OSSR AD&D 1e Players Handbook

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darkmaster
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Post by darkmaster »

Yeah, in my volume it's page 14, I'd cite a figure number, but this book is not that well organized. But I will recreate the table for you below

Character Race Table II.: Class Level limitations
DwarvenElvenGnomeHalf-ElvenHalflingHalf-OrcHuman
Cleric(8)(7)(7)5no4u
Druidnononou(6)nou

Followed by this notation
Notes Regarding Character Race Table II: wrote:Numbers in Parentheses () indicate that this class exists only as non-player characters in the race in question.

Numbers -- not in parenthesis -- indicate the maximum level attainable by a character of the race in question.

U appearing in a race column indicates that a character of the race in question has no limitation as to how high the character cn o with regard to level in the appropriate class.
So dwarves CAN be clerics, of up to 8th level but you can't play as a dwarven cleric because fuck you.
Kaelik wrote:
darkmaster wrote:Tgdmb.moe, like the gaming den, but we all yell at eachother about wich lucky star character is the cutest.
Fuck you Haruhi is clearly the best moe anime, and we will argue about how Haruhi and Nagato are OP and um... that girl with blond hair? is for shitters.

If you like Lucky Star then I will explain in great detail why Lucky Star is the a shitty shitty anime for shitty shitty people, and how the characters have no interesting abilities at all, and everything is poorly designed especially the skill challenges.
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Count Arioch the 28th
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Wow, that's pretty gay.
In this moment, I am Ur-phoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my int score.
darkmaster
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Post by darkmaster »

Very homosexual yes.
Kaelik wrote:
darkmaster wrote:Tgdmb.moe, like the gaming den, but we all yell at eachother about wich lucky star character is the cutest.
Fuck you Haruhi is clearly the best moe anime, and we will argue about how Haruhi and Nagato are OP and um... that girl with blond hair? is for shitters.

If you like Lucky Star then I will explain in great detail why Lucky Star is the a shitty shitty anime for shitty shitty people, and how the characters have no interesting abilities at all, and everything is poorly designed especially the skill challenges.
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hogarth
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Post by hogarth »

Pixels wrote:
Orca wrote:thieves had some specialty I forget, probably because it seldom came up.
I don't have access to books right now, but probably breath weapon. Save vs breath weapon was a catch-all for reflexes in early editions, which led to it being used in all sorts of non-breath weapon situations. Save vs breath weapon to avoid falling into a pit!
Thieves are good vs. Wands, of course! (I think the idea is that you're dodging a beam or some shit.)

Breath Weapons are the fighter's specialty.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

I wonder what kind of thought process lead to "Ok this is to dodge wands, this is to dodge breath, this is to resist death, this is to resist poison..." being written before "Fort/Ref/Will" being made.
darkmaster
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Post by darkmaster »

The rest of the book is going to be character classes, alignment, equipment, some miscellaneous bullshit sprinkled in the middle, and then spells and appendices. Now, that might not sound like much, but we are less than half done with this book. The last section ended on page 18 of 126. Half of that space is spells and I’m not positive I’m going to cover the spells in depth. I may hit every spell, I might must read them and highlight the ones that are a special brand of crazy. I’ll decide when I start reading them.

Classes start out with a longwinded description of the classes; it’s about what you’d expect fighters stab shit magic-users magic-missile shit it’s dull. Then we get an actually useful table of hit dice, maximum hit dice, spell casting, and level limit by class. Notable information druids, assassins, and monks have a maximum level of 14, 14, and 17, the rest can apparently keep on going but they all have maximum hit dice, fighter’s get a maximum of merely 9, but those are d10 compared to the 11 d4s a magic user can get. It still doesn’t make sense to me, I’m betting this is another thing people just kind of forgot about after a while.

There’s a note telling you how to determine the hp of multiclass characters, but it makes no sense. I’ll try to explain it, feel free to tell me if I get this wrong. You roll hit dice for each class, add those together, divide by the number of classes rounding fractions normally, and that’s the HP you get. This is stupid, I kind of get why it’s like this they wanted to avoid HP bloat but there is no reason for this, you’re already crippling your character by effectively making it take at least twice as long to level up, why not just give people both hit dice?

Next is what equipment you can use by class, fighters can use everything, kind of one of the four foot notes tells us if you’re under 5 feet tall you can’t use longbows or weapons of more than a foot long, and if you weigh less than 100 pounds you can’t wield weapons in excess of 200 weight in gold pieces the example is given two handed swords. Imma have a bit of a rant now.

