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Monday, May 22, 2023

AD&D DMG cover to cover - Part II, pages 9-22

We are reading the original DMG - the ultimate DM book - but from a B/X and OSR point-of-view. Check the other parts of this series here

Today we will tackle:
THE GAME 9
— APPROACHES TO PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 9
— DICE 9
— USE OF MINIATURE FIGURES 10
— AIDS TO PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 11
CREATING THE PLAYER CHARACTER 11
— GENERATION OF ABILITY SCORES 11
— NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS 11
— THE EFFECT OF WISHES ON CHARACTER ABILITY SCORES 11
— CHARACTERISTICS FOR PLAYER CHARACTERS 11
— PLAYER CHARACTER NON-PROFESSIONAL SKILLS 12
— STARTING LEVEL OF EXPERIENCE FOR PLAYER CHARACTERS 12
CHARACTER AGE, AGING, DISEASE, AND DEATH 12
— CHARACTER AGE 12
— AGING 13
— Unnatural Aging 13
— DISEASE 13
— DEATH 15
CHARACTER ABILITIES 15
— EXPLANATION OF ABILITIES 15
CHARACTER RACES 15
— PLAYER CHARACTER RACIAL TENDENCIES 15
CHARACTER CLASSES 16
— FOLLOWERS FOR UPPER LEVEL PLAYER CHARACTERS 16
— The Paladin’s Warhorse 18
— SPYING 18
— THIEF ABILITIES 19
— THIEVES AND ASSASSINS SETTING TRAPS 20
— ASSASSINATION EXPERIENCE POINTS 20
— ASSASSINS’ USE OF POISON 20
— THE MONSTER AS A PLAYER CHARACTER 21
— LYCANTHROPY 22

The game

First, we get a small paragraph repeating what we have heard before: D&D is about fun, not "realism" or "simulation". Sounds obvious, but it is valuable advice if you are coming from wargames - as they did at the time.

Next, we get a section explaining dice. Again, this looks obvious now, but it was necessary back in 1979, since the stranger dice types (including the iconic d20) were a lot less common. One interesting things is that it teaches you what a bell curve is - I find this knowledge to be essential to DMs (and, well, to everyone) and sorely lacking in modern DMGs.

In the end of this part, we get an interesting alternative for the habitual reaction rolls, and a good conclusion on dice in general. I'll reproduce it here (as a curiosity), but TBH I won't try it in my games, since it requires special dice and a lot of rolling and thought for something that can easily be resolved with 2d6.

Unfortunately, this is apparently something common in the book: we get decent advice mixed with unrefined, convoluted, in unnecessarily complex systems. 
The author has a d6 with the following faces: SPADE, CLUB, CLUB, DIAMOND, DIAMOND, HEART. If, during an encounter, players meet a character whose reaction is uncertain, the card suit die is rolled in conjunction with 3d6. Black suits mean dislike, with the SPADE equalling hate, while red equals like, the HEART being great favor. The 3d6 give a bell-shaped probability curve of 3-18, with 9-12 being the mean spread. SPADE 18 means absolute and unchangeable hate, while HEART 18 indicates the opposite. CLUBS or DIAMONDS can be altered by discourse, rewards, etc. Thus, CLUBS 12 could possibly be altered to CLUBS 3 by offer of a tribute or favor, CLUBS 3 changed to DIAMONDS 3 by a gift, etc.

In closing this discussion, simply keep in mind that the dice are your tools. Learn to use them properly and they will serve you well.
The sections on miniatures and playing aids (sheets, etc.)  are not especially relevant or useful nowadays, since most of it has gone digital.

Creating the PCs

As AD&D is an ongoing game of fantasy adventuring, it is important to allow
participants to generate a viable character of the race and profession which he
or she desires. While it is possible to generate some fairly playable characters
by rolling 3d6, there is often an extended period of attempts at finding a
suitable one due to quirks of the dice. Furthermore, these rather marginal
characters tend to have short life expectancy — which tends to discourage new
players, as does having to make do with some character of a race and/or class
which he or she really can’t or won’t identify with. Character generation, then,
is a serious matter, and it is recommended that the following systems be used.
Four alternatives are offered for player characters: [...]

