Encounter Distance: Am I doing it wrong?

A while back I wrote a bit on the silliness that is the AD&D encounter distance rules. Basically, in case you don't know, when the dice determine that a random encounter happens, you roll to see how far away the randos are. 

I've never bothered to roll this because in every circumstance the distance is  going to be determined by the lay of the land. If you're in a room, the randos are going to come in one of the doors; in a corridor, they'll round a bend or wander into the edge of your torch light, etc. If they're outside, then they're either on the same road or laying in ambush beside the road or walking out of a tavern or what have you. It just seems a lot easier to figure out how far away this encounter should occur than roll the dice and then try to justify how the carrion crawler suddenly spawned 50' behind you. And yet, pretty much every version of Big D has a rule for rolling up encounter distance.

Even my new best friend Shadowdark includes this on page 112:

"If one or more wandering creatures appear, roll 1d6 for their distance from the group"

Here it is, still chugging along in the 50th year of D&D; Roll to see where the encounter takes place. And if you roll a 1, the encounter is "Close" to you (imagine Karen Carpenter singing here--Aaaaa-aahahahaa-Close to you...). How the hell did these randos get within 5' of you without you noticing? But Shadowdark can do no wrong, so clearly it must be me who is in error. 

Do people actually rely on the dice to tell them where the monsters are going to appear?

Shadowdark: Thieves are called Thieves!

Cover art

[Pretending it's not already mid-May before I finally acknowledge my damn blog for the first time this calendar year] 

I'm about to start running a gang of nerds through the old Giga-dungeon I was working on back, oh, 12-ish years ago--I swear I wrote about it here on the ol' blog but I can't find any evidence to support this notion. 

Anyway, I was casting about for a good rule set, and I've settled on Shadowdark as the rules of choice. I'd toyed with many others--AD&D, HackMaster, Castles & Crusades, DCC, ICRPG, Mork Borg--but never felt like either a) it was a system I felt comfortable running or b) it was a system that my posse of gamers would be willing to play. Enter Shadowdark; the recent kickstarter phenom that raised a quarter of a trillion dollars in just under six minutes. It's a nice blend of old school stuff plus some of the modern bullcrap that kids these days seem to like; a game of the Nouveau Old School if you will. I like it for the lightness of its touch and emphasis on resource management; my players tolerate it because it looks like D&D. But most importantly, thieves are called thieves in this game!

I had reservations about Shadowdark, but they're mostly semantic. In particular, the name Shadowdark is reminiscent of "Underdark," a term used in latter-day Big-D that I've always found a bit cringey. But balancing that small misstep: in this game thieves are called thieves! 

Furthermore, the first thing you'll see in the extreme upper left corner of the inside the front cover is the weapons list. And the first weapon listed is the Bastard Sword! Thank you Shadowdark for bringing the bastard back to Big D. In an odd backward step, there is no battle axe, just a great axe. As there are no lesser axes listed, what is this greataxe supposed to be greater than? But still, thieves are called thieves!

Anyway, I made a half-assed effort at identifying the sources of many of the rules that are included in Shadowdark and wrote them down. Below is a list of games which I've identified as the source (probably mistakenly) of various rules for Shadowdark. Please accept this in lieu of an actual blog post.

Olden D&D (also Basic D&D)

1. Tripartite alignment: Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic
2. tripartite armor selection: Leather, Chain, Plate
   
3. The 4 classic classes
4. level titles (Footpad, Burglar, Acolyte, etc.) 
5. thieves have d4 HD (BOOOOOOOO!)
   

 AD&D

1. Bastard Swords!
2. Race (aka ancestry) is NOT class (YAAAAAAAAY!)
3. 1 minute melee rounds--KIDDING! Nobody ever thought that was a good idea
   

DCC

1. level titles vary with alignment--I'm not going to be doing alignment so whatevs [still too old]
   
2. roll spell checks to see if your magic succeeds
3. 0-level character funnel (called The Gauntlet) 
4. five spell levels (called "tiers")
   

5e

1. contemporary ability score modifiers
2. roll with Advantage© 
3. Death saves when ya' reach 0 HP
   
4. roll a 20-sider for initiative; that might actually be from versions 2-4e

ICRPG

1. Constant initiative; not just for combat anymore
   
2. Close, Near, Far movement/range classifications
   
3. Easy, Normal, Hard, and Extreme difficulty for your challenge s
4. Ya' need to roll a 20 for a successful death save

All Reasonable Versions of D&D

1. THIEVES ARE CALLED THIEVES!