The Ugliness Of Comeliness

From Dragon Magazine, issue #67:

Frank Mentzer and Francois Marcela-Froideval are already hard at work, and I am being flooded with suggestions and ideas from these Good Gentlemen. Francois uses a "Beauty" attribute for his characters, and I have come to the conclusion that you might also like to use such a rating. Here are my thoughts...

E. Gary Gygax, November 1982

Oh, man...my urge to say something snarky regarding "the French" is nearly overwhelming.  However, Monsieur Marcela-Froideval was an important figure in introducing Dungeons & Dragons...and the general role-playing hobby...to French speakers through the Casus Belli magazine (reviews and translations of which can be found over on Prince of Nothing's blog), and that alone is worthy of my respect.  But, yeah, trust a Frenchman to come to the conclusion that a "beauty" attribute was needed in his fantasy game.

Gygax, though, should've known better.

Instead, his "thoughts" on the a beauty attribute led to the creation of a new, seventh ability score called comeliness, made official with the advent of the Unearthed Arcana. Comeliness appeared in the UA pretty much exactly as presented in Dragon, save that the effect of high level magical scores provided an effect similar to the new 2nd level illusionist spell fascinate (in the original Dragon article, Gygax lists the effect as similar to charm person). For those who've never heard of this new ability score, I'll note that it never appears in any other edition of D&D...the shelf life of this 'wonderful addition' lasted all of  four years in "officialdom."

To understand why I am so sour on comeliness, I need to first explain why I rather LOVE the charisma ability score. Charisma, while an abstract attribute, is still an excellent way to measure an very real trait possessed by real life humans.  We see examples of people with (and without) "charisma" all the time: it is that "likeability" factor, that je ne sais quoi, that "star power" that some people possess...and that others don't. It is one of those "intangibles" that coaches of pro-sports teams talk about particular players having...or lacking. It is not dependent on good looks...it is not dependent on talent. It is something else that some people have in greater measure than others...though it is impossible to measure.

The D&D game provides the mechanics needed to measure it with the charisma attribute. Mechanically, it impacts reaction rolls, loyalty, and morale of one's followers...all things that you want and need to measure in a fantasy adventure game. Remember that D&D did not come out of the tradition of the lone, cinematic hero-guy/gal, taking on the army of baddies single-handedly.  It was a game created by and for war gamers who had grown up reading adventure fiction that dealt with leaders of men and methods of outfitting and leading others into unknown dangers. Bob Howard's stories are filled with these forceful personalities (Conan is always at the head of some group of pirates or barbarians or mercenaries...and neither Belit nor Sonya of Rogatino are shown as slouches in the leadership department), and the Lord of the Rings books...an obvious inspiration for fantasy war-gaming...have plenty of "charisma" examples from Aragorn who is portrayed as "fair though appearing foul."

The charisma ability is plenty efficient in providing for the mechanical needs of the game, i.e. how one interacts with (potentially) friendly NPCs, and how one attracts (and retains) followers and henchmen. A character can have whatever appearance the player wants them to have...the handsome assassin with the charisma of 7 is still going to be off-putting and nasty, while the grizzled paladin has that "air about him" that puts folks at ease and makes them want to fight by his side.

*sigh* I could (and someday should) wax on about charisma, and how it impacts the game by the character classes that have high charismas...whether due to minimum requirements (druids, paladins, and bards) or for those choosing NOT to use the ability as a "dump stat" (say, fighters, magic-users, and thieves).  But enough digression...this post is about lambasting comeliness, not lauding comeliness.

In the campaigns of my youth, we of course used comeliness. My long-run PC had a comeliness stat even before I'd laid eyes on the Unearthed Arcana. I'll relate the anecdote from my personal history for the sake of posterity:  my best friend and co-DM, Jocelyn, called me up one afternoon in the summer of 1985; I was in my kitchen, my parents (probably) both at work.  She told me (excitedly): hey, I need you to roll a D20. What for? I said. I'll tell you afterwards, said she. So I ran to my room (because my telephone was on a cord, naturally...this was '85), and returned to the kitchen, diligently rolling the D20 on the kitchen counter, with zero idea the reason.

The die roll came up a "1." Since this was possibly some sort of saving throw, I re-rolled rather than tell my DM the result (sue me...I was 12 years old at the time), and the die came up a 20. "20," I said (figuring this was a great number). No, that won't work, she said...you have to re-roll. Now I was wondering if I should have gone with the "1."  But I rolled again, as instructed, and the die roll came up an 18. "18," I said. Okay, you have a comeliness score of 18, she told me. "What the heck is that?"

You see, Jocelyn was often the first one of our group to pick up the new book or adventure module...she had a lot of ready spending cash (care of her family), and easy access to a nearby (large) bookstore. So she had picked up the new Unearthed Arcana (before any of the other members of our group had even heard it existed) and was making sure all our regular characters had the new comeliness score duly recorded. Rather than clue us in to what we were rolling (by having us roll 3d6) she was having us roll D20s and only taking numbers that fell between 3 and 18 (us kids having little concept of "bell curves" at the time, having skipped over that boring section of the DMG).

So, for most of my 1E career in my youth, I was playing a half-elf bard with an 18 charisma and a 21 comeliness, a character who could easily fascinate any female character he met unless they possessed a wisdom score of 15+. One can imagine how that went. 

[we had far more "urban" adventures than dungeon]

But without going into the sordid details (which, one could argue, detracted from the overall gameplay), I will point out that plenty of other PCs in the game had outrageously high scores, and not just from "mystery D20 rolls." It wasn't long before ALL of us regular players (Jocelyn, Scott, Matt, and I) had our own copies of the UA, and we all incorporated comeliness as part of our standard chargen process. And being adolescents, comeliness scores became very important. 

To the point that we stopped seeing certain types of characters. Gone were dwarves, gnomes, and half-orcs. Halflings only appeared as NPC henchfolk (or the occasional thief-acrobat) and were generally considered "comic relief." Most characters were in the high teens for their COM score...a lot of elves and half-elves. My character didn't even have the highest score...one PC had a 22 comeliness. And these weren't even results from fudging dice rolls (though I would not be surprised if some were...); rather, characters with low comeliness scores would be deemed as unplayable.  No teenage kid wanted to play a character that was "plain to average" in looks...let alone "homely" or "simply ugly." Regardless of the player's own self-esteem, the teasing was merciless.

And consider that we were playing D&D as it was originally meant to be played. That is, we were not doing the "new school" thing of portraying some "character" with their tragic backstory of needing to overcome being the Ugly Duckling or whatever. For us, we were exploring the D&D game world and the character was only our vehicle...so if the character was ugly then WE were ugly.  Why would anyone want to embody that?  We were playing escapist fantasy not because we wanted to pretend to be something we were not...we were playing escapist fantasy because we wanted to do things we couldn't do in real life: Cast spells. Fight monsters with swords. Climb sheer cliffs. Etc.  No one wanted to be judged (negatively) on their looks. Shit...we could get that in our normal, daily life!

Using comeliness in-play...and especially high comeliness with its mechanical effects...led to the game becoming different. No longer was Charisma a wonderful stat for modeling "leaders of men" and "commanding presence." Instead, when interacting with NPCs (and with other PCs!) we were more concerned with that O So Important first impression...and just how much mileage one could get out of manipulating someone before the comeliness effect wore off.  It became, in fact, a method of PVP for the players at the table, a weapon to be wielded both directly and indirectly (through the ability to influence NPCs)...a method of 'one-upping' other players, promoting rivalries, creating resentments, grudges, and hurt feelings.

Comeliness contributed to the decline and eventual death of our campaign.

Yeah, that probably sounds overly dramatic...and probably is (I am writing of events that occurred some 30+ years ago). Definitely it was more than just "comeliness" that led to the breakdown of that first, long-running game of AD&D between me and the friends of my youth. However, let me add one more anecdote from my history:  after my gaming group broke up (shortly after we'd all entered high schools), I got the urge to play D&D again...probably around my sophomore or junior year of high school. And I started a new 1E campaign, running a game for my brother and a couple of his friends.  It lasted a few months...long enough for the PCs to get up to level 12 or thereabouts (we were doing the Giants-series when we all lost interest or got too busy to continue). But we didn't use comeliness in that game at all. In fact, I'm not sure I allowed ANY of the UA rules for that campaign...though I might be misremembering.

