Welcome to Part 6 of Motivations in Roleplaying Game Economies. You can find Part 1 here. In this series we discuss how games affect the behavior of their players, using Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set (1981, Ed. Tom Moldvay) as our example text. Part 6 describes how players utilize rules to facilitate play. Subscribe to get the updates!
We hope this essay provides a useful rule of thumb next time you’re in a dungeon.
Developing Dungeoneering Heuristics
We suspect that most players engaging with Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set for the first time imagine the experience point lifecycle of the game to be something like the following: explore a dungeon, fight the denizens, go back to town to rest and tally the XP. In this conception, fighting generates the experience points and going back to town allows players to cash in and, hopefully, level up. It’s a simple model for the heroic fantasy that the game pitches to players, and provides them with a first layer heuristic.
Wiser players versed in the traditions of the fantasy genre might imagine a cycle with another layer: loot. And Moldvay acknowledges this idea when includes “recovering treasures” in his pitch to prospective players. In this variant of the model, the adventurers fight monsters in order to loot their wealth.1
We note that this version of the XP model presents the highest potential returns because only by defeating all of the monsters and extracting all of the treasure from the dungeon can adventurers earn 100% of available experience points. According to the Placed Treasure paragraph on page B45, treasure XP makes up 75% of that haul, so to avoid combat is to leave 25% of potential experience points on the table, so to speak. Learning the early lessons of the game allows players to move up the heuristic tree and establish a more complex and more successful game loop.
However, our forensic investigation of the 4.9 million deaths of Fighter X demonstrates that the cost of fighting is extremely high. Not only does it bear the social risk of eliminating a player from the action at the table should it go poorly, but the death of a character removes their earned experience points from the ecosystem. A character who has earned 1000 XP and is subsequently slain by an orc on their next foray into the dungeon loses their total investment. There’s no safe place to bank your experience points. Going further into this idea, since experience is divided equally among the player characters, one can view experience points as investments in fellow adventurers as well. For one player to lose 1000 XP marks a loss of investment for the whole group. After all, as each character increases in level, the entire team benefits. As the team gets stronger, reducing the carnage inflicted on its members, more characters survive, allowing it to retain more of the experience points it accumulates—a virtuous cycle. Flushing experience points out of the system due to character death is a significant cost, one worse than even a tax because it benefits no one. Thus, when trying to maximize the amount of experience points earned by defeating all monsters before extracting loot, the group faces substantial, back-breaking risks.
We can use our survivability calculator to assess a basic frame for this risk. Recall that the core efficiency of the fighter—confronting a single goblin—gives only an 81% survivability rate. Now we are able to look at this rate from another angle. Each time Fighter X confronts a single goblin, there exists a 19% chance that all of their banked experience points are eliminated from the ecosystem.2
Thus the most experienced dungeon crawlers know the truth: Don’t fight unless you’re completely out of options. Through hard-won scars, and quite a few character sheets, they’ve learned to ignore the text’s soothing talk of fantasy heroics. Instead, they know that the experience point ecosystem in Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set looks like this:
This final heuristic diagram can be read like so: Steal what you can and fight only when you have to (and when you do fight, fight dirty). While this view of the system does not maximize returns, it optimizes them. By avoiding fights, these clever dungeon crawlers keep more of their earned experience points on the table, rather than making periodic deposits in the rubbish bin. This behavior represents a step further up the heuristics tree again, bringing players to a new plateau from which to explore the game, its world and systems.
Is it possible to play this game in this manner? Yes. For example, in their bizarrely deficient skills, the thief points to the way. By using asymmetrical abilities that allow one to bypass multiple enemies at once while accessing treasure—move silently, hide in shadows, climb sheer surfaces, open locks, for example—the space for action and consequence opens up. Having the option to choose to flee or fight or use another tactic is a huge advantage in this style of play—especially when fighting is so thoroughly disincentivized.
We’ve made examples of the thief and fighter, but the spell-casting classes also conjure up possibilities which affect these heuristics even more deeply. In our next installment, we attempt to map how these special abilities allow the group to avoid fights—using Turn Undead, Web or Sleep—or invent creative solutions to difficult problems in the exploration space—using Light, Hold Portal, Cause Fear, etc.
Until next time…we are your Ludological Alchemists.
Here we would like to note that we find the game’s entire premise of play deeply problematic. Othering a being who is not a player character as a “monster” and building systems of violence and manipulation in service of extracting wealth from their wilderness homes and returning it to “civilized” towns paints an awful portrait of life in this game. While we enjoy challenging games, this particular text offers no reflection or self-awareness of the rapine picture it encourages players to re-enact in “heroic” fashion. Thus we feel compelled to note that though we use this game as an example due to its influential status on the four decades of fantasy roleplaying games that have followed in its wake (whether digital, tabletop and live action), we can not endorse the behavior it encourages.
Since we’re modeling X only as a first-level fighter, that limits the loss range to 1 to 1,999 XP—as he will advance to level 2 upon earning 2000 XP and returning to town. If we suppose that, on his journey to level 2, X will find himself forced to face down a single goblin in just five separate moments, his probability of survival is reduced from 81% to 35% (.81 x .81 x .81 x .81 x .81=.349). And worse, each foray he survives makes a subsequent death more costly as he’s accumulated more experience points toward his next level. If we assume, for sake of example, a regular expression of experience point gain across his five deadly face-offs with goblins, X will have banked 0 XP if we assume the first comes on his first foray (now is the best time for X to die!), 500 during his second, 1000 during his third, 1500 at his fourth and a disastrous 1999 XP for his final encounter before reaching level 2. X is a walking incident pit. He’s at substantial risk of death during each foray and the more effort we pour into him, the greater the cost when he collapses but, the more effort we pour into him, the greater the chance he increases his survivability and our investment pays off in the long term. What could possibly go wrong?