Race-as-Class is a Terrible Idea

An undercooked idea that should have died in the brainstorming stage, some game designers actually continue this practice. Why? What is RAC, and why is it so bad? I'll answer these questions and more in this week's reason why OSR games suck!

To better understand this terrible idea, we first have to go back to the start of role-playing games. RPGs were born in-part from tabletop war games. These are games where you have different "units" of characters in a battlefield simulacrum waged within a diorama usually setup on a board or tabletop.

Similar to little plastic army men, players might have one unit be a "minesweeper" army figure, another "crawling on the ground prone" figurine and another "aiming a rifle" miniature. Each unit had certain strengths, weaknesses and capabilities associated with it. This idea seems ok for a game that focuses on the "big picture" of an entire battle; but it is as primitive as a flint-knapped knife when it comes to roleplay and adventure games.

"This game uses race-as-class?! NNNNOOOO!!!!"

In Basic Dungeons & Dragons (red book), for example, you had a few choices when choosing what "type" of character you wanted to play:

1. Human Fighter
2. Human Cleric
3. Human Thief
4. Human Magic-User

Now, I know some of you are probably screaming at your screens saying that there were really seven choices, not four. But you'd be wrong. The other three options (which all subscribe to the "race-as-class" methodology) are simply a re-hash of two or more of the above classes. Let's review:

1.  Elf - Fighter/Magic-User hybrid
2. Dwarf - Fighter with added defense and saves
3. Halfling - Fighter/Thief hybrid

You'll notice that humans have four choices while elves, dwarves and halflings only have one choice each. This means if you want to be some kind of badass book-thumpin' cleric who calls down the wrath of <insert patron deity>, you can only be human. But what if you were envisioning some kind of awesome dwarf-turned-holy-man? Kind of like how Worf worked for Starfleet or Chewbacca hung out with humans. Well, too bad, you're out of luck. Apparently only humans are noble enough for religion and spirituality.

What about a ninja-like elven thief? Sorry, not in the cards. Only humans can be thieves. Don't even ask about magical halflings, because it isn't going to happen.

Not allowed!

You see, race-as-class means that whatever class, or style of play, you choose for your character, their race (or more appropriately called "species") is inexorably linked to that socio-economic class. This in turn "type casts" less common races--such as halflings--into a certain style of play. There is no room for mixing and matching, no room for flexibility or customization. You're forced to play the style that the game designers chose for you.

And why? To what end were the game designers hoping to achieve? Some may say it's to make humans be the predominant species of the land by there being a 4 out of 7 chance a human-based character class is chosen by players. But who said that humans should be the dominant species in the adventure you want to run? This is really just the designer's way of saying that their notion of "realism" within a fantasy world outweighs your desire to have fun. Effectively, the original D&D designers are either insulting your intelligence by making the choice for you, or flipping you the bird.

 Say YES to choice!

It's no wonder this completely unnecessary and absolutely asinine practice went extinct when the BD&D lineage died out. Even Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition, which was released around the same time as Basic Dungeons & Dragons, knew better. Their system wasn't perfect (still denying players the satisfaction of certain race/class combinations because realism), but at least they recognized that players deserve a choice.

So why in the world would certain game designers perpetuate such a silly practice? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they are suffering from the Stradivarius myth by believing that everything the founders touched turned to gold. The reality was that they were a bunch of guys who were quite literally making it up as they went. Maybe these offending game designers just want to continue the status quo, without a single forethought into whether it's even a good idea.

I've even heard some apologist old-school gamers try to defend race-as-class by saying that classes are really just a big blurry abstraction and shouldn't be taken so seriously. Um, what? Are you saying I'm wrong in thinking that combination X & Y is more fun for me than just X?

This whole thing is racist, really. No, not real-world racist; but fantasy-racist. It's saying that all dwarves, no matter their background; their upbringing, their homeland, their life choices, etc. all inherently understand gnome, goblin and kobold languages and have a 33% chance of recognizing new construction (Rulescyclopedia page 23). How is that realistic? How is that "just an abstraction"? It certainly isn't worth denying me my halfling magic-user!

 "But why can't we use magic?"

The fact of the matter is that life is a very complex and beautiful thing. Take humans as an example. We come in many different sizes, shapes, colors, cultures, expertise, strengths, weaknesses, capabilities and so on. To type cast humans by saying we are all one and a half to two meters tall would just be wrong. Saying we all have an inherit know-how to use computers, swords, vehicles or science is also wrong. It would be like saying we all run around stealing stuff from people's pockets, or carry battleaxes wherever we go.