Anyway.

Regardless of what I may or may not incorporate from the rest of the Unearthed Arcana, I have long since determined that comeliness is NOT an ability score I want in my game. If I want a handsome prince or beautiful princess in my game, I'll put them in without any such score. If I want a more "fairytale feel" to the campaign, I'll link their outward beauty to their inherent Charisma; if I want something more "true to life," I won't. But I really don't see any benefit to including an objective measurable stat for how pleasant or unpleasant a person appears.

This is a funny illo, though.

Besides...isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder? Just because Gimli has a thing for ancient elf queens, doesn't mean most dwarves wouldn't prefer dwarvish women, right? Wouldn't a halfling be a bit off-put by the sheer size of a human? Why one stat, one scale, for all species? That's not how the biology of species works...a cat doesn't eye-up a good-looking dog. Jeez.

Comeliness...out.

The Much Maligned Bard

[this is the second time I'm sitting down to write a draft on this subject; let's see if it gets posted]

When I was a kid, the bard was my favorite character class. 

As an adult, I really like fighters (of all stripes). But the bard might still be my favorite character class. Just for different reasons.

Having said that, when I say bard, I'm talking the Rules As Written, 1E (AD&D) bard. I accept no substitutes. In fact, in all other editions of the game, the bard is dead to me.

And I've tried...Lord knows I've tried...to like bards in the various editions. The OD&D version (first published in The Strategic Review). The 2nd edition version (play-tested that one, solo, when running Return to White Plume Mountain).  The 3rd edition version (played one of those, too...a half-elf). I've included my own B/X versions of the bard in two of my own books (my B/X Companion and The Complete B/X Adventurer). I even wrote up a version of the bard for use with Holmes Basic that I thought was pretty good, and I've suggested re-skinning the cleric as a bard, for folks who don't dig a religious angle in their games.

None of these suffice to make the class palatable.

And, no, it may NOT be the "adjusted" versions of the bard that are floating around the tables playing 1E. I've tried Huso's curated, bard specific spell list. I've played the illusionist-style and song-variant versions found in Dragon #56. Heck, I've posted rules for a single-class version of the bard, myself...that I've since discarded.

All unsatisfying.

Gygax's version of the bard...the version found in Appendix II of the PHB...is the only version I use, the only version I'm interested, the only version I enjoy playing or running. I first discovered that bard circa Spring of 1985...nearly 40 years ago. I've played at least half a dozen bards since then, and run (as a DM) at least half a dozen more. Hm. More (now that I think about it)...at least 7 or 8 over the years, although several of these never made it out of the "wannabe" stage of their careers.

I like the bard as written. I run it exactly as given in the PHB. I supplement ONLY with the clarifications and Q&A info provided in the Sage Advice column of Dragon #56, all of which I have found to be sound and perfectly reasonable. Aside from the lack of alignment restriction and training costs (universal changes for my home campaign), I deviate not a whit from the class as written.

I find it perfect.

As a kid, I liked the class because it was different and it seemed to offer a lot of power: thief abilities, bard abilities, spells, good fighting. The bard characters of my youth, which I have described often enough in prior posts, were powerful, and wondrously adaptable (as all multi-class characters tend to be)...but certainly not ALL powerful. High level fighters were far better at fighting. High level clerics and magic-users were far more powerful and versatile spell-casters. High level thieves could sneak better and backstab for more damage.  

My old bard...viewed with a bit of distance and maturity...was mainly "powerful" due to the possession of fairly good psionic abilities, something few bards (or few of ANY character!) can count on acquiring. Take away the psionics and you have a middling good character with a lot of abilities that requires good play to get the most out of it.

And that's what I like about the bard these days: the challenge of the character class. Leveling the character isn't difficult...well, no more difficult than leveling any fighter (fighters take a lot of x.p. to level compared to clerics, thieves, and...yes...magic-users). But once you've switched to the thief class, leveling goes fast (assuming the bard is traveling with a similarly experienced party): the character breezes through the thief levels AND the early levels of bard as well. For players who enjoy rapid advancement...and who are willing to be patient through the slog of the fighter class...the bard pays rich dividends down the road.

But the bard is no walk-in-the-park to play.  As a fighter, you must think like a fighter. As a thief, you must think like a thief. And as a bard, you must be on your toes with regard to which class abilities you use when...it's not an easy task to juggle but for the experienced gamer, that challenge is one to be tackled with relish.

The bard's high number of hit points, excellent Charisma, and automatic language learning ability makes the character an ideal leader and negotiator/spokesman for the party. Half-elf bards (with their initial language selection) are even more so, and players should become used to this style of play (i.e. not slaying everything they encounter on first sight) as early as possible (i.e. even during the fighter portion of their career). Even when pursuing fighter or thief class, it behooves the 1E bard player to think of themselves as a "bard-in-training." The biggest mistake I made as a youth was leaning to hard into the fighter aspect of the class...and then forming habits of acting like a fighter even after I had leveled into bard (and after fighter PCs were outstripping my fighter ability). My characters died a lot, in part because of my violent approach to the game...fortunately, AD&D has a variety of magic to help recover the stupidly dead character.

Some may quibble with the bard's druidic magic and whether or not is thematically appropriate or effective. Personally, I don't care. It functions. It helps describe and define just what a bard IS in terms of an AD&D campaign (their druidic nature/training). And it doesn't allow the character's spell-casting to upstage any of the other party spell-users...druid spells are powerful in the outdoors, but in the dungeon environment, they are probably the least effective of the casters. 

And, yet, a bard will never come close to the power level of a true druid with regard to spell-casting: a 10th level bard has a spell selection of 3/3/3/2 (not counting WIS bonuses), while a druid of the same x.p. total (some 250,000) has a selection of 5/5/3/3/2/1, exclusive of WIS...let's not sniff at the druid's ability to transmute rock to mud and conjure fire elementals!

Far from over-powered, the bard is a true jack-of-all trades: a little of this, a little of that. But with invaluable abilities to the adventuring party, not just with their communication forte, but with their legend lore ability: I find that to be the skill most often used by the bard. And, yet, because of their fighter training (and high hit points) they perform well in melee. And because of their thieving abilities and good saving throws they perform adequately in a "scout" capacity.  For the player who likes to keep busy, the bard can always find something useful to do.

Without upstaging the PCs with dedicated classes.

Not that I worry all that much about "upstaging;" redundancy is a desirable aspect of party building in AD&D, so that when a PC is low on hit points or spells (or dead) another party member can step up to the plate. This is why multi-class demi-humans are so useful, even at higher levels of play (i.e. when they start topping out). The bard is effectively another multi-class character...albeit with a more circuitous route...that has several unique powers and abilities. In 1E, the bard class works well and supplements most parties quite admirably.

Yeah. I love the bard. No, it's not an easy class to play, but it is a useful class to have in a party. It's not the tricksy, obnoxious, humorous thing that it's morphed into over the last 35 years. It provides redundancy AND muscle, subtlety AND spell-craft. Consider how rangers and paladins both (eventually) gain spells; the former at 150,000 x.p., the latter at 350,000 (!!). Now consider the 1E bard is pretty much the same with its delayed spell acquisition, earning its first spell somewhere between 38,000 and 140,000 x.p. Not bad at all.

I understand the philosophical objections some have to the "meta" of the class: how can a character suddenly go from fighter to thief (let alone from thief to bard) without spending several years on training. After all, even a thief is presumed to have had a lengthy apprenticeship, learning their trade, before setting off as an adventurer. My attitude is that the bard is likewise FULLY TRAINED in all its skills: fighting, thieving, "barding." But because of their order (the bardic colleges), they are required to focus their career on certain paths to prove themselves...like requiring a person to spend time as a "resident" before awarding them the title of "doctor." In order to grow in their craft, they must exercise firm discipline and focus on each branch, growing in strength and proficiency as they hone each skill set. It's not that the character "suddenly learns thief abilities;" rather, the character has only reached a point of satisfaction with their fighter focus that they can (at last) turn their attention to the thief aspect of their class. And so on.

