Fixing Weapons vs. Armor Class

Posted on by Joshua Macy

At the risk of turning this into a blog for commenting on Delta’s blog, here are some thoughts on a post of his back in March about the big error in the infamous Greyhawk and AD&D Weapons vs AC charts.

Basically, Dan observed that there’s a fundamental error in the way the chart was derived from Chainmail to convert it to the d20 “alternative” combat system in original Dungeons and Dragons (specifically the Greyhawk supplement), and that chart was just reproduced and elaborated on in AD&D. The error was in converting Chainmail’s chart showing with this weapon vs. this type of armor roll this number on 2d6 to kill the target into D&D’s roll this on d20 to hit the target, they forgot to adjust for the armor class! Basically, the difficulty of hitting the armor is baked into the Chainmail table, but it’s a completely separate consideration in OD&D, so that e.g. in Chainmail a mace has pretty much the same chance of killing regardless of armor (roll 8 or better), that’s presented in Greyhawk as a mace has no bonus vs. any particular armor so the mace gets worse and worse chance of hitting as armor gets better! Oopsie.

So what would a “correct” version of the Weapon vs. AC chart for Greyhawk look like? That is, one that preserves the logic worked into the Chainmail chart as to which weapons are better against which armors, which seem to have at least rough approximation of what weapons historically were preferred against which prevailing types of armor.

The Chainmail Man-to-Man combat chart looks like this:

Armor Class
No ArmorLeatherShieldLeather+
Shield		ChainChain+
Shield		PlatePlate+
Shield
Weapon98765432
Dagger67889101212
Hand Axe778910101112
Mace88898878
Sword7889891011
Battle Axe888877910
Morn. Star66776788
Flail77776767
Spear889910101112
Pole arms666778910
Halbard88876678
2 Hnd. Swd66665567
Mtd. Lance55556789
Pike888888910
Chainmail Man-to-Man combat

The first thing we have to deal with is all the target numbers in this chart represent kills; in Chainmail there were no hit-points or variable weapon damages. So this chart represents both the deadliness of the weapon and its ability to penetrate various types of armor.

What I’m going to do is assume that the relative deadliness of the weapon is represented by the target number vs. unarmored men, while the penetration ability of the weapon vs the various armors is thus the difference between its “normal” ability to kill an unarmored man and its lessened ability to kill armored men. This normalization gives the following chart of how much worse a weapon is against the various ACs relative to its ability to kill an unarmored man; we’ll presume that in D&D that ability to kill an unarmored man is represented by the weapon damage, from d4 to d12 or whatever.

Armor Class
No ArmorLeatherShieldLeather+
Shield		ChainChain+
Shield		PlatePlate+
Shield
Weapon98765432
Dagger0-1-2-2-3-4-6-6
Hand Axe00-1-2-3-3-4-5
Mace000-10010
Sword0-1-1-2-1-2-3-4
Battle Axe000011-1-2
Morn. Star00-1-10-1-2-2
Flail00001010
Spear00-1-1-2-2-3-4
Pole arms000-1-1-2-3-4
Halbard00012210
2 Hnd. Swd0000110-1
Mtd. Lance0000-1-2-3-4
Pike000000-1-2
Normalized

So here we see the relative values of armor against a given weapon. Against a mace, no armor really helps, though leather + shield is a tiny bit better than unarmored and plate is a tiny bit worse. Swords, though, quickly become ineffective against heavier armors, which take a two-handed sword to punch through. Mounted lances and spears are almost completely ineffective against plate + shield combination. This all seems plausibly historically accurate.

