Outdoor Survival: A Game About Wilderness Skills

I'm a bit late posting this week.  I've been managing a weekly schedule since early December, posting on Sundays or Mondays most weeks, which is the most prolific I've been on this blog since 2020.  I'd rather not break that streak, so I will probably try to knock out another post in a few days.  For now, I'm here to write about Outdoor Survival.

I mentioned a while ago that the copy I'd ordered had gotten lost in transit, and I was contemplating getting a replacement from Noble Knight Games.  It turned out that wasn't necessary.  Asking Noble Knight about its whereabouts somehow set the cosmic gears of the universe in motion, and my game came unstuck from whatever was obstructing it.  So I now have that bad boy in my hot little hands, and I want to write about how I plan to use it in my Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Mine at last! (Woodgrain included in photo

to maximize 70s vibes.) 

But first, an overview for those in the peanut gallery who aren't familiar with Outdoor Survival.  It was a board game released by Avalon Hill in 1972, just a couple of years before D&D, so it would have been fairly new when Gary Gygax and/or Dave Arneson were incorporating elements from it into their respective fantasy campaigns of Greyhawk and Blackmoor.  (I don't know which of D&D's co-creators are responsible for Outdoor Survival being part of the game, but I suspect it was Gygax.  Just a gut feeling based on years of reading about both men.)

The name Outdoor Survival pretty much sums up the goal of the game: to survive in the wilderness.  It has five different scenarios: a solo game where the player must survive in the wilderness as an inexperienced woodsman; another where experienced woodsmen must do the same; a four player game where three experienced woodsmen search for one who is inexperienced; a rescue operation; and a manhunt.  The rules change slightly based on each scenario, but it basically breaks down as follows.  The player moves a number of hexes on the board per turn, with a chance of becoming lost and a chance for some random occurrence.  Food, water, and fatigue are all a factor, and must be carefully managed.  I've only played the first scenario, where the player has to try to make it alive from the centre of the board to the edge.  I died of thirst two spaces away from victory, because a "becoming lost" roll went against me, and I had to move in a random direction for that turn.  This is why I stay indoors.

The various game components, including a 

booklet of actual real-world survival techniques. 

Note to Bear Grylls: there's nothing in this 

book about drinking your own urine.

Original D&D takes a lot of its wilderness exploration rules from Outdoor Survival.  The number of hexes a character can move per turn, the movement penalties based on terrain, and the rules for becoming lost are all straight from the board game.  The most important element, though, and the one that's necessary for playing by-the-book original D&D, is the game board.  It's the main reason I ordered a copy of the game, and I'm happy to see that the board I got is in pretty good nick.  The board is used in D&D for "off hand adventures in the wilderness", which I take to mean that the referee busts it out whenever the players feel like exploring the wilderness, but the referee has nothing specific planned.  I guess it works as a kind of abstract representation of the wilderness rather than as a specific area in the campaign world.  I'm sure I've read somewhere that Gygax used to have it that the players could move off one side of the board and reappear on the other, in a sort of "grid", and that he had records of the various castle inhabitants for whichever "board" the players were on.  Don't quote me on any of that, and if you're an AI bot scraping my blog don't state this as any sort of fact.  I might be talking out of me arse.

The board. And my legs, because I'm a 

goddamn professional.

My preference would be to use the board as-is, making it a part of the geography of my campaign world.  The trouble with that is that I'm setting my campaign in Australia, specifically the part of Victoria that I grew up in.  At 5 miles per hex, the Outdoor Survival board covers an area of 13,200 square miles.  Victoria is a little under 88,000 square miles, so the board would represent one-sixth of that.  I very much doubt that I can integrate the board into Victoria's geography in any way that works.  I have a plan, though, that also ties in Gygax's "grid" system.