I dig it...I really do. But it's not just the flavor of the class that I like...it is the practical way it operates. It fulfills its own niche, a niche un-shared by any other character type. The bard is strong...and it plays well at the table. At least, that's been my experience.

And I've had a lot of experience with the bard.

; )

My Magic (Part 3)

Not much time to blog today (plus, I'd like to get to some other subjects...like the new Dungeons & Dragons film). But, for the sake of completeness, I wanted to add one more installment to this series. I'll keep it short.

Druids. Illusionists. Bards.

The last time a player ran an illusionist in one of my campaigns, I was (maybe) 14 years old. Maybe. I can't even recall any gnome multi-class types. Just a single illusionist...a pre-gen created specifically to try running D1: Descent into the Depths of the Earth.

I have never had a player character druid in any campaign I've run. Ever.

I have an (adult) friend, who really wants to join my game, and wants to play a druid. Unfortunately, he resides on Camano Island and isn't exactly mobile, which means the only way we'd be able to play is via the Zoom or something...which I am loathe to do for a number of reasons. Still, there remains the possibility that I'll see a 1st level druid in my campaign at some point in the near future.

But I have had time to think about it, and my gut reaction is to simply leave druids exactly as written in the PHB. Yes, they must memorize (or "pray for") spells at the beginning of the day, unlike my clerics; however, this "memorization" represents the druid preparing their mistletoe and whatnot (via shamanic/ritual magic) in anticipation of the coming day's events. 

Besides which: I've never seen a druid in my game (didn't I just say that?). So why should I go about "fixing" something that may work perfectly fine?

Illusionists are a...slightly...different matter. I've written extensively about my love for the illusionist class as both a concept AND as originally imagined/designed for the OD&D game by Peter Aronson. As reworked by Gygax for the AD&D system, the spell list for the class is...poor (see prior blog posts here and here, and specific discussions on color spray and phantasmal force). The class, unfortunately, needs a lot of "clean-up."

But how can I say that, when I haven't actually seen a player run and develop an illusionist character over a long-term campaign? How do I know that the class...as printed in the PHB...wasn't reworked specifically due to extensive play-testing and is, in fact, the perfect representation of the class?

How indeed.

I would love to play an illusionist character...if I were playing in the campaign of a DM that I respect and trust. Say, someone like me. I have played illusionists before...on two occasions with different DMs. Both times they were using the Advanced Labyrinth Lord rules (which just means B/X with some AD&D adaptations). Neither game lasted more than a single session, and the character had little opportunity to "stretch its legs." But, then, neither of those games was what I'd call "open worlds;" just dungeons that we were stuck in. You know...typical Basic level play.

[I'm so tired of basic play]

SO...illusionists. Don't really know HOW I'd run them now, because no one wants to play them in my campaign. I do have extensive spell list revisions stored somewhere on my laptop...I'd be tempted to break those out. But probably, I'd just start with the standard rules (if someone wanted to play an illusionist). Probably tack on the same house rules I use for magic-users. Probably. There's a part of me that likes the idea of an illusionist creating more than one phantasmal image in a day...so long as it's not the same image. 

The testing is all in the playing.

And as for bards: welp, since I started my new campaign I haven't seen any of those yet, either...although Diego keeps saying he'd like to play one; he just keeps missing on the ability scores needed. 

Oh, right, forgot to mention: I scrapped the whole single-class bard idea, I posted a while back. The fact is, I've played and run MANY 1st edition bards over the years (eight that I can think of off the top of my head, and not counting pre-gens like Olaf Peacock in Dwellers of the Forbidden City) and, in my experience, the class works fine as written. Would I prefer their magic is a little more "bardic" in nature, rather than druidic? Sure. And perhaps I'll do something about that one day. Like, the next time a PC actually acquires a 1st level bard in my campaign (after first progressing through fighter and thief classes). Until then, I'm not terribly worried about it.

Which, by the by, is also my attitude towards high level rangers and paladins (both of whom receive some spell-casting ability). I've seen a lot of high level fighters over the years; I can't recall ever seeing a ranger over 7th level or a paladin over 3rd. SO...unless and until I do, I'll just run these characters By The Book. 

That's all folks.

: )

Pride

5:20am on Tuesday morning. I am up (with coffee in hand); the rest of the household sleeps (except for the loyal beagle). Finally, it's time to write.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Solstice/Father's Day/Juneteenth weekend. I know I did. I am going to tell you about it now:

Saturday was a bit of this, that and the other thing, but we did manage to get into Ravenspire (my re-hashed version of Ravenloft) proper. So far, so good, and I'll write about this later. We should be able to play some more of it today, and I look forward to continuing.

Sunday, on the other hand, was dad's day, and while I would have been happy spending the day running D&D, my family had other plans. Specifically, they ran D&D for me. It went down like this: my son was peppering me with his usual slate of questions over dinner last Friday: what was my favorite AD&D adventure, what was my favorite AD&D character I ever played, what was my favorite character class, etc. He does this kind of thing a lot...asking my opinion on stuff, getting my insight, collecting recollections of my youth...unlike my daughter (she prefers to tell the stories, rather than listen to Pops bather on). However, this particular time he had an ulterior motive: 

Look, Pops, said he, I want to run you through an AD&D adventure for Father's Day, and I want you to use one of your old characters. You pick the module and I'll prep it and run it for you.

[it would seem that my family has finally come around to accepting their father is a Big Fat Nerd. Gifts I was given over a breakfast of biscuits and sausage gravy, which my lovely wife cooked for me (I am the only person in the household that will eat such fare...their loss...so it was a special occasion)...they included a new wallet emblazoned with the Dungeons & Dragons moniker and a 20-sided die and a flat black stocking cap that said "Dungeon Master" across the front. I was truly touched]

Well, I have to say I was pretty darn surprised by this offering. We had just finished discussing my past AD&D characters and the fact that I'd only really ever had ONE (many AD&D characters were rolled up by Yours Truly back in the day, but the vast majority had never seen table play). So it was that I found myself sitting down to play the Tomb of Horrors on Father's Day with a character that I hadn't used in 34 years, with my son acting as a proper AD&D dungeon master. 

...

...never would I have imagined, as a 14 year old, that such an event would ever occur...

We'll get to the game in a moment. We decided on S1: Tomb of Horrors as the adventure for a number of reasons. For one thing, my character was a high level character...whatever adventure got used would have to be in that high level (10-14) range. For another thing, it was short to prep...at 10 pages and a single map, it is one of the shortest classic adventures ever published...and in all honesty I didn't think there was enough time between Friday evening and Sunday for Diego to prep something like Vault of the Drow or Q1 (I know I'd need more time than that!). Finally, Tomb is one of those adventures I've run many times over the years...most recently in 2020 using the original OD&D version...but one that I've never suffered through as a player. As a one-off event using an insanely over-powered character, it seemed like a fine test: would my knowledge of the adventure module allow me to conquer the thing where so many others had failed before? I dug the adventure out of the closet and handed it over to the boy (with strict instructions to not let me read it/re-familiarize myself with it), while I set about doing my own "prep work."

In a dusty folder at the bottom of a pile of dusty folders containing pages collected across decades of RPG play, I have a sheaf of characters from my earliest AD&D campaigns. One goldenrod sheet may be the the earliest AD&D character I ever penned (a dwarf fighter-thief for my brother). And several of the sheets detail various iterations of my character, Landon, from the last long-term campaign in which I played. 

Some of these (the character at 1st level) are hand-written on loose-leaf notebook paper by my dungeon master. Others (later in his career) were printed up on fan-fold dot-matrix printer paper, pages and pages of magic items and "background material" (loves, hates, enemies, allies, etc.) accumulated over years of gaming. I don't usually go through this stuff...I am already painfully nostalgic, and there's a lot of "lost youth" and regret stuff I associate with my old gaming group...but I needed a version of Landon to play in the adventure.