Finally, though, we have to convert this to d20, taking into account the way armor class is worked into the target number to hit on a d20 (the crucial step the author(s) of that section of Greyhawk forgot). This yields the following chart of modifiers that preserve the penetrating power of weapons from the Chainmail rules:

Armor Class
No ArmorLeatherShieldLeather+
Shield		ChainChain+
Shield		PlatePlate+
Shield
Weapon98765432
Dagger00011101
Hand Axe01111222
Mace01224577
Sword00113333
Battle Axe01235655
Morn. Star01124445
Flail01235577
Spear01122333
Pole arms01223333
Halbard01246777
2 Hnd. Swd01235666
Mtd. Lance01233333
Pike01234555
Weapon vs Armor Adjustment Corrected

And here we see, as intended, against an unarmored foe a 1st level Fighting Man armed with a mace would need to roll a 10 to hit, and against somebody with plate + shield would need… a 10 to hit. (To Hit of 17 from the Men Attacking Matrix in original D&D, with a bonus on the roll of +7) Armed with a dagger he’d need the same 10 to hit an unarmored man, but a 16 vs plate armor + shield.

Is it worth it? Frankly, I have my doubts. If Gygax himself never bothered with it, it’s hard to see the added complication of the table lookup every time you switch weapons or foes (assuming they’re not all equipped identically) adds that much. On the other hand, it is kind of logical that you ought to prefer the weapons that were historically favored against particularly heavy armors. One thing that is clear to me, though, is that if you want to have that kind of mechanic in your game you’re better off starting with the Chainmail assumptions and not their mistranslation.

Cleaving Attacks

Posted on by Joshua Macy

Dan Collins of Delta’s D&D Hotspot has a new post on what he calls “Cleaving Through the Ages”, where he goes into the history of making multiple attacks against low-level foes through every edition of D&D, as well as the pre-history in Chainmail. And an exhaustive round-up it is, too. Without repeating it here, the basic idea is that ever since Chainmail, every edition has had some variant of a rule that allowed Fighters (and usually only Fighters) to plow through multiple opponents in a round. Among other observations, this turns out to be an important balancing factor in very early editions between the PCs and the huge numbers, into the hundreds, of 1 Hit Die enemies they might encounter in the wilderness according to the standard encounter charts. In Chainmail and OD&D, a heroic figure could attack as many 1 Hit Die enemies as the hero had Hit Dice (more or less, you can see Dan’s post for the gory details), potentially eliminating them all at once.

Later editions tended to tone it down, and often made it contingent upon success: If you hit the enemy and you killed the enemy, then you could immediately try to hit another adjacent enemy until you either failed to kill one or ran out of enemies. It’s this version that’s usually called “Cleave” in D&D and its kin. Personally I like the name “Sweep” since that’s what we used to call it back in the day.

There are a couple of problems with this, but for me the biggest one has always been it just takes too long to resolve at the table. One PC getting multiple actions on a turn always has the potential to make things drag, and it’s exacerbated when there’s potentially a big disparity in the number of actions. An 8th-level fighter getting 8 attacks vs a wizard’s one (maybe) spell can drag on, and making it so that they have to be resolved in order and you have to determine for each attack how much damage it did and whether that kills the foe before making the next attack and then updating the HP on the final foe makes the worst case even worse, even if often it’ll cut the round short before every last foe is attacked.

On the other hand, something along those lines has been part of every edition of D&D and really is needed to let the fighter’s keep up with the later-game area-of-effect spells that casters get. Carving through hordes of creatures one per round is for the birds.

So what should we do? My favored approach is to look all the way back to Chainmail, where you just roll one d6 per the PC’s hit dice and if you hit the appropriate target number you eliminate the foe. Against 1 HD foes this is pretty justifiable: in OD&D all weapons do 1d6 so the average will exactly kill a 1 HD enemy. You can roll them all at once, count the successes, and cross off or remove that many foes, so minimal book-keeping. If, as seems reasonable, when you’re using variable damage dice for weapons you say you can’t cleave with a small weapon (i.e. no d4 weapons), then it’s at least 50-50 that any hit kills, and more likely than not if you have any Strength or magic bonuses at all.

