For each retweet this gets I will post one surprising thing we discovered running AD&D by the book with an all original campaign. (Note: was a die hard B/X, ACKS, Classic Traveller guy going into this.) 
In first edition AD&D, orcs are not the Predator-looking monsters of those execrable fantasy movies that have now set how most people imagine them. Nope! In addition to having pig noses, real AD&D orcs are also SHORT. Human fighters cram them into lockers all the time!
Unlike illustrations of half-orcs in later editions, first edition AD&D half-orc player characters are of the "superior 10%" that "are sufficiently non-orcish to pass for human." This is among the most hilariously unintentionally funny passages in rpg history & is GREAT GAMING.
Given that green slimes can be killed by a cure disease spell, the paladin is able to INSTANTLY KILL a green slime if he still has his weekly cure disease ability available. (B/X omits both the paladin class and the disease elements of the slime creating a very different tone!
People have long sneered at AD&D for being a "ROLL playing game", but people play completely differently depending on the class. When they play as assassins, for instance, they get so taken up with playing as crazy evil they invariably do things that bring on tpk's or near tpk's.
I used to think that the core classes from Basic D&D were purer somehow, that the extra ones in AD&D were just overpowered splat. The reality is that the Paladin, Druid, Ranger, and Assassin are implemented so audaciously their presence in a party fundamentally changes the game.
People think of AD&D as being focused mostly on the combats. Yet it includes a class that has a means to IGNORE COMPLETELY all that stuff about hit points, to-hit matrices, even saving throws. The assassination rules shift the focus of the gameplay to an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FOCUS!
I grew up thinking that wilderness adventures were special, requiring both higher level characters and elite level dungeon mastering. AD&D's inclusion of the ranger and the druid means that wilderness adventure in on the table even with a level one party.
The druid spells looked like garbage to 14-year-old me, but in actual play they allow the party to parley with natural creatures, gain animal allies, and avoid unnecessary combats. If you are transporting recovered treasure back to town through jungles, this is INSANELY USEFUL!
There is about a 1-in-9 chance of a player qualifying for the paladin class. If one is in the group, there are whole categories of problems that become "easy" thanks to the "free" detect evil, cure disease, laying on hands, and protection from evil.
So the point of the "fancy" classes in AD&D is to effectively mute MAJOR aspects of play so that as party composition changes due to attrition, the game both plays differently week to week and also presents players with different opportunities with the EXACT SAME CAMPAIGN.
Magic-users and thieves are so useless in a fight, that fighters become REALLY important. A second level fighter with as many fightery henchmen as he can keep around is a FOUNDATIONAL player character. Due to morale, his charisma bonus is FAR more important than his damage bonus.
AD&D is designed around the need for players to be able to run away. This is really what makes the game work with completely random content. You don't have to design everything so that the players win with their last hit point, so scenario design is OPTIONAL and even unnecessary.
The most reliably useful first level spell in our AD&D campaign is not Sleep, Magic Missile, or Cure Light Wounds. It's Entangle. Because again, avoiding combat and escaping certain death is the soul of the game. This is contrary to EVERYONE'S expectations for fantasy rpgs.
I confess that the AD&D monk class baffled me for decades. What is this thing and why is it here?! Well, given how often an AD&D party is in hot water, the incredible Move rating of this class BY ITSELF makes the monk the most likely to survive the "fun" sessions. RUN!!!!
Encounters with groups of monsters in open spaces have a SIGNIFICANT chance of killing at least one party member. Large numbers of fighting-man henchmen dilute the losses to established player characters, yet players are willing to spend them needlessly.
https://twitter.com/ashofcreativity/status/1304844292649873409
The idea of "boss monsters" is foreign to AD&D. An insanely powerful monster with no entourage can easily be eliminated and/or outmaneuvered by a low level party that is at all creative and cohesive. As @lewpuls famously noted, the game strongly encourages combined arms tactics.
The iconic percentile based monster tables of the DMG and Fiend Folio give way to a d8+d12 "artisan" approach in MM2. Each of the five middle results-- 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13-- each have a 1-in-12 chance of coming up. (The 2 and the 20 each have a 1-in-96 chance of occurring.)
If you think AD&D's lore is no good after playing a game set in fantasy city with an overlord, a weird cult, an assassin, a harlot, a courtesan, electrum pieces, an ethereal silver cord, and a couple of thieves, then you have NO IDEA who Fritz Leiber was!
https://twitter.com/Axenhammer1/status/1300998670960095232
It takes three hours to make a playable one page dungeon. You don't need a key. All you need is a few monsters, treasures, and really dumb ideas marked directly on the rooms. This was good enough for Dave Arneson. The original D&D game system will make this work for you as well.
In a real campaign, the players can go anywhere and reject all of your adventure locations for ANY reason. You will need a lot of them in order to be ready. And you will have be prepared to see things you develop go unused. Quantity is FAR more important than quality!
The most daunting thing about running a campaign with all original material is having to watch the players have WAY MORE FUN with stuff you made up on the spot than the stuff you spent hours developing for them. You are learning what actually matters in a real D&D campaign, tho!
If fourteen-year-old you tried making dungeons with the random tables in the back of your D&D book and you despaired because they just seemed so awful to you, then know this. Your biggest problem was that you didn't keep playing in your horrible original dungeon.
The most significant thing about AD&D that nobody seems to have noticed is that AD&D is not predicated on the 15 minute work day, but rather a ONE WEEK work day! This is such a foundational component of running a campaign that Gygax dedicates two entire pages to describing this.
For a lot of dumb reasons, most people play D&D as one very long adventure with the same set players getting together week after week where time freezes at the end of each session with the players still in the dungeon. This is NOTHING LIKE the game described in the AD&D DMG.
Adventure modules obviate the advice and direction of the AD&D DMG and insinuate that SOME OTHER GAME should be played at with the AD&D system. This causes people to be unable to comprehend the game put together by Gygax. At all. It's brain damage, y'all!
With all of developments in the rpg scene going on in 1979, it still seemed natural to Gygax that elite hobbyists would still want to run the game more or less the way he and Arneson ran it in the early seventies!
I've been playing that the players must be second level to get henchmen and that rates for men-at-arm are for non-adventure work only. But the first level parties will have have men-at-arms beefing up their ranks on the lowest levels of the dungeon.
In AD&D, every player regardless of player skill and character ability gets to...
A) Contribute to the party's scheming and planning
B) Describe their individual action before initiative is rolled
C) Decide how they want to spend their six days of down time between sessions
A) Contribute to the party's scheming and planning
B) Describe their individual action before initiative is rolled
C) Decide how they want to spend their six days of down time between sessions
The uniqueness of real AD&D campaigns and the extent to which the PLAYERS drive the fleshing out of its milieux is astonishing. You can't purchase something that is as well suited to your group as the world that they'll help you create. And it's something that is uniquely THEIRS.
Seeing the results of an original AD&D campaign consistently outperform in actual play the countless products purchased over the years to do the same job, I'm persuaded that the rpg innovation since 1980 mostly just serves to persuade you (wrongly) that you can't pull this off.
Real AD&D campaigns are filled with things you'd never have thought to make but which your players forced you put in there either directly or indirectly. They are engines of culture creation-- specific, tailored culture that's just for your friends.
https://twitter.com/JohnsonJeffro/status/1263265774858354691
When I started running AD&D, I tried 2 do anything that Gygax said in the text regardless of how strange it seemed. Most people asking about this wondered about things like weapon speed and armor class adjustments. As if the game was just Basic but with Advanced combat. It's not.
The act of playing AD&D correctly will make you feel like you are constantly "majoring on minors." The more you lean on the text of the DMG, the more you will find yourself taking the time to do things that seem extraneous or irrelevant to most role-players today.
Similarly, most people tuning into the DMG today are going to be shocked by the audacity of a Gygax speaking emphatically and with authority about how to run a D&D campaign. Taken piecemeal and out of context, his pronouncements sound crazy, unhinged, weird. Bizarre!
Because of this, it is very VERY surprising when you finally take the time to sit down with the DMG and discover that there is actually a very well thought out game in there, that the text really is far more cogent than it is given credit for being.
In May 1979 when Mike Carr wrote the foreward to the DMG, dungeon mastering was synonymous with running a UNIQUE and ORIGINAL campaign. The DMG is a TOOLKIT for making YOUR OWN milieu. If you do not do this, you are not playing the game described within its covers!
Writing in the preface, Gygax says, "only you can construct a masterpiece from [the DMG], your personal campaign which will bring hundreds of hours of fun and excitement to many eager players." It's hard to believe, but everything you need REALLY IS within the pages of that book!
No one person is in control of what happens in an AD&D game.
The Dungeon master can build out locations in the world, but the players decide where they go..
Meanwhile player in an adventure are limited by what they can persuade each other to do.
The Dungeon master can build out locations in the world, but the players decide where they go..
Meanwhile player in an adventure are limited by what they can persuade each other to do.
https://twitter.com/Geocon19/status/1305342645976346626
People whose formative years happened after 1e AD&D tend to a hard time even IMAGINING an rpg that is consistent with what Gygax describes in the DMG. Everything about it is an affront to their assumptions about how rpgs can even work.
https://twitter.com/nicklongshankz/status/1305512377870430208
70s rpg culture embraces randomness and the occult in a matter of fact way. Phillip K. Dick's application of the I-Ching is indicative of the times. The old school's "oracular powers of the dice" is essentially magic. In contrast, 80s rpg culture is overwhelmingly modernist.
The are three things required in order to make a dungeon environment come alive. Empty rooms with many passages connecting them, wandering monster tables, and time.
