A Brief Personal History & Bit of Guilt

I've always been a reader.  Some of my earliest memories I hold are of my grandparents and parents reading to me.  One of my most treasured possessions today is not my flat-screen TV or delux garage workbench, but the tattered copy of Rip Van Winkle that I begged my grandmother to read to me as frequently as possible while I was growing up.  Our second home, while moving us far away from my grandparents, had both a fireplace and large ornate bookshelf in the basement.  I remember spending long spans of time with my winter backside warming (we heated our house through woodstoves) as my front side faced the acres of books with delight.

We lived rural and that meant that we didn't watch much TV.  Usually just Masterpiece Theater and Mystery on weekends.  Some nights dad would let me sneak downstairs to watch some Benny Hill much to my mom's displeasure.  I could watch all the college basketball and NFL I wanted since my dad was a former high school football coach and all-around fan, but I found myself wanting to play sports rather than watch them.  This holds true, for the most part, today as well.

Living rural also meant that, during the day, I rarely spent much time inside.  Even if it was raining, snowing, or generally precipitating in some manner, you'd find me outside.  I'd be hunting, playing in mud, or riding my dirt bike in endless loops.  Even though we were far from other people and our house was rustic (it was a log cabin that my dad built with his own hands), having over one hundred acres of forest turned me into a person that feels very comfortable both in natural surroundings and being alone.

This concept of solitude was further reinforced at night when I would stay up late reading.  Each night, after my parents tucked me in and mom retired to sleep and dad would relax in his rocking chair with a beer and sports game, I would turn my desk lamp back on and pick up in my book from where I'd left off the night before.  I oscillated between fiction and non-fiction and, eventually, role-playing games. 

At the onset, I didn't pay much attention to the game's rules.  The value in the game, in my young mind, was in the construction of maze-like dungeons populated with dangerous monsters from my imagination.  When I had free time at school or when I stayed over at a friend's house (a rare occurance), I recall staying up late running each other through our mazes.  Getting a character killed was a regular and even expected occurance.  At this time we were using Mentzer's Red Box, but it didn't really matter.  We could have just as easily ignored the rules for AD&D or Rolemaster or Star Frontiers.

While I was a relatively popular kid in middle school, by the time I got to high school I had dropped out of sports and also out of the popularity race.  I would have liked to have been popular, and in retrospect, I see how easily I could have been, but for reasons I don't understand I became even more anti-social and isolated during high school.  It was at this time that I joined a new circle of friends and starting playing D&D second edition and RIFTS.  In my school district, role-playing games were cool in elementary, OK in middle school, but firmly associated with unpopularity in high school.

My school grades, interestingly, performed inversley to my popularity.  That is, while I was popular in elementary and middle school, my grades were exceptionally low, averaging in the low "C" to "D" range.  Despite scoring very high on fluency assessments, I chose not to do classwork.  Not because I thought I was above it, or even capable (sometimes I was truly incapable), but because I was more concerned with other things.  Namely girls and friends.

In high school I dove into academics, did very well grade-wise (much to my parents relief), and by my sophomore year was also working full-time at a pizza parlor, quickly ascending to a manager's position.  Here I met a new ring of role-playing friends and skirted with disaster.  By this I mean my new friends held habits that were both illegal and physically damaging.  Luckily, I graduated with good grades, a good bank account, and an ongoing love of both reading and role-playing.  I left my job and devoted myself to school for my freshman year.

Sophomore year, to the immense displeasure of my entire family, I quit school to travel with my best friend.  I quickly blew through my savings, but enjoyed backpacking around Europe.  I fell in love with European culture.  Specifically, English literature, the German language, and Belgian beer.  To this day, you can see these influences in my fantasy writing.

I returned home, picked up a new job at a grocery store, and jumped back into school.  By working and taking classes through all my summers, I was able to graduate with an education degree and secure a teaching position by 1999, nearly four years after graduating from high school.