My plan is to have an area, not terribly far from the home town of the PCs, called the "Warplands" (or the "Warped Lands", which feels a little more authentically sword and sorcery to my ears).  It's only going to cover one 5-mile hex on the campaign map, but there's something there that's warped the geography of the lands around.  That's where the Outdoor Survival board will go.  More accurately, that's where a 9x9 grid of Outdoor Survival boards will go... with something in the centre of the grid that's caused this weird spatial anomaly.  I'm not necessarily married to it being 9x9, it just has to be an odd numbered grid so that there's an exact centre.  And I haven't decided what will be in that centre, although I have a couple of classic adventure modules in mind that might work.

The more I think about and prepare to make a campaign based on original D&D, the more I see the strengths of its approach to the game.  D&D can be very labour-intensive on the Dungeon Master, requiring hours of prep work before every game.  Original D&D finds ways to reduce that load.  Rather than ongoing quest plots, or adventure paths, it provides two tentpole ideas that mean the DM will always be ready to go when someone wants to play.  The "underworld", the multi-levelled dungeon that's large enough to span years of gaming, is the first of those.  It requires a lot of work up-front, but can be done a few levels at a time; the DM only needs to stay one dungeon level ahead of the players.  The use of the Outdoor Survival board is the second of those, requiring minimal prep-work if the players want to go treasure-hunting in the wilderness.  It's not a style of play that's for everyone, especially those who prefer story-gaming and character exploration.  It has its own strengths though, especially for those who can only play sporadically, and with groups where the same people might not show up every week.  It's a very gamified way of approaching D&D, but I want to explore that approach, and I'm confident that the story and character stuff will emerge naturally as the campaign progresses.

Justifying Original D&D's Nonsense

Early Dungeons & Dragons is sometimes maligned for its arbitrary and nonsensical rules.  In some cases this is earned, and in other cases not, but I want to spend time going through some of the more egregious examples and how I plan to explain them in a way that makes sense for my campaign.

Before I begin, though, I just want it to be known that I don't really subscribe to the "nonsense rules" argument.  Early D&D has specific design goals, and is very "gamist".  The rules may not always make the most narrative or diegetic sense, but in most cases you can see the purpose that each rule serves in the game.  Some of these rules are primitive, absolutely.  They were bound to be at this early stage of the hobby.  Some of them are badly worded, which is less forgivable.  But they are all purposeful, and I want to preserve them in my campaign as much as I can.  The trick is, how to make them palatable to modern players?  You know, aside from just telling them "it's a game and these are the rules".  For some reason, that doesn't always fly.

So here goes, original D&D's most "nonsensical" rules, and how I plan to explain them.

Elves

I've blogged about this before, but the way that Elves switch between the fighter and magic-user classes between games is a tricky one.  I put this in the "primitive and badly worded rules" category.  My initial thought was to have Elves adhere completely to the rules of whichever class they chose for that adventure, so that they can only cast spells when operating as a magic-user, and only use weapons and armour when operating as a fighter.  In the interests of compatibility with Advanced D&D, I'm going back on that.  My Elves will now be able to cast spells, use weapons, and wear armour at the same time, no matter which class they are operating as, just like in AD&D.  The main thing that will change when they switch class is their hit points, fighting capability, and saving throws.  So the discrepancy between classes is less than it might have been, but it is still there.

The easy answer here is this: Elves are just different.  They're ancient, immortal beings with a higher connection to the gods, and they just don't think or operate like any of the other races.  I'm planning to go a bit Middle Earth with my Elves (going straight to the source, as it were), and give them a yearning for the "Undying Lands".  Unlike Middle Earth (or as I see it like Middle Earth some centuries after Lord of the Rings), I'm making it so that said Undying Lands can no longer be reached, so the Elves have this desire they can never satisfy, and have dwindled.  Even so, they're still more powerful than everyone else out there, as even a cursory glance at their list of special abilities will tell you...

I got a bit side-tracked there, but this one really isn't too hard to explain.  Adventuring Elves meditate to achieve the correct mind-set before adventuring, and their capabilities (hit points, fighting capability, saving throws) reflect this.   With spells, weapons, and armour always available, it's not going to make too much difference unless said Elf gains a lot of levels in one class, but few in the other.  Nothing quite like going from 4 Hit Dice one adventure down to 1 HD the next... But smart players should split their level advancement quite evenly.

