Holmes and the Human Fighting Man

I've been revisiting my copies of Holmes Basic Dungeons & Dragons and Blueholme - both the Prentice and the Journeymanne Rules. This is a version of D&D I only gained awareness of 20 years ago when I bought TSR's Silver Anniversary box set. It's a version I can examine with fresh eyes, unaffected by the fog of nostalgia. Sure, it's familiar in that there's a bunch of Sutherland and Tramp art throughout and the core concepts are the same. And yet, in terms of tone, it's pretty singular.

Caught between OD&D and AD&D, and edited by neurologist, J. Eric Holmes, this rule set is a streamlined reinterpretation of the original rules designed to bring new players into Dungeons & Dragons who didn't have a background in war gaming. To that end, it was incredibly successful, and it provided a nice segue into the advanced game which would come out over the next couple of years.

There are small differences between this compact rulebook and both the original and advanced rules, but again, it's the tone that separates it from the other books. It feels open and mercurial and magical compared to the abstract war gaming instructions of the original rules, and nowhere near as precise as AD&D with its explanations of bell curves and rules for grappling and psionics. In the section titled, "Dungeon Mastering as a Fine Art," Holmes explains how to run the game with simple pragmatic advice to make the game challenging, but survivable. He directs DMs to narrate dramatically, use colorful dialogue, and have characters invoke gods like Zeus, Crom, and Cthulhu when they swear. The spell lists, monsters, and magic items don't feel Basic. They have a Byzantine, Old World faerie-land feel to them. They evoke all kinds of mysterious possibilities. Blueholme's retro-clone version of the rules extends this feel with its whimsical fairy-tale art and tone.

I recently read an old Dragonsfoot post by Geoffrey McKinney about using the Holmes edition as a complete game. There's something compelling to the argument. There are better places to read about Holmes' rules (like here), so rather than go on and on over well-covered territory, I wanted to touch on one particular topic that's I found interesting: Holmes' human Fighting Man.

The Fighting Man is in some ways the base class of any edition. You can tell a lot about the system by how it treats its fighters. Looking at Holmes' Human Fighting Man, it strikes me as curious how unimpressive this class is when compared to the others. The only benefit the Fighting Man has is having the largest hit dice of any class. Although, Rules as Written, you could still roll a 2 on the d8 while your Magic-user rolls a 4 on their d4, though the law of averages who suggest the opposite most of the time.

So what do other classes have that the Fighting Man doesn't? I mean, outside of the fact that they don't cast spells, turn undead, or have special skills.

First, every class has the same attack matrix as the Fighting Man for levels 1-3, which is all that this rule set covers. That means the Cleric, Magic-User, and Thief are equal to the Fighting Man in terms of combat ability. In OD&D, the Fighting Man and Cleric both increased in their to-hit roll at 3rd level. In Holmes, everyone hits an AC of 9 on a 10. Since the Human Fighting Man needs more XP to level up than the Cleric and Thief, it's likely that those two classes will improve their to-hit roll before the Fighting Man. Holmes also does not use the Greyhawk supplement's Strength bonus for attacking or damage given only to the Fighting Man. This means that a high Strength only nets the Holmesian Fighting Man a bonus to their XP. There's only a vague mention that Fighting Men's Strength should make them able to carry more weight. Which makes them mules.

While it is true that Holmes' human Fighting Man can wear any armor, the same can be said for dwarven and halfling Fighting Men, as well as the  Cleric and elves, which can both cast spells as well. It's not a special benefit. The Fighting Man can also use any weapon. This limitation is rendered mechanically meaningless though by the fact that Holmes didn't incorporate Greyhawk's variable weapon damage, so everything does d6 damage (except burning oil, which uses the d8). This means that a Magic-user could do as much damage with their dagger as the Fighting Man deals with their two-handed blade. There is no mechanical limitation to a character's weapon restriction, meaning the Human Fighting Man doesn't get bragging rights for being able to swing everything. Holmes even loses the OD&D Fighting Man's multiple attacks per level against opponents of less than one hit die (Goblins, Kobolds, etc.).

In terms of Saving Throws, the Human Fighting Man is equal to the Thief, a little better than Magic-users on the whole, but not as good as Clerics. Both dwarven and halfling Fighting Men, however, have better Saving Throws than the human version of the class. It's also worth noting that all the demi-human Fighting Men have abilities (infravision, search chances, +1 to hit with missiles, etc.) that their human counterparts don't.

