Thoughts on the Gygax's AD&D (1E)

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Mon Apr 25, 2011 10:35 pm

What needs to be added to that is high levels shouldn't add that much to the character.

For example, in AD&D, the difference between a level 12 fighter and a level 15 fighter is pretty mimimal. 9 more hit points, and an additional +3 to hit is not that relevant, since a level 12 fighter hits almost everything in the MM 80% of the time anyway, at least if he has a +1 weapon.

A higher level mage has much more powerful and numerous spells, but in a system where you can't count on getting much beyond +2 ring of protection and a +2 cloak (and both at the same time is apretty good), having less than 40 hit points and gaining a mere 1 more point a level means you still need to watch yourself a bit even with 'weak' monsters...a surprise round from 30 archers could be fatal.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Apr 25, 2011 10:43 pm

If high-level characters aren't supposed to gain that much then why have 'high levels' at all?

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Mon Apr 25, 2011 10:56 pm

Because there's more to the game than just experience and phat lewts?

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Mon Apr 25, 2011 10:58 pm

But if the only difference between a 10th and a 15th level character is that the 15th level guy has a bigger castle and more followers ... then you don't need there to be a 15th level - just have a 10th level guy with the increased followers.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Mon Apr 25, 2011 11:27 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote: One of the problems with high levels is that there isn't much you can call high-level flavor that's exclusive to high levels without moving past the paradigms of dungeon crawling. I mean by then it's quite possible for PCs to have already saved the world once or twice by then. And of course shoehorning high-level concepts like 'merge the positive energy plane with the negative energy plane to permanently kill off the undead' or 'lead a crusade against Hell where you MUST KILL ALL THE DEMONS' within the confines of a small-squad dungeon crawl gets increasingly contrived over time. I mean, honestly, how often can you stomach the plots of Keystone Armies and Unique Universe-Holding Together MacGuffins and Fisher Kings No You Don't Get To Be One? My personal answer is about 7-9 of them, which should be enough of a campaign to get you from the start to the end of the middle levels.

...

The more I think about it the more I think that a Stronghold and followers/subjects/students/whatever should be mandatory for people who want to get into the high levels. If you don't want that stuff then you shouldn't be playing high levels.

The problem is that you're arguing two different directions which aren't compatible. Iron Man and Superman don't lead followers and armies. This is because by the genre, nameless mooks just don't have any power. Having family, followers, whatever is actually just a plot hook and mechanically a disadvantage. Mary Jane gets kidnapped and Spiderman has to save her. That's how superhero works.

If you want people to get a stronghold and not immediately want to sell the thing for a better magic sword, you need that stronghold to do something worthwhile. Those 500 knights at your command need to be good for something, and when your quests involve merging the positive and negative material plane, they're not going to help, at all.

You can't go superhero and SimKingdom in the same game. If you want being King to be a prestigious title that people want, then having 500 lesser knights at your command needs to be a big deal. That's notoriously difficult because the game itself isn't made to handle that many hirelings on the board. Anything those knights do is actually best handled as a DM fiat issue rather than ever putting them on the board. The power curve of D&D works well for that because in both 4E and 3E, having a bunch of 1st hirelings seldom matters by the time you can afford them, so you don't feel like you're missing much by not bringing them along. And you don't want people to bring them along because the game would become glacially slow and break.

Sticking with a basic skirmish game is actually the way you probably want to go, and just scale up the dungeons to be epic level threats. Going from goblin cave -> Ogre fortress -> tomb of horrors -> Heart of the Abyss is a workable progression, and one people are going to understand.

The fundamental basis of the game is heroes killing monsters. The moment you screw with that and try to create SimKingdom, you're writing an entirely new game. What you do on your non-adventuring time is just backstory.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 2:55 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/03/ ... dgame.html

If this is true, this is one of the things that 1E D&D did absolutely right and better than every other edition.

As a minor quibble, I feel the author is wrong (and this is picked up in the comments by one or two people): the realm-management rules really only showed up in the Companion set, not in the Expert set. As far as the meta-discussion goes, I completely agree with them.

Also, they're talking about BECMI DnD, not 1eADnD (which lacked all that stuff, save for Battlesystem for a wargame mass combat engine). 2eADnD had Birthright, which for its shortcomings still managed to make the point that this kind of stuff is exactly what characters ought to be doing.