Coming from a BX/OSR view, this is strange advice, as many are used to roll 3d6 in order and play with what they get.  In practice, however, I agree with Gygax - why not let players get the class/race they want? Most players will create the same kind of PCs over and over again (in my experience), but they are having fun, so be it. 

So, instead of the usual 3d6 in order, we get FOUR different methods of generating PCs, the most famous being "roll4d6, drop lowest. That's a lot of redundancy and needless dice rolling, and generates very high ability scores. I might choose a less benevolent method for my own games, however: maybe assign 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 7, or roll 3d6 seven times and assign to taste. Even better, just roll 3d20.

NPCs, wishes, Characteristics for PCs

NPCs have their own methods of generating ability scores. I find this unnecessary. Wishes can augment ability scores, but after 16 they only improve by one decimal point per wish. Okay. PCs shouldn't have (random) NPC characteristics (e.g., personality - the table is actually on page 100) forced upon them, as they should play the PCs as they see fit. Except for weight and height somehow.  Okay.

Player Character non-professional skills

Now, we get something useful. PCs are defined by their class "virtually to the exclusion of all other activities", but might have some past experience determined randomly. This is nice as it replaces many skills and backgrounds in modern games. It can be ported directly to B/X, and a similar system is used in modern games such as Shadow of the Demon Lord and my own Dark Fantasy Basic (both with a bit more specific advice on how to use these backgrounds mechanically). Just roll 1d100 and check the table below:

When secondary skills are used, it is up to the DM to create and/or adjudicate situations in which these skills are used or useful to the player character. As a general rule, having a skill will give the character the ability to determine the general worth and soundness of an item, the ability to find food, make small repairs, or actually construct (crude) items. For example, an individual with armorer skill could tell the quality of normal armor, repair chain links, or perhaps fashion certain weapons.

Starting level of experience for player characters

Some advice on dealing with PCs of different levels, and also players of different levels of experience. All very vague and nothing particularly useful except for the advice of running separate high level and low level campaigns, so that new players can have a taste of high level if they want.

CHARACTER AGE, AGING, DISEASE, AND DEATH

This section has several detailed tables on starting age, aging, disease, death and resurrection. As such, they can be used in B/X as written. While I'm not particularly interested in checking monthly to see if the PCs suffer from parasites or mild ear disease, I can see the point if you're running a particularly extended and realistic campaign. But fun trumps realism, remember? Which is why we don't get realistic combat or even critical hits (IIRC). Instead, we have urinary system infection.

A sword to the head without a helmet is in the rules, but this won't cost you an eye or ear. Disease might. I'm not even sure there are rules for PCs that have lost an eye or part of their hearing. Guess we will see later on (let me know in the comments, or remind me to edit this post in a few months!). In short, these rules are interesting, but half-baked at best.

CHARACTER ABILITIES, RACES

An explanation on what abilities (Strength, Dexterity, etc.) mean and how they function, followed by a section explaining dwarves, elves, etc. Mildly useful if you still want to understand the difference between Wisdom and Intelligence ("while the intelligent character will know that smoking is harmful to him, he may well lack the wisdom to stop"). The race descriptions are pretty standard.

CHARACTER CLASSES

Frist, we get lots of random tables for followers the PCs can get when they reach high levels. These are organized as troops, presumably for domain management and mass battles. Rangers get special creatures, including, potentially, a copper dragon or storm giant. The paladin's special warhorse is also described here.

Then we have rules for spying. Especially for NPC spies (assassins). No idea why this is in the PC section, but it is useful to gather information.