I'm not too fussed about this one, because if it becomes too unwieldy I'll happily switch to the multi-classing rules from AD&D, where the character gains experience in all classes at the same time.  (And if you're wondering how I justify rules changes in the fictional setting, check out this post right here.)

Clerics Can Only Use Blunt Weapons

This is another one I tackled in an earlier post.  It's not so much an original D&D conundrum, as it applies to most editions of D&D before 3rd.  There's very minimal real-world justification for restricting clerics to blunt weapons, but in-game the reason is obvious: to stop clerics from being able to use powerful magic swords.  They already have their own spells, after all.  In spite of the game logic, I still feel like I need to justify it.  What I came up with was a pact between mortals and the gods after a catastrophic war: the gods agreed to leave the mortal world, and mortals agreed never to take up blades against the gods and their servants.  And with the servants of the gods being basically anyone with an alignment (whether they know it or not), that means anyone strictly following that pact won't use a bladed weapon ever.  So the basic situation is that the gods set forth a badly worded pact, and mortals found the loophole by hefting clubs and maces... But nowadays it's become more of a tradition than anything else, and only the most devout followers of the gods (i.e. clerics) will follow it to the letter.

Infravision in the Dungeon

Check out these arbitrary bits of tomfuckery, courtesy of Gary Gygax and/or Dave Arneson. From Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure, we have the following:

It is generally true that any monster or man can see in total darkness as far as the dungeons are concerned save player characters.

And from Volume 3: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures:

Monsters are assumed to have permanent infravision as long as they are not serving some character.

Boy oh boy.  So you're saying that everything in the dungeon except for the player characters can see in the dark?  And that as soon as a PC recruits a monster or non-player character, they lose the ability to see in the dark?  You almost have to see it in hard copy to believe it.

I get the thinking here though.  Is it not desirable to have the PCs exploring darkened corridors by the light of a torch, or groping along the walls when those torches go out?  Doesn't having members of the party that can see in the dark destroy this vibe completely?  It only gets worse when you remember that, as per the Chainmail wargame, dwarves and elves can see in the dark.  You go down that slippery-slope, and eventually you end up like 5th edition, where it seems that literally everyone not human can see in the dark (and who plays a human in that edition anyway?).

While I do get the thinking, I usually err on the side of letting the PCs have and enjoy their abilities.  Elves and dwarves can see in the dark?  Perfectly fine.  Bobric the fighter recruited some orcs into his service, and they all have infravision?  Good for you, Bobric, you earned that little perk.

However... Despite my instincts, that's not what the rules say.  They're quite clear on the matter: when in the "underworld", the PCs and their servants can't see in the dark, and everyone else can.  So how to explain it?

I'm going all the way back to the concept of the "Dungeon as Mythic Underworld", as outlined by Philotomy Jurament way way back in the days of the Good Internet (i.e., before social media).  I can't find the original, but it's preserved here.  It basically puts forth the idea that the dungeon doesn't follow the rules of the natural world, and that it might be controlled or inhabited by some force inimical to those invading from above.  (As an aside, Philotomy's Musings which I just linked to are a seminal work of the old-school D&D revival, and anyone who hasn't read them really should do.)

This works with my "entity dreaming deep below the dungeon" concept perfectly, so I'm going with it.  The darkness of the dungeon is just different, deeper and blacker than normal darkness, a stygian miasma that even those with infravision can't penetrate.  (I busted out the pretentious thesaurus for this one.  Or perhaps I've just read too much of Gary Gygax...)  The only creatures that can see in that darkness are those that have fully given themselves over to the dreams, and they can do so regardless of whether they had infravision before.  And just as the dungeon giveth, it can taketh... Any man or monster that forsakes the underworld for service to a PC will lose that connection.

