When I last gamed with Mike Mornard, I also him a few miscellaneous questions about OD&D: largely about where various game elements came from. Here are his equally miscellaneous answers:
It strikes me that the designers of 4e recognized this goal and made it explicit with their rules for minions and boss monsters.
For me, dungeon traps are an unsolved problem in 4e. I’d like something between a full-fledged 4e skill-challenge trap and the old-school spanking for not tapping every flagstone with a ten-foot pole. I’ve made attempts to solve the problem, but I haven’t been happy with any of them. (My favorite so far is the Mazes and Monsters rule: the Maze Controller cannot spring a trap unless he has announced that it “could be a trap”.)
The above panels from “Red Nails” in the 1970’s Savage Sword of Conan comic gave me an idea. Conan would TOTALLY have spotted that bear trap if he hadn’t been raging – and running.
How about this rule: Under normal circumstances, all PCs spot all adjacent traps – no Perception check required.
PCs only fail to notice traps when they’re running or charging (and maybe also a handful of other distracting conditions: dazed, stunned, or blinded).
With this rule, traps are most dangerous in combat, and in very specific circumstances like chases: in other words, they add danger to already dangerous scenes, instead of slowing down routine situations. It’s the DM’s job, as the roleplayer of the ancient dungeon architect and the kobold snaremaster, to put traps in places where PCs will be tempted to rush heedlessly.
And what makes you think the Memorabilia is completely free of pap? Even the gifted and Venerable Boedullus once remarked scornfully that about half of it should be called the Inscrutabilia. Treasured fragments of a dead civilization there were indeed-but how much of it has been reduced to gibberish, embellished with olive leaves and cherubims, by forty generations of us monastic ignoramuses, children of dark centuries, many, entrusted by adults with an incomprehensible message, to be memorized and delivered to other adults.
The monks in the post-apocalyptic sci fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz are in approximately the same position as scholars in most D&D worlds. They’re inheritors of a fallen civilization they don’t fully understand. Whether your fallen civilization is 20th century Earth or Bael Turath, books from the past age are precious – and, in another way, irrelevant. A single ancient book of pre-cataclysmic magic might do the PCs no good, just as a modern book on electronics wouldn’t do a medieval scholar any good: in this book, too much knowledge is taken for granted.
A library, on the other hand, is a different thing. When I DM, I tend to put treasures in libraries, because that’s a natural place to find powers from past ages. I tend to be interested in mechanics for performing research, and in powerful wizard spells as treasure (as, indeed, they were in previous editions). I haven’t quite figured out the perfect mechanics yet, but I do want to find a way to make players greedy for ancient spells and secrets. For now, I plan to use my ideas for spells as treasure.
As you can tell, one of the things I miss in 4e is rolling your attributes. However, I have never missed rolling for hit points.
Rolling your attributes helps throw some randomness into your character concept, and randomness is usually an aid to creativity.
Rolling for hit points doesn’t spark creativity. It has the potential to sabotage a character you like, and it’s such an important roll that, for me at least, it encourages cheating as little else in D&D does. It just doesn’t seem fair that my cool paladin leveled up and rolled 1 hit point.
Here’s a suggestion for those who would like to roll HP in 4e:
1) Start with your normal 4e HP – or a little less.
2) Roll a HP die at the beginning of every level. This is a special pool of bonus Wound Points. If you have any Wound Points left from last level, they’re gone – they don’t stack.
Wound Points can be used instead of HP at any time: typically on an attack where you would go below 0 HP. (But you always have a choice to save your Wound Points, if you don’t mind falling unconscious.)
Wound points cannot be healed in any way. You only get them when you level.
This rule lets you “roll hit points” every level. It also solves a common 4e objection that an extended rest cures all injuries. There are some wounds that only time can cure.
You can also use it to model semi-permanent injuries. If you are ever at 0 Wound Points, you can be considered to have some nagging injury. I’d play this entirely as a flavor thing, but other DMs could hang some random penalty on it if they wanted.