So average human height is about 5 feet, and we can effectively use spears of up to about 10 feet in length (I have spoken with people who do HEMA and the consensus seems to be that around 8-10 feet is more or less manageable. As for weapons and weight?
Image Are you happy now? Hm? See what you’ve done? Where to fucking start? I hope all yall are ready for a dissertation in weapon design. So, when you’re setting out to make yourself a weapon, or a piece of armor for that matter, you need to keep several things in mind its effectiveness against contemporary implements, how it’s going to do its job, the battle field roll you have in mind for it, but most of all you need to consider usability. See most people who fight, do not fight that often, even if you are a soldier in a war you are unlikely to actually take part in combat that often. If some part of your kit equipment is very heavy, or it doesn’t do its job very well, or its just inconvenient to carry around, there is a good chance people will seriously just throw it away. So when you talk about how heavy two handed swords are it smells of bullshit, actual two handed swords weighed somewhere between 5 and 8 pounds, they’re not that heavy, in contrast, they could range from around 5 to nearly 6 feet long from pommel to tip and bear in mind, these are not side arms, you’re not meant to carry these around all the times, but they were still not overly heavy.

Swords you were meant to carry around with you all the time? Those tended to be about 2-2.5 pounds no matter where you go in the world the weight everyone seems to have arrived at is around 2-3 pounds because that is the weight that works for bladed instruments that are meant to be carried as side arms.

However, even if this weren’t ridiculous on the basis that weapons meant to be used by human beings weigh almost nothing it would still be bullshit because the actual wieldyness of a weapon has very little to do with its overall weight. See, there are reasons to intentionally make a weapon less wieldy, you do this by changing where in the weapon the weight is carried, in swords this is known as the balance of the blade, and having a balance that makes it more difficult to maneuver also makes that sword a better cutting implement you can swing that sword harder because it naturally falls in the direction of the cut. So this idea of someone simply being to light and weak to effectively use any weapon based upon its form factor is dumb. So long as the weapon is within certain well known tolerances if you are roughly within the range of possible human size congratulations you can probably use whatever weapon.

Moving on from the foot notes. Druids, thieves, and assassins can only use leather armor; I would like to take a moment to say, leather armor is a concept of… questionable reality in a historical context.
Image It can look very good though. Image Though Gambeson can be just as good looking too I have to ask, padded armor exists in this game, I just looked at the equipment section, and it provides the same AC as leather armor, and is far more solid in terms of existence in history. So why even have leather armor? Why limit certain classes to leather armor only? What’s the point? I mean, I get why you have armor restrictions, even though they’re stupid and have really no grounding in reality, for balance reasons you have to throw the fighty types something. But why have two pieces of armor that are for all intents and purposes identical, well, almost identical, padded armor is cheaper and therefor superior. But we’ll get to that, moving onto the weapon limitations. The real highlight here is that the druid can use clubs, but not maces; and scimitars, but not swords. Because scimitars are apparently not swords.
Image You might have guessed, but I think this is stupid. After that we move to the classes proper, the Cleric section starts by reminding you that Cleics need high wis for their spells and hey, str and con can’t hurt either, and dex. Then it goes into telling you that clerics are basically Templar knights but they aren’t allowed to use swords because all religious orders in D&D forbid the spilling of blood… This is retarded, game, you already have dumb shit for purely metagame reasons, just say that Clerics can’t use swords because fuck you.
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This is a list of on Wikipedia of christens denominations. Most of these denominations are different enough that they are not capable of coexisting. Different religions have different rules D&D
Anyway, Clerics are supposed to be buff machine’s and to fuck with undead and demons. We’ll have to see about that when we get to spells. Anway, it talks about how humans are probably the only ones who are single class Clerics, and what the game means is that only humans are single class clerics because only two other races can play as clerics and they can only reach level 5 and level 4 in the cleric class. At level 8 clerics can build a church and get followers, at level 9 they can build a fortress with a big church and start levying taxes at a rate of 9 silver per month per head. After 9th level they stop gaining hit dice but instead gain a flat 2 hp per level. They also get spells, but I do not know what those spells are yet but they do get more uses of their spells than other magic classes.

