Category: osr

Dungeons & Falling

As noted in Review: Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised, there’s no rules for falling damage. Never have been. Referees just rely on folklore and other games to figure it out.

Researching OD&D sources is frustrating, but if I’ve read all this, you should too!

It never clearly says in OD&D (books 1-3, supp 1-4, nor Holmes). In Book III, there’s a Chainmail example of 1 die save on 5 or 6 per level (10′?) fallen.

AD&D Player’s Handbook (1978, but non-canon to me), it’s 1d6 for each 10′, and the commentary makes it clear that’s the meaning intended. You wouldn’t say “this is not realistic” if falling was super dangerous.

FALLING DAMAGE
Falling into pits, from ledges, down shafts, and so forth will certainly cause damage unless the fall is broken. While such falls could break limbs and other bones, it is probable that your referee will simply use a hit points damage computation based on 1d6 for each 10′ of distance fallen to a maximum of 20d6, plus or minus adjustments for the surface fallen upon, This treatment gives characters a better survival chance, although it is not as “realistic” as systems to determine breaks, sprains, dislocations, internal organ damage, etc.

Basic Dungeons & Dragons (1981), same. Interesting note that climbing is per 100′!

Climb Steep Surfaces, when failed, will result in a fall. The thief will take 1-6 (1d6) points of damage for each 10 feet fallen. This roll should only be made once per 100′ of climb attempted. If failed, the fall will be from halfway up the surface.

Suddenly in Dragon # 69 (Jan 1983), in a sidebox in the Thief-Acrobat class, Gygax claims that it was cumulative ALL ALONG.

Falling damage
The correct procedure for determining falling damage in the AD&D game system is to roll 1d6 per 10′ fallen, cumulative. Since a falling body accelerates quickly, the damage mounts geometrically: 2d6 for the second 10 feet fallen, 3d6 for the third 10 feet, etc. The maximum of 20d6 is therefore reached after a fall of approximately 60 feet for most characters. A thief-acrobat can often fall further distances, but the same 20d6 maximum should be applied. The rationale behind this system will discussed in the next issue (# 70) of DRAGON Magazine.

Note you would also not use 20d6 as a limit if you were counting 1d6, 3d6, 6d6, 10d6, 15d6, 21d6 all along.

Next issue (Feb 1983), he makes Frank Mentzer carry his water and blames some editor (Mike Carr?).

Gary has always used a geometrically increasing system for falling damage in AD&D games; the trouble arose because that system simply never made it into the rule books. When the AD&D Players Handbook was being assembled, a brief section on falling damage was included: a mere 7 1⁄2 lines that offers more advice on broken bones and sprains than on falling damage. As we now understand the event, the section was not included in the first draft, and the editors requested a brief insert on this frequently referred-to topic. So Gary hastily wrote a sentence describing damage as “1d6 per 10’ for each 10’ fallen.” Someone removed the “per 10’” as being (so it was thought) redundant, and off we went. That section was later quoted in passing in the Aerial Adventures section of the Dungeon Masters Guide, thereby becoming further entrenched in our game procedures.

My bullshit meter goes off the scale at this sudden Invention of Lying level retcon. But is it a better rule?

AD&D 2nd Edition (1989, again non-canon to me) has this lengthy rebuttal:

Player characters have a marvelous (and, to the DM, vastly amusing) tendency to fall off things. generally from great heights and almost always onto hard surfaces. While the falling is harmless, the abrupt stop at the end tends to cause damage.
When a character falls. he suffers 1d6 points of damage for every 10 feet fallen, to a maximum of 20d6 (which for game purposes can be considered terminal velocity).
This method is simple and it provides all the realism necessary in the game. It is not a scientific calculation of the rate of acceleration, exact terminal velocity, mass, impact energy, etc. of the falling body.
The fact of the matter is that physical laws may describe the exact motion of a body as it falls through space, but relatively little is known about the effects of impact. The distance fallen is not the only determining factor in how badly a person is hurt. Other factors may include elasticity of the falling body and the ground, angle of impact, shock wave through the falling body, dumb luck, and more.
People have actually fallen from great heights and survived, albeit very rarely. The current record-holder, Vesna Vulovic, survived a fall from a height of 31,33O feet in 1972, although she was severely injured. Flight Sergeant Nicholas S. Alkemade actually fell 18,000 feet—almost 3.5 miles—without a parachute and landed uninjured!
The point of all this is roll the dice, as described above, and don’t worry too much about science.

The 3.0 SRD is typically boring, legalistic, but continues this standard:

FALLING
Falling Damage: The basic rule is simple: 1d6 points of damage per 10 feet fallen, to a maximum of 20d6.
If a character deliberately jumps instead of merely slipping or falling, the damage is the same but the first 1d6 is nonlethal damage. A DC 15 Jump check or DC 15 Tumble check allows the character to avoid any damage from the first 10 feet fallen and converts any damage from the second 10 feet to nonlethal damage. Thus, a character who slips from a ledge 30 feet up takes 3d6 damage. If the same character deliberately jumped, he takes 1d6 points of nonlethal damage and 2d6 points of lethal damage. And if the character leaps down with a successful Jump or Tumble check, he takes only 1d6 points of nonlethal damage and 1d6 points of lethal damage from the plunge.
Falls onto yielding surfaces (soft ground, mud) also convert the first 1d6 of damage to nonlethal damage. This reduction is cumulative with reduced damage due to deliberate jumps and the Jump skill.
Falling into Water: Falls into water are handled somewhat differently. If the water is at least 10 feet deep, the first 20 feet of falling do no damage. The next 20 feet do nonlethal damage (1d3 per 10-foot increment). Beyond that, falling damage is lethal damage (1d6 per additional 10-foot increment).
Characters who deliberately dive into water take no damage on a successful DC 15 Swim check or DC 15 Tumble check, so long as the water is at least 10 feet deep for every 30 feet fallen. However, the DC of the check increases by 5 for every 50 feet of the dive.

Arduin Grimoire has a complex table, RCH = Random Critical Hit (Arduin crits are murder), others are Broken, Crushed, Dislocated, bruisE, Fracture, Multi, No damage, Sprain. I would never use this, but it’s on par with linear damage until far up.

Conclusion

I’m certainly going to stick with 1d6 per 10′ linear, but it should increase some chance of injury or death. At low Levels the HP damage is going to be the deadly factor, so it doesn’t matter if there’s also injury. At higher Levels, falling damage equivalent to your Level should be highly risky, and even moderate falls should have some risk.

Falling

Characters who fall more than 5′ take d6 damage per 10′ to a maximum of 20d6. If fallen 20′ or more, make a Save vs Paralysis, + DEX bonus, –1 per 10′ past the first, on failure roll d6 to see what you landed on:

  1. Head. Instant death. You needed that, roll a new character.
  2. Left arm. Broken, cannot hold shield or 2-handed weapon, or cast spells.
  3. Right arm. Broken, cannot hold weapon, or cast spells.
  4. Torso. Broken ribs, half STR, CON.
  5. Left leg. Broken, cannot move.
  6. Right leg. Broken, cannot move.

Cure Serious Wounds or Restoration will repair all but the head, otherwise takes 2d4 weeks recovery.

(note I don’t have Clerics, but there are items or rituals which can produce these effects)

I made a table to better understand the odds here (assuming Save 15 at 1st-Level, +1 bonus for Paralysis), and I think I’m good with this. A 3rd-Level Thief with DEX 15 has a 50% chance to drop 50′ with nothing broken, a 1st-Level Magic-User has 20%. HP damage is much more likely to kill them.

