Basic D&D at 40

The 1977 Origins Game Fair was in Staten Island, New York, on July 22-24 of that year. It was the event where TSR debuted the D&D Basic Set, edited by J. Eric Holmes. It's at the nexus of D&D history, where OD&D, AD&D, and Classic D&D all touch on one document.

Holmes's Basic Set was closely based on OD&D, with only very selected material imported from Greyhawk. The book captures the brevity of OD&D while hinting at the broader expanses that would be found in AD&D. And it would be the template for expansion in Moldvay's 1981 Basic set that forms half of B/X D&D.

If you really want to grasp Dr. Holmes's D&D, you need to read the 55 (!) part series on the Zenopus Archives blog: Holmes Manuscript. It's particularly important to read the parts on melee combat if you want to understand how the blow-by-blow combat mechanics work. The short version is that Holmes's D&D was never supposed to make daggers into the ultimate weapon, or two-handed weapons useless. It was based on Chainmail and characters had two attacks in a round.

The internal history of the boxed set is fascinating. If you read the long list of changes that happened across three editions of the Basic book with three printings each, you'll see the book tightening and standardizing things closer to the AD&D Monster Manual, and getting rid of a lot of the marks that OD&D had left on the rules.

As time went on TSR would not only change the Basic booklet but would alter the included module. The initial print runs had the Monster & Treasure Assortment and Dungeon Geomorphs - only 8 pages each - that Ernie Gygax had cranked out at the Dungeon Hobby Shop. In late 1978, it changed to a copy of B1 In Search of the Unknown. A year later, at the end of 1979, the module changed again - to B2 Keep on the Borderlands.

The original approach was very much intended for OD&D referees and provided only the tools to put together a fully stocked dungeon. The dungeons featured the mazy, twisty labyrinths with "paper-thin walls" that we see in Gary Gygax's own Castle Greyhawk, and the monsters and treasures are the main ingredients. (I would love to see an analogue that included traps and weirdness.) The next step was B1 In Search of the Unknown, a unique module that leaves the monsters and treasure separate from the map key, as an exercise for the referee. Finally in B2 Keep on the Borderlands, Gygax decided to simply break down and show the referee how to run the game.

This process of revision reflected a growing attitude of professional presentation that came to predominate in TSR. The first printing of Holmes D&D is very much a child of the TSR that put out the Little Brown Books, a growing cottage publisher that was lucky to have had help from this nice doctor in California to put the rules in more or less coherent order. The last printing is thoroughly professionalized and has all the wooliness tamed from it, and leads logically to the 1981 Moldvay boxed set. (So logically, in fact, that late copies of Holmes remained in circulation until after the Mentzer boxed sets were already out.)

Holmes is a set that anyone can take out and recognize classic D&D from. OD&D is more raw and DIY, AD&D more detailed, and B/X more polished. But you can always take out Holmes, and the map I prefer for B1 In Search of the Unknown, ReQuasqueton, and play some solid D&D with all the core ingredients.

Actual Play: ReQuasqueton

Things have been quiet here because, well, they've been quiet in my gaming. I haven't been actively doing much by way of hangout gaming, but I got to run some games for other folks I know who drafted me to run an old school D&D game in Philadelphia.

I used Dyson Logos's ReQuasqueton map, which was his riff on the classic module B1 In Search of the Unknown. I wrote up my own concise version of Quasqueton that was similarly taking B1's concepts and developing them rather than following it literally. This is what the resulting player map looked like:

Since it was a one-shot and started at level 1, I decided to use Holmes Basic. The decision was really assisted by the excellent work Zach H. has done with Holmes Ref, a great series of one-page utility tables for Holmes Basic D&D that, particularly his recent character creation worksheet that gives a concise one page guide to rolling up a PC.

The crew started out balanced: two fighters, a cleric, a dwarven thief, and a magic-user / torch holder. I used hints of the battle in the entrance to Quasqueton as in B1, which gives a nice sense of danger. Tarrying at the entrance attracted wandering skeletons, which were turned and then pursued and beaten. The lack of any duration of turning makes the mechanics kind of wonky when players decide to kill the monsters anyway; I decided that turning lasts at least a turn, and the result was that the PCs pursued the monsters through a length of hallway.

They missed a room I was really hoping they'd pick up on, but did at least give the cavern section a brief go. The result was probably for the best, as the dwarf decided not to check out the bioluminescent fungus in the cavern beyond.