But how does that stack up against the normal (aka “alternative”) combat system using d20s to hit? I mean, you could roll a fistful of d20s and count successes whenever you got better than 15, 16, or whatever based on the foe’s armor class, but that seems…a bit fiddly? What would it look like if you wanted to use d6 for that, like the good old days? Would it be that different?

As it turns out, no. Take a look at the following chart, showing what an ordinary man with no bonuses needs to hit the various armor classes (for simplicity using Dan’s Target-20 system)1.

ACArmorTo hit on d20To Hit on d6THD6 roundedTHD6 truncatedThe Heck with Shields
2plate + shield186666
3plate175.67656
4chain + shield165.33555
5chain155555
6leather + shield144.67544
7leather134.33444
8shield124443
9unarmored113.67433
Roll needed for a 1 Hit Kill

If you divide it by three to reduce the max needed 18 to a 6, you get the To Hit on d6 column. Then, depending on whether you round or truncate that result you get some pretty easy to understand patterns. Either plate needs a 6, chain needs a 5, anything less needs a 4, or only plate and shield needs a 6, combos down to chain needs a 5, down to naked is 4, and naked is 3. A final option is to fudge it and say we don’t care about shields: Plate 6, Chain 5, Leather 4, Unarmored 3. I’m a little bit torn between saying come on, at least pick up a shield and saying chain and plate really ought to be different, but in the end any of these seems perfectly workable since it’ll be really rare to have a situation where the 1 HD foes have mixed kits. Most likely you just write down the single target number for the whole lot of them and you’re done with it.

So that’s my current plan for handling Cleaving/Sweeps in all the D&D-like games I run. Against 1 HD foes (or likely against any foes where your average damage is a 1 Hit kill) just roll d6s against the target number based on their armor and sweep them off the board.

  1. Justification for this, if needed, comes from the fact that at least the earliest versions specified that the attacks were carried out using the normal man row of the table, and that in any case allowing for both multiple attacks and bonuses to the attacks is a form of double-dipping.

Strength is Size

Posted on by Joshua Macy

One thing I tend to do in D&D-esque games is treat the Strength attribute as indicating size as well. (Other games, such as Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing and its kin have a separate Size attribute.) It seems to me, though, that there’s a bunch of pretty good arguments that the two are at least highly correlated, if not one and the same.

In most combat sports, from boxing and wrestling to taekwondo, as well as sheer strength-based sports like weight lifting, competitors are divided into weight classes for both health and safety reasons as well as to make the competitions more fair (and interesting). The average winner of the World’s Strongest Man competition stands 6′ 4″ and weighs in at 390 pounds!

Moreover, at least in the earliest editions of D&D starting with Supplement I Greyhawk, the two biggest mechanical differences from exceptionally high or low strength scores are to-hit, damage, and carrying capacity. To-hit I think makes perfect sense as reach, which is a huge factor in hand-to-hand combat, as does damage as function of mass (again thinking about weight classes in combat sports). Carrying capacity is a little less clear, in that the additional weight of your body seems to count against your maximum carrying capacity, at least over distances1, but since the bonuses tend to be linear while body weight increases exponentially, I call it good enough for D&D.

As a quick approximation for human, you can look up Strength in the following chart. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to apply adjustments for non-humans, and of course you might decide that any particular character is a bit bigger or smaller than the chart indicates. 2 Or you might decide (as my long-time Friday night GM did) to just roll size separately on 3d6.