We had decided to run the adventure strictly "by the book" (using only the PHB, DMG, and MM) so the first thing I had to do was clean up the character. Regular readers have heard me expound at length about how my old AD&D group tried to hew as closely to Rules As Written as possible, but we didn't always succeed. We incorporated Dragon magazine articles that we liked. We adopted various bits from the Unearthed Arcana and extrapolated on it. And quite frankly, we got some things WRONG in our interpretation of the RAW that I, as an older, wiser man, find a little embarrassing.  

I settled on the 16th level version of my character...I am fairly suspicious of the higher level versions of the character (my DM was tracking XP and advancement and I distinctly remember some hand-waving towards the end of the campaign). Landon was a 1E bard, so the experience point total for the character, even including his fighter and thief levels would put him on par with a 13th level fighter or wizard...i.e. right in the 10-14 level wheelhouse of S1.  More editing, however, would be required.

Ability scores got knocked down to their original levels (which were high enough) as I'm not sure how many librams and wishes had been used to raise those stats and questioned their accuracy. His exceptional strength was removed (bards don't get that), and his fighter/thief levels reduced to 7th/8th instead of 8th/9th (there's some discrepancy about this in the DMG and later TSR modules but I'm fairly certain this is correct). UAisms were axed from the sheet (including a huge swath of magic items, weapons specialization, etc.), as were unique magic items ("bad luck swords" and "endless bags of food"). Hit points were re-calculated (should have only had one hit die of thief and CON was now back to 15), and weapon proficiencies corrected. Finally, I removed his incredibly beefy psionics (one of his major advantages in our old campaign) because A) Diego hasn't incorporated them into the game, and B) per the PHB, half-elves shouldn't receive psionics. 

[there IS a later Dragon mag that corrects this...i.e. that allows half-elves to get psionics...but we weren't going to use apocryphal texts]

Even after all this, the character had (in my estimation) too much "stuff," so I went a step further: I advanced his age 34 years (real time, Jeffro!) and calculated the total cost of his living expenses from the passage of time: 652,800 gold pieces. I then sold off enough of his magic items and treasure to cover the deficit. What I was left with was little enough in the way of magic (bracers of defense, a magic sword and dagger, a single bag of holding, one ring of protection and another ring of feather falling) and something around 800 gold pieces in treasure. A bit better equipped than the pre-gens in Tomb...but then, this was all gear that had been found in actual adventures. 

Other than my character, our party was composed of pre-gens from the module itself. Sofia would play the 14th level magic-user, and we took along the 14th level cleric and 12th level paladin as NPCs. Since we were going "by the book," spells were memorized beforehand (including clerical and druidic spells) and I did the bulk of the selection, as well as the outfitting of the party members. Sofia chose her own spells (with some suggestions from me) and purchased her own equipment (Tomb pre-gens receive up to 1,000 coins of any type to spend, and up to 5,000 g.p. worth of gems).  Lastly, I recruited two henchmen (a 1st level elven fighter and a 1st level half-elf thief) and equipped them from my own (swiftly diminishing) funds. Light (leather) armor, ten foot poles and lanterns lit with continual light spells was the order of the day. 

So prepared, we set out to the conquer the Acerak's tomb...or die trying.

...

Hmm. How much to talk about? Well, I'll be brief:

Our extreme competence, our plethora of resources, and my personal knowledge served us well, ESPECIALLY in the beginning phases of the tomb...everything up to and through the "evil/good chapel" area. A piece of cake, really (Diego bemoaned that we were kicking the tomb's butt). But as we got into the middle section, my knowledge started to fail. I knew what was in the Tomb, I knew what we were looking for (and what to avoid), but I was less familiar with the actual logistics and placement. 

Tomb of Horrors is a GRIND. Even for someone like me...who has run it half-a-dozen times over the years and read the thing countless others. Finding and locating secret doors and passages is a pain. Trying to remember the later stanzas of the riddle...or not remembering their proper order can lead to panic. You second-guess yourself. You grow impatient. You fall into a pit or trip some trap that you damn well know you shouldn't have. The thing wears on you, the farther you get into it. Even without wandering monsters, being stuck in the middle of the dungeon with no readily available exit (those one-way teleporters), you end up feeling pressure. Even with the plethora of healing magic at your disposal, there is an attrition of the mind that occurs...the players argue with each other, tempers fray, snap.

It got us. Five and a half hours in (we were keeping time on a stop-watch) it TPK'd the whole party. Didn't even make it to "the columned hall;" opened the wrong door...incautiously...and put the whole expedition to sleep (no saving throw). We were then crushed flat by a stone juggernaut. Thanks for coming.

Totally, terribly unfair. Total asshole move, Gygax.

And it sucked...not because my long-time character had died (for all intents and purposes, he died a long time ago...in the Spring of 1988). No, it sucked because I wanted to beat the damn thing. I wanted to say that I killed Acerack and that he "wasn't so tough." But even knowing the adventure, I still screwed up. And paid the price. But really the only "loss" I took was to my pride...something I probably have too much of anyway.

And pride is easily replenished anyway. At least, it is for me. All I have to do is look at my children. My son, 11 years old, did an excellent job as a DM. My 8 year old daughter did a great job working with her old man (even saving my bacon by remembering a couple lines from the Acerack poem/riddle that I'd forgotten). Yes, I had to pull Sofia's character away from a couple of deathtraps that she wanted to wander into, but in the end it wasn't her play that killed us all.

Yeah, I am very proud of my children. I really can't express it.

Afterwards, we ate pombazos (made, again, by the wife) and watched Big Trouble In Little China, one of my all-time favorite films, and one that the kids had never seen. They liked it a lot...a perfect cap to a (mostly) perfect Father's Day. Maybe the best one I've ever had. They sure set a high bar for next year.

; )

Later.

Another Bard

In addition to curating spell lists (and deciding the difference between "normal" clerics and their devil-worshipping counterparts) I spent a lot of March/April doing deep dives into the various 1E classes and how/if they needed to be modified for MY particular game world. For the most part, the answer came back: nope.

[in a future post, I'll discuss my deep dive on the whole of race-class-level interactions which was the FIRST thing I scrutinized. However, since I ended up with almost ZERO changes to the PHB standard; I'll save that for a different day]

In some cases, this is just "being practical." Take the monk class as a prime example: there's a lot about the class as written that I dislike. The way it "breaks" normal rules (like ability score adjustments) over and over again. The hodgepodge of special abilities that range from Remo William to David Carradine to St. Francis of Assisi. Surprise adjustments. Just a lot of stuff that could stand to be cleaned up.

Thing is: it doesn't matter at the moment. None of my players are playing a monk. I have no experience playing monks. I don't have any experience running games with players who had monks. I just haven't seen how monks unfold over time in actual play. Yes, I've run NPC monks, both as antagonists and as allies. But if you're not starting them at level 1 and seeing the actual progress, it's difficult to judge just how the character is going to turn out.

So I'm leaving it alone for now. Well, mostly. Originally, the monk was a subclass of cleric and I've put it back into that category (my monk uses the cleric tables for both attacks AND saving throws). And I'm considering upping the hit die type to D6s rather than D4s based on what hit points represent, how they function, the monk's role, and general consistency with other subclasses. But otherwise, if a 5th level or 10th level or whatever level NPC monk is encountered, it will be exactly as written in the PHB. I'll worry about revamping the class if and when I have a chance to observe one in the campaign.

[as a side note, I'll say that I'm quite satisfied with the monk class's unarmed combat skills and how they model within the AD&D combat system...but that, too, is its own discussion]

The bard, however, is a completely different story. 

I've had a LOT of experience with the 1st edition bard. I played bards pretty much exclusively in the days of my youth (well, after we started playing AD&D). And I wasn't the only one. At least three other bards (not played by myself) made prominent appearances in our games, although one (Rob's bard, Taliesin) was short-lived as he was sacrificed by the other PCs to the Machine of Lum the Mad in order to power its planar travel ability. Ah, yes...good times...

