A Matter of Inches

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: , ,

Tomb of Horrors room 13 “They are fast (12” move) and will continue biting…”
Once upon a long time ago there was CHAINMAIL.  When Gygax and Arneson discussed the creation of the OD&D rules, they agreed that it should be tied to CHAINMAIL, a game that many of their wargamer friends played.  This is referenced throughout the 3lbb’s such as in the statement “…functions are generally as indicated in CHAINMAIL where not contradictory to the information stated hereinafter…” Monsters and Treasures:5
Just about all the monsters in the CHAINMAIL fantasy supplement were ported into D&D, along with the movement stats for most of them.  For example,

critter
Chainmail Movement
OD&D Movement



Dwarf
6”
6”
Elf
12”
12”
Ent
6”
6”
Giant
12”
12”
Ogre
9”
9“
Orc
9”
9”


There were a couple tweaks (trolls were made a little faster) but for the most part, there you have it.
So, to know what 12” means, you simply convert to the scale:
“…the ground scale is 1":10 yards, and one turn of play is roughly equivalent to one minute of time in battle.” CM:8

Okay, an elf moves 120 yards in one minute, as do Longbowmen and swiss pikemen.  Orcs, Heavy Foot, and Turkish Bowmen move 90 yards a minute.

Real life average walking speed per minute is about 270 feet/90 yards (9”), but varies with age and gender, of course, so that a healthy, unencumbered man walking at a normal pace will cover about 120 yards (12”) in a minute.
CHAINMAIL’S rates are pretty realistic, and so by extension are D&D’s.
Except….
It seems that the majority of D&D players in the early 1970’s never owned CHAINMAIL or made much attempt to incorporate “not contradictory” information.
The 3lbb’s tell us that 1” equals 10 yards as in CHAINMAIL, but only outdoors.  In dungeons and so forth we switch to 1” equals 10 feet.  Okay so far…
Movement on the other hand has a special new rule:

“Movement (distances given in Vol. 1) is in segments of approximately ten minutes.  Thus it takes ten minutes to move about two moves — 120 feet for a fully armored character. Two moves constitute a turn, except in flight/pursuit situations where the moves/turn will be doubled (and no mapping allowed).
Time must be taken to rest, so one turn every hour must be spent motionless, and double the rest period must be taken after a flight/pursuit takes place.” Underworld and Wilderness Adventures:8
The introduction of this 10 minute turn, seemingly to require characters to rest once an hour, brought in a number of side issue and convinced many a D&D player that those 10 combat rounds must be a minute long each, since there was nothing to tell them otherwise and no indication of how long a combat round should be.
This new length of a Turn would be no big deal, except, nothing else in the game was set up with a ten minute turn in mind.  Problems arise.  For example none of the spell durations were changed.  Suddenly a one use detection spell lasting at most 6 minutes, now lasts for an hour.   A lot more could be said about this, but that’s not the horse I want to beat at the moment.

The problem of more relevance here is what happens to movement.  I’ve been forced to think through this stuff lately because I’ve been converting monsters from various eras to use in my OD&D games.  All of D&D from Holmes to the 1991 Blackbox, uses  a feet per 10 minute turn movement rate.  From the quote from UW&A, we see that a character in OD&D is supposed to move their movement rate in a 5 minute Move (1/2 ten minute Turn).   A fully armored character has a rate of 6” so that’s doubled to 12” in a 10 minute turn or as UW&A puts it "120 feet " underground.   Okay, this doubling of movement rate is only specified for character movement, but it’s as likely as not that the same rule would apply to all monsters and NPC’s as well.
Therefore:
To convert D&D rates to OD&D movement rates should be a matter of cutting the D&D rates in two and droping the zero.  120’ ought to directly port to 6” in OD&D and vice versa. 
AD&D is fairly straightforward; AD&D also uses the ten minute time interval and so its rates probably ought to be doubled too.
As it happens, it don’t work this way.


critter
OD&D Movement
D&D Movement
AD&D Movement




Dwarf
6”
60’
6”
Elf
12”
120’
12”
Ent
6”
60’
12”
Giant
12”
120’
12”
Ogre
9”
90’
9“
Orc
9”
120’
9”


So you can see there’s been a little bit of fiddling, but the only rate doubled is the Ent, and that only in D&D.
I take this to mean the “5 minute move” rule in OD&D conveniently applied only to characters (or else everybody just forgot it.)
I also take this to mean that to convert D&D movement back to CHAINMAIL rates the most that ever has to be done is drop a zero…. 
It’s been a perennial complaint that D&D time and movement rates are flawed, but it turns out they are dead easy to restore if you want to.  Probably the simplest is to ditch the snail pace ten minute turn and consider all turns to be 1 minute long.
For whatever reasons, Gygax liked the ponderous movement rates and coded them into his AD&D.  That’s history, but knowing what the intended movement rates were when they were first penned down provides the opportunity to put some verisimilitude back in the game.

9 comments

You Can’t Win.

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: ,

There was a question, several years back, on Finarvyns forum asking about characteristics of a Dave Arneson dungeon design.  Not a lot was said in response, but we did talk about architecture and monsters and such.  Something else just occurred to me; with the exception of the tournament module Haunted Lighthouse, more often than not, you can’t beat a Dave Arneson D&D dungeon, nor are you supposed to.
If you compare Temple of the Frog (1975), Blackmoor Dungeon (1977), Glendower (1977), Temple of ID (1977), The realm of the Egg of Coot, The city of Father Dragon (1977), The City of the Gods (as described in Robilars adventure), the sample Dungeon in AiF, Garbage Pits of Despair, or even the Comeback Inn (1986), The only one of these that a standard, mid-level party of adventurers could reasonably clean out was Glendower.
The rest were designed as limited objective, hit and run adventures.  There was no attempt to “balance” the “challenge level” to the party.  To truly take on these challenges would require a proper army (and a sandtable to play it out on.)  Instead, like the plot of many a commando and sci-fi movie, the small band of adventurers was expected to get in and get out with as much loot as they could manage.
No wonder one of the first things Dave came up with was the pursuit and evasion rules….