Since then, I've moved, married, and fathered a wonderful child while living in a beautiful new suburbian home that I most assuridly did not build with my own hands.  But I've also carried with me a nagging sense of guilt that I am not providing my own daughter with a childhood as enriching as my own.  Sure, my house is newer, bigger, and holds more stuff than the one in which I grew up.  Sure, she enjoys central air-conditioning, dance lessons, and friends that live on our block.  But, she isn't outside as often as I was.  She sees houses when she looks out the window instead of trees and fields.  Her ears are filled, not with wind, birds, and insects, but the steady whoosh of cars and the occaisonal emergency vehicle.  She can't throw a ball as hard as she can or want to in our backyard.

My wife and I read to her every night.  One day soon, we'll all sit down and explore a dungeon that her daddy built.  And I'm proud of what I have provided and will provide.  I only hope that "will" includes a little love of solitude one day.

House Rule: Unified XP Advancement

Instead of giving each race/class its own progression chart, I use the average for them all to create a uniform chart:



Graph 1:  My proposed unified table for level advancement.

 As you can see from the graph below, my proposal is closely based on the average XP requirements for all classes.

Graph 2:  The average XP needed for level advancement for all classes accordign to B/X.

 

XP for All Classes	Level
0	1
2000	2
4000	3
8000	4
16000	5
32000	6
64000	7
128000	8
256000	9
384000	10
512000	11
640000	12
768000	13
896000	14
1024000	15
1152000	16
1280000	17
1408000	18
1536000	19
1664000	20

XP, Leveling, & Measuring Game Difficulty

My method for quantifying Labyrinth Lord/B/X adventure difficulty includes the following designations by average monster Hit Dice range:

Low-Level:  1-6
Mid-Level:  7-14
High-Level:  15-20

This designation makes sense when you look at the trend in XP requirements for leveling up.  The vertical bar graphs below shows the XP required for each level in Moldvay D&D.  Below that is a line graph showing the average for all classes of the XP required for each level advancement.

Graph 1:  Each bar represents the XP needed for each level (x-axis) up to level 8.

Graph 2:  Each bar represents the XP needed for each level (x-axis) up to level 20.
 

Graph 3:  The line represents the average for all classes of the XP needed for leveling up.

It appears that all classes progress throught the first seven or eight levels in a relatively similar numerical pattern; it is close to doubling each time.  It isn't until human characters progress beyond level 8 that the XP required increases at much greater variability.  Once level 14 is reached, the increments remain consistent on average (see graph 4 below).  This supports my ranges for the three categories above.  As you can see from the graph below, once demi-humans start dropping out of the picture, there is a range (levels 8-14) of increased variability in XP needed for advancement.

Graph 4:  The line represents the change in average XP needed for leveling up.

What does that mean?  For one thing, either a DM boosts the available XP for mid to high-level parties, or level advancement slows down considerably past level 14.  It also means that mid to high-level play for demi-humans is significantly different.

On a side note, I was also surprised to observe that it was clerics who progressed far faster than magic-users.  I had always assumed (without really looking at the numbers) that it would be fighters (see graph 2).  It makes me wonder if there is really a need for differences in level advancement at all.

Graph 5:  Comparing the XP needed for leveling up between Clerics and Magic-Users.

An idea I've been toying with is to use cumulative monster XP and compare it to graph 3 (above) to determine adventure difficulty.  Such a method creates a singular difficulty number instead of range.  This method also accounds for number encountered and special monster characteristics, something my older method did not.  A major drawback of this method is the somewhat cumbersome and time consuming calculations involved.  If the monsters are arrayed in a spreadsheet, however, either method would be equally simple.  Perhaps I should start including such tables in my future publications.

Creating High-Level Adventures

All five of my self-published Labyrinth Lord adventures have been for low-level parties.  I want my next published adventure to be a high-level or mid-level adventure.  What does that mean?  I recently quantified that in a series of posts.  While I've more-or-less settled on my answer, I still aknoweldge that it fails to account for various important factors such as trap complexity, number of monsters encountered, and monster special characteristics among other things.