The incorporation of a time element into D&D games is so obscure, players reflexively treat the game world as if it is completely static. They may come up with solid combat tactics and wild plans, but they rarely note when their strategies entail significant opportunity costs.
A typical AD&D adventure consists of
1) Players coming to agreement on where to go and what to do
2) Some travel/exploration
3) Turning around and going home the moment they find significant treasure and/or use up too many spells and hit points.
1) Players coming to agreement on where to go and what to do
2) Some travel/exploration
3) Turning around and going home the moment they find significant treasure and/or use up too many spells and hit points.
AD&D sessions do not need to be planned. They cannot be planned. Less ambitious games allow players to choose between a few adventuring options. The actual play of an AD&D campaign will quickly get to the point were there are a dozen possibilities or more at any given time.
This encounter from Keep on the Borderlands can easily B stretched into 3 hours of gameplay. At my table it turned into a reenactment of the attack on the bandit camp from Seven Samurai. This quality of D&D means you can run entire sessions just from the random tables of the DMG.
I made countless mistakes trying to learn the game as I went. I felt bad about this and would apologize for it as I gradually nailed things down. But the thing is, the players don't care about your rules. Your campaign benefits from that. But that is not your players' concern!
This is not to give you license to play the game wrongly. The point is YOU HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THIS WHILE YOU ALSO STEADILY LEARN HOW TO CREATE A CAMPAIGN MILIEU ON THE FLY. The players somehow manage to have fun through it all.
I look back at my terrible notes from when the AD&D game was just beginning. The city we played in didn't even have a name. We started with nothing! But somehow, everything we needed would emerge spontaneously, mostly in the heat of play. It really is magical.
The simple "there and back again" structure of an AD&D session allows people to sit in as they please-- just like playing jazz. When you complicate things with elaborate story arcs, you sacrifice your ability to improvise well with anyone who shows up.
https://twitter.com/sebastiangood/status/1306067111442370560
Once you have a suitably large play area roughed out, you can stay FAR ahead of the players by just adding a new one page dungeon each week. Given that this takes less than 3 hours, an AD&D campaign with total player autonomy is AMAZINGLY SUSTAINABLE.
https://twitter.com/JohnsonJeffro/status/1306726457067085825
There is nothing wrong with your first dozen one page dungeons that cannot be fixed with the next dozen one page dungeons.
AD&D campaigns are additive, eventually containing everything the players could conceivably want 2 do. The more you play, the better feel you will have for what you need to add. The campaign will necessarily trend towards the best solution for YOUR GROUP'S collective preferences.
When you sit down to make twelve+ one page dungeons, you really have NO IDEA which one will stick, which one will become the focus of the action. No matter how well you think you know your players, they will still continually surprise you.
The sprawling, massive underworld that Gygax architects in the appendices of the DMG is a direct consequence of the requirements of actual play. Unpredictable players with total autonomy require LARGE PLAY AREAS THAT CAN BE STOCKED QUICKLY.
Nothing that you create can be so elaborate that you or the players can't simply walk away from it. Modules are of course antithetical to this. People that learn to play D&D via modules are thus primed to distrust the deceptively simple dungeons suggested by the DMG.
When you're running the game, you second guess yourself wondering if you're doing the right thing. But when the players double down and triple one on 1 course of action out of DOZENS of choices, you just have to accept that the players are playing the game that they want.
This property of real D&D is the reason why AD&D explicitly repudiates rule zero. It's counter-intuitive, but only by elevating the campaign to a level of supremacy FAR above the players can you ever succeed in giving them what they actually want.
https://twitter.com/JohnsonJeffro/status/1306791326051184642
Playing AD&D by the rules does not put a LIMIT on your creativity. Far from it! Follow the instructions within the DMG and you will discover an ingenious framework that will SUPPORT you as you DEVELOP your creativity far beyond what you think you can do.
https://twitter.com/Grand_DM/status/1306921329283694592
Is making your own megadungeon DIFFICULT? Only if you change the definition of it to be something different from what Gygax outlined in the DMG! ANYBODY can build, maintain, and develop an AUTHENTIC AD&D megadungeon if they commit to just 3 hours of mapping and stocking a week.
The AD&D DMG is not a framework for running other peoples modules in somebody else's campaign setting. The entirety of the text TAKES FOR GRANTED that you will construct your own original campaign milieu and gives you precise instructions on how to do it.
https://twitter.com/meffridus/status/1307138498013663234
One reason the default AD&D DMG megadungeon fails to make sense is because people have embraced the tenets of modernism and rejected the premise of a mythic underworld, sure. But the real reason it doesn't make sense is that THEY HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY TRIED IT.
The campaign style presented in the AD&D DMG is so dynamic, so coherent IT PRACTICALLY RUNS ITSELF. You can try to inject module-style situations into it, but the effects of time, responsive monsters, and sheer player brutality rapidly turns them into a mass of jibbering chaos.
More than anything else, players love to pool their talents and cunning in order to completely annihilate anything that smells like a prepared adventure situation. The entirety of D&D culture after the AD&D DMG is engineered to DENY players this elemental pleasure. They hate it.
Point four there by Mike Carr in the foreword to the Players Handbook indicates that players could have their characters participate even if they weren't present for the game. This is expected practice today by contrary to my reading of the AD&D DMG.
I am a little nuts for insisting on multiple characters per player, 1 game day = 1 real day, not ever pausing game time and so on, but even the introduction of the Players Handbook describes just that sort of game. AD&D assumes a massively open table with overlapping play types.
Per the Players Handbook, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a world. The DM *must* use the system to devise an individual and unique world. This ambitious game is FUNDMENTALLY DIFFERENT from "telling a story" or running an "adventure path"-- completely different mindset!
Most people get to this table and want to roll chance to know for every single first level magic-user spell in the Players Handbook. THIS IS DEAD WRONG. The world implied by the AD&D rules simply doesn't work that way. There is no "complete book of spells" for player chartacters!
AD&D magic-users get 3 random spells at the start of the game in addition to Read Magic. Unlike B/X magic-users, they do not get Sleep or Charm Person for free. Like fighters that haven't earned their plate-mail yet, they must be creative with what they happen to have available!
Magic-users in AD&D adventure in the hopes of finding spell scrolls with spells that they can add to their spell books. If they manage this, they get ALL of the XP value of these items. Because of this, multi-classed mages will advance faster as mages than as their other roles!
Just as in OD&D, AD&D magic-users can begin researching original spells EVEN AT FIRST LEVEL. Random starting spells and spells recovered from dungeons already make every magic-user unique. This rule allows players to create variant mage types IN THE COURSE OF ACTUAL PLAY!
Again, the rules outlined in the DMG supersede the Holmes style application of the chance to know percentages. AD&D emphasizes a post-apocalyptic Dying Earth style world of LOST MAGIC. You can't roll for chance to know on a spell you don't even know you don't know!
Random starting spells mean they start out much more quixotic that their counterparts in other editions. Leveling does not guarantee access to new spells. Players have a huge incentive to research new spells that solve campaign-specific problems. GAMING GOLD!
AD&D produces a world where magic is FAR MORE like that of Vance's Dying Earth than any other edition of D&D. Magic-users are offbeat, highly individual, greedy, cerebral. The rules drive play + cause each player character to rapidly diverge from stock D&D archetypes. IT'S WILD!
The specialist mages of later editions solve a problem that REAL AD&D does not have! It systematizes something that should not be formalized. Turns something fraught with weirdness and wonder into a problem space to be hacked into by boring min/maxer types.
AD&D's magic system was not designed. It GREW out of actual play through the efforts of creative player character magic-users. If you play the game AS IT WAS INTENDED TO BE PLAYED, your players will do likewise. They have a mechanism to alter an extend THE RULES through PLAY!
The AD&D spell-using classes provide enough uniformity that it is easy to manage them in the campaign. With the addition of even 1 original spell, low level player characters of this type can be transformed into JUST ABOUT ANYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE-- without splat or rules bloat!
Gygax does not assume a campaign is tailored to a specific group of player characters. Bad play will kill off bad character concepts. Untenable characters will be transitioned to npc status. Great players develop their characters into an interesting campaign element over time.
AD&D's training costs are BRUTAL. We frequently have characters with enough XP to level, but they are FROZEN at their previous level until they can get enough of a treasure haul to pay for training. You can't just scrape along and keep leveling. You must do AWESOME THINGS!
The AD&D training costs have a tremendous influence on play. The players are always broke. They think about how they are going to get tens of thousands of gold ALL THE TIME. This keeps each session focused on the sort of gameplay that the game best supports.
AD&D training costs defined our campaign the moment I began asking players to DESCRIBE their training. This grounded play in the broader society, set up systems of patronage and obligation, made background elements relevant, and created an entire economy around self-improvement.
Kicked out of the thieves guild, our Elven thief "Chaz" had to pay DOUBLE training costs due to self-training penalties. Demi-human player characters would later on get their through Chaz-- gradually building up a modest rival to their Lankhmar style thieves guild of their city!
Meanwhile, the half-orc fighter Fàgor used his training money to put out a hit on himself: 10 gold to anyone that successfully punched him in the face. In game, he searched for the legendary six-armed skeleton fighting master Trobelor in hopes of getting his tutelage.
Clerics who accepted their proper role as Catholic-style avatars of holiness and purity got the benefit of low cost training and patronage from an established religious order. Human thieves similarly advanced quickly due to the benefits of working for a proper guild.
Players with stupid deity concepts were relegated to The Street of the Gods where they attempted to slowly build up their own religious cult. Double training costs! I allowed spell research costs to count for this-- with newly minted spells slowly replacing the bible themed ones.