A tea service in one room was suitably freaky, with the cleric's player acting ultra-paranoid as one of the fighters ate one of those little cucumber sandwiches (they looked fresh and produced no ill effects). The teapot was eventually used as ammo against more skeletons in the following room, while the magic-user had considerable success using chairs as one-time improvised weapons; he did so well that he hauled a chair around and used it as a prop going forward.

Standard d6 damage in Holmes may seem like weak tea, but I do love the flexibility it allows. Maces, daggers, chairs – the variety is fun. I think the main issue isn't to add variable damage but to give monsters d6 hit dice (as the first edition of Holmes implied) and allow fighters bonus damage, and link it to high Strength: d6+1 for fighters with Strength 14 or better, d6+2 if they have Strength 18. Not only does it make the fighter a better class, it also gives the Strength spell something useful to do.

Eventually the PCs wound up fighting berserkers. Now, berserkers are to me like the booby prize of old school D&D. You put them in thinking, "Oh, this will be interesting." But then you put them in and you remember that berserkers just fight. They never break morale, they never negotiate, no prisoners is written into the description. It makes them one-dimensional, which is nice for "bad guys" but kind of bland for a dungeon that needs interesting factions. Forget the berserkers, use actual Norsemen instead.

The design of the rooms in ReQuasqueton wound up with a period where the dwarf was dead (he wanted to negotiate when he had succeeded in using Move Silently and gotten a full surprise round on three of the berserkers) and one fighter was holding a door with the rest of the group behind him. It wound up going better once the PCs took the room inside, but only because my dice stopped rolling over 10 and couldn't even hit the magic-user. So the PCs took a decent haul out with only one fatality.

One move I particularly enjoyed was one of the fighters trying to use her spear against two opponents in one round. I told her if she got a 20 on the die roll I'd let her make a second attack; she actually got a 19 and then rolled 6 damage on an opponent with just 2 HP left, so I let her get a point of damage against the second berserker. With older D&D combat I really find encouraging things like that, but leaving it at a fairly hard difficulty, makes life more fun.

ReQuasqueton is a solid map. It's got some nice long corridors without turning all mazy and geomorph-ish like the original. And since it basically invites a similar riff on B1 when populating the dungeon, it allows you to make it a good classic dungeon romp without duplicating the original. Running it with two players who'd DMed In Search of the Unknown worked out well; they recognized broad strokes but didn't know the map in advance. I enjoy the concept of a "module riff" and would have fun doing the same with B2.

Going back to Holmes really felt like the right move in this game, and it worked like a charm. It's light and really close to classic D&D without being hard to reference like OD&D can be in play. While it needs some tweaks and adjustments, it's actually the version of D&D I'd probably most recommend that a referee runs as a go-to for games that really need to have that classic "D&D" feel (as opposed to OD&D which is its own thing and has a different purpose, as a basis for freestyling rather than a complete package).

One note – it's always worthwhile to tell the player of the magic-user a few things, like the fun of torch-holding, the utility of lamp oil as Molotov cocktails, and the power of the Sleep spell. Although I really enjoyed the turn toward WWE style use of chairs from the player. If you don't, you're not taking the journey with me. Picture the stereotypical D&D wizard. Now he's going all WWE on skeletons. Yeah. That's just fun and there's no apologizing.

That's One Large Spider!

Zach H. over at the Zenopus Archives blog has done another of his excellent Holmes Manuscript series comparing the published Blue Book to the original document Holmes provided TSR. He's into the Sample Dungeon at this point and describes the giant spider as originally conceived:

He is Armor Class 3, plate mail, has 1 hit die and a poisonous bite.

The final text is significantly emended:

He is armor class 3 (plate mail), has 6 hit dice (31 hit points), and his bite causes 1-8 points of damage and is poisonous (-1 on saving throw dice because it is so strong)

For a first level group, that is straight-up nasty: 31 hit points takes 9 average hits to kill, and at AC 3 in Holmes that takes 36 attacks. It's quite likely to be a TPK unless the PCs just run from the encounter. Certainly a good lesson, but it points to the giant spider becoming standardized as a type.

The spider pictured above is a Brazilian wandering spider, reputedly the most venomous spider in the world. The largest is the giant huntsman spider, whose leg span reaches up to twelve inches. A Goliath birdeater tarantula only goes up to 6 ounces, and that's the heaviest spider by weight. So that gives us parameters for spiders.

