A case for Quartermasters

23 Oct, 2023

I have been inexplicably blessed by Fortune and found an in-person group to play 1974 White Box OD&D with. I'm working on a longer post about what a unique and invigorating experience it has been, but until then I'll be posting a few miscellaneous musings¹.

One of the more interesting aspects of OD&D is its emphasis on player characters functioning as a unit with internal division of labor but a more-or-less unified interface with the dungeon/world. Characters are rendered mechanically in coarse resolution, and many recorded stats relate more to the characters role than innate qualities². In this way, White Box³ OD&D feels more like XCOM than Skyrim.

As a player, the game is less focused on controlling your character like some homunculus evangelion pilot than it is on collaborating with other players to solve the tactical challenges posed by a dungeon. This involves some players taking on meta-roles, typically a mapper (who hand draws a map of the dungeon/wilderness based on the Referee's description) and a 'caller' (who condenses the intra-player negotiations into a plan of action for the Referee to resolve).

Granting that I'm 99% sure I'm not the first to do so⁴, I humbly suggest that quartermaster be added as a semi-formal party role. If number of house-rules floating around is any judge, tracking encumbrance is one of the bigger 'sticking points' in this play-style. It's important to do, because judging the costs and benefits of loading up on treasure is a core part of the dungeon-crawling experience. But the default rules that assign a coin-weight to every item are fiddly in a way that clashes with the rest of the system. Slot-based inventory is a popular alternative, but I don't think it satisfactorily addresses the deeper problem, which is that new items are acquired collectively but stored individually. Thus every time the party finds loot, there's an ensuing negotiation to determine:

1. Does any individual character want or need any of these items?

2. Does the group collectively want to keep any for sale or later use?

   1. If yes, who is able and willing to store them?

There isn't really a natural ordering to questions 1 and 2, and in my experience they tend to bounce around awkwardly. 2a is also tricky because in addition to the fiddly math mentioned above, an optimal solution requires knowledge of all characters' inventories, which most players don't track and can't easily calculate on the fly.

Thus, for future campaigns I intend to enshrine a 'quartermaster'⁵ role alongside the mapper and caller. The quartermaster will keep a record sheet of all the characters, porters, and mules nesodons, the amount of coin-weight⁶ they can take on before incurring penalties, and possibly the number of free hands and sacks/backpacks available. Whenever the party loots something, it's their job to assign it to whoever has room, and it's their job to divvy up gold earnings at the end. They could also be delegated the task of marking off torches and rations. Equipped with the top-down view of the party's resources, decisions about whether to take on new items will hopefully be better informed and faster.

#game-design #odnd