Destroying Levels
(Editor Andrew Lang. Illustrator H. J. Ford., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Destroying Levels
I've been dipping my toes into NSR games over the past couple of days. Mainly for the sake of broadening my horizons beyond just OSR games, to gain a different perspective, if nothing else.Traditionally, the OSR movement, which started in the early 2000s, is one that emphasizes playing games in this idealized version of the foundation of the hobby. It has mostly arisen as a rejection of "modern" TTRPG design - a style which tends to cultivate clunky rail-roady narratives, overly combat focused adventures and overall tries too much to pretend to be a video game. While many blog posts have delved into the taxonomy of games, most notably The Retired Adventurer's "Six Cultures of Play," that discussion a bit beyond the scope of today's article.
More presently, the NSR, or New-School Revolution, attempts to be neither of the styles at the same time. For lack of a better term, it cherry-picks aspects from every style of RPG. It has a high emphasis on player choice, but willingness to move beyond the mechanics set into stone by Gygax et al. half a century ago. The flagship system, and incidentally, the one that got me into non-D&D RPGs, is Yochai Gal's Cairn.
A major tenet of the system, and the one I want to focus on today, is its commitment to classlessness. Instead of discrete paths of advancement that most games have, rather characters are defined by their background, equipment and their relationship with the fiction of the world. Advancement in Cairn looks less like "Kill stuff for XP" and more like "get an 'in' with the town sheriff, make a Faustian deal with the fae, or train with a master swordsman."
This makes for an interesting spin on the game. What it does is remove the outward incentives to do anything. Dungeon-delving is no longer about retrieving as much GP for XP, like in an OSR game, or killing the dungeon's boss to move to the next beat of the story, like in modern D&D. Rather, this concept makes it so that the players define their own path through the world, rather than following what the DM approves of be that "the prewritten narrative," or "Dungeon delving for Gold, Loot and XP." It challenges the players to ask: "what do you want to do?"
This is assuredly an uncomfortable question for players, and requires a decent amount of skill as a DM. More than I possess, in a few ways, considering my Cairn games have met middling success (which is a story for another day). Of course, the players aren't alone in this relationship. The DM is responsible to provide some things for players to latch on to in a game as open as this. Whether it be capital-Q "Quests" given by NPCs, or rumors overheard in a hazy tavern evening, the players should always have some threads to latch on to in a game like this.
I like this approach for a few reasons. Primarily, it moves slightly away from the sort of "gold rush" mindset given to adventure designs in the 80s, where the party consists of fortune-seeking prospectors willing to fight skeletons and manticores for loot. Having a classless system removes the reliance on that conceit, and allows for more nuance. Not that something like B/X can't exist in a different setting than the cowboy-flick structure, but it becomes a question of "how do we play the game" (generally "levelling up") rather than "what do we do in the world" (something up to the players). Although sometimes the answer to the latter is simply: "Dungeon delving for Gold, Loot and the experience it gives the players."
My idea today is a simple one. Destroy levels, or rather, XP. Any version of any game with XP; D&D 5e, TSR era D&D and retroclones, Pathfinder, or a myriad of other systems can grant this motivation through simply not awarding XP to the character(I'm looking at this through a lens of OSR games, though). Players stay at level 1 forever, and their goal becomes advancement through the fiction, and engagement with the world. There's no longer a need for murderhoboing, nor that subtle manipulation of being "good players" by doing things the game and DM approve of. The players can make any choice, good or bad, and simply deal with the consequences, not an undiegetic and metaphysical wagging finger saying "if you do this, no XP for you!"
This obviously needs some amount of tuning. The way I would consider it is by shifting the lens a bit. What makes the characters unique is having classes at all. Sure, the wizard will never know more than one spell, but they know how to cast spells! A cleric in B/X can't cast any spells at level 1, but they have a pretty solid chance of just saying "no" to zombies and immediately profiting.
The point here is to shift classes into a more mythic position. A character with any class at all is wondrous and rare, simply by the fact that they're slightly better than a Normal Man in terms of higher HP, and potential to hit (I'd bump fighters to have a THAC0 one step higher than base for the sake of making them worth picking beyond the higher hit die and lack of weapon restrictions.). Any classed character is significantly better equipped to fight any monster than a peasant with a pitchfork.
Of course, this means that they're going to be mostly fighting low-level enemies, but it just means that those fights are going to matter significantly more, and that HD 3+ monsters need some major combat as war play to win against. This can make for more tense and interesting experiences rather than "we'll come back when we've gotten some more XP."
I apologize for not meeting the recently implemented Lonely Star Tax, but I have yet to test this. I simply do not know whether hacking B/X like this makes for a more fun game, or if the juice isn't worth the squeeze. However, it's an interesting concept that is worth exploring, and I'll publish a play report when I've gotten the chance to do just that.
Happy 4th to the fellow Americans reading, and I hope your games don't get too postponed by the long weekend.
This blog is, and always will be, 100% human-generated