10 comments

Hit Points and Fatigue Rules

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: ,

A Paladin in a Citadel posted a thoughtful essay today on the lack of fatigue in D&D play.  She makes the case that this is a significant shortcoming and lays the blame on Gary Gygax for characterizing fatigue/stamina as a function of Hit Points.  As discussed last month here on this blog, Dave Arneson never had any intention of hit points representing fatigue. 
So why didn’t Dave give Gary a set of fatigue rules to work into D&D?  As UWSguy pointed out in a comment on Paladin’s ‘blog, the default fatigue rules for OD&D were assumed to be those of CHAINMAIL.  In CHAINMAIL, fatigue sets in after 5 turns (minutes) of movement, charging and moving, or  3 rounds of combat.
Fine as far as it goes.  However, the effects of Fatigue are very much in CHAINMAIL terms and have to be translated for D&D use.  Figuring out how to aplly “They attack at the next lower value (heavy foot = light foot).” (CM:11) isn’t exactly straightforward.

Also factoring in to the fatigue problem is OD&D's convoluted "Accumaltive Hits" paragraph which suggests the DM decide any side effects of damage.  “Whether sustaining accumulative hits will otherwise affect a character is left to the discretion of the referee.” (Men and Magic:18)

As it happens, in Supplement II Blackmoor, Dave answered that question, but again not with fatigue, with actual physical effects.  In his Hit Location system a hit could result in loss of movement, loss of dexterity and continued loss of hit points if left untreated.  This again illustrates Gygax had a very different concept of hit points than Arneson intended.  Supplement II’s hit location system suffers from unwanted complexity and the fact that with so few hit points to begin with, any such system will be extremely lethal.  Nevertheless, fatigue plays no role in Hit Points for Dave.

Unbeknownst to many, Dave Arneson in fact actually did provide specific rules for fatigue in combat for D&D.  Trouble is, he didn’t get around to doing so until 1986 and then published them in the obscure adventure Garbage Pits of Despair as follows: ”..reduce all movement by 1/3rd.  The men will all suffer a -1 on Dexterity and Strength for the duration of the combat.  These effects can be reversed by the usual magical means if such means are available.” (GPoD1:M3)
For the Fatigue rules in CoZ, I have combined those of CHAINMAIL with GPoD.

A Paladin in the Citadel's original post is here: http://apaladinincitadel.blogspot.com/2012/03/combat-fatigue-and-failure-of-gygax.html

5 comments

Tracing Magic Swords

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: ,

Zenopus comments have inspired me to post another old thread I wrote in relation to his asking about being able to date certain parts of the FFC.
Magic Swords is one of the trickier entries in the FFC, being not well organized and hard to follow, and not something most gamers are ever likely to have bothered with. 

There are actually two magic sword creation methods in the FFC "Magic Swords & Matrix" section, both quite different. The first is a list of ability categories, followed by the actual swords Arneson created using that list and wrote on index cards for the first or second year of his campaign using his Blackmoor rules of course.
The second, written "in the third year" under the heading of "Matrix" is a different and quite complex system.
On the face of it, given Arneson’s dating comments, the first of these methods should predate Gygax D&D, while the second could be either pre or post the publication of D&D, but should be within the Gygax era in any case.  Looking closer we see that the first magic swords list does indeed contain a lot of “weird” non D&Disms: +6 Appearance, Double Values, +9 combat increase, Magic Ability II, and so forth.  Many of them terms that are familiar from other early snippets.
 The second sword creation section from “the third year” is much more in line with D&D – but not quite.  In fact it turns out to be something Arneson must have developed in 1973 and submitted to Gygax during the writing/playtesting process.

How do I know this? -by clues left in the FFC text and by comparing it with the magical sword creation section in OD&D Monsters and Treasure pages 27-30.
Among the quirks found in the Arneson rules is a section describing the creation of Holy swords complete with “curate” not cleric spells.  The instructions further tell us “If the roll indicates no spel (I.e. such as a 5 on a level 4 curate….”  Not only is it weird that cleric spells are consistently referred to as curate spells, but in OD&D there are in fact 6 level 5 Cleric spells, so rolling a 5 would result in the sword having Speak with Plants.  No problem.
The only way these statements make sense in the otherwise fairly standard D&D approach of the sword matrix section is if they date to a time before OD&D's publication when clerics were referred to as curates and there were less than 5 level 4 cleric spells.  Interestingly, the D&D draft mss.(edit: Dalluhn mss) I’ve mentioned before, has clerics, just like OD&D, but it also only has 4 level 4 cleric spells….  Clearly the FFC swords text was prepared at a time during the writing process before those last two cleric spells were added to the level 4 list.

Yet, we can see these "Matrix" rules were written after there already existed at least a draft of the D&D rules because young Arneson references them several times, most explicitly in this statement. "Roll appropriate number of die on Spell Table in Magic Section of rules: Note that lower spells cannot be used for higher levels of magic but can be exchanged on a two for one basis for the next lower level of magic."
It follows that the FFC “Swords Matrix” section was written for Gary Gygax to add to one of his playtest drafts of D&D and not written after D&D was published.  We know Gygax got this sword section because the magic Swords section of M&T (p27-30) is, in fact, the same piece, steamlined and simplified and arguably quite improved by Gary, but clearly using much of Arneson's text and ideas while recasting some in his own fashion.  For example merging Arneson's several different type magic bonusues into two categories: ordinary and extroadinary powers.

Comparing the two texts side by side clearly shows the relationship between the two.  One example:

Arneson wrote:
"Should a player pick up a Sword that has Origins other than that of the player, that player cannot use that Sword. Also, if the player should pick up the Sword, then that player will suffer damage at the following rates: Law-Chaos- 2 die; Neutral-Law- 1 die; Neutral-Chaos- 1die; Chaos-Law - 2 die.