Humans are the archetypal 1 hit die creature. At minimum, an adult human is about 4'10" tall and weighs 100 lbs. According to the square-cube ratio, if we took our maximum spider and made it 3' in width, that would be over 100 lbs already, and at 6' it would weigh almost 500. Compared to a person, I think that's enough to merit extra hit dice!

But Holmes's giant spider could be the more modest 3' wide spider. That's still a mean critter, but it is a sensible 1 hit die. We could scale up by a hit die per foot of leg span, with a 6' spider being 4 HD, and the monstrosity in the Blue Book at 8' and over 800 lbs. This gives us a good scale for giant insects in general, and allows for a flourishing variety. Maybe the spiders on your 3rd dungeon level have 3 hit dice. That would make them 5' wide and weighing as much as an NFL offensive lineman (over 330 lbs.). Similarly, we can change the effects of their bite, or even make them non-poisonous (if such a thing can be imagined).

Here's a chart based on some quick-and-dirty math:

Size	Weight	HD
1'	6 oz.	1 hp
2'	14 lbs.	1-2 hp
3'	122 lbs.	1
4'	216 lbs.	2
5'	338 lbs.	3
6'	486 lbs.	4-5
7'	662 lbs.	5-6
8'	864 lbs.	7-9
9'	1094 lbs.	8-10
10'	1350 lbs.	9+

From here, you can get an idea of the size and hit dice of any giant insect or arthropod you care to put in your game.

Spitder Image by Techuser, CC-BY-SA

Fading Gems in Classic D&D

I'll preface this by noting that I prefer to use OD&D volumes II and III to roll up treasure for my classic games, no matter what rules I am nominally following. This has led me to notice a small but extremely meaningful change in gems, specifically.

When you roll on the gems table in OD&D, you come up with a value between 10 and 1000 GP. Once you roll each gem, you roll a d6 to see whether it needs to be increased a step. Every 1 rolled moves it up by a step and calls for a further roll. Beyond 1000, this goes to 5000 GP and then, by increasingly large steps, all the way up to half a million. (This is less ridiculous than it seems; there is only a 10% chance of rolling a 1000 GP gem, and you'd need to roll six 1s in a row - almost one in half a million odds, in total.)

Without getting too much into the math, OD&D gems wind up averaging about 440 GP each. This is heavily inflated by outliers, but that is the reality of gems in the game: you get one 5000 GP gem and it also skews a PC's XP total rather nicely. Over one percent of gems will be so valuable, so they are rare but possible in-game events, too. (Whereas maybe two in a million will be worth 500K.)

The Holmes edition contains a reworked gem table that changes two factors. First, it lowers the chances of high value gems, skewing the whole situation toward lower values. Second, it caps the value of increases at 1000 GP. The net effect is that, in Holmes, the value of the average gem declines to under 250 GP. This is quite a letdown, even though the rationale for removing gem values over 1000 in Holmes is sound: they could take the PCs clear past level 3 and out of the basic set's purview.

Moldvay uses the same modified table as Holmes, but has no increase rolls. This further simplification shaves another 50 or so GP off the average gem, leaving it a few GP under 200. At this point we are less than half what we had in OD&D, and all through some evidently minor fiddling with the numbers of the chart.

In play, this makes gems in an OD&D dungeon a very desirable commodity, since their values tend to run higher (and since, in OD&D, you tend to find 1d6 gems rather than a single gem at a time). Gems are already the second best treasure in the game, after jewelry; after all, if one gem weighs the same as one gold piece but is worth five hundred, that makes a huge dent on encumbrance relative to value. In OD&D, it's worth taking a determined effort to specifically find gems in a dungeon. In Holmes and Moldvay, because their value is so much lower on average, it's not really worth seeking them out after level 1.

Also, I think that the removal of the 5000+ GP gem values takes out a bit of the excitement of finding a treasure hoard. By allowing for that possibility in a GP-for-XP game, OD&D makes it really possible that an individual treasure will get some low level characters up in level in a single adventure. It also allows for some really impressive physical specimens - after all, isn't a lot of the joy of treasure hunting not just finding some average jewels but a massive pearl or ruby? If you can't find a diamond like the one in the film Titanic (which I figure would be in the 100,000-500,000 GP range), I think it diminishes gems as a vital part of the hoard.

