Ruminations on OD&D: Armor

The success or failure of a to-hit roll in OD&D depends on the target's Armor Class (AC). In its earliest form, AC was based entirely on the actual armor worn by a character, or the relative protective value of a creature's hide. Things such as Dexterity bonuses or magic armor modified the attacker's roll, not the defender's AC. Mathematically there may be no difference, if things stopped right there. However, doing it this way does open some possibilities.

The chief option this allows is a modifier based on weapon v. armor. I'll grant you, this is not a popular option. It is seen as "too fiddly" or just too much bother by most. I happen to like it. I don't really see where it is a bother. It is a fairly simple matter to jot down to-hit numbers on your character sheet. Most old-school character sheets include a small matrix for just such a thing. It is a small matter to fill that in for your weapons, with the modifiers already factored in.

The main reason I like this option is it introduces a mechanical reason to influence weapon selection. With the OD&D paradigm of all weapons doing d6 damage, I like the idea of having something that prevents weapons from being generic. I don't want to turn this into more of a weapons discussion, though. That's going to be another topic.

In my gaming travels, I have run across several ways to handle armor. The other main method is to have armor absorb/block/soak damage (terms vary). In these systems the to-hit number remains relatively fixed, based on attacker's skill, sometimes modified or cross-referenced with defender's skill. If the attacker is successful, he rolls damage. The defender subtracts his armor's rating, and applies any remaining damage to the character. If the damage roll is less than the armor's rating, the character takes no damage.

I played in a GURPS campaign once. GURPS armor functions in this damage-reduction model. There were so many times in every combat encounter where rounds would be fought with no effective damage being dealt. We had our share of successful to-hit rolls, but many times there wasn't enough damage to penetrate the armor. It finally dawned on me that this is what "misses" are in D&D (any flavor): they aren't necessarily misses at all. They are simply failures to cause damage. Sadly, even with that epiphany (which I had almost 20 years ago) I doggedly continued to search for a system that featured damage reducing armor because I was still convinced it should be the True Way.

I am pleased to say I abandoned that foolish quest and I am now quite satisfied with OD&D's take on armor and armor classes.

Ruminations on OD&D: Nostalgia or Just a Good System?

When my mind returns to OD&D, I get caught up in this sort of duality conundrum. On the one hand, I am constantly drawn to OD&D out of nostalgia. It was my first RPG. I actually started gaming with Avalon Hill wargames (Tobruk and Third Reich being the first), but that's another story. I still remember buying my white box, mail ordering Eldritch Wizardry and a set of dice (the soft ones that saw the d20 turn into a ball after some steady use). Hell, when I started there were no d10s, the d20 was numbered from 0-9 twice. All the d20s were like that, there weren't any numbered 1-20 back then.

I have a lot of extremely fond memories of those times. There's a part of me that turns to OD&D in an effort to recapture the sense of those games. That part of me doesn't want to change the game, at least no more than we did back then. So, I don't want a lot of house rules or "outside influences", beyond what we may have been using in 1976-78. This included Greyhawk, pretty much whole clothe, but very little from Blackmoor or Eldritch Wizardry. We had zero access to Strategic Review, Dragon, or Judge's Guild materials.

Then there's the other reason I turn to OD&D. It is simply a damn good system. It does what it intends to extremely well.

(An aside: It never ceases to amaze me when people compare OD&D to other games on the basis that OD&D is all about killing and looting and doesn't promote role playing at all. "There's nothing in the rules to support role playing and the only way to improve your character is by killing things" is the common refrain. Then they will point to systems, usually skill-based, as champions of "role playing not roll playing". Funny thing is, these systems all rely on die rolls to adjudicate skill use, and the skill lists are usually quite detailed, as are the rules governing their use. OD&D has no skill lists, relying instead on player skill and role playing. Players are encouraged to role play their characters' actions, rather than rely on "skill" rolls. Bizarre.)