So, after all this, why would you choose to play a Human Fighting Man in Holmes? While I'm not a power gamer, and I dislike discussions of character optimization, the Holmes game world seems stacked against your standard fighters. And yet, in some ways this makes them more heroic.

There is something inherently noble in a character without any special talents or abilities who decides against a life of common serfdom or as a village guard to choose to adventure into the unknown for gold and glory. It may take them longer to advance and progress, but that advancement means more because it was harder fought and wasn't aided by spells, sly tricks, or extrahuman abilities. Any abilities the Holmes Fighting Man has must be based on in game play where trial and error connects with an understanding between the player and their referee.

This is who the Holmes Fighting Man is. Their heroism is one that is earned and based on their deeds, not on a gift package given to them by their god (I need to write a whole post on why Clerics in D&D are OP). It also makes them more challenging to play, encouraging the player to find ways to make their Fighting Man matter to the group outside of combat. This makes the Holmes fighter stand apart from the modern incarnation of the uber-warrior tank. That doesn't exist in Holmes. The Fighting Man's relative weakness is perhaps what provides the Holmes rule set the space to be as magical as it is.

[All this said, I still prefer a little more in the way of game fighter game balance and advocate for something a little closer to the Fighter in BFRPG and S&W, or B/X and OD&D if you prefer.]

What We Are Really Nostalgic For When We Talk About BECMI

With the recent release of a POD copy of the Rules Cyclopedia, there's been a lot of looking back at the Basic D&D rule set(s) that spawned that early 90s compendium. Retroactively referred to as BECMI (for Basic/Expert/Companion/Master/Immortal) these were the Basic D&D rules released as five boxed sets in the mid-80s by TSR, and written by Frank Mentzer. An army of kids grew up with this version of the game, myself included. Although I owned Moldvay's box for less than a day, this was the boxed set that taught me how to play the game. Many of us transitioned to AD&D, but in name only. We may have pulled monsters from Fiend Folio and magic items from the AD&D DMG, but the engine we ran the game on was Basic.

I never bought the RC when it was initially released, and I don't think I'd buy it now. That book, its layout, and its art hold no nostalgia for me. The OSR clones I have now do all the things I want, generally with better organization. I revisited my old BECMI books a few weeks ago and tried to see if they still held the same magic for me. What I found was surprising.

Taken as a whole the BECMI, or RC, rules system is pretty crunchy. There are a lot of rules in this game which increase as characters progress to higher levels, more than I am currently interested in running. It's not just the number of rules either; it's what the rules cover that leaves me cold. Details about hirelings, strongholds, jousting tournaments, weapons mastery - some these are holdovers from 1974, but they have absolutely nothing to do with the reasons I play the game. Also, the packed, three-column layout of these books isn't very reader-friendly and much of the Elmore/Easley artwork hasn't aged well for me.

I can't imagine going back to descending AC, alignment languages, race-as-class, demi-human level limits, pre-AD&D PHB thieves skills, etc. I mean I could go back and it would be fine, but I don't have to, so why would I? Like most nostalgia, what we remember is a freshness that has long since faded, and one we desperately wish to recapture. Looking through these books now makes my remember the childhood bedroom I shared with my brother where I first read them and had my mind blown wide as to the possibilities of the game. As artifacts of my childhood they still hold some charm, but as gaming materials they are of little use to me.

There is one exception. One book among all the sets that transcends nostalgia and still feels like it has relevancy. The Players Manual of Set 1, otherwise known as The Red Box, is perhaps the best introduction to fantasy role playing ever written. It's my belief that when people wax nostalgic about BECMI, Mentzer Basic, or The Red Box, what they're really talking about is this first booklet. The Dungeon Masters Rulebook from the first box, by comparison, is fairly dry, flavorless, and contains little art. The Players Manual, on the other hand, is gold.

The first thing the PM does right is get the new player right into the action. It puts a sword in the reader's hand and has them step into a dungeon. This opening adventure could cynically be called a choose-your-own-adventure railroad, but for people who have never played the game before, this kind of rigid structure is exactly what they need. It also manages to introduce a number of important concepts of the game in along the way in a naturalistic way. By the end of the adventure, you have a pretty good idea of what D&D is about.

