Old school campaigns and the assumption of time-richness

Sometimes you have an interesting exchange on Reddit that sets your mind working. I had such an exchange recently regarding the concept of being time-rich, and how classic editions of D&D, right back to OD&D itself, assume you have a lot of time on your hands - something that, in the modern world, is increasingly not the case.

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A lot of things in the old systems only make sense when viewed from a certain point of view. Here, the point of view is that of a young wargamer in the mid-70s. You're fairly affluent, and your job doesn't impinge too much on your leisure time - apart from fantasy and sci-fi paperbacks, and the occasional late-night movie marathon, there aren't a lot of demands on your attention. This is the perfect environment within which to become obsessed with the brand new game of Dungeons & Dragons that someone just came up with.

The old editions assume a similar environment for their players. OD&D in particular assumes that you'll have a large open table, consisting of many players and several dungeon masters, each of whom runs their own world (dungeon and wilderness). Play sessions are regular - once a week or multiple times per week - and, crucially, people can take their characters between different tables. From the DM's perspective, this means you'll get a motley assortment of characters turning up each week; from the players' perspective, this means you can game multiple times per week. Oh, and sessions are long affairs, frequently going on late into the night.

First off, this helps us answer the question raised on Reddit: Why is level advancement in classic D&D so slow? The answer: Because it's assumed that a character is able to go on multiple lucrative dungeon-diving expeditions per week if their player so chooses. If you were a particularly energetic player, you could get in eighteen hours of gaming a week if the circumstances were right. All that gold-for-xp adds up quickly, and the xp tables are balanced so that the game has some longevity for players inundated with opportunities to play (which the people testing the rules were, thanks to the obsessive energy of Gygax and Arneson, and their respective cohorts). Note that in the Greyhawk supplement, Gygax decreases xp for monster kills from 100xp per hit die, which he deems absurd, down to a pittance, presumably to stop characters shooting up in level too quickly, and to extend the lifespan of the game.

This isn't the only riddle to which time-richness is the answer. The case of demi-human level caps is likewise illuminated if we assume this environment. If a character goes up in level once every few weeks because a player plays frequently, the decision to play a dwarf becomes a plan to play the character, with their enhanced abilities and skills, for a few months, rather than a year plus of playing a slightly less capable human character. Playing a demi-human becomes a choice to have a briefer, differently flavoured experience - sort of a palate cleanser - before you rotate them out and try someone new. The key assumption here is that you'll be able to bring multiple characters up to name level or higher, and that the demi-human therefore isn't your only character. You're not thus capping the player, just this one character.

The idea of parties with different levels of experience makes more sense too. First, you'll get people who have played at different tables, and in varying amounts - they might not have seen as many lucrative sessions, or might have seen more. But being behind on xp is only a temporary thing. Because everyone's assumed to be getting so many game hours in, it's assumed that everyone's level of xp is fluctuating at a fairly high frequency (fluctuating not only because they're gaining xp, but because they're occasionally losing characters and restarting). Some of the earliest White Dwarf articles are devoted to working out what to do if a player has significantly less xp than the rest of the party. But if you can play as frequently and as long as you like, and you're not tethered to a particular party that's at a particular level, then the only thing limiting your ability to catch up is the hours you're willing to put in. This is where you get the idea of people showing off a long-lived favourite character they've managed to get to a high level (e.g.: Neil's Fighting Man in Community); unlike in the modern style, the character exists independently of any given campaign, and their xp total (and the fact they've survived) represents a significant achievement on the player's part, as well as the commitment of a lot of hours of game time. Contrast this with a modern style where all characters are expected to be the same level, and everyone levels up by GM fiat, and on a per-x-sessions basis, a pattern that is clearly a response to a relative time-poorness.

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Speaking more generally, there's a slower pace to classic play that makes more sense if your session is going to last five hours or more. I mean this in the sense of scouting out opportunities. Thoroughly searching a dungeon room that turns out to be completely empty feels like a waste of time if you only have two hours to play a session (worse still if you're playing in a modern system where a single encounter can take hours to resolve). But if your session is three times that length, the opportunity cost of the wasted time is small compared to the possibility of finding something interesting, like a secret door or hidden treasure. Including empty rooms actually helps establish a sense of genuine exploration on these assumptions - the search wouldn't be tantalising if you knew there was something to be found in every room, it would be rote. More broadly, the idea of a procedurally populated dungeon or hexcrawl makes more sense - it doesn't matter if you don't accomplish very much this expedition (because the dice decided there wasn't anything to find), because you can go on another one in two days time.

An interesting sidebar: The West Marches style of play is almost identical to the old school setup I'm describing here, but for the assumption of session length. In a West Marches campaign, players likewise turn up in motley groups to play individual expeditions with different DMs. Even the player-motivated session planning fits; Gygax was always recounting how people would badger him to run a game for their buddies every other night. The key difference is that a WM game specifies that the PCs have to return to base by the end of the session, meaning within the time it takes to run a reasonable length session. This is the cause of many ad hoc solutions for what to do when the PCs are stuck in the dungeon at the end of play. In the classic, time-rich mode of play, this doesn't happen - the session ends when the PCs get back to base (or escape to the surface, or whatever). The session can go all night if that's how long it takes, although the (comparatively) deadly nature of the game means that the longer you run, the further you push your luck (this is surely the origin of those breathless stories of all-nighters spent delving a dungeon - the players couldn't believe they'd survived so long).