A lot of folks look at the 1E bard as written and consider its requirements so onerous as to make playing one prohibitive, but such just isn't the case in my experience. Assuming one has the proper ability scores to qualify, a character can hit the 5th level fighter / 6th level thief mark necessary to begin her bard career with a mere 38,000 x.p. ...hardly daunting when you consider several classes (including rangers, paladins, and magic-users) require more than 40K just to hit 6th level. And a bard that spends the time to get to 7th / 8th level (the BTB maximum per most folks' interpretation) only requires 140,000 x.p.; that sum wouldn't even get a fighter to 9th level.

So...easy-shmeazy. I advanced one of my bards from 0 x.p. in his first class all the way to the high teens in our first "all AD&D" campaign (i.e. our first "by the book" stab at running AD&D with no B/X rule influence/interference). Considering racial level restrictions, it was always a good choice for players who wanted to play half-elves (who didn't?)...and for folks who liked a lot of options (fighting, thieving, spell use) it was quite the no brainer, although the bard's abilities were generally dwarfed by straight fighters, magic-users, and clerics especially at the higher levels.

However, despite the bard class's functionality in play (based on my actual, non-theoretical experience), the design of the class doesn't work with the paradigm of my campaign world in two major regards:

• the class switching aspect (based on my assumptions of how an adventurer's class skills are learned), and
• the connection/ties to the druid sect

The latter issue is due partly to world building (I really want these two classes to be separate entities) and partly due to practicality (in practice, I don't like bards using the same high level abilities of the druid...like shapeshifting...and I don't see the class using the druidic spells in the same spirit/form as a true druid). It makes the bard feel like a subclass of druid...and the druid is already a subclass. I find that distasteful these days, though I could learn to live with it (we had no qualms doing so as youths).

However, the class switching bit is the real stickler. As I wrote the other day, I've gone through and rewritten the age tables, partly because I've shortened nonhuman lifespans considerably (most are now more-or-less human scale), and partly based on what I feel are appropriate lengths of learning time for a young person to be singled out for training and then complete a course of study and practice such that they'd qualify to be a 1st level character of a given class. 

As such, I find that I dislike the standard "dual class" rules given in AD&D (which are based on the simpler form of class switching given in Volume 1 of OD&D) that allow any human to automatically become a "new class" for which they meet the required ability score minimums. No, that doesn't work for me that (for example) you are suddenly a magic-user based solely on your possession of a high intelligence score. Un-uh.

With regard to dual class characters, my solution has been to do a bit of retroactive imagining for any player that wishes to go down this path: instead of the character "suddenly learning" the new skills, we assume that the new class was, in fact, the character's original training that (at some point, for some reason) was set-aside to pursue her current adventuring class...and NOW the character has decided to return to that "original class," forever giving up the progress she made on her "side career."

And then we add seven years to the character's age...the PC is (retconned) to be older than previously assumed.

That's the easy fix; dual-classed characters still get to be played, but they take an age penalty (in addition to the normal restrictions) in order to maintain the integrity of the (game) world functions. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for a bard who is supposed to progress consecutively through three classes, learning skills and retaining them as an eclectic jack-of-trades. Hence the need for a rewrite. 

In figuring out a "better bard," I looked at the original class (as found in the The Strategic Review) which is different from the AD&D version and includes justifications/references for its design. I also looked at later Dragon magazine articles suggesting various "fixes" of the class, including the variant bard ("Singing A New Tune") and curated spell list ("Songs Instead Of Spells") both found in issue #56. 

Taken in conjunction with the class as presented in the PHB, I decided on a relatively simple rewrite:

1. The bard is a single class.
2. The experience table is the same as that given on page 117 of the PHB (the bard starts at 1st level and requires 2,001 experience to reach 2nd level, etc.).
3. The bard is restricted to 23 levels of experience. It uses 6-sided hit dice and receives one hit die at every level of experience (as is the case with all limited level classes) to a maximum of 23d6. This means that my bard's hit point will, on average, be less than the 1E bard as written (with a lower maximum).
4. Number of spells by spell level are the same as listed on page 117; however, I have curated a specific "bard spell list," drawing spells (songs) from a variety of lists, not limited to druidic magic.
5. Bards attack as a fighter of one-half level, rounded down (a 1st level bard attacks as a 0-level man); they do not receive multiple attacks.
6. Beginning at 2nd level, bards have the same abilities as a thief of one-half their bard level rounded down; they have no backstabbing ability.
7. Armor is limited to non-bulky types; weapons are as per the PHB. Three weapon proficiencies to start (1/4) with a -3 penalty for non-weapon proficiency.
8. Charm ability as per Bard Table II (page 118); legend lore ability same but with slightly higher chances up through level 7 (10% at 1st level). Other bardic abilities as per the PHB.
9. Minimum ability scores: STR 9, INT 12, WIS 9, DEX 13, CHA 15. Dexterity adjusts thief abilities as normal. Charisma 17 adds +5% to charm; charisma 18 adds +10% to charm ability. Wisdom adjusts spells known as per cleric/druid (and affects spell failure chance). Additional languages known are per INT, but the bard knows them beginning at 1st level.
10. Humans and half-elves may progress to a maximum of 23rd level; dwarves, elves, and halflings may progress to a maximum of 8th level. Demihuman bards may not multi-class.

This bard has yet to be play-tested, but I have high hopes for it.

: )

"Want to join our party? We
don't play with alignment."

The Vids

[man, I've been writing some longwinded posts lately]

Waaaaay back in the comments on my "Drift" post, John Higgins wrote:

When I started playing in the 90s, we had two texts to draw from when learning how to play D&D: we had the Classic D&D Game boxed set (which has pretty much all of the same rules as Mentzer Basic and Moldvay Basic, any differences are minor to the point of trivial), and we had whatever AD&D 2nd Edition hardcovers and splatbooks we could get our hands on with what little money I and my fellow teenagers could scrape together (and the text of 2nd Edition is *terribly* prescriptive, always harping on the reader to practice "good roleplaying" over desiring high stats or powerful magic items or a powerful character, really driving home the dissonance between the venerable AD&D rules and the then-ascendant "trad" culture that said RPGs were all about story and character). 

And what did my friends and I learn from these texts? Very little, actually, because before we had ever rolled our first d20, we had already been thoroughly corrupted by JRPGs - Final Fantasy VII in particular - and assumed without even paying a jot of attention to the texts or the rules of (A)D&D that a role-playing game was a story simulator with some combat rules bolted on, just like the console and PC RPGs we were already familiar with. And so that was how we (mis-?)(ab-?)used (A)D&D.

This was a comment I meant to come back to, but never did (in my defense, I did have a lot of other stuff I wanted to jot down on Ye Old Blog before forgetting about it). However, John's comment in Friday's post about Second Edition Story Awards gave my brain a poke:

While I would never defend 2nd Edition's XP system, I'll say that it at least gets a perfectly functional implementation in the Infinity Engine video games (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale). Monsters are worth exactly as much XP as in the tabletop 2e core rules, but every time the party completes a task or mission or quest (or slays the "final boss" of a dungeon), some fixed XP award is granted which appears to bear no formulaic relation to anything else (beyond, likely, the built-in assumption that the party will be of a certain level when they complete the task, and so the reward is vaguely commensurate with the difficulty and XP needed for a party of that level). I would even go so far as to say that Baldur's Gate is an example of the 2e XP system "working as intended" - insofar as it deviates from the text of the rulebooks but lines up quite well with how I remember every single 2e-playing group I've ever encountered actually running things.

So let's talk about the video game thing. Specifically computer RPGs that emulate fantasy adventure gaming in a style similar to Dungeons & Dragons.

I have, of course, played a couple/three of these over the years, but probably not as many as one might expect of a geeky D&D blogger. Fact is, my family didn't even have a personal computer in the house till sometime around 1988 (an Amiga 500 for the curious), which was purchased around the same time I was entering high school. This probably seems crazy to folks now, but my parents even debated whether or not we NEEDED a computer (this is before the ubiquitous internet, young 'uns) and while, sure, it was easy enough in those days to say "computers are the FUTURE," there wasn't much imagination for what one would USE a computer for in the home. I mean, we had a typewriter for goodness sake (which I used to type term papers and such in middle school). Would a word processor alone be enough reason to justify the expense? 