Do yourself, your game and the community as a whole a favor; and do right with the players. Give them what they want. Don't force your preconceptions and bias onto everyone else. Let us customize the game how we want.

Dungeons & Dragons Ability Scores Are Pointless

When the original D&D designers were creating the game; they wanted a means to differentiate one "type" of character from another. So they came up with the six core stats (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution and charisma) that they felt would best encapsulate the parts of the character's body and mind needed during an adventure. Next they needed a way to quantify how powerful each stat would be. They chose to give each "ability score" a numerical value. Since the twenty-sided die (d20) was new and shiny back in the day; they wanted to use it in parts of their game.

A d20 allows for a random number to be rolled between one (1) and 20. Therefore, each number has a 5% chance of being rolled. I believe the original designers figured an "average" humanoid character in D&D would have a stat number somewhere in the middle of all this, and thus declared an ten as the average stat number. At first glance it seems to make sense, too: we humans have ten fingers and ten toes, we use a decimal system, and when rolling a d20 there is a 50% chance of rolling 10 or less and a 50% chance of rolling 11 or higher. All perfect, right? Not quite; that's when everything begins to unravel.

To better understand what is inherently wrong with this logic; let me ask you a question: on a day-to-day basis, how often do you consider yourself failing at things? Let's imagine you're carrying some heavy boxes up some stairs. You have to move 16 boxes up a flight of stairs; how many of the boxes are you typically going to drop and helplessly watch tumble down to the bottom? Probably none; if you're careful. But with the logic of D&D; an average character should fail at 50% of everything they do. What a bummer!

Ten is a Terrible Number

Worse yet, ten is just a terrible number. Our decimal system is not one (1) through ten (10), it's zero (0) through nine (9). Yup, nine is the limit. Starting at ten is starting over the maximum of our single-digit decimal system; not in the middle. The number ten is like that awkward period in our lives when we're going through puberty and our bodies are all gangly and disproportionated as we're growing into our true potential.

The number ten, it turns out, is too big for some things and too small for others. Imagine your PC has a constitution of 10; what does that get you? Does that mean you can start with 10 HP? Nope; that'd be too much HP to start, according to old school D&D. Okay, maybe if you had a dexterity of 10; that denotes how many spaces you can move per turn. Wrong again. What if we said an intelligence of 10 was the number of spells we could cast or the number of languages we knew? All too many. 10 is just too big of a number for these kinds of things.

The original designers of D&D decided that rolling 3d6 was a good way for you to randomly generate an ability score for your character which would have a statistical bias toward the number ten, as seen here. Except--wait a minute--there's a problem, isn't there? 3d6 doesn't center on the number 10, it centers on the number 10.5. If you have OCD tendencies like me, that 0.5% imbalance will make your eye twitch. It's almost as if the designers of D&D either didn't know their dice probabilities or simply shrugged it off, grabbed a beer and said "good enough". This means you're just as likely to roll an 11 as you are a ten. They easily could have used a plethora of other methods, such as roll 4d4, but decided to use an imperfect dice mechanic.

Ability Modifiers Are A Hack

But none of this solves our original problem with ten. You see, the founders of D&D knew ten was imperfect, which is why they had to come up with a hack to fix it. Thus, Ability Modifies were born. The idea was that the more of an extreme you rolled over or under this fabled ten, the more +1, +2 or +3 modifiers you would gain for various tasks. In later editions of D&D these modifiers would be expanded up to +4 and +5 and sometimes even beyond).



It was these numbers that the designers truly wanted to work with. These numbers were smaller, more manageable and more applicable. They allowed characters to dictate a number of feats:

• Melee Combat -- Increased the chances a character would hit their target.
• Increase Weapon Damage -- Melee and thrown weapons would deal more damage with a high strength modifier.
• Force Open Doors -- Could be used to increase the "Open Doors" roll.
• Languages -- Dictates the number of languages a character knows.
• Save Throws vs Spells -- Applied to the save throw roll to increase a character's odds of saving themselves from damage or magical effects.
• Armor Class -- Effectively increased the defense of a character who had a high dexterity modifier.
• Extra Hit Points Per Level -- Added a number of extra HP equal to the constitution modifier.
• Reactions & Number of Retainers -- The charisma modifier added to reaction rolls and dictated the number of hirelings a character could hire.

As you can tell, these modifiers are an important part of what makes a character capable in an adventure. It was as if the ability scores, and their average stat of ten, were only there to create the ability modifiers then fade into the background.