Mashup: Holmes D&D and Metamorphosis Alpha

I love the Holmes rulebook, and I often wonder why I have so much affection for it. Part of it is simply that Dave Sutherland cover; the art is not polished but it is completely evocative, both in color and in the monochrome blue. (I particularly love the blue book look.)

But it's the potential in the incomplete work that draws me in. The Holmes booklet allows the DM to run a few games of D&D, but not a full campaign. Meepo's Companion is an easy fix, and fills out levels 4 through 9 in just four pages. From that basis, unorthodox "supplements" to the Holmes rulebook are one of my favorite thought experiments. It allows you to have a basis that is 100% classic Dungeons & Dragons, but change everything outside that core and create something totally different.

Of course, it helps that TSR published something totally different from D&D just a year before Holmes Basic. Just re-released as a super-deluxe book by Goodman Games, Metamorphosis Alpha is a wild game of exploration in a generation starship that has gone horribly wrong. Radiation killed most of the people on board, and the survivors have reverted to barbarism. There are weird animal mutants, deadly plants and high-tech weapons and gadgets abounding in the setting. It's a decided alternative to the stereotypical post-nuclear apocalypse world that, for instance, appears in Jim Ward's later Gamma World. MA gives nigh-magical powers through mutations, and cares not for hard science.

The games are both focused on exploration, and as such make a natural pairing. The mutants and high technology of MA are excellent variants on the overly-familiar fantasy tropes supported in Dungeons & Dragons, while D&D's framework is fundamentally similar to MA's, to the point where MA has been called a "megadungeon in space." And while MA has some wild and awesome ideas, D&D is more of a sustainable campaign game.

MA's system is very nearly in scale with classic D&D, and uses similar systems of armor, weapon, and hit dice. Its characters don't advance, and get hit points as a direct function of Constitution (1d6 per point). This is similar to an eighth level D&D fighting-man using the Holmes Companion, so it stands to reason that the tougher MA creatures will be at the lower dungeon levels, with only a scattering of mutants in the first levels. Jim Ward's game is notoriously tough, and even with D&D levels and spells it's still not a walk in the park.

Look at the Tom Wham "Skull Mountain" dungeon layout:

This is a perfect fit for a D&D/MA mashup. I picture the early levels being fairly straightforward D&D type affairs, with hints of more – a stray mutant or two, a piece of inexplicable technology here and there. Then level 4A is the first level with serious numbers of Metamorphosis Alpha style mutations as well as D&D monsters, while 4B focuses on some of the tougher "fantasy" baddies. Then the 5th and 6th levels have some serious high-tech artifacts as well as some of the humanoid mutations of MA, and progressively meaner creatures. Finally the 7th level - the "Domed City" - is a high tech city straight out of Metamorphosis Alpha. A twist suggested by Zach H of Zenopus Archives is to have the whole of Skull Mountain be aboard MA's Starship Warden.

I like this setup because it takes TSR's two "lightest" rulesets, and links them together in what I feel is a largely organic way. For instance, it would be perfectly fun to have PCs roll up a Radiation Resistance score the very first time they actually encounter radiation. Mental Resistance can be converted from Wisdom, and Leadership from Charisma. And it merges the "big reveal" style of MA with the "secret at the heart of the dungeon" aspect that D&D always promises but it turns out to be a chute to China.

(If you read that link, or if you know your classic Dragon magazines, you know that Gygax did send PCs to the Warden; here we are talking about the opposite, using MA as the "reveal" at the deeper levels of D&D.)

The mashup has some great potential for chocolate/peanut butter type mixtures. First, factions in a large-scale dungeon transition naturally into some of the classic MA bad guys: wolfoids and androids, particularly, are classic MA villains. Technology, particularly Brian Blume's Bionics table from The Dragon (Jeff Rients reproduced it here) could be a lot of fun when applied to D&D monsters. Imagine a hobgoblin with a bionic arm, or a hyper-intelligent ogre with bionic eyes and brain. Mutations, too – I mean, come on, you can have kobolds that fire frickin' lasers from their eyes. Meanwhile the D&D magic items gain particular effect in MA; after all, think of the power of a single Ring of Animal Control over the mutated beasts of MA. Not to mention the visual of, say, a bearoid wielding a flaming sword.