3eDnD had such an unfortunate power curve and rules that you never really saw an effective realm management/mass combat expansion. Fields of Blood was one of the few to try anything fiddly that covered both topics and it was a solid meh, while still being the best of the bunch IMO. Way of the Daimyo for Rokugan d20 took the magic tea party path and did a decent job, though no one ever even saw it

.

Emerald · Post by **Emerald** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 2:39 pm

Swordslinger wrote:I had the opposite reaction to the SBG. It felt like a waste of time. Nobody was going to spend their money on strongholds instead of more magic items. The SBG would have made sense in 2E where you can't buy magic items at all, but so long as you can buy magic items, that's where your money is going to go.

In the SBG, there's a feat called Landlord that requires character level 9 and gives you money to build a stronghold (and only to build a stronghold) and also matches contributions you make out of your own money. You don't have to make a choice between making a cool castle and buying a cool sword, you can do both if you really want to with the expenditure of one feat.

Doom wrote:What needs to be added to that is high levels shouldn't add that much to the character.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If high-level characters aren't supposed to gain that much then why have 'high levels' at all?

Ice9 wrote:But if the only difference between a 10th and a 15th level character is that the 15th level guy has a bigger castle and more followers ... then you don't need there to be a 15th level - just have a 10th level guy with the increased followers.

I believe his point isn't that high-level characters aren't supposed to gain much objectively, but rather that the rate of advancement should slow and possibly level off so the gap between, say, 15th and 10th level isn't as large as it is now and is closer to as the gap between 10th and 5th level. If you want to get into the realm management minigame at high levels, the followers you get should be more than background fluff. In AD&D, you stopped gaining HD at 10th level or so, only gaining a few HP instead so you didn't have the HP inflation of 3e, and since the AC scale was capped there was a possibility for some number of a 10th+ level fighter's followers to actually help him against another 10th+ level fighter, rather than being speedbumps at best.

Of course the difference in AD&D between high-level and mid-level fighters is just a few HP and an attack boost; that's mostly all they got anyway. It doesn't have to be that way in 3e. What would the ramifications be if new spells came, say, every 3rd level after 5th instead of every 2 levels (so you'd get 6ths at level 12, 7ths at level 15, etc. up to 9ths at level 21, so 9ths would be epic magic)? Sure, it wouldn't do all that much (you're still in Fighters Don't Get Nice Things territory with 6ths and 7ths), but delaying the endgame sorts of spells would make followers meaningful for longer and make more of a "sweet spot" at mid-to-high levels. If the delay was 4 or 5 levels, it would be even more dramatic: you still get those 6th and 7th level spells, which are measurably more powerful than the mid-level 4ths and 5ths, but it would take a while to get there.

Now, I'm not advocating just stretching out high level advancement more; delaying spell levels is just a quick and easy example of something you can do to stretch things out. Nor do I personally particularly want to slow advancement to make realm management work, I'd rather do other things to the system. But slowed advancement doesn't necessarily imply that there is no longer a point to high levels.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 3:37 pm

This one pretty much captured the essence of the old vs. new schools, for me:

some guy wrote:Today's D&D is made for the everybody-goes-to-college era, a career-path game that shoots you rapidly toward 20th level so you can start fighting dracoliches with one arm tied behind your back. Gygax D&D made you roll once a month to see if you got ringworm.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 4:28 pm

Doom wrote:What needs to be added to that is high levels shouldn't add that much to the character.

Well since this is a 1E thread, let us consider the wisdom (yea I know, it's OK to barf here) of Gygax on these matters. The problem, that I see it is that a simple open ended linearly infinite advancement system is at the macro level BORING AS ALL HELL. And for a number of reasons, it doesn't doesn't work. So there is only one logical solution.

Fuck it. Throw it out the window completely. Absolute and practical level caps are the best way to go. Of the basic classes in the PHB, several have level caps that only allow limited numbers in the upper ranks. Druids, Assassins, and Monks. Level limits are placed on all non humans with the exception of thief (assassin in the case of half orc).

Post name advancement of non spellcasters is exceptionally linear. Spellcasting abilities of both Rangers and Paladins eventually cap at level (17,20). The advancement of spellcasters is still non linear, but by the time you get to the really high levels (wish, for example requires being seven levels above "name") you start to see so many spells that have a cost requirement of againg and 1E implemented a "secret" maximum age for the character. Add to the fact that the non linear advancement is an illusion, you simply cannot cast your full spell ability every day because it would take over a day to memorize them all.

