Race and class in my D&D game

I am pretty sure that this post will be a "downer" in this day and age of "egalitarian" fantasy role-playing games where anyone can be anything and excel at it. Consider yourself warned?

When it comes to D&D-type games I am quite fond of "conservative racial stereotypes" in the style of the original rules: Certain races are better (or worse) at doing certain things, period. Issues of "game balance" aside, the answer to the old "Which races can pick which classes?" question is one of the central player-facing rules that allows me to make clear statements about the world, statements the players will care about a lot more than when I rattle off 20 minutes of flavor text.

Instead of discussing this entirely in the abstract, let's start by looking at the table of race/class combinations for my world:

	Dwarf	Elf	Halfling	Human
Cleric	8	-	-	U
Fighter	U	4	4	U
Rogue	4	8	U	U
Wizard	-	U	-	U

The very first statement I make is that there are only 4 races and 4 classes that can be played which establishes the "outer limits" of the world (from a player perspective). The next statement is that humans are good at everything: the Us mean that humans can advance to any level in all available classes. The remaining U entries state what the various demi-humans are good at: dwarven fighters, elven wizards, and halfling rogues are all on par with their human counterparts. In fact, given their greater life-spans, demi-humans actually have a chance of exceeding human capabilities in those particular classes (see below for how this plays out).

The remaining nine entries are where things usually get controversial: the 4s and 8s mean that the race in question is limited to level 4 or 8 in a given class, the dash means that the race cannot have characters of that class at all. These are the cases that (in my humble opinion) require justification, and it's those justifications that convey most of the flavor about who these races really are in this particular world.

Looking at my table you may already "get" the flavor I am going for to some extent, but just in case I also provide detailed justifications below. Before we get to that, however, I'd like to briefly summarize how my race/class table differs from various "official" versions of D&D:

In comparison to (A)D&D 3e and its free-wheeling attitudes my table is blatantly restrictive. If you like "everything goes" just fine then you should definitely ignore this post.

In comparison to "classic" B/X or BECMI D&D my table is very flexible: Yes you can be an elven rogue or a dwarven cleric! But if you like "race classes" just fine you should probably also ignore this post.

The comparison to OD&D is more complex: Dwarven fighters are just as good as human fighters (instead of peaking at level 6 as in OD&D), elven wizards are just as good as human wizards (instead of peaking at level 8), but both dwarves and elves are restricted as rogues (thieves) and there are no elven clerics at all (which is more restrictive than OD&D on both counts). The elven and halfling fighters are unchanged.

The comparison to AD&D 1e is even more convoluted: Gary allows non-player clerics for dwarves and elves (but curiously not for halflings); I'd rather have a universal reason instead of treating PCs and NPCs differently. Gary stops dwarves, elves, and halflings at levels 9, 7, and 6 as fighters; he clearly gives a nod to dwarves being better at killing things, but his distinction is too muddled for my tastes. Gary does let elves advance to level 11 as wizards; as far as campaigns go, this is actually pretty close to my thinking (see below). Finally, Gary gives all races unlimited advancement as rogues, just like OD&D does; that I have a hard time with, particularly in the case of dwarves and their sausage fingers.

Does my table seem too random for your taste? Personally I find OD&D and AD&D 1e even more random, especially since those rules give very little in terms of justification or explanation. So in an effort to rectify that let me try to run you through my thinking on a class-by-class basis:

Clerics are essentially religious fanatics, an attitude that I see neither in elves (too "scientific" or "arcane" or "enlightened" as it were) nor halflings (too "laid-back" for sure, they'd at most be fanatics about food and wine). Dwarves and humans on the other hand can clearly be block-headed enough to spout religious dogma for a long time; dwarves just eventually calm down and start to realize that there's more to life than that. Humans on the other hand rarely develop far enough (not in terms of levels mind you, but in terms of overall enlightenment about the world and their place in it).

