Shopping, Listing, Picking and Gambling
Precisely ten years ago today (give or take, I did not keep strict time records), I played my first game of Dungeons & Dragons. I recall being excited to partake in the ur-nerd activity with the new friends I had made in the first couple of weeks of university, and one such friend agreed to referee, having himself learned the game from his father. I expected to immediately get into high fantasy and flights of fancy, but to my dismay, we spent the session building our characters. This was quite a lengthy process in the third-and-a-half edition of the game, which involved not just picking a race and class but also feats and distributing points into skills (involving fiddly math of its own). But where it really crawled as equipping our characters, which was an exercise in Shopping.
One of the most important aspects of old school gaming is stuff. When you start, you need to know what stuff your character has so that you might better leverage that stuff in the dungeon into getting more stuff. Some of the stuff you will go back to town to sell, and then spend those spoils on more stuff that you can use when you once more venture out to get the good stuff hid away in dungeons deep. But for the cycle of accumulation to begin, you have to determine what stuff you have! There exist as many options as there are games, but they broadly fall into four categories, which I shall elucidate further: Shopping, Listing, Picking and Gambling.
Shopping
This is the method used by gamers since time immemorial (~1974). It involves giving characters a certain sum of gold to spend outfitting their characters, using the list price for items in the rules. In Original D&D, it involved rolling 3d6 x 10 gold pieces and spending that amount to outfit a character. D&D 3.5 innovated on this model by adding means testing. Now druids start with 2d4 x 10 gold pieces while the ranger has 6d4 x 10 gold to spend. The nicest thing I can say about shopping is that it is almost all about player agency. The players get to make choices about the things they carry, subject to a randomized constraint. However, due to the milquetoast equipment list, these choices aren’t particularly impactful. If you are a 3.5 bard, you are almost always going to get the studded leather armor. Why even make that a choice? Is it even a choice or just a trap for the unwary? But even being maximally generous to the agency provided by the shopping method, it also takes way more time than can be justified by that amount of player agency. There has to be a better way!
Listing
Another innovation from the OSR has spread into the mainstream. In July of 2012, my colleague Brendan of the Necropraxis blog recognized that “[b]uying equipment has traditionally been the most time consuming part of creating a D&D character” and developed a method for generating starting equipment to “speed the process up”. This process kept the randomness (e.g., rolling a gold amount to use for shopping), but now you roll for a starting package based on your class. Although I cannot prove it, I think this helped inspire the eventual approach in 5th edition D&D. In the 4th edition rules compendium, the default method for starting equipment was that all characters begin with 100 gold coins worth of equipment (removing both randomness and the class-based means testing). Less than two years later, in August of 2012 (ten years from the day I began writing this piece, in another coincidence), the D&D Next playtest, which would become 5th edition, released the first packet out that addressed character creation. Its default rule was to give starting equipment based on the character’s class and background, providing shopping as an alternative. It even extols this method as “get[ting] started quickly.” The D&D Next designers were known for keeping up with the then-vibrant OSR blogosphere (to the point of crediting some truly noxious individuals in the player’s handbook). It isn’t a total conspiracy theory that the ideas in a July 2012 blog post ended up in an August 2012 playtest packet and is now in the hands of millions. It's not a story the WotC IP attorneys would tell you. It's an OSR legend.
Beyond that spurious connection, the listing method is an incredibly popular method of starting equipment in P/OSR [meaning both OSR and Post-OSR] games. This is largely due to the influence of both Into the Odd (which has a starting gear package for each combination of highest-stat and starting-gold) and Troika and GLOG (which each have lots-of-wacky-character-backgrounds as a major selling point). These games have an outsized footprint on the current scene, not only because they are popular in their own right, but also because Into the Odd is the game that launched a thousand hacks and Troika and GLOG are each unique in inspiring the creation of an uncountable number of additional backgrounds (at least 561 for the GLOG, but even this is incomplete, lacking, for instance, this Gamma World Janissary class).
The starter packages from Into the Odd.
The listing method excels in its speed of getting you into the game. It also has the benefit of letting the game give weird items, like a mummified hand on a chain or 1d6 small monkeys, that wouldn’t be included on even the most comprehensive equipment list in the shopping method. However, there are also potential drawbacks. As Mr. Skerples, Esq., of the Coins and Scrolls blog says in his joint review of both Troika and Electric Bastionland:
“The downside of background-loaded is that the characters can grow stale. Having tasted one delicious and perfect background, players desire another. Like soft sugary fruit candies they melt away after a few moments of exquisite flavour. Both games weight backgrounds heavily. I like foregrounds.This isn't a flaw in the systems. It's a choice.”
Picking
The latest edition of D&D did not purely adopt the listing method. Instead, it incorporates picking elements. For instance, the rogue gets to pick between a rapier and a short sword and a bow and arrow or another short sword. This basically gives the player the option of having an efficient sword and bow or dual wielding short swords. Picking, like shopping, includes an element of agency, but it is less granular in the presentation. There is any number of things a character can spend 10 gold coins on, but the picking method limits the choice, hopefully clarifying the two options.
