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…