Druids can only be true neutral, and having played Baldur’s Gate with the true neutral druid in my party, I feel safe in saying that she is entirely incoherent in her moral bearing and is pretty good proof that to be truly neutral is to be truly insane. At that point the rules are made up and the points don’t matter, you’re considerations are so foreign to normal people that you might as well just be tow face and flip a goddamn coin for all anyone cares. The character’s actions are consistent, but the way she talks about things are not consistent with her actions which begs the question, why does she do these things? Alignment in general is stupid, but true neutral is probably the stupidest alignment.
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Actually, that’s not fair, at least with him you at least know his decisions are purely random.
To be a druid you need 12 wis and 15 cha and if you have 16 or more in both you get a 10% xp bonus. Something I didn’t mention in the tables that’s mentioned here again is that druids can’t use metal shields. Most shields though history have been made of wood, because by and large wood is a superior medium for making shields. But I digress Druids, the book contends, are totally like Celtic druids don’t worship gods, but trees and shit and they totally have to protect the trees and plants and, you know, their followers if they feel like it, and this is really dumb.

Game, Celtic druids were holy people who were believed to be able to commune with and control nature for the benefit of mankind they did not give the faintest of fucks about nature except what it could do for them what it could provide. No, human society, has every had a religious system like this. “But wait!” I hear you cry, “surely there are hunter gatherers who have been that close to nature.” To which I respond, pfff, no! If anything hunter gatherers are worse in that regard. Just a for instance. You have a forest, and that forest has a lot of ground cover, fallen trees, scrubs and the like. The average peasant will clear the ground cover, and groom the trees, use them for wood and the like. The hunter gatherer, will burn the forest to the ground. Why? Because the forest in its natural state is really very inconvenient to do that hunting thing in, and it’s not terribly conducive to the gathering bit either. So what do you do? You light a fire, fire burns away all the inedible scrub, and a fair number of the trees, and hey presto no more cover for the game and there’s all sorts of yummy new growth for you and the animals you want to murder for their bits to enjoy. The Cleric was a little silly, the Druid is quite simply disconnected from reality.

Oh, also, the book tells us that Druids are unlikely to try and stop people from happily cutting down the forest, but will try to exact revenge later. So we can add shit at their jobs to the list of complaints. Moving on.
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“What’s that? Someone defiling the woodland? Well… I just sat down though… It’ll work itself out I’m sure.”
At 3rd level druids can tell you about plant and animals and aren’t hampered by overgrowth, at 7th they’re immune to charms from nature themed characters and can turn into bird, a lizard, and a mammal once a day each they can be as small as a bullfrog to as large as a bear, and get up to 60% of their hps back. They also have their very own supersecret druid language that they keep a secret… somehow.

There are only ever 9 druids of 12th level or higher… apparently, it’s not very clearly written. Point is, at level 12 you get three druid lackeys of first level to attend you. After that you get 3 9th level druid lackeys, and at level 14 you get 9 11th level lackeys but you have to kill your way to that position because there can be only one!(tm)
Image Except that druids can’t use a straight sword at all for no reason. Druids also don’t live in cities or castles, it’s dumb, whatever.

Fighters! Everybody’s favorite. Str, Dex, Con, do it. The book thinks being able to wear plate armor makes up for not being god. Oh no what a surprise…. It isn’t a surprise.
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Oh nooooo… this is such a shocking development….
They do get magic items though, at leave 9 they get to build a castle, raise an army, and start collecting taxes. That’s the fighter, fascinating. Something I’d like to note here, is that all the class tables have cute little names for the class levels, I wouldn’t mention it except that the level 8 fighter title is superhero.

Okay paladins, Paladins have to be lawful, yes, it’s dumb. Every paladin gets detect evil at will, +2 to saves, immunity to disease, healing once a day, cure disease once per week, and is constantly under protection from evil just for waking up in the morning… why would anyone play a fighter again?

At 3rd they get the cleric’s turn ability, at 4th can summon their magic war horse but the paladin is required to go into a ten year mourning period if it dies and this is a game about dungeons so a war horse is probably not overly useful. At 9th level the paladin starts to gain cleric spell slots.

There’s one other thing in this section I’m just going to quote it.
“bullshit” wrote:I fa paladin has a “Holy Sword” (a special Magic Sword which your referee is aware of and will explain to you if the need arises), he or she projects a circle of power one foot in diameter when the Holy Sword is unsheathed and hel; and this power dispels magic (see CHARACTER SPELLS, dispel magic) att the level of magic use equal to the experience level of the paladin.
“Translation, you have this ability dependent upon sucking the DM off to get a magic weapon we’re not even going to bother telling you about here.” So why even mention it then? Say it with me now, because fuck you that’s why.

Next the book answers my question as to why you do not play a paladin, ever. You know how jews and Christians have ten commandments, Islamist have 8 pillars, and bhuddists have an 8 fold path. Well paladins have 5 commandments, again, independent of their actual religion.