Distance Level: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
20′ 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6
30′ 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7
40′ 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8
50′ 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9
60′ 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
70′ 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
80′ 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
90′ 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
100′ 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

Review: Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised

I funded the kickstarter, still waiting for my lovely print book, but you can get PDF now, and I assume print-on-demand (POD) will come eventually.

S&W was one of the first “Old-School Renaissance” games. Matt Finch had worked on OSRIC (an AD&D-like retro-clone) in 2006, and took that and applied it to the original game.

I’m going to review the new book by looking at three (plus a bit) editions over time.

Swords & Wizardry Core in 2008, had most of OD&D (Original D&D, 1974) and fragments of Greyhawk (Supplement I, 1975):

  • Stats (“Ability Scores”): Uses the “modern” order of STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA (instead of SIWDCCh), but rolls 3d6 for each. Like OD&D, bonuses are only -1 to +1. INT has reduced extra languages, which I prefer to replace with CHA-10 languages. Has a bizarre new EP bonus system, where WIS, CHA, and class Prime give +5% each, no penalties for low stats. M-U with INT 15+, and Clerics with WIS 15+, get an extra 1st-Level spell.

  • Classes: Only Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, and a few non-Human species (“Race”, as was the fashion at the time): Dwarf (with their own class table), Elf (with their own class table), Halfling (barely defined, Fighter up to 4th-Level). Fighter has a base save 14, everyone else has 15, Dwarfs only get +4 save against magic; in OD&D they get +4 levels against all saves (which varies from +2 to +4 bonus depending on level).

  • Combat: Mostly OD&D-like, but opinionated because there are not clear procedures in the original. For both legal and modernization reasons, it changed Armor Class from descending 9 (unprotected) down to 2 (plate+shield), to combination ascending, 9[10] (unprotected) to 2[17] (plate+shield); saving throws went from five different numbers for Death, Wands, Petrify, Dragon Breath, Spells & Staves, to a single target number, with bonuses for some classes and species.

    Turn Undead is a new table, based on the D20 SRD, using a d20 chance to turn all of the same type. It’s pretty generous, and makes Clerics OP against Undead and Demons!

    You know what’s hilarious? There’s no rules for falling, fire, or disease. Some monsters list damage for poisons, others it does death. How is Neutralize Poison useful? It’s unknown.

  • High-Level Adventuring: Followers, mass combat, spell research, all very brief.

  • Magic: Almost all of the OD&D + Greyhawk + some later spells. Notably, Magic Missile has both variants, auto-hit for d4+1 damage, or to-hit as a +1 arrow.

  • Referee: How to design a dungeon, very light. Two sample maps, side-layout lines, and small dungeon. Random dungeon & a couple terrain-specifc encounter tables, but no overall wilderness encounter table.

  • Monsters: Most of the OD&D monsters, but not the under-defined “Maybe dinosaurs, giant bugs, robots, Martian Thoats” entry. As in later games, but contradicting OD&D, Skeletons are 1 HD not 1/2 HD, Zombies are 2 HD, not 1 HD. There’s only 2 Demons, Lemures & Balrog (“Baalroch”). Dragons are Black, Blue, Gold, Green, Red, White, Turtle.

    Officially it uses d8 hit dice. OD&D was unclear, Holmes and later specify d8 hit dice, but I continue to use d6 for all except very tough monsters (Dragons x3 HP, Demons, Elementals, Giants get larger HD by type).

  • Treasure: Core through Complete (unrevised) used a system of giving GP = 2-3x monster XP, with trade-outs that almost never (5%) generated magic items. The item lists are minimal compared even to OD&D, intelligent magic swords almost never happen (1/1440 of major treasures!) and only have a 10% chance of spell-casting.

Core’s fine for a quick and very minimalist game, and has higher-Level options almost all other retro-clones ignore, but you need to add a lot to finish it.

Offshoot: There’s also a White Box variant, cutting out even more of that material, and later another publisher made White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game (FMAG), which is more variant, adds Thieves, and limited to 10th-Level (12 for M-U), but it’s very compact, a good pick-up game system; while apparently some people have run long games with FMAG, you’d do better with Core/Complete/Revised.

Swords & Wizardry Complete in 2010, was a major upgrade. Where I don’t mention, it was the same as Core, but often expanded and rewritten for clarity. Boxes sometimes explain the rationale for rules, which at least helps you write house rules to change them!

  • Stats: Adds more of the Greyhawk tables, increasing power of STR but doesn’t add the 18/d100 mechanic so that’s… overpowered but not the worst. INT removes the M-U bonus spell, and adds a bunch of stupid spell choice mechanics. I hate the INT table, so much. I give M-U Detect Magic, Read Magic, 2 spells of choice, +1 spell for INT 15+. Done. Never make spell gain rolls. WTF Gary Gygax, let’s not perpetuate this.

  • Classes: All the classes of the OD&D supplements, Ranger (stupidly overpowered) from The Strategic Review/Dragon, but not Bard, Illusionist, or Barbarian. Stat minumums for the “better” classes are an optional rule, but listed. Non-Humans are standard classes or multiclass, and Half-Elves are added. “Halflings” are still garbage. Multi-classing is explained clearly, tho not necessarily the way I like. But it’s A system.

    The Cleric spells/day table changed, more like OD&D, but I think this is a design error. In Core, 5th is 2/2/1, 6th is 2/2/1/1, Complete jumps from 5th is 2/2 to 6th is 2/2/1/1; inexplicably gives 2 spell levels at once.

  • Alignment: Defined as a juvenile, He-Man, Law-good, Chaos-bad thing. I reject this, I’m more Moorcockian where everyone is bad except maybe Balance (and, you know, not everyone likes my Captain Planet “replace Humans with trees” definition of good).

  • Combat: Has an alternate version of the OD&D saving throws, tho they’re not integrated into the rules. If you do want to use these, understand that the deadliest, most environmental things are easiest to save against, mere inconveniences are harder, directed effects are hardest. You can read hardest to easiest if you’re a bastard DM, easiest to hardest if you’re tolerant.

    There remain no rules for falling, disease, and minimal for fire and poison. Starting fires is listed under Lamp Oil (which is ridiculous, lamp oil is not napalm or Greek Fire). The use of poisons is barely touched on in Assassins, but not their effects.

    Surprise is completely rewritten and expanded, and includes a hard-to-read monster reaction roll.

    Initiative rewrites the Core mechanic, and then presents two alternate systems: Holmes-like DEX rank (which is what I use), and Eldritch Wizardry activity points. All 3 systems are still using a 1-minute round which isn’t clear in OD&D, contrary to Holmes and B/X which are 10-second, I use the 10-second round (and 100-second combat turn) from Holmes.

    Turning undead uses almost the same table (slightly harder at Level 9+), but changes from d20 to 2d10, and turns only 2d6 Undead (no Demons), so now high-powered Undead are up to 10x harder to turn.

  • High-Level Adventuring: Followers, strongholds. Research is moved to Magic, rest is moved to Referee.

  • Magic: Same spell list, with minor changes.

  • Referee: All-new dungeon examples, an evocative side-view cross-section, a much better detailed dungeon, and a sketchy part of Rappan Athuk with no key, but good design. Better dungeon encounter tables (from 6 to 10 options) and adds a very good, detailed wilderness encounter system. Mass warfare, siege warfare, aerial combat, ship combat are all fleshed out and quite usable; tho in practice I’ve always used the GAZ4 Kingdom of Ierendi larger-scale naval system.