The rest of the book fleshes out the rest of the rules need to play. Mentzer's tone is open and familiar. There's no trace of Gygaxian pretension (which I can enjoy as well). You get the sense that Frank is excited for you to play. The organization is genius, and if I'm not mistaken, it marks the first time in a D&D book where each character class is given a spotlight section each complete with an illustration that conveys as much information as the text. The very D&D concept of a Cleric is initially pretty foreign, but Elmore and Easley's illustrations of the mace-wielding holy warrior and the stern, pageboy-cut priest tell you exactly who these people are.

This version of the Basic game doesn't have hieroglyphic mystery of the Holmes edition or the space-disco vibe of Moldvay/Cook/Marsh's B/X (think of Otus' alien dungeonscapes and Willingham's and Dee's flared cuffs). Instead, a very hair metal/chainmail bikini (hello, Clyde Caldwell) atmosphere starts to present itself. Dragonlance's art killed Elmore's work for me, but his art for the Red Box still gets me. The cover painting, of course, is one of the top 10 iconic pieces in the game's history. When we talk of our fondness for Mentzer Red Box, I firmly believe it's that red dragon and the opening excursion into Bargle's hideout that holds sway. Sometimes that's all your looking for.

Anticipating Into the Borderlands: Revisiting B1 and B2

I saw Erik Tenkar from Tenkar's Tavern post a pic of Goodman Games new book, Into the Borderlands (check it out), from Gary Con the other day. I heard a couple of months ago about this coming out and it made me really happy, but not out of any sense of nostalgia. I never actually owned a copy of B1 back in the day and the only version of B2 I currently have is the one in the 25th Anniversary TSR box (my original is long gone). I recently picked up the print-on-demand scanned versions of both modules from DriveThruRPG (pictured left) as a way to have disposable play copies. They're a little blurry, but they're serviceable.

Into the Borderlands is a compilation of both the original modules along with 5e updates of the adventures. Even though I don't play 5e D&D, I still may get this just for the new format and to have nice, clear copies of each (hopefully the Otus Minotaur is in there). My happiness about this release is really not about me owning a copy though. I'm happy that newer DMs will get to experience these modules because they fill a gap that I've noticed in modern editions. B1 In Search of the Unknown and B2 The Keep on the Borderlands are two of the best training adventures for both players and DMs ever made, and they prepare gamers to create their own worlds in a way that perhaps modern RPG products don't.

Although I've played in very few modern D&D games, I've noticed a lot of current DMs rely on published adventures and campaign content for their games, much more than I remember doing in the 80s. Sure, everyone liked having the rite of passage of playing through classic adventures like Isle of Dread, Tomb of Horrors, and of course, B1 and B2; but the adventures I remember playing as kids were mostly of our own design. Coming back to gaming in the past year, I don't hear as much talk about people creating their own campaign worlds, at least outside of the OSR community. I see videos about how to run Curse of Strahd or Tomb of Annihilation, but not so much about how to come up with your own stuff. The OSR, by comparison, is all about sharing random tables, one-page dungeon advice, and sandbox toolkits. Meanwhile, the mainstream D&D community seem to view home-brewing as an eccentric option for fringe DMs who choose to miss out on the brilliance of the Forgotten Realms (not that there's anything wrong with FR).

It's possible that this is just my warped perception and foggy memory. However, I see a lot of new DMs asking questions on Facebook, G+, and other forums that I learned the answer to by playing Borderlands. Looking through my new POD copies of B1 and B2, I've started to understand their genius through a new lens of experience and perspective. These two early modules intentionally left a lot of space for the DM to fill in. B1 is completely un-keyed in terms of monsters and treasure. The DM is given lists to choose from and some advice to not use everything and leave some rooms empty. The inhabitants of The Keep in B2 are unnamed beyond their profession, leaving it up to the DM to provide their motives and backstory. B2 also doesn't direct you very much on how to get the players to the Caves of Chaos or give you some overarching plot to move the action. It keys the locations, but you need to make sense of it.

By modern players' and DMs' standards these two modules might seem incomplete, possibly not even suitable for publication compared to newer tomes filled with lore and legend in every hex. B1 and B2 don't do all the work for you. DMs have to do some heavy lifting and players need to ask questions and be curious. These modules don't lead anyone around by the nose to high adventure.