How It Should Have Been

A more proper design would have focused on these smaller numbers from the start. For example, instead of centering on ten (or, technically, 10.5) D&D characters should have had about half that value (for an average of 5). With a smaller number like five you can assign values that matter in the game with the number as-is.

For example, with a CON 5, you could say your character starts with 5 HP. If you wanted to retain that 50/50 success-to-failure ratio, simply roll a 1d10 for any and all ability rolls; then add your character's number to that roll. If the total is equal to or greater than ten, the character would be successful in whatever they were attempting to accomplish. It's such a simple, easy to play and easy to remember mechanic; it makes one wonder why the designers used such a roundabout system, instead.

The Naming Conventions of D&D Don't Make Sense

I don't want to fault the founding fathers of what are now known as role-playing games. They were pioneers who had no idea what they were doing because frankly, they were creating a new paradigm of game and it had never been done before. One of the many, many mistakes they made along the way was to use non self-descriptive nomenclature within the rules. In short, they took something relatively easy to describe and made it much more difficult to understand. Worse yet, many of us are still using these asinine titles as if they were the inspired word of some divine force.

Take Armor Class for example. Put yourself in the position of someone who has only played common games like "Monopoly", "Chutes & Ladders" and "Life". If someone asked you "What's your character's armor class?", how would you respond? The term doesn't tell us much about what it is, or what purpose it serves. Sure, it has the word "armor" in it; which is about as good of a clue as we are afforded. But "class"? Who came up with "class"? When I think of a class, I imagine a schoolroom with desks, chairs and students with a teacher.

A far better term would be "Armor Grade", "Armor Quality", "Armor Level", or "Armor Rating"...even "Armor Points" would have been better. When people talk about a "class", such as a class of people or items, they're rarely referring to a numerical value. Worse yet; to make things even more unfriendly to prospective or new gamers, we shorten the term to an acronym of "AC". So instead of asking "What's your Armor Class?" we lay on our fellow novices the cryptic question "What's your AC?" to which anyone in their right mind would respond with "Huh?".

The worst part of it all, of course, is that it isn't even about armor. A character in an RPG who has not a lick of armor on their body still has an "AC" of 10. Don't pretend that "no armor" is a type of armor; because we know that halflings get -2 AC when defending against attacking creatures who are larger than man-sized (Rules Cyclopedia). Many other extemporaneous factors can influence a characters armor class, as well; all of which have nothing to do with what your character is wearing.

So really, the very word "Armor" doesn't even apply. It should have been "Defense Rating". How about simply "Defense"? And why in the world is having a -2 AC a good thing (a topic worthy of a rant for another time)?

THAC0

If you think AC is a badly botched term, let's touch on the infamous "THAC0". No ladies and gentlemen; that's not an "O" at the end; it's the number 0. If that doesn't give you any indication of what a terrible idea this term was, I don't know what will.

Normally I'd say that the original writers of D&D took a total of 30 seconds to come up with these terms before moving on (without a second more devoted to peer-review or player feedback); but THAC0 is special. It's special in the fact that it's such a backwards, ill conceived algebraic problem; it's as if a mathematician who flunked out of college came up with this and actually thought it'd be fun.

For those who don't know what THAC0 is or how it works; allow me to explain: First, THAC0 stands for "To-Hit Armor Class 0 (Zero)". I do have to give credit where it is due: the designer at least tried to make this dozy self-explanatory...and promptly failed. Ask yourself; now that you know what it stands for, does it reveal to you what purpose it serves? I didn't think so.

So what does THAC0 do? Allow "Rules Cyclopedia" to explain it to you:

"If someone needs to roll a 7 [on a 1d20]--not counting any of his individual bonuses--to hit armor class of 0, we say that he has a THAC0 of 7...When a target's AC is worse than 0 (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc.), you subtract that AC from his THAC0. Likewise, when a target's AC is better than 0 (i.e. -1, -2, etc.), you subtract the AC from the THAC0 score--but remember that subtracting negative numbers is the same as adding positive numbers."

Wow...just, wow.

Rules Cyclopedia goes on to explain that to use THAC0 in an easier-to-understand manner, you must use the table below:

That's right folks; the bread-and-butter of dungeon crawling (attacking in combat) requires a friggin chart! And wow, what a chart it is! First you have to find your character's class, then their experience level, then the attacker's THAC0 value and cross-reference that to the number rolled on the 1d20, which is then compared to the defender's armor class.

So, so many bad terms...

I'm going to stop bashing on THAC0 because, quite simply, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. It's a joke. Let me say it again: THAC0 is an absolute, unmitigated disaster, and you know it. Its very name is super-nerdy; and its definition is a bigger mess than Pizza the Hutt.

