Welcome to Part 3 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 3 explores the many deaths of fighters in D&D. Further installments publish weekly on Saturdays. Subscribe to get the updates!
We hope you enjoy the read. Prepare to die one thousand times one thousand deaths.
Your Chance of Earning 100 XP
Can a single neophyte warrior defeat an army of 400 goblins in this game? Such a feat seems implausible, even for Beowulf.
For our example, we shall conjure up a standard heavily armored human fighter. His loadout in this version of D&D is as follows: Platemail & Shield (Armor Class 2), Sword (1d8 damage), 5 hit points (of a possible 8) and a THAC0 (an acronym for “To Hit Armor Class 0”) of 19, and we’ll assign him 12s for ability scores with no modifiers to account for. A fighter in this mold requires 2,000 XP to advance from level 1 to 2, so even this exemplar 100 XP is only 5% of his laborious progress to a better, longer life.
Fighter X in the Caves of Chaos
A “fighter” is a class in the Basic Set. The game’s text states “Fighters are humans who train for battle. It is their job to fight monsters and protect the weaker members of the party.”
And here the shade of Beowulf must stand aside as the author conjures for his example fighter no less than the indefatigable Greek god Hercules! Based on that description, we think it is safe to assume that the fighter’s core function is to be able to reliably murder a goblin. Certainly the myths surrounding Hercules recount his many battles with the Goblin King of the Misty Mountains.
To ground our example, we’ll place this vagabond in the scenario found in TSR’s B2, Keep on the Borderlands and its adventure location known as “The Caves of Chaos,” as these caves contain many goblins. The module lists goblins of the Caves of Chaos with the following ability scores: Armor Class 6, 3 hit points each, morale 7, THAC0 of 19 and bearing spears that deal 1d6 damage.
Let us imagine that our imperiled fighter journeys across the titular borderlands to the valley beyond the keep and enters the first cave on his left. Unbeknownst to our fantasy crash-test dummy, this is Cave D, the goblin caves, and he is about to die a thousand thousand deaths.
Let’s run some tests!
In each of the examples that follow, we ran the simulation one million times. The percentage generated is the number of times the character died divided into 1,000,000. To generate these numbers, we built a Dungeon Survivability calculator with our friends Anthony Hersey and Colin Booth.
The 400 Blows
For our first test, let’s cut loose and try to win it all in one throw of the dice. Can Fighter X cut down 400 goblins like a fantasy murder Musashi?
Much to our surprise (mainly due to how the morale rules function in this edition of Dungeons & Dragons) 1 in 20 fighters could pull off this feat.1
A Reasonable Amount of Goblins
Even so, 5% odds for survival are rarely a great gameplay experience. Perhaps let’s adopt a more restrained stance and examine how Fighter X fares against a single goblin.
In 1,000,000 trials against a single goblin X died just 192,460 times, for a respectable survival rate of 80.75%. This tells us that in the Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set, the statistical model of a typical fighter gets a B grade when performing the basic function of their class—crushing a goblin (and earning 5 XP).
What if Fighter X wanted to earn 100 XP all at once? Would he fare better against 20 goblins rather than the 400?
According to our calculator, fighting 20 goblins at once gives X a mere 6% chance of survival. Not impossible, but obviously suboptimal, and only marginally less risky than aiming for 400 in one go. Such odds are a steep gamble and unlikely to produce fun for the player.
What if X gets smart and sets up a Fight Booth™ outside the caves and challenges 20 goblins to get in line and duel him one at a time? Oddly (again due to how the morale rules work in this edition of Dungeons & Dragons) fighting 20 goblins one at a time is much worse for X—granting only 0.08% survival odds.2
However, that type of Park Chan-wook-style slaughterhouse horror is not representative of how combat in the Caves of Chaos works. If we read through the scenario presented in B2, Keep on the Borderlands, we find that the description of the areas in cave D of the Caves of Chaos places six goblins in each of the two guard chambers and six more on patrol near the entrance. Those 18 goblins with spears are close to our target of 20, so let’s investigate if X is able to fight his way to glory through the guards and patrols as set out by the scenario creator, E. Gary Gygax himself.
Spoiler-free Cave D Map
Given the dynamics of fighting in 10’ x 10’ squares in D&D and the parameters of the module, it’s unlikely that X would face all 18 at once. If we imagine a combat in the narrow tunnels of this cave, we feel the available space permits only three goblins at a time to attack X. The Group Combat rules on B26 support this idea and state that “not more than two or three characters could fight side by side.” What are the results if X then faces three goblins at a time in six consecutive waves?
Our calculator of doom says X’s chance of survival is less than 1%. Grim.
Perhaps we can better model the situation. Let’s expand our imagined scenario into something more likely to be found in a typical session. To start, we’ll grant X a companion who stands shoulder to shoulder with him and faces half the goblins—a typical arrangement for this style of Dungeons & Dragons play. Thus in this mode, our doomed fighter might reasonably face only three waves of three goblins with spears, at a cost of splitting the experience points with their fellow warrior.
In this scenario, X’s odds improve dramatically but not so much that he is likely to live: a 50x improvement from .08% to… 4% survivability. A 96% chance of dying while trying to scrape together a measly 45 XP (5 XP x 9 goblin opponents).
Don’t blame the fighter, though. It’s not that they’re bad at their job, it’s that the deck is stacked against them. Even if we enhance them a bit with decent scores in Strength, Dexterity and Constitution—improvements that increase their hits, damage, hit points and armor class—their odds improve to a 17% chance of survivability against three waves of three goblins with spears in Cave D of the Caves of Chaos. More than a 400% improvement…but still terrible odds for such a fine student of Hercules!
At this point, we’ve slain Fighter X approximately 4.9 million times in our bloody quest to unearth the secrets of the Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set system. He’s done enough—perhaps more than any fighter ever has. We believe that his multitudinous demises create a strong case that fighting is a rube’s game in Dungeons & Dragons. To fight is to die.
If fighting is such a doomed sport, does the game present options to the players so that they may take alternate paths toward their 100 XP? In our next installment, we examine two of the other character classes in the game, the thief and the magic-user, and see how they stack up.
Join us next week for more death, mayhem and ludological alchemy.
The rulebook lists each creature type with its morale value. After the creature’s team suffers its first casualty, at the start of the following combat round, the dungeon master rolls 2d6 against its morale value to determine if the remaining creatures flee or surrender. If they do not, the creatures must pass a second morale check once they are reduced to 50% of their starting numbers. In this example of 1 vs 400, the morale rules favor the single fighter against the large group of fragile enemies, since the fighter may win initiative, fell a goblin in a single blow and the remainder then fail their morale check and flee.
In this case, morale plays no role since the rule only affects groups of monsters. Fighting one at a time means, essentially, fighting 20 groups of 1. As each group of 1 falls, the remaining waves are unphased by the fate of the comrade ahead of them in line. It’s a quirk of the rules unlikely to ever emerge in play, but valuable for our analysis.