So What Are "Victoria Rules"
and How Did They Come About?

HISTORY:

During the 1979-80 heyday of Gary Gygax's Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (or AD+D, now commonly known as "1^st edition" of what has since become 4), DMs Alain Hargreaves and Rob Von Rudloff took the game, turned it upside down, and shook it to see what might fall out; they started making rather dramatic changes to allow it to play a little differently than designed.  They were later gleefully joined in the process in progress by DM Keith Piddington, and along the way by a host of players offering suggestions – some of which were better than anything the DMs could dream up! Here follow some of the more significant changes, preceded by the perceived need that drove them into existence….

The game-as-campaign needed to last longer.  A system where characters reached "name" level (usually about 9^th) in just a year or two of consistent play just did not allow enough playing time to properly mine a campaign for all the stories it might hold.  Further, even in these early days there was an inkling that the game's best moments might lie between about 3^rd and 7^th level, when characters have some powers but are still somewhat vulnerable, and thus there would be benefit gained from stretching that period out somewhat.  Armed with this knowledge, the AD+D rule that gave characters experience points for found treasure was scrapped on the spot…and level advancement slowed to a relative crawl.  (a pleasant, though unexpected, side-effect of this was that players in general began to focus more on the story being told than on the numbers on their character sheets)  We have since learned our system tended to collapse on itself around 9^th level in the early days (as was the case in original Dafan); the changes made by the major campaigns since have managed to add about a level each: Telenet fell apart at about 10^th, Riveria around 11^th, and the projected collapse point of the current ongoing campaigns is perhaps 12^th -14^th level…in other words, a long time from now as this is written (July 2008)!

The game needed to be easier to play.  This was driven largely by the player base at the time (and since), who had little patience for minutiae such as weapon speed or weapon-vs.-armour-type tables.  These were removed, and replaced with a much simpler combat system; over time, many other tables have also been streamlined or reworked both on the players' side of the screen and the DM's.  Another major development here saw spellcasters put on a partly-pre-memorized spell point system rather than fully pre-memorized slots; more recently, in one game casters have all been shifted to work much like 3^rd-edition Sorcerers, with no pre-memorization required at all.

The game needed to, where practical, reflect reality at least to some extent.  To this end, rules were adopted to allow for critical hits and fumbles in combat; aiming of spell effects (thus can miss); re-rolling of initiative dice each round in combat – for each individual participant – to reflect the chaos of battle; and so on.  And training rules were adopted, such that one had to undertake a period of study or practice before gaining the full abilities of a new level; alongside this, rules to allow some untrained acquisition of experience points were developed as the AD+D rule requiring advancement to stop completely while awaiting training for a new level made no real sense.

The game needed to allow for a few more character archetypes by both race and class to allow players to play characters more in line with what they imagine.  The release of Unearthed Arcana provided a much-needed Knight archetype in the Cavalier class; by that time, the battle-oriented priest archetype had already found its place in the game through the in-house War Cleric class, and the Bard was in process of being redesigned so as to start at 1^st level like all the other classes.  Along this same line, the AD+D restrictions on what races could be what classes, and how far they could advance in said classes, were relaxed significantly and-or eliminated entirely; to compensate, some races had their benefits reduced slightly e.g. Elves were no longer automatically proficient and superior with sword and bow regardless of class.  Further, racial stat requirements were taken out and replaced with a system of bell-curve adjustments such that whatever was rolled for initial stats (Strength, Intelligence, etc.) could be slotted in to any race and still function.  For example, the bell-curve for all Human stats is 3-18 (the possible totals from rolling 3 six-sided dice) with an average of 10.5.  But a Dwarf is naturally stronger than a Human, thus their racial Strength range was determined to be about 8-19; a Dwarf with a rolled '3' in Strength would see it adjusted to '8'.  Many of these changes led to a slight increase in the time and effort required to create characters; but players generally found this not to be a detriment, as it only occurred once per character and added to the sense that this was a *role* playing game.

The races needed to make sense.  Gnomes in particular were difficult to tell apart from Dwarves, and thus they were made smaller (and Hobbits [aka "Halflings"] slightly larger) and nimbler to better distinguish them; in effect, Gnomes and Hobbits roughly switched places on the size charts.  Barbarian was made a sub-race of Human, to reflect the vast difference between civilization levels encountered in the historical melting pot – e.g. classical Greeks living a few hundred miles away from early-renaissance-era Spaniards, with crude Vikings (Barbarians) not far to the north – that these games tend toward.

And above all else, the game needed to be entertaining, both on the small scale and the large.  Not so much a rules change as an ongoing philosophy, where there's been a choice past or present between a dull outcome and a whimsical or amusing one, whimsy has tended to win out somewhat more often than random chance would dictate.  Wild magic, mis-aimed spells, weapons clanging into stone walls and breaking, characters of grandly-opposed alignments or ethics trying to operate in the same party (and occasionally killing each other; it's allowed) – all have been and are still facts of life in a Victoria Rules game…along, of course, with great heroism, swashbuckling derring-do, and the princely rewards that make the adventuring life worthwhile.  But it's not all good times; the game also needs an edge of risk and danger, and can and must in its ebb and flow sometimes be rather cruel to its characters and – by extension – players; and players are well warned of this on entering the game.  It was a player, in fact, that introduced the rest of us to a very apt philosophy for the game:  "Dungeons without mortality are dungeons without life."  On the large scale of entertainment, well, that's where the DMs – sometimes with great assistance from the players – come in: a long campaign gives all kinds of opportunity to tell not one good story but several, sometimes intertwined; and on the odd occasion we manage to pull it off the game almost takes on a life of its own.