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?

OSR Deadliness and 3d6 Straight Down

I've seen some recent discussion in forums about the deadliness of OSR games, both from a positive and a negative perspective. Critics of the OSR claim that the inherent deadliness of these games are a barrier to immersive play since it is hard to get attached or bond with your character knowing any random encounter could take them out. Another argument goes even further, maintaining that systems like this are inherently antagonistic towards players, turning them into grist for the GM's murder mill, meat on an adventure conveyor belt of the GM's design. Such systems, it is said, strip away player agency and rob them of a chance to build the epic stories they wish to partake in.

Of course, while it's possible for bad GM's to run their OSR games this way, I don't think it's inherent in the systems or psychologies of OSR games themselves. For me, as a GM or a player, I like the feeling and flavor of terror. Not terror in the cheap, slapstick horror movie manner, but terror in the sense of life or death stakes. I want to feel unnerved and not fully in control of the story or the outcome of the adventure. If I feel that my player is always going to survive, I'm not going to be as invested because the stakes aren't very high.

I realize my take on this is not the majority opinion. It seems like a lot of players are simply looking for a stage to express themselves through the avatar of their player. That's a completely valid way to play; it's just not for me. However, because a lot of people don't want to feel that sense of terror that I like, the very idea of a game that threatens the lives of their characters automatically becomes something antagonistic.

Modern gaming's solve for this perceived anti-player bias has been a carefully designed system of balanced encounter challenge ratings, and quick character level-advancement with escalating power bloat. This gives only the very fool-hardiest of player a real chance to die by never pitting PCs against something stronger than themselves and giving them an arsenal of special abilities and video game-like combos to defeat the enemy. I could (and still may, someday) write an article on the OSR's combat-as-war versus the New School's combat-as-sport. Instead, what I wanted to focus on here is that first-step in character generation: the rolling of ability scores.

Ability scores are more than just stat blocks that help determine success or failure in encounters. Theyare the foundational pillars of what defines a character. In some ways there is no more effective spring board for character background than the ability scores. They also have a lot influence over a character's chance of survival at low levels before a character gains a lot of special abilities, spells, skills, feats, or magical items. With this in mind, how these scores are generated matter.

In Old School D&D (Basic Fantasy, in my case), ability scores are generated by rolling 3d6 straight-down the line: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma, giving scores ranging between 3-18. Simple right? Well, even in the rules of the old game, there are a host of secondary options all of which have an effect for how strong, smart, wise, agile, etc. your character is. Some of the popular options include rolling 4d6 and dropping the lowest die, rolling six columns of six stats and picking the best, or starting with a base of 8 in every stat and allotting a pool of points wherever desired. There are also methods and rules for freely arranging the scores, evenly swapping a certain number of scores, or dropping one score by two to bump another up by one. All of these methods are usually employed to boost the numbers of player's scores. They don't guarantee superpowered characters, but they greatly decrease the likelihood of truly low scores (but it's possible).

In my current Basic Fantasy campaign I'm running pretty close to RaW. I had my player roll 3d6 straight down and I allowed them to swap a pair of scores as long as one those scores was an intended prerequisite. If the player rolled below 9 in all of the first four (Str, Int, Wis, Dex) I had them re-roll because they wouldn't technically qualify for any class. Also, if the net of their modifiers was negative, they could also re-roll. I like Chris Gonnerman's fix for this, which is to subtract all the scores from 21 which turns the negatives to positives and still creates a balanced character.

I'm pretty happy with this method given my GM style, but something caught my eye when I was perusing my old copy of the original AD&D PHB. On page 9 it mentions that characters without at least two ability scores above 15 risk a low chance of survival. This gave me pause for a couple reasons. First, because I never remembered this from back in the day; and second, because this statement implied that it was recommended (in fact, Gary uses the word "essential") to use a method of generating ability scores that would produce at least two exceptional stats. The deadliness of Old School all of the sudden seemed not so deadly. I finally understood why my PCs were never as studly as the pre-gens in the old modules. A quick scan of the scores of magic items handed out in those adventures also makes those Old School slug-fests not as scary.

I guess what I've decided is for now I will stick with my 3d6 method and my rare magic item games while understanding that my players will need to be extra careful in combat and run often early on if they hope to live. This also means fewer monsters beaten which means fewer XP, which in turn means a longer time before they level up and gain more power. I've hit upon a good XP method that not only rewards for combat and treasure, but also for exploration, clever play, and role-playing. But that's for another post.