Part of why I think I'm enjoying this particular blend of sci-fi and fantasy over the more sword and planet ideas I've explored in the past is that it's a very human-centric game, and rooted firmly in RPG history. It also lives up to the sci-fi elements that were present in the original edition of D&D but disappeared shortly thereafter. I like it enough that I think it's worth pursuing further and looking at some of the places where the two games intersect in the most interesting ways.

A Missing Link: A Miniature Megadungeon

(A brief edit to note: This is officially my 300th post on this blog. Wow.)

Zach Howard at the Zenopus Archives has managed to surprise us again, this time showing the original cross-section of Holmes's sample dungeon. Take a look and come back, I'll be talking about the hand-drawn image a good bit.

This little diagram is a master class in the "megadungeon in miniature." It condenses into 3 levels most of the principal ideas that underlie the Gygaxian megadungeon. There are multiple entrances, multiple connections between levels, different types of terrain, sloping passages, and generally everything you'd want from a complex dungeon, all in three neat levels. None of which is to disregard Tom Wham's great Skull Mountain diagram, but Holmes manages to do a lot with a few levels.

We come to two entrances on separate hills. This creates an interesting choice right off the bat. There might be something low-level like goblins or kobolds guarding the hillside entrance, but the descent into the mine is obviously the deeper way down. It's a good idea to let the rumor tables give a hint that the mine shaft to level 2 is a way down to more difficult monsters than the hillside cave.

In level 1 we're about equidistant from the two ways down. The level below the ladder has one of the long, gradual slopes that Gygax was fond of, and a party may reasonably be surprised when they go up a level of stairs and are still on the second level. Holmes's original wandering monster tables, drawn from Supplement I: Greyhawk, might give us a good idea of what kinds of threats lurk in each of them. Given how many humans with levels there are, it either suggests that the dungeon has a significant human faction, or is actively plied by rival adventuring parties. Either choice is interesting.

I really love those two carved-out areas by the mine shaft. They just have a ton of potential for mischief. As soon as I saw them I was envisioning a nasty monster swooping out as the PCs try to go down (or up) the ladder and causing all kinds of havoc. Or they could be rooms that are rigged with nasty traps, maybe something explosive, or a simple arrow trap that happens to knock the PC a long way down to the dungeon floor below. Or one of them could have a treasure visible, but a monster or a trap nearby that will turn the PCs' avarice into their undoing.

The third level's relative size suggests it should be a nice, big, sprawling level with lots of rooms and interesting tricks. Then there's the cave, and I have to admit if it had a lake indicated it'd be exactly after my heart. As it stands, the cave feels like it should really be the lair of a dragon as the culmination of the whole adventure (and a justification for the game being "Dungeons & Dragons"). It would really make the whole thing a summation of D&D in three levels.

It doesn't have the domed city and the great stone skull of Wham's drawing, but Holmes's original sketch points to a dungeon that can be played in the three character levels suggested by his rule book, and still give you the megadungeon experience. There's no reason the weird and cool stuff we've talked about previously can't be on these three levels, and Wham's drawing really only gives us an extra two or three true "levels" (counting 2 and 2A, the entrance cave as "one up", and the cave separate from the third normal dungeon level). What I think using a dungeon like this does is gives just enough of the complex elements without going into "megadungeon fatigue" that modern games often run into. By the time the players are bored with runs into the same dungeon, they're finished.

From that perspective, this is the missing link between the megadungeon and the smaller types that came to dominate the scene after the mid-1970s. You could describe this in a relatively short module but have months of play material come out of it. The only published dungeon that really comes close to this is Caverns of Thracia, whose reputation should tell you how great of a dungeon I think this could be turned into.

What are D&D and the OSR? - A Couple of Reactions

A couple of quotes have made me want to write a kneejerk reaction. I don't like blogging from kneejerks but I think these make some good places to hang points I'd like to make.

John Wick said some dumb things in a blog post. But one of them is actually worth responding to.

The first four editions of D&D are not roleplaying games. You can successfully play them without roleplaying.

Which of course is nonsense. The term "role-playing game" was invented by people trying to describe what happened when they were playing Dungeons & Dragons. Any definition which doesn't include D&D is, prima facie, wrong.

But I'm going to submit that Holmes D&D – which definitely fits in the "first four editions" – is actually a really good roleplaying game, by Wick's criteria. You see, Holmes wrote on page 11 that monsters don't necessarily attack, but instead reactions should be determined on the reaction chart lifted from OD&D. Strictly speaking, this chart in OD&D is used to determine monster reactions to an offer made by the PCs, but Holmes changes it so that it refers directly to encounter reactions. This means that some monsters encountered in the Holmes edition of the game will be "friendly" and involve some negotiation. If the referee chooses to ignore that, it's not the D&D game's fault; it told the players to roleplay, right there in the text.

