Intelligence and Crawling

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Kane
Posts: 51
Joined: Wed Nov 16, 2022 4:08 pm

Intelligence and Crawling

Post by Kane »

I was reading a review of another game (Adventures Dark & Deep), but I it really applies to any game of dungeon/hex crawling. The review said that Illusionist or Magic User was a better choice than Savant because Savants don't 'get enough' to make up for the difference. But that's only true if your DM makes secondary skills trivial and doesn't encourage gathering intelligence (as in information, not IQ). If your Savant has an occult skill and can identify the type of rod the Evil Cleric might be carrying, you may have just saved everyone's life.

When I play a hex-crawler type of game, I like to do research: figure out what kinds of animals and monsters live in the area, ask characters if they've seen anything unusual here or there, etc. This requires the DM to do extra leg work, but I think it's vastly more believable than marching in blindly and hoping for the best. In Keep on the Borderlands I wanted to know about the politics of the Keep, and tried to forge connections with people who could be useful for our final thrust against the Caves of Chaos.

Perhaps it comes from grand strategy games, but for me the perfect adventure is where I found out what I was going to fight, where it would be, and made sure we had a plan and the perfect weapons. I don't want to depend on luck if I don't have to, and random encounters make cautiously searching everything dangerous. So the answer is to be forewarned and forearmed.

Systematic planning, logistics and an intelligent communication of player characters so they know each other's strengths and have plans to deal with foreseeable contingencies takes time and thought, as well as a DM who is actually going to have meaningful information to give you, but I would really much rather play OSR games this way than kicking in the door and hoping for the best. I'm fine with my character dying, but I am going to play him as though he isn't. If we're going to possibly encounter a cockatrice, I want to have a spell of stone to flesh, or at least a mirror, handy. Gathering intelligence and making use of good planning has saved my characters far more times than a lucky critical hit or an extra Magic Missile.

I tend to look at OSRs as a war game with added setting/roleplaying elements, and from that perspective having a character who can give other characters the information to help plan is essential. In a more oldschool game without skills and a huge variety of classes this could just be an intelligent character - making your wizard useful for something other than doing d4 damage once a day.

I know some people for time constraints or whatever other reason just want to run in and kill stuff, and if that's how you want to play I'm not going to stop you. I'm just saying there is a whole dimension of immersion and role playing which, if supported by the DM's effort and players being willing to cooperate, can actually prove far more useful than a bunch of +s on your character sheet. What prompted this is more than the person writing the article (and this is not the only place I've seen something like this) that an ability to access obscure and difficult facts was objectively less useful than another spell slot, whereas I see combat as something to be avoided if possible. I want to steal the treasure without fighting, I want to kill the monster before he wakes up, I want to find out the Baron is the villain working with the necromancer before he even knows we're looking for him. Short-circuiting obstacles is much more enjoyable, to me, than overcoming them!

Not that I mind a combat or a duel of spells, I am notorious for playing elven fighter/mages, so I love the spell slinging and sword slashing. I want my elf to chop and disintegrate as many people as possible without taking any unnecessary risks. But in the type of OSR hex/dungeon crawl that I like best you might be better off with two savants than three fighters.

The sword is for when things go wrong. Ideally, we walk into the caves, take everything, kill everyone, and nobody ever gets seen. Of course, a module which actually ran that way would be kind of weird but if it truly resulted from brilliant (and sometimes meta) planning by the players I would be, as a DM, more than satisfied with the conclusion.

On the DM side, I also run my wizards with 17 intelligence as though they had a 17 intelligence. Which means they will have a selection of spells, arrangement of troops, etc. which are logical and effective for the situations they expect to be in. Maybe the entire front of the cave is covered in a thin mesh, effectively preventing anything larger than a bead from coming in without getting snared, and he's hidden behind a slit in the rock wall where he'll shoot a fireball at you right through the weave. That's what I would do as a PC, I don't see why the NPC would be any dumber. I'm not going to have him act on knowledge he doesn't have - unless I've written in spies and they've legitimately evaded detection, he probably won't know who the PCs are. There's no reason he would have a spell specifically tailored to neutralize their magic items. But if they're going to use fairly obvious and predictable tactics, it's quite likely he is ready.