The entire focus of the game shifts with the assumption of time-richness, and still more if we throw in multiple tables. In the modern style, run in a time-poor setting, a one-year campaign - a milestone many DMs can only aspire to reach - might amount to about 40 in-game hours or less (about 3hrs actual game time per month, a generous estimate for the long-term 5e campaign in which I'm a player). Within this setting, it becomes unrewarding or impossible to conceive long- or even mid-term plans for characters, because it will take many months of real-world time to see them come to fruition. This pushes the game to become more focused on shorter-term goals that can be realised within a session. We see this in sharp relief in combat rules: Combat gets more complex in 3e through 5e because the focus is on giving players something to strategize about and do within an encounter that can be realised immediately, as opposed to managing the strategy of an expedition over a large number of encounters, decisions and puzzles. In a time-rich setting, the latter works fine, but if it's spread over several months of real-world time, it starts to lose its immediacy and interest. If you can only play your character once a month for a few hours, you want them to have something fun they can reliably do that yields an effect within the session, hence the focus on "intra-scene" rules, abilities etc.

Indeed, this need for payoff is why the gradual exploration of a (mega)dungeon over the course of many sessions - an exploration that may never be fully "complete" - has been abandoned in the modern playstyle, in favour of narrative focus and compact, linear dungeons. Whatever your feelings may be towards scripted narrative in games (I know mine), stringing together bespoke set-pieces into an "adventure path" for your players is an effective way to maximise that payoff when you're time-poor (and when you play within a framework that minimises the game time available - more on that below). This move towards the linear has its roots in a changing pattern of gaming groups, and the move away from the assumption of time-richness. As such, it's actually quite an old phenomenon, as some quarters never tire of pointing out; the Dragonlance modules are infamously railroaded, and the Melan diagram for Deep Dwarven Delve, the last dungeon released for AD&D, is a straight line. This is because, although Gygax very much wrote AD&D 1e with the time-rich model in mind, even seeming to double down on it in places, the Hickman model of punchy, scripted adventures seems to have resonated more with a broadening gaming public that didn't have the time to commit to Gary's wide open sandboxes. The endless debates over how old school D&D actually used to be played miss the point: How you used to play depended on how much time you had, and how much of it you were able to commit to gaming.

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Ben Milton at Questing Beast compares the interlinked open tables campaign structure to an MMORPG, and I largely agree - if I were to comment at all, it would simply be to say that one could remove the "O", and make the acronym fully accurate. But the idea of time-richness reveals a deeper significance to this comparison: An actual MMO is like a DM who's always available, and always willing to run the session for as long as you want to keep doing stuff. I think a big, and underappreciated, part of the play culture that Ben describes is the effort made by the earliest DMs to approximate this as far as was possible for a real human being with responsibilities and limited energy, and the extent to which their surroundings made them able to do so.

Nowadays, there are many more demands on our attention. Does that mean we can't play old games? Well, not exactly, but they, even more than their modern-style counterparts, require thinking about how you structure your campaign, and your table.

I've long since sworn off the model that says that every player needs to attend every session. Even for modern games, this makes play far too infrequent for my tastes - for old school systems, it hampers the ability to explore a sandbox, as discussed above. The easiest solution to implement is an open table: Set a day of the week when you always run a session, set a minimum number of players you're willing to run for (mine is three), and welcome anyone who turns up. In practice (from experience) what will probably happen is that you get a few players who form the persistent core of the group, and it works more or less like a regular party, with some added flexibility and robustness. As a tip, this is also a good way to frame an ongoing D&D game for a work group or pre-existing group of friends, for various reasons.

Side note: Even a policy of running if one or two players are missing results in massively more game time. Many narrative-focussed campaigns eschew this option because the GM wants everyone to be present for all the important events. That's fair enough, but the fact is that if games are weeks or months apart, players will need reminding what's going on anyway. It feels weird to play without the person who's only free one week in three, but in actuality such a policy results in many more hours spent gaming with friends for everyone including that person.

My second recommendation for running an old school game in a time-poor setting is to adjust the death rules. I allow my Swords & Wizardry players a final saving throw if they drop to zero hitpoints: succeed, and they're merely unconscious, but they do get a nasty, often permanent, injury. This means that the game remains deadly (and the characters pick up scars from their exploits, something The Black Hack introduced me to), but players don't have to spend months or years playing level 1 characters.

That leads me to my final tip: Tweak the xp rules. You could always just revert to Arneson's 100xp per monster hit die, but I actually prefer a houserule of my own; when a character dies, the new character that player creates starts with xp equal to 80% of the lowest xp total in the group (including the recently dead character). With this rule, the player is pushed back from the loss, but they're not stuck miles behind the pack for months on end. The party will suffer for frequent losses as well, since the xp will reduce with each new character. This basically acts as a cushion, and helps to mitigate for the fact that first level characters can be extremely fragile considering the challenges they face when part of a higher level party - a player losing multiple characters in a row still stings, but it feels less like you're stuck at square one and unable to advance. You can also tweak the amount of xp up or down to taste (I'd usually do somewhere between 50% and 90% - I stole this tweak from the video game Control, where you only lose 10% of your xp on death, but that feels fairly generous).

With the right adjustments, you can recapture the atmosphere of exploration and derring-do that classic systems evoke, even as modern-day adults with various time commitments. It just takes a bit of thinking about the logistics of running a game of this type, and an awareness of the expectations built into the system.

I hope this helps someone tweak their game for the better.

SQ