Minions that are directed to take up the Sword whose origins are different than that of the directing part and are not acting as free agents (i.e. they are under the player's power), will suffer damage at half the normal rates. In special cases (see Special Table), players may not suffer damage. may be forced to change sides, may be freed from any spells they are under, may lose or gain powers."

Rewritten by Gygax on pg M&T pg. 27 as:

"If a character picks up a sword which is not of the same alignment as he, damage will be taken as follows:

Law - Chaos: 2 Dice (2-12 points)
Neutrality-Law/Chaos: 1 Die (1-6 Points)

If a non-player character is directed to take up a sword the damage will be only one-half that stated above, for the party is not acting as a free agent. Additionally, the sword might cause the one who took it up to be freed from a spell, change alignment, or otherwise gain powers which would remove them from the service of their former master."

One cool thing about this is we get a direct look at Gygax's editing process. 

Interestingly this magic sword creation system survived - virtually unchanged and yet almost completely ignored in actual gaming - all the way through AD&D and the Rules Cyclopedia.

3 comments

Class or Career?

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: ,

Most of the discussions involving Classes in D&D revolve around arguments of legitimacy;  Should there be a Thief Class or a Witch class or an Amazon.  Proponents and detratctors argue on.
Many bring up the word “Archetypes”.  The Amazon is an archetype of fantasy and sci-fi etc., they will argue, and therefore it should be a class. 
The belief seems to be that there are a dozen or so archetypes out there that are suitable classes.  Defining those then gives the best choices for the game.  The debate then revolves around what is and is not the best examples of archetypes to use in play.  This is the path taken with the OD&D supplements, both the Greyhawk and Blackmoor campaigns and later with AD&D; not to mention countless other games. 

It's natural that gamers would likewise follow this trend, but the realization that many fail to make is that attempting  to restrict and define the classes on the basis of literary archetypes is an arbitrary and impossible task.  Evil stepmother, handsome prince, and wise old man are literary archytpes and could concievably be "classes".  There's hundreds, but that's typically not the sort of thing that gets made into a class. 
Lets be blunt; what is really being defined as classes are professions.  It doesn’t matter if these professions are attempts at copying literary “archetypes” or not.  Class write-ups – from at least the thief onward - are descriptions of particular, specific kinds of careers.
When character classes are professions, then there really is no logical cut off point.  Any kind of career path is potential grounds for a character class, provided you can find some way to get them out on an adventure.
Adventurer, Conqueror, King is possibly the first D&D game to acknowledge this up front, and, following in the footsteps of an inspired, but ultimately inadequate Dragon magazine article, has developed a much improved method of generating endless, custom character classes in a logical and game consistent fashion.
I’m not disparaging this approach.  It’s legitimate and fun, but it does open the door to endless rule generation, splat book creation and character type proliferation.  From a Game Masters perspective its a potentially a lot more to keep track of.
Proponents of classless skill based systems have a legitimate argument that its cleaner and simpler to do away with classes altogether.  I'm not disparaging that approach either.  Skill only systems are perfectly playable too, but they too are not without complexity issues.
However, there is another, different way to look at classes.  Not as archetypes or professions or anything of the sort, but rather as simply a broad classification. 
A rare few grognards  have pointed out that the original three classes – Fighter, Magic-user, Cleric – represent the three possible classifications adventuring people can fall into in a fantasy trope.  That is mudane only, magic only, and part magic/ part mundane.  In fact, the cleric magic/mundane mix, itself isn’t strictly necessary, but it’s useful if your world has – as is assumed in D&D – a different kind of divine magic.
Viewed this way, a class is a very basic and broad classification, not a profession.  Indeed, the original names of “Fighting Man” and “Magic User” and “Cleric” couldn’t possibly be more generic.  Using a class as classification approach de-emphasizes the meaning of “the classes”, which quickly became almost caste-like in D&D and keeps things much more manageable, familiar, and simple.  Characters could still be customized in all sorts of ways but the basic rules and class structure still apply without any question or confusion.     For me, that’s a big reason to like a two or three “class” only system.   

0 comments

Infamous Characters, and the history of levels in D&D

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: , ,

Levels are at the heart of D&D, from experience to combat to hit points - not to mention how much the term is used for other things, such as dungeon level and magic level.   Knowing when character levels came to be in the form familiar to us from the 1974 rules would go a long way to really understanding the development of the game.
We know Gary Gygax used the familiar numbered levels in his write-ups of the game from the winter of 1972/73 onward.  What's been unclear is if he invented them or inherited them from Dave Arneson.
We know that Dave invented the concept of levels and experience points, but the question has always been whether Dave’s levels were ever more than “Flunky. Hero, Superhero”, or if he also subdivided into 1-3rd level flunky, 4-7 level hero, etc.
There’s no doubt that Gary gave the names to each level (i.e. thaumaturgiest), but did he also come up with the numbers?
In Arneson’s First Fantasy Campaign there is the section titled  "Blackmoor's More Infamous Characters: Giving a breakdown on the sheets handed out to the players..."  Further Down it says "Krey turned traitor and joined Soukup... during the first year."  This is followed by a list of "Blackmoor Military Manpower" (good guys) and their Hit Dice which includes Krey and thus we know this list is from a very early period of gaming, before Krey turned traitor, but also apparently after Svenson's character had been promoted to superhero - perhaps the first quarter of 1972.
This list is followed by write-ups of "bad guy" infamous characters.  It is not at all clear if these write-ups are also supposed to be from the first year handouts or from later years or a mix of each.
There is a brief "table of contents" introducing the write-ups that is particularly interesting in that it  leaves out four entries: The Blue Rider, Svenny, Mello and the Bishop. These four are all the "good guys" and appear in the text sandwiched between the last and next to last entries mentioned in the brief “table of contents.”
Okay, so what?
We know that the Blue Rider, for example, contains information from adventures that took place in 1973, a time when the D&D playtest rules were being used, and not surprisingly, there’s no weird or UnD&D like terminology in any of these four write-ups.  So that would seem to indicate that all the write-ups date to 1973 or later, unless the four good guy write-ups were additions to an earlier handout.