SDMaleFemale
HeightHeightWeightHeightHeightWeight
Strength5′ 9″69.301695′ 4″64.10135
SD2.962.922.92272.752.7524
3-2.535′ 2″61.901014′ 9″57.1373
4-2.205′ 3″62.891104′ 10″58.0682
5-1.865′ 4″63.871194′ 11″58.9990
6-1.525′ 5″64.861284′ 0″59.9298
7-1.185′ 6″65.851375′ 1″60.85106
8-0.845′ 7″66.831465′ 2″61.78115
9-0.515′ 8″67.821555′ 3″62.71123
10-0.175′ 9″69.301695′ 4″64.10135
110.175′ 10″69.791735′ 5″64.56139
120.515′ 11″70.781825′ 5″65.49148
130.845′ 0″71.771915′ 6″66.42156
141.186′ 1″72.752005′ 7″67.35164
151.526′ 2″73.742095′ 8″68.28172
161.866′ 3″74.732185′ 9″69.21181
172.206′ 4″75.712275′ 10″70.14189
182.536′ 5″76.702365′ 11″71.07197
  1. Backpack Weight and the Scaling of the Human Frame
  2. Distribution of Body Weight and Height . It’s actually pretty hard to look up data on raw weights instead of BMI, and I’m not particularly confident that the standard deviations in weights correlate exactly with standard deviations in height as the chart would indicate, but whaddaya want for nothing?

D&D & Me (Part III)

Posted on by Joshua Macy

For the first Gygax Day, back in 2008, I wanted to try running a one-shot purely Old School D&D adventure in his honor. I didn’t have a copy of OD&D, so I ended up using the Mentzer Basic and a free dungeon that had a good reputation that had been put together by the folks on the Dragonsfoot forums.

It did not go well.

Basically, I had lost all my chops at running D&D, and had not yet steeped myself in the wisdom of the OSR and identifying what was good about the old school way. Despite the fact that I had in days gone by been part of that Old School, my expectations as to what the rules would cover and wouldn’t and my habits of DMing had changed so much over the intervening years that the whole thing was incredibly awkward. The players were frustrated by not having skill checks to rely on to interpret the world, that the dungeon seemed so arbitrary, that they didn’t have their usual ability to craft the characters and backstory for roleplaying opportunities. Most of the players had started playing with Vampire: The Masquerade, or even later, so they didn’t have any nostalgia or even knowledge of the older styles of play. I was frustrated that I couldn’t really keep the momentum of the game up, there were too many times when I thought I had to look something up and it turned out there wasn’t a rule for it, or there was but not where I expected, or it didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t help that I had gotten it into my head that I really wanted to try it “rules as written” instead of just winging something that was inspired by those old dungeon crawls that I remembered fondly.

After that one-shot they were pretty much done with that. I still felt there was something that I was missing; I knew that even if D&D wasn’t everything you could want in an RPG, back when we played D&D regularly it was tense and exciting. It certainly shouldn’t have been boring. It was around then that I began reading a bunch of blogs that focused on old-school play, especially Grognardia and Jeff’s Gameblog.

I began thinking a lot about Old School play, and what I could take from it, and what we had the most fun with back then. It was also around then, maybe a bit before, that my friend Mac’s kids were old enough to be interested in playing D&D (in her household, all RPGs were “D&D”… she’s the DM of the AD&D campaign I mentioned before, that had been running since she was in high school). Playing as a player with them, and later as a DM, let me see thing from a fresh perspective, with players brand new to role playing, including my then new bride, who played with us and had even less exposure to RPGs than the kids had. Seeing them play, and contrasting how confusing my wife had been finding the much more open-ended and free-form RPGs that she’d been trying with my regular group with the much more structured play and environment of Mac’s dungeon-delves, and how things suddenly “clicked” for her gave me a healthy new respect for the “outmoded” design choices of Old School Dungeons and Dragons. Limiting the new player’s choice when creating a character to what class given your randomly rolled stats was brilliant compared to “What do you want to play? we can help you design anything!” Ditto for leveling up. Constraining the decisions you need to make when interacting with the environment initially to things like “do you want to go left towards where you hear the noise of growling, or right towards where you see the cobwebs?” really helped my wife in particular understand her “role” in making decisions for her character, where analogies to improv theater or storytelling left her confused and timid about not “making a mistake” regardless of how many times the other players had reassured her that there was no wrong answer to the question “what do you do next?”