I'm honestly not sure how much of OD&D was intentional design and how much was serendipity. We all know it was born out of a miniatures wargame. There are references to Chainmail throughout the LBBs, and it is in fact required for complete descriptions of some of the monsters. So, essentially, the LBBs were house rules bolted on to Chainmail to turn a wargame into a roleplaying game. By all rights it should have been an odd fit, to say the least. Especially with so many artifacts from a 20:1 scale miniatures game making  their way into a game about 1:1 conflict between "characters" and creatures. Yet, somehow it works, and it does so in an almost transparent-to-the-user fashion in many cases.

Take for example the simple, yet profound, relationship between armor, HD, and weapon damage. In Chainmail a  standard figure was killed by a single hit. In order to score that hit a target number, based on the target's armor and the attacker's weapon, must be met. (In a sense, armor reduces damage, as a hit roll that wasn't sufficient to kill the figure is ignored. Only enough damage to kill is considered.) In OD&D this was translated as a standard figure having d6 HD and all weapons doing d6 damage. Thus, we set the standard that a normal man may be killed in a single attack. But, I digress.

My main point here is that for all the nostalgia that may fuel the OSR engine, OD&D is a fine, fun game on its own merits. It may seem antiquated to some, but I am very comfortable with its practices and forms. I have my LBB pdfs printed and spiral bound into a single volume and spiral bound. In that minimal 114(ish) page tome is all the gaming I need.

A New Critical Hit Idea

I came up with this idea yesterday. I would really like some feedback, so if you would be so kind as to comment, I will greatly appreciate it.

I don't really like have a to-hit roll of 20 represent a critical hit. It essentially means everyone crits at the same rate. I don't like "confirming" crits, either. I've discussed this in an older post. I think the damage die should be the indicator, but I am against exploding damage dice.

OD&D is about modelling results. With that in mind, I had this idea. If a player rolls max damage, he gets a +1 to-hit on his next attack against that opponent. This represents such a severe flurry of blows that it affords a continuing advantage. Really it represents the potential to do it bring the fight to a swifter conclusion, thus modelling the result of critical success in combat. I also like it because it can only occur as the result of a successful hit, which means that characters and creatures with better to-hit numbers will achieve it more often. It is also a small bonus which is well in-line with the OD&D philosophy of such things.

Please let me know what you think.

Ruminations on OD&D: Hit Points

In the pursuit of my job I have a lot of time to think about gaming (and anything else that crosses my mind). However, I have no time whatsoever to write, design, or develop anything I think about. One of the things I've been thinking about lately is OD&D, but I've been thinking about it on a much more philosophical level. I'm a huge fan of Philotomy's OD&D Musings and read and reread them frequently. This will (hopefully) be a series of posts of my personal observations, with the title inspired by those musings.

First up: Hit Points

I've blathered about hit points before. Anyone that makes a conscious choice to have D&D in their life has. I'm not going to rehash those previous thoughts; they are easy enough to find. No, this is about the drama inherent in hit points.

Over the course of my gaming travels and experimentations I have run across the notion that hit points aren't dramatic. According to many systems, designers, and players, it isn't realistic nor dramatic to know with absolute certainty how much abuse you can take before being killed. A lot of games trumpet their "fun" and "realism" by pointing out that death is always possible and any blow may kill any character at any time. Each and every creature in the game, from stableboy to the Queen's Champion, from kobold to ancient red dragon, could be killed with a single stroke of a blade.

I have been lured by this temptation myself. I have bought into the idea that it is a bit meta-gamey and jarring to base one's willingness to risk combat on knowing how much more damage on'e character can sustain. It occurred to me yesterday, though, that while ripe with dramatic potential, systems which support this notion of ever-possible character death are better in theory than in fact.

Think of it from the player's perspective. How much fun is it to have a favorite character killed by random chance? Sure, it makes combat more tense, and perhaps causes the player to actually consider the risk/reward every single combat rather than only when hit points are low. Yet, for that threat of imminent death to be real, and not just some sort of boogeyman, it has to actually happen from time to time. I was playing in a sort of mini-campaign with two friends. My friend Rick was DM and he had developed some critical hit charts that included the possibility of instant death. The other player was my friend Todd. He was playing a dwarf. We were about 4th or 5th level and quite attached to our characters. We had a random encounter with a small number of goblins, definitely not enough to pose a real threat. One of them scored a critical hit on Todd's dwarf. Rick rolled on his new chart and ended up with the goblin getting in a one-in-a-million hit that pierced the dwarf's heart, killing him instantly. Todd was devastated.