AD&D training costs are frequently dispensed with and often derided by connoisseurs of gaming, but for us... they were a means of fleshing out the broader campaign world and integrating each player character's place in it from session to session. Underrated!
Thanks to the training costs, players got rated at the end of each session-- always hilarious! Note that magic-users are penalized for engaging in melee. Thieves are punished for engaging in frontal attacks. THERE ARE RIGHT AND WRONG WAYS TO PLAY YOUR ROLE IN AD&D!!!
Poor play not only multiplies the exorbitant cost of training your AD&D character. It also increases the length of time your PC will be out of play. Thanks to this rule, the group can get a break from annoying and overbearing character concepts that end up dominating gameplay.
AD&D is notoriously hard to master. It has no rules that I ever implemented correctly on the first try. Every time you reread a passage you find something you never saw before. People naturally speculate that the text of the rules is somehow weirdly Vancian in its own right.
Why is AD&D hard to master? Gygax had a fundamentally different concept of fantasy from most of us, sure. He was also steeped in the hard core do-it-yourself world of historical miniatures gaming. He is culturally remote-- but also has a crazily different concept of D&D to boot!
AD&D was developed by accretion, a compounding of ad hoc ruling on top of ad hoc ruling. People delve into it hoping to pull out some sort of system that would be recognizable to gamers steeped in later game design efforts. The fact is, it's just not there. And not needed.
The curious thing about AD&D is that it works so well when it violates every principle of design that we take for granted. No systemization. Twice as difficult to level as in Basic D&D. Obscure and tedious rules elements. The active repudiation of both session zero and rule zero.
In contrast to its competitors, AD&D is designed to produce "a campaign which offers the most interesting play possibilities to the greatest number of participants for the longest period of time possible." It is engineered to help you recreate the SUCCESS of Gygax's campaign.
AD&D takes for granted that your campaign will run forever. It assumes your players will just keep on coming back. It is set up to accommodate dozens of concurrent "campaigns" with a dizzying range of playstyles. No other game is this encompassing, this ambitious. But it works!
AD&D players don't burn out the way that DM's are wont to do. The people that get hooked have their eyes on the game's nearly impossible campaign goals. And they just don't want to stop. The difficulty and scope are a tremendous lure.
On the other side of the screen, AD&D is an elaborate machine-- the never-ending basement game of the lost miniatures gamer cult. It's built from the ground up to help you fake a coherent campaign for a veritable hoard of gamers. This is why the DMG equips you as well as it does!
The dirty secret of rpg's is that designers don't playtest them and purchasers mostly just put them on their game shelfs. AD&D is as far from this culture on nonplay as it gets. Every weird looking rule within its covers is put there with your long term actual play needs in mind.
In the preface to the PHB, Gygaxs proclaims that there
s "no ponderous combat systems for greater 'realism'" and no "hint of a spell point system." D&D is a campaign superstructure. Bloating out the tactical element like that completely displaces the game's expansive focus.
s "no ponderous combat systems for greater 'realism'" and no "hint of a spell point system." D&D is a campaign superstructure. Bloating out the tactical element like that completely displaces the game's expansive focus.
Combat must remain simple enough that it can scale up to handle the titanic battles that Gygax took for granted as being your birthright. "Realistic" combat systems and spell point systems drive the scope down to just a few figures per side. That's why initiative is by side!
I'll tell you an secret. AD&D's combat system is not so granular that it can break the combat round down in the 6 second "segments" the way that a surface reading of the rules would lead you 2 believe. Segments don't come into play the way that Car Wars phases or SFB impulses do.
Note this off the wall rule here. The number of segments it takes 2 cast a spell is compared to a d6 initiative roll to determine if a melee attack has spoiled it. This is a quick ad hoc ruling on top of a simple system. It's just not an elaborate and #SuperAdvanced monster game.
If someone is casting a spell in melee, then segments briefly matter in this incredibly abstract way. All of the elaborations of the AD&D combat rules are like this. Fast, simple rules with hyperspecific cases that have enough detail to quell the objections of a barracks lawyer.
AD&D combat is so abstract, you don't get to decide which figure your character is attacking. The players describe their actions BEFORE initiative is rolled. After that the DM has a LOT of latitude to describe how things actually play out. This requires imagination, not minis.
The unrealistic hit point system of D&D is there so that you can break off of battle when things turn against you. However, if you want to break off from melee you are liable to take some damage. This rule lets player wipe out fleeing monsters. But it can also result in TPKs.
If you tell people that you are running AD&D, they will typically ask if you are using weapon speed and armor class adjustments because it's the only thing they know about the game from the PHB charts. These #SuperAdvanced game elements actually don't come up that often.
AD&D determines spell spoilage in melee randomly because without individual initiative and individual movement and attack actions, there really is no other way to determine what precisely is happening during a melee round and when it actually transpires.
https://twitter.com/JohnsonJeffro/status/1326681135917756417
People that play house-ruled D&D variants typically go around the table during combat with each player deciding what their character will do on their turn. There is always some guy that has no idea what is happening that slows the game down. REAL AD&D IS NOT AT ALL LIKE THAT!
Note Gygax's use of segments here. The player DESCRIBES HIS ACTIONS before the round while the DM translates it into something that can fit into the chaotic melee. The player is not moving a pawn on a grid. He is participating in something that exists only in the imagination.
Miniatures gamers of the time were the sort 2 whip up entire Napoleonic armies from molten lead. Dungeon Masters were expected to craft a completely original campaign milieu. But wow, not using Official AD&D Miniatures is beyond the capacity of the intended audience of this book!
People that think early D&D was not played theater of the mind style lamely point to these diagrams from the 1979 DMG for evidence, but minis change the abstractness of the combat system not one whit beyond limiting the number of opponents that can attack a single figure. Sad!
AD&D takes for granted that you are fluent in medieval miniatures gaming. It uses a miniatures rule set as its chassis, it assumes that medieval battles are an intrinsic part of that game's backdrop, and that the campaign will eventually incorporate miniatures battles into play.
If AD&D combat is played with miniatures, it isn't played on a grid but rather with rulers. Further, player characters do not move independently but instead behave as is they are all operating on the same base. This is the only interpretation of the game consistent with the rules
AD&D combat is resolved as if a base with 30 goblin figures on it is right up against another base with the players' party on it. That is the level of granularity it assumes. (Your 20 men-at-arms get their own base. Your spell-casters and thieves are also put on their own base.)
Gygax assumes that your dungeon expeditions are going to be brief "there and back again" type affairs. If you think you are inclined to spend days or weeks inside of a dungeon, you have departed from the premise of the AD&D game.
The no. appearing for many entries in the Monster Manual are baffling to contemporary gamers. The numbers are a poor fit for typical adventure situations. But they just so happen to translate perfectly to a single infantry unit in Chainmail.
We know from Three Hearts and Three Lions and also the Elric stories that alignments are not just characterizations of personal philosophy, but rather they correspond to powers and principalities on a cosmological level. Bipolar law vs. chaos is insufficient for real D&D's needs.
The foundations for alignment in AD&D derive from the need to establish opposing sides in fairly larger miniatures battles-- each with units consisting of hundreds of men or monsters. But what happens when you are running a campaign with many players running multiple characters?
The switch to the weirdly baroque 9-point alignment system gives you an objective means of determining how well not only NPC henchmen but also ENTIRE ARMIES are going to cooperate-- providing referee and player guidance at both the adventure and the strategic level of the game.
AD&D accomplishes PRECISELY what the game's original subtitle claimed: provide "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames - Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures." The purpose of the rules is to provide a framework for generating large miniatures battles.
AD&D has this baffling rule that gives a side a free round of melee attacks to their opponents' flank when they break off melee. This rule can TPK groups that aren't expecting it. Why is this in AD&D? Because in Chainmail, an about face maneuver takes an ENTIRE MOVE.
How soon can you begin miniatures battles in AD&D? Well, a 4th level fighter is a Chainmail unit by himself-- a "hero". At fifth level he becomes a de facto centurion. At 1:20 scale that is five figures. (And five figures of horsemen is nothing to sneeze at.)
But wait, there's more! Your fighter has some fightery henchmen, right? Well they can each command 10 men for each level they have obtained. So a fifth level captain with four 2nd level henchmen can command 180 men, or nine figures at 1:20 scale. Not bad!
Even a first level fighter can lead a significant number of men. Ten men-at-arms is pretty reasonable. Just don't forget that they won't go past the third level in a dungeon. Also, they have to make morale checks if stuff gets crazy!
The main reason a real D&D campaign can last years or decades is because they can accommodate countless play groups in the same campaign and countless varieties of play within them: lairs, mega-dungeons, wilderness travel, massive medieval miniatures battles. Variety = longevity!
The other BIG reason why an AD&D campaign can last years or even decades is that once you know how to use all the random tables in the DMG, you can build everything from sprawling wilderness areas to insanely complex mega-dungeons in the course of play WITH NO PREP WHATSOEVER!
Sometimes the players are stupid. Sometimes the players are outrageously stupid. This is a gift that takes a huge burden off of the DM-- you don't have to be some kind of rocket surgeon in order to keep the campaign going!
If your concept of D&D is that of an ongoing story with a sort of spotlight on one set of PC's, then alignment is reduced being a personality test. If you play with domains and miniatures battles, it's a tool for managing conflict at all levels of the game and between players.
AD&D is not meant to be played "Mech Pilot" fashion. Players are not limited by what is on their sheets, after all. And Gygax never intended that they be privy to what is in the DMG. Heck, they probably don't deserve to even know how many hit points they have! (via @RationalMale)
There were a lot of people in the eighties that sneered at AD&D for its supposed childlike simplicity. But characters and worlds don't become compelling for being well thought out. Actual play for many sessions imbues even the dumbest ideas with a multifaceted charm.