  • Monsters: Adds many classic monsters:

    • Bulette (ludicrously lists Tim Kask’s pr. “boo-LAY”, when French pr. would be “bu-let”)
    • Crocodiles
    • Demons (13, from Manes to Orcus)
    • Clay Golem
    • Leech (which drain a life level like undead!)
    • Naga
    • Rakshasa
    • Fish, Octopus, Squid, Sea Monsters (adds a 30 HD variant! Screw you! Never get on a boat! Never go in the water!)
    • Shambling Mound
    • Shrieker, Lurker, Piercer, Slithering Tracker, Trapper (screw you to dungeoneers)
    • Yeti
  • Treasure: A few more items, swords are now intelligent more often, but there’s no real mechanics for this. Adds cursed scrolls.

I’ve run S&W Complete for 11 years, I use the nice blue-cover kickstarter edition (look under “Troll Slayer” in the back), it’s a very solid OD&D-that-doesn’t-suck. I don’t use everything, but it’s nice to have the options. It’s easy to extend into a “modern” (2nd-gen or later) RPG, adding professions & skills, more character background options, situational rules, and there’s not many interacting parts to stop you. Very importantly, saving throws are basically D20’s “DC 15” skill roll. Just add a stat or skill modifier, and Level bonus is built in.

See under “Previously Swords & Wizardry” my notebook of Olde House Rules for Complete. I’m currently hacking up all my character & referee notes for a new version. If you like opinionated house rules, you’ll like that when I’m done.

Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised has just completed its kickstarter. It’s the same size book, 144 pages, but more usable pages: 140 vs 125 in Complete. This is because there’s No Fucking Index. Complete’s 2-page index wasn’t the most useful thing ever, everything’s listed in contents and reasonably organized, but occasionally I have to search in PDF instead of checking the index. SIGH, why, Matt? No kickstarter credits in new book, either.

Many places in the book now go from 2-column to 3-column layout, which can be helpful or too tight. It’s fine for spells & monsters which have a lot of data fields, less great for species.

  • Character Sheet: New sheet is a fillable form, many more boxes, but less aesthetic than the old one. In any case, I just use James V West’s character sheets, many of which have single-save boxes. I will note, the new one lists AC from 0 to 9, instead of 9[10] to 0[19] order & labelling. I really dislike that.

  • Stats: Same as Complete. CHA does get a new use for follower morale.

  • Class: Cleric spell table remains in design error. Fighters now have a standard 15 save, BUT get a +1 bonus against all except spells, which is a little better balanced, more OD&D. Monks no longer have stat minimums, BUT most of their powers require higher stats, so an average-Joe Monk would have only minimal skills. There’s no stat minimum for Paladin, except when a Fighter takes vows they need CHA 17, inconsistent.

    Thieves remain up to 10d4 HD (while Assassins are up to 13d6!), but have a +2% chance to Climb Walls, Dwarf Thieves get a +15 on Traps, no +10 bonus on Pick Locks, finally this travesty is corrected! Must-buy for this change! :) Seriously, all the classes are pretty close.

    There’s an argument here “Why Would I Play a Fighter?” that Rangers & Paladins are not Fighters, so don’t get Fighter STR bonuses, etc. I’d rather that it just went back to stat minumums, so you can’t be one of these advanced classes unless you roll well. Especially this makes no sense for Paladins, who are JUST Fighters who’ve taken holy vows; why would they suddenly lose their fighting skills?

    The non-Human species (now “Character Ancestry”) are the same; this is a little disappointing since there was room to improve the class/levels permitted from long dialogues to clearer lists:

    Dwarven player characters must be Fighters or Fighter-Thieves. Multi-classed Fight- er-Thieves are limited to 6th level as Fight- ers, and may not advance beyond this point. (For more information on multi-classed char- acters, see below.) A Dwarf who is purely a Fighter may advance beyond 6th level only if the warrior has Strength of 17 (maximum 7th level) or 18 (maximum 8th level). Such a Fighter may also take advantage of any XP bonus due to a high Strength score to gain experience more quickly.

    Could be cleaned up to:

    • Fighter (max Level 6th, 7th if STR 17, 8th if STR 18), Prime requisite bonus applies.
    • Fighter/Thief (max Level 6th/unlimited)
  • Movement: Encumbrance & movement has been changed, and now combat speed is faster, 60-120′ per 1-minute round (Core was 3-12′, Complete was 10-40′!), walking & running out-of-combat are still per 10-minute turn. Combat speed is now nearly plausible if you use a 10-second round, Usain Bolt did 100m in 10 seconds, so 1/3 rate for equipped normals is fine. The per-turn speeds are still nonsense, even with mapping it should be 10x or more. There’s a collected movement chart here that is much clearer.

  • Combat: Morale rules have been added, and a morale stat to every monster. Now, here’s the thing: It copies B/X (Basic/Expert, 1981) in using roll 2d6 under morale to save. OD&D almost always had roll high good, and Chainmail’s morale system was roll 2d6 high over a number determined by troop type. I would have greatly preferred a standard d20 save with morale modifier per monster, or some such. But the presence of any morale rule and stat is helpful.

    There’s arguments, most recently on Wandering DMs, about the use of morale, but I think it’s an essential tool, both as wargame simulation, where people in battle do sometimes just crap their pants and “Run away! Run away!”; and narratively as a way to avoid mass-murdering everyone you ever meet and fight.

    There remain no rules for falling, disease, and minimal for fire and poison.

    Healing has been reduced back to OD&D rate of 1 HP per 2 days, 4 weeks heals all. Death is at –1 HP, with an optional rule for survival to negative Level. Whoof. Since I don’t use Clerics, that’s not really practical.

  • Magic: Magic item creation is detailed, including the very popular rule from Holmes that Magic-Users and Clerics can write their own scrolls at 100 GP per Level, which makes a massive improvement to their quality of life. All new layout and a spell index, which since they’re in alphabetical order I didn’t really need. The page numbers could’ve been on the spell list instead!

  • Referee: Alas, the side-view dungeon & Rappan Athuk maps are gone, the dungeon from Complete is kept in 1-page dungeon form. Which is convenient for design, but less in depth for training new Referees.

    A new system for generating random castles, inspired by OD&D Book 3, is very welcome. And there are stats for generic high-Level NPCs, with sometimes magical equipment, spell lists, etc.

    A Referee Session Log (“control sheet” as I call them) is added, with fillable form fields, which may be very helpful to new Referees. There’s no explanation of its use, but at least they can see how to organize information for a game. There’s no time tracker on this one, I use a 6×24 chunk of graph paper in Turns for mine.

  • Monsters: Each monster now has Morale, Number Encountered, % in Lair (but I prefer % is Liar from OD&D and Arduin), and a full stat line you can copy-paste out:

    Bugbear: HD 3+1; AC 5[14]; Atk bite (2d4) or weapon (1d8+1); Move 9; Save 14; Morale 9; AL C; CL/XP 4/120; Special: surprise opponents (1–3 on d6).

    New monsters:

    • Dinosaurs: Ankylosaurus, Brontosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus Rex. They’ve always been 20% of the Clear encounters (Oof!), but weren’t defined in previous editions.
    • Horse finally gets full stats.
    • Mammoth
    • Night Hag
    • Nightmare
    • Otyugh

    Designing monsters, there’s new CL modifiers, EP values for CL 8+ have increased a bit, and the table goes up to 21+ now, more fairly rewarding very powerful monsters.

  • Treasure: System has been totally redesigned. You now roll on GP value tables, which give more specific coin & gem results, and many more of them have chances for magic items. At 4001-7000 GPV, you now have a 1/6 chance to get a major item, 1/6 to get a medium item, 2/6 to get a minor item. I’m not really gonna complain it’s too rich now, but it’s a big jump from 5%.