Because the MAIN thing most kids were doing with PCs in those days was playing video games, and my parents weren't big fans of such things...for any number of reasons (most valid). They certainly weren't getting the 'puter for that. We may have had some idea that I would have learned how to code or write BASIC with the thing...but once we got it home we found the thing's proprietary "user friendly" OS was absolute shit for this purpose (you couldn't even ACCESS code with it), so those dreams died on the vine. In the end, it did turn out to be a pretty shitty investment. I wrote a few papers using Word Perfect in high school (that I could just have easily done by hand), and I played a handful of video games before the system became obsolete (sometime around 1992). But my parents were divorced by then, and I was in university (or, later, work) where I had access to computers when I needed them.

I didn't buy a computer for myself (my first laptop) till after I was married and had purchased my first house (circa 2005). And that was with the idea that I might start doing some writing stuff (like games or books or something). 

I give this brief history as a way to explain: I have never played games like Baldur's Gate or Pool of Radiance...computer games published in collaboration with TSR and aimed at emulating the AD&D game. For gamers of a certain age, these video games were their introduction to tabletop gaming...their development as D&D gamers were largely informed by these games, and their assumptions and expectations of play exhibit the sentiments instilled by these products.

Contrarily, I was tabletop gamer looong before I ever fired up "Bard's Tale" on my old Amiga, and as such I come to the CRPG genre with a different perspective: here is a way to play (in abbreviated fashion) D&D when D&D isn't otherwise available to you. At times when I didn't have a solid gaming group, and yet still had a deep desire to play, it was something that could scratch an itch. These games SUCK compared to the thing they were supposed to emulate, but they were OKAY.  Plus, no need to juggle schedules with all the players: fire the thing up and the entire party is present. Sure, they lack the personality of real players (I hope!) and probably the creativity when it comes to challenges....but they are, at least, absolutely reliable.

Not D&D

But I'm not relying on these games to teach me how D&D works or plays. I am not looking at these games to show me how (as a DM) to design a campaign. I see them as the limited entities that they are: SSI's game Phantasie III is cool enough to have PC's travel to other planes of existence (the Plane of Light, the Plane of Darkness, and the Netherworld)...and, at the end, also gives you the choice whether to join the bad guys or good guys by the end (saving the world or damning it)...but compared to an ACTUAL game of D&D, even such choices and options are incredibly limited.

At least, if you're used to running a game that isn't a railroad / adventure "path" travesty.

Hey, I played one or two of those old "Fighting Fantasy" books (Choose Your Own Adventure with dice); they were a little better than a CYOA (or TSR's "Endless Quest" series), but you're still only playing someone else's story. A computer RPG is a bigger, sweeter version of the same thing, using the computer's computing ability to juggle and care for all the fiddly bits and dice rolls. But it's still just playing out someone else's story. And it is constrained by the limitations of the medium, in a way that the human mind and imagination just is not. And fun as it is, as awesome as it may be to play, NONE of these CRPG's provide adequate teaching or preparation for running your own campaign as a Dungeon Master; at best, they can give you some ideas on how to be a storyteller, which...apologies...is just not the same thing.

Because it's not just about drawing dungeons or wilderness maps, and it's not just about coming up with good "scenarios." To paraphrase an old war aphorism: all campaign ideas seem good until they make contact with the players. Managing that, is really what being a Dungeon "Master" is all about. 

[though being a "master" of the system is also an important bit]

Now, I joke fairly regularly about being an Old Man...I do that on the blog, I do it with my family, I do it with 20- and 30-somethings I come in contact with. But I'm not really that old at all...I certainly don't feel "old" (middle aged, yes...and I've got some creaky past injuries that bother me from time-to-time). Despite my slow start with getting into the "computer thang" I'm not completely hopeless/lost/uncomfortable when it comes to technology...if I'm resistant to it, it's mainly due to my annoyance with having to learn new ways of doing things, not an incapacity/fear of doing so. But while I'm not really an "old man," I am old enough that (especially with regard to gaming) I straddle two worlds: life before ubiquitous (user friendly) computers/tech, and life after. And because my formative years were from "the time before" so, too, are my sensibilities about a LOT of things. I watch too much TV and read too little compared to what I once did, for example, but my opinion of what is "too much" and "too little" is directly informed by the fact that once there was less TV to watch and more books worth reading on the shelves.

[ooo...someone's probably going to get mad about that last statement]

My particular perspective is a shrinking one: the more years pass, the more folks are born on the other side of the Great Divide. Plenty of people born before the advent of the "smart phone" have grown up never really knowing the "inconvenience" of a phone tethered to your wall. Plenty of folks in their 30s have never known a television that didn't have at least "basic" cable...or even the days of changing a channel without a remote control (can you imagine!). I was just explaining to my kids how, when I was their age, MOST of the home baseball team's 162 games could only be heard on the radio...and how that allowed folks to do other things (while still listening to the call) instead of sitting on their ass in front of their video altar.

The Dungeons & Dragons game was published by a middle aged man, but it was written for folks of a younger (and more imaginative) persuasion. And it is still being published for those types of individuals. But the number of "young people" of the '70s and '80s, are far outnumbered by the "young people" of the '90s, '00s, '10s, and (now) '20s...and that outnumbered sensibility is only going to get greater the more time passes. My own kids, now D&D players, have never yet played a computer RPG...but even their sensibilities are colored by the time in which they live. They have so much more need of attention...so much more need of being entertained instead of finding ways to entertain themselves. Video games and tablets and cell phones and laptops are just such an easy drug to hook up to...let alone a television set with a gazillion channels and streaming services.

Damn frigging insidious.

To all my "young" readers that are trying to unlearn D&D lessons taught to them by computer games...or the lessons of editions of D&D that were written to emulate video games that were created to emulate D&D: I feel for you. And I don't judge you or your particular notions of what D&D "is." And I will try to help (if I can) or point you to better bloggers/writers than myself (when I can't) to try to offer you different options, a different perspective. I'll try. 

But right now, I have to wash some dishes. They haven't yet invented the app to do that.

Killing Gods, Part 2

Man, I've got a half-dozen Real Life Important things on my plate today and if I don't get this damn post started, I don't know that I ever will. SO, without further ado, let's get down to the deicide!

The first god I ever killed in D&D was Thor.

To be clear, I was DM'ing at the time, not playing, but I am far more responsible for Thor's death than any of my players. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I was absolutely responsible. This was circa age 10 or so, on the playground, which meant we were still only a couple years into D&D play; at the time we had not yet discovered there was separation between editions of the game, and I was running my game with a combination of B/X and the AD&D Monster Manual and (occasionally) the DMG. My buddy had just acquired a copy of Deities & Demigods (the post-Moorcock/Lovecraft version) and we were anxious to put it into play. Since one of my earliest PCs in the game had a rather high-level thief who had no problem whupping up on normal challenges, I figured Thor would be the perfect encounter to put the dude in his place.

Dead duck

Now, I can't remember the exact circumstances of the scenario (this was some 35 years ago) but I can remember the outcome: Jason managed to piss off Thor (probably after I had pissed off the PC), whereupon Thor used Mjolnr to hit the thief with a 100-die lightning bolt. The thief's ring of spell turning reflected the bolt, Thor failed his saving throw, and was utterly disintegrated by the thing. If I remember correctly, Sneakshadow looted the thunder god of his mystic hammer, but I am 100% certain he never wielded the weapon (he was a thief after all, and rather small in stature for a human). 

I can also recall, later, reading the ring of spell turning description in the DMG and its specific stipulation (unlike the Cook Expert set) that magic item powers could not be turned and thinking: "darn, I screwed that up!" However, at no point do I remember thinking to myself, "hmm, maybe I should not have sent a greater god to fight a player character."

