.

	Dice for Acc	Fighting
Wanderers	umulated Hits	Capability
Nomad	1 + 1	Man + 1
Wild Man	2	2 Men + 1
Roamer	3	3 Men or Hero - 1
Ranger	4	Hero
Outlaw	5 + 1	Hero + 1 or 5 Men
Marauder	6	Hero + 1 or 6 Men
Outlander	7 + 1	Superhero - 1
Wanderer	8 + 2	Superhero
Barbarian King	9 + 3	Superhero + 1
Barbarian King, 10th Level	10 + 1	Superhero + 1

The Rogue

As an optional character class for more pulpy games, here is my take on the rogue-sorcerer.

Rogues: Outcasts from the academy, rogue-sorcerers must eke out a living amidst the dregs of society. Rogues develop unique skills while living away from the wizardry colleges, and while they are not as proficient in magic, they more than make up for this in grit and cunning. Rogues may use all magical items and weaponry, but are limited from wearing the heavier armours. Rogues do not use spellbooks, and must rely on the limited number of spells they can learn by heart. Rogues fight, save and require the same number of experience points for each level as clerics do. A Rogue who successfully sneaks up on a mark has a chance to immediately eliminate his target.

	Dice for Acc	Fighting	Spells & Levels
Rogues	umulated Hit	Capability	1 2 3
Knave	1	Man	- - -
Miscreant	2	Man + 1	1 - -
Prestidigitator	3	2 Men	2 - -
Trickster	4	3 Men	2 1 -
Scoundrel	4 + 1	3 Men + 1	3 2 -
Ensorceler	5	Hero - 1	4 2 -
Mountebank	6	Hero	4 2 1
Rogue	7	Hero + 1	4 2 2
Rogue, 9th Level	7 + 1	Superhero-1	4 3 2
Rogue, 10th Level	7 + 2	Superhero-1	4 3 3