Doing a little high-level adventure research, I pulled my copy of Queen of the Demonweb Pits off my bookshelf and started compiling the monsters as I read through each room description.  I got thirty or so rooms into this endeavor before I stopped with the following data:

Name/HD/HD Bonus/Number Appearing
trolls/6/0/10
werewolves/4/3/5
cleric/9/0/1
gnoll/2/0/66
minotaur/6/3/3
demon/8/0/4
bugbears/3/1/30
drow/6/0/1
drow/6/0/1
drow/8/0/1
drow/7/0/1
drow/7/0/1
ogres/4/1/20
demons/9/0/4
jackalweres/4/0/4
drow/2/0/6

I wasn't even close to reaching the spider dieties and larger unique monsters, but it was clear that adventure difficulty was more about monster's special abilities and number encountered than Hit Dice.  I mean, good grief, 30 bugbears?  20 ogres?  These are huge numbers and, frankly, a bit of a nightmare for in-game data tracking even if you admit the liklihood that a high-level party will likely defeat them in battle.  The mechanics of such a battle are likely to become too tiresome for my own tastes.

Therefore, I will use high numbers of monsters encountered very sparingly, if at all, in the course of my mid-level adventure.  I currently have nine original monsters brainstormed, and I'm using the low encounter number + high Hit Dice + multiple special abilities method for generated a challenging adventure.  The number of traps will also be exceptionally low.

New Review for Ice Lord

A monster from my adventure.

Tim over at the awesome blog Gothridge Manor has written a flattering review for my recent Labyrinth Lord adventure, Menagerie of the Ice Lord.  Tim is not only a fellow old-school blogger, but he also puts together excellent adventures himself.  Even if you're not interested in my own publications, I still recommend swinging by his blog for a visit.  There's a lot of good stuff going on there.

Aside from a brief flurry of spending on the new old-school D&D PDF re-releases over at RPGNow, things are fairly quiet on the Digital Orc front.  I like to relax a few weeks after the stressors of editing, layout, and self-imposed deadlines that accompany my self-published adventures.

However.  I have settled on my next publication seed.  It's a little different than my previous work.  I'd like to think that all of my products (there are five so far) are each unique.  This current project is my first attempt at publishing a high level adventure.  Being such, it's turning out a little gonzo.  I'm having a bit of difficulty reconciling realism within my world and the extreme abilities of the inhabiting monsters.  I suppose that's were my feeling of gonzo is derived.

Anyway, I'm brainstorming my next adventure.  I will probably have a workable rough draft in one or two months.  After that, I tend to complete the drafting, editing, and illustrations fairly quickly.  The label for this not-yet-titled adventure is "verloren" if you'd like to follow along with its development.

One last thing:  I'd like to remind you, Constant Reader, that even though I charge for my adventures ($2.99 for PDF and $3.99 for print), it is not out of a glutonous greed.  All of the money I earn through self-publication is promptly reinvested in similar endeavors from other self-publishers in our little neck 'o the blogosphere.  That said, I hope you come back based on my quality... granted you find some.  Quality is awefully hard to come by these days.

Cheers, and thanks Tim!

P.S. Tim's snowfall blog is PERFECT for a Menagerie ad!

First Review Comes Rolling In!

The first review for my adventure Menagerie of the Ice Lord has been posted by the always awesome Boric on his uncommonly cool blog, The Dwarven Stronghold.  Check it out!

You can see a full video flip-through by clicking here.

Next Big Product Released!

Menagerie of the Ice Lord
A Low-Level Fantasy Adventure for Character Levels 3-5
Written &Illustrated by Dylan Hartwell

Lord Venator lived in a remote mountain top family estate castle overlooking the snowbound village of Nix.  An accomplished and enthusiastic hunter, he bored of mounting stuffed trophies and took to keeping his prey alive in a growing menagerie in his expansive abode.  A recent malfunction of the magical cages resulted in widespread escape.  The Venator family castle is now overrun with vicious beasts and Lord Venator is thought dead.  A brave party of adventurers, suspecting the Ice Lord is dead, hurry to loot the icy abode that resembles the valuable magical crystals with which it may be filled.