Thief skills are next. Back Stabbing does not function against creatures with no discernible backs. Opening locks, finding traps, disarming traps take 1-4 rounds each. Useful information. Slippery walls can be added to make climbing harder for the thief. "Slightly slippery is the norm for some reason, which DOUBLES the chance of failure. Sounds like a bad choice and a needles nerf on the thief.

OTOH, we learn that thieves and assassins can set traps. Assassins also learn to concoct poisons, and this section contains a poison table that is very useful for B/X games, as B/X does not contain a similar tool.

THE MONSTER AS A PLAYER CHARACTER is included in character CLASSES for some reason. Here, the author insists in the “humanocentric” tone of AD&D, discouraging PCs that want to de dragons, demons, devils, etc. This is contrary to OD&Ds suggestion that you could start the game as a low-level Balrog or dragon (and seems to contradict the advice we've read a few pages ago that players should be able to pick race, class, and personality as desired). I think each method has its own pros and cons, which deserve a post of its own (this one!). Suffice to say, this is general advice and could be useful for any RPG. I'll highlight this bit (emphasis mine):
The game features humankind for a reason. It is the most logical basis in an illogical game. From a design aspect it provides the sound groundwork. From a standpoint of creating the campaign milieu it provides the most readily usable assumptions. From a participation approach it is the only method, for all players are, after all is said and done, human, and it allows them the role with which most are most desirous and capable of identifying with. From all views then it is enough fantasy to assume a swords & sorcery cosmos, with impossible professions and make-believe magic. To adventure amongst the weird is fantasy enough without becoming that too!
Next, we get advice discouraging PCs to become lycanthropes, very much in the same vein, but more detailed. Apparently, these are allowed, with lots of downsides. Nothing particularly useful for my games here. Well, enough for today.

What have we learned today?
 
Lots of cool tables, but everything seems a bit unnecessarily complex, sometimes redundant. Some philosophical essays that are worth a read, and at least two subsystems that are easy and fun to use in B/X games: secondary skills and poisons. The spying section is equally useful, since B/X does not have an assassin class but does have spies you can hire, with no rules except for some very vague guidelines.


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13 comments:

  1. If you haven't read OSE:Advanced Fantasy you might enjoy it. Many of these AD&D rules are ported into a B/X context (including secondary skills, chance of raising the dead, and poisons) there.

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    1. Good advice. I've bought OSE advanced and I think when I finish this exercise I will write a post about it, comparing the two.

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    2. It's a good exercise in what it might look like to port the AD&D stuff *aaalmost* as-is, but with some things simplified to keep it "Basic".

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  2. I just started getting in to OSR and (solo)RPGing a few weeks ago and came across your blog. Since my knowledge base in traditional paperback RPG is limited, I figure that I would join you in a read through of AD&D. It's been very interesting so far! There are definitely a lot of weeds to sift through and I can see some of the criticisms of AD&D pop through. The formulation for age and aging seems more in-depth than I would think many people would use. The disease and parasite information is pretty cool, but a great another good example of how deep in the weeds Gary went.

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  3. I haven't fallen off my read along yet!

    Comments on the first half of this section:

