>>1563
>I do understand the whole idea of not wanting to roll dice if you can avoid it - I feel like that's the case at times. Unless you are referring to reducing the amount of bookkeeping you need to do, I can understand why OSR usually encourages caution. I imagine games of that sort have middle to high lethality rate as a defining feature (but maybe I am wrong).
Well, think of it this way: in OSR games, if you're rolling dice and your success (and possibly your payday and/or survival) hinges on a good roll, you've already fucked up by getting into that position.
Let me elaborate on this.
The situation
The context here is that you and your friends and are moderately experienced murderhobos (let's say level four or so) and you've agreed to help a
LOCAL LORD with his minor bandit problem in exchange for him providing you with a writ of passage through the mountain pass he controls which will shave a month off of your trip to some tomb you're on your way to rob as well as whatever the bandits have. The bandits aren't especially skilled but the local terrain has lots of caves that let them hide easily and they know it well. Let's look at how this might work from the perspective of more modern games first and then how it might work in an OSR game.
Overview of events
1. Learn about the bandits
2. Learn about where the bandits
are
3. Come up with a plan to kill the bandits
4. Kill the bandits
5. Get loot
Modern RPG
1. Completely optional. Whoever they are, you're more than a match for them.
2. Roll a gather information check to find out that the bandits like to steal booze.
3. Optional. You decide to hide in a booze wagon and then pop out and attack the bandits when the wagon is stopped.
4. Trivial but time-consuming. Dice are rolled, your enemies die after giving you a few bumps the bruises and you loot their bodies for gold, jewels and magic items and go back to the
LOCAL LORD for your payday.
OSR
1. This is a necessary task. While the bandits make the townspeople uneasy, they're also afraid of what might happen to them if it gets out that they talked. You decide to grease the palm of the local publican to find out a few rumors as well as asking the guards and merchants who have been robbed. You discover that there are roughly a dozen bandits, they mostly use bows to shoot at people from the trees when they don't get paid, they seem like they're competent and may be ex-soldiers, they're not picky about who they rob and they always take whatever food and alcohol - especially alcohol - their targets might be carrying. In a stand-up fight you and your friends would be turned into pincushions so you're going to have to be clever about this.
2. With this information in mind, you decide to bait the bandits and then track them back to their hideout. You send out your least-threatening hireling on the road, carrying a basket of fresh loaves. As expected, the bandits appear and demand the bread, which your hireling promptly gives up and then runs away. As the bandits retreat away from the road, however, the raven familiar of the party's wizard is following them. The bandits suspect nothing and are tracked to their cave hideout where the raven watches them for a day and returns with the information.
3. Now you and your friends know where the bandits are and where they lay their heads and it's time to make good on that information. The bandits station a carefully hidden lookout near the cave day and night and there's only one way in and out, so a simple assault is probably a bad idea. With that considered, you discuss your options. You could try to start a fire and suffocate them, but that would take a while and might damage the goods or start a forest fire if you do a fucky-wucky. You could flood the cave, but that would also damage the loot and might not work and would be a pain in the ass. Collapsing the cave is impractical, even with magic. However, you know that the bandits are fond of alcohol, so
poisoned alcohol seems just the trick. The wizard has some herbology knowledge from his magical studies and the thief knows something about poisons so they make a trip to the local apothecary and gather a few fresh plants to brew up a poison while the nominal leader of the party goes back to the
LOCAL LORD[/doom] and asks for a fairly large amount of wine from the castle. The [doom]LOCAL LORD is having none of this as he thinks you're just going to get drunk while stalling, so you decide to ask around town. Eventually you come to the local importer, who has some awful wine he bought to sell to the castle without success. He tries to charge you for it, but you drop a hint that this is related to the bandit problem and he tells you to just take it.
4. The time has come. With the wine poisoned, you repeat your ruse by sending out a different hireling with the party's cart and the bandits strike again. As night begins to fall you head for the bandit cave guided by the wizard's familiar and the good night vision of the party's half-elf thirf. You pause a bit outside the cave to send the half-elf thief ahead to scout and he returns bearing news that almost all the bandits are laid out. With this in mind, you advance on the cave and find out that yep, everyone is having a bad time. The thief has already slit the throat of the sentry out of spite but the rest of them are alive and one of them spots you and yells. The fighter and cleric form a small shield wall and the wizard creates a cloud of choking gas in the rear of the cave which forces the bandits that can stand to try to get past the shield wall and chokes out the ones that can't, Utilizing this strategy, the bandits are easily defeated. The leader is in pretty bad shape from the poisoned wine and almost suffocating so you decide to take him alive.
5.The bandits don't have much in the way of coins but there are other goodies - a map of the region with interesting features marked, some cheap jewelry, trade goods (including some rough gems, textiles, tools, and various metal ingots such as copper/tin/bronze/etc.) some books (including a few with magical relevance, which go to the wizard by common agreement), the bandits' weapons and armor, a sizable store of rations, a spyglass, and the leader had a +1 bow. You gather up some of it, get some sleep and send your hirelings to organize and stash the rest. The
LOCAL LORD is pleased that the bandits have been dealt with and gives you a bonus for bringing back the leader alive so he can be executed properly. You are treated to a meal at the castle and head out the next day with your writ in hand. You decided to leave most of the loot stashed near the road because you weren't sure if, strictly speaking, those goods that were obviously robbed from merchants were part of your payment. You double back to get it and when the guards get suspicious you just wave the writ in front of them and they back down. You make it through the pass with your possibly unrighteous loot and you're on your way. Fin.
Review
I hope this example helped you a bit. OSR gaming, at its core, is about treating challenges as puzzles or riddles instead of DPS checks. The use of treasure as XP means that creativity and lateral reasoning are highly incentivized and that every combat encounter is a risk-reward benefit; the easiest way to deal with the bandits would be to just dump a bunch of flammable liquids into the cave, seal it off and then cook the bandits alive, but at that point what do you get out of it? Your reward goes from a fat stack in the form of flammable goods to a handful of coins and gems. If the bandits were in a swamp or a decrepit fort or didn't drink you'd need an entirely new solution from an OSR perspective but from a modern perspective it probably wouldn't do anything besides change the backdrop for the combat encounter.
Anyway, it's late and I sort of petered off there at the end but I think I got my point across.