Over the next few years I continued to toy around with D&D-related OSR stuff, mostly in as a player in on-line campaigns, or running games using Michael Curtis’ Stonehell dungeon for the kids. I was fiddling a lot with different retro-clone rulesets or kitbashing my own, because there always seemed to be things that just didn’t sit right with me with how these versions of D&D worked… I could play in them or even run them and have fun, but they always seemed like compromises between what I would have preferred running and what the players I was with wanted and expected.

Eventually 5th Edition came out, and my home group tried that with the Mines of Phandelver; it was reasonably fun, but I could see it would be a lot of work to GM as characters went up in level and got more and more abilities that the GM would have to pretty thoroughly understand. Maybe not as bad as the days of the old 3e “splat-books” where selling new game-bending rules and feats for the players to bring into the game became the business model, but way more than my ideal of being able to hold more-or-less everything in my head to run without having to look up rules at the table. When the party TPK’ed in the last session in the Mines, I was actually planning to keep running 5e, but we took a quick break to run a DCC adventure and all the players liked that more so the Out of the Abyss campaign I was planning for the TPK’ed party (they had mostly fallen to 0, not been killed outright) never got off the ground.

Fast forward to the present, where thanks to the pandemic we have to play online and I’m actually running the group through The Mines of Phandelver again. Originally I planned to call it Re:Phandelver and make use of the trope where the protagonist(s) fail at the end and then somehow wake up back in the past as their younger selves, but with all their memories of how things played out in the original timeline intact. Except it turned out none of them actually remembered what had happened when we played through the first time, not even which characters they’d played… so instead we’re doing in straight. The online tools really help with running the game, and using Roll20 with the maps and dynamic lighting is different and interesting. I can still foresee a time when the complication of high-level 5e play may wear me down, but hopefully this whole social distancing thing will be over before we reach that point.

D&D & Me (Part II)

Posted on by Joshua Macy

The next phase of my involvement with D&D came decades later, barring a terrible AD&D campaign a friend of mine ran in college that I only participated in for a month or two, around the year 2000 when I started playing a heavily-house-ruled version of AD&D after I move to Pennsylvania, with a friend who’d been playing that same homebrew campaign-world since she was in high-school. She was one of those DMs who did all the rolling, and the the players were never sure what the rules actually were beyond what was on the character sheet. While I really loved getting together with these friends every week, I was actually kind of relieved on the weeks when we played board-games instead. The almost exclusive emphasis on dungeon crawling through fun-house dungeons, with turn-by-turn foot-by-foot mapping and minimal interaction between characters was pretty much everything I disliked in D&D. Eventually I learned to find the fun in it, mostly by trying to make each character memorable and distinct despite having basically no customization other than choosing a class (even race was restricted by a random roll for place of origin). Once her kids had all gone off to college we played D&D very rarely, though we still got together every Friday until the pandemic hit.

When Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition was released, originally, I wasn’t much interested. I felt I had moved on from D&D, and a lot of what I liked in RPGs I viewed as being in opposition to the design of D&D. Eventually, though I picked up a copy just to see what everybody was talking about, and while I wasn’t smitten with it, it did seem to be a significantly more “modern” design as far as character customization and detailed resolution went. I wasn’t going to immediately switch my home group over to it, but around 2005 I was open to running it online for some friends who were interested in trying it and were having trouble finding local gamers.

This was in the long, long ago before there was anything like Roll 20 or Fantasy Grounds, but I found a (now discontinued) program called ScreenMonkey from NBos that promised to be at least a step up from playing purely over AIM or irc, and we gave it a whirl. That campaign actually lasted almost three years, and was set in the Forgotten Realms. Eventually what made me tire of it was exactly that… I really didn’t know or care much about Forgotten Realms, but some players were very into it, which is why they’d asked for an FR campaign in the first place. There wasn’t any blow up, but the mismatch between the effort it took to provide them with what they were looking for each week and how much I enjoyed running FR-based materials created entirely from scratch caused me to put it on hiatus that became permanent.