    - dice and probability: probably great to include in '79, now people are generally pretty familiar. Good note about understanding bell curves though
    - scale: 3 abreast is great, but doesn't mesh super nicely with 5' or 10' squares. This probably works a lot better without minis. I don't hate the modern "each character takes up a 5' square" even if it is a bit wide
    - approved / official / authorized AD&D products: ironic that interest in AD&D (via OSRIC) was saved by the least "official" kind of product.
    - character generation: important to allow players to generate a character of the race and profession they desire: interesting, somewhat contrary to the B/X "find out what you're gonna play". Does AD&D rely more on ability scores though? Playing characters with weak scores isn't too terrible in B/X, but you really can't rely on about checks except much and expect characters to succeed. I might be inclined towards 3d6 down the line, reroll any one score or something similar to facilitate players picking a class, to some degree
    - NPC ability scores - typically not necessary in B/X (from what I can tell) unless they're expected to be classed adventurers
    - wishes raising ability scores 1/10 point beyond 16. A wildly specific ruling and a crazy thing to include this early in the book. For characters who can prepare and cast wish this doesn't seem terribly effective at keeping ability scores down, for scrolls it seems way too punitive. Doesn't Wish have drawbacks anyway?
    - NPC personality and characteristics (tables?) hope to see these later! Always good to have some kind of basic NPC idea.
    - secondary skills: didn't know this was a thing. NO SKILL OF MEASURABLE WORTH is just cruel as plenty of these secondary skills are unlikely to come up in play anyway. I think a very similar version of this table shows up in OSE advanced.
    - starting characters at levels above 1: surprised he doesn't mention that players with high level characters can just start a new character and adventure somewhere appropriate.
    - "the superior DM will have just enough treasure to whet the appetite of players, while keeping them lean and hungry still, always after that carrot just ahead" - good to see this early. One of my beefs with B/X is the lack of ways to "keep the characters lean and hungry" at any level.
    - aging: good stuff, if you run a truly long campaign. Getting old sucks. Elves, as usual, are OP.
    - Magical Aging Causes: there's the downside of Wish I was wondering about earlier. demi-human lifespans being much less affected by magical aging seems pretty good for them.
    - disease tables: gave me a chuckle. Actually a pretty decent system for determining if you get something so far, though I haven't read the effects yet
    - annnnd the actual diseases aren't specific and have a bunch more dice rolls. Really this system would be better as a table of specifically named diseases and then a generator of new ones imo. I've heard people discuss using this system at a way to encourage PCs to spend their wealth on lifestyle expenses, which has some merit.

    More to follow! Hoping my PoD copy arrives soon, I hate reading PDFs.

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  4. Pages 15-22
    - death due to age: actually really interesting to think about the "alignment" choice facing a venerable character - does one face oblivion bravely and resign oneself to living vicariously through descendants, or cling to immortality through terrible magical means like lichdom. Inspiring stuff.
    - maximum age determination system is needlessly complex, though I suppose not used often. A recurring theme on the complexity.
    - ability scores: a list of average strength for monsters - probably useful here and there. Lots of Gygax voice in here - love the note about Rasputin having 18 CON.
    - Character races - elves don't love ships huh? Not very aligned with Tolkien or Moorcock. Curious notion.
    - character races - no section on humans. I suppose most readers are familiar.
    - half-orcs - not all of them are terrible, only most of them.
    - followers for for upper level player characters - no mention of "name level" - does AD&D use that term? This system is wildly complex, but I suppose it only happens once per high level character so it's not really slowing down play or anything. The combination of rolls gives a nice effect where if you get fewer followers, they're higher level or of a more rare/powerful type. Quite clever.
    - followers continued - 75% of assassin followers will desert the guild when you take over (presumably by killing the old guildmaster / guildmistress? Haven't read the PHB yet) - this really implies a whole game of cloak and dagger city intrigue - finding and neutralizing all the new rival guilds that spring up after you take over, populated by said deserters. Curious how much 'city stuff' is sprinkled throughout the DMG and what sort of systems there are. City adventuring seems like one of those things discussed but not quite systematized as much as dungeons and wildernesses
    - paladin warhorses - very flavorful! I'm curious where the whole "magical vision of the mount" comes from - that's gotta be out of some appendix N literary source. 4th level as the time for this quest corresponds well with the rules for wilderness play starting at 4th level in the Expert book (and I'm guessing that's more or less where wilderness play starts in AD&D as well?)
    - Spying - great stuff, very flavorful. As usual, the system has at least one more dice roll than I'd expect. Love the spying failure results.
    - Thief abilities - setting traps is brutal! Using the same percentage of the trap working as find/remove traps is fine, but having the traps go off on the thief or assassin means setting traps is a dangerous business. I suppose it does encourage you to set traps that you can survive, which has a nice balancing effect.
    - humanocentrism - lots to think about here. The idea that players have human perspectives is sound, but doesn't solidly explain why players can play elves and half-orcs but not regular orcs. Nor does Gary lean on alignment (at least here) to say "well the player characters won't be chaotic or evil, so playing monsters of such alignment is disallowed". I don't love the "let a player run a terrible monster character and eventually they'll abandon it when it becomes apparent how bad it is" approach, but describing such an approach does get the DM thinking about what such drawbacks might be for a monster trying to operate in human society.