    Intelligent weapons are at the same rate as Complete, but now there’s actually rules for ego contests.

    Items seem to be the same.

Book abruptly ends. So, the current license situation is there’s no license (“all rights reserved”). There will be a Mythmere license very like the old OGL, or ORC with an SRD, or something, in the very near future, as a downloadable thing.

Conclusion

So this has been a long haul over a few days comparing PDFs until my eyes bleed out. I can’t speak to the print book condition until I get it; my old blue book is in perfect (well, Very Good) condition after a decade of hard use, but printers are random.

There’s several other retro-clones of OD&D, in particular Fantastic Medieval Campaigns which is VERY precise at copying warts and all of the original books, with minimal spackle over the rough spots. There’s a lot, a kaiju-sized shitload, of B/X clones, which have a goofier, overpowered style, poorly adapted to swords & sorcery; I have played some Basic Fantasy lately and it was fine, very candy-coated Saturday morning D&D cartoon tone, but not a replacement.

Swords & Wizardry is much more eclectic and opinionated. It’s also much more playable, more hackable, and more easily used as a “modern” RPG (I always air-quote that, but RPG design has moved on from Dave Arneson’s game that Gary Gygax published & ripped off). There’s still a lot of weird little gaps.

★★★★½ — S&W is a really great “dnd”-like to run, and Complete Revised is the best of these. I really dislike not having an index. I still need a booklet of house rules to play.

Covers: One last thing, the cover art over the editions is… not the best progression. I think the Core rules cover was the most D&D-like, an homage to the AD&D cover but grimmer. The Erol Otus blue book cover was fun, the electric demon and portal are eerie. The old city is meh, you can barely see the adventurers. The flying polyp thing is hideous. Giants are amateur. FMAG has gone thru many variants, they all look like (often are) clip art with airbrushing. The new edition comes in a green embossed cover, classy but boring, or a POD cover with maybe the most hideous art I’ve ever seen; only the teeny preview is available, and that’s a blessing like Langford’s Parrot basilisk.

Fighters Are Not Boring, Players Are

My infrequent commentary on role-playing games, in particular the Old-School Renaissance.

I don’t understand how fighters can be “boring”? They’re up front fighting, which is the most exciting role for most people. They can be mechanically simple, but of course you role-play and make up your actions to be interesting.

And what I’m seeing as arguments from the “other side” is they only mean in tactical wargames without role-playing. As if they can’t do anything that isn’t listed as a specific rule and skill. That’s not what RPGs are for!

A Fighter should be role-playing during fights, as players should at all times. Not looking at your dice, stats, feats, skills, magic powers, equipment. BE THERE. BE Ichi the Bushi, or whatever you named your “generic Level 1 Fighter”. Describe what you’re doing. Run up stairs to get a height advantage (or be able to fight a giant above the knees), or swing on a chandelier, or kick furniture at someone, or throw dirt, tactically de-advance into an ambush, etc. If you’re fencing, you compare styles, observe the enemy’s preferred moves, do a riposte against that. Don’t be boring.

Then the Referee tells you what happens; that might involve your usual attack roll with a bonus, more damage, more defense, or just narrate what happens.

Non-fighters can do those things, too, but they mostly miss against any competent foe, and can’t take a hit back, so it’s fairly pointless. How often does a Thief get in position to get their backstab bonus & damage, the one mechanical chance they have to be effective in combat? Basically never. If they do, they die the next round because they stood up in melee.

Magic items also differentiate them. Only Fighters and Thieves can use most magic weapons, and in OD&D even the most simplistic +1 magic sword makes a pig farmer into a hero, and allows fighting ghosts and werewolves! And you’d never waste a sword on a Thief who can’t hit.

You don’t need giant stacks of rules & mechanics to be interesting! Even my SIX WORD RPG! is all you need, and your fighter will be effective if you role-play effectively.

As always, read Matt Finch’s Primer, he says almost exactly what I’d say (esp. the Ninja example & Abstract Combat-Fu):

And some inspirational “be a Fighter” music, with Army of Darkness video:

ORCs Versus the Evil Wizards

A summary of this thing I’ve been angry about on fediverse all week/month, and how it affects my plans.

So, Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro had been working on their “One D&D”/6E playtest/previews, which has been previously held in only moderate contempt here. And then they decided to update the license.

Since 2000, we’ve had the Open Game License (OGL) 1.0a, which lets you reuse anything else put under it, like the System Reference Document (SRD) of D&D 3.0; I used that in my Stone Halls & Serpent Men game, mainly to copy spells & monsters. This has allowed a massive ecosystem of vaguely-D&D-ish games to flourish, as well as used for very not-D&D games like Legend and OpenQuest, and Cepheus Engine.

  • 2022-12-21, WotC announced a new OGL 1.1, with onerous financial terms on big earners, and no creative use outside books & ebooks. Nobody liked this, but we could keep using the 1.0a license, right? I started making plans to migrate off their SRD, but otherwise not super concerned. Future of OGL games is in some peril.

  • OGL 1.1 fiasco timeline

  • Saturday 2023-01-07, Basic Fantasy RPG started rewriting their books to get out from under the OGL, and go full CC-BY-SA. This is a pretty drastic solution, but legally the safest. It looks to me like BFRPG might be the new post-WotC “core OSR book”.

  • Monday, the actual license was leaked, and it’s a clusterfuck.
    Registering with WotC, revocation of 1.0a licenses, WotC gets to moral-police you and shut down anything they don’t like; screwed if you like weird horror, sex, drugs, or violence in your games.

    Gizmodo report is pretty reasonable.

    The claim they can revoke the 1.0a license is the rough part. The original license was meant to be irrevokable, but that wasn’t in the licenses it copied from (GPL, etc.), so it doesn’t say that.

  • Tim Cask

    the money-grubbing pomposity of Hasbro and WotC trying to squeeze third-party produces to death — don’t they make enough already? Could their insipid releases be the cause of their reduced revenues, or is it those nasty little third-party guys that have kept the hobby alive and growing? The new OGL 1.1.

    Tim Cask encourages WotC to fuck off

  • Matt Finch on how this affects Swords & Wizardry

  • Ryan Dancey, formerly of WotC and creator of the OGL, said:

    Yeah my public opinion is that Hasbro does not have the power to deauthorize a version of the OGL. If that had been a power that we wanted to reserve for Hasbro, we would have enumerated it in the license. I am on record numerous places in email and blogs and interviews saying that the license could never be revoked.

  • ArsTechnica RPG fans irate

  • Thursday, a leak from inside WotC circulated:

ogl leak

  • Then WotC cancelled their livestream, while an angry mob gathered on Roll for Combat’s livestream. Yes, Dr Frankenstein, the villagers are coming for you and your monster.

  • At which time, Paizo announced their own Open RPG Creative License (ORC) … Paizo doesn’t use a CDN, so their site’s been down most of the day from being hugged to death, in the mean time quoted here.

Paizo does not believe that the OGL 1.0a can be “deauthorized,” ever. While we are prepared to argue that point in a court of law if need be, we don’t want to have to do that, and we know that many of our fellow publishers are not in a position to do so.
We have no interest whatsoever in Wizards’ new OGL. Instead, we have a plan that we believe will irrevocably and unquestionably keep alive the spirit of the Open Game License. …
In addition to Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Legendary Games, and a growing list of publishers have already agreed to participate in the Open RPG Creative License, and in the coming days we hope and expect to add substantially to this group. …
We’ll be there at your side. You can count on us not to go back on our word.

I’m slightly disappointed their promo image is their dumb Human Fighter “iconic” leading the charge, and not an Orc.