I'm curious to see how this new release plays to modern, 5e D&D gamers. My hopes are two-fold. First, I'd love for this book to teach newer generations of gamers how to think for themselves and come up with their own content, and how to be confident enough in their own ideas to fill in the details on-the-fly. Second, I'd love to introduce or re-acquaint the 5e crowd to the old school way of doing things, where you don't have to rely on official product to tell you how to D&D. We all love fancy new books, but in the end our own imaginations are the best engines of fantasy. I realize it's absurd to expect a complete sea change to happen, but a little bit of old school wisdom wouldn't hurt at all. It would also help to bridge the gap between editions a bit, and that's always a good thing.

One final note: While perusing the Monster stats at the back of B1, I noticed dual Descending/Ascending AC numbers. As the pic to the right shows, the explanation of AC gives the descending AC rank, followed by the to-hit number. Did Mike Carr invent ascending AC in 1979?

Challenge Ratings: Why To For Make So Hard?

Erol Otus is the best.

I had a conversation with my office mate this morning who happens to also be a player in my Basic Fantasy game. I was telling him about my idea for a different kind of bestiary that wasn't based around stat blocks (like Fire on the Velvet Horizon, but different). He listened and told me, "I hate coming up with stat blocks. It's too hard."

What's strange is that I find stat blocks to be the easiest part of designing a creature. It's literally a handful of numbers. The difficult part is coming up with something that looks and behaves in a new and mysterious way. It's tough to come up with something the players haven't encountered before, yet sounds plausible, not something that feels like a bunch of monster parts Frankensteined together from random tables, like a dwarfs head with a unicorn horn, a Displacer Beast's tentacles, and the trunk of a Roper.

The main issue for him was being uncertain of whether he was creating something too hard or too easy, and he found the whole 5e challenge rating system confusing and difficult to wrap his head around. I asked him why worry about it. If you make it too tough, you're players can run away and figure out a way to defeat it tactically. If it's too easy, have two or three more come around the corner.

Challenge Ratings are something I don't really understand the need for in D&D. Perhaps it's just because I have enough confidence and experience to feel what the right difficulty is. I don't really need to think about it anymore (if I ever did), and I certainly don't need to consult a set of rules for encounter balance. And if the first-level players don't do enough information gathering, ignore the blatant warnings, and go traipsing into the temple of a slumbering chaos demon, well, they get what's coming to them.

Say you have a standard D&D adventuring party of a couple fighters, a cleric, a magic-user, and a thief - all around 4-6 level.  How many ogres would you pit against them. If the setting and environment would support it, I would probably throw six at them. I would expect the party to (mostly) survive the encounter, but it might get a little hairy there depending on how the dice go. If the same PCs were 1-3 level I'd probably cut it down to two, maybe three. What's more important to me is picking a Number Appearing that makes sense for the environment that the players are exploring. In the above example, if six ogres would seem overcrowded in the area encountered, then I'd only have there be three, but just make them tougher.

That's just off the top of head. I'm sure someone would consult some official WotC oracle and tell me all the ways that encounter isn't balanced. Here's the thing: I don't care. If it proves too deadly, the worst that will happen is one of the players (or maybe more) will be making a new character. If you already have a predetermined outcome for the adventure, why play through it? Let things go wrong. That's part of the game. What do you think?

The Corniness Threshold of High vs. Low Fantasy

ARCANE BARCALOUNGER

I've come to the conclusion that my problems with or distaste for newer versions of D&D may be less about mechanics or rules and more about the fluff. I still have issues with the mechanics, but they're just different ways of arbitrating success or failure. What really turns me off anything 3e and up is I find the inherent high fantasy setting of modern D&D really corny.

There's way too much magic, too many superpowers, and an endless smorgasbord of player character options of classes and races of increasing silliness. The artwork matches this themepark/kitchen-sink setting where the weird and unusual - the truly magical - becomes mundane. It all crosses a threshold of credulity for me. Sure, I realize I'm complaining about my fantasy RPG having too much fantasy in it, but we all have a line where too much is too much.

All of these player options and powers in current 5e D&D are very popular - many feel the more, the better. At the same time, I doubt those players psyched to play a Tortle Monk in the style of Kung Fu Panda's Master Oogway would think playing something like a walking Lollipop Accountant to be just dumb. Everyone has their threshold.

