Towards A New Model of Adventure Gaming

Posted On August 21, 2024

As this post goes live, the IP holders for D&D are doing their darndest to rip conventional play away from the hobby approach of “anything is possible at the table (as long as you adhere to story-arc driven narrative games)” and into a consumerist approach of “gatcha driven subscription model in which anything not permitted is proscribed”.  Meanwhile, we happy few of the #BROSR have been happily demolishing sacred gaming idols and rebuilding the hobby practically from the ground up.

But it’s not just us.  Quite a few guys are trying to escape the conventional tabletop role-playing game model, and today we’re going to look at two of them.  It’s admirable, and interesting, that these conversations are going on out there in the wilds of RPG blogs. My prognosis for their games is good.  They are on the right track, even if they haven’t quite fully accepted that the house that TSR built needs more than a few cosmetic changes.

We start with the Itinerant Overlord, who adopts the term Classic Adventure Gaming, for his model.  That’s a fine term, and not one to question.

It is the style of gaming presumed and presented in the 1E PHB and DMG which was common before a playacting style of “roleplaying” grew into a new normal.  It rejects the term “roleplaying game” or “RPG” because today those names firmly convey implicit expectations running contrary to practices of successful adventure gaming.

His post is well worth reading, as it contains a succinct bullet-point list of things the CAG model incorporates. I’m not going to list them all here, you should go check them out for yourself. Before you go, see if you can identify what’s missing from his list.

Zherbus takes a swing at things with a blog post in which he countersignals the utility of B/X and it’s many, many clones for recapturing the magic of Classic Adventure Gaming:

With a full breadth campaign comes multiple modes of adventure gaming. Domain play aside, there is massive room for wilderness exploration, ocean, city and some aerial play. With that comes a need of supporting rules to navigate and overcome those challenges. Large-scale conflict should be able to be resolved with relative ease, because it will come up from time to time even if it isn’t the games focus.

There are at least two critical aspects of CAG that these two bloggers are missing.  Bear in mind, it’s no insult to either of these guys.  They are reaching for something greater, a fuller and more engrossing experience, than modern games have offered over the last four decades, and their scholarship and desire to explore off the beaten path is laudable. Breaking out of ruts four decades in the carving is HARD WORK, and anyone who has tried has found himself beset by modern crabs in a bucket on all sides.

They have pushed the boundaries of gaming, but haven’t yet crossed the Rubicon.  Maybe we can drag them onside by pointing out two of the things they have missed.  So what are they?

1. Player versus player dynamics.  This is foundational, square one style gaming out of which conventional RPG play sprouted, and it’s been so long discarded that most players can’t even imagine a game that includes it.  The earlies RPGs started life as wargames with clearly drawn sides, and into which the lives of heroes stepped.  The earliest days of Hyboria and Blackmoor et al. were built on the idea of players running not just single characters, but entire factions or armies.  Instead of a single player (commonly referred to as the “GM”) inventing and running every group antagonistic to a united party of PCs, these early games utilized a neutral referee who took and interpreted orders from players antagonistic toward each other.  This opens the path to new modes of gaming and invites the creativity of everyone in the game, which exponentially increases the amount not just of skullduggery and trickery, but also opportunities for role-playing.  It also bashes open the door to the next point.
2. Fog of War.  This exists to a limited extent in conventional play.  GMs have a screen for a reason, after all.  But just as PvP opens up opportunities for role-play (a subject on which you can expect a full blog post later), PvP also opens up opportunities for implementing – and cleverly circumventing – uncertainty in your RPGs.  With each player running his own plots and plans, even the GM doesn’t have absolute certainty in what’s going on in the campaign.  He doesn’t need to in order to resolve player orders. He doesn’t need to know what might  happen, only what does happen, so that he can resolve any conflicts the players themselves create.  In many cases, informing him early allows the GM to serve as a neutral authority who can confirm that hidden plans and resources were legitimate, but in the case of players that trust each other enough to enjoy PvP, that’s hardly necessary.  The increase in fog of war allows a table to fully implement countless aspects of the rules that go under-utilized in conventional games, such as spying and scrying and blackmail and bribery and if you can’t imagine countless others you’re probably in the wrong hobby.

Even moreso than accepting rules-as-written, it is these two aspects of the earliest days of gaming that have allowed for the creation of the Total Nonstop Braunstein mode of gaming.  It’s an incredible achievement, and we’ve already seen the incredible results that can be achieved by implementing the Axis of JeffroBdubsian Gaming into new and long established campaigns alike.

They may bristle at the suggestion, but the TNB is probably not the only way to implement Classic Adventure Gaming.  Guys like Itinerant Overlord and Zherbus are blazing their own paths to new methods of implementation, to say nothing of guys like Gelatinous Rube,  and Purple Druid, the latter of which is beating his way through the old jungles of miniature wargaming in his quest.  It’s going to be very interesting to see where they wind up, and how lucky are we all to have front row seats for this adventure?