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    1. Thanks for the comment! Great insights there!

      I agree about the thieves/spies/assassins stuff being especially flavorful.

      Ability scores: AD&D is just overly complicated about them IMO. I prefer B/X or modern approaches.

      About humanocentrism, I wrote a post on that too... has its pros and cons.

      https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2023/05/all-elves-are-half-elves.html

      Hadn't considered the 4th-level paladin thing, makes lots of sense and fits perfectly into B/X!

      Will try to post part 3 soon!

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    2. I like your take on all playable races being half human - it has a nice harmony where the human player can approach things from a human perspective and it makes sense for the character. Why is your elf concerned with risking his life underground for material gain? Well he's half human - he only prances about in the forest by starlight on the weekends (ie, during downtime)

      I think at root, the campaign is best with some playable groups that are human or close to human, and some mysterious and/or antagonist groups that the players will interact with and learn about, and they should should probably be separate.

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    3. Yeah, exactly. If you want to keep things mysterious, you should probably keep them off he PCs hand in the beggining.

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  5. On the subject of diseases (and the weakness of the AD&D approach) - looks like thet were specific back in OD&D Sup 2. Post from Delta on it - https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2012/02/damn-you-gygax-part-1.html?m=1.

    Seems like it's your want use them, using the OD&D version is the way to go.

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    1. Great find! And yeas, I like the OD&D table better, now that I've seem it.

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  6. I love that he talks about probability distributions! I don't feel he explained it well, though. Gamers generally understand the uniform distribution enough to get by (although they tend to misdirect complaints towards the streakiness of randomness rather than game designs that make streakiness be a problem). Yet the first diagram has confusing labeling and it doesn't have the same axes or presentation as the second (better, albeit it is in fact discrete and not continuous as a curve implies, and listing the actual probabilities might help someone out there--the left half of the "curve" is 1/216, 3/216, 6/216, 10/216, 15/216, 21/216, 25/216, and 27/216). Two directly comparable diagrams would have rendered the attempt at layman's-terms explanations and examples less laborious or even unnecessary to read, even without the revision it sorely needs.

    It is somewhat amusing, like you note, that not much longer after he gets done talking about doing away with rules that don't add to your campaign, he starts covering exactly the kind of realism rules that belong more towards the back of this book than its front. I reckon few today would take the, uh, pioneering step of putting old age and disease tables before an explanation of abilities and classes.

    Alas, the reflection on smoking is a bit sobering in light of what we know about his struggles with substances and his later health.

    I find a lack of clear, concise language in specifying rules vexing; that Gary often does us a real service in explaining reasonings as best he can does not excuse the maestro from not separating sidebar-like material consistently. Purple prose and digression into anecdote and even "bad page-long boxed text" have much more of a place in my heart than most others seem to permit, but the meat of a rule (like any game information in that boxed text) needs to be the absolute first thing your eye catches when you're the judge and you're in a bind.

    Well, my own biases exist, of course. I don't speak as someone who homebrews or even knows a darned thing about tabletop games, but as someone who video games and then goes down a rabbit hole looking for the deep cuts (when I've enjoyed one so much that I don't want to ruin it by immediately loading up a bad game). So, uh, I beat the "PF Kingmaker" video game a month back and the ensuing research project has gotten a liiiiittle intense... this is a good post series, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought to look at this particular book this year looking to mine the gold and rethink ideas we now take for granted.

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