Chainmail devotes one sentence to describing what a medieval campaign would look like. The fact that D&D takes for granted that you will do something like this becomes evident when you observe the extent to which games like Tunnels & Trolls and The Fantasy Trip assume you won't!
OD&D was intended to support campaigns for 4 to 50 players, frequent sessions, multiple PC groups, tremendous battles. The elaborations in AD&D teach you in how to do that. Competing rpgs lower the bar on "campaign" to suddenly mean "supports more than just a one shot." Sad!
AD&D is equally an expression of pulp fantasy and historical miniatures culture. Its assumptions, esoterica, and rules dominated gaming throughout the 80s and well into the 90s even as culturally denuded non-gamers struggled with their reduced pidgin variants of it.
Raise dead is not available until a 9th level cleric enters play, it doesn't work with half-orcs or elves, your initial CON limits the # of times you can be raised, you must roll your resurrection survival %, *AND* raise dead reduces your CON by one. This is of utmost importance!
Multi-classing in AD&D becomes MORE FLAVORFUL when combined with training costs. They gain XP in each class at the same rate as henchmen, so they likely won't have to wait for gold when they get that 1st new level. They are liable to focus on improving one class over the others.
Multi-class characters will be rarer in the opening phases of the campaign when the players are struggling to get those 1st few characters leveled. They become more viable when some higher level characters can give them a hand up as parties @ levels 2-4 will progress MUCH faster.
Demi-humans are mostly locked out of the over-powered classes (Druid, Paladin, Ranger) and are also locked out of the most advanced spells. Demi-humans are limited in the domain game and are more likely to form a criminal underclass to polite society. Huge implications here!
Note how punishing this is: "Elven fighters with less than 17 strength are limited to 5th level; those with 17 strength are limited to 6th level." An elf fighter must have strength 18 to establish a domain. At best they will tend to lead a small elf unit in battle. Weak!
To clarify, your Fighter/Magic-user/Thief pays for training costs to be a 2nd level thief and 2nd level magic-user. He is then maxed out on XP as a first level fighter for a long time due to lack of funds. When he finally gets some gold, he might pay to advance as magic-user.
The AD&D demi-human level limits produce a fantasy setting where non-humans provide a little spice to a predominantly medieval human foundation. It's very Third Age Middle Earth-- the big armies are Rohan, Gondor, Uruk-hai, and Orc... with elves and dwarves mostly staying home.
Demi-humans in classic D&D are safe, legal, and rare. When domain and miniatures battles are removed, the reason for level limits evaporates. Gameplay then trends towards the Fellowship of the Freaks mode. With no way to impact the world, growth is displaced to character powers.
Expert D&D *DOES* allow Cure Disease to kill Green Slime. This is not in the monster description in Moldvay Basic. This will not be part of the game until a cleric reaches 6th level. The overpowered AD&D paladin meanwhile gets this awesome ability at 1st level. h/t @bxblackrazor
Due to the AD&D morale rules being so different, for a while I thought that skeletons could end up fleeing combat. Very different behavior from the Morale 12 rating in Moldvay Basic.! The truth was buried in the Monster Manual entry which I failed to pick up on in during play.
When learning a piece of music, it works well to master the ending first and then work backwards. Playing D&D without grasping Chainmail means you tinker with the opening phrases of a campaign while having no confidence for allowing it to culminate into what it is working to.
The idea of creating on original AD&D milieu and then stocking it with countless module-like situations is uninspiring. You simply don't need a sprawling continent to support that type of play. Thinking in terms of Chainmail armies changes everything, however.
Stocking your campaign map with a range of Chainmail units of all alignments and then imagining what alliances and battles might emerge is a powerful tool for creating a broader fantasy backdrop to support your players activities. Even better, it's easy to do!
The AD&D Monster Manual takes for granted that you will be using these creatures to create massive miniatures armies. The breakdown of weapon types given for many entries are of marginal value in a dungeon, but are TREMENDOUSLY USEFUL in working out armies for Chainmail.
Here is the magic. A Chainmail unit of 200 hobgoblins or whatever is THE EXACT SAME conceptual unit as a single D&D character. If you are tracking time and are comfortable with wilderness treks and can run ANY sort of D&D combat, congrats. YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW TO RUN A CAMPAIGN!!
The reason it was a mistake for D&D to transition to individual initiative and feats on a grid map is that it formally repudiates the massive miniatures campaign that the game was intended to support. This type of play DOES NOT SCALE.
Classic D&D's combat system was lifted from a medieval miniatures rule set and changed very little in the process. It is NOT optimized for small man-to-man battles. But playing it LITERALLY TRAINS YOU TO HANDLE INCREDIBLE FANTASTIC MEGA-BATTLES WITH EASE!
So when BRILLIANT GAME DESIGNERS (and DMs) fix AD&D's obvious deficiencies as a man-to-man combat game, they end up sacrificing the very game elements that allow it to EFFORTLESSLY SCALE UP to handle truly titanic campaign-worthy conflicts. This is rpg history's greatest tragedy!
AD&D does not give a morale rating to each monster the way B/X does. They get a base % rating as a function of hit dice. This system is derived from the one in Chainmail where the difference in casualties is a major factor. THESE MODIFIERS PRODUCE HIGHLY REALISTIC RESULTS.
The reason that "story games" fail as rpgs is that they introduce rules into the one part of D&D that does not have them at all. While rules provide you with the structure to allow you to run a lengthy campaign, it's the part WITHOUT rules that produces engagement and excitement.
OD&D tended 2 emphasize the sprawling megadungeon over everything else. But the moment you give players total freedom of movement, the WORLD takes center stage. No dungeon environment can long command the players' attention when things are happening in the wide world around them!
To place a lair within a dungeon, you need to determine its proper level. For example, roll 10d10 for number of troglodytes. There can be 2d4 on level 2, 4d4 on 3, 6d4 on 4th, and so on. After rolling a bunch of d4's, you can place the troglodyte lair on level 9 with CONFIDENCE.
Once that lair is placed on level 9, you can see that a Trog encounter on level 8 would include most all of the lair's population. Not realistic! A trog encounter on level 2 would be 2d4 scouts. Trogs from that lair on level 5 would be a solid group of 8d4 warriors on a mission.
Most "old school" dungeon designers compose levels with a set of two or three factions in mind. Gygax's AD&D random dungeon doesn't work that way. The tables imply a lot activity up and down through the levels. Stop assuming static rooms. Start thinking vertically!
Using the Dungeon Random Monster Determination Matrix, you can see it's possible for a level 2 monster like the Troglodytes to show up on like level 16-- with 30d4 warriors! A very big lair, but still within the ranges from the Monster Manual.
When designing a dungeon, identify where the lairs are, determining their depths as I've described. Then place outposts and wandering monster groups above them. Think vertically FIRST and imagine the resulting activity. Then design your levels around this dynamism.
I'd never heard of a game supporting multiple parties in the same campaign until I ran AD&D. Gygax's exhortations about timekeeping make no sense if play is focused on a single party. Campaigns as he defined them cannot emerge until this happens. Same players can run both groups!
The afterword of AD&D gives today's rpg players fits. It states that "rules > campaign > players" which they see as being completely inverted. They are not seasoned campaigners like the original grognards and cannot imagine anything being more important than the players.
Eldritch Wizardry added artifacts to the D&D game system because overcautious players had ruined the game by reading the rules and abusing hirelings. Gygax went even further by making book knowledge worthy of the death penalty and by removing even suggested powers for artifacts.
After making 15 one page dungeons scattered around the map, playing half with mixed results, and THEN building a dungeon with many levels VERTICALLY first-- wow! A couple of stocking rolls and each level practically designs itself. Actual play + Gygaxian tools CANNOT BE BEAT!
After designing a megadungeon vertically, you can immediately imagine both up down traffic and likely wilderness area activity. Placing particularly thrilling treasures comes next as does Chainmail type units. Rumors and clues about all of the above just emerge out of nowhere!
It takes me about 2 or 3 hours to make a one page dungeon. With that same effort you can plan an entire OD&D style megadungeon and end up with something that can entertain a huge range of players, provide wilderness encounters, AND spiff up any medieval miniatures battles.
What people don't understand is that you have to do this a lot while running a campaign. The old books just ASSUME you know how to do this and that as a hobbyist you wouldn't need much else to run a game. Amazingly, EVEN THE MINIATURES WARGAMES were run with this attitude.
The single worst idea to intrude onto classic D&D is this thing of the PC's being significant and in some kind of story. They can set off on adventure and tpk, they can just plain fail, and they can blunder into something more interesting than what they originally planned to do.
People struggle with running games in the old "sandbox" style because it's scary. And yes, it DOES require imagination to make it work. But they will necessarily wander aimlessly as bad ideas are tested and discarded and enough good ideas accumulate that things click.
If you stay with a "sandbox" game and keep at it, the collective creativity of the ENTIRE group will produce worlds and adventures that are fit ESPECIALLY to your group. YOU CANNOT BUY GAMING MATERIAL THAT IS THIS GOOD. Only hobbyists and amateurs can play at this level.
By intentionally breaking the fellowship of PC's and allowing multiple active parties and multiple PC's per player, the campaign can generate multiple independent threads rather than being limited to a single imposed story that's maintained by repudiating the game aspects of D&D.
For the old hands, it was a major objective to break out of 1st level-- took many sessions. But a small number of characters levels 2-4 can greatly increase the rate of advancement for the new players. If they make any kind of major score, the new guy can ride on their coattails.