The picking method can even be seen in modern story games. For instance, the award-winning Wanderhome’s character creation process leads the players across several picklists to define the characters, their relationships to each other and their relationship to the world they will explore. Most playbooks (that’s story game-speak for character class or background, FYI) has one list relating to the things you carry but also how the character relates to the things they carry. For instance, the Shepherd starts with an item “that stays by [their] side” and another item “that [they] need to leet go of” or the Poet has one book that they “read from constantly” and another that they “have memorized.” These additional prompts are neat because it intertwines equipment with the character. It isn’t enough that the veteran has a sword—we need to know how they got it and how they feel about the sword. I think the magic in these picklists are in the options you pick, so please see below for an example from the Ragamuffin playbook (which is the playbook I have played):
“Choose 1 you carry with you openly and 1 you carry with you secretly. Tell the table about them.
A nervous young paradise mantis, the last of its kind.
A necklace with a painting of your birth family in it.
A pan-flute that reveals your heritage from a forgotten and hidden community.
An encoded scroll that you can’t read, pressed into your hands by one of the last heroes of the rebellion.
Nak, a small and luminescent god that once dwelled in the center of the holiest shrine in all of thee Haeth.
The capacity to see brief snippets of the future, which always revolve around a mysterious stranger with one white eye.
Dreams about a vast and bloody war, always centered around a powerful hero.
The Ring of 99 Vengeful Daemons, the greatest treasure of the King of the Floating Mountain.
The Heavenblade, lost after slaying the Slobbering God, that you would never use to hurt another soul.”
Picking is basically superior to shopping in every way. It maximizes player agency in starting equipment but is much quicker than the shopping method (though not as quick as the listing method). However, like listing, this method works best with games with classes, backgrounds or playbooks. In a classless system, picking can lead to characters feeling samey. Also, if you like a mix of randomness with agency (or more accurately, agency constrained by randomness), picking lacks that because it sacrifices randomness in favor of maximal player agency.
Gambling
What about maximizing randomness in the selection of starting gear? This is the pure-gambling method. Interestingly, Brendan of the Necropraxis blog proposed a class-based gambling method a few months before cracking the listing method wide open. But, just like Listing and Picking really thrive in a class-based system, pure-gambling works best without classes. For instance, Cairn directs each player to roll on a series of 7 random gear tables, and the results define the resulting character as much as the choice of class does in other systems. The downside to the pure-gambling method is a lack of agency. If you want a spellbook in Cairn, you have to hope you roll that result. But for these systems, the randomness is the selling point. It is about discovering a character, not building one.
All of these methods have pros and cons. Shopping sacrifices speed for agency. Listing sacrifices agency for speed. Picking sacrifices randomness for agency. Pure-gambling sacrifices agency for randomness. What if I want a method that tries to accomplish the triple goals of agency, speed and randomness? Well, someone else already solved that problem, wouldn’t ya know.
A few of the starting equipment tables for Macchiato Monsters, a game for high rollers.
Macchiato Monsters is a 2018 game from Eric Nieudan that takes the “usage die” mechanic popularized by the Black Hack and bravely asks “what if this was the core mechanic for the game?” For character creation, that means each player has a full dice pool (d20, d12, d10, d8, d6 and d4) that they can roll on nine different tables, in any order or combination they desire. These tables are categorized (i.e., Equipment & Food, Wealth & Valuables, Melee Weapons, Armor, Missile Weapons, Magical Trinkets, Heirlooms & Heritage and Faith) with ascending results being better. So if you want a really good sword, roll the d20 on the Melee Weapons table. Maybe you want nothing but fucking swords, well then go ahead and roll everything you got on that Melee Weapons table, I’m not your mom. This still has a ton of randomness (e.g., a d20 may result in a full plate armor with a heater shield or an ill-fitting helmet), but by choosing which tables to roll which dice on, it also provides a good level of player agency. And, of course, rolling six dice is much quicker than a shopping excursion.
Is this the best of all possible worlds? No, each method (maybe even shopping) has its uses for which it is ideally suited. For instance, the Macchiato Monsters modified-gambling method would be a poor fit for a game like Wanderhome where choosing the things your character carry helps form more of a connection between the character and their stuff. But it is definitely a near-best of all possible worlds.
Unearthed ArCairna
Recently, I have been running Cairn and, because I am an incorrigible tinker of games, I have imported the modified-gambling method into character creation, along with a few other house rules and procedures that serve to heighten player agency. Cairn, a descendant of both Into the Odd and Knave, is a solid base for hacking, so most of my house rules and procedures plug in quite easily. Because I’ve already written these rules for my players, my colleague and the creator of Cairn, Yochai Gal of the New School Revolution blog, exhorted me by saying “Dude wtf please share this.” Well, I guess it won’t take too long to put it together in a nice little PDF (or even print-on-demand) format. So that is on my to do list. And I gave it a silly (but tentative) name, the most important part of any project: Unearthed ArCairna.
If you’d like to get an email when that comes out (or be generally apprised when I release new games), you can subscribe to my project updates by putting your email below.
