Streamlined Swords & Wizardry II

I met with my ex-girlfriend for some tea last night and tried to explain D&D to her. I've tried explaining it to my father recently. They both gave me friendly, supportive looks, nodding their heads as if I was telling them that aliens were teaching me the violin.

I suppose many people these days will have encountered video games and to explain roleplaying you could say it's like a game with no limits, but these people I'm talking about have no conception of video games either. (This is why I value the OSR community, you sort of know what I'm about)

I meet tomorrow with 3 players who don't know what a roleplaying game is. Because of that I've been trying to distill down only what I need to get them going, but without just throwing them in the game. I shared some of my thinking behind it here and my progress to that end here.

So, to be clear, this isn't me re-writing the rules because I'm dissatisfied with the writing or the organization in Swords & Wizardry book-- I actually think they are pretty well done. And I'm not trying to make a Quick Start-- Chgowiz has done great work on one already. Think of this as more like player handouts, things an experienced DM can pass out to inexperienced players to help while explaining the rules and especially move them through the process of character creation. If you can find uses for them other than that I would be thrilled, but that's the aim I have in mind.

So, here I have the explanation of the six abilities and how to roll them. I made some house rule tweaks in here that might make them less universally useful, but I added some text to the three "mental" stats that I think could have been helpful to have in the Core rules.

• Streamlined Ability Scores Handout
  

After that players will most likely want to see the classes. Here is the list of

• Streamlined Classes Handout
  

I had to make some decisions about what to cut and what not (standing toe-to-toe with a dragon probably isn't the best image to put in a newbie's head). I wanted this on one page so I tried to keep what was essential about each class, what distinguishes the archetypes. For example, I don't think you need to know how many experience points it takes to get a cleric to 20th when you're first choosing a character, so the charts are right out. If you'ld like to use this handout, there is room for one more class of your choice on the page: thief, druid, or a dragon borne homewrecker, whatever suits your fancy. Also if you'd like the editable open office files just let me know.

What I like about these streamlined resources is that when they are trying to decide on their class a player may want to see the spells a wizard can cast or what weapons are available, BOOM-- you've got those on separate, single pages right there.

I decided not to put a NPC/Hireling generator on the backburner; I'm still digesting all the wonderful ones I've found on your blogs and trying to decide what I think is essential. I'm also thinking that maybe the best way for these newbies to realize the value of hirelings is to have a little taste of old school adventuring without them.

As for the adventure, I still don't have a map, arrrrgh. How's that for procrastinating? But I have the location in my mind and could probably run it from that if I had to. It is an abandoned convent. The convent has seen several waves of occupiers: the original Sisters of Penitence, humanoids, bandits, and now a nice big hill of giant ants. I'm going to put several hermit cottages on adjacent hillsides and multiple methods of ingress for the players to have to choose fromm. Oh, and also there's going to be a bantling in a well . . . buwhaahahaha!

Streamlined Swords & Wizardry

Here is what I have so far towards streamlining the novice Swords & Wizardry experience. I offered these as Open Office files before, but realize now, people may find them more convenient as pdfs. So, here they are newly minted as pdfs and titled more specifically so you won't lose them in your many computer folders:

Telecanter's:

• Streamlined Starting Equipment
  
• Streamlined Weapons List
• One Page Beginning Spell List-Magic-User
• One Page Beginning Spell List-Cleric

Again, I've only edited and synthesised the work of others here. To learn about the construction of the starting equipment list read this post, and to realise why the weights for the weapons list are in stones see here.

• So, what else do I need?I have been digesting ~five different NPC/Hireling generators and may need to finally boil that down.
  
• I still plan on producing a one page summary of the three primary character classes.
• Still trying to decide how much, if anything players need to know about my world (gods, governments, languages, etc.) in order to situate themselves for play.
• Introductory Dungeon, and I mean for novices-- a kind of preview version of the Dungeon Alphabet to give them some of that Old School Flavor!
  

That's it for now. If you have any suggestions, or experiences you want to offer up about novice play, please let me know.

Update: I added an acknowledgement to the Streamlined Equipment list because it wasn't my great idea, I just edited it down and tried to simplify it for novices. So thanks to Thoth Amon from the Swords & Wizardry forums for the idea and to Lord Kilgore for bringing it to my attention.

Introducing Novices To Swords & Wizardry

Game's Afoot! It looks like I've got all systems go for my first Swords & Wizardry Session next Tuesday! Three players so far: one, my 4e DM who has no experience of D&D before 3.x and, two others with no roleplaying experience whatsoever.

I've been trying to streamline the rules for a complete novice, especially adult novices, who I think will have much less time and need to have a good first impression to decide to devote their time to playing more in the future.

Today I re-read Ed Greenwood's Article "Keep Em Guessing" from Dragon #49. It's about this very subject, introducing complete novices to D&D. He suggests having the DM handling everything and just narrate what the results of die rolls are, even to the point of not letting the player see their stats.

I agree that this could work, but . . . I have some big reservations here. First, by introducing new characters to the game this way, you aren't really introducing them to the game, but shielding them from it. I think the reason I'm so nervous about DMing novices is that my last DMing experience, about 3 1/2 years ago involved novices and I handled it all wrong. One of the things I did was give the novices pre-rolled characters. This might be the first thing that comes to peoples' minds as a logical way to start newcomers: "Cut to the chase," "Jump right in to play." But what it did was put inert pieces of paper into their hands that they didn't really understand.

Novice players will understand better what is going on by rolling up their own characters. This is an introduction to a lot of subtle things about the game. First of all, that it is a game; we won't just be playing pretend, their are baselines and boundaries. Just seeing stats will, for example let you know you have limits on your strength and how many hits you can take in combat.

Even something as simple as rolling the dice can give a novice a preview of the unpleasant possibilities of dice outcomes "I rolled a 5 for intelligence!" I've read elsewhere that an important part of game design is letting players know their chances of success so they can make informed choices. It seems small, but getting a feel for the randomness of the dice may help them to understand that they won't be hitting every time they swing their sword and all the implications that follow from that.

I think character creation also gives players the first sense of the power they have to shape the game in ways they will enjoy. They have to start thinking about whether they would enjoy playing a sword swinging Saxon, or whether the idea of magic intrigues them. And with this, is the implication that there are more ways than one to approach the game, and that they will be able to try another approach later if they like.

Character creation can also be a subtle foreshadowing of the challenges that lie ahead in the fact that players have to decide: "Will I need missile weapons?," "Having torches, implies we might end up in darkness. . . right?" "What spells should I memorize?"

So I guess after all that, my conclusion isn't profound, it's just if you want to introduce players to a game, you need to introduce them to it. And Ed's article was more sophisticated than just hiding the game from newbies; he actually suggests slowly introducing them to the rules over many sessions and touches on some other issues. But for me, I think time spent creating characters is time well spent, at least with something as simple and clean as Swords & Wizardry.

That being said, I think there is wisdom in streamlining the novice experience. That's the reason for my work at boiling down equipment and weapon lists in previous posts. Along those lines I think I will avoid demihumans for now. I'd like the players to get a sense of what humans can do first and I envision demihumans uncommon in my campaign world anyway. I'm thinking for the same reason to leave my Choose Your-Own rogues out of the mix for now. But we'll see.