Players that do not want to participate in dungeon and wilderness sessions due to interest level, times zones, etc. can be given domains with a set # of Chainmail units to run. Just why you would separate this out into a "modular campaign" as Gygax describes here is a mystery.
A viable campaign is, as Gygax says here, going to suffer attrition. He takes it for granted that you will run what is called an "open table". Some people bail after the first session, some will have a good run 6-8 sessions, others will take breaks. This is a normal.
Once you have mastered "real" time and running multiple parties in the same campaign, this advice about putting a new player in charge of a brand new party becomes less outlandish. It will likely end in a TPK or something close to it, so it doesn't have to take over your game.
When people read that "the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way", they typically apply it to stupid things like starting first level with max hits and magic-users using swords. The truth is, it's really for adjudicating the big stuff.
The old style long-running campaign REQUIRES you to be able to create reflexively. Good rpgs will help you learn how to do that but most do it FOR you in such a way that they retard your ability to ever get there. The old games take it for granted that you can. And they're right!
Module X4 takes this old school looking hex map and then imposes a linear set of encounters on top of it. D&D-like props repurposed to play a decidedly un-D&D type game. An entire generation was basically told to not even TRY to play the game in the core rules they bought.
Module X4 puts the players on a linear track... and then puts UNAVOIDABLE wilderness encounters in their path. This is not at all how any legitimate incarnation of D&D functions. Check for surprise. Check for distance. Check for reactions. So many ways they can play out!
You think I am exaggerating, but this X4 "adventure" suspends the rules in favor of a linear story at every opportunity. The box text even comes right out and tells them what they DON'T see. As if the players lack scouts, pegasi, gryphons, or magic broom sticks. It's bizarre.
Players take great pleasure in short-circuiting plots, outsmarting foes, and doing off the wall things-- but post-1980 modules TAKE IT FOR GRANTED that paypigs are unable to run actual D&D games and are only too happy to pay $$$ for scenarios that are INTRINSICALLY NOT FUN.
Why couldn't TSR just put out more well stocked wilderness locations with lots of things to do and lots interesting places to explore and interact with? THEY KNEW HOW. But you can't sell very much of that sort of game. Real D&D had to go!
Gygax directs campaign maps to be at 30 miles per hex. Small scale maps for wilderness clearing are at 9 hexes = 1 mile, appropriate scale for imagining Chainmail battles. One wandering monster check per 200 yd hex combined with % in lair rolls resulted in one lair in 1 sq mile.
A systematic crawl through a 1 mile hex can easily flush out a dozen large monster groups. The AD&D wilderness positively teems with activity! Determining where such monsters monster actually lair and what they are actually up to can generate MANY potential adventure situations.
Rolled up a slew of Lawful Good encounters in my hex. 230 Dervishes (60 med cav, 170 light cav) with clerics (11th, 8th, 6th) and magic-users (7th, 4th, 4th) with a literal air support wing on 5 shedu and 6 lammasu. Creates a spontaneous implied domain and mission.
People drop into the game and they don't always stick. The campaign took on a life of its own in a modest way and the way it develops is when we talk about what is happening in it and how it impacts the characters. This is boring non-play to you because it's not your campaign.
I think it is pretty exciting. The campaign itself CAN generate adventure hooks by itself if you let it. The stuff that is obvious to me is not obvious to the group. And the particular group of players that shows up sorta has to come to consensus on what to do. THIS TAKES TIME.
Multiple independent parties in a well-played-in campaign area creates a vibrant backdrop. A dozen random wilderness encounters dropped into it will NATURALLY catalyze with existing threads. This happens during sessions as weird, unexpected things stack up.
I remember as a kid randomly stocking a dungeon in Moldvay Basic and just not feeling anything. It was all inert, dull. But an active campaign has so many hooks, it will synergize with just about anything you throw at it.
Same thing happened a few months ago needing to flesh out the campaign world beyond Trollopulous... but not a lot of ideas of what to do with it. Play a bunch of wilderness travel around there, though, and suddenly... you just KNOW what needs to be there!
@archon talks about this in his book-- "given that this or that random thing has occurred, what must the world have been like in order that all of this could have transpired the way that it did?" You end up doing this A LOT in a game. You can grow a world rather than engineer 1.
Naturally, these random occurrences that shape the development of a campaign world will naturally be interpreted to address problems and questions created by the actual play within the campaign. You reinterpret everything based on what you collectively want to do.
There is a tradeoff between deciding what is the best way to plan a campaign and allowing one to sort of just build itself. I choose to err on the side of exploratory gaming. In my view, leaving the door open to something magical happening is well worth the investment.
Stray ideas at one level of play generates inspiration at another and feeds back into itself. Reflexive compartmentalization of dungeon adventure, wilderness travel and miniatures battles shuts down this potent source of creativity, excitement, and momentum.
You can tell people compartmentalize game play by their talk: adventures are somehow distinct from the campaign, wilderness travel is viewed as a distraction from the adventure, and the domain is something you deal with *after* you are done adventuring. This is foreign to AD&D.
The goblins The Hobbit show up as a dungeon scenario at Goblin Town, a wilderness encounter at the fir trees, and as a Chainmail unit at the Battle of Five Armies. Shifting between these levels of gameplay is far more natural than your game supplements have led you to believe!
The 1977 Monster Manual assumes you will be comfortable adjudicating battles with hundreds of units per side and that such situations will not substantively disrupt your campaign, your adventures, or your sessions. Yet most gamers lack the ability to operate at this level.
It's hard to imagine fantasy without domain-scale events. Rpg designers alter D&D to emphasize tiny battles with only a handful per side when the AD&D combat system was all along an abstract of a miniatures system built to handle 1000's of men per side. Gaming's greatest tragedy!
Imagine a fantasy campaign run by a DM that is unable to drop 200 knights onto the campaign map, riding 200 miles to perform a heroic deed. Unthinkable, right? If that is not in your gaming, then what in the world have you been doing all this time?! What else is there?!
To unlock the titanic medieval fantasy of AD&D, you need four ideas all at once "real time", multiple active parties, wilderness travel with full autonomy, and EASY Chainmail scale mass combat.
Sacrifice any one of this and TOTAL GAMING ENLIGHTENMENT will necessarily elude you!
Sacrifice any one of this and TOTAL GAMING ENLIGHTENMENT will necessarily elude you!
In Chainmail, 200 medium cavalry are as easy to handle as a single D&D figure. It has 10 "hit points" (10 figures, really) but will have to make morale checks in order to retain its cohesion. Real fantastic medieval combat is neither complex nor is it a grind. This is EPIC!
In a lot of ways, these giant battles with several hundred men per side are WAY easier to adjudicate and reason about than the stuff you make up for your dungeons. But people stay cooped up inside the dungeons for way too long because they are AFRAID playing at this scale. Sad!
In module X5, the Big Bad's strategic objectives are foiled by taking his plans from him and giving them to his enemies, thereby destroying his army completely. An actual strategic situation modeled in the game would provide a FAR richer gaming experience with manifold outcomes.
Total player autonomy, weird random wilderness encounters, and making mass combat a 1st class element of the game IS WAY EASIER than pretending to play a game when there is really isn't one. A seventies style campaign solves the problems of gaming WAY BATTER than anything since.
What's in a name? "Tactical Studies Rules" signals D&D's wargaming origins, natch. But "TSR Hobbies" indicates that D&D is the same sort of pastime as model railroading and assembling model kits. Bringing these things to life from the ground YOURSELF is how these things work.
The thing about "core book only" AD&D is that it will force you to face all your gaming fears at once. Don't feel creative? Confused by byzantine rules? Afraid of the players ability to do whatever they want? Not sure what anything will actually do in actual play. SCARY!
Going into session after session not having ANY idea what the players would do. Unplanned things being more fun than planned things. Hours spent after games to check what the CORRECT way to rule things as Gygax directed. Grueling! After a while, though, it does something to you.
This process of continually rolling with the punches as you pursue a HOBBY of developing your own original AD&D milieu-- what it does is it stresses and exercises your IMAGINATION to the point where you will ACTUALLY DISCOVER THAT YOU HAVE ONE.
D&D's transition from hobby to product in the early 80 was ultimately a process engineering a way for unimaginative people to play a semblance of the game. The odd fear of running AD&D "core books only" is rooted in BEING UNWILLING TO DEDICATE TIME TO WHAT OUGHT TO BE A HOBBY.
AD&D assumes the better players will ALSO pursue it as hobby. The depth and breadth of the game combined with the strange "1 game day = 1 real day" rule causes the campaign to take up a life of its own. Things happen even if you don't play... and players get hooked by this.
The AD&D game is unlike any game produced after 1980 because it WAS NOT AT ALL ENGINEERED TO BE A PRODUCT. It assumes you are so much more than just a consumer. Spend enough time with the rules and it will eventually MAKE you more than just a consumer.
AD&D's lack of system cogency lowers the bar on what it takes to create your own material for the game. There is nothing to learn, no right way to make a monster or magic item. YOU JUST THINK HOW SOMETHING SHOULD BE AND MAKE IT SO. This really ENCOURAGES original creation.
The "simple" unified systems that most people want to impose on the game actually creates more FRICTION than Gygax's unclear and disorganized rules. It is a creativity suck that contracts GREATLY with his unquenchably specificity when it comes to how he imagines fantasy to work.
The baroque combat rules in AD&D are just ruling after ruling layered on top of the old Chainmail system. Continue playing them without to cleaning them up and something significant about the culture will eventually be conveyed to you. Old games will cease to appear incomplete!
