Another gem from module X4. The first thing you do in this encounter is talk a long long time about the player characters' dreams. Because everyone knows that players love to let the DM talk talk talk as much as he feels like.
Next up, there is some stray random hints about what is coming however the players will not notice them unless they specifically ask for information about the random details that they won't know about unless SPECIFICALLY ASK ABOUT THEM. Players love this stuff!
Once you are in the encounter you are stuck until you do whatever it is that the Dungeon Master has decided you are going to do. Which is maybe along the lines of part of that session where the players went to Gayhenna to make a deal with a weird extraplanar entity.
One the players are inside your unescapable deathtrap you now have a problem of getting the players out. Brilliant dungeon masters will torture their dumb players for as long as he feels like it until giving them outright whatever random spell the need to solve the puzzle. Ha!
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Skeledjinn has had it with you guys. He casts "Rocks Fall, You Die!" If you make your save, you only take half of a million points of damage.
Really have a hard time understanding how anyone can seriously play this way.
So there is pages of crap where the HIGH LEVEL PC's are supposed to be flunkies in some loser army. They do watches. They report to their commander. Blah Blah. This whole scene is basically to set up a patron encounter WHICH THE DM COULD HAVE JUST INTRODUCED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
The party met two barbarians at the Octogon society's Adventurer's Aid Hostile. Fagor threw the tall one out the window and has persuaded them to join the party.
Party is filling out waiver forms before entering the dungeon.
The bard got turned into stone after the fighter graciously bent bars on the prison cell to let the Shambleau out. She got hit by a magic lava lamp javelin, orco-Turkish grappled, and then finally her head got chopped off.
Honestly, I wouldn't blame anyone that threw these books against the wall at this point and then made Tunnels & Trolls instead.
Chainmail has three different combat systems in it. D&D has two systems in it right out of the gate, with more on the way via the supplements. Enrage 1-8 turns.
Okay, sure. A hero is worth four "men" and a super-hero is worth eight "men". What type of "man" that is depends on whether you are equipped as heavy foot, armored foot, light horse, or whatever.
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.
AD&D does not offer instant gratification. I create a one page dungeon with no guarantee that the players will ever go there. Magic-user spends thousands of gold to research an original spell when he doesn't even know if he has passed his "chance to know" roll for it or not.
The player has an opportunity to make a lasting impact on how the game is played. But given, say, five different spell concepts... he won't know which of them will actually enter play and become incorporated in to the campaign's legendarium.
Meanwhile, the players have to come to a consensus about what 2 do in any given session. This can lead to either conservative, overcautious attempts to extract low hanging fruit from lazy and unimaginative DMs. It can also lead to surprisingly innovative departures from the norm.
The AD&D grappling rules are in the game for two reasons. One is so that there is a means for the game to continue when hapless players have allowed themselves to be completely disarmed. The other is so that elite players can utterly dominate the game.
Class and level-- combined with a secret die roll-- serve as a floating bonus either on the initial chance to hit or on the combat result table. Character level will at most result in a swing of 2 or 3 percentage points. You won't witness D&D game design this bold anywhere else!
Great stuff here. Beautiful rules for handling subdual damage, recovery, knockouts. An order of magnitude better than every other house rule and elaboration ever made for this game. This is important because it establishes that Gygax was not high on cocaine when he wrote this.