Meanwhile at some point my home group *did* switch over to playing 3e, at least as one of the games in our rotation, mostly because my friend Russell liked it and my group really liked his GMing and the setting he’d created. We had some really fun and memorable adventures, but I eventually noticed that the crunch was a real drag on the players as they leveled up. It got to the point where when they reached a new level, they just handed their character sheets over to Doug, our rules monkey, to do all the grunt work leveling them up. When Russell’s job stopped being bi-coastal, the once a month game turned into once-in-a-blue-moon, and that was pretty much it for our 3e experience.

D&D & Me (part 1)

Posted on by Joshua Macy

Back in 1975 my father took me to The Games People Play in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and bought me a copy of the new game Dungeons and Dragons, which he had read about somewhere (I think in some science fiction magazine). That gift literally changed my life. Hardly a day has gone by since then when I haven’t read, written, or done something to do with RPGs. All of my closest friends, save one, are people I met doing RPGs, and almost all them I still game with at least semi-regularly.

My first game group was my 6th grade friends, none of whom had ever even heard of the game, and a teacher I roped into running an after-school club for us to play D&D. I played D&D almost every chance I got, and when I wasn’t playing I was making dungeons, doodling monsters, or reading fiction that would work its way back into the game. I remember actually running a fairly longish campaign in High School set in Xanth, based on the first two books. The girls in our group1 liked that better than the previous Arduin Grimoire-based campaign; I’m not sure whether it was because it was more whimsical or they just liked having what were in effect super-powers instead of magic spells.

In the beginning I was the only DM in our group, but my step-brother started to DM as well, and we played a lot of two person games with one or the other of us as DM and the other as a lone PC, possibly with retainers; it never seemed to occur to us that one person could run more than one PC and having a party would make things such as recovering the bodies of fallen adventurers easier. We never worried much about lethality, because resurrection was easy in our games. In my Arduin game, it was something that the inn-keeper at the home base could do for you; granted, influenced by the over-the-topness of some of the Arduin random encounter charts the inn-keeper was a Platinum Dragon, whose human form was a 70+ level “techno.” We made all of our own dungeons and setting materials; I never actually even purchased any of the classic adventure modules, although I did get the Judge’s Guild City-State of the Invincible Overlord and my step-brother used it pretty heavily for a while before making his own cities and overland maps. We heavily modded the combat and magic systems, borrowing from Steve Jackson’s Melee and Wizard tactical fantasy arena combat games.

Actually, though, I moved on from D&D pretty quickly, both through D&D-likes such as Empire of the Petal Throne, and Arduin Grimoire, and also outward to different takes and genres: Chivalry and Sorcery, Runequest, Traveller (lots and lots of Traveller), Villains and Vigilantes, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, The Fantasy Trip… if it was an RPG of the era, I probably tried it. By the time the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook came out in 1978 I mostly thought of myself as an ex-D&D player. It had been fun at the time, but it was too limited and clunky. There were so many better, more coherent, and “realistic”2 systems out there. It chapped my hide that to the general public they were all “D&D.”

My complaints about D&D were the usual ones: what’s a hit point, anyway? How can one person have so many multiples of how much another person has? In what world is a cat a deadly threat to a wizard? Class restrictions are so pointless, and invalidate so many good character concepts. Balancing wizards by making them nearly useless at low levels and god-like at high levels doesn’t actually accomplish anything useful when it comes to day-to-day play. How does armor make you harder to hit, shouldn’t it just reduce the damage? How can people possibly be moving so slowly both in and out of combat?

I kept trying new systems, but eventually most of my gaming moved to various home-brews of my own devising that–mostly by design–rejected most of the features of D&D. It would be a long time before I played D&D again. But that’s a story for Part 2.

1- We had girls in our groups, even from the earliest years. The stereotype of D&D being something that was only played by boys never matched my experience.