Many things that look like design problems really aren't when you can assume that a game will become an ongoing project of several players. AD&D is one of a VERY small number of games that can reliably make that assumption. Start there and you enter a completely different world.
To make a living world, you need massive actions and movements by forces far greater than the players. This takes the spotlight off of them, forces them to play smarter, and makes the game more about finding their way against a chaotic and dynamic backdrop. Think big!
AD&D is so well built for extended play and its tool frameworks are so solid, it is possible to run it week after week with almost no prep. This is feature forestalls DM burnout like nothing else that came after it, yet most systems eliminate this feature in order one up Gygax.
Players don't really care about potions. They hold no sway over their strategic imagination. But an expiring "I win button" like a medusa head that is rotting away? THAT will spur the players on to take insanely stupid risks.
When I was a kid I couldn't imagine how people ran D&D with demons, deities and artifacts. I mean it's all so insane and OBVIOUSLY IMBALANCED. But I am going 2 say now that not only does it all work, but it works WAY BETTER than the games where people try to tone everything down.
If you build a game around the INSANE stuff AD&D packs into its core books, THE ADVENTURES JUST WRITE THEMSELVES. And they wither away every time you say no to a weird wilderness encounter result and every time you pass over a weirdly specific Gygaxian mega-rule.
We can't keep magic-users alive. Does this mean the game needs to be fixed? No! The game fixes itself. It gets easier to level a new player every session that the average PC strength goes up. If the players decided to make gaining a magic-user a priority, it will happen.
The half-orc Fagor was WEIRDLY out of character last game-- overcautious, fearful, low energy, and FAR from bold. Given that this guy is being groomed by the campaign world to lead hundreds of men in battle, this ESPECIALLY merits a grade of "P" for a POOR SHOWING.
Are fighting-men then obligated to charge into every melee and take EVERY risk that presents itself? Not at all! But if they don't like the way a situation is shaping up, it's on them to seize the initiative and help direct things to the point where actual D&D is being played!
AD&D is a role-playing game-- NOT a medium for expressing YOURSELF. It's a fantasy world where YOU take on the role of BOLD FIGHTERS, REDOUBTABLE CLERICS, INSCRUTIBLE MAGIC-USERS, and CUNNING THIEVES. Play your role or else the cost of obtaining the next level will be exorbitant!
Need for training lead to wilderness travel which lead to campaign bifurcation. Atomic "return to town" type sessions in this context lead to a 3+ part side story that fleshed out the broader world situation outside of Trollopulous. Everything just works.
Each session introduces these BIG world elements-- strange devices and locales, large groups of people moving about the world pursuing their own objectives. All of this is filtered through the players' immediate interests and resources. Which produces NEW gonzo world elements!
The audacious wilderness encounters of AD&D that come up spontaneously during play imply tremendous things about the world which don't have to be fleshed out all at once. The things that do matter will synergize with each other, making it OBVIOUS what a session should be about.
When your scenarios and game sessions derive from player choices and game events, you DEFINITELY get better quality game material than the many prepared modules that are out there. The Trollopulous campaign demonstrated this first by accident and then later more intentionally.
The game rules that were paramount in allowing the game to again reach those fleeting levels of gaming awesome were the weirder, less understood ones: wilderness travel, training costs, real time, chainmail scale, and multiple parties. All rules role-players reflexively dismiss!
Imagine being dropped into somebody's bewildering AD&D campaign where it took other players a dozen sessions to level only to get into off the wall hijinks where YOUR CHARACTER is pivotal in the party making a huge score over weird odds. This has happened twice in 29 sessions.
The back cover of Moldvay Basic declares that "each adventure is like writing a novel." More accurately a session corresponds to an issue of a comic book or a chapter from a trashy dime store paperback written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, Gardner Fox, or Lin Carter.
The tragic flaw of Moldvay Basic is the reduction of the concept of campaign down to being merely a linked set of adventures. This weak definition allows for tacky railroad modules with no player autonomy to pass a D&D campaign. A real step backwards for the game!
The two things you want to think about as you sketch out your AD&D campaign world is (a) Chainmail strengths of major cities/lairs and (b) location/class/level/alignment of people that will be willing to train player characters.
The most important lesson in rpg history is the Braunstein which was INSANELY FUN when it was out of control and then a TOTAL DISASTER when the referee fixed everything. The majority of rpg rules/supplements REPEAT Dave Wesley's error and consequently see little continued play.
The AD&D training rules necessarily create situations where players have enough XP to level but not enough gold to train. Players that have no chance of leveling any time soon are easily persuaded to make contributions to other characters' training costs.
AD&D offers "levels for training" with training costs multiplied for poor play. It takes anywhere from 3 to 12 sessions to level. Only 1 in 6 sessions will have a significant treasure haul. All together this rewards perfect attendance, risk taking, and smarter play.
The vignette used to describe D&D by Tom Moldvay does not describe "by the book" Basic D&D play. But this type of play NATURALLY occurs in a very loose, stupid AD&D game where both outrageously hard monsters and over the top magic items are in play.
Original D&D takes it for granted that the Dungeon Master will be comfortable instantiating large Chainmail units in his campaign world. Rather than quietly dispensing with this, the 1977 Monster Manual ELABORATES on this idea. Yet most players did not do this.
OD&D actually supports the wilderness backdrop BETTER than the dungeon environment. The number appearing in the monster descriptions is tailored to the outdoors, yet the number appearing on the dungeon charts has "no hard and fast rule." Only the 1979 DMG worked this out!
Rather than backstory-heavy character concepts and intense wrangling over big dreams in some kind of session zero, AD&D characters enter in a gigantic funnel. Thru training costs and down time, survivors determine the specific details of their classes and races within the game.
Brother Payne died pointlessly in a ludicrous game session and his cult of Issek died with him. Half-elf figher/cleric Bob Dobs shows up for 5 sessions with big payoffs and can now set up his own "church", create original spells for it, and train demi-humans in a new career type.
Building on Chaz's efforts across MANY sessions, it is now possible for new demi-humans to enter the game as cleric/thieves trained personally by BOTH Chaz the elf-thief and Bob Dobs the fighter/cleric. This campaign feature took one year to develop and explore.
The combination of real time, training costs, and Chainmail scale combats allow the players to have a major impact on that campaign world even at levels 1-3. The breaking apart of the rules into Dungeon-only, now-Wilderness, now-Mass Combat sets WRONG expectations about the game.
By using concepts from Chainmail and Swords & Spells, it is very easy to jump up to mass combat scales. AD&D interfaces with this seamlessly and-- more importantly-- players NATURALLY adapt to this type of play. Play involving hundreds of men/monsters are highly playable.
Fantasy stories ALWAYS use big battles for the climax. Not having a game system that can support that type of play in such a way that can integrate the PC's is a MAJOR OMISSION for any fantasy adventure game. Because of its roots, AD&D does it better than any competing system!
In a real campaign, funnel effects operate on everything. Your dungeon ideas can be vetoed just as easily as somebody's dumb character concept. The action of a session ends up being composed of whatever elements ended up sticking.
It wasn't until Gary Gygax starting writing checks to Judges Guild for supplements that he could even begin to conceive of there being a market for adventure modules. Play AD&D as written and it won't be long before the concept will be just as unimaginable to you!
The AD&D rules ground your campaign by formalizing a WEALTH of commonly understood gaming ideas. Your original milieu can stand up to any weird thing you or your players throw at it. When the dust settles you still have this remarkable system lending coherence to your efforts.
If you have an campaign that runs for 30 sessions, you are going to use up every single good idea you have and then some. AD&D is so packed with weirdly specific esoterica, its capacity to continuously inform your game is inexhaustible. This is a huge resource.
The majority of role-players pat themselves on the back for being able to alter the rules at will and ignore die rules that threaten to upset the "balance of the campaign." But honoring the rules and dice creates suspense and breaking the campaign pushes you into the unknown.
What's it mean when you allow game-breaking and campaign-breaking events to happen week after week in your game? It means that your players can go anywhere, do anything, have a significant impact on your game world, and-- best of all-- help that world take on a life of its own.
A campaign that is "broken" all the time is one where the players have exceeded the bounds of your expectations and imaginations. Players take a great satisfaction from both accomplishing this sort of thing and even just being confident that this sort of thing can even be done.
"Bad" sessions where the players have full autonomy are better than even the best sessions that are on rails. But people bend rules and fudge dice in order to keep the game within the limits of their imagination. This is outright FEAR of the game running its natural course.
Every time you are astonished by the players' choices and every time you are dumbfounded by events in your campaign, your imagination and your world develop and grow and expand just a little bit more.
I was very frustrated in the early sessions when I had designed dungeon areas that were never going to see play. When a Chainmail type battle goes down, EVERYTHING about a location is relevant and impacts play. This dual use of a dungeon is a powerful gaming tool.
I had this great lieutenant type monster that was hidden in a random spot in a dungeon where the players were never going to find him. When an army showed up on his doorstep, OF COURSE he would get called up in a way I had never anticipated. Chainmail wins again!
Same thing happened with my mushroom dimension and the related dungeon. The players never went back to this because it scared them to death. Then alignment rules indicated they were natural allies to the druid. And they became a major component of the campaign via an epic battle.
Our assumptions about adventure design lead to so much unused material when placed in a wide open campaign. But if you think like a wargamer rather than a storyteller, suddenly EVERYTHING you develop gets leveraged to create strange and exciting situations.
I look at the supplements that flesh out settings for you and they just don't work like this. They give you piles and piles of data that are as much a tax on the imagination as anything else. They load up their maps with so much stuff there is no place to add anything!