• 30 Monsters
• 100 Rooms
• 6 Maps
• 5 Non-Player Character Descriptions
• Countless Hours of Fun

$2.99 PDF through RPGNow Click Here

 

My Picture, Your Blog

I'd love it if you put the picture above on your own blog linking back here.  Doing so will earn you 500 Digital Orc points!  If you put it up on your blog, tell me here as a comment or email me at hartwell602 at gmail dot com.

Change in the OSR

For me, I learned about the OSR through blogs.  Grognardia, B/X Blackrazor, D&D with Porn Stars, and Jeff's Gameblog were the most influential at the onset.  Through their blogrolls I quickly learned about retro-clones and the people running them.  After a few months I dove in full-bore and created Digital Orc, a blog named in homage to the gaming fanzine I made during the early nineties.  After a couple of years, I dove a little deeper and published my first adventure, The Blasphemous Brewery of Pilz! using the OGL and Labyrinth Lord.  A year later, and I find myself having published five adventure and running several of them at Gencon.  I've been reviewed numerous times, seen my material utilized, and made enough money to buy some game products.

As these events were unfolding, I was also coming in digital contact with fellow gamers.  Most of them were also bloggers.  They seemed and seem like great guys (no girls yet), but I've only met a few personally (I'm looking at you, Sniderman).  Their comments, suggestions, and editing services have reminded me of the lighter side of human nature.  This is especially contrasting with the snarkier aspects of online society.  

Some digital friends have come and gone, while others amaze me in their ability to keep at it day after month after year.  I, myself, have seriously considered pulling the plug on a hobby that sometimes threatens to be more than that.  Something more than habit brings me back.  And looking over my short life of nearly forty years on planet earth I see that tabletop gaming is something I've done regularly since 1984 when a friend first introduced me to Mentzer's Red Box.

I take encouragement from that fact now, especially as the OSR accomodates Google+ and many OSR bloggers fall silent.  In fact, looking at the four blogs listed in my introduction, you can clearly see a reduction in posts.  This is not to say a reduction in activity, just that this activity is shifting elsewhere.  Still, it saddens me.  Will I go with it anytime soon?  I'm not sure.  My toes are in Google+, but I have yet to jump in.  I see too many advantages to staying in blog format from a Game Master's perspective.

Cyberpunk 2077 Update

Projekt Red, the company responsible for creating the upcoming Cyberpunk video game based on the tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020, released a new video.  I like that they brought Mike Pondsmith, the original author, in for development.  I also like that they're updating Cyberpunk 2020 even though it's very tricky because Cyberpunk is, by definition, on the edge of our current time and technology.  Cyberpunk is a commentary of sorts on our current condition.  You can watch the video on Youtube, in addition to multiple other locations such as the official site. 

Even though I'm more of a tabletop guy, I admit the video looks pretty cool.  I've written several Cyberpunk posts over the years; they're conveniently compiled by the tag "cyberpunk" if you're interested in reading them.

Digital Orc's Monster Compiler

Thanks to feedback, the Digital Orc Monster Compiler is now better than ever!  Not only can you submit your original monsters quickly,easily, and see everyone's submissions.  You can now also add your name and your gaming website if you have one.  Enjoy!

Monster Compiler

Enter your monsters below!  It's easy and quick.  Come on, you know you want to!

Digital Orc's Monster Compiler

Help me out and post a link to the compiler on your gaming blog.  Feel free to use any of my illustrations below.

You can see the submission here.

Project Update

I updated the status of several of my projects listed along the right-hand side of the blog and even posted a new one.

Menagerie of the Snow Lord is a low level Labyrinth Lord adventure.  It is now officially in the final edit and layout stage.

Cemetery House is a mid level Labyrinth Lord adventure.  This is in the brainstorming stage.  The product was inspired by some of Tim's comments about room description complexity.  It will be an experimental design in which there are only three or four rooms, but their descriptions will fill 40 plus pages.  I'm very excited at how this one turns out.