I basically refuse to fudge rolls/events or whatever, they happen as they're written, things happen based on what the world is and how characters interact with it, they don't occur either to inconvenience or assist the players. If I want an NPC who can help the PCs in a pinch I'll stat him out and track his movement throughout time, and if he's not around when they need him, he's not around. When you run the game this way that means there are real facts for the players to learn by research, spying, etc. But if you run the game on the fly and just insert things you think are cool or will cause chaos, knowledge and planning become kind of a sham.

In short, if you play your D&D like a hardcore wargame, it pays to have someone who knows things. And this doesn't just apply to the bookish types, but also Fighters with strategic knowledge, Paladins who know heraldry, etc. Whether you're just basing it on class and stats or actually have some kind of a skill system, I always try to allow players to take advantage of (and be encouraged to obtain) character knowledge, because otherwise having a high Int, Wis or profession is just window dressing and extra ammo.

There are some situations where knowledge may not help, or where you can't get access to a bunch of books and people to interrogate. But there are many situations where research and intelligence gathering would be extremely useful, and would be done by basically anyone taking themselves seriously in a real world or novel, and I think it's one of the most interesting parts of the game. Not only do players get to learn about the setting, but they are actually rewarded for doing so.

For me, it's just hard to take a game seriously where characters don't think ahead and plan. I know some people are bad at this in real life, but for every character to be bad at it is kind of ridiculous (or worse, to be a genius with skills you never use, even though he obviously would because he's the kind of person to have those skills). Maybe the pizza drivers are going delivery to delivery, but someone in management has projected sales numbers and ordered based on those. And if he hasn't, the place is probably on the way to getting TPKd. SWAT teams don't just show up and blindly charge into buildings, they spy, the look at records of previous events, etc. Even if you're mr Badass Commando - especially if you're Mr Commando - you want to know who's where and who you have to shoot and avoid before you step one foot in the door. There are always uncertainties, but that doesn't mean you have to be okay with it! You act with insufficient information because you have to due to time constraints and unavoidable risk, not because you just don't care whether you die (which is honestly how it seems sometimes).

This also ties into oldschool/tournament games where you actually had a party leader. I think this makes perfect sense. Warriors without a leader or a plan are DEAD. I usually pick whoever has the highest Int or appropriate class skills, or charisma, to be the party leader. This dynamic is present in almost any fantasy novel, and I don't know why having a commander isn't sought out more often in RPGs. Given all the dithering and contradictory plans people try to run at the same time, it would save a lot of headache and hit points to have someone who says, 'this is what we're doing', and also save the DM the trouble of trying to negotiate five different contradictory plans every character has that keep changing as they progress. That doesn't mean PCs have to be blindly obedient, but it's just not credible to have a war party with no leadership and it's dangerous and tedious to manage, as well. If you decide your thief is going to toss the plan and run off, OK, but not only are sane characters not likely to do that, they'd probably resent the thief for it, as well.

Even the most badass lone wolf Sword & Sorcery characters, like Elric or Conan, follow (or give) orders and act with coordinated strategies. I find this aspect immersive, I don't resent having a commander as a PC (supposing it fits the scenario), and the only real possible trouble is immature drama/player-player disputes, which I just refuse to deal with. It's perfectly possible for another player to be my boss or wife in game without having spats about it in real life - even if the characters hate each other! Of course I do tend to tell people at the outset of a game 'your characters have to be able to cooperate' but I leave it to them to work out why and how their characters work together. And it really doesn't matter why they do it, as long as they're behaving in a coordinated fashion.

There are a lot of aspects of research, planning and management that work perfectly well in RPG games for the same reason they work in real life, if only the DM and the players can convince themselves to put in the effort to make it happen.
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