If you want to create something that is sure to see use in your campaign, design a dungeon side-view first, have some conventional dungeon stuff in it, an awesome mega-treasure at the bottom, and then a breakdown of what kind of Chainmail-type army it can call up.
You have no control over where or how the players dungeon delve. But the overall strategic situation? That's something that provides a significant backdrop to everything that happens and something the players can interact with directly when play jumps up to the mega-battle level.
Very little in the vast amounts of D&D product published over the years can assist you in thinking this way, but given the game's origins this is something that is a NATURAL FIT for the game once you realize the extent to which the game actually supports this.
AD&D's ability to easily jump to and integrate with a Chainmail type mega-battle is important not just because it allows the domain game of name level characters to be played. It is also something that allows the players to grow into something other than cartoonish superheroes.
Why does AD&D produce many more distinct character roles and archetypes than competing systems? Because of its many modes of play: dungeon delve, wilderness travel, chainmail-type battle.... Each class impacts each mode in striking ways. Eliminate the modes, lose the archetypes!
Nobody needs a class that is 30% more fighting ability in exchange for 30% of its thieving ability. Who cares! The AD&D assassin has a vital role at the strategic scale via spying. His assassination ability redefines combat system. A game with an assassin is a DIFFERENT GAME!
Most people competing with AD&D attempted to add more character options and class variants in order to one up it. But they did so under the assumption that only one mode of gameplay actually mattered. Ultimately, all this flash and sparkle has very little substance.
This is why you see a trend toward magic-users and thieves having their melee abilities amped up in other games-- because when you eliminate AD&D's manifold modes of play, these classes suddenly had nothing much to do. A flattening of gameplay combined with a lack of imagination!
Meanwhile, each mode you play you embrace produces layers of specific meanings an opportunities for each class in AD&D. People look at these parts of the game and dismiss them for looking unfun or unworkable. But it really is where it all comes alive!
Big battles are great because the demand attention over the course of many sessions, assembling an alliance requires travel and role-playing, and the battle itself is an opportunity for more planning and creative play. The threat of war GENERATES varied scenarios.
A big battle such as like Pelannor fields ties together your fantasy geography, all of the big NPC's on your campaign map, all of their armies, and then whatever gonzo magic items and special class abilities you've established in your campaign. It's awesome!
Chainmail battles between units of hundreds of men/monsters can be played out while "hero" type characters duke it out amidst the chaos. AD&D combat is ripped off from Chainmail so the scale and turn lengths are all identical. It really is mind-blowing how well it integrates.
The things that make AD&D and Chainmail look terrible and poorly designed are exactly the things that make them work so well at the table. These large battles combined with real time and wilderness travel create the tone of epic fantasy novels better than anything. It's amazing.
Imagine Tolkienesque high fantasy becoming the default genre for both fiction and tabletop gaming... BUT THEN NOT HAVING GAMES WHERE GIGANTIC BATTLES ARE A MAJOR ELEMENT OF GAMEPLAY AND CAMPAIGNING. This actually happened! This is bizarre!!!
What kind of fantasy stories do you get in your role-playing when you eliminate real wargaming from the tools you have at your disposal? Man, they'd really have to be dumb and fake and artificial and weird contortions of the genre, wouldn't they?
Man, to have titanic duels between heroic units while a tremendous battle wages around them? WHO WOULDN'T WANT TO PLAY THAT?! Easy to dream up. Easy to foreshadow. Easy to engage with. Big beautiful results at the table. WHAT THE HECK HAVE PEOPLE BEEN DOING FOR 5 DECADES OF RP?!
Sandboxes are daunting to players because they don't want to spend many sessions looking for the good stuff. If they don't want to find the good adventure options through trial and error, either. Without Chainmail and real time, sandboxes tend to be way too static.
You drop a siege by orcs and Apache Indians and white apes into the game and the players will react-- either to get away from it, make a buck off it, or even foil it altogether. THIS IS NOT STATIC. It feels different from the kind of gaming conjured by terms like 'hexcrawling.'
You've already set up lairs around your campaign map. What happens when they go beyond simply waiting around for your players to walk into them? Well when one faction threatens to wipe out another one, you end up with a large scale version of the situation depicted in module B2.
Chainmail scale actions on the campaign map don't feel like adventure hooks. They're something else. On the one hand they almost just scenery. On the other, they somehow generate adventure hooks spontaneously. One thing they aren't though is STATIC. They are anything but boring.
I needed to be able to treat lairs as domains for my real time campaign. How do you do it without in depth rules like ACKS? Easy. Monster Manual gives complete population stats including women and children. Calculate an income of 7sp/month per monster. There's your econ system!
When you hand your campaign's biggest patrons/groups over to other players to run, your campaign world ceases to be a mere backdrop for the adventurers actions. Multiple independent actors in the same campaign forces the game world to snap into focus in really rich way.
If you allow people to roll chance to know for entire spell lists until they have their max number of spells at each level, then they will not be able to do any spell research at all unless and until they raise their intelligence score somehow. Do it the DMG way instead!
In AD&D, you start with 4 spells at first level and thereafter may add ONLY 1 spell to your spell book each time you level, but this is only from those available to you via scrolls and other spell books. The cost for this is paid with training costs. (Max known is not used!!)
Did little kid you look at the Expert D&D set and then decide there was NO WAY the rules for getting lost could be used for real? GARY KNEW BETTER THAN COOK/MARSH. In AD&D, if you take a wrong turn, chances are you will realize your mistake the next day of travel and backtrack.
In AD&D, your spellbook size is a function of your level. Your ability to add a new spell to it is gained when you pay your training costs. Given this, it is possible to estimate a rough cost to replace a spell book-- maybe half your training costs? Everything makes sense!
Okay, this passage reaffirms the min/max spells and chance to know usage from the PHB... however it indicates that you may do this only as you find scrolls, etc. Which means spell book size is a function of intelligence. Which means I again don't know the value of a spellbook.
Now we are back to this one. What is happening when you level? I think it's possible that the magic-user has worked out the formula for a spell that he can "know" but which he has not acquired through recovering scrolls and spellbooks. Because spellcasting is like math.
Lost spell books are merely LOST. You can transcribe memorized spells for next to nothing. The penalty is... you have to find spells again all over, limited by your spells known list. Expensive spell research can recover them and expensive scrolls can be backups.
What happens when you get to your Max Number of Spells Known?? You can't put any new spells into your spell book or research new spells again until you can either (a) level up to be able to access a new spell level or (b) raise your intelligence score somehow.
Real D&D is a framework for synthesizing miniatures battles, rpg sessions, and complex double-blind or even quadruple-blind fog of war conflicts into ONE continuous campaign. This was the most conceivable amount of fun that could be had in the pre-commercialized gaming world.
The campaign approach to D&D disappeared after 1979 for the same reasons that mega-dungeons ceased to be a foundational norm. You can't make a product out of the ingenious methods of the mid-seventies wargamer. Worse, you don't NEED products to sustain this style.
The most amazing thing about the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide is that Gygax's writing within it is completely oblivious to there being ANY other way to play D&D than the sprawling monster miniatures club basement campaign. The coming 1980s rpg market is COMPLETELY foreign to it.
"Combat as War vs Combat as Sport" has been a longstanding discussion topic, sure. With time and space and anything goes and total autonomy and multiple independent factions and intense fog war... the Trollopulous campaign managed to capture WAR as war.
jeffro.wordpress.com/2021/07/31/the…
jeffro.wordpress.com/2021/07/31/the…
When you adopt 1:1 time, you go from exploring a wide range of party configurations to having multiple active parties. The campaign starts to "pop", overshadowing any one group's "spotlight". When you scale up to over a dozen independent actors... you end up with an model world!
This seems reasonable, but it ceases to hold under 1:1 time with "rules > campaign > players". A legitimate campaign starts producing adventure hooks and situations spontaneously and en masse. In some sense, it's more of a world simulator than a game.
hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-sla…
hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-sla…
The Quantum Ogre question for 1:1 games with many independent players: "if someone makes a campaign altering decision without any information and without having any concept of what the consequences would be, then did they actually make a decision?" The answer is ABSOLUTELY, YES!
Name level characters are not murder hobos. They are quite happy to let each other alone if there is space in the game world for them to coexist. In the event of inter-Patron combat, they are likely to spare each other's lives in exchange for an alliance. This is unexpected.
We debate ways of setting up a game to get patron players to embrace a wargaming ethos and play the way I want them to. On the other hand, dynamics that emerge from these players running high level lords and so forth is probably more realistic than what I would force them to do.
Gygax circa 1975 was not running the type of monster wargame that Arneson did. His game then was more like Keep on the Borderlands with a freaky mega-dungeon-- with the best players building strongholds fairly close at hand. There was no Egg of Coot threatening to destroy it all.
Nothing in Arneson's notes indicates that the overworld was an afterthought or that it must all be left to grow into being organically. Note that Blackmoor had campaign-scale "encounters" of its own upsetting the status quo every single month.
Gygax's instruction in the DMG directs you to an ultimate goal of producing a campaign scope more in line with Arneson's and less anchored to the mega-dungeon. The most effective means of fulfilling this mandate is turning loose multiple independent and high level characters.
Looking at this map again, the number of places of interest have multiplied. Areas where epic-level events played out have tripled. Stuff that started out as a rough sketch to sustain random wilderness treks really is an actual place with a weird sense of reality.
The instructions for fleshing out your games base town from the old Expert set are just plain weak. Right now we know who governs Trollopulous, we know how they govern, how they react in a crisis, and what type of strengths they could bring to bear on any significant challenge.