1. Thou shalt make thyself less effective by keeping not more than one score magical weapons.
2. Thou shalt piss your wealth away on mead and harlots giveth thine material wealth to those less fortunate, keeping only that which is necessary to maintain thyself and settle thine righteous debts.
3. Thou shalt tithe 10% of thine material goods to thine priest, and shall not question this donation for surely it doth serve to enrich thein ethereal sky daddy who requires such shows of thine devotion.
4. Thou shalt not dally with those of inferior belief, nor dwell in dens of the wicked. Thou midst ally, for a time and for the glory of the Lord God with those of mere ambivalence to thine superior moral state, but those of wicked hearts shall never be tolerated and aught be dealt swift death.
5. Rather, thou shalt seek those of proper faith, and lend them thine service however you may, for surely they wilt lead thee truly and without err.

Finally paladins don’t get an army, and can only get up to level 4 cleric spells.

Rangers must have 13 str, 13 int, 14 wis, and 14 con, and so have an enforced MAD other classes do not have, but let’s be honest, you need to roll well on your stats to be a good fighter at all in this game.

Rangers get a 1/level bonus to their damage against the monster’s gnomes and dwarves are good at fighting, have a 50% chance to surprise an opponent (I’d ask if the elvish stealth stacks with this for a 140% chance, but elves can’t be rangers by RAW) and can track but the rules are longwinded so I’m going to skip them, suffice to say, you get a % chance depending upon terrain. Level 8 ranger sstart to gain druid spells, level 9 rangers start to gain Magic-User spells but they can’t read scrolls for… reasons fuck you that’s why, at 10th they can uses non scrolls items that let you scry and shit and they gets 2-24 followers who never replenish if they die and the DM gets to decide what you get.

Clerics also have 4 commandments, they have to be good, they can’t hire any mercenaries until 8th level, only 3 rangers in a party, and you can only own as much shit as they can carry, and the text then makes reference to the fact that rangers can build strongholds which I would assume would break number 4 and lose them their class benefits.

They can gain druid spells up to level 3 and magic-user spells up to level 2. Not sure how useful this is.

Then there’s a table for the number of attacks you get per round, that number is 1 at 1-6 for fighter’s and paladins, and 1-7 for rangers, and 3 every 2 rounds at 7-12/8-14, and 2 per round at 13 and up/15 an up Unless the enemy you’re fighting has less than on d8 hit die in which case you get one attack per level and I assume this means you are explicitly able to butcher any magic-user, thief, or monk you can reach because they have sub d8 hit dice.
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MORE SACRAFICES! MORE DEATH! MORE GLOOOOORIOUS CARNAGE!
Magic users need high int, use magic (hat trick) have d4 hit dice and are shit in combat. There I just gave you literally all the information in the first two paragraphs of this entry in one sentence. I’m looking for work Hasbro.

Magic users get to use scrolls, wands, staves, and most of the other items in the game and the text out and out states that as a magic user you suck now and are god later. So… at least they’re being honest? But the book also says that dungeon masters are supposed to be dicks about time management when it comes to making magic items and presumably resting, and also we’re not going to tell you how to make magic items, and presumably expect you to not buy the DM guide to find out. Stay in the dark plebian! Pluse when you get to 12th you get to make a stronghold like a fighter and get taxes, but at a lower rate because no one likes a nerd, and you don’t get the army because no self-respecting jock would listen to your scrawny mathleet ass, not like us handsome and successful wargamers.

And that’s basically it, there’s the exp chart and the spells per level chart, but that’s boring

Illusionits need int and dex which is fewer stats than other classes but they need a minimum of 15 and 16 so it’s probably actually pretty rare to see an illusionist at char gen. Anyway, the book straight up says illusionists are probably inferior to magic-users and they do get access to fewer kinds of magic items and they can also make magic items but on ones that make illusions.

Thieves must be neutral or evil, why you cannot have a robin hood character who robs the rich and gives to the poor escapes me but there you are. They’re kind of shit at fighting and get some abilities to show for themselves.

