Last week, I played D&D with Mike Mornard, a member of the original Greyhawk and Blackmoor campaigns. This is the last piece of my writeup of Mike’s wisdom.

monsters

Mike cried fie on the modern-era concept of PC-leveled encounters. (I don’t remember if he actually said “fie,” but he is the sort of person who would have said “fie” if he thought of it, so I’ll let it stand.) In Greyhawk, you might encounter trolls on level 1 of the dungeon. There would be warnings: skulls and gnawed bones, and the party dwarf might notice a trollish stench. I asked, “Would there also be skulls and gnawed bones in front of the kobold lair?” meaning to ask if the danger warning signs were applied to every monster, weak and strong alike. It turned out to be a bad question: despite their lousy hit points, the badassification of kobolds started on day 1 in D&D. Gygax’s kobolds were deadly. Mike said that they collected the magic items of the characters they killed, which meant that besides their fearsome tactics, they also had a scary magical arsenal.

When Mike started DMing, lo and behold, the first monsters we fought were… kobolds! The first signs we saw of them were stones whizzing from the darkness to hit our PCs. We chased the stone-throwers into passages, around corners, and past intersections, never sure if we were on the right track. We managed to corner two kobolds, killing one and Charming the other. We tried to interrogate the kobolds, but none of us spoke kobold (we should have thought of that before we wasted our wizard’s only spell, I guess.) We gave the Charmed kobold my map and tried to pantomime for him to complete it, which I thought was pretty clever, but he filled the paper with pornographic kobold scrawls. Couldn’t have been much less helpful than my map.

We spent the entire session chasing down four more kobolds. They dropped two of us to 0 HP, and it was touch and go whether the rest of us would make it out of the dungeon. Here, again, light was an important factor: since we had torches, we were great targets for stone-throwing creatures in the darkness. Eventually, we started setting ambushes in the dark; surrounding our position with torches so that the kobolds would have to show themselves to attack; and, most importantly, planning fast. Every time we spent too much time in deliberation, another sling stone would come flying out of the darkness.

Mike later mentioned that he’d given kobolds an affinity for stones because, in Chainmail, kobolds were sort of the monster equivalent of halflings, and halflings also had bonuses with stones. Also, kobolds are traditionally mining spirits: the element cobalt is derived from the name kobold.

After the game, Mike told us that he’d run this adventure before, and we’d done better than a lot of groups, because we were fairly focused and we played with a minimum of “cross-chat”. We did a little out-of-character and in-character joking around, but less than most groups I’ve been in: both because delays tended to get us attacked, and because we were in a noisy art gallery where we had to strain to hear the DM.

That’s not to say that there was no joking among the players, and the DM wasn’t entirely serious either. In choosing the kobold mine, we passed up several adventure hooks, including one involving getting back a sacred bra or something – I wasn’t interested in that because it didn’t seem serious enough. I guess I’ve come to expect relative seriousness from the DM and silliness from the players, while Mornard-style OD&D seems to involve seriousness from the players and silliness from the DM. Mornard has said elsewhere that D&D is a “piss-take” – a send-up of the fantasy and wargames of the 60s and 70s. If that’s the case, it’s especially funny that D&D has outlived the things it was parodying. It’s as if the audiophiles of the future had to piece together the music of the 80’s and 90’s entirely from Weird Al albums.

Speaking of humor: Mike recommended the Book of Weird, a “humorous dictionary of fantasy” that he said was great reading for a DM.

treasure

When we finally found a part of the mine that was studded with gems, we grabbed the gems and ran – we didn’t care what else was in the dungeon. We ended up with 27 gems: Mike gave our fighter bonus XP for being cautious enough to pry the first one out with a ten-foot pole.

When we got back from town, Mike rolled up the values of all the gems, announcing the value of each to the party record-keeper (me, again my default). If I were the DM, I probably would have announced an average value of the gems or something: I wouldn’t have thought the players wanted to sit through a list of 27 numbers. But it’s funny: people’s attention spans get longer when it comes to profits.