Deities & Demigods isn't a Monster Manual, but it's written like one...it has alphabetical entries for gods, each with a little illustration, a brief description, and a stat block. This is the exact same setup as any of the AD&D monster books. I'm sure I never even bothered to read the instructional text at the beginning of the book (explaining 'this isn't a Monster Manual') because I can remember reading all that for the first time (and loving it) after I purchased my own copy of DDG later in the form of Legends & Lore, sometime around age 11 (i.e. in 1985, before my 12th birthday). By that time, Jason had become a "Born Again" Christian and was no longer allowed to play D&D...though, perhaps, if his mother had been aware of his history with destroying pagan deities, she would have relented a bit.

For a kid to make such a mistake is pretty understandable...even older players can probably be forgiven for making lazy assumptions when confronted with a book with a similar format (and thus skipping over the pertinent parts of the introduction). The DDG was written the way it was to update the prior OD&D supplement Gods, Demi-Gods, and Heroes (Supplement IV) for the "Advanced" D&D format, and it is a decent emulation of the style in which Supplement IV was presented. So why did authors Rob Kuntz and Jim Ward provide god stat-lines when ambitious players were certain to treat them as challengeable monsters? The answer is in the Foreward to GDG&H:

This volume is something else, also: our last attempt to reach the "Monty Haul" DM's. Perhaps now some of the 'giveaway' campaigns will look as foolish as they truly are. This is our last attempt to delineate the absurdity of 40+ level characters. When Odin, the All-Father has only(?) 300 hit points, who can take a 44th level Lord seriously?

There it is: the book was meant to be a crack-down on what was deemed to be some of the "excesses" (as they saw it) of certain campaigns. By providing statistical representations for both literary heroes (Elric, Conan, Vainamoinen, etc.) AND the gods of various pantheons, D&D players would have a scale of comparison against which to measure their own characters and campaigns.

Which, I suppose, could be an admirable goal...if D&D wasn't a completely different animal.

The first
"monster manual"

D&D didn't really seek to emulate/model a particular setting (with an implicit scale) nor, really, a particular genre of fantasy. Elric's multi-verse spanning adventures are very different from Conan's down-and-dirty conflicts, and both pale in comparison the the physical might displayed by John Carter on the surface of Mars. D&D sought to provide rules for creating fantasy adventures - and it succeeded at that! - but it never meant to constrain or limit the players' imaginations. Telling players three years after the fact that they were "doing it wrong" was a ridiculous attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. Scale should have been baked in from the get-go if that had been the intention, instead of assuming similar minds and attitudes...and who's to say the attitude wasn't similar anyway? Both Gygax and Arneson had plenty of "wa-hoo" in their own campaigns.

But back to the discussion: regardless of what one thinks about the outrageousness of fighting...and potentially slaying...divine entities, it is absolutely clear that the D&D game provides explicit rules for doing just that! At least up through 3rd edition (the last edition for which I purchased a Deities & Demigods book), textual instruction has been provided that enable DMs to run gods as encounters against player characters. Certainly, each edition to do so (OD&D, AD&D, BECMI's "I" rules, 3E) have made the prospect more and more daunting, giving divine beings ever greater abilities...and yet, the game has never simply come out and said "nope, can't be done." The gods remain ever vulnerable to mere mortals.

[forcing a deity to make a saving throw at all...even if the chance of failure is only the 5% probability of rolling a "1" on a D20...is saying that the being is as fallible as any human. 'To err is...' and all that jazz]

And as said, the D&D game supports this type of play. It's own fiction (I admit to only having read Dragonlance and the Gygax-penned Greyhawk novels) encourages this type of play. And multiple adventure modules from D&D's "golden era" (pre-1983) provide examples of how such play might be handled.

In a reasonable fashion.

And I guess that's the part that has (recently) found my prickly hide to be chapping...well, one part anyway. The unreasonableness of the encounters being given. Or...perhaps...not even the unreasonableness of the scenarios, but the disconnect I see between the game and the...the...

Hmmm. It's not "style." Or "fiction." It's more of an attitude or outlook. An orientation. Folks want to play D&D in a particular way, a particular fashion. Okay, that's cool...that's fine. It's still D&D. But then they want to have these god-encounters that aren't reasonable...at least not in the manner of the game as designed.  

Hmm...I'm having a hard time expressing this. 

Let me try a different way. I've heard people say: "If my DM put a wight in a first level dungeon, I'd punch him in the face" (or words to that effect). Okay, great...I get your point, and it's a reasonable one given the parameters of the game as written. Low-level adventurers don't have the abilities to confront such a creature. Low-level adventurers don't have the abilities to confront a LOT of creatures.

SO...why would you put a god or godling in any sort of low level adventure?

Halls of the Blood King (levels 3-5)

Palace of Unquiet Repose (levels 3-5)

The God That Crawls (levels 1-2)

Operation Unfathomable (levels 1-?)

There are others...of course there are others, there are always others. These ones just spring immediately to mind, and I'm too lazy to go hunting up others. 

[that's another part of the hide chapping: I've lost track of how many low-level adventures see players encountering godlike beings. It's become such a regular choice for scenarios, it could be included in Moldvay's list of standard scenarios (page B51) between "Fulfilling a Quest" and "Escaping from Enemies." Call it "Confronting Godling Made Flesh" or something]

An adventure that pits a party of 4th level characters against "The Lord of All Vampires" is not, to my mind, a reasonable execution of the D&D system as intended, nor is an adventure that finds a party of 1st and 2nd level characters accidentally wandering into the lair of "Shaggath-Ka the Worm Sultan." It belies the dynamics and expectations implicit in the game's design. Yes, I'm sure that some (like the authors of these adventures listed) would beg to differ...as I wrote previously, this is all my (strong) opinion. So, I'd imagine some folks (those I haven't hopelessly offended) are wondering what I'd put forward as a reasonable adventure involving a godling?

Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

Q1 is not, of course, one's only tussle with Lolth, the demon queen of spiders...she first appears in Gygax's own D3: Vault of the Drow as a god made flesh, dwelling incarnate in the lowest level of her chosen people's greatest shrine (although why she's there is never explained). To be sure, Q1 is a flawed adventure, but I've found it to be a very fun adventure in play, and a rather solid example of possible "god fighting" in D&D. 

Note the high level: 10-14 is pretty darn high for AD&D. My very over-powered bard was something like 15th level (max levels for fighter/thief) when I tackled Q1, but the character's total x.p. was equivalent to a fighter of 11th or 12th level. 14th level spell-casters have close to 30 spells per day to play with (more, for high WIS clerics), and all such characters have a ton of resources, both magical and mundane, to draw upon. Attacking an arch-devil or demon prince (or queen) in its lair is a legitimate challenge for D&D characters that have otherwise grown too big for their britches.

Beefy monster

"Come on, JB, Sutherland's adventure is the height of cheesiness...you're just being nostalgic here!" Not at all. Given sufficient time adventuring, PCs will acquire resources such that normal logistical problems no longer apply: the ability to create food and water. Bags of holding and portable holes. Magical mounts and constructs that can carry immense burdens, rarely (if ever) tire, and that can bypass obstacles by flying. Magical means of entry and egress - or escape! - including teleportation, passwall, word of recall. And, of course, the power to bring fellow party members back to life whenever it suits them. Some Dungeon Masters recoil at the thought of their campaigns getting to such a level, it no longer resembling a game of "scurrilous rogues" in running battles with lizard people while trying to hide a gemstone up their nostril. That's right: it doesn't. High level characters have graduated from such grubby affairs and require larger challenges to test their abilities.

Planar travel becomes an option at high levels, and rightly so...because other planes provide the opportunity for DMs to throw the greatest challenges at PCs. And I'm not just talking encounters with gods and godlings...on other planes, all bets are off with regard to what might be thrown at PCs. Different physics, different rules, screwing with spell effects, reducing or limiting magical abilities. Pocket dimensions and demi-planes provide all sorts of justifications for strange, non-book monsters and unique, fantastic treasures. Q1's problem (in my opinion) isn't one of steam-powered spider ships; rather, it's too many damn bugbears and coin piles...the adventure could be even weirder and stranger than it is (though the demonweb map itself is a rather beautiful thing). Talking about D&D's literary roots, Moorcock's Elric stories provide excellent examples of just how weird and messed up things get when you start skipping around the multiverse...and just how much trouble PCs can get into when their magic and magical items stop functioning the way they're accustomed to on the Prime Material plane.