Granted, with the charts being experimental, Rick could have invoked fiat and ignored such a horrific result, but that's not the point. The point is: the supposed fun brought on by the "dramatic tension" of the dangerous critical hits did not outweigh the let-down as a result of watching a favorite character killed by pure chance. So, ultimately, from the player perspective, I just don't see this type of thing fun. Whether it is through a bolted-on critical hit table, or baked into the health/damage system, it is not an even trade. Furthermore, since we actually play these games for fun, I wouldn't ever, as a referee, allow a player's character to be killed in such a manner. So, the threat of imminent death becomes hollow and meaningless.

From the referee's perspective, and the player's as well, to a degree, this type of system saps the fun from battles which end prematurely in the characters' favor. Who wants to spend months of real time and many sessions to get to the Ultimate Threat only to have him killed by an exploding damage die on the first hit? Again, the point of the exercise is fun, and it is hard to do that when a planned three-hour session ends in 15 minutes because of a lucky roll.

Upon reflection, I have to say that I see a lot of drama in D&D's hit point system. It's all in how it is role played. Hit points, especially in the relatively low amounts as generated in OD&D, really model the ebb and flow of a battle. I have been in countless games where I was sweating bullets because my hit points were at a point where one more really good hit could kill my character and I knew I had my opponent in bad shape (or at least I thought I knew). I was praying to the dice gods that I hit him before he hit me. For me, that is a much more satisfying sort of drama than that offered by random chance death.

Bag o' Bones

The Bag o' Bones is an enchanted canvas or burlap bag, securely tied. It is roughly "meduim" size, not small but not so large it would draw undue attention if tied to a belt. It rattle slightly if shaken, but is otherwise unremarkable.

The Bag o' Bones may be thrown at a target (range and modifiers as a Dagger). Upon striking the ground, presumably at the target's feet, its tie will fly loose and a pile of bones will spill out. The bones will form into a fully functional skeleton on the round the bag is thrown. The skeleton will be armed with a bone club.

The target must make a saving throw vs Fear. If failed, the target is frozen in fear, rooted to the spot, until attacked. Whether the attack is successful or not, the target will then flee. The fleeing target may make another saving throw each round, to shake off the fear. Obviously, if the saving throw is successful, the target acts normally.

This is a one-use item. The skeleton is in no fashion under the control of the owner of the bag. It functions as a normal skeleton. It will continue attacking should its first target be slain, moving on to a randomly determined target, including possibly the thrower or his allies. Note that subsequent targets are not subject to the Fear effect.

Free Goodness from Lamentations of the Flame Princess

There are a couple of new things available for LotFP. The first is a pay-what-you-want pdf of the Free RPG Day adventure, Better Than Any Man. I haven't printed/read it yet. It looks completely awesome. There isn't a FLGS near me, so I'm not familiar with actual Free RPG Day offerings. I rarely even try to get in on them post-Day. My general feeling is that they are mostly introductory in nature, intended for either completely new players, or trying to get established players to try a certain rules set. Maybe I'm wrong about that and doing myself a disservice. I'm certainly glad I stumbled across this one. It is 180 pages(!) with a slew of advanced features in the pdf, including color maps that are printer-friendly. My impression of it is that is almost a mini-campaign, an impression which may, or may not, bear out. It is set against real-world history and seems to be intended to showcase LotFP's particular gaming proclivities.

The second link is to a new, no-art version of the Rules & Magic book. I'm not sure what has changed, content-wise, and of course I can't comment on the art in the for-pay version, but overall I think it looks much better. There is a new font that doesn't do that weird curlicue thing with the "s".

Better Than Any Man

Free No-Art Rules & Magic

Delving Deeper Reliquary

Delving Deeper Reliquary, the all-in-one version of Delving Deeper is available for download. It is in plain-text only. I dig the name, btw.