The Campaign: The Game Does Not Coddle Players, But It Rewards Persistence

(Following from yesterday's post.)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition is a fantastic adventure wargame. It is meant to be played as a campaign where there are multiple people acting as Referees in a shared milieu (Rules As Written), where all actions are tracked and mapped (1:1 Timekeeping w/ strict accounting) and the action is Always On.

Players rotate through their characters as those character go into and come out of mandatory downtime (see accounting for timekeeping), and Referees take turns in the big chair (run on different nights, at different times, different places, etc.).

All of the results get plotting on the map and the calendar for everyone to see, creating a living history of a fantastic world that unfolds emergently as if it were the real thing.

But not everyone succeeds.

You Can't Be Unlucky

Some of this is luck, and luck is outside of any player's control- including the Referee.

This cannot be avoided. You are using dice to determine the outcomes of uncertain events. Players can maximize the odds that those dice roll in their favor--and they should--but they cannot eliminate uncertainty entirely.

That means that there will be occassions where, despite their best plans, things go wrong and the players lose. Maybe it's a setback which they can recover from quickly, but more often when they lose it's an occassion of a snowball of failure that ends with most or all of that party getting killed by some combination of opposition forces and natural hazards.

Players need to be told, in no uncertain terms, that this is always on the table- they can reduce, but never eliminate, uncertainity in their operations. This becomes obvious when a player-run operation faces opposition by another player-run operation, as it becomes obvious that both parties want to conceal their own moves while seeking out those of their opposition with the aim of attaining a decisive advantage that leads to winning the conflict.

But most players' failures are not the result of bad luck with the dice. They are the result of poor play.

You Also Cannot Suck

You can't elminiate uncertainity. You can minimize it.

Part of this is knowing the rules of the game. Knowing the procedures for travel, encounters, combat, spell-casting, well allows a player to be more effective at the table than those that do not.

Part of this is knowing the ways of effective operation. Knowing the need to acquire intelligence, develop logistics, maintain situational awareness, and discern which choices for action need to be done as well as which ones--given current intelligence--promise to be most profitable also allows players to have an outsized impact at the table. In time, that impact reverberates across tables and during downtime activities.

And those that don't? They get left behind. They get used. They get eaten by monsters. (They often get eaten by monsters.)

You Will Fail

The dice go against you, so you miss a Saving Throw and your man ends up dead (or worse). Other players outplay you and your man gets got in a well-executed ambush, his corpse stripped of his goods and his treasures now those of his killers. Your planning shows a flaw due to intelligence that you did not get, or comprehend, and thus failed to account for and thus Things Go Wrong.

In other words, for some reason or another your man died in action.

The thing to do is to shrug it off; you have other characters for a reason, so you're not out of action permanently or even (with plannng) for the night- take over the senior Henchman and keep going.

And if you don't, well go reach for the dice. Time to reroll and try again.

The Master Fails More Than The Amateur Ever Attempts

#EliteLevel players got there the hard way. They strike out. They get ganked out of nowhere. They had lapses of judgement that had them do stupid things which got their man, even their party, killed. They learn from their own mistakes as well as those of others.

In time, after plenty of precessors get heaped on the corpse pile, they get a man up to the Big Leagues and into the Domain Game. Maybe they also get asked to run a Faction leader, or they rotate into the big chair and be Referee for some sessions- maybe even take up a region heretofore uncharted.

Eventually they can and will win a campaign. Not merely by just playing until they win, but by seeking to become better players as persistently as they play the game itself.

The habits formed, the attitude assumed, and the mindset adopted in the course of pursing victory directly transfer over to everyday real life. If you can learn how to win at AD&D1e, you can win at real life.

No other game in this hobby even tries to do this.

No wonder they always feel like they're lacking.