Fighters either kill things or organize others to do the same on a large scale. Every race has some potential for slaughter, but only dwarves and humans are dedicated and aggressive enough to perfect their techniques: Dwarves to defend their mountain homes (and the rest of the world) from the endless hordes of the underdark, humans almost invariably to accumulate wealth and power. Elves tend to ignore the petty squabbles of the short-lived races. They have plenty of time to "wait things out" in the relative safety of their ancient forests and most of them don't see the point of "playing soldier" and risking their (almost) immortal skin as it were. Halflings are neither fond of the discipline required nor the decided lack of comfort military ventures bring with them. In the end they also don't much care for a "fair" fight and would rather overwhelm those "ugly biggens" who want to steal their pipe weed with guerrilla tactics.

Rogues are fundamentally opportunists, they only differ regarding the kind of opportunity they prefer to exploit. Dwarves don't have much patience with this approach to life: You're either doing it right or you're doing it wrong, and if you're doing it right it's honorable and you don't have to sneak around. Elves do enjoy the mischievous aspects of life as a rogue, but they also eventually tire of the "inelegant" physical approach when magical techniques would simply guarantee success. Halflings however couldn't feel more at home with the idea of tricking others or overcoming a wide variety of obstacles with hairy toes and nimble fingers. It's pretty much the only thing exciting enough to keep them away from home during pie season.

Wizards are "academic technocrats" who unravel the mysteries of the multiverse in order to bend it to their will. Well, at least the human ones do, the elven ones look at it more as "communing with the multiverse" but it all works out to the same. Either way, studying musty tomes for hours on end (without snacks even!) doesn't sit well with halflings at all. Dwarves, while not necessarily turned off by the studying, prefer the simpler truths that tradition and religion provide over having to make up their own minds about what is what. For both halflings and dwarves their natural resistance to magic also gets in the way a bit.

Of course these are generalizations, but they are "true enough" in my world to be made into rules. I find that if I don't clearly state that "dwarven wizards" and the like simply don't exist, sooner or later a player will try to roll one up. And if I say at that point that they can't, much needless sadness results.

Note that I don't rule out the existence of "priests" as opposed to "clerics" for any race. It's just that "priests" (religious figures more akin to studious wizards than bloodthirsty fighters) are not a playable class in my world. At least not yet.

I should also mention that I really only play up to level 12 or so; in practice the "soft limit" for player characters is probably closer to 10. This means that while the level 4 limit is a significant restriction, the level 8 limit is much less of one. Combined with the fact that demi-humans can have two (or three in the case of elves) classes, this means that no race has a "hard limit" of any sort to their combined levels unless they pick unfortunate combinations. But even elven fighter/rogues and dwarven cleric/rogues can make it to 12 combined levels, so that's mostly a theoretical concern.

The limit to about 12 levels ties in with my preferred campaign style as well as my choice of level progression.

What D&D Character?

According to this quiz (beware, takes rather long and some of the questions are extremely silly) I am a Chaotic Good Human Wizard (5th Level). Weird, but I guess at least I can cast Fireball?

Das Schwarze Auge

Although I am pretty much a complete "D&D nut" these days, D&D actually wasn't the first table-top role-playing game I played. That dubious honor belongs to a German game called Das Schwarze Auge ("The Dark Eye") which was first published in 1984 and luckily I discovered it that same year.

(Digression: I guess I was "OSR before the OSR" because I never liked any of the later versions they came out with, I stuck to that 1984 release for as long as I could. Of course eventually everybody else I played with switched so I had to as well. But much to my credit I never actually bought any of those "modernized" versions, I just played them with my friends. I wish I had been just as strong when AD&D 2e came out.)

In any case, I always thought it would be interesting to share how that system worked with the rest of the OSR community, so I had planned to write a summary of the original 1984 rules in English. But I don't have to do that anymore because someone else already did, I just never knew about it until today!