Now if the four heroes are additions, and the brief table of contents was really the original list of an earlier handout, then it opens the possibility that the earlier handout also dates to the first year (1971/2).  Another clue suggesting the four hero's are added to an earlier "bad guy" handout, is that the afformentioned Captain Krey is not on the list.  If the bad guy handout was made before his character turned traitor, it's sure he wouldn't be on it.  In any case, the bad guy write-ups are worth investigating to see if they indicate pre Gygax information. 
So, looking deeper we find these clues:
Intro:
“level fourteen Lord”
Egg of Coot:
“Level II intelligence”
Alchemical spell magic (non-Vancian)
Ran of Ah Foo
Alchemical spell magic (non-Vancian)
Ran is dual class
            Class: Warrior (not fighter) “skill” Level 10
            Class: Magic (not Magic-user) 10th Level
Dragon types being bred by Ran include Red and Gold dragons at “Max Level”.  D&D dragons are not graded by level.
Rans assistant is “Level 7 Warrior and Magic”
Description includes many wargaming notes, including a modifier for “morale condition” perhaps ala Don’t Give up the Ship.  There is no such thing as “morale condition” in D&D.
Gin of Salik
Alchemical spell magic (non-Vancian)
Marfeltd the Barbarian, Duke of the Peaks, Final Notes
Nothing pertaining to D&D.  Many more Wargaming references.
These “bad guy” write-ups listed in the “table of contents” show very clearly they were prepared before Gygaxian D&D introduced the concepts of Vancian Magic, named levels, and terms like “fighting-men” and "Magic-user", at a time when monsters were still graded by “level” rather than “Hit Dice”, at a time when Level II intelligence meant something and wargaming was very much a factor in the minds of the players.  They must therefore date to 1972 at the latest, and are pre-D&D, just like the Blackmoor Military Manpower listing that precedes it on the page.  Indeed, it may very well have been part of the same 1972 handout.  Note that no mention is made of Clerics either, further suggesting an early date, possibly as early as fall 1971.
We see then that Dave developed two “skill” classes, that of Warrior and Magic and divided each into at least 14 levels.  We know that heroes and superheroes were still meaningful terms, and we see “Lord” used here also.  So it follows that Dave had divided Flunky, Hero, Superhero, Lord into the familiar levels 1-3, 4-7, 8-10, 11-14 or something like that, very early on, and in any case, long before he introduced Gary Gygax to the game.   

6 comments

The meaning of Hit Points

Author: DHBoggs / Labels:

I just finished reading a series of posts on hit points.  I'm not going to bother to link it, because there are many such posts and discussions and they are all more or less the same.

Hit points are a thorny issue and have been so since way back when.  The barbs jabbing at the minds of so many involve the realization that characters with high hit points can survive seemingly impossible situations - a hail of arrows for example.  After all, if a single arrow can kill a peasant, why does it take 10 to kill a fighter?

This question popped up often enough that Gygax wrote several essays about it, including the description in the DMG, p82.  His explanation is always the same: Hit points represent fatigue, luck and physical toughness, all three, and a trick or two besides. 

Folks have wrestled with this answer ever since.  Some have tried to break it down into some kind of fatigue damage, vs. physical damage, etc.  Others have argued that there are contradictions in this explanation, particularly as regards monster HP. 

Despite the messiness, I never let it worry me much as a game mechanic, but the thread I just read wondered how Constitution should or should not affect Hit Points at each level, given the physical vs. fatigue aspect, and that seemed like a really legitimate question, given Gygax's definition.

The course out of this muddle begins with a simple realization:

Gygax was wrong.

Now, to those crying foul, I would point to a simple fact: Gygax had no more authority to talk about the meaning of Hit Points than Traci Hickman, Monte Cook, or Mike Mearls do.   What I mean is that while he was certainly a very involved game designer - almost certainly the most involved in the '70s - in the D&D world, he didn't invent the concept of Hit Points.  His explanation is his opinion.  It is not the explanation of the designer.

Dave Arneson created the idea (and the label) of Hit Points.  Dave Arneson didn't have a lot to say about what Hit Points meant.  Luckily, if we look closely, its not too hard to figure out what he thought about them.

In the FFC he wrote "As the player progressed, he did not receive additional Hit Points, but rather he became harder to Hit"

For Dave, Hit points were a fixed number.  In original Blackmoor, Arneson was a bit more nuanced than the above suggests so that while characters still received a fixed number of points, it grew greater at each level, but the principle in the second part of that statement "became harder to Hit" is really the most interesting.  Arneson's thinking was that going up in level equaled increased ability to survive.  Ability to survive - the characters defense against death - is wrapped in three stats: Saving Throws, Armor Class, and Hit Points.

Armor Class has its limits.  It's not much fun if characters and monsters are statistically invulnerable to being hit.  The same limitations apply to saving throws.  Hit Points are a lot more flexible.

For Arneson, all three of these were subject to situational modification.  Armor Class and Saving Throws could get a bonus of +1 to +4, and that's still common in D&D.  Hit Point "values" (as he sometimes wrote it) were even more fluid; they changed from situation to situation.  Arneson’s early gaming material often mentions "double (or more) values".  the 1975 version of Temple of the Frog makes it clear that the key "defense value" of Hit Points could be doubled, trebled, even sextupled; ToTF: Pg 45. Breeding pond frogs “fight at Double value for 2-12 rounds” – but 3 hit points are the only value given; Pg 47. “double strength and HIT POINT VALUES”. (emphasis mine)

When Arneson created Hit Points for monsters and characters he didn't intend them to represent a one to one amount of physical damage a creature could take, or a one to one amount of luck or fatigue.  They didn't represent anything concrete and interchangeable at all.  Hit Points were a fluid abstraction for how many dice pips it took to turn it from living to dead or free to subdued.   This amount could change from situation to situation based on the creatures willingness and ability to fight, mostly.

