In one round a lifetime: round 2

In many old school games and AD&D, you hire retainers to help you in the dungeon, which can give a player lots of actions (see my last post). Does that mean tactics and consequences are more varied and fun in OSR retainer play than traditional (trad) RPG play, like D&D 5e with its multiple actions per round?

For many games, I am going to say yes*.

Why is there a darn asterisk by my yes? Well, please read on if you really want to know. But before I get started, I want to dedicate this post to three people:

• bankuei, who made an excellent Discord comment about interesting tactical play.
• The Knight of the Opera, who closed up their blog this week but has inspired so many good conversations over the years.
• Ravenwing, my OD&D level 1 elf wizard, who fell in Thracia last week. She drowned in the river, fleeing a pack of stirges she foolishly attacked.

From the standpoint of a player in many OSR games, there are three phases in PC life:

Phase 1: You are a single low-leveled character in a small party. You should run, not fight, a pack of eight stirges!

Phase 2: You finally hauled enough treasure back to town to hire retainers. You now command 1-4 henchfolk and could survive those stirges (potentially with losses).

Phase 3: You struck it rich and have leveled way up¹, and now you are ready to hire a bunch of minions and take over a domain. You could send a battalion in to curbstomp those stirges.

In the first phase, you are weak and have only one life to lose. Later, as you gain strength, you gain additional lives to command (and lose). This phased progression, created in the 70s and 80s in the first couple of editions of D&D, follows the video game traditions of the time, where you started off with three lives and got more if you did well².

That's right, a retainer is a 1-up!

In phase 1, a trad game, with its reactions, bonus actions, etc, can give a player more tactical options than an OSR game. That's partly why I put an asterisk up there, and because I am a pedant, I am putting another caveat here³. A game oriented around combat should allow tactical infinity, but I am going to stipulate that both OSR and trad games can allow that sort of play. What I am focusing on here is the basic game rules, and the diversity of tactical choices and consequences they offer up for combat.

But once we get to phase 2 and mid-levels, OSR games are far more interesting tactically. A trad game allows you to attack twice, sure, but consider the massive tactical options created by commanding a wolf-pack of varied retainers. Your fighter retainer advances while the mage casts a spell, and you order your thief retainer to slip up behind and hamstring the minotaur!

With a pack of 1-4 retainers, you (the player) can literally attack from several different directions at once, with sword, spells, and flame. You are a multi-armed, multi-attacking death machine. Your adventuring party is in awe of your combat might.

That is, until something goes wrong. In trad play, your player takes a mighty blow from the minotaur's axe and loses half their health, falling back and calling for healing. Moments later she will be back up to full and in the fight.

But in OSR play, your fighter retainer is now down on the floor, dead from that axe blow (you never should have made a frontal attack). As a player, you are permanently weakened (at least until you get back to town to hire another fighter), and there are lasting consequences—current retainers have to save for morale to keep fighting, whatever the fighter was carrying may be lost or too heavy for you to retrieve, and back in town, prices go up for new retainers given your track record!

Comparing the two: starting at Phase 2, mid-level OSR play gives you more tactical options than a trad game, and you face real consequences for poor tactical choices.

So yes*, tactics and consequences are more varied and fun in mid-level OSR play than traditional (trad) RPG play. One can hire a retainer as early as level 2 or 3, so mid-level includes low-levels is one is lucky and/or clever in acquiring lucre.

Why is that asterisk still there? Well this sort of "troupe play", where each player commands a small tactical group, is common in many OSR games: Ultraviolet Grasslands even has a badass species option, the Porcelain polybodies, that is a crowd of humans with one mind. But retainers are not universal across OSR games--thus the asterisk.

Porcelain polybodies are so freaking cool. This mask available for purchase. The 176-page amazing-creative-rocket-fuel Vastland Guidebook? Free.

Shadowdark is a noted exception. It omits Phase 2 altogether, by design, to emphasize the actions of the main heroes. Adding back retainers breaks the math of Shadowdark monsters: their low HP and damage output is built around facing small parties, not masses of angry retainers.

To be fair to Shadowdark, that's a conscious design choice in a game that was very thoughtful in its rule curation. For many players, teamwork is more fun with others, instead of with your own private wolves. A pack of retainers can be boring for others, like waiting for a 5e sorcerer to take three actions and 5 minutes to destroy half the battlefield. Teamwork across a group often leads to lots of high fives and memorable saves—and it goes very quickly if a single player cannot do much on their own.

But although it is quite speedy and promotes teamwork, retainer-less OSR play in Shadowdark leaves PCs with both the spotlight and a paucity of built-in tactical choices relative to other OSR and trad games. Is there a fun middle ground between solo players having few options and retainer-burdened players being over-powered spotlight huggers? I think so--that's why I have been playing with my Shadowfeats and my Shadowfight rules, to spice things up (but that's another post). I have also been exploring games that offer interesting tactical options for individuals and groups, and I think Mythic Bastionland is top-tier in the current OSR pack for tactics. Such good, intuitive tactical options for individual knights, and it all flows at a rapid clip. Whether to attack singly or as a group is the very first tactical choice!