I highly recommend that you read at least the sections on character creation and combat, those give a pretty good flavor; the magic section is fun too of course but less essential. The most fundamental differences to D&D are probably these:

1. Ability scores start between 8 and 13; on gaining a level, a character can raise one of their ability scores by 1 up to a maximum of 20; ability scores are used for "skills" by rolling under with a d20; "courage" is actually an ability score (so player characters will sometimes run away even if their player doesn't want them to).
2. Combat has no "static defenses" so both combatants roll: the attacker rolls to hit (d20 under their "attack" value), the defender rolls to parry (d20 under their "parry" value); a successful parry can result in one or both weapons breaking; armor reduces damage unless the attack was a critical hit; critical hits or missile weapons cannot be parried.
3. Magic uses a "spell point" system with some effects depending on how many "spell points" the caster has left; the player has to actually recite the proper words by heart, no cheating; there are no saving throws, but the caster may have to overcome the target's "monster level" with a custom roll depending on the spell.

I still have a soft spot in my heart for this quirky system. In fact, now that I found an English translation, I may just run a game or two if my current AD&D 2e group ever needs a one-shot when the referee can't make it. I'll probably even try my hands at type-setting a nice PDF version...

A Tiny Sandbox: Populated Starting Area

I've been working on the starting area for my sandbox campaign some more. Although I said I wouldn't, I did end up changing a few things about the geography. For example I introduced a small-ish marsh/swamp area to partially sink a certain semi-ruined temple into. I also added a bunch of streams/brooks/rivers (and one new lake!) to make it all sort-of work. Here's how things look right now:

Sandbox campaign starting area at 1 mile/hex.

The red outline marks hex 05.05 on the 5 miles/hex regional map I posted earlier. I have not gotten around to updating the larger-scale maps yet, but this is close enough for now. Here's some flavor text for the "populated" hexes (from west to east). Note that I have no had time to edit all of this for consistency yet.

02.13 Hold of The Chaos Cult: A small group of Xinlurgash cultists have established a hideout in this abandoned dwarven delve. They were sent by their main temple (off the area map to the west) to investigate the ruins in hex 10.16 but have not made a lot of progress toward that goal yet. They did, however, successfully recruit several small bands of humanoids (kobolds, orcs, ogres) who for one reason or another decided not to work with the Broken Fang hobgoblins in hex 26.21; their most prized recruits so far are a minotaur and an owl bear.

04.10 The Sunken City: This mist-covered lake hides an ancient sunken city under its otherwise calm surface. The topmost spires of three towers peek out in the center of the lake but cannot be seen from a distance due to the ever-billowing mist. The towers are made out of a strange bluish-green stone not native to the area.

06.03 Village of Tirn (Krak'Vaza, Citadel of Iron): A mining village of about 450 inhabitants with a sizable dwarven population of about 60. Tirn is built around an old dwarven citadel that has changed hands (between dwarves and various humanoid tribes) many times over the centuries. It was last reconquered by the dwarves around 120 years ago. About 80 years ago the dwarves invited human settlers to join them to make up for their dwindling numbers. The village is now ruled by a council of three dwarves and three humans with a mayor that alternates between dwarves and humans every 10 years. The current mayor is Mart Morren, an experienced human miner of about 50 years; Mart will step down in three years. Despite its relatively small size, Tirn has an actual stone wall.

06.24 Hidden Village of Nath'Valin (Lake of Whispers): A small semi-fortified tree-house village of about 80 high elves guards this entrance to the Vi'Valin (Forest of Whispers) which extends to the south. The elves keep close tabs on the Broken Fang hobgoblins in hex 26.21. They occasionally skirmish with the humanoids, but as long as their attention is focused on the human settlers to the north, the elves are not going to take any major action.

10.16 Temple of the Froghemoth: An ancient temple of unknown origin is slowly sinking deeper into this blighted swamp as the centuries drag on. Statues and bas reliefs of strange reptilians cover the crumbling structures that hide a strange conglomeration of lizardmen, yuan-ti, kuo-toa, and worse.

11.08 Caves of Uncertainty: This network of natural caves is rumored to lead far into the depths of the earth. A small group of about 20 bandits is currently using the surface caves as a hideout. They arrived only recently from the north and have not yet attacked any of the merchants in the area.