This is Pizza the Hutt

How any of this got past quality assurance boggles my mind. The fact of the matter is, early versions of D&D are littered with terrible, obscure terms. Here's a few more, for nostalgia's sake:

• Alignment -- What does this have to do with morality, philosophy and ethics?
•  Constitution -- A term not often used in the english language over, say, "health", "vitality" or "life force".
• Hit Dice / Hit points -- Am I suppose to punch the dice? It doesn't measure how many times something can get hit since weapons deal variable points of damage, and characters can die in many other ways then simply being "hit", so why is it called that?
•  Magic User -- Really? You couldn't come up with "magician", "wizard", "sorcerer" or any of the other two dozen terms for someone who wields magical powers?
• Prime Requisite -- Not self descriptive at all, and so many better terms could have been used like "Primary Trait" or "Character Class Trait".
• Mystic -- Literally nobody calls "Monk" character classes a "Mystic" anymore, and for good reason.
• Saving Throws -- Am I suppose to toss something at my fellow players? At the very least this should be called "Saving Roll". 
• Gold Piece -- Because apparently "gold coin" or any other known form of monetary trade was too difficult, they had to use "pieces" instead of actual in-game money.
• Coin Weight -- The "official" unit of weight measurement that is in multiples of gold pieces. Yep, gold pieces are apparently in coin weight.

Part of the problem with D&D and other OSR games is that it's very difficult for new players to join. The games come off as cryptic and mysterious in part because of these unnecessarily confusing terms. It leaves many players feeling that they need to know somebody who already knows how to play; just to play the game themselves.

It's embarrassing when game designers--even today--propagate these cryptonyms and carry on the status quo. You're hurting the RPG community by continuing these confusing descriptors in the name of nostalgia. Please, don't be afraid to re-think game design. Question everything, and ask yourself if there's a better more efficient way to accomplish the same task. I'm certain you'll find one.

Introduction

I'd like to welcome everyone to my very first blog. Some of you may be wondering what "OSR" is, and why it apparently sucks. Some of you may be offended by the very title of this blog. Others, I hope, will understand the mission I have set out to accomplish.

Before creating this blog I thought long and hard about whether or not I should call it "OSR Sucks!". I consider myself a naturally positive person and I didn't want people to brand me as a nay-sayer, boat rocker or dissident. But in the end I feel that the title of this blog will serve to capture enough attention; and hopefully generate enough discussion, to serve my true mission...

You see, the Old School Renaissance movement is made up of a small, passionate group of gamers who enjoy the role-playing games (RPGs) of yore. These RPGs, which are decades old and often out-of-print, are what's considered "old school". Of the gamers who enjoy role-playing and adventure games, some prefer the old school style over the new school publications. Thus, a type of renaissance was born with the goals of preserving and rejoicing in these now classic games.

Each OSR fan is attracted to the games-of-years-long-past for their own reasons; but for each there is something special they hold dear to their hearts. For some, it's the nostalgia; for others it's the stories and theme of that era, and for others it's the simplicity of the system and mechanics.

However, the old school RPGs in question are not perfect. They never have been. In fact it could be argued there is no such thing as a perfect role-playing game. But sometimes gamers will, in an act to defend the past characteristics and methodologies of these "old school" games, will turn a blind eye to their blemishes. Some will refute or outright ignore obvious improvements made in more modern games; going so far as lying to themselves by telling themselves that "they don't make 'em like they used to".

These games, designed and crafted by our forefathers, take on an almost stradivarian effect; where nothing seems quite as good as the original. Is it because the original is infallible, or because cognative dissonance has taken hold?

It is my hope that the audience of this blog does not consider the title "OSR Sucks!" as offensive; but rather a tongue-and-cheek joke to be shared amongst each other. For you see, I am not an outsider attempting to bash the OSR movement; but rather one of you; a fellow OSR-ian who wants all of us to succeed where our fathers have faltered.

It is my dream that we will be honest enough with one another--as well as ourselves--to admit to that which is flawed; and work together to fix the snags for future generations. Let us come together to help shape and influence the direction of RPGs of today by letting go of inefficient mechanics and embracing what brings the most fun to the most amount of people in the easiest and most flavorful way we know.

It has been said that true change happens when we are in a ritual space; and that a ritual space is born through intent. I hope you join me in my journey to question, re-think and challenge the pre-conceptions of the old school movement--without cold-bloodedness--but rather impartiality; for the sake of a better game.

Thank you for reading.