2- Yes, I used to value realism, or at verisimilitude, in RPGs very highly, while having a pretty narrow view of what counted. But I’m much better now.

House Rules Swiped from DCC

Posted on by Joshua Macy

In my last post I mentioned playing OD&D using Dan Collins’ Original Edition Delta plus some house rules that I swiped from DCC because I feel they’re essential. Commenter tipsta asks which ones and why.

  • Luck replaces Wisdom. Clerics don’t exist as a class (as per OED), which makes Wisdom a dead stat except for things that I really don’t favor rolling for (“insight checks” as modern editions would have it). Replace it with Luck and everything is golden.
    Why?
    • Allowing players to spend Luck from their very limited supply gives them some say in what rolls are really, really important to them, and somewhat mitigates the fact (mentioned before on this blog) that streaks of unlucky rolls can make a competent character seem like a yutz because every time we see them perform we see them fail.
    • Rolling against Luck or having things that hit a random party member hit whoever has the lowest Luck is a dead simple mechanic that covers a lot of things that come up during adventures that need some kind of decision procedure, and adds flavor.
  • Rolling the Body Roll under Luck after a combat to see if your character thought dead miraculously survived, but permanently reduce Con by 1.
    Why?
    It’s a great rule for making D&D a tiny bit less lethal. OED has a roughly equivalent Save vs. Death at 0 HP, and white box had a %chance to survive (survive what? It never said) attached to high Con scores. 5e’s Death Checks are maybe more tense, but they’re not self-limiting the way Rolling the Body is: eventually if they keep rolling your body you’re going to run out of Con.
  • Halfling Luck. Halflings get to spend luck on other people’s rolls or themselves and recover level in Luck per day. When Halflings spend luck they get 2 points for every point spent (Halfling Thieves rolling luck dice instead, as normal).
    Why?
    Differentiates them more from Elves and Dwarves, in a way that really feels like the source material.
  • Mighty Deeds for Fighters. Fighters can attempt a Mighty Deed of Arms by declaring what kind of combat stunt or maneuver they’re attempting (such as knocking a foe down or back, blinding them, disarming them, tumbling between their legs, etc.) They forgo their normal Attack Bonus based on level and roll a Deed Die which gets used as the bonus instead; in addition if the deed die shows 3+ and the attack hit the DM rules on how effective the maneuver was based on how much it exceeds 3. E.g. A blinding attack that rolls a 3 on the Deed Die might get blood in their eyes and give them a -2 next round, while a 7+ might force them to Save vs. Paralysis or be blinded permanently.
    Why?
    Gary Gygax, with his “fast and furious” one-minute combat rounds didn’t see any need for anything more than the DM adjudicating attempts to do combat stunts like knock somebody down, blind them with your torch, or what-have-you, while later editions piled on rules and maneuvers for special cases. The Deed Die solves all that with a universal mechanic for off-the-wall stunts that still leaves enough room for DM interpretation to keep it from becoming some kind of story-game narrative push. I also allow non-Fighters to use a Deed Die, but theirs is always a d6 with success on a 6, instead of the Fighter’s growing Deed Die with success on a 3+.
  • Luck Die for Thieves. As per DCC Thieves cans add their Luck Die to any of their rolls by spending a point of Luck, which they recover 1 point per level per night.
    Why?
    Thieves skills suck, and always have. Except for climbing, all of their signature skills start at around a 1 in 6 chance to succeed rising all the way to a 3 in 4 chance at 9th level. Even if you interpret it Philotomy-style as being an extraordinary ability (anybody can hide, thieves can hide in shadows!) for most of the Thief’s career they are going to fail at most things they attempt. OED makes rolling to fail not require looking up anything on a chart, but doesn’t change the probabilities (which, admittedly, is kind of the point of how Dan derived the rules). As soon as you add Luck Dice and Luck regeneration to Thieves they probably *can* succeed in the clutch, when lives or fortunes are on the line… but only a few times a day. In a game where a first level Wizard can have an encounter-winning spell like Sleep once a day at first level, being able to probably guarantee success roughly as often for picking a lock or moving silently is only fair.
  • Re-Casting Spent Spells Through Spellburn. Same as DCC rules, it’s a point of Spellburn (a point off of either Con, Str, or Dex) per level of spell… plus to succeed they’ll have to roll a check d20+Int Bonus+Caster Level-Spell Level against Target 20. The Spellburn has to be done each time you want to cast a spell you’ve already use up for the day. Attribute points recover at the same rate as Hit Points, which in OED is level per week of rest and relaxation in comfortable surroundings.
    Why?
    The single thing that players have complained most about in all the time I’ve been playing D&D, going all the way back to 1975, is the limited number of spells per day at low levels. A couple of times per day, the wizard gets to be a wizard, the rest of the time he can cower behind everybody and toss daggers. This is one of the first things that used to get replaced with some sort of spell-point system with many fewer spells known but some pool of points limiting how many times they can be cast, or in modern editions “cantrips” that are roughly equivalent to throwing a dagger but can be cast infinitely. The thing is I like the strategic aspect of the Magic User having to decide which spells to equip each day; I think it adds a lot to the game. I also think that encouraging players to use a variety of spells, rather than to save all their spell points/slots to cast their single best spell (usually Sleep at low levels) is an important consideration. Keeping the Vancian casting limits, but including the DCC “out” that you’re never completely out of spells as a wizard as long as you’re prepared to sacrifice something valuable gives you the best of both worlds.
  • Dwarves can smell gold, and Elves are allergic to iron.
    Why?
    The RP aspects of both of these are just too much fun to do without.