15.09 Village of Sern: A village of about 500 (mostly human) souls, Sern sits on both banks of the river Url. The village sprung up roughly 40 years ago at the site of an ancient (but perfectly intact!) stone bridge of dwarven construction (complete with small gate-houses on either side which are now used to collect tolls). Sern has two major temples, one to Mielikki (goddess of forests, hunters, and woodsmen) on the south shore and one to Demeter (goddess of agriculture, fishermen, and fertility) on the north shore. There is also a small shrine dedicated to a variety of other deities, mostly frequented by merchants and other travelers. Sern hosts a weekly market where both homesteaders from the surrounding area as well as craftsmen from Sern sell their products; merchants from Sern in turn regularly attend the monthly market in the town of Marken to the north (not on the area map).

16.11 Stones of Sorrow: A mysterious circle of 19 ancient standing stones (each about 12 feet high, 5 feet wide, and 2 feet deep) looms on the highest peak amidst these strangely desolate hills. Travelers have reported frightening wailing sounds emanating from the stones. Some believe that memories of an ancient cult or civilization mourn their own passing here on every full moon.

19.17 Ruins of Parm: Before being overrun by the Broken Fang hobgoblins and their minions last year, Parm used to be a small village of about 150 hunters and woodsmen. Many who survived the attack have volunteered their services to Baron Tembar and Sternbow Keep on the condition that Parm will be taken back this year. The ruins are currently home to about 30 goblin raiders who are still occasionally digging up some useful loot. A small band of 5 human hunters who are too impatient to wait for Baron Tembar's plans to take shape is waging a guerrilla war on the goblins, albeit not very successfully.

20.09 Tower of Brinsaro: The wizard Foranius Brinsaro and his wife Emiliane Sirramor (both human) reside here together with a handful of apprentices and servants. Rumor has it that the tower appeared out of nowhere about 20 winters ago, something the decidedly foreign-looking bluish-green stone it is made out of lends further credence to. A few of the surrounding homesteaders have agreed to supply the wizard with essential goods in return for his protection. Foranius is on generally good terms with the area's population, although his search for new apprentices every four years or so is something few families want to volunteer their youngsters for. Foranius has also helped baron Tembar with the fortifications of Sternbow Keep, a debt the baron repays by stationing four guards from the keep here on a monthly rotation.

22.13 Sternbow Keep: Baron Rinald Tembar has ruled this area for the last 15 years. His father, baron Orland Tembar, came south to carve his barony out of the surrounding wilderness about 35 years ago. The keep is small but well-fortified with both high walls and a sizable moot. The baron's garrison numbers about 60 men-at-arms with 3 sergeants and an experienced captain to lead them. Sternbow Keep is surrounded by a small village of about 60 farmers, hunters, and woodsmen, 30 of which are ready to serve as a militia. About 15 refugees from Parm are temporarily camped here as well; so far they refuse to join the village proper because they want to liberate Parm from its goblin invaders this year. The temple of Tyr located in the keep encouraged the refugees in this endeavour.

26.21 Fort Morr'Runk (Broken Fang): Hobgoblins of the Broken Fang tribe have been rallying the surrounding goblin clans under their banner for several years now. Last year they destroyed the village of Parm, dealing a painful blow to human settlers from the north. Fort Morr'Runk consists of three concentric palisades around a hill with a small stone keep of unknown origin that serves as their headquarters. There are about 500 goblins from various tribes as well as 150 hobgoblins who maintain order by savage discipline. A cult of hobgoblin shamans of Maglubiyet are behind all this, having received omens and visions from their god to lead a holy war against the lesser races.

28.23 Prison of Ilmor'Karanth (Hell of Stone): The old Varmerian Empire decided to dump many of its "undesirables" into this gargantuan prison complex at its eastern-most border. When the empire crumbled to dust hundreds of years ago the prison was simply abandoned. Many strange and dangerous creatures have moved in since, both from above and from below.