They can pick locks, find and remove traps, move quietly, and blend into the shadows. This worked better, I think in Thief(tm) where you were just invisible in dark areas and not in bright ones, much simpler. They can listen at doors, climb shit, and stabe people from behind really good, even with clubs. Thieves also have a super secret language that stays a secret by (undisclosed) at 4th the can read languages good, and at 10th they an use scrolls but not cleric scrolls, but you can use druid scrolls even though they’re also divine magic scrolls and…
But they can’t use Cleric scrolls because they’re for divine spells, but they can use druid scrolls because they are and- and-
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Thieves don’t get to make strongholds but they can make a fortified hideout if it’s close to a city and they can use that as a head quarters for a gang and then they have to fight a gang war over it. Then there’s a table of percentages for thief abilities to succeed and then a fucking long winded series of notes about it. This book is really long winded, it’s less than 200 pages long and it could seriously probably be about a third shorter, Gigax just fucking rambles on and on about everything. The editor must have had to come in with a fucking garden shears to get it down to even this length.

Assassins are like thieves but they have to be evil because assassins could never have noble aspirations, nope, they kill people and even get paid to kill people.
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Ignore that column of crusaders off to murder people, rob their homes, and burn said homes to the ground. For they are good an honorable.
Yeah, sure game, whatever you say. Assassins assassin people, and they don’t have to obtain their license to kill from the local regulatory commission assassin’s guild, but if you try to do an assassin job and you don’t then all the local assassins will start trying to kill you because despite all being completely evil they still work together really well and value their organizational ties enough to risk their lives going after a trained killer, for free even, or maybe there’s a bounty, whatever, the point is the game apparently forgot to tell us assassins all also have to be lawful. So anti-paladins I suppose. At int 15+ and level 9 and beyond assasins get extra languages, even druidic and thieve’s cant which are the super secret special class languages and assassin’s also get the ability to disguise themselves. Everyone gets a chance to spot the disguise each day in proximity to the assassin but only people the assassin is trying to get close to and the percent chance is really small, maximum 8% and that get reduced by 1% every 1 point below 24 the observer’s combined int and wis are. , but if the combined total is more than 30 it gets increased by 1 per point above that. This would all be useful to an assassin I’m sure but several magical effects simply negate it. Of course. Also it probably wouldn’t be helpful in a dungeon or against a dragon. Just saying. Assassins also thief like a thief of two levels less than their level.
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Remember, friends don’t let friends play assassins.
The monk’s section seriously starts by telling you the monk class is presented out of alphabetical order because it’s the bestest most awesome class with the most strictest entry requirements and it is again saying suck now rock later, but I’m not sure how I feel about that. The book goes on and on sucking the monk’s cock and they do get a lot of abilities.. They get armor class down to -3 at level 17, all thief abilities accept pick pocket and read language, increased movement, extra attacks, and on and on and on. But they can’t use any equipment basically which means very few magic items, and they have d4 hit dice so I assume a fighter just gets as many hits as they have levels on the monk. So I don’t know, I get the feeling the game overestimates the monk a bit. And anyway this entry is extremely long and needs an editor badly, the monk entry seriously goes on for the better part of three pages, so I’m going to skip to the next bit, but I invite anyone to educate me as to the effectiveness of the AD&D 1e monk.

Multiclass characters have two classes, humans can’t be multi-classed because they have another completely different system that was necessary because…
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Because fuck you that’s why.


Anyway, you can only have certain class combinations, of two to three classes, there is no mention of how becoming a multiclass character works, nor how advancing a multi-class character, because hey, why would you need that information you filthy fucking power gamer?

Humans don’t multi-class they just gain a second class, they stop being their first class, and progress I the ne wone, you have to have 15 or higher in the main stat of your primary class and 17 or higher in the main stat of the second class. No word on if this can be the result of magic items, or not so have fun I guess. Unlike multi-class characters, you can be any combination most combos probably suck though. You keep your hit points but you’re level one in your new class and if you use your old classes abilities even once in an adventure you get no exp rewards for that adventure, because you need to suffer for wanting to do something interesting. Once you have reached a level in your new class that’s greater than the old one that limit goes away, and you start gaining hit die again, oh yeah, you don’t get hit die for those levels, did I not mention that?

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Whoops.


Alignment, you determine alignment after everything else, unless you determined your alignment when you signed up for your class, in which case you did it then. The book then tries to paint a choherant picture of what the alignments mean and you might have figured out by now but Gigax is not Nietzsche and so he does not succeed even a little bit. For instance

Chaotic Evil: The major precepts of this alignment are freedom, randomness, and woe.


What does that mean really? Well, according to the book…

Laws and Order, kindness, and good deeds are disdained. Live has no value. By promoting chaos and evil, thos of this alignment hope to bring themselves to positions of power, glory, and prestige in a system ruled by individual caprice and their own whims.