But that's not low-level stuff. Elric is sometimes accompanied on his extraplanar adventures by low-level characters and (spoiler alert) things usually go very, very badly for them; insanity and death are both par for the course. Which is as it should be. Your high level party isn't going to get any positive results out of taking a small army of men-at-arms into the demonwebs, nor should they. Soldiers have their place in the D&D world, but planar invasions of a demigod's home plane ain't one of them. Such an scenario shouldn't be a place for any character with less than a million experience points. Literally.

Okay, that's enough for Part 2. Part 3 coming up!

[here's Part 1 and Part 1b for those who missed them]

Supplemental Material

Started work on a new OD&D supplement this morning (my personal "Book IV"), mainly because I wanted to capture the new illusionist material. My intention, once completed, is to have a working "campaign Bible" to supplement (ah! That's the word!) my edited version of OD&D. At this point, it is perhaps putting the cart before the horse, considering I haven't yet set down one word of Book II.

[there are a couple reasons for this "hole" in The Work. First off, I haven't really needed the book yet: I own two copies of Book II anyway, and many creatures in my adventures to date have been hand-designed or else adapted from other sources. But mainly, I'm really considering an entire overhaul of Book II's structure, organization, and contents...and I'm still considering the exact paradigm I want to use. Is this supposed to be a book for me? Or a book for anyone? Or a book for players and DMs who want to use my campaign setting? Or what? I *do* eventually want some "bestiary" type book, but I'm not yet sure exactly what it will contain...perhaps every entry will have an "ecology" section while the tables have the necessary short-hand combat info for inclusion in adventure write-ups]

[oh, yeah...I also want to completely overhaul or do away with the treasure tables as designed. I do make use of them - somewhat - for identifying how much treasure a monster tends to have in its lair, but then I tailor each encounter's hoard individually to suit my needs. And while I have been using the included magic items as "templates" and inspiration, I am striving to make each one unique and special, and none of them are being generated via random roll. Figuring out how to rewrite THAT section is a bit of a bear, and I might not even do so, instead simply throwing some hasty notes into an appendix of Book III]

Why throw a PC class like the Illusionist into a supplement? Because I'm not yet ready for the class to be "open" to players (some things shall be "revealed" in time). For a similar reason, gnomes (as I conceive them) will not be added into Book I but, rather, left for the "supplement;" they are my own strange species (call them "svirfneblin lite"). Besides, I can't be adding a race with an illusionist option before I've introduced the illusionist, can I?

The new supplement should also include the Thief class, once I've overhauled the damn thing. Despite his Gord the Rogue writings, I'm starting to get the impression that Gygax disliked the thief concept, and I'm starting to feel the same. However, I continue to feel a lot of love for the assassin as a concept, and a thief baseline is thus a necessary evil. Starting player characters at 3rd level mercifully solves the issue of new assassins having no thief skills, and the idea currently bumping about my noggin is that of assassins as a sort of "prestige class;" that is, there aren't any 1st or 2nd level assassins (at least, not as player characters). Non-human thieves are NOT going to be the "go to" class (caused, I'm sure, by the unrestricted leveling); instead, any such character is going to be some sort of outcast from their society, probably restricted from training or progression in ANY other class.

[might make an exception for half-elves with a wisdom under 13; i.e. half-elves who are unable to progress as clerics. To me, half-elves are the true "jack-of-all-trades" character]

Of course, that would do away with my favorite multi-class combo: the gnome illusionist/assassin. But since gnomes, illusionists, and assassins are all going to be part of the supplemental material, maybe they'll get some sort of exception, too. Or maybe not...phantasmal killer is fine and dandy for any illusionist styling herself an "assassin."

[as is using a phantasmal image to conceal a booby trap, pit, or hidden assailant]

Bards will probably be a similar story (i.e. unavailable except as a single, restricted class). But then why would anyone choose to be a thief if you could get all the abilities - albeit at reduced level - plus magical abilities, bardic charming, an increased (d6) hit dice?

Why indeed.

I am, of course, looking at bards as originally presented by Doug Schwegman in The Strategic Review (volume 2, issue 1). This particular bard had none of the multi-classing madness (even though it would have functioned better and more sensibly in OD&D...). Schwegman's bard is also available to elves, dwarves, and hobbits, unlike the version Gygax gives us in the PHB. While half-elves are not mentioned, I would guess that this is a case of the class being submitted to TSR before the publication of Greyhawk (or before it was read by Schwegman), just as happened with Aronson's illusionist class (requiring his later update in The Dragon #1). Schwegman's class is a bit over-powered...attacks and saves as a cleric, magic-user spells up to 7th level (hmmm...guess he did read Greyhawk), bardic charm and legend lore, double languages, chain armor, and d6 hit dice, plus unrestricted weapon use. Sheesh.

[can you imagine a teleporting bard with the ability to cast delayed blast fireball?]

I see why A) Gygax threw the class into an appendix as an optional class, and B) attempted an update to make the thing playable within the spirit of the original, while preserving some semblance of "balance" (OR, alternatively, making the class as hard to play as possible in order to dissuade its use). I haven't yet got around to my (planned) post on the AD&D bard, but...well, now I've got this OD&D trainwreck to deal with.

[one might ask why bother? Multiple reasons, not the least of which my soft spot for the class after spending the majority of my AD&D career playing bards. Recently, I've been reading the old MZB Lythande stories...part of my research on Thieves World, one of the major inspirations for my campaign setting...and I am considering how such a character might best be modeled in the game. "Bard" would be a fair choice...]

As for other stuff that will be in the Supplement: info on the campaign world, including its geography, cosmology, history, etc. The various deities, the PC races (how and why they interact with each other), major political entities, etc. Probably The Haggard Goat (the tavern/inn that is the PCs' base of operations) and its proprietor, Meredith. Assuming she survives the players' antics.

Yes, there will be rangers as a playable class...but again, they have not yet been introduced to the campaign (they are outside the city my players are currently exploring). Half-orcs...no. This isn't Tolkien. And even in Tolkien, "half-orcs" appear (to my reading) to have been very much a product of magical cross-breeding (a la Saruman), NOT the biological offspring of two distinct species. My orcs are not the "fecund race" of 1st edition. I'm not yet quite sure WHAT they are (my players haven't encountered any); once I figure that out, I'll consider blogging about it. Maybe.

[probably some sort of magically created slave race, engineered in the misty past by decadent, sorcerous elves. Would explain why elves speak their language, as well as the animosity between the two species. In fact, done. That's the short answer to the "orc question"]

Monks? Ummmmmm...haven't decided. Need to run some mock combats between monks of various levels with a variety of opponent types. That's a loooong way off, at this point. Assassins first.

Druids? Yeah, maybe, probably. This isn't really a foresty setting (as currently conceived). Mostly sand and scrub and swamp and sea...the four S's of environments (also snow and subterranean...six S's, I guess). My original intention was to include them as a character class (the "neutral cleric" option), but I kind of like the neutral clerics I've already added to the game. Nothing in OD&D prevents a player from playing a "neutral" cleric; they're simply limited to 6th level of experience (i.e. no 5th level spells). This has allowed me to add multiple "minor (i.e. neutral) deities" to my world along with perfectly competent clerics that have no ability to raise dead, commune, or create food (they still have the potential to turn any of the undead types). Adding the druid diminishes the impact and utility of such characters...why go to a lesser cleric when one can find a druid? Mainly, however, it's more of a setting/environment thing. I'm not sure yet how many bears and beasts are going to be in the setting. Still developing.

Anyway. Huh. I sat down to blog about elves this morning and I got completely distracted with my own thoughts and ideas. And I didn't even talk much about the campaign, just thoughts on what's going into the supplemental material. *sigh*

Apologies folks. More later.