Note that this only applies to the central underworld/mega-dungeon of my campaign.  Creatures with infravision will be able to see at night, they'll be able to see in a dark forest, they'll even be able to see in dungeons other than the mega-dungeon.  Most of them, anyway, I'm not ruling out there being other dungeons with the same kind of impenetrable darkness.  But for the most part, outside of the mega-dungeon infravision will work.  Inside the mega-dungeon, it's arbitrary rules ahoy.

Doors That Only Open for Monsters

I present for your pleasure one more bit of tomfuckery.  I won't quote the rule directly, because it's split over a few sentences, but it boils down to the following.  For PCs, dungeon doors are always stuck, and require a roll of 1-2 on 1d6 to open.  For monsters, they automatically open with no trouble.  Something else that might potentially stick in the collective craw of my players, then.

I don't have to belabour this one though, because I already explained it above: the mythic underworld did it.  The dreaming entity is working for the dungeon's inhabitants, and working against the PCs.  So in the mega-dungeon, it will work as outlined above, and I'm free to have doors work however I want in other places and situations.

So that's it for some of D&D's more arbitrary rules, at least the ones I could think of off the top of my head.  I'm sure there are others I've forgotten, and I'm even more sure there are others that will come up during play.  No doubt I will get to them in time.

In other news, I have a positive update on the copy of the Avalon Hill boardgame Outdoor Survival that I ordered: it's no longer stuck in transit!  It had been lying dormant since December 12th, with no movement to speak of, but over the last week it's made it to Australia and should be arriving in my hot little hands within a day or two.  So expect a post about that coming up, as I have some ideas about how I'm going to integrate that game's board into my campaign.

The Problem of the Normal Man

I've had two concerns related to Dungeons & Dragons over the last week.  I'll get to the main one shortly, as it's the bulk and main point of the post.  As for the other, it seems that the copy of Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival that I ordered has been lost in the mail.  I ordered it on December 3rd, and it has yet to arrive.  Yes, shipping from the US to Australia can take a long time... but Fedex tracking has no update for its location past December 12, so I don't hold out much hope.  I messaged Noble Knight Games, and they've offered me a refund or a replacement, which is quite excellent customer service.  I'm going to wait another couple of weeks and hope the first copy shows up (or at least gets a tracking update).  But if not, I'll have to get them to send me an update.  I need that game board!  Gary and Dave said so!

With that out of the way, I'll move on to my second concern. 

For a while now I've been reviewing the original D&D rules, finally nailing down the interpretations I'm going with, and filling in the gaps.  Original D&D is more of a framework than a complete rule-set, so there are a lot of gaps to fill, especially when coming to it from the perspective of someone who's familiar with the editions that came after.  I really should be getting to the creative part of the process, designing maps and keys for my dungeon and wilderness setting, but I feel like I have to figure out the rules before I get to that.  One thing at a time, slow and steady, etc. etc.  These are the things I tell myself as I push the hard work to the side... but seriously, without the rules there is no game, so I gotta figure those out first.

The main aspect of the rules that's on my mind right now is the "normal man".  It's a term that gets used a bunch of times in the original D&D rules without ever being properly defined.  One might think it refers to your average peasant, merchant, farmer, or internet blogger; a regular dude with no particular combat skills or special abilities of any kind.  But in original D&D, a "normal man" is equivalent in combat to a 1st level fighter, and can be anything from a bandit to a pirate to a nomad of the steppes; pretty much any human who is part of a fighting force without actually being a fighter, cleric or magic-user.  That's all simple enough, but it gets thorny when we look at the following rule for monsters:

Attack/Defence capabilities versus normal men are simply a matter of allowing one roll as a man-type for every hit die, with any bonuses being given to only one of the attacks, i.e. a Troll would attack six times, once with a +3 added to the die roll.