29.07 Village of Mirm: A small village of about 50 farmers and horse-traders, Mirm was founded about 25 years ago by Imen Mirm, a female knight who was able to befriend the centaurs who still roam this region. Imen built a small manor keep but had no ambition to rule and swore fealty to baron Tembar instead. Imen breeds excellent war horses and trains those she considers worthy in the art of equestrian combat. Her philosophy of "honoring your horse as you would your brother" strikes many as strange, but the results she achieves are unquestioned and enlightened knights travel far and wide to learn from her.

Note that there are other adventuring sites, quite a few in fact, ranging from small burial mounds to forgotten cellars and the like. I am considering adding a little bit of an "underdark" dimension as well, just in case the players decide to roam deep instead of wide.

I'd appreciate any feedback you may have about what I've thrown together here. In particular:

1. Did I go over the top with all the water in the map? Recall that the scale is 1 mile/hex, so pretty small. I consider many of the streams I added "brooks" and the like, not "real" rivers.
2. Should I exchange hexes 15.09 and 22.13, the village of Sern and Sternbow Keep? After I got done I realized that the old baron would probably have built his keep at the border of the forest instead of inside.
3. Should I add another village in hex 16.02 or hex 27.01 for example? The latter would allow me to add a fishing village, what with the lake right there.

But as I said, all kinds of feedback are welcome. I've never gone this far in putting together a sandbox before, so I am sure I've screwed up a lot of things. :-)

A Tiny Sandbox: Final Area Geography

The journey I started a few days ago may finally be getting to the point where I can actually populate the sandbox. Who knew that I'd be so picky about my geography? In any case, this will be a longer post because I'll include some of the "development steps" I went through to end up with the final area map. You may want to look at this post to "get your bearings" as it were.

I initially went with the tiny "one big hex and partial neighbors" sub-hex template because I wanted to build a tiny sandbox. Makes sense of course, but then I realized that I prefer a "wider" low-level area so that my players can start exploring and making their own decisions about where to go right away. I guess the more common approach, the one with "Gygaxian heritage" if you will, is to simply tell them that until their characters have leveled up enough, they must go back and forth between town and the one and only dungeon that's close enough so the trip won't kill them. (How that will prepare anyone, players or characters, for the wider hex crawls later on I do not know.) That meant that I needed a larger area-scale map at 1 mile per hex, covering a larger section of the regional map. Here's the comparison between what the initial area map covered and what the new area map covers:

Coverage of old (left) and new (right) area map.

There's obviously quite a bit more territory now: Instead of roughly four 5-mile hexes we now cover roughly 28! This is exactly what the regional template is made for. I copied an empty regional template and I started by filling in the region-scale type of each hex as the "center hex" in my new area map. Then I copied over the area previously covered by the sub-hex map and marked it with a red boundary (because I didn't want to make changes to those areas anymore). Finally I started filling in the missing pieces according to the campaign design guidelines. Here's an early state of the area map:

An early state of the new area map.

In an effort to once again test how well the campaign design guidelines do in practice, I stuck to the simplest possible interpretation: Fill each whole hex with 9 primary, 6 secondary, and 3 tertiary sub-hexes depending on the overall terrain type on the larger-scale map. After a while I ended up with an area map where only the partial large-scale hexes were missing:

All complete large-scale hexes refined.

At this point I made a post about what I perceived as the problems with following the campaign design guidelines in too simple-minded a manner and we'll get to my modifications in a moment, but first here's the completed simple-minded area map:

All large-scale hexes refined, simple-minded.

To address the problems I had identified I first concentrated on the heavy forests in the south and worked in the new terrain type I had outlined earlier. Going through this wasn't very hard, and I ended up with this area map:

Improvement: The new "heavy forest" terrain type.

That certainly looks a lot better than having "plains" and "hills" show up in the middle of what is ostensibly "heavy" forest. Next I went through all the large-scale hexes one more time and rolled for "wildcards," terrain features that are not common but still possible given the terrain for a large-scale hex. I only got four "hits" here, and for three of them I decided to make them "water" because the map otherwise looks rather dry; for one I picked "mountain" and in the middle of a "heavy forest" hex no less. I envision this as the site for one of the last "low-level adventures" the players might have before setting out into the wider world. So here's the map with wildcards:

Improvement: Three "water" and one "mountain" wildcards.