WELL THEN

So my retroclone is toast. I’d have to scrub a lot of monster & spell text to get rid of the SRD, and that’s being done better by BFRPG. I can package some of what I wrote as a sourcebook for that. It’s B/X-ish, not Holmes, but I’m adaptable, and I can fix some of the tone by making new species-as-class combinations and minor rules tweaks. Might be a good zine type thing.

My roguelike is based on my retroclone, but it’s mostly naming issues, easily fixed. Fucking Hasbro claiming OGL doesn’t cover videogames, I’ll show them a pantomime.

I toyed with shifting to d100 and I can borrow more from OpenQuest than Legend and be legally safer, but I dunno if that’s useful to anyone. Just play OpenQuest, delete all the divine & shaman nonsense, and throw 50% more zombies at everyone, and it’s just like I’d done it!

My sword & planet game I’ll keep working on, and either release as CC-BY-SA, or ORC, depending on how that looks.

UPDATE 50 MINUTES LATER

Oh, WotC’s PR flacks sweated this all night:

However, it’s clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1.

[canned Big Bang Theory laff trak, meme face of Sheldon looking cross but robotic]

It has become clear that it is no longer possible to fully achieve all three goals while still staying true to our principles. So, here is what we are doing.

[paraphrasing]

  1. Removing our principles.
  2. Doubling down on extortion over non-book products and anything Pat Pulling would’ve objected to.
  3. Fuck over “major corporations” some other way.

RPG Tilemap

I had a useful JavaScript utility hidden away in the source for my Stone Halls & Serpent Men game, so I extracted it into its own thing:

Especially with people doing the challenge, it may be helpful for quickly drawing a dungeon, roguelike style.

I’m pondering doing a full wilderness + dungeon adventure again sometime soon, and I’ll likely use Tilemap for it, but I sure won’t be doing a room a day or anything like that!

Dungeoning & Dragoning and My New Rules, No Clerics Allowed

So I have, uh, three tabletop RPGs in development right now. One’s a little corporate sabotage game, inspired by Severance, Brazil, Paranoia… One of my mini horror games with poor long-term survivability, but neat premise, should be fun.

Second is my sword & planet RPG, still needs a lot of work for space & time & dimension mechanics; it works great for fantasy swordfighting but that’s not the whole point. I considered using variant Traveller/Cepheus Engine for this, but the tone is not “grizzled vets play Elite”, so I’m off in my own direction here.

Third is yet another in a long series of D&D house rules that become their own OGL game, and that’s what I’m on about today. In replacement for my overly-variant and overly-3.x-mechanics Stone Halls & Serpent Men, or handwritten Olde House Rules. Name to be decided later.

I’ve been reading a lot of the very oldest games & magazines, and really getting in the space of “what does this game need instead of what Gary published?”

  • New rules, basically OGL, spells & monsters are mostly stock from Swords & Wizardry White Box SRD, but some have partial to total rewrites. A handful of entirely new monsters, or takes on mythical/literary monsters. All new encounter table! I’m only using d20, d6 dice, and things you can do with those.
  • Stats change Wisdom to Willpower (WIL). Stat bonuses are B/X-ish, -3 to +3, which works with a d20-based mechanic. Saves & skill rolls are all based on stats.
  • HP start a little higher, Classed types get their CON score as base, but only d6 +/- 1 HD per Level. Somewhat like Arduin Grimoire. With limited healing, you need a bit more buffer between alive/dead. If you hit 0, you make death saves at penalty and probably die soon, but it’s possible to be knocked out & captured like John Carter et al. do in every book.
  • Species are Human, Dwarf, Wood Elf, Beastfolk. As previously noted in The Thing About Orcs, I don’t do kill-on-sight intelligent beings. You can have wars against hostile tribes, but the Badger Beastfolk who runs the bakery is not at war with you. High Elves are, as usual for me, The Big Bad (as well as Serpent Men, because I’m a Kull fanboy). No “dark elves”, “half-demon goth chick”, “dragon scalyfucker”, “hobbit”, etc. species. As I noted in Orcs, Humans-only doesn’t work well without cultural markers that are harder to explain.
  • Classes are Fighter, Thief, Magician, and Spellsword (mediocre warriors with mediocre magic). No multi-class, no Clerics. Not doing anything fancy with career paths. Other than a few more experience options, and “Orgies, Inc” style pay-for-EP, it’s a normal experience system! Who knew I could do that?! Should be interesting at least for this game.
  • Magic has a number of hard limits, which will make you invest in traditional fantasy accoutrements like flying mounts and magic potions instead of being superheroes with pointy hats. It is Vancian, in the sense that I’ve actually read Jack Vance so it works like that. Minimized spell/item creation rules, but there is some support for stuck-in-a-tower research campaigns.
  • Adventuring rules are simplified quite a bit, down to what I actually do in play; the more complex mechanics in SHSM rarely got used, the simple stuff does.
  • I may just pull the Inspirational Media (aka “Appendix N”) chapter from SHSM and post it as a page. That media list is what I mean by “pulp fantasy”.
  • Currently it’s about 32 pages, not too densely packed, might be a bit more if I include more setting detail; certainly not above 48 pages, which seems a fine oldest-school size. Not bothering with art except the cover? I don’t think so. Literature doesn’t need interior art, use your imagination.

No Clerics Allowed

The lack of Clerics is contentious, but Delta’s DND and Binder Full of Notes share my arguments.

I don’t see heroic Clerics in any of the pulp swords & sorcery I like. There’s Priest-Magicians in Moorcock’s Elric stories or Thieves World, and they’re the baddies. New campaign world is more like Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, where at best the few priests seen are charlatans, at worst cultists. The only historical place they come from is Archbishop Turpin from La Chanson de Roland; even Le Morte d’Arthur has only knights who praise their god, not magic Clerics. The only fantasy Cleric I can think of that I like is Duncan from Deryni Rising, and he’s a secretly-apostate priest who uses black magic to save his people from Christian Human genocide!

They don’t appear in Chainmail (Heroes & Wizards), or Dave Arneson’s games (Adventures in Fantasy has skill-based fighters, who develop faerry[sic] magic skills later). The only reason they were ever in the game was Gary had an annoying vampire PC, and rather than do anything OOC (unaware that Rousseau had published The Social Contract in 1762), he made a grudge class for someone else.

Getting rid of Clerics makes Undead terrifying, and I love the Undead but don’t love turning the undead. You don’t have a living body shield who can just turn Undead all day; a Magician’s Protection, Area spell lasts a few turns and only delays your murder or waiting for sunrise. Healing becomes slow (high-Level Magicians can cast 1 healing spell per day) or expensive (potions and scrolls), which encourages you to creatively avoid combat, not wade in and heal later, unless you have superior power. No raise dead, resurrection, or restoration (tho “level drain” has a different meaning in my game).

The super weird part of Clerics in D&D is they’re based very heavily on Medieval Catholic priests; they carry crosses (not “holy symbols”) in OD&D, they use “blessed holy water”, their miracles are all based on Jesus stories, their hierarchy is based on the Medieval Catholic Church (with some weird level titles). But then they do nothing related to the Church! Because they’re just Van Helsing minus the science.

The thing that stands out to me most is they have no interaction with Faerie or other gods. Historically and in myth, The Church ordered Christians to mass murder any Pagans who wouldn’t convert, and fought endlessly to genocide/unexist the Little People, the Fair Folk, the People Under the Hill, Trolls, whatever you call them; their worship barely survived at all in Iceland, Finland, Norway, they’re just “fairy tales” now. The worlds of Law (Christianity) & Chaos (Faerie) are openly at war in Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts & Three Lions. Clerics should be all carrying iron staves and fighting against the Fey. They do in Ars Magica. But it’s never come up in D&D?