Eventually, the average character will retire, perhaps a few might venture on to even higher "planes" of gaming existance, but the process is not linear as many of the later editions would want it to be. Instead it is more of a matter of moving on to another type of game entirely, with characters that are only vaguely releated to the ones you played at the lower levels.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 4:33 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If high-level characters aren't supposed to gain that much then why have 'high levels' at all?

Good question. Basically in 1E there are two reasons. The first, in the case of spell casters is the ability to get the really exceptionally powerful spells. The second, in the case of the non spell casters is the fact that even in retirement advancement does occur except at a slower rate. Now people tend to come to them to steal their treasure.

It was also a legacy of the open ended linear nature of OD&D and ED&D. Gygax capped some but not all of the classes.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 5:47 pm

tzor wrote: Post name advancement of non spellcasters is exceptionally linear. Spellcasting abilities of both Rangers and Paladins eventually cap at level (17,20). The advancement of spellcasters is still non linear, but by the time you get to the really high levels (wish, for example requires being seven levels above "name") you start to see so many spells that have a cost requirement of againg and 1E implemented a "secret" maximum age for the character. Add to the fact that the non linear advancement is an illusion, you simply cannot cast your full spell ability every day because it would take over a day to memorize them all.

As well, even the primary spellcasters eventually reach the end of their capabilities. H4 specifically pointed out that spellcasters stop getting more spells per level -- the chart ends, and although you could extrapolate from it, you're actually not supposed to. Granted, it ends at level 29. But this was in an era before bonus spells for high intelligence, so a level 20 3.x wizard is actually about the same as a level 29 1E wizard, spells-wise:

1E:(7), 7, 7, 7, 7, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6
3E: (4), 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4
If we assume 18 starting Int, +6 enhancement, +5 inherent:
3E: (4), 7, 7, 7, 7, 6, 6, 6, 6, 5

Play with races that have intrinsic Int bonuses and you can actually have more spells at 20th than a 1E wizard ever gets.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 1:48 am

So, I read some of the AD&D rules and came across this:
[Steps of combat]...

3. Determine Initiative (d6, highest result is the winner, each
party acts in the segment indicated by the other party’s die
roll)

That would have made things so much easier to keep track of back in the days when I DMed... Keeping track of a dozen initiative numbers doesn't *sound* hard ... until you actually try doing it while running combat. This looks like it would be confusing to me the first few times it had to be done, but after that it seems like it would be all easier.

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 4:09 am

I just use one initiative for monsters, while all players roll individual initiative (sometimes special monsters might act at a different time).

Initiative makes a difference in AD&D--even at mid-levels, it's quite possible attacking with a sword first will mean the difference between killing a monster and taking damage (a level 5 fighter can hit an ogre for 15 points without too much unusual--and ogres have an average of 19 hp, to give some idea). At higher levels, the 'rocket tag' of melee is replaced by a similar effect with magical spells/abilities.

Blasted · Post by **Blasted** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 6:50 am

Doom wrote: At higher levels, the 'rocket tag' of melee is replaced by a similar effect with magical spells/abilities.

Missile fire and spells happen before initiative rounds, so that even at lower levels it's quite possible to level melee opponents before they get a hit in.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 7:04 am

3.5 had Power of Faerun and the rules in the DMG 2. They were not good rules for realm management or business growth, but they existed. People wanted them, and were legitimately disappointed when they sucked. Same for Heroes of Battle and mass combat systems.

The thing to understand is that 3e D&D is essentially just a glorified Red Box. There are some Blue Box ideas in there, and that's all well and good, but the bottom line is that the initial designers of Williams, Tweet, and Cook didn't even really try to make something that held up into the stages of realm management. Remember: the highest level any playtesting occurred was tenth. The high level stuff, including castle ownership, mass battles, and realm management was all supposed to be patched in later. And it was. But very poorly.

And for 4th edition they took exactly the wrong message home. Having realized that their late game offerings sucked ass, they attempted to extend the early game to the entire game. And that sucked ass. The correct response to late game content being poorly written is not to scrap all the late game content, it's to write better late game content.