When a spider dropped on my loyal teamster, Pedro, I was on the other side of my mule and too far away to rush to his aid. But, hey, at least the spider hadn’t dropped on me. That seems to be the main reason why people have hirelings and henchmen, and mules for that matter. They provide tasty alternatives for hungry spiders.
I started this D&D session wealthy. The last time I had played with Mike Mornard, we had found a giant cache of gems, and my thief, Roger de Coverley, had earned enough gold and XP to level up almost to level 3. In this game session, I was joined by all-new level 1 PCs, with 30-180 GP each. Some of them were smart enough to suck up to me. I sprang for new suits of armor for the fighting men played by Andrew and Tavis, each of whom swore fealty to me and wore one of my garters as a favor.
I also decided that I should get into the spirit of OD&D and get a few NPC hirelings. It ended up costing less than 100 GP to get a level 0 man at arms named Baldric, a teamster named Pedro, and a mule. The mule’s main job was to carry the rest of my wealth (which, at 1/10# per GP, weighed more than 300 pounds).
I never ordered my man at arms, Baldric, to do much, and he never volunteered to jump into combat. The mule was more useful. I used him several times as a shield, or skulked behind him when I was in danger. Pedro the teamster was in the thick of things. He was the first target of the first spider who attacked us.
One of the other PCs recognized our dungeon as the sample dungeon from the 1e DMG, which has a few filled-out rooms and a bunch of uncharted areas for the DM to fill in himself. I don’t know if Mike was winging it or if he was using a premade adventure key, but we quickly fought our way through the initial spider attack, survived an ambush by giant camel spiders, avoided the deadly save-or-die yellow mold spores on the grain sacks, and made it into unfamiliar territory. Terrifying unfamiliar territory.
Tavis at The Mule Abides describes our antics pretty fully, but I’d like to spend some time on my first interaction with henchmen and hirelings.
First of all, Charm Person is a pretty cool spell, as it unlocks a new sort of pokémon-collecting henchmen acquisition system at level 1. You might not get a castle and followers until level 10 or so, but you can, like Mike’s level 1 magic-user Lessnard in Gygax’s game, pick up a fifth-level fighting man as a bodyguard if he happens to fail his saving throw. In OD&D, Charm Person can be long-lasting or permanent, but Mike emphasized that it didn’t do more than the name implied: it made someone your buddy, not your slave. If you didn’t treat your new friend fairly, they might not be your willing ally forever.
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This is Karl Marx, not Mike Mornard. Mike's beard is shorter.
I love D&D, and it’s that love that makes me, a fourth edition player, so delighted to delve into the secrets of OD&D and Dave and Gary’s campaigns. As Mike said, understanding history is all about context. There are so many charming, inexplicable mysteries in D&D, from the baffling stone head in Greyhawk to the puzzle of what the heck hit points represent. I can bring my own context to them, but I think I need to have some understanding of those first games in order to know just what the heck my D&D is about.
It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon.
In OD&D, there’s no guarantee that things are fair. One of Gary’s and Rob Kuntz’s favorite stories, says Mornard, was Clark Ashton Smith’s The Seven Geases, in which (spoilers ahead) the hero survives a horrible death at the hands of seven different monsters only to die meaninglessly slipping from a ledge. That was one of the seminal texts of D&D, said Mornard, and one of the stories it was designed to model. “The story that D&D tells,” said Mike, “is the story of the world. Heroes aren’t invincible.”
That’s a long way from the Fourth Edition ethos. In 4e, it takes a long time to make a character, and so you’re invested in him before he’s downed his first kobold. If your 4e character is killed, you can be sure he’ll get a chance to put up a good fight first.
Not in 0e. Characters died all the time. That’s why Gary Gygax’s characters got names like Xagyg the wizard and Yrag the fighter, and other players contributed Melf the Elf, or (if I remember Mike’s anecdote correctly) Bellus of Telefono. It was the sixties and seventies. Life was cheap, and heroes died.