Blackmoor/Eldritch Wizardry/AD&D added Druids (historically, more Sage political leaders than lightning-throwing Poison Ivy/Captain Planet superheroes), who should literally be at bloody war all the time with Christian Clerics, but everyone’s copacetic, it’s an ecumenical matter. Church and Holly Grove are next door in the tiny village of Hommlett. They have Clay Golems, explicitly based on the Golem of Prague, made by Clerics instead of Jewish Rabbis (again, Sages, not magic Clerics except in some Torah stories). What. I do use Golems, I love “programmed clay/flesh/iron machine goes crazy” stories; but the religious issue is impossible to resolve.

If I cared one whit for religious ceremony and all that, well, you can still have religions without Clerics, as seen in our world. They can be non-Classed, Thieves (most appropriately), or Fighters, or even Magicians if you don’t mind the cognitive dissonance. But the only old-timey-religions that have ever been in my games are demon-summoning cultists Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!, or fascist Templar priests, who are more political than religious.

So, the gameplay is better without Clerics. The world is much better (more like the pulp S&S I want) without Clerics. Even in a historical setting (which I very much do not do), Clerics shouldn’t have superpowers.

Why Not 5E?

Because I don’t need 1000 pages of corporate rules to tell me how to move down a corridor, check for traps, fight or flight. I really hate the superheroic power level. It’s nearly impossible to disentangle the healing rules from it.

Fantasy Inspirations of My Youth

This is a good “why are you like this” challenge:

If I’d been called on to run a D&D campaign at age 10 or 12,
these are the images and plots I would have drawn on to
provide the inspiration for my game. […] What were your earliest
childhood fantasy inspirations? What did your fantasy world
look like back then?
—DIY and Dragons

I think these are roughly in order of age of discovery, publication date’s often very different. I was… the word schools liked was “precocious”, which just means I was years and years ahead of the curriculum designed for morons and they had no idea how to educate me, any more than an ape could educate a mere Human. The Tarzan problem. So I read and watched whatever I liked, and grew up weird. Giving me D&D and then Gamma World was just giving a junkie an endless needle.

  • Godzilla (1954): This is what dragons are like. Any kind of giant, dinosaur, or kaiju is a catastrophe you run from, not a “monster” you fight from horseback, those are just wyverns. I saw basically every monster movie and some sentai on KSTW-11, which only had budget for old movies and reruns.

  • Star Wars (1977), Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, by Alan Dean Foster (1978), Empire Strikes Back (1980): High-tech but just fantasy activity; as I learned later, Star Wars is The Hidden Fortress with spaceships, many scenes are shot-for-shot remakes.

    I’m trying to think what I learned from this, and I think it’s that every alignment can be cool. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Leia are Chaos, and they’re cool, tho if Leia wins she’ll establish a tyrannical monarchy again which is no good. Han Solo is Neutral, and he’s cooler than cool, and shoots first. Darth Vader is Order, choking out all dissension, and he’s THE COOLEST. Luke and Grand Moff Tarkin suck, but you can’t have everyone be cool or nobody is.

    Figure out your antagonists’ motives, take their affectations and crank them up to 11, and you have an EPIC hero or villain. Pity they never made any more Star Wars movies, I might’ve liked to see Revenge of the Jedi. I will take no email or comments to the contrary.

  • Bullfinch’s Mythology: While now it’s “oh that old thing”, Bullfinch did a fantastic job of covering Greek/Roman (more Greek, but with Roman names; Roman syncretism mapped names to their gods but their practices were different), Norse, and Arthurian mythos, including a lot of the poetry and literature that referenced them in the 2000 years since. Academic mythology books are too concerned with period beliefs and not how those ideas are used in later works, so they’re less gameable. The art in Bullfinch’s is also fantastic.

  • Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter of Mars, Tarzan of the Apes, Pellucidar: You know why everyone in fantasy worlds speaks Common? Because the Barsoomians have a common language by way of telepathy; Carter’s telepathy’s a little stronger than usual, so he can project it, but they all have it. The ruined cities, falling civilization, a hero trying to bring back glories, toppling false religions, it had it all. Tarzan’s ruined cities and ancient civilizations hidden in the jungle were awesome, literally set much of my campaign style. Pellucidar was so weird and dream-like, I barely understood it, but a plausible way for dinosaurs, Humans, and evil Mahars to coexist was amazing, too. It’s not a coincidence Eric J. Holmes, editor of Dungeons & Dragons Basic set, wrote a Pellucidar novel.

  • National Geographic: I had access to a big stack of old NatGeo from ’40s to ’70s. In particular, I devoured anything about Ancient Rome, Egypt, Greece, Mayans, & Aztecs. NatGeo of the time was astoundingly West-oriented and racist; I would’ve loved to know more about China, Japan, Korea, & India, but they were barely touched on. Africa was only ever presented as wilderness or savages, zero mention of modern cities. I have an eternal love of giant detailed maps from this time.

  • ElfQuest (1978): Very pretty, cutesy comics about cuddly little Wood Elves and their Wolf pets… Ha ha no, I lie, they’re vicious, backstabbing, eternally horny/drunk little bastards, the Trolls (more like Dwarfs) are venal scumbags, Preservers (Fairies) are insane pests, High Elves are supernatural psychopath villains, and Humans are the dumbest, meanest animals on 2 legs. Here’s how to throw all your dumb Tolkien racist shit out and have murderous Keebler Elves.

  • Michael Moorcock: The silver Elric books and bronze Count Brass books, I grabbed as soon as each new one came out, devoured them. Elric’s world is full of weird mystical secrets you can grab hold of, bargain with, steal, and use. Horrible monsters and demons are summoned up by fool wizards for lust or revenge, and spread Chaos in the world. Hooray, Chaos! We see in the decayed post-apocalypse of Count Brass that Order is just as poisonous, and can’t be recovered from. I didn’t encounter Moorcock’s weirder stuff like Jerry Cornelius until much later, presumably the local hillbilly bookstores didn’t order them.

  • Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950): Literally my model of the megadungeon. The structure seems to go on forever, up and down, buried into the Earth. Strange structures poke out everywhere, mapping beyond the known halls is impossible. The inhabitants are mad. There’s little/no magic or monsters in the books, but they feel like there’s magic & monsters everywhere. Don’t read past the 2nd book, I didn’t as a yout’ and much later I didn’t like Titus Alone.

  • Katherine Kurtz, Deryni Rising (1970): Low fantasy proto-England with swordfights, witchcraft & ritual magic, treachery. The ongoing fetishization of monarchy and religion, and an “actual miracle”, finally soured me on the series, but the early books made it clear these are Human (or Deryni) fabrications. The consistent, low-powered but useful “magic” (or psionics, or mutant powers) are a good way to model magic in games. The Deryni are High Elves who don’t suck.

  • Gamma World (1978): The game that defined how I see role-playing games. Harsh, brutal, shockingly beautiful at times, erratic, full of impossible, anachronistic references. It’s fun, it’s not reality. Unspeakably deadly in most places, but two medieval dipshits having at each other with swords will take half an hour to whittle their HP down to nothing, and then the survivor will take months to heal; so you learn to cheat, to use poisons, artifacts, traps, tame monsters as pets, risk getting more mutations, so you can survive.

  • Robert Asprin & Lynn Abbey, Thieves World (1978): Absolutely should never have been given to an impressionable young Mark. Cruelty, treachery, black magic, and of course thievery in a corrupt hellhole end-of-the-Empire city called Sanctuary. Pretty much all my fantasy cities are a bit of Sanctuary.