-Username17

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 8:07 am

Just out of curiosity (wondering what people think), is there even a point to designing an empire bit? I mean, we know it's fun, and we want it, and we want it to be meaningful... but is that even possible?

Mechanically, what does an empire earn you that isn't completely worthless and doesn't need mechanics? Gold? You're in the wish economy, you can just wave your hands and make that. Soldiers? Again, you're probably a high enough level at this point that you can wave your hands and make armies disappear. The only use an army can have is subjugating more peasants who can pay you taxes in material wealth you can already wish into existence.

Gold and armies mean nothing to a high-level character, so what else is the empire offering the player that makes it something worthwhile to create mechanics for? And if we can't have mechanically interesting empires, what has to change about levels 11-20 to be able to have empires that PC's aren't suckers for putting time and effort into? How do we design rules for empires that don't make PC's suckers for using them and make empires a valuable PC asset?

How do we fix this shit?!

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 8:25 am

Populous had a pretty good setup for wanting people who sat around and grew grass with your flag over their huts.

-Username17

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 3:48 pm

You mean the 1989-ish computer game? So you're wanting rules so that players gain power/abilities depending on how many worshippers/peasants they have?

Winnah · Post by **Winnah** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 4:44 pm

Doom wrote:You mean the 1989-ish computer game? So you're wanting rules so that players gain power/abilities depending on how many worshippers/peasants they have?

Actually that idea has some merit. Imagine a high level preist needing to convert a village or province before they could level, or a fighter needing to lead an army or build a castle. You would have theives planning the perfect heist or wizards hiring apprentices to help them with their research.

As the scope of what characters are capable of expands, shouldn't the requirements of experience match that change" I'm not sure that hard mechanics are even neccesary, just a set of guidelines for RP requirements. It would be similar to the training rules of AD&D, only less stupid.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 9:34 pm

In the 2e "DM's Option (High Level Campaigns)", one of the suggested methods of allowing demihumans to advance beyond their level caps without making them basically strictly superior to humans is what you suggested; require them to complete an appropriate quest for their race, class, and level each time they want to level up past the cap.

Archmage · Post by **Archmage** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 11:07 pm

That's a humorously pointless "requirement."

"You are at the level cap, but you can level up again if...you go on an adventure!"

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Sun May 01, 2011 2:22 am

Agreed, but that's really how all the stupid/contradictory/unplayable stuff is handled. "Yeah, the rules say X, but here are special rules that trump that."

Winnah · Post by **Winnah** » Sun May 01, 2011 3:38 am

Aside from the example of the theif planning a heist, nothing I suggested was really an adventure. Rather it was increasing power at the cost of time and resources.

The preist and warrior increase their political power, perhaps even the ability to derive an income. The wizard gets tenure and a couple of hot azn research assistants. The rogue does not lose any money, instead gaining a fat pile of loot to sit on.

I think that is better than seeking out a higher level haracter (who may or may not exist) and persuading them to teach you the neccesary skills to gain a level. But hey, whatever.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Sun May 01, 2011 8:29 pm

FrankTrollman wrote: And for 4th edition they took exactly the wrong message home. Having realized that their late game offerings sucked ass, they attempted to extend the early game to the entire game. And that sucked ass. The correct response to late game content being poorly written is not to scrap all the late game content, it's to write better late game content.

No, actually, it was the right message, because you're not going to write good realm management rules. This is because Realm Management is in fact a backstory activity and one that's trivial by the time you do it.

Managing a village at level 5 might actually matter, where even have a few militiamen with shortswords and leather armor could actually help you deal with potential threats, but by the time you're level 11, you have transcended the common folk. They no longer even matter. The only purpose of those weak warriors and wizards is that they may one day evolve into something better. But in that case, you're better off opening an arena where you can present them controlled challenges to power level. The guy throwing summoned monsters against some underlings is going to do better in the long haul than one sending them out on potentially lethal quests.

You can have your game turn into something like Vampire if you wanted, where it's a political match-up played between high level characters and monsters, but at no point is commanding armies or building castles really going to be a big deal. Like Vampire, you're better off just handling it as "You have 5 dots in resources and own a mansion."

The game will just never turn into Kings and Castles, because both are defunct when you're high enough in level to afford them.

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Sun May 01, 2011 10:25 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Remember: the highest level any playtesting occurred was tenth.

Can you provide some more information on this topic, Frank? I'm also interested in your source.

echo