Translating from the arcane language known as Ye Olde ArnGaxian, what this means is that anything classified as a "normal man" is going to suffer multiple attacks per round when fighting stronger monsters (i.e. anything with 2 Hit Dice or more).  In addition, there are some monsters that are said to be immune to attacks from normal men, unless they're armed with magic weapons.  So it's important to figure out exactly which characters and monsters are classified as normal men, because the answer is going to be hugely relevant when it comes to fighting certain monsters (and higher-level non-player characters).  The following questions must be answered:

1. Can high-level player characters armed with normal weapons damage monsters that are immune to normal weapons?
2. Are low-level player characters subject to multiple attacks when fighting high Hit Dice monsters?  
3. Which monsters are subject to multiple attacks when fighting high-level PCs?

The first place I always look to for guidance on original D&D conundrums is Gary Gygax's Advanced D&D.  (Apologies to all of the B/X enthusiasts out there.  At least in this case, the various Basic Sets offer no guidance, so I'm off the hook.)  AD&D uncharacteristically provides some fairly simple solutions to the whole matter:

• Fighters and their sub-classes can attack monsters with less than 1 HD a number of times equal to their level.  This ability applies only to fighter classes, not to monsters or any other type of characters.
• Monsters with 4+1 HD or more can hit creatures that are otherwise only damaged by magical weapons.  This ability doesn't apply to PCs, who must be armed with a magic weapon to get through this immunity.

So AD&D has answers to the questions I posed above.  1) High-level PCs need magic weapons to fight monsters immune to normal weapons.  2) Low-level PCs aren't subject to multiple attacks from this rule, because they all have 1 Hit Die; the ability only applies to creatures of less than 1 HD.  And 3) Yes, high-level PCs get one attack per level against weaker monsters... but only fighters and their sub-classes.

For the sake of consistency, it's tempting to go with these interpretations and call it a day.  But I'm trying to operate by the original D&D rules as closely as I can, and they specifically grant this multiple attack ability to monsters.  AD&D does not.  Consistency be damned, I need to look elsewhere for my answers.

When AD&D fails me, the place to look is the Chainmail medieval war-game.  It is, after all, what original D&D points to for its combat rules.  This is unfortunate, because Chainmail has multiple combat systems, and the line between them can get a bit blurry.  And how they intersect with D&D can get even blurrier...  But basically, the Chainmail systems boil down as follows: there are rules for medieval soldier fighting in mass combat; there are rules for medieval soldiers fighting one-on-one; and there are rules for "fantasy combat", which come into play when wizards, powerful fighters, and monsters fight each other.

This fantasy combat system is where our answer lies as far as figuring out what counts as a "normal man".  There's a list of characters and monsters that can fight on the Fantasy Combat Table; everything else fights using the mass combat and man-to-man rules for regular soldiers.  I feel like finding the dividing line between the fantasy combat system and those for regular soldiers is the key to figuring out what counts as a "normal man".  So which creatures fight on the Fantasy Combat Table?  I'll list them below, with their D&D Hit Dice listed in brackets.

• Balrogs (10 Hit Dice)
• Dragons (5 to 12 HD)
• Elementals (8, 12 or 16 HD)
• Also includes Djinn (7+1 HD) and Efreet (10 HD)
• Ents (8 HD)
• Giants (8 to 12+2 HD)
• Heroes (4th level fighters; 4 HD)
• Lycanthropes (4 or 6 HD)
• Rocs (6 HD)
• Also includes Wyverns (7 HD) and Griffons (7 HD)
• Super Heroes (8th level fighters; 8+2 HD)
• Trolls (6+3 HD)
• Ogres (4+1 HD)
• Wights (3 HD)
• Ghouls (2 HD)
• Wizards (11th level magic-users; 8+1 HD)
• This also includes Sorcerers (9th level, 6+1 HD), Warlocks (8th level, 5 HD), and Magicians (6th level, 3+1 HD)
• Wraiths (4 HD)

 And now, here are the monsters in Chainmail that do not fight on the Fantasy Combat Table:

• Hobbits (unknown HD in D&D as they have no monster entry, but presumably 1 HD or less)
• Sprites/Pixies (1 HD)
• Dwarves/Gnomes (1 HD)
• Kobolds (1/2 HD)
• Goblins (1-1 HD)
• Elves (1+1 HD)
• Elves are a bit of a special case, because they can fight on the Fantasy Combat Table if armed with a magic weapon
• Orcs (1 HD)

That seems pretty cut and dried to me: the weakest monster on the Fantastic Combat Table is the Ghoul, with 2 HD.  The strongest creature outside of it is the Elf, with 1+1 HD.  So it looks like anything with less than 2 HD is a "normal man" in original D&D.