In short, 1 Hit Point does not equal 1 Hit Point.  The value of a point is circumstantial and fluid and not the same from situation to situation or creature to creature.

This means that a human with 60 HP isn't somehow super duper lucky and imbued with bullet proof skin.  It means that they have become really good at mitigating damage, like Conan, they take scratches where lesser skilled individuals take egregious wounds.  Ten Hit Points for them is like one to a normal person.   
               

7 comments

Why not

Author: DHBoggs /

This survey took a lot longer than I thought it would http://www.easydamus.com/character.html

Neutral Good Human Ranger/Sorcerer (3rd/3rd Level)



Ability Scores:
Strength- 16
Dexterity- 15
Constitution- 14
Intelligence- 17
Wisdom- 18
Charisma- 14

Alignment:
Neutral Good- A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Primary Class:
Rangers- Rangers are skilled stalkers and hunters who make their home in the woods. Their martial skill is nearly the equal of the fighter, but they lack the latter's dedication to the craft of fighting. Instead, the ranger focuses his skills and training on a specific enemy a type of creature he bears a vengeful grudge against and hunts above all others. Rangers often accept the role of protector, aiding those who live in or travel through the woods. His skills allow him to move quietly and stick to the shadows, especially in natural settings, and he also has special knowledge of certain types of creatures. Finally, an experienced ranger has such a tie to nature that he can actually draw on natural power to cast divine spells, much as a druid does, and like a druid he is often accompanied by animal companions. A ranger's Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

Secondary Class:
Sorcerers- Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

0 comments

The Chance of Discovery

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: ,

In the original rules, travel through the wilderness calls for a check for wandering monsters once “at the end of each day”, with the odd caveat that seaborne encounters will occur in the middle of the day.   
So you roll the dice.  If you get a monster you check the % in Lair to see if our intrepid adventurers have stumbled on a lair or encountered some non lair or out of lair troublemakers.
That’s a workable method.  The trouble is that it lacks any granularity with regards to the map.  What I mean is that characters may be traveling 3, 4 or more hexes in a day.  So where does this encounter take place?
If it is truly at the end of the day, presumably as characters prepare to camp or lodge for the night, then it will obviously be in the last hex traveled in.  If on the other hand the encounter occurs at midday, then one of the other hexes must be picked and travel halted at that point.
Referee’s can do this.  They can pick a hex, either randomly or deliberately for the encounter, and again this is a workable method; But it is not a very sharp method.
When I first started to work on the “evasion” table, it was less than clear to me what exactly it was intended to do.  One description of it – I think it was in AiF – said it was “the chance to avoid an encounter”.  This set me to thinking, as they say.  While I think the major intent of the evasion table was originally for hexcrawl chases in the Wilderness, there was a flexibility there (as with almost everything in OD&D) to apply it to other “surprise” situations.
Now if the chance of party A to avoid party B is 70%, then conversely, the chance of Party B to find party A is 30%.
Viola! The Chance of Discovery.  Rather than rolling once a day regardless of how far a group has traveled and backtracking to figure out where an encounter may be, Champions of ZED gives the Referee the option of checking each hex as the PC’s pass through.  For each new hex entered, a roll is first made to check for lair encounters using % in Lair, followed by roll(s) on the Chance of Discovery column made for all “wandering” groups in the area.  If an encounter is indicated, the Referee then check surprise.
Using the method is optional, of course, but it is an example of how the original rules can be stretched a bit when needed to cover more than the obvious situation and give a little more granularity to hex travel.   

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Designers and Dragons - only $49.95!

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: ,

Note: Since I take the subject very seriously, I've decided to replace my original post with a fuller and expanded review.  The contenets are much the same however and the original can be viewed as my post on enworld.

Earlier today on the OD&D forum, and then again on Enworld here http://www.enworld.org/forum/press-releases-announcements/312556-mongoose-designers-dragons-history-rpg-industry.html

was posted an exciting announcement from Mongoose.  A new history of the RPG industry has been published.  Immediately I wondered if Dr. Rob Macdougall had finally published.  Of course, that wasn't a very logical thought given the publisher in question.  But honestly I've always thought pretty well of Mongoose; at least they seem to be an aggressive success story in the industry and while I only have two of thier Conan books (Betrayer of Asgard and the Stygia sourcebook) I think they are pretty cool.  Unfortunetly it's dead obvious they are out of their depth with this attemp at history.


The book, Designers and Dragons, has available a 7 page preview. I am actually only discussing the prieview here, it was enough for me to see the character of the book.

A history book, in the modern sense, will contain the fruits of carefull scholarship. It will have many references and footnotes in an appendix discussing sources and details. In other words the author will "show the work", behind it. It will also be fact checked. This is when a publisher sends the book to credible readers who will double check, to the extent that they can, the assertions of the book.

Mr. Appelcline and Mongoose Publishing have very obviously done none of these things.

The preview contains several pages discussing the Origin of the Dungeons & Dragons game. As it happens, I'm an archaeologist with an avid interest in that subject and have researched it extensively, including talking with a number of the people involved. So I'm pretty well versed.

There's no question that RPG history owes a great deal to a man named David Wesely, and Appelcline does indeed mention him, or I think it must be him, but Wesely's name is repeatedly misspelled (something a fact checker would have noticead right off)

Imagine a History of the United States starting with Georg Washingtown.