I return to Thracia with d4 hp magic-user tomorrow, the wizard's apprentice Crowfeather⁴ having avenged his master by destroying that stirge swarm. This time, he and his friends brought fire…ain't teamwork grand?

---

1 Phase 3 domain play is a different game, and many modern OSR games omit it altogether. ↩

2 I never had the ability to survive long in Galaga as a double-ship, sadly. ↩

3 OSR games with Mighty Deeds are tactically interesting even at low levels, especially compared to fighters in trad games. ↩

4 Crowfeather is a dwarven fighter with NO magic, and black-lung to boot. ↩ How he became Ravenwing's apprentice is a whole nother story.

In one round a lifetime

How many things can one do in a round, and how does it change the feel of the game?  I am playing OD&D this week, running through Thracia with the amazing d4 hp magic-user, and I love being able to attack twice from range (if I don’t move).   The OD&D rules for actions, fresh from wargaming, are odd and a touch fiddly.

If we look at the action economy of a few different games, trad games tend to have more actions per round, and OSR games have fewer actions (for B/X based games like Shadowdark, 1 action and 1 move).  I originally assumed this was a simplicity/aesthetic thing: OSR games made combat simpler so that less of the game was spent doing it.  Combat is a fail state, yadda yadda. 

By contrast, trad games have 2-3 actions (bonus actions, reactions, pre-actions, alteractions, underactions, etc) because acting more often is fun (for the individual) and “heroic” because one person can make a bigger difference!  Yawn.  Let me know when your turn is over and I will stop playing Candy Crush or something.

But this post over at Fail Forward made me realize that simpler combat had its origins in hireling and henchman play.  In B/X and OSE, unlike in Shadowdark, you are expected to hire help in the dungeon.   You are supposed to surround the monster and wail away on it as a crowd in D&D and AD&D 1e.  And if every PC and NPC with a sword has an action, bonus action, reaction, free action, etc. it gets unmanageable quickly.   Instead, each individual is simple to run (1 attack/spell, 1 move), and smart/rich/charming players manage multiple NPCs alongside their PC starting at level 2. 

So rather than see the old-school action economy as distinct from the trad action economy, it’s really the same.  Nimble gives each player three actions.  If a player has one henchman, Old School Essentials gives the player four actions!   Individually, each PC and NPC has a quick set of actions in OSR games, but collectively, I suspect turns in Nimble 2e are comparable in speed to those of an OSE PC with 1-4 henchmonkeys. 

Trad heroes are really two to four kobolds in a trenchcoat.

Where some games drag in terms of the combat action economy, I believe, is when the action choices are complicated.  D&D 5e has the worst of both worlds here, with a fragmented action economy that is hard to remember for both PCs and DMs: actions, attacking twice, bonus actions, reactions, opportunity attack, movements, free actions.  Players go down that list of action-boxes, ticking them off and often forgetting one each combat.  Similarly, DMs do the same for monsters, all the while trying to select from a menu of monster options a page or more in length.  It’s stressful, and increasingly slow as the number of choices balloons at higher levels and monster difficulties (parallel-processsing initiative can only do so much). 

This is why Nimble 2e combat works nimbly, I think, with:

•        three standard actions and freedom to choose from a simple menu of choices (it’s a lot simpler to count to three actions then go down a list of 6-7 action types). 
• radically simplified monsters, to B/X levels of complexity (every monster has only 1-3 special things it can do). 

Complicated action choices are not the only things that can slow down games, of course.  There’s a lot to be done, system-wise, in terms of speeding up action resolution (limiting which spells/powers require saving throws, making it easy to run the game without looking at hit-location or weapon-armor tables, simple spells that don’t need to be looked up, etc).  But simple action choices and simple monsters go a long way towards speeding up combat. 

What this means, I think, is that Shadowdark (and other OSR games without minion rules) are overly optimized for combat speed.  With 1 action and 1 move and no minions to slow things down, they are American pronghorns leaving wolves behind in their 55 mph dust.   We could restore a few interesting combat options and the game would still be quick enough, as long as we kept the options simple.

I personally want more options than the standard:  Move, then either Attack (sword or spell) or make something crazy up.  The last is good fun, and can be the best fun, but sometimes you want to just be defensive, or guard a friend, or heck, attack twice because you didn’t move this turn.  I want tactical choices, and while fast combat is great, I think Shadowdark has room for choices that don’t slow things down too much.

Which is why I am making a drop-in combat system for Shadowdark and other OSR games, once inspired by both Nimble 2e and Perils and Princesses.  The goal is something fast, easy to remember, and easy to run at any reasonable party size.  I have been playing it with my weekly group, and they like it very much.  Stay tuned, folks—it’s not a three-action economy, it’s neater than that imho.  If you are not familiar with Perils and Princesses, go check it out!  It’s a good teaser—and I will update this post once my system is out.

So, next time someone tells you that a PC in an OSR game can only have two actions per round, at most, and they have to be 1 action and 1 move, ask them—what about henchpeople?