Blog book club #12: The Death of the Wandering Monster

[martin]

Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “The Death of the Wandering Monster” from 2008 by Justin Alexander (The Alexandrian).

Next week we’ll discuss “Playing with Death and Dismemberment” from 2008 by Trollsmyth. You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.

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This is a very third edition take on the problem of losing wandering monsters: that it allows spellcasters to dominate combat as they don’t have to manage the resource of limited spell slots. Of course, it also plays havoc with all resource management: If you can always retreat and rest in between each “set-piece” encounter then all resource management (HP, torches, etc.) becomes irrelevant.

Moreover, without the risk of wanderers (and time-based resources), there is no consequence to failing a roll during exploration. This leads to the weird phenomenon in trad play of pointless rolls, which then leads to all kinds of indie/forgeite maxims around “only roll if there is something at stake” and “failing forward”. Which is all great stuff! But the muddle trad got into is (I think) because wanderers and resource management give every roll in the dungeon default stakes, so the need for stakes when rolling was not apparent.

[pooserville]

One of the things that makes the Alexandrian a regular read is that he seems to identify why things from old school D&D worked. Gygax/Arneson built a lot of systems that were load-bearing and told people to use them but never explained why they were important, and so many of them eventually got dropped. The original OSR, from my perspective, restored some of the old-school approaches but largely cargo-culted them; they knew they worked but they didn’t know why. Justin isn’t the only person analyzing what the systems did and suggesting other ways to accomplish the same goals — @GusL has done some great work here, and I’m sure there are others that my undercaffeinated brain can’t recall at 0630 — but he’s one of the most prolific and systematic writers.
For myself, as someone who played Basic and Advanced D&D in the early '80s, much of the cargo-cult OSR work seemed irrelevant; I quit playing D&D in '87 for a reason, after all. Justin and other folks like him were doing the work that lets me run new-school games in a way that delivers on the experiences of the old school without the clunkiness.

[xaran]

I started with D&D 3.5E, so I can relate to a lot of what’s outlined in this post and what others are saying here. For the first couple of campaigns I ran (my first exposure to TTRPG gaming), we ignored quite a bit:

• encumbrance rules (I never liked encumbrance in video games)
• ammo tracking (who wants to track the number of missed shots and roll to recover each missile?)
• light sources (most of the party can see in the dark)
• player mapping (it’s hard to describe and slows things down)
• random encounters (nothing happens when I roll most of the time anyway!)
• disarming traps and picking locks ended up being resolved without a roll most of the time (I take 10 or 20; is my skill high enough?)

This all contributed to exploration falling flat pretty easily in those games.

Even D&D 5E doesn’t have a lot of teeth in its exploration mechanics. Some of that may also be due to adventure structures shifting to smaller spaces like “5 room dungeons”. Despite that it’s interesting how many of the mechanics and rules for these still exist in 5E, though it doesn’t really feel like many adventures published for it generally take them into account. I admit most of my exposure for 5E has been on the player side of the screen. Has anyone had a fun experience using exploration rules that are in D&D 5E?

While I eased into it, I found old school play refreshing. The benefits of these rules feel obvious to me now, but I think it did take seeing them in action to appreciate them. I do really like how they add stakes to exploration in what feels like an effortless way. I do tend to like newer versions of many of the mechanics like slot-based encumbrance, usage dice, or an overloaded encounter die.

Non-OSR Tangent

Another direction I’ve seen this go with modern TTRPG design leans hard into the “combat as sport” idea with explicit boundaries on how and when resources can be recovered. I’m thinking of something like 13th Age where by default you aren’t supposed to be able to heal up until you’ve had 4 average battles (fewer if more challenging; more if less), even if the “adventuring day” covers multiple rest periods. It definitely makes the game feel more artificial, but it’s easier to make all combats feel roughly as “exciting” as any other and players can portion out their abilities somewhat reliably.

[GusL]

I find this post an interesting cul de sac in OSR theory. Not bad, and certainly influential, but directed at the issues with 3.5E (I wonder how the argument holds with the then emerging 4E?) not really at understanding how old games in my mind. This post feels like 4E theory, long combat theory, encounter based design theory … and to me the fix for its problems are found in character and combat design - because that is the focus of the game. Wandering monsters should be omitted and set piece combat improved mechanically for these games. To me the problem there is less “Oh no not enough unstructured/randomized risk” and more “Proper tactical mechanics are needed”.

What I’m saying is I don’t know how much wandering monsters help with the “quadratic wizard” - but I’ve also never really seen that as a huge problem. In OD&D derived systems Wizards become comparatively more and more squishy as they level … they need a party or a lot of flunkies to protect themselves, and honestly level 10+ play has never really interested me. It might if domain play was more popular but simply battling increasingly powerful monsters in ever longer combat encounters has always felt dull to me.

1st - 7th level dungeon crawling is where I think old systems shine and where wandering monsters matter. Here random encounters perform one primary function and a couple of less important ones:

I) to produce randomized risk that limits/changes player navigation choice (one tends to avoid random encounters when possible), and threatens character resources (even survival as apex predator/asymmetrical encounters are important) in an unpredictable way. This is in opposition to supplies (more or less consistent resource depletion) and intentional depilation (entering combat, using resources on obstacles).

A) Description and flavor - the random encounter provides a taste of the level, its factions and risks. Monsters encountered on random tables in a well designed location provide clues to the level’s ecology and power structure.

B) Faction interaction - similar to the above, faction patrols (a very important and common type of random encounter) provide initial contact and complications for players and level/dungeon factions. They are the place to start negotiations and gain allies and enemies.

C) Make changes to the dungeon. The random encounter table can evolve. New monsters can be added: filtering in from outside/below as the dungeon is explored, demonstrating faction strength/activity, or representing responses to other player actions (opening the gate of the damned etc). Likewise they can be removed and reduced as wandering predators (especially dangerous apex predators) and factions are eliminated.

D) Alexanderian’s point - to provide potential risk for moving through “cleared” dungeon areas and thus limiting the “15 minute adventuring day”. I think of this one less as I use an expedition based style, where healing and spell recouping is on a “per Session” basis, not a “daily” one - the turn is named after its real world time period effect/not its in game one (just like “Round” and “Turn”. If one is using the something besides 1 to 1 time them it becomes more of a thing - especially with cautious players.

To me these are the reasons the wandering monster table is to be emphasized - with the wizard power/PC resource hoarding issue a tertiary one.

In 2008 though I think it was a serious issue in D&D/trad play culture - I remember playing in such games in fact. Alexandrian is making a solid point for the era and one whose resolution within the OSR opened the way for the observations on random encounter design/necessity that I and others in the OSR ended up championing.