The AD&D DMG tells you what to expect as you grow your campaign. The Cook/Marsh abstract of the D&D game is... weirdly incomplete and unhelpful. The absence of any description of how a campaign's setting emerges in the course of actual play is a criminal disservice to novice DMs.
It is possible to roll up an artifact randomly in AD&D, but you may have missed the table entry for it. It is not referenced on the main table of magic item tables! If you roll a 46-48 on the latter, you go on to Miscellaneous Magic Item table 1 where you'll need a 17 exactly!
People frequently complain that the Sword +1 is boring and not worthy to grace your game-- as if they are cluttering up their fantasy games. In AD&D, 25% of *ALL* magic swords have additional capabilities beyond the bonus to to-hit and damage. DM's just forget to check for this!
This is a very subtle rule of hyper-Gygaxian specificity. Here's how it works. A thief needs at least 1,251 experience points to level. If he gets lucky his first session and earns 2,039 XP, then he cannot earn any more XP until he pays for and completes his training for level 2.
My ranger that's on the verge of leveling has to make a tough call. Should he travel alone 5-10 hexes though dangerous territory to find a tutor or should he stay where his adventuring peers are so he can continue with them, but then have to pay DOUBLE training costs??
The 2-12 followers that rangers pick up at 10th level can be pretty out there. If the ranger class is appropriated from The Lord of the RIngs, this pretty well translates it well into comic book fantasy territory. This would be a bizarre addition to any campaign!
Doing the best I can with this: An attack against a magic-user casting a spell lands on the segment equal to the winning initiative roll (DMG 65). If the attack has a weapon speed, it lands on the segment equal to the weapon speed minus the attacker's initiative roll (DMG 66).
Monsters don't use weapon vs. AC, weapon length, or weapon speed. The stats aren't there! Using rules with battles between armies opens up a means getting a great deal of richness and variety in the performance of your fighters as a function of how they are equipped. Use them!
I've never heard someone go nuts talking about what they did with this spell. This is one of those things that is very ho-hum in a conventional game but which is a total godsend in real D&D. Why? Because fortifications that only cost you a bit of TIME completely changes the game.
An 11th level wizard can build three level tower that's 30 feet tall in about two weeks. For free. Build several of these and connect them with walls and you now have a modest keep. (!!) You can add in additional buildings and fortifications at your leisure. All it takes is TIME.
Demi human level-limits are another thing that seems arbitrary in conventional role-play but which becomes way more significant when "always on" domain play is running. Non-humans are not establishing strongholds. This is perhaps the biggest difference between AD&D and B/X.
When you roll up a new character, don't forget to determine your age and also check for attribute bonuses for being young, mature, etc. Your character's birthdate is the day you created him.
Splash damage for flaming oil is not automatic. Those that are within the burst radius only take damage if they fail to save versus poison. This rule is obviously VERY IMPORTANT for anyone throwing vials of holy water, poison, acid, etc.
The question comes up, just what kind of sword is this magic sword, anyway? Gygax does have a rule for that tucked away among the magic item tables. NOW you can know if the assassin got that magic short sword or not.
The question comes up, is requiring the players to declare actions before initiative is rolled an actual rule or is it just some weird thing Jeffro dreamed?
It's a rule.
AD&D combat does not have the kind of granularity people want to impute to it!
It's a rule.
AD&D combat does not have the kind of granularity people want to impute to it!
The question comes up, is the integration of Chainmail-scale combat with PC-scale action an actual rule or just some weird thing Jeffro cooked up?
It's a rule.
AD&D takes for granted that you are familiar with Chainmail and Swords & Spells.
It's a rule.
AD&D takes for granted that you are familiar with Chainmail and Swords & Spells.
The fact that scales are different depending on whether you are in the dungeon or outdoors is something most people struggle with when they encounter AD&D. Most designers dispense with this rule in their competing games. But they also dispense with mass combat as well!
Just wear a helmet, okay? I mean just do it already! I really don't want to deal with the game having de facto hit location system AT ALL!
But do note that this game that supposedly ripped off Tolkien is vehemently opposed to the concept of elfin chainmail. Bizarre!
But do note that this game that supposedly ripped off Tolkien is vehemently opposed to the concept of elfin chainmail. Bizarre!
Okay, okay. It's not that there is no elfin chainmail in AD&D. It's that there is no MAGICAL elfin chainmail. Which, as @BrianRenninger6 points out... elf level limits prevent them from making magic armor at all. Elfin chain CANNOT be magical!!!
How much are the characters spending in between adventures? Quite a bit. All the more so if you have henchmen. And wow, henchmen are EXPENSIVE. Without 1:1 time, these rules have no teeth. With time in play, you can't afford not to show up to the game. (h/t @licensedtodill)
Man, this spell just is not the one I had in my old Basic manual! The obvious application here is a 5" by 2" stand of archers in a Chainmail battle. Given that this is available to first level Illusionists, you have PCs integrating with mass combat at 1st level in AD&D. Huge!
AC -7. Need magical weapons just to hit it. Bewildering array of spell-like abilities. Oh, and 80% magic resistance. You can't outfight her. You can't just blast her with lightning bolts. She's practically unbeatable... but only if you have dispensed with the psionics rules.
The psionic rules can take what is shaping up to be a multi-hour battle with countless figures in play and instead just settle it with relatively little effort. As with the assassination tables, it is a tremendous repudiation of the type of grid gaming that is prevalent today.
Conventional approaches to D&D attempt to boil everything down to a single least common denominator mode of play. Real D&D embraces a wide range of very different modes of play and moves between them as needed. Psi can add an entirely new dimension to an existing campaign.
Psionics are unique in that using the spell-like disciplines can leave you and your party vulnerable to psychic attacks. Running out of psionic defense points is practically a death sentence for psis. Counterbalancing this, cooperating psis can pool their defenses.
AD&D RAW implies the existence of multiple competing Psi Corps within the campaign that will work covertly to isolate and eliminate any psionic threat that is not part of a similarly well-organized group of psis.
We simply have not had to compile our rulings into a house rule document. Situations requiring rulings are so case-specific, they really cannot conceivably apply to anything else. The only example to the contrary is to what extent demonic powers are treated as spells in AD&D.
Lots of people were in campaigns where there was just one PC psi that ever happened and whose brain got melted in their first big encounter. In a real campaign with countless active pcs, such a character would be offered a position on a psi corp by a patron of similar alignment.
AD&D Psionics is not designed for a game where there is a lone Genius-level DM and then a single "Fellowship" style party for the entirety of its campaign. There are more modes of play in the game than just the endless dungeon crawl. Psi offers a distinct mode of play of its own!
With Psi being embraced as a part of AD&D, low level PCs can now make bank by reporting psionic threats to interested patrons. Every single encounter doesn't have to be all about YOU. One party of PCs doesn't have to be able to do EVERYTHING!
@AuraTaxonomist has brought it to my attention that each spell level requires its own 20-pound spell book. This is very weird and very surprising. (I have suggested that this may be an artifact from Holmes Basic which is superseded in the DMG, but this is too fun not to play.)
The DEX adjustment in AD&D does not alter initiative order as it does in other systems... except for missile attacks, as @LL_929 points out. The only other way for someone to go out of the initiative order indicated for their side is to be a Kensai or... a Wu-jen using his ki.
Another way things can happen out of initiative order is for a wizard that won initiative casts a spell. The melee attack occurs BEFORE the spell goes off if the segments required to cast are greater than the value of the winning initiative roll.
One oddity here that @LL_929 points out-- only melee attacks have the ability to spoil spells out of initiative order. Via DEX bonuses, missile attacks can by themselves go out of initiative order, so they do not require the special case rule that melee attacks get.
While we're on the subject, I note that in the only outright contradiction in the rules that I know of, there's a second way to figure is a magic-user with the initiative gets a spell spoiled. This one uses | weapon speed - losing initiative roll | to determine when this happens.
Most people select weapons where no multiple attacks occur due to weapon speed, however an assassin with a magic short sword and creatures with "fist" type attacks will get them. Watch the initiative dice on the second round of a cavalry charge for some real excitement!
@LL_929 figured this out! The reason there are 2 different rules for handling spell spoilage is because one set of rules is for when the magic-user is hit by missile weapons and the other is for when the magic-user is hit my melee weapons. THERE ARE NO CONTRADICTIONS IN THE DMG!
If you are attempting to spoil a magic-user's spell in order to save your party from a devastating spell... then daggers, short swords, fists, and the monk's open-hand attacks are the way to go! (And this goes for even when initiative is not tied.)
Do monsters have weapon vs. ac adjustments? They do if they wear armor or if the DM decides they do on a case-by-case basis.
What about weapon speed factors? Any monster with a regular weapon would have them... the others would have to be assigned one if the DM elects to.
What about weapon speed factors? Any monster with a regular weapon would have them... the others would have to be assigned one if the DM elects to.
Split mail plus shield is AC 3. The plus two for the magic drops his AC down to 1, but it does not change the armor type for the purposes of looking up the Armor Class Adjustment for weapon vs. AC. The chart works just like you would think it would. No surprise here!
Out of two years of play we only saw two paladins as player characters. The honors of who gets to play them is selected by the dice via attribute rolls. (Method III for us.) But there is another way. Once you have leveled you can search for a paladin to take on as a henchman.
My illusionist reached 5th level and had to select his new spell from a limited list because illusionists are so rare in the campaign. I had to roll my "chance to know" to see if I could get the 3rd level spell I wanted. Very exciting roll! Almost as exciting as a saving throw.
Dragon #47 offers up an alternative method of reading the Weapon vs AC adjustments which contradicts the combat example from the DMG.
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