Wesely ran - and still runs from time to time - a game set in a fictional town of Braunstein. Appelcline labels Braunstein as Napoleonic, but then says Dave Arneson - Co Creator of D&D - started running Braunstein and changed it to many types of settings. While Dave did run a Braunstien - he called it Blackmoor - it was Wesely himself who started changing the setting to different locals and set most of his games in a fictional, modern day Banana Republic, not the Napoleonic period.

This may seem like a minor fauxpaux but since nothing is referenced, the reader is left to assume that Appelcline is relaying accurate information.

It gets worse, much worse.

"Various sources describe Arneson visiting Gygax, Gygax visiting Arneson, or the two meeting at GenCon IV (1971)."

This is pure non-sense. All the people directly involved who have said anything about it have told exactly the same story - including, Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz, and Megarry. Megarry and Arneson went to Lake Geneva in late fall of 1972. (November, according to Mr. Kuntz). Megarry went to showcase his Dungeon boardgame and Mr. Arneson went to help him and run "a Blackmoor" for Mr. Gygax. "Other sources", meaning fan speculation and half forgotten comments from third parties, have no credibility in the matter.

This is really basic reasearch 101 stuff. The correct information can be gotten directly by asking the surviving participants or can be found without much trouble using a search engine.

Next we have this lovely sttement:

"Whatever the case, in that 1971 meeting Gygax and Arneson decided to jointly design a game that incorporated their ideas of fantasy realms and individual player characters. They called it ... `The Fantasy Game'."

There is exactly nothing true in any of the above. Gygax asked Arneson for his rules so they could "jointly design" Dungeons and Dragons in the tail end of 1972 after experiencing a delve into Blackmoor Dungeon as a player. They did not put their head together and decide to jointly design a fantasy game in 1971. Far from it, Arneson had been running his RPG for nearly two years before Gygax got involved with the game.


Further - in an interview on the very website that Mr. Appelcline founded and manages http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/lynch01may01.html - Gygax emphatically denied that "The Fantasy Game" was ever an actual name for the game. Here's the quote "As an aside, I must laugh at some comment I saw about the name for the game being "The Fantasy Game" until someone "wised me up". Having been employed as an Editor-in-Chief, selecting what game rules and games would be published by Guidon Games since the beginning of 1971, I was well aware of the need to use a working title, the need for some caution in regards using the actual name for a a projected game release. So that's the reason for that bland one on the draft works."

Appelcline seems to cavalierly ignore the information on his own website! "They" never called it "The Fantasy Game" Gygax merely put that on an early draft as a placeholder. Arneson, as it happens, had an entirely different title in mind, but that is another story.

Here's yet another unchecked and unsited "fact": We all know - at least those who have seen the circa 90 page reformatted versions of the 3 LBB's - that Gygax's figure of 150 typewritten pages (or 300 !! as claimed in his Dragon #7 article) for the final playtest manuscript of D&D is an um... overestimate - yet Appelcline states it as simple fact without citing any source or giving any hint it might be otherwise.

That nearly ends the preview and its enough for me to shake my head in wonder at what can be published as history with a straight face and a less than inexpensive pricetag. This book doesn't even meet the most basic standards of journalism, let alone historical inquiry.

I imagine there might be a lot of good information in the book, particularly as it gets closer to the present, but with such sloppy scholarship and lack of decent references, who's to know what parts can be trusted?

4 comments

Baskets of Notes

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: ,

Was just looking at some old post and thinking about how far we've come in getting a better handle on those early days of D&D. 

For a very long time, just about everyone, myself included, bought into the message to varying degrees that Arneson was a hack who got more than he deserved.   Twas said he couldn’t write, didn’t write and was just some sloppy idea guy guilty of sour grapes.

Of course, old Dave really was a decent and kind gentleman and actually a pretty good writer, and his writings, if somewhat obscure, are clear and cogent.  Check out Trapman, DNA/DOA or Longtooth Lounge, for examples.

A lot of hay has been made over Tim Kask talking about the difficult task he faced when handed a “basketful of notes” that contained an apparently haphazard collection of materials for Supplement II.

Dave likely was a bit haphazard with his notes but the whole thing with Supplement II "basket of notes" is misleading.

Baskets holding project materials were standard operating proceedure at TSR in the early days, so the Supplement II notes were no different from any other project in that regard.  Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the basket in question had been collected and futzed over for some time by Brian Blume as the original editor on the project.  Indeed, it was Blume who tossed in the monk character.  Its likely that the material Arneson had mailed in contained a manuscript and table of monsters (the Giant creatures), the Hit location section, the TotF, The disease section, and a character class manuscript with Assasin and Sage, and a few things Kask cut out.  Among the cut material was probably the "Special Interests" and "Investments" sections Arneson included in The First Fantasy Campaign.  The rest of the material likely was a jumble of notes from Brian Blum and disparate materials written by Steve Marsh.  Its not fair to blame Arneson for that.  Tim Kask has made no secret of his feelings towards Arneson, so it is not surprising that his readers infer the basket of notes to be a defect peculiar to DA.  In any case it is to Tims credit that he pulled it all together into a fascinating little book.

 For anyone interested in exploring the make -up of SII further, I have a post on the authorship of various sections HERE. 