Now, you might have noticed that a lot of that second quote does not necessarily follow the thesis statement of the first. And indeed some of it is outright self-defeating. A system predicated on the mood swings of individuals is not a system at all. It’s all basically like that, either it’s meaningless buzz words or it’s nuts.

Neutral evil seriously says that neutral evil creatures view laws and freedom as distractions from evil, as though a world could exist without at least the abstract concept of freedom. Like, what? Is that supposed to mean only abominations are neutral evil because they’re capable of conceiving of an existence without these concepts? Or are neural evil people like solipsists, who think these concepts literally just don’t exist because they can’t be experienced. It’s insane.

True neutral characters are more coherent in that they are merely mindless slaves to conservatism forever masturbating to the status quo. Oh, and then the book spends a paragraph talking about how all of that was meaningless and characters basically act however regardless of their alignment… You know what, I’m convinced this is a joke. Gigax wrote this part on April first but the hearty APRIL FOOLS! Got lost somewhere, like he forgot to write it got cut by mistake.

There’s a section about hitpoints this was all mostly covered before and it wasn’t important there either. We all know how hit die work by now. Character’s also get languages determined by their race, the limits on number of languages known are different based upon race and it’s dumb.

Your class determines how much money you start with and that’s rolled randomly, the exchange rate table has a minor typo in that 20 silver is supposed to equal one electrum (which is platinum cut with silver so you’d think it would be worth more but whatever) instead it’s written as 20 silver=1 gold, also, the game tells you that the merchants are going to gouge their prices. Fuck you too game. It tries to say that it’s because of inflation, but it does so by referencing supply and demand in relation to the amount of money in the area. Gigax not Nietzsche not Greenspan either apparently.

What we really care about though, is the equipment. Plate armor is 400 gold pieces and I am actually fine with that, if anything the other pieces of armor are far too in expensive, with the exception perhaps of padded armor. Actual armor was fantastically expensive but there are other problems here. There is a table of the armor value for all the armors you can wear. None is 10 plate and shield is 2. The problems here are many. Specifically adding a shield drops the armor value of whatever you’re wearing by one, well actually problem zero more armor makes your armor value lower and that is phenomenally stupid and confusing, anyway, adding more armor specifically gains you better armor. But see, by this paradigm, armor values should be much better because armor is additive. So you would wear, a padded jacket under your chain mail, and in deed your chain mail would be very ineffective without that padding, and when wearing full plate you’re not wearing just the plate, you’re wearing plate over chain, over a padded jacket So that would plate for 7 ac bonus+chain for 5+a padded jacket for 2 for 14 and a total of -4 AC. See? Also, plate+shield is stupid. You do not use a shield with full plate anyway because you don’t need one, at that point you essentially just don’t need to worry about arrows which are the main reason to have a shield, and you’re protected enough for most melee weapons too, the one’s you’re adequately protected from are pretty unwieldy and thus relatively easy to dodge and parry. It’s a nitpick, but it’s my nitpick.

One of the listed armor is “studded” armor, and I assume this means studded leather… how to put this…

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Why thank you Mister business man.


Yeah that’s stupid, as is the idea of leather as “light” armor actually. Really even armors like full plate were not especially encumbering so really the deciding factor would be how much the armor reduces your ability to move, and hardened leather would be as restrictive as metal plates. If not more because hardened leather has to be made as one solid piece while metal plates and be made to be jointed.

The weapons are nice, there’s a lot of selection, probably too much, and a lot of these weapons… do not belong together. We’re talking periods of actual thousands of years between the use of some of these. Many are also not weapons for small units. Halberds, for example, belong in mixed infantry columns. But otherwise, I could be more angry at the selection.

You can buy livestock, the only thing you ever buy are horses, but chickens and cow and goats are included too… because why the fuck not?

The rest is pretty standard, food, backpacks, transport, 10 foot pole. Kind of boring the real money is on the next page.

Classes have limited weapons they can use, they then also have proficiencies they can spend on weapons otherwise they take a penalty, why? Because fuck you that’s why.

Next we have a table of weapon damage, and then a table of weapon stats. I looked ahead at this before and this second table made me legitimately angry. Because this shit is confusing. There are values on this table liasted as armor class adjustment, but what the table actually means is to hit adjustment So I spent twenty fucking minutes trying to figure out if this meant adjustment to your armor class, or your opponent’s either way it looked stupid. Because it’s determined by level and at low levels the value is -3 which I know for armor would be good and then later at level 10 the value would be +2 which would be bad. So it must adjust your opponent’s armor, but why would the weapon I’m wielding adjust some characteristic of my opponent?

