The value proposition of low-level heroes

A lonely outpost on the edge of civilization is being harassed by a rabble of unruly goblinoids. The forces at the outpost turn to your party of novice heroes to save them.

Sound familiar?

It is the premise of many first level fantasy RPG adventures. As a plot mechanic, it works well to get players quickly into an adventure and be in a position to look like heroes. As a module writer, I am supremely thankful for this canard. However, even a cursory review of combat tables in D&D and retro-clones will show you that first level heroes have a mere %5 to hit advantage over non-adventurer humans. What is worse is that when looking at the stats for Men in the Monsters section of Labyrinth Lord or B/X D&D, even merchants have 1 hit die. This seems to reduce the premium of novice heroes quite a bit. When you look at more "trained" class like thieves, clerics and magic-users, the hit die situation worsens.

Why doesn't the town/outpost/keep just round up 10 or so of their own people to slay the kobolds/rats/vampire roses?

Player Characters as mercenaries offer their clients a few advantages:

• The locals do not risk their own necks
• When there are not enough "spare" locals of fighting age to solve the problem, outsourcing to remote heroes is necessary
• When the quest giver cannot trust anyone local, out of town heroes are desirable
• When the quest giver is looking to feed an unspeakable evil, out of town heroes are particularly desirable
• Heroes bring specialized skills that locals will not have (i.e. magic, thieving, detecting secret doors, etc.)
• If the heroes succeed, they will become stronger and possibly famous. Locals can bask in the reflected glory of being a past client

Low-level adventures have a bit of a stigma in that they are necessarily used to introduce players new to RPG to adventuring. However, low-level adventures are also where experienced players start with new heroes. In the world of Old School RPG, there are many well-seasoned players. We should be crafting low level adventures expecting expert players.

With some obvious modifications, it should be possible to scale down even the classic Tomb of Horrors to something first level characters could survive (at least survive at the same rate as high level characters do when running through the original adventure).

This is the sort of challenge I am looking to overcome when I release my own adventures. There is another issue of the hero career path, but that is a longer post.

We are all members of the Church of the Big Gamble

As an older player of Dungeons and Dragons, there are aspects of the game that are only now glaringly apparent. For player (that is PCs), the challenge of the game is primarily resource management. The resource is their character. Players need to balance their character's remaining hit points against remaining spells and gold. There really aren't enough demands on player gold, but that's a topic for another day.

Players invest their real world time (that most precious and non-replenishable of resources) into building increasingly high level characters. To do this, they must risk the very asset that they wish to improve: their character.

This risk is a lot like that of the traditional gambler, who puts his money at risk to make more. The desire of the gambler is, obviously, to make more money and not lose his original stake.

Of course, PCs aren't quite in the same boat. In D&D, you don't get much reward for killing 8 kobolds. You have to keep killing monsters until your characters levels up. This is like playing tournament Texas Hold 'em. You can't stop; You're totally committed.

Others in the old school blogosphere have lamented exactly this discontinuous reward system that frankly defines D&D and many other RPGs (including Fallout).

It might be a good idea to reward the players for smaller milestones. In particular, award hit points every several hundred experience points instead of a lump sum at the time of leveling. This is most critical at the first few levels. Users of magic can get additional spells normally -- that is less critical to survival. Thieving abilities might similarly progress at a sub-level event threshold.

It feels very cruel to make players invest perhaps dozens of hours of play to have their characters get to level 2. This fails to reward good play, narrow escapes and hard-won skirmishes along the way. If poker worked the same way, few people would play it.

One might reasonably ask what does the Dungeon Master risk and what is his pay off, but that will have to wait for another day.

Actors versus Generals

A problem has vexed all role playing games since the hobby's inception: what exactly is it? Poker is a card game in which players wager on the strength of their hands. Chess is a wargame in which each opponent attempts to take his opposite's king. Monopoly is a board game in which each player attempts to bankrupt each of his competitors. This pithy exercise fails to yield a satisfying answer for an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons.

Keeping the party in the dungeon

From Greyhawk Grognard

«To wit, characters in a dungeon go through two or three rooms, find themselves down some hit points and/or spells, and then return to the surface, heal up and re-memorize spells to return on the next day. Or, alternatively, they barricade themselves in a room and camp out in the dungeon itself. It's a problem that especially presents itself in lower-level games, because the spell casters have few spells and must recharge more often.»

Whether this is a problem or not depends on your expectations. Frankly, given the high mortality rate of low level characters, it's surprising that they don't rest after every encounter (I ran a brief adventure in which this pretty much happened).

You can't blame the players. The game asks them to invest some emotional effort into customizing their characters. Players naturally do not want to throw that away early in a campaign.

If the DM allows for quick PC replacement of expired characters, the game loses a lot of its frisson. D&D isn't Donkey Kong.

The suggestion of the article linked above is to make the monsters more wary of PC incursions. That is exactly the recommendation found in The Keep on the Borderlands.

The essence of RPGs (and most other games) is the fallout from player choices. Sometimes a rapid, unyielding assault is the best tactical decision. However, this is rarely the case for low-level characters.

My own preference is to allow the party to rest whenever and wherever they choose and to put the monsters on guard (if warranted). For example, an aborted assault on a liar of orcs will cause them to post more guards and even create new traps at the entrance. A dragon who repels invaders will not be caught napping a second time. On the other hand, a tomb filled with zombies, skeletons and wights will not change their behavior once the party is out of sight.

Also, I see no harm in starting out the party with several potions of healing. That at least gets them through one extra encounter before a rest.

If you feel like giving potions for free to a party is "Monty Hall," then simply have the potions expire in a week and make them have no resell value.

Total Party Kill

The Total Party Kill is a phrase I learned only recently. I have experienced this on World of Warcraft (quiet a few times, sadly). This happens in the Fallout series all the time. In Pencil and Paper RPGs, the TPK event was considered among my peers as undesirable and generally anti-fun. We preferred to achieve the imaginary mission objectives and reap the fantasy rewards for pretend glory.