The random rolling paid off for us when, among the other gems, we found a 10,000 GP-value gem. That pushed us all up to level 2. Mike commented that that’s why he likes random charts: they help tell a story that neither the DM nor the players can anticipate.

character classes

As we were making our characters, and the cleric was exclaiming over the lack of level spells, Mike told us a little bit about the evolution of the classes. A low-level OD&D cleric, he reminded us, was a capable front-line fighter – kind of an undead specialist warrior – especially in the early days of D&D, when every weapon did 1d6 damage.

One of the effects of variable weapon damage, he said, was to make weapon choice more plausible and meaningful. Before variable weapon damage, everyone was using the cheapest weapon possible – iron spikes! After variable weapon damage, fighters started using swords, which did 1d8 damage, or 1d12 against large monsters. Fighters with swords was a better mirror of history and heroic fantasy than fighters with daggers or iron spikes.

combat rules

Mike played with pretty straight OD&D rules with the Greyhawk supplement. He says that Gary’s group played with variable weapon damage, including different damage for medium and large opponents, but not the AD&D weapon speed rules.

In our game, when Mike called for initiative, each player rolled a d6 at the beginning of each round. Mike would call out: “Any sixes? Fives?” etc, so a high roll was good. I don’t know if that’s what they did in Gary’s game, but it worked for us in 2012.

Mike told us that, while he was in Dave Arneson’s game, they mostly played straight OD&D. They didn’t use the hit-location rules from the Blackmoor supplement: Mike doubts that anyone ever played with those. But who knows: “people were bringing in new rules all the time,” he reminded me, “and not everything stuck.” Mike also didn’t remember anyone using the assassin. Too bad: I’m pretty curious about how that class actually worked in play.

One last comment about Gary Gygax: When Mike joinde Gary’s game, Mike was 17 years old. “Gary was the first person who ever treated me like an adult,” he said. Not a bad legacy, even apart from the cool game.

Last week I played a D&D game DMed by Mike Mornard, a veteran of Gygax’s and Arneson’s gaming groups. A lot of the original assumptions of Gary’s and Dave’s game didn’t make it through the Little Brown Books into my brain, so as we played, I asked Mike a lot of questions.

mapping

At the beginning of our game, I made the mistake of asking the group, “Who wants to map?” Since I had asked first, I was elected to the position. I am a piss poor mapper, especially on non-graph paper. At the end of the game, Mike compared his map to my scrawl, and the contrast was disheartening. On the other hand, my inaccurate, twisted fun-house version of the dungeon was topographically the same as Mike’s map, in the same way that a donut is topographically identical to a coffee mug, and I had been able to accurately steer our group through the map’s twists and turns.

Mike’s map-describing style was approximately like this. “You go ten, twenty, thirty feet north, and hit a wall. You can go east and west along the wall.” He’d wait for input, like “We go east”, and then continue, “Ten, twenty feet east, and there is a ten-foot wide passageway in the north wall. The stonework here is rougher. The north passage goes straight as far as you can see.” As the party mapper, I would sometimes just say “North” or “East”. This presentation felt oddly like a text adventure: maybe Action Castle is closer to the original version of D&D than I thought.

One thing that actually made mapping easier: the fact that our light sources were important. We could only see twenty or thirty feet in any direction, which helped focus our decisions. Even in a big room with lots of details, we were only in the position to see a couple of our choices at the same time.

Mike mentioned that he went to high school with Rob Kuntz, Gary’s eventual co-DM. Rob had an eidetic memory, and when he was playing in Gygax’s dungeon, he didn’t need to map and never got lost. Sometimes he would correct Gygax. Mike did his impression of Gary crying, “Curse you, Kuntz!”

I should add that, as the mapper, I got a lot of the DM’s attention. Mapping is a big slice of the OD&D pie. This meant I was always engaged, and so was the DM, but what did the other players do while I was asking for clarifications about the length of the east wall? Probably zoning out a little – especially since cross-table chatter was frowned upon. So far I’ve only experienced OD&D as the mapper and the DM, so I’ll have to try a different role next time.

character background

Someone asked Mike, “How much character background did you do in the old days?” Mike came back with a pretty quotable line: “The cool thing about your character was what you did in the game.” Characters had backgrounds like “fighter” or, at most, “the youngest son of a landless knight”.

