A different kind of long-form campaign?

Mountain Dragons - Photo by Ali Müftüoğulları on Unsplash

My regular game of D&D fifth edition didn't happen this week, as one of the players has had COVID-19 (hopefully on the mend now) and I have a lovely (not-COVID) sinus infection which left me pretty much wiped out after a full day of Teams Meetings and working-from-home. So we cancelled. 

It hasn't stopped me musing a bit about the long-form nature of D&D, prompted by some of First Age's blog posts about the 4e campaign he's running. I was counter-pointing this to some of the brutalist comments from a poster on the Old-School Essentials Facebook group, mainly about not tailoring the scenario to the characters and letting it fall as it will. Interesting stuff, if a tad evangelical and heading towards telling people that they're doing it wrong. 

Dungeons & Dragons has supported long form since it started, but the nature of that support has changed, mostly from the release of D&D3e, although there's a case that later-day AD&D2e (especially with the splat-books) was moving to a different form of game.

Early D&D had characters go through a winnowing process; they were fragile, and died often if you followed the core rules. Most DMs that I knew had house rules to address this; maximum hit points at first level, not dying at zero hit points, loads of retainers to soak damage and so on. Definitely not the rules as written. By the time characters hit the mid-level sweet-spot, you felt that the characters had pulled themselves up from inexperience newbies to minor heroes. They weren't that fragile and they were powerful enough to put at risk. Your investment in the character grew with them, and they started to show themselves later in the game from what they did. RuneQuest followed the same tropes.

Later D&D starts from an assumption that your characters are minor heroes. They have feats and cool powers (which really start to kick in at 3rd level in fifth edition). They aren't anywhere near as fragile (I remember realising this when I first ran the game and the party killed a vampire spawn with ease at second level, something that would have probably resulted in character deaths in the older games). The character investment is higher, as is the preparation time. By the time you hit mid-levels, they're powerhouses which can take on a serious level of threat.

System-wise, I think that the characters probably occupy a similar point in the eco-system at mid-levels; in both styles of D&D, you won't want to lose a character. We're 33 sessions into Curse of Strahd, and losing a character now would be both shocking and sad, especially if it was seen to be for something meaningless. That said, I don't mollycoddle. I will foreshadow, I will warn, but when push comes to shove, the players have the choice about the combats that they initiate. There've been a number of combats when they've taken decisions that could have killed them; the attack on the vampire spawn at the coffin-maker's workshop, the ambush by the vampire spawn at the Blue Water Inn and the attacks on the Durst Mill (the Old Bonegrinder) came close to killing characters. The Barovian sandbox follows an OSR mindset in some ways; the characters chose where they go and the threats that they face (or not). The only balance is made by geography; less dangerous areas tend to be encountered first.

A decent OSR DM will foreshadow, leave options to avoid combat and reward innovative play. Encounters could be deadly, but ultimately they can be avoided. If they can't, the DM isn't doing it right. Holmes, B/X, BECMI and AD&D weren't built as funnels to slay characters, it was just they way the mechanics played out; a skilled player could still lose a character to RNG, but the chances were reduced with experience. 

Both game styles look for the long form, it was just harder to get there with the earlier takes on the game.

19 December 2021