4 comments

Secrets of Monster Manual

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: , ,

The AD&D Monster Manual occupies an interesting space in D&D history.  Interesting because it was published years before the rules for the “Advanced” game itself.  Mike Carr’s 1977 introduction – only 3 years after D&D was published and roughly contemporary with Arnesons publication of the FFC – mentions D&D 13 times to AD&D’s 4 times.
Its been observed that the MM falls somewhere between OD&D and AD&D in conformity to the rules, and many regard it as an OD&D supplement with a few extras and indeed, for several years until the publication of the AD&D players handbook, it effectively was.
Mostly, that’s just an artifact of curiosity, but there exists on page five and the top of page 6 a mostly forgotten and rarely sited section called “Explanatory Notes” by Gary Gygax.  This little section has information not found in other OD&D or AD&D books (excepting Dieties and Demigods, where it is largely repeated verbatim), that goes a long way to clarifying the intentions behind a number of the OD&D monster stats that directly relate to in game play choices.  In Particular:
FREQUENCY:  Now this is an interesting stat.  For example, we are told a rare creature has an 11% chance of appearing in an “area or region”.   This seems to be unused information.  I suppose you could look at the tables of all the creatures that might be in a given kind of area – mountains lets say – roll percentiles repeatedly until you had narrowed the creatures to one “frequency” type - Rare lets say - and then roll against the list of rare creatures to find the one encountered.  I don’t think anybody really did this nor do I get the sense that the random encounter tables in the DMG are really keyed with this stat in mind (although they could be, I dunno).
NUMBER APPEARING:  Not explained.  We are told it is an “average” “guideline””to be altered … as the need arises”.  We are also told “It is not generally recommended for use in establishing the population of Dungeon Levels.”
So, what does it represent?  Well, looking back to Frequency, we could safely assume the number appearing is the population in “a region or area where it might be an inhabitant”.  This could mean a “region” of a dungeon level, presumably but not usually an entire level.
The alternative meaning is that Number Appearing is how many monsters would be randomly encountered if PCs stumbled onto them as wandering monsters.  This is how many have understood it.
Hmm, lets look a little further and see if there are more clues.
% IN LAIR:  We’ve looked at this one back in August, but here is something else interesting “…where it domiciles and stores its Treasure.  If a monster encountered is not in its lair it will not have any treasure unless it carries “individual” treasure…”
Which ties in to:
TREASURE:  these are the types listed on a table which can appear with a monster listing.  About these types Gygax writes that they “… are only found in lairs of monsters as found above.”; and “The use of treasure type to determine the treasure guarded by a creature in a dungeon is not generally recommended.”
So
Frequency covers “an area or region”
and
Treasure Types are meant for the domicile (Lair) in an area or region, not an individual creature and not as an isolated dungeon treasure of the sort used when placing a monster in a room.
Therefore
Number Appearing should represent the creatures who will have the assigned treasure type in an area or region.  Otherwise, there is a guide given for region, a lair, and treasure to be found, but none for how many inhabitants may be found there.  If somehow the Number Appearing was not meant to function in harmony with the other stats but referred to wandering, out of lair encounters it would make more sense to list individual treasures for the wanderers, not lair treasures for the unknown number of the “domicile” population.

6 comments

The Book of Elder Magic

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: ,

is now available here http://sites.fastspring.com/apriorcrs/product/thebookofeldermagic

and in print on Lulu.

So, what's this thing Boggs?  Well, it started as a fairly obvious idea: convert all the spells from Dragons at Dawn and Supplement into use for OD&D and then collect them (the non redundant ones anyway) together with all the OD&D spells prepared for Champions of ZED.  Create a nice little booklet for use at the table.  This was something I wanted for my games.  So that's what I started to do.  Then I thought, "Hey, the Dave Arneson Blackmoor books have OGL spells and some of them are kinda cool, why not convert them to OD&D so they get some use in the OSR?"  So I went through the Blackmoor books and started picking cherries.

Then I thought "Hmm, what about Dave's players creations - Fred Funks Freds World, Richard Sniders Powers and Perils, and Dave Megarry's Pentantastar?  And there's still a bit left to mine out of Adventures in Fantasy too...."  For Freds World I got permission to use a few spells; the others, being very different systems and being non OGL material could not be direct sources, but could serve as sources of inspiration in a few instances.

I ended up with a whoping lot of spells.  There's some 57 pages worth.

For good measure, I also threw in some of D@D supplement I magic notes, adapted to OD&D play; the reworked and expanded section on Spell Books from Holmes to Level 12, and the Dragons at Dawn spell magic redone as an Alchemist class, matching Arneson's brief notes on the class.

It's good stuff, and directly portable into any of the Classic or OD&D retroclones.  I'll be getting a lot of use out of this one, and maybe some of you will too.

P.S.
I's in standard (US) 8.5 * 11 paper size, because that seemed the most practical.  I'll be converting my pdf to booklet when I print, so I left the font big enough (11 point) so as to still be legible, for those who may wish to do the same.

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Rescue Lotsa!

Author: DHBoggs / Labels: , ,

I hope everyone had as great a holiday weekend as I did.  This weekend was the annual Council of Five Nations – the worlds second oldest gaming convention after Gencon, so they say – held by the Schenectady Wargamers Association, and it was a blast.  I ran two events and participated in another – a playtest of Adventurer, Conqueror, King run by Tavis Allison.
I’m not much for after action reports for game sessions.  My eyes tend to glaze over when I try to read them and I write them even less often.  But such a great weekend deserves a little tale telling.
The First game I ran was a Dragons at Dawn event recreating one of the earliest Blackmoor adventures.  In 1971 Dave Wesely was home on leave from the army and joined Dave Arneson and the Boys on an expedition into the dungeons of Blackmoor.  Orcs had recently driven out Baron Fant and taken over the place.  Somehow they had also managed to kidnap Lotsa, daughter of the Elven king.  The elves promptly surrounded the place with an army and offered 10,000 GP and marriage to Lotsa (temporarily) to any rescuer.
For players I had only one of my usual D@D crowd, but once we had all our characters rolled up and the stragglers all setteled we got off to a great start.  SWA’s resident grognard (played D&D since 74) led the gang as Atroz the hedge knight and wasted little time with all the obvious passages and quickly discovered the elevators in the basement pillars.
I won’t do a step by step, but its fascinating to watch an experienced group of players make all the right moves and use the right tools to get the job done.  I guessed finding Lotsa in a 20 level dungeon might be a bit challenging, but the wizard used a location spell to discover an object known to have been in Lotsa’s possession when she disappeared.  A captured orc in the general area and use of a ward on a passageway to block the chasing hordes, and a tranqulize spell on a unruly Lotsa are some of the highlights.  In short, mission accomplished and a great time had by all.  Oh, and twas the lady wizard who won the bride….
Mention should also be made of the next game I ran.  Dave Arneson’s Haunted Lighthouse using OD&D, CoZ rules.  That was interesting in that I had 11 players at the table, 4 of whom were youngsters with their parents.  Again, efficient play ruled the day with the group sussing out and destroying the baddie (Atroz pushed him off a ledge into the nethervoid) with only one fatality.
And to round out the Blackmoor goodness of the con, Travis, unbeknownst to me, set his ACKS playtest in Blackmoor dungeon.  I might be proud to say that the humble Mage I played was one of only two characters to survive, escaping unscathed, except that was mostly due to hiding in the back and running like heck.  At least I wasn’t the player who managed to get killed twice by the same monster…..    Good Times.