The Fallen Lands

Posted on by Joshua Macy

I’ve created an Obsidian Portal site for my online Fallen Lands campaign. My Sunday group has actually switched to doing 5e Phandelver on Roll20 during the quarantine, but I fell in with a new group that was playing OD&D and they expressed interest in playing a second night a week with me refereeing. People have a lot of time on their hands thanks to the pandemic.

So far we’re three sessions in, with the next session scheduled for tomorrow, (Wednesday the 26th of August, 2020). I’m using Dan Collin’s Original Edition Delta house rules, which smooths out some of the rough bits of the white box edition, plus some house rules of my own, mostly swiped from the bits Dungeon Crawl Classics that I can’t really do without any more.

It seems to be going well, and it’s a real pleasure to run compared to some of the later, fancier editions. Even 5e, which does away with a lot of the cruft, and with support of some excellent tools in Roll20, feels like heavy lifting compared to OED. But more on that later.

It’s Marvelous!

Posted on by Joshua Macy

A while back I wrote a web page to help play Marvel Super Heroes, by automating the roll on the “Universal Power Chart” to show you exactly what cell and color your percentile roll lands in based on the Power Level Column (the old Feeble, Poor, Typical, Good, Remarkable, Incredible, Amazing, etc. rating that MSH gave character’s powers). I don’t think it actually got much use, because it does require that you have a browser open when you play… but that was before plague stalked the land like some great stalking thing. Now that folks are doing most of their gaming online, it might be a bit more useful

Marvel FASERIP Universal Power Chart

I’ve moved it to github, since Google is closing down the classic Google Sites where I used to host it.

Oh, and if you have never played it before and want to get into it, you can check out the Classic Marvel Forever website.

Excelsior!

Torches & Lanterns

Posted on by Joshua Macy

A while back Dyson of Dyson Logos drew up a couple of nifty images to use to track torch and lantern use in B/X D&D, where torches burn for 6 turns and lanterns burn for 24. That was back in the world before, when people could actually gather face-to-face to play. In order to make this a little more friendly for online play, I’ve turned the images into a pair of PDF forms where you can check off each turn as you go. They’re free for personal use, derived from Dyson’s images which themselves are free for personal use.

Torch Card PDF
Torch Card
Lantern Card PDF
Lantern Card