    A very similar influence I encountered later was Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser. But I didn’t read those until late ’80s.

  • Thundarr the Barbarian (1980): The most formative thing possible. Every frame of even the opening title is inspirational. Jack Kirby designed this, and it shows. A mix of Gamma World, magic, Burroughs-type ruins, superhuman heroes.

    “In the year 1994, from outer space comes a runaway planet,
    hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic
    destruction! Man’s civilization is cast in ruins! 2000 years
    later, Earth is reborn, a strange new world rises from the
    old, a world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery! But one
    man bursts his bonds to fight for justice! With his companions
    Ookla the Mok, and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his
    courage, and his fabulous Sun Sword against the forces of evil!”

  • Clash of the Titans (1981): Ray Harryhausen’s masterpiece. The monsters are amazing, the gods are meddling jerks but not the center of attention, more amazing monsters, the dumb-ass hero and chick yada yada another amazing monster! The myths I’d read so much about were filmed. Pity that Perseus & Andromeda are so much more wooden than the monsters. The gods do indeed play games with the lives of mortals.

  • Heavy Metal (1981): I’d seen maybe one issue of the magazine at this time, it was definitely not sold to minors. But somehow I got into the movie, and when it came out on tape I got it and rewatched endlessly. The Lock-Nar itself is irrelevant, the framing story is silly. But “Den of Neverwhere”, “Taarna”, and to some extent “Captain Stern” and “So Beautiful So Dangerous” (“wanna do some nyborg?”) are all peak young Mark. “Harry Canyon” (ha) is great but I don’t really do urban SF. I’ve never found any real use for “B-17”.

  • Neil Hancock, Greyfax Grimwald (1982): What looks like a cute talking-animals and Dwarf book becomes something much deeper, as it turns into a sort of Buddhist Journey to the West-ish fantasy adventure. Collides fairy-world with real-world and actually made me think about what these worlds are. Not as gonzo as everything else here, probably the only thing with any philosophical merit.

  • Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982): Surreal, dream-like, horrifying imagery, a true Mythic Underworld dungeon, a crazy Warlock, a nigh-invincible Dragon. And then there’s the game system, which was a perfect little marvel of design, Skill, Stamina, Luck, 2d6, that’s all you need (for fighter/rogues in a dungeon crawl), one of the biggest influences on how I make my own games.

  • The Day After (1983): … 14 years later, there’s a scene in The Fifth Element where Leeloo types “WAR” into the encyclopedia, and just breaks down screaming & crying on seeing what Humans do to each other. That was me.

    “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU ALL?!” I asked, and keep asking, and they had no answers. And this is, like, an unreasonably optimistic scenario of nuclear war, because anyone gets to live long enough to wrap their dead family in plastic bags and worry about cancer, or looters eating fallout-poisoned food. So, growing up I had zero expectation that I’d live to see 2000, let alone another score of years after. Maybe we didn’t, and this is a final dream.

If I’d known about Ralph Baksi’s Wizards, it would fit right in, but I didn’t see that until mid-to-late ’80s.

I was already reading H. Beam Piper’s books by ’82, but I definitely didn’t read Space Viking or Empire until late ’80s, which are the ones that fit my ethos.

Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith (discovered thru X2 Castle Amber) were late ’80s for sure. I know precisely that I read “At the Mountains of Madness” in 1986.

Raaka’tu, Zork, Ultima, Wizardry, and more computer games certainly influenced how I do videogames, but they didn’t teach me much world-building.

The D&D and GW games I ran early on were very formulaic retreads of B1 In Search of the Unknown, B4 Lost City, or GW1 Legion of Gold modules. Later I learned to make more creative worlds, but they’re still much the same framework & generated world madness.

I’ve probably never run a game which wasn’t: A) Post-apocalypse, often centuries, millennia later; or B) Just pre-apocalypse, and there’s nothing you can do about it but your actions are probably futile. Vast military horrors lurking on the edge of your vision.

I’ve rarely run anything with legitimate authorities above town headman who aren’t dead, completely corrupted, or too distant to care. Instead the adventurers, usually venal thieves and bastards, are the only force strong enough to fight the worse guy “villains”. I suppose some Call of Cthulhu, but I usually outfit the group for an expedition into weird lands, or they’re trapped in some Old One or Fungi from Yuggoth laboratory or whatever. I had a “king” and court in a Dungeons & Zombies game, but the entire power structure was like 20 knights including our new recruit PCs, and the necromancers and alien gods raising millions of ravenous dead, and the chittering spidery goblins in the dark, had other ideas.

Usually my games start out looking like medieval, ancient, stone age, or sorta spacey fantasy, and you rapidly learn the world was once very different from that. You get into other lands, or old bases full of artifacts from the time before. You go into space, sometimes, and find the colony worlds have their own problems. But you still keep looting tombs/bases and building power, because you live in the world you’ve been left, not the peaceful one you want.

3d6 Six Times in Order

I was looking at my Gamma World 1E and GW1 Legion of Gold reprints from drivethrurpg — the first RPG I ever ran, and my one true love system, tho my old copy was destroyed by flooding decades ago — and discovered that even in 1978, the rot had set in, tho I ignored it then and now.

I speak, of course, of “more generous” systems for generating stats.

Character personae are created at the beginning of the campaign, endowed with certain basic attributes through the roll of dice. First, each player must choose to play either Pure Strain Human, humanoid, or mutated animal-type characters (the advantages and disadvantages of each of these three categories will be explained momentarily). Having selected the type of character he wishes to play, the player then rolls three six-sided dice to determine the relative strengths of each of his character’s six basic attributes: mental strength, intelligence, dexterity, charisma, constitution, and physical strength. As a general rule, a roll of 3-8 for a given attribute indicates a weak trait, 9-12 is average, and 13-18 is above average. The relative strengths of certain attributes can (and most likely will) change during the course of the campaign, due to mutation, acquired experience, or some other method devised by the referee.

It is desirable that few, if any, of a player character’s basic attributes be below average. Player characters represent an elite with the desire, the initiative, and the ability to venture outside the boundaries of the village, town, or tribal lands. They are the pioneers, explorers, and tamers of the vast wilderness. It is they who will eventually bring order to the chaos of GAMMA WORLD and an end to the Black Years. To increase the player’s chances of rolling up an exceptional character, the referee will find it advisable to use the following method: for each basic attribute, the player rolls four dice (4d6) but totals only the highest three. If, for example, the player rolled 4, 3, 5, 1 on the four dice, he would add together 4+3+5=12 and leave out the 1. If he rolled 4, 3, 2, 2 he would add 4+3+2=9 and leave out the second 2. While it is still possible to roll very low numbers (3, 2, 2, 1), the player’s chances of rolling an average to above average character are greatly increased.
—Gamma World (1978), James M. Ward and Gary Jaquet

But just 2 years earlier in Metamorphosis Alpha, no such mercies are given:

A human player will roll 3 six-sided dice several times for the abilities he or she has at the start of the game. Each player has the following abilities: radiation resistance, mental resistance, dexterity, constitution, strength, and leadership potential.
—Metamorphosis Alpha (1976), James M. Ward

So I strongly suspect the 4d6 keep 3 paragraph was added by Jaquet to fit with Gary Gygax’s AD&D stat inflation. The shift from every other part of GW being “grubby scavengers trying not to die” to this Manifest Destiny “heroes of the Black Years!” bullshit is also stinky. We love chaos! We hate order! Down with civilization! You don’t play Gamma World to be a farmer and accountant, you do it to be a weird mutant viking beaver with a laser pistol and a STOP sign shield!