I sometimes find myself watching 5e YouTuber character-build videos for a laugh, watching people talk seriously about playing something like a Dragonborn Paladin Warlock. To me, this is not any less corny than playing the aforementioned Lollipop Accountant, or an Arcane Barcalounger (see above). I don't really want to turn this into a rant of Bad-Wrong-Fun. If playing a Half-Dragonfruit Druid of the Lost Circle K is where it's at for you, go for it.

I've spent a lot of time recently trying to determine where this threshold lies for me. This is something I've always struggled with. Back when I played AD&D in the 80s, I was never particularly fond of Gnomes, and Half-Orc PCs were just right out. I've always been okay with the four standard Tolkien races (human, elf, dwarf, halfling), though lately I've even questioned these. Humanocentric games/campaigns have begun to appeal to me more, but I don't know that I'm absolutely done with demi-humans yet. I've been buying a lot of sword & sorcery-style games like Low Fantasy Gaming, Barbarians & Basilisks, and Crypts & Things. While these are all very cool, there is a definite jockish vibe about them and a real slavish worship of Howard's Conan. I'm sure from simulationist wargamer perspective, my preferred milieu is just as cartoony as I think 4e was, because perhaps it doesn't have enough historical, fact-based realism behind it.

Finding other players who have similar tastes and attitudes about how much fantasy is the right amount can be just as important as finding people who like the same systems or mechanics. We're all a little goofy in our preferences and we all take ourselves and our elf games a little too seriously from time to time.

#RPGaDay: Day 27

27. What are your essential tools for good gaming?

Answer: I'll answer an alternate question as the answer to this standard one is so straightforward. For me, the essential tools for good gaming are simple: core rulebooks and any other necessary supplements, dice, paper, pencils, a quiet enough place, and respectful people excited and committed to play a game. A lot of people use digital apps which can be convenient, but they're not essential.

Alternate question: How far from human do you enjoy getting the chance to be in an RPG?

Answer:This is an intriguing question for me because as a player back in the day I always liked to play demi-humans, particularly elves (yeah, I was one of those). Since then, I've come around to the idea of all-human fantasy game either along the lines of an historical, real-world Earth (a la LotFP) or an approximation of Hyperborea. Although demi-human characters have always interested me, there's always been a line I wasn't willing to cross.

Half-elves were certainly okay, and even gnomes were acceptable. However I found things like half-orcs or half-ogres distasteful, and not just because I was forced to imagine that horrific coupling. In later editions, when things like Tieflings and Dragonborn PCs became canon to D&D, I actually became offended. Even my current favorite RPG, Basic Fantasy, includes supplemental races like the Minotaur-like Bisren, the dog-man Caneins, turtle-ish Kappa, Faun, and Gelfling-ish Phaerim. I ignore all of these supplemental races since I'm free to take them or leave them although Fauns and Phaerim hold a certain charm for me, but really mostly as NPCs.

The problem with potentially opening up characters to be any race they want is that it immediately creates a crisis of balance. Game balance has become a buzzword for RPGs over the last couple of decades, something that they strive to maintain at all costs. While game balance isn't that high of a priority for me, having different character races of varying power creates a disparity that causes problems.

Non-human characters generally are given special abilities to highlight their extra-human otherness. When you have a game where humans and non-humans are both options to play, and the non-humans have special powers without some balancing restrictions, who would want to play a human? Older versions of D&D sometimes dealt with this (clumsily) by imposing class-restrictions or level-limits on demi-humans with the justification that human beings are more adaptable and learn quicker. This was never very satisfactory for most players, particularly those who wanted options to play non-humans and get extra powers without any downsides. Modern RPGs have solved the issue somewhat by making all character super-powered no matter what the race. Basic Fantasy handles this dilemma by having some class-restrictions, but no level limits, and giving humans a +10% to all experience earned (again, the adaptability reasoning). It's not perfect, but it's reasonable.

What's funny is that this is not a new problem. It's something that the original version of D&D opened up in the 1974 version when it talked about allowing characters to be non-standard races, even dragons. While one could run a campaign of all dragons, having a campaign where one player runs a 1st-level human fighter and another runs a 1st-level young, red dragon doesn't make much sense. That's an inequality that will break the game. So, for my answer, I'm comfortable playing a non-human, but only to a point.