Mike added that DM game pitches should be short as well: the opening crawl to Star Wars is only 92 words long (Mike went on to quote the crawl from memory: I’m a big Star Wars fan but I was outclassed.) Gary Gygax pitched D&D as, “Want to try this new game called Greyhawk where you kill monsters and get treasure?”

I was also interested in this quote because, from this and other quotes about the “Greyhawk campaign”, it sounds like players thought of the game as “Greyhawk”. Imagine if D&D had been published as “Greyhawk”: just that name change would cemented the setting right in the middle of the game, and really changed how a lot of people play, I bet.

Chainmail and game development

Mike commented that Chainmail was still his favorite minis game. He said that when they introduced new players to the game, they would just give the players a few units to keep track of (battles were often played with four or five players). New players could expect to get beaten for a couple of games too.

Mike credited Chainmail’s good rules to Gary’s maxim, “I’d rather have a good rule now than a perfect one in a year.” I’d never heard this ascribed to Gary before, but it makes a lot of sense, and when we’re wondering why this D&D class requires so many XP to level up or whatever, it’s good to remember that Gary, Dave, and the other D&D contributors were coming to the table with new rules all the time: those they like stayed, even if some pieces of them were arbitrary and not fully thought-out. It didn’t make sense to kill yourself perfecting every detail while there was still so much new game-design ground to cover.

This post is getting long, and I still have a lot of game notes to get through! I’ll do one more post, and try to cover Mike’s wisdom on monsters, treasure, character classes, and combat rules.

Yesterday, Tavis enticed my gaming group to the Soho Gallery for Digital Art for a D&D art/gaming event. The bait on the hook included Doritos, new art by Erol Otus and other cool people, and a game DMed by Mike Mornard. Mike played in Gary Gygax’s DND game in 1971 AND in Dave Arneson’s game and Phil Barker’s game. The guy had a talent for finding cool gaming groups.

Since I’ve appointed myself a minor curate in the Church of Preserving Cool D&D History, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pepper Mike with questions. I also got to play a session in his game, and made a real hash of being the party mapper. (What else would you expected from a 4e player?)

Mike showed off some of his autographed books: his 1e Player’s Handbook was signed to “Lessnard the Wizard”, one of Mike’s characters. Apparently, when he was level 1, Lessnard had the distinction of surviving a solo trip to level 3 of the Greyhawk dungeon. Lessnard was alone because he couldn’t convince any hirelings to join him – he had lost too many hirelings in the dungeon already. Mike produced that story to demonstrate that, contrary to common belief, a lowly level 1 wizard had plenty of survivability!

It sounds like Lessnard adventured over several solo adventures with Gygax, which seems to have been pretty common in the old days. I’d heard that low-level characters often travelled in groups while high-level characters adventured solo, with just their henchmen to back them up, but from the Lessnard story, it appears that even ill-advised level-one characters sometimes attempted the feat. On the other hand, Lessnard’s survival was notable enough to be memorable for 40 years, so maybe it wasn’t a common practice.

Mike gave a fascinating account of a typical early D&D game, with a peculiar detail that I’d never heard before. Gary never used maps or minis: maps and minis were Dave Arneson’s thing. Gary ran games in his office, which was provided with chairs, a couch, and file cabinets. While playing, Gary would open the drawers of the file cabinet and sit behind them so that the players COULD NOT SEE HIM. They only experienced the Dungeon Master as a disembodied voice.

During games, cross-talk was discouraged: the party caller did most of the talking, and other players only talked if they had something to contribute. If the players chattered too much, they’d miss what the Disembodied Voice was saying, and that would be, as Mike put it, “suicide”. “You could feel the tension in the room,” he added.

It’s a very different style than the way I and my friends play. We do a lot of joking and chattering, the DM doesn’t kill you for not paying attention, and apart from a few suspenseful moments, tension at the table is often low. I honestly don’t think one way to play is necessarily worse than the other, any more than comedies are worse than suspense movies or vice versa. I’d be happy to play in either style of game – preferably both.

Mike said a lot more. I’ll try to write up the rest of my notes – including answers to questions about mapping, classes, weapons, and roleplaying in the early days – in the next post.