Welcome to Part 5 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 5 takes a step back to examine the text itself and how it frames the rules for its players and dungeon masters. Further installments publish weekly on Saturdays. Subscribe to get the updates!
We hope this essay grants you enough experience points to level up.
When the Adventure Is Over
Now that we’ve peeked into the innards of hundreds of thousands of dead fighters and thieves, we need to take a step back and heed what Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set says about itself. Under the heading Giving Experience Points on page B22, we can safely say the game makes clear that the players will earn experience points through their actions—specifically by cadging “non-magical treasure” and “defeating monsters.”
Further down the next column on page B22, the game text also makes explicit that accruing XP will improve the survivability and utility of their characters. Such an explanation may seem obvious to us with decades of experience playing Dungeons & Dragons, but a game text must be clear to the players about their goals in the system, regardless of their personal experience.
Is this promise of accumulated experience points granting future hit points enough to motivate players to plunge their characters into danger in dark dungeons? History seems to indicate yes. This edition of the game was wildly popular in 1981. Thousands of players hurled their characters into the Caves of Chaos, heedless of the many lurking dangers. But does the game’s incentive economy drive players to the right behaviors on their adventures? We’re not certain it does—at least in a typical first run. We suspect that the natural bravado of those early-adopting players led to thousands of their characters being likewise slaughtered in the bowels of those fell dungeons. The game’s brutal logic is not readily apparent to most new players, especially when it introduces itself as recreating a land of magic in which heroes overcome perils. In fact, we observe that the game seems to toss characters into Moloch’s yawning jaws with a cheery wink and a “Good luck!” as the demon’s maw snaps shut.
Let’s look at the Experience Points for Monsters table on page B22. The picture it paints begins to clarify how the game’s systems represent its world.
Reviewing its simple formula, we assess that accumulating 100 experience points from “monsters killed or overcome with magic, fighting or wits” is challenging. We used 20 goblins as our example goal in this essay (at 5 points each according to the table above), but we could attempt to earn our 100 experience points by overcoming 10 orcs, 6-7 hobgoblins, or something roughly equivalent to an ogre with 4+ hit dice. All terrifying obstacles for a group of first-level adventurers—and each a source of death and mayhem in their own right. To put an even finer point on it, the white dragon from our example earlier is worth only 600 experience points—and this a creature that can wipe out an entire group of first-level adventures in a single breath.
Compare those 100 potential experience points earned in deadly combat with goblins against the first significant deposit of hidden treasure in B2 Keep of the Borderlands Cave D, Location 18: In it, adventurers might find a sack containing 250 gold coins. We are eager to point out that this amount is an XP outlay greater than defeating all of the regular goblins in the entire D area encounters—who are worth approximately 210 XP, not counting the chief and his guards.
If they know what to look for, a player new to Dungeons & Dragons might begin to suspect that if killing is the business, they’re in for a raw deal. In terms of the game’s economy, what is the optimal path to gaining experience points? In fact, the game text is coy about what’s truly at stake. In the Dividing XP heading on page B22, the Basic Set rulebook only implies the actual value of treasure as experience points.
In this example, we see 5800 experience points from treasure compared to only 800 experience points from monsters they’ve killed. The gulf between the amounts is a significant clue to how the game is intended to be played.
To find explicit mention of the true nature of the experience point economy, the dungeon master must delve into Part 7: Treasure, PLACED TREASURES on page B45. Buried here in this paragraph is the game design gold. The author casually reveals that “placed treasures” should account for 75% of experience points or more. Three quarters!
Glancing back at the example of the experience point haul in Dividing XP, we are compelled to note that 800 is only 12% of the total haul of 6600 experience points—less than half of the 25% ratio the game recommends. Going back further, if defeating a white dragon produces 600 experience points, but its hoard amounts to 50,000 experience points, we think that the authors intend for far more than 75% of experience to come from treasure. The game is quite serious regarding the economic balance of its reward system being weighted toward treasure over the defeat of monsters—and it telegraphs a heuristic to the dungeon master that treasure is the player’s goal, not the glory of combat. Thus, after carefully studying the rulebook, an astute dungeon master knows what’s at stake, while most players will be ignorant of the misfortunes that await in the darkness below.
How does the game’s rubric for distributing XP relate back to our intrepid fighter and foolish thief? First, we strongly suspect that the character’s 81% survivability chance against a typical first-level foe creates a false sense of efficacy in players. In our experience, players routinely overestimate their characters’ effectiveness in general. Most bring genre expectations to the table. In the ur-texts we love, few, if any, fantasy heroes fall wordlessly to the first goblin they meet on their journey. Even meek Frodo survives the Morgul blade of a Ringwraith in his first brush with danger, so we feel these expectations of effectiveness and survivability based on genre are quite reasonable. And if a fighter player (or any character type who favors frontline melee) happens to face down a single goblin, successfully notching their first B-grade performance, the player may be further seduced by their character’s initial performance into believing that they are good at their job and that they can hack their way to victory. However, 81% survivability is not forgiving. These are harsh odds, and so about 1 in 5 players immediately learn another lesson: Frontline combat is the fastest path to creating a new character. And, as the travails of Fighter X demonstrate, after a few combats, nearly every player of Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set learns the horror of the game’s merciless internal logic. In our experience dungeon mastering, playing in and even reading accounts of B2 Keep on the Borderlands played using this rule set, we’ve found that the game can produce a staggering body count. Grim tales which our survivability calculator’s prognostications only confirm.
So is this blasted game’s economy irrevocably broken? Not at all. Successful play is possible. We’ve seen it with our own rheumy eyes. But to navigate the horror business of the dungeon, players must adopt a particular stance. When their character is devoured by Gruumsh’s merciless goblins, all is not lost…provided they create a new character and return to the dungeon. In addition to their shiny new character sheet, returning players re-enter the dungeon with an ever-increasing meta-knowledge of how to optimize play: avoid fights and seek treasure. They establish a new heuristic that lives above their genre expectations and the text’s early clues. It is through this meta-experience that the game teaches its economy.
How to Win
Delightfully, like any good puzzle or mystery, the game even hints at the player’s eventual experience early in its introduction. On page B4, under its “How to ‘Win’” heading, editor Tom Moldvay wisely notes that “the game [is not] ‘lost’ when an unlucky player’s character dies, since the player may simply ‘roll up’ a new character.”
Moldvay knows you’re going to die in there, but he also understands the meta-experience that’s possible if you return to play with a new character. In this way, players absorb the game’s incentive economy through repeated cycles of interaction—even those that produce catastrophic results—rather than through explicit instruction or guidance.1
That is all well and good, but you might recall that the game introduces itself preaching a seemingly contradictory message: “a fantasy world where magic is real and heroes venture out on dangerous quests in search of fame and fortune.” And the author overreaches to a comical level in the How To Win section when he references fantasy novels. Imagine Dragonlance if Raistlin III was the third attempt after both his father, Raistlin, and brother, Raistlin II, were bitten in half and devoured by draconians.
If combat appears to be unheroically unrewarding, what other aspects of the game evoke heroes struggling to overcome perils in a magical fantasy world? If treasure presents such a great reward, how does the hero capture it if not as the prize after a battle? All this and more shall we explore as we plunge deeper into the labyrinth of Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set’s heuristics.
Until next week, we are your Ludological Alchemists.
The Inheritance system on page B16 also hints at the designers’ understanding of the survivability of individual player characters and the necessity for players to return to the adventure with a new character and their hard won wisdom.