That’s all scary stuff to hear from your DM right before he runs your thief through a dungeon.
Next blog post: My thief explores one of the classic D&D dungeons.
Raven Feather Boat: if a dead person is put at the helm and the boat is sent adrift down a river, it will, after several hours, take all inhabitants to the shadowfell.
This feather boat’s power is discovered only when the PCs find the one black feather on the swan boat’s body.
While some items may get mechanically better (for instance, a +1 sword becomes a +2 sword), it’s more challenging to improve items that don’t have numeric bonuses. I thought I’d go through the Wondrous Items in the 4e Player’s Handbook and give examples of how each could gain powers that reflect their history.
Feather Boat of the Northern Mists: While the feather boat is in motion, the boat’s steersman may use a minor action to render the boat and all its passengers invisible. If the boat stops, or any of the boat’s occupants make an attack, it becomes visible for the next five minutes.
The northern barbarians know the secret test which must be performed to unlock this special power.
Swanmay boat: Besides a feather token and a boat, the token can also take on its true form once a day for up to an hour: a swanmay, a fey woman with swan wings. The swanmay can fly, has defenses of 26, and, if hit, returns to token form. In swanmay form, the token is under no obligation to follow orders, but may help the PCs if she trusts them. In swanmay or boat form, this token can speak elven and common.
The boat’s swanmay form is discovered only when the swanmay first chooses to show herself.
I’m in the middle of a stretch of 4 nights of D&D, in 5 days and 3 different editions, including another OD&D game with Mike Mornard.
So it only seems right to link to our GM’s account of a game of Tech Noir that I played last week.
4e expects you to have around an 18 in your best attribute, and a decent secondary attribute. This is very predictably achieved with point buy. 4e is big on not having a single bad roll torpedo your character.
On the other hand, point buy usually leads to your non-class stats being predictably bad. Every single barbarian has a low Intelligence. That means D&D cannot properly render Conan the Barbarian. In a game like Dungeons and Dragons, that’s just about as big a failure as I can imagine.
4e point buy generally gives you a 20, a 16, and a bunch of 10s. You know what’s boring? A bunch of 10s. For the most part, non-class stats aren’t very important for power and balance, but they are important for roleplaying variety.
I really like the 4e Gamma World approach, where your main 2 stats are 18 and 16, and you roll 3d6 down the line for your other stats. Sure, they’ll probably all be pretty close to 10 or 11: but the door is open for the occasional pleasant surprise or hilarious disability.
So here’s my proposal: it introduces a little power creep, but hey, we’re late in the edition here.
Interestingly, the following two stat arrays have the same point cost:
a) 18, 14, 10, 10, 10, 8
b) 17, 16, 10, 10, 10, 8
So, to let’s do this for starting characters: take either
a) 18 in your primary class attribute and 14 in your secondary attribute: roll 3d6 straight down the other attributes; or
b) 17 in your primary class attribute and 16 in your secondary attribute: roll 3d6 for the rest
Now you might just end up with a strong, tough, dextrous, canny barbarian like Conan; or you might get a Raistlin wizard with a hilariously weak Constitution. You probably won’t. You’ll probably roll a bunch of 10s and 11s. But here’s hoping.
enworld posted
“Playtesting in the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. My dwarf just slew a lurker with a well-timed crit to save the swallowed paladin.” – Monte Cook. “Playtested in the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. My cleric burned several downed trolls before they could finish off the unconscious paladin.” – Bruce Cordell.
One of the posters at enworld, 1Mac, noticed that these sound suspiciously like a Mad-Libs-style 5e playtest tweet generator.
Inasmuch as I have a wheelhouse, random generators are my wheelhouse, so behold the
Playtest Report Generator
Repeat until the new edition is completely pieced together!