Angel is a stand-alone game.  I'm still working on the draft and have added a few pages as well as some interesting mechanics.  It is not a heartbreaker, but just a simple system for a supernatural game.

Stories from Shatensite was renamed Tales from Verloren and is going in a completely unexpected, but exciting direction.  Instead of being a multi-year project of five books and 200 plus pages, it has become a urban-based Labyrinth Lord adventure with a twist.

Determining Adventure Module Difficulty Part 3: Example & Spreadsheets

click to enlarge.

Part 1

Part 2

In my adventure The Horrendous Heap of Sixteen Cities there are 17 monsters with an average Hit Die of about 3.  The standard deviation is also about 3.  It's pretty big becuase I have a couple of outliers; the Garbage Golum and Great Heap Worm.  So, using my new system, this module is a:

Low Level Adventure for Character Levels 0-6
 

It makes sense that this adventure would have a wider range of character levels becuase of the exceptionally large monsters.  Spreadsheets makes this sort of thinking easy.  In fact, a monster spreadsheet is a very handy tool for GMs.  Because you can quickly sort monsters by a variety of factors, not only does it give you a good idea of the relative difficulty, but it helps plan encounters and create logical environments.  Don't let "logical" scare you, I'm not necesarily talking about biology, but gaming mechanics.

For example, if you expect your players to run around at night you can sort the monsters (see picture above) by their activity classificiation (diurnal, noctural, cathederal, etc) to see if there is enough variety and/or liklihood that they encounter the monsters you want them to.

You can also create images on the fly to think about your games in new ways.  For example, I can plot HD as a bar graph (see above) and see something very interesting about my adventure:  It's either going to be relatively easy or very difficult without much middle ground.

Compare that Heap data to my data from my upcoming adventure, Menagerie of the Snow Lord, which offers a far gentler slope of difficulty reflected in the subtitle:

A Low-Level Fantasy Adventure for Character Levels 1-5



click to enlarge

You can also create fun line graphs of your monsters to think about, not only the game you run, but the trends in your monster creation.

click to enlarge

In this line graph using the same Heap monsters as listed in the first image, I chose to compare the number encountered, AC, HD, number of attacks, and maximum possible damage.  When I do this (and they're still sorted by HD), I see some interesting things in my own style of monster creation.  I see that, while I vary my damage greatly, the number of attacks is remarkably consistent.  Boringly so.  This is something I need to change more in the future.  I also notice little correlation between HD and the other factors I inlcuded here. 

This last point further weakens my damage naming algorithm, but I'm still sticking with it, to paraphrase Starship Troopers, until I find something that does the job beter.

Also, I can use this graph to see what monsters are really nasty, as opposed to simply high HD monsters.  If I see a single monster (a number on the x-axis) with corresponding spikes in many factors, I know they're going to be really tough.  Inversely, if I see a monster with a high HD, but inverted spikes for the other categories, I know it's more of a bluffing monster.  That is, it looks harder to defeat than it really is.

Determining Adventure Module Difficulty Part 2: My Solution

Part 1

I settled on a system for quantifying and naming the difficulty level of my adventure modules.  A weakness is that it accounts for monster difficulty, but not environmental hazards and sandbox playstyle, but I think it gives a fairly accurate snapshot for prospecting Game Masters.

Since Labyrinth Lord lays out information to 20 levels in the main book, I created three broad categories:

Low-Level Adventure:  Levels 1-6

Mid-Level Adventure:  Levels 7-14

High-Level Adventure:  Levels 15-20

To determine which category from the three above, calculate the average monster HD in the adventure.  Then add and subtract the standard deviation from the HD average to create a level range.

Step 1:  Average the HD for all of the monster/encounters in the adventure.

Step 2:  Calculate the standard deviation for the HD of all of the monsters/encounters in the adventure.

