Worker Placement Manifesto

A specter is haunting elf-games… the specter of WORKER PLACEMENT! (Please, God, don't let people read this as if I was suggesting this was actually a manifesto and am not just playing to the theme.)

Many years ago, I posted about an assumption of the original Dungeons & Dragons which was eventually forgotten: that characters are supposed to cooperate on difficult tasks and doing so is the only way the game makes sense. Think especially about opening doors or searching for secrets in a room. The likelihoods of those tasks are ²/₆ or ¹/₆ for little folk, which means you don’t have a snowball’s chance of relying on the dice as an individual to get what you want. I think this, combined with the (fair!) advice that you should not allow infinite rerolls on a task, contributed partly to the so-called “old-school” play-style where dice are not your friend and you need to work outside the rules to get anywhere.

That’s not OD&D, though. In OD&D, since three persons can comfortably fit in the width of a hallway, up to three persons can also cooperate to open doors. Though an individual may have just a ~33% chance of opening the door, two individuals have a ~56% chance, and three have a ~70% chance. The main constraint is not likelihood, but the procedural aspects of the game which push and pull characters towards different tasks. Who wants to help open the door? Who wants to search for a secret passage? Who wants to watch out for any monsters? Or should we keep moving? Each turn that passes has a ¹/₆ chance of a wandering monster coming to get you, and you can only consume so many supplies before you need to consider dipping altogether.

This aspect was lost also immediately after OD&D. Holmes outright assumes that it is not individuals who take actions during exploration, but the party as a unit, even though their relative chances of success are vastly reduced since the dice roll itself is unchanged.

Doors are usually closed and often stuck or locked. They have to have the locks picked or be smashed open. A roll of 1 or 2 indicates that a door has been forced open. Of course, if the party has to hit the door several time’s before getting their roll of 1 or 2, there is no possibility of surprising the occupants of the room.

When the characters come to a door they may listen to detect any sound within. A die roll of 1 for humans, 1 or 2 for elves, dwarves and halflings, indicates that they have heard something, if there is anything to hear. The “Undead” — skeletons, zombies, ghouls, wights, wraiths, mummies, spectres and vampires — make no noise unless they wish to. The party gets one try at listening to any door, wall, panel, etc.

D&D Basic Rules (Holmes 1977), p. 10

Moldvay doesn’t mention the possibility of characters cooperating to open doors at all: the more important factor is the strength of the individual opening the door, which can increase their chance of success up to ⁵/₆. Though he retains cooperation for searching, he further reduces the individual chance of success to ²/₆ for elves (previously ⁴/₆) and ¹/₆ for everyone else. My PDF doesn’t have OCR so you can just check D&D Basic 1981 p. 21, or the corresponding page in Old School Essentials which more-or-less reproduces that approach (can’t always trust it!). AD&D also basically does this, because both it and Moldvay are pulling from the Greyhawk supplement which originates the trend away from procedural dynamics to individual abilities. Funnily enough, I feel like Fifth Edition actually is very interested in character cooperation, albeit between pairs of characters rather than up to three (two’s a couple, three’s a crowd, baby!). I have three different posts about this because the system invites thinking about this more than most other editions.

Back to the present now. Last year, I posted about a new travel procedure I was trying in my home game, where you pick a number of outcomes based on how well you roll, which quickly evolved (though it took me forever to actually write about it) into players deciding which task their character would target (and for which they would roll), with the option to cooperate on tasks they deem more important. But I wasn’t the only one exploring this avenue of representing a complex situation by decomposing it into tasks for characters to target. There were multiple other posts this past year doing the same thing, each doing it a little differently. Vorpal Coil has players allocate successes to tasks after rolling dice, and also distinguishes between risks and rewards. Mindstorm instead distinguishes between outcomes that are certain to happen, those that are certain not to happen, and those that are up in the air: characters are then allocated to different outcomes to make them more or less likely relative to their base state. CaelReader distinguishes between routine tasks which occur consistently between instances of the same “montage”, and significant tasks specific to an instance which is resolved once and for all without retries. Null Mana Crystal conceptualizes social situations as sets of events to which one or more characters may be party, and which change with time (e.g. between daytime or nighttime, or changing from calendar day to calendar day). Each of these approaches offers a particular angle on the same principle that there’s interesting play in splitting characters between efforts as well as giving them the option to combine their efforts if they prioritize one over another, with push-and-pull factors informing those strategic decisions.

It should be said that this isn’t just about opening stuck doors. I’ve been in many games where the assumption is either that the party acts as a unit or an individual character acts like an atom. But the party is a molecule! Worker placement is a fun way to encourage the cooperative play that’s definitive of role-playing games. It treats the party like a complex structure which connects and breaks and reacts according to its environs/circumstances, and it also helps make sure everyone is heard. I love worker placement. You should too. You’re bourgeois if you don’t. Teamwork makes the dream work, baby.