But no, it does mean the second thing, it just means it in a way that is not intuitive at all. Good, fuck you too game. Then you have that table again but for ranged weapons.

Next hireling and Henchmen, hirelings are people you can hire to do job like stab people in the face and ah- bear things. Bearer is a profession listed here. Do they mean a porter? Whatever, depending upon the hireling’s personality and how well you suck the mister cavern off hirelings could cost anything and be paid in whatever intervals you can imagine and you can have as many as you can afford.

Henchmen are different from hirelings in that I have no idea how you actually obtain them, you just get them if your charisma is high enough and presumably if mister cavern is especially impressed with your dick sucking skills. Seriously the details of how you gain a henchman are nonexistent. You just get a vague, “post fliers at the local bar or something” and the book goes on its merry way, plowing right on through.. You ave to pay for housing, and a wage for the henchman, they get a share of the treasure, and magic items, and says you should totally give your henchman as much money as you can so they can level up, by the way they get 50% xp rewards. Also I guess gold is your xp? It hasn’t explained leveling up at all, I would not be surprised if that information isn’t in this book. Also the book goes on for henchman loyalty for two paragraphs, right mister cavern wink wink nudge nudge tip of the hat.

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Why be competent when you can just dick with people?


So time is weird in this system specifically every turn is 10 minutes, each turn has 10 rounds of 1 minute and each round divided in 6 second segments where players have their initiative counted. That is- Well I don’t know if it works or not because I haven’t read the rest of the system. But it sounds really clunky. Also that only applies to dungeons, outside time is measure in daylight and night time. And how combat time works is presumably the same but I wouldn’t put anything past this book at his point.

The distance section is long winded and confusing but here it goes, so spell and missile ranges are shown in inches where one inch equals 10 yards in outdoor areas and 10 feet in indoor areas. The thing is the book says that that can be justified, but it does not actually succeed in doing so. See it tries to say, “well, it’s dark in there, and you have arc the shot for distance” and my immediate answer is this. Anyone who has been to an archery range knows that if you’re actually trying to aim at a target you do not fucking arc your shot. Yes, extremely long range shots with bows require you to fire in the air and use an arc, but that is for volley firing into formations of men not a single archer trying to skirmish. And really the point is, this is unnecessary word bloat in an already overly long section.

The explanation for magic spells is just like, “well we couldn’t have lonbowmen out ranging god Magic-Users.” Fucking, good, no really, good, I’m glad you’re lazy and wasting my time. Next!

The game next tells us monster could mean anything, from that Balor forcing a massive spiked dildo he uses as a mace into the new face vagina he just gave you, to a lowly squirrel. And if monster is that broad a term you might want to just stop using it game cause it is completely meaningless.

And that’s the section. Next is spells and that is literally half the book all on its own, still not quite sure what I’m going to do with that.
Kaelik wrote:
darkmaster wrote:Tgdmb.moe, like the gaming den, but we all yell at eachother about wich lucky star character is the cutest.
Fuck you Haruhi is clearly the best moe anime, and we will argue about how Haruhi and Nagato are OP and um... that girl with blond hair? is for shitters.

If you like Lucky Star then I will explain in great detail why Lucky Star is the a shitty shitty anime for shitty shitty people, and how the characters have no interesting abilities at all, and everything is poorly designed especially the skill challenges.
GâtFromKI
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Post by GâtFromKI »

darkmaster wrote:There’s a note telling you how to determine the hp of multiclass characters, but it makes no sense. I’ll try to explain it, feel free to tell me if I get this wrong. You roll hit dice for each class, add those together, divide by the number of classes rounding fractions normally, and that’s the HP you get. This is stupid, I kind of get why it’s like this they wanted to avoid HP bloat but there is no reason for this, you’re already crippling your character by effectively making it take at least twice as long to level up, why not just give people both hit dice?
During the first 10 levels, the xp requirement for gaining a level is exponential; you need as much xp for leveling from level N to level N+1 as for leveling from 1 to N. This means that a multiclass character of level 9/9 should have as much xp as a level 10 character. Therefore, the formula for computing hit points seems correct (the 9/9 character has a bit less HP than his level 10 counterpart, but he has the level 9 abilities of two classes).