Original Dungeons & Dragons (“little brown books”) and Holmes’ D&D Basic Set (“blue book”) are strict 3d6-in-order, with the possibility of moving points 2:1 to a class’s prime stat, which often resulted in lopsided but more specialized characters. Moldvay’s B/X (“red book”) is 3d6-in-order.

AD&D has the following four increasingly ludicrous methods:

Method I:
All scores are recorded and arranged in the order the player desires. 4d6 are rolled, and the lowest die (or one of the lower) is discarded.
Method II:
All scores are recorded and arranged as in Method I. 3d6 are rolled 12 times and the highest 6 scores are retained.
Method III:
Scores rolled are according to each ability category, in order, STRENGTH, INTELLIGENCE, WISDOM, DEXTERITY, CONSTITUTION, CHARISMA. 3d6 are rolled 6 times for each ability, and the highest score in each category is retained for that category.
Method IV:
3d6 are rolled sufficient times to generate the 6 ability scores, in order, for 12 characters, The player then selects the single set of scores which he or she finds most desirable and these scores are noted on the character record sheet.

I’m tempted to write a little simulation script to see just how insane those stats are; it should basically be impossible to have anything under a 13 out of 18 with Methods II and III. I almost don’t hate Method IV, I’ve allowed that with just 1-3 alternates instead of 12. Method I is what D&D 5E uses.

Tunnels & Trolls also from 1975, was 3d6 six times in order, though later editions added “triples add and roll over” (TARO) for superheroic characters, and non-Humans multiply various stats by anything from 0.25 to 2.0; but since T&T characters increase their stats as they level, that was just a head start, not unbalance.

The appeal of those early games was a normal, maybe a little better than average schlub, working their way up by way of good stats, player intelligence & skill, luck, hard work grinding out experience, cowardice, and ruthless treachery, until they were slightly less likely to explode in a blood geyser at the first papercut. If you made it to 3rd level, you were good, and extremely attached to your character. If you made it to 9th, you quit because you had won, and it was time to start over with one of your henchmen.

If you can just get another guy from the vending machine with high stats, who cares if you die? You’ll come right back. Not that you can actually die in 5E, it’s basically Toon with swords.

There is an argument that old-school games didn’t give high bonuses to stats, which is true… but we did make a lot of stat rolls, long before such things were official. The Perrin Conventions (see Dexterity Roll) and RuneQuest formalized what a lot of us had always done: Roll stat x 5% on percentile, or d20 or 3d6 roll under. The guy who taught me used 3d6 for average, 2d6 easy, 4d6 hard, roll under your stat; I don’t recall if all 6’s were always a failure, but that’s how I used it.

…

Oh, you know I’ve posted about this, but not the specific mechanics, a couple years ago on my Mark Rolls Dice blog

Wizards Address the Orc Problem

Nice to see this directly addressed. Obviously I still prefer my solution which was just to replace Orcs with a more sympathetic species, but WotC is a business with tight margins so they’ll just do the minimum necessary to not be running a minstrel show.

I’ve never really used “Drow” except in the GDQ modules (Giants went great, never got a party to finish Drow, let alone Queen of the Demonweb Pits), I preferred the Sidhe from Celtic myth making all “Elves” pretty, alien, and sociopathic (interesting point, there’s a subworld of Queen, “Caer Sidi”, which inspired me to get into Elves-as-Sidhe!), and later the Gazetteer Shadow Elves created underground Elves with a grudge, but they’re not Drow. Having the black-skinned, white-haired Elves be “evil” and relentlessly, cartoonishly cruel torturers, poisoners, perverts, and backstabbers wasn’t one of TSR’s better takes. And then R.A. Salvatore, the third-worst writer in the world (I’ve read two of his books, part-way, and they’re so bad it’s impossible to finish them), made his Mary Sue character Drizzle-doo-wah-Diddy who’s the One Good Drow, which became TSR canon. I’d flush the entire archetype, I don’t think it’s fixable.

The Vistani thing is also pretty hard to fix. They’re stereotype “Gypsies”. You can pull elements out to make carny folk, maybe, but if you have a tribe of thieves and soothsayers in a caravan it’s obvious what you’re doing. There’s also Romani-based caricatures in Greyhawk, and who knows where else, it was a very popular trope with the ’80s-’90s TSR writers, because “a Gypsy tells you your fortune” is a super easy plot hook, if you’re unaware/unconcerned about your racism.

Changing ability score modifiers is weird. Now, there’s no modifiers in Original D&D, everyone has the same 3d6 scores down the line, and fairly simple species special abilities and some harsh class limits. AD&D 1st Ed added the racist & sexist race vs stat & class tables, and each following edition dug in further. Hm, looking at my AD&D PDF (bought back when Paizo had the rights), I could swear in the original print back in ’79 there was a Human column up front there, that’s been redacted, where Human females got 3/17 Strength and probably Constitution & Charisma (being used more for leadership in AD&D, and women leaders were Not A Thing to those guys). Was this changed in a later printing? And the Half-Orcs got seriously shafted here.

Note this is the AD&D 1st ed text on Half-Orcs. “Orcs are fecund”, “player characters which are of the half-orc race are within the superior 10%”. What the fuck, Gary?

I don’t really have any use for D&D 5th Ed, it’s a cartoony game with 10-100x as many rules as it needs, and they’ve dug themselves into this hole by pushing out old content which was noted as being problematic 20 years ago, but at least WotC’s a little self-aware of the things they’re publishing now.

The Thing About Orcs

So, there’s this piece on Orcs and racism:

And they have a long blog post about Tolkien’s racist origins of Orcs & “Eastern Men”:

“The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”
—J.R.R.Tolkien, Letter #210

Which I agree is pretty horrible, I greatly dislike Tolkien the man, and his post-Hobbit work. The post is kind of a waste of time to read beyond that, I eyerolled 180° at the quoting-white-men-about-racism tone, and denial of other people of colors’ different experiences (Jason Momoa in particular). Maybe that’s just how James talks, all the goddamned time. Someone should set up a medical research fund. Anyway, I’m only in this to read about the Orcs, shit that happens on Earth is not my problem.

My old solution to the Orc problem was to make Orcs tolerated and playable if they lived in civilization, but so culturally different in their nomadic tribes, that you still had something like the classic Human/Orc war trope. That can be problematic when compared to how the US, etc. treated Native Americans and other indigenous populations, but it cut down on the genocides/”we kill all the Orc babies”; players treated Orcs like a hostile tribe of Humans, warred against them until they stopped being annoying, and made peace.

But then why not just use Humans? That’s James Raggi’s solution, which technically works, but it’s not interesting unless you throw an enormous book of “What do the Saxons believe and why are they so awful?” at the players which you don’t want to write, and which they won’t read. In history it was pretty easy to tell what culture someone was by their artifacts, dress, and speech; but none of those are easily visible in Theatre of the Mind role-playing.

So in everything I’ve run or written in the last few years, I solved the problem by replacing Orcs with Beastfolk, humanoids with bestial features chosen off a table of local mammals. They behave almost exactly like my previous use of Orcs, and yet because they’re not all green-skinned pig-men, and might even be cute & fuzzy, especially the young ones, suddenly reaction is completely different. It either arouses or annoys furries, neither of which is my intention, but that’s a small price to pay for how radically it changes the conversation.

I don’t usually want “half-breeds”, because that directly leads to racial theory bullshit, but in a magical world full of Owlbears it’s certainly possible for species to be crossed, and Edgy McEdgertons always want to be a half-breed Goblin/Dark Elf with a tragic backstory or some such, so unless you want to waste half an hour arguing before the game, just say yes and move on.