1 comments

Zac's combat challenge

Author: DHBoggs / Labels:

So I tried posting this as a comment on Zacs blog for this post http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/09/does-system-matterto-rancor.html

But for reasons unknown to me it just won't post.  What the heck, I'll just put it here.

Fun Challenge

Dragons at Dawn (Dave Arneson tribute game)
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/dragons-at-dawn/16163330
Luke is a Hero level Priest , Monk subclass, Order of the Jedi
Level 4, HD 2+1, HPV 8.  He is unarmored, therefore AC1,  Scores: Appearance 6; Brains 8; Cunning 8; Dexterity 9; Health 8; Strength 7; 

Rancor is apparently a non regenerative variety of true troll or something like it with the ability to swallow victims, so well give him (her?) an AC 6, HD12, HPV 46, Dexterity 5.

Gammoriean – why bother. 1 HD AC4 (leather).
Note: because the Rancor is a stupid beast, the Referee does not apply any level adjustment benefits that might otherwise be due to a 12 HD combatant facing a 4 HD combatant.

Round 1

The gammorrean falls into the pit.  The Referee decides to begin the Gamorrean at “disrupted” morale state – Rolls a failure and the Gamorean is now “routed” for 18 rounds.

Luke falls into the pit.  He is not hurt but is surprised for one round and the Referee applies a penalty to his Morale roll.  He fails, and drops one step to “shaken” for 2 rounds (minutes). (at Luke’s level, Morale rolls are optional for players, but we will assume the Ref likes to use them.)

The Rancor easily passes his morale roll and attacks the Gamorean.  Size is the only modifier that applies (12/10 = 1.2 rounded to +1) in the Gammorean’s favor, but being routed, receives only ¼ of Fighting Strength (1HD +1)/(4)  - Resulting in “Less than 1 FS” or  12 FS vs  >1 on the matrix.  This means the Rancor only needs an 11 or less on 2d6 to hit.  The roll is good; the Gammorean is hit.  Being generous, the Ref allows an Armor Class Saving throw for the Gamorean (AC4), but rolls a 5.  The Gammorean is knocked down, scooped up  and quickly eaten.

Meanwhile, The Priest (Luke), picks up a bone , retreats,  and surveys the room for details.

Round 2

Rancor: The Rancor, still possessing the Morale advantage, attempts to grab Luke.  The Referee, considers the situation and asks the Priests player to make a 2d6 dex roll at -4.  Despite Luke’s excellent dexterity (9), the roll fails and the Rancor has him and gives a good squeeze (lets say 1d6 damage – about 3 HPV) to soften him up before devouring.

Luke:  the Priest/Monk however, decides  not to attack with the bone, realizing the most he could possibly do – assuming a successful hit and 6’s on all damage die – would be 14 points of damage.  Instead he decides to jam it in the Rancor’s mouth to prevent being eaten.  The Referee considers the action and requests a Dex roll at -1.  A 6 is rolled and the move is declared successful.

Luke is dropped. The Referee allows a saving throw vs. Health (just to mix it up), but Luke’s player rolls high (a 10) and fails the roll.  Since the drop isn’t very far, the Referee rolls 1d4 for damage and gets 2 -  bringing Luke’s total down to 3 HPV.

Round 3

Luke’s Moral has now returned to normal.  The Referee decides a new Morale Throw should be made.  Both the Rancor and the Priest pass, but Luke’s roll is much higher.  The Referee decides a momentum shift has occurred and grants Luke the initiative.

Luke: Luke throws a rock at the Rancor, an activity at which he is quite skilled (+4),  requiring a combat roll.  Luke gains a +1 for size modifier, +4 for Dexterity (9-5 = 4), giving a total adjustment of +5 to FS.  Added to his 2 + 1  HD, Luke gets an FS of 7 vs. the Rancor’s FS of 12.  On the matrix, 7 vs. 12 requires a 3 or better to hit.  Adding Luke’s skill bonus, that become a 7 or better.  Lukes’ player rolls a 6, hitting the Rancor. Using the split move allowed to shooters, Luke now backs away from the Rancor, opening a door and moving into the next room.

Rancor: as Luke backs away, the beast attempts another grab.  Luke’s player makes a successful save vs. dexterity.

Round  4

Luke:  the Priest attempts to open a barred doorway – the Referee looks at the Priest’s strength score and declares an automatic failure.   Instead the player opts to use a projectile “split move” again (move and shoot), and declares Luke will pick up a rock throw it at the Portcullis controls as the Rancor passes under.  Throwing against a nearby stationary object would normally require a Dexterity Throw, but given Luke’s throwing skill and his high dexterity, he cannot miss.

Rancor:   The Rancor is slowed by the confined space but begins to enter the second room just as Luke throws the rock.  The Referee does not bother to calculate the damage as portcullis through the brain is fatal even to Rancor kind.

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Game Archaeologist/Anthropologist, Scholar, Historic Preservation Analyst, and a rural American father of three.
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