Well, that's the theory. In practice, the actual xp needed to go from level N to level N + 1 is the number of xp needed to go from 1 to N, minus a random quantity. For fighters and clerics, this random quantity is 0 (but the cleric needs less xp than the fighter to gain levels, because fuck the fighter). For wizards, this random quantity is huge, so a wizard reaches the level 8 long before a fighter reaches the level 6. For druids, this random quantity is even more huge, because why not ? Then you add some individual xp gain depending on your class (that may be or may not be easy to get, depending on your class and your MC), a 10% bonus that you may or may not have depending on your ability scores, some special conditions your class may have for leveling like "kill all your friends", and now the process of leveling is byzantine enough so any formula you use for HP doesn't seem any wronger than any other formula. That's AD&D's balance in a pinch: if something seems unbalanced, add more complexity and moving parameters until nobody can say anything about it.
Last edited by GâtFromKI on Fri Apr 22, 2016 11:08 am, edited 4 times in total.
Orca
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Post by Orca »

On the followers - you can't see it here, but in the DMG you see that rangers get actually fun and useful followers, thieves at least get people with class levels, and fighters mostly get mooks. Sheer numbers aren't the whole story.

17 charisma minimum meant that the only paladins you saw were those whose DM had an unusually generous means of determining stats.

1e AD&D monks - as you may have guessed - suck. Magic-users and multiclassed magic-users were what players would gravitate to over a campaign with character deaths.
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hogarth
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Post by hogarth »

GâtFromKI wrote: In practice, the actual xp needed to go from level N to level N + 1 is the number of xp needed to go from 1 to N, minus a random quantity. For fighters and clerics, this random quantity is 0 (but the cleric needs less xp than the fighter to gain levels, because fuck the fighter). For wizards, this random quantity is huge, so a wizard reaches the level 8 long before a fighter reaches the level 6. For druids, this random quantity is even more huge, because why not ?
The most bizarre is the 1E bard; it's relatively slow to get to your first bard level, then you take off like a rocket compared to everyone else in the party. As I noted in another thread, a PC with 250,001 xp could be...
-a 10th level magic-user
-a 9th level cleric
-a 9th level fighter
-an 11th level thief
-an 8th level monk (boo)
-a 11th level druid
-a 5th level fighter/6th level thief/12th level bard (so the fastest way to get -12th level druid spellcasting is to become a bard, not a druid!)
-a 7th level fighter/7th level cleric/7th level magic-user
etc.
Orca wrote:1e AD&D monks - as you may have guessed - suck. Magic-users and multiclassed magic-users were what players would gravitate to over a campaign with character deaths.
In my experience (where PCs were almost always started at level 1), there would almost never be more than one M-U in the party. Being a low level M-U really sucked; you fire off your one spell for the day, and then the rest of the time you throw darts and miss.

The most popular low-level class was fighter by a landslide. The book "Dragons of Autumn Twilight" was a pretty accurate representation of a 1E campaign, with one thief, one magic-user, one cleric, one ranger, one fighter/M-U and 6 (!) vanilla fighters over the course of the novel.
Last edited by hogarth on Fri Apr 22, 2016 11:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Orca
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Post by Orca »

Yeah, restarting PCs at level 1 when the campaign's moved on from that point? It was obviously enough a bad idea that we stopped doing that before I left primary school. Apparently that does result in different incentives.
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Post by tussock »

Gygax explaining in the DMG that when your 12th level Wizard lost all his other party members, you could either adventure solo forever after (and he ran a bunch of solo high-level stuff as a result, IRL), or you could assign them some slow-ass downtime stuff like spell research and roll up a 1st level PC to play with everyone else's new 1st level character until people had enough XP to go with your level 12 guy again.

Your "campaign" ended when you died, obviously. The question of uniting the Yarldoms under your iron fist doesn't really matter when your corpse has been disintegrated by a demon lord on level 12 of the local mega-dungeon, or it does but the answer is no.

I wonder what kind of thought process lead to "Ok this is to dodge wands, this is to dodge breath, this is to resist death, this is to resist poison..." being written before "Fort/Ref/Will" being made.
Basically, the DM wrote the rules, and what the DM was seeing first was the type of attack, and who should most likely survive that, rather than how each was defending themselves (which was just a rare bonus added later, as for attacks and other things).

Also, it was a priority system. So your Cleric usually survived the insta-kills no matter the source, but the Wizard did not if he forgot his immunities, your Fighter did not die to the dragon's first attack but the Thief did if he forgot to hide, and your Wizard was unlikely to be charmed or dominated but the Fighter more gullible.

Which was partly lost in 3e, where the save system makes more sense to players but misses out on some of the of the old outcomes because they didn't bother giving Clerics +4 vs death and paralysis, or Wizards +4 vs mind-effecting spells and evocations, or Fighter-types good saves at higher levels at all.
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