Step 3:  The level range is created by adding and subtracting the standard deviation rounded to the nearest whole number to the average (from step 1).

For example, in my upcoming adventure, Menagerie of the Ice Lord, there are 29 monsters with a total of 76 HD, giving an average of 2.6... which I round to 3.  The same data set has a standard deviation of 1.5678... which I round to 2.  Therefore, the recomended level range is 1-5 (3-2 and 3+2).  The final subtitle for the adventure, therefore, is: 

A Low-Level Fantasy Adventure for Character Levels 1-5

My OSR Character Sheet

I finished my OSR character sheet.  I wanted to keep it simple and logical.  That is, exclude extraneous information and focus on what I want my players to do:  Fight monsters and explore weird places!  You can get yours free by clicking here.  I also linked it in my "Free Stuff" tab located at the top of my blog.

If you'd like me to do a personalized character sheet in which I draw your character and insert it on the bottom of the sheet, shoot me a picture or description and I'll see what I come up with.  You can contact me through a comment on this post or through email at hartwell602 at gmail dot com.  Enjoy!

Solo Adventures Part 2: Rended Press & T&T Kickstarter

A few days ago I expressed an interest in the history of solo adventures in D&D.  Shortly afterward Matt Schmeer of the Rended Press blog posted a comment with substantial follow-up links of solo adventure examples, so be sure to check out the comments section.  Around the same time the Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls kickstarter began and promptly met it's relatively small goal of $26,000.  Tunnels & Trolls was designed, in part, for solo play, so we may see a resurgence in solo adventures.  I welcome such a development.

Determining Adventure Module Difficulty

I often wonder how publishers create their recommendations for player level.  I'd like to think there is a system, but if there is, I can't figure it out.  For a while I discounted their importance altogether.  However, as I began to publish more adventure one of the most frequent questions was, "What is the adventure level?"  So, I suppose it's something I should begin including, but how do I do it systematically?

Right now my system is to average all of the Hit Dice for all of the monster encounters and use that as my experience level.  For example, in my Extra Stout adventure, the sum of all 11 monsters's HD is 42, so I rounded the difficulty level to 4 (42/11~4).

I'm not fully satisfied with this method because it fails to account for the many dangerous factors other than monsters.  Traps, items, and other environmental hazards can adjust relative difficulty.  This system also doesn't account for the probability of encountering certain hazards.  This last problem is more pronounced in more sandboxy-style of play.

I'm not concerned with balance, but I am very concerned about giving potential customers an accurate snapshot of the relative difficulty.  So, until I come up with something better, this is the system I plan on using.  You can expect to see this begin with my next adventure, Menagerie of the Ice Lord.  It has a difficulty level of 3, by the way, and should be available for sale before the end of January!

Here are some of my illustrations for Menagerie:

Digital Orc Picture Challenge

I'd like to extend best wishes for a great 2013 to all my readers and to start things off right, I'm hosting the first Digital Orc challenge of the year!

What is it?

The Digital Orc Picture Challenge is a month-long competition in which you, my constant readers, submit your artistic interpretations of the Digital Orc.  You may email the image to me in GIF, JPEG, or PDF format.  There is no limit to the number of entries each participant may submit.  The image may be black and white, grayscale, or color and in any medium.  By submitting your image, you agree that you have copyright ownership of the image, and retain ownership, but give me permission to post the image on my blog indiscriminately.

How can I help?

Even if you don't plan on participating, I would greatly appreciate it if you take the image above, post it on your blog, and link it to this post.  The more submissions, the more interesting and fun this will be!

When is it due?

I will select the winner Thursday, January 31.  I will post submissions as they arrive.

Where do I send it?

hartwell602 at gmail dot com.

Do I need artistic skill?

Nope!  Entries are just as likely to win based on originality or humor as much as in skill exposition.

What do I win?

Everyone who participates earns 500 Digital Orc points.  The overall winner will get PDF copies of all my published adventures and a signed print copy of the game of their choice!

So what are you waiting for?  Start doodling and get the year off to a fun start!