In fact, I would submit that this makes D&D a really good roleplaying game. Roleplaying is not just play-acting your character; it's negotiation as part of a strategy for surviving in a ridiculously lethal dungeon and getting out with treasure. By the book, in Holmes D&D, roleplaying is a required part of the game and, in fact, is a really good strategy. If you keep negotiating there is a 50/50 chance that you will get a positive result. The worst thing that can happen is that you're forced to fight.

Did people play D&D that way? A lot of them didn't. But a lot of people don't play Monopoly by the rules, either. It's just what happens when you have a really popular game. But D&D is distinctly a roleplaying game, even if you don't play it that way.

Then there's Ron Edwards, who makes a wonderful flamebait comment in an interview on the Argentine blog Runas Explosivas.

"Old school" is a marketing term and is neither old nor an identifiable single way to play (school).

In his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens pithily described his use of old school as "a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young." It's part of why old school gaming has always been somewhat associated with the grognards, named after Napoleon's veterans who were infamous for grumbling, even to l'Empereur himself. People misunderstand "old school" to mean "the way that people played back in 197x or 198x" when it really means a re-emphasizing of certain "classic" tropes and ideas, including adventure design, mechanics, and play style.

The marketing aspect is interesting. I almost want to agree with it, in that it's primarily a label for people and products to denote that they are oriented to the "old school," but I disagree with its cynicism. The community aspect of the OSR, from blogs to G+ and the associated forums, has been probably more important overall than the marketing. You can bicker and argue over whether it's one single thing or a lot of things, but what you can't argue is that there are a lot of people in a network creating and consuming content.

Honestly the rest of Ron's interview isn't really worth much response. The OSR isn't that close to most Forge stuff when you get down to brass tacks. What happens in the game play experience is simply too different. Back in his heyday, Ron called the classic era of D&D a period of cargo cults, while I find it to have been far more creative and unrestrained. (That essay also contains his total misunderstanding of Gygax and Arneson, and application of the "Big Model" to their D&D.)

It's unfortunate, after eight years of doing this, that we are still at a high point of misunderstanding old school D&D from people who ought to know better. I've always found that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and old school D&D is a real thing, and in the OSR period it's been great roleplaying.

Talking Blue Book D&D: Ability Scores

I haven't talked for a while about Blue Book D&D, my name for a fusion of Holmes Basic D&D with Cook/Marsh Expert. But lately it's been on my mind, and I've thought more about cleaning it up and solidifying it for my own future games.

Specifically I've been thinking a lot lately about tweaks to ability scores. Holmes is minimal with bonuses, copying OD&D's Dexterity and Constitution bonuses, but increasing the Constitution bonuses to hit points at 17 and 18. Moldvay, meanwhile, sets out with the standardized thresholds: 13-15 for +1, 16-17 for +2, and 18 for +3, with corresponding penalties on the low side.

But Moldvay's attribute curve is misleading. One +1 is not the same as another, if the first bonus is on 1d6 and the second bonus is on 1d20. +1 to 1d6 is 16.67%, while +1 to 1d20 is only 5%. This has a distorting effect, particularly with Strength where damage bonuses go as high as +25% (for daggers and such that deal 1d4 damage).

OD&D has a schema hidden within it. Constitution gives -1 hit point per die (d6) at 6, and +1 at 15. These are the same distance, 3 units, from the median range of 9-12. Dexterity gives -1 to hit with missile weapons (d20) at 8, and +1 at 13. Again, these are equidistant from the median range. This is an interesting rule of thumb, and I think it's a good one for Blue Book.

So, Wisdom can give a bonus to save versus spells, just as in Moldvay, but it only gives +1 at 13 and -1 at 8. This gives Wisdom some role mechanically that it lacks in Holmes.

Strength is a thornier matter. If we have it give bonuses to hit and damage, the logical places are for a bonus to-hit at 13, a bonus to damage at 15, and penalties at 8 and 6, respectively. The difference is that 13 Constitution doesn't already grant a bonus, and 8 Constitution gives no penalty, so it seems fairer to move the second bonus 1 unit