Of course I could simply have placed more wildcards, but once again I wanted to stick with the campaign design guidelines mostly as written. As for the perceived "dryness" of the map: I'll eventually add brooks and streams and rivers and the like, so things should work out okay. After these two improvements I spent about an hour looking over the geography and "reshuffling" hexes so they make a little more sense overall. I'd like to emphasize the "reshuffling" part: I stuck with the recommended breakdown into primary, secondary, and tertiary terrain types, so turning a "plain" hex into a "hill" required that I turn another "hill" hex into a "plain," at least for interior hexes. Borderline hexes are considered fair game for just about anything anyway, so I didn't have to "trade" those. Of course I am no expert, but this is my final take on the area map after my "careful" reshuffling:

Improvement: Reshuffling hexes overall.

I made one additional change: Notice the "water" hex in the top left? I added that after checking the regional map again, just north of that hex is where the "big lake" starts and I wanted to remind myself of that. It's a borderline hex so it doesn't count against the balance of hexes anyway, which makes the "rules as written" fanatic in me happy.

Phew! I swear I am done with the geography now! Three posts later than initially expected, but heck, it was worth it. I have to congratulate (and thank!) The Welsh Piper for a great approach to the geography of a sandbox, and I highly recommend his approach even if you start off differently, for example with a donjon world map.

I will now switch to rivers, roads, settlements, ruins, dungeons, random encounter tables and the like. Maybe I even get to run a few games in this sandbox soon! Wishful thinking? I hope not...

A Tiny Sandbox: Expanded Area Map

As a last (geographical!) step in my quest to put together a tiny sandbox I wanted to expand the 1 mile/hex area-scale map to allow my players to trek a little further even in their initial low-level ventures. This also allows me to put the low-level adventuring sites a little further apart instead of crowding them all into a roughly 10-by-10-hex area. Here's the result so far:

Expanded 1 mile/hex area map, original dimensions in red.

I don't know about you, but I find the terrain generated by just using the "primary, secondary, tertiary" categories from The Welsh Piper's campaign design tutorial a little too homogeneous. Also, in the southern portion of the map, I don't like how heavily forested hexes still include plains, that doesn't seem appropriate.

So my plan is to first "spice things up" a bit by also using the "wildcard" categories. In a "forest" hex, for example, we currently only get "forest, plains, hills" sub-hexes because those are the "primary, secondary, tertiary" categories. With "wildcards" included there will also be the occasional "water, swamp, mountain" sub-hex. That should help.

Second I'll change the current "forest" category to "light forest" and introduce a "heavy forest" category in which we have "heavy forest, light forest, forested hills" instead of "light forest, plains, hills" as before. The "wildcards" for "heavy forest" will be "water, swamp, forested mountain" of course. That should make those "heavy forest" hexes just a tad bit more spooky. Or so I hope. Stay tuned!

A Tiny Sandbox: Revised Geography

I couldn't help myself, I needed to know (desperately!) what the "wider world" around my regional sandbox map looks like. So once again armed with the free version of Hexographer and The Welsh Piper's excellent campaign design tutorial I "zoomed out" into an atlas-scale map where each numbered hex is 25 miles. Here's the result:

The sandbox at 25 miles/hex, 5 miles/hex, and 1 mile/hex.

So from left to right we have an atlas map at 25 miles per hex, a regional map around atlas hex 05.05 at 5 miles per hex, and an area map around region hex 05.05 at 1 mile per hex. Pretty neat.

If you compare this regional map to the one I posted yesterday you'll see that by expanding to atlas-scale I was able to "fix" a few things regarding the terrain. For example the upper-left corner now properly reflects "more water" to the north. I also changed the distribution of "light" and "heavy" forest in the south to fit. On the area map I moved the mountains fully inside the hills instead of having them run up against the plains. All improvements in my book.

Yes, I still have to populate the sandbox. But now I am a lot happier with the overall amount of geographical information available, so hopefully I won't be tempted to redo the geography again. At least not anytime soon.