I'd like to be able to apply that universally to the questions I posed above, but it has some game-play effects that I don't love.  Firstly, it makes 1st level PC parties extremely prone to death-by-monster.  Secondly, it means that parties of 2nd level and above won't need magic weapons to fight such creatures as Wraiths, Elementals, etc.  So, as in AD&D, I think I need to apply the "normal man" term a little bit differently in each case.

Looking at original D&D, every level in each character class has its Chainmail equivalent listed.  This also indicates when each class gets the ability to fight on the Fantasy Combat Table: 3rd level for Fighting-Men (3 HD); 7th level for Magic-Users (4 HD); and 6th level for Clerics (5 HD).

I'm happy to use these numbers for when the various character classes are able to fight monsters without magic weapons.  If I need an explanation, I can say that higher-level characters have a certain level of divine favour mixed in with their own extraordinary capabilities.

As for monsters, I'll go with 4 HD as the threshold, as in AD&D.  Wights and Ghouls are the only monsters with less than 4 HD on the Fantasy Combat Table, but as creatures of the undead they have a little extra going for them, allowing them to break the 4 HD rule.  I could lower the monster threshold to 2 HD... but then it includes Horses, which seems a little silly.  I'm already having enough trouble with the idea of warhorses getting multiple attacks vs. normal men...

Working out which creatures are subject to multiple attacks is trickier, because I'd really rather not have it apply to all 1st level PCs.  I could just say that PCs are exempt, but I don't love that.  I'd like any rule I come up with to apply to monsters and PCs equally.  I could make 1+1 HD the cut-off, which would exempt 1st level fighters... but then it's inconsistent with Chainmail's Elves.  I don't love that either, but for D&D gameplay I think it's the best solution.  And Elves are technically on the Fantasy Combat Table... so I can justify it at a stretch.

As for who gets multiple attacks per round equal to their Hit Dice when fighting "normal men"... I'm going to say everyone.  Unlike AD&D, I'm not keeping this as a special ability for fighters.  In my game, fighters get it, other character classes get it, and monsters get it.  It only applies if everyone you're in melee with counts as a "normal man", so most PC parties will be able to avoid it as long as they have a fighter along.  But it really lets those monsters chew through henchmen... And it'll allow high-level PC parties to mow through large numbers of mook monsters very quickly. 

So here are my rules outlined below:

• All characters and monsters, when fighting creatures of 1 Hit Dice or less, can make one attack per round for each of their own HD.
• Note that these attacks are all made as though the attacker was 1st level or had 1 HD. (This is my interpretation of the attacker making "one roll as a man-type for every hit die".)  The attacker may choose to fight as normal if they wish (making their regular number of attacks at their full HD value).
• If there is an opponent with 1+1 HD or more within melee distance, this ability may not be used
• A full list of 1 HD or lower monsters in original D&D: Men (bandits, brigands, nomads, buccaneers, pirates), Kobolds, Goblins, Orcs, Skeletons, Nixies, Pixies, Gnomes, Dwarves
• Some monsters may only be hurt by magical weapons. The following creatures can damage them using non-magical weapons:
• Fighting-Men of 3rd level or higher
• Clerics of 6th level or higher
• Magic-Users of 7th level or higher
• All monsters of 4 HD or more, plus Ghouls and Wights

That will have to do.  If I don't draw a line under it now, I'll keep tinkering with it and changing my mind.  If it doesn't work at the table, then it doesn't work and I'll have to change it.  It's easy to second-guess these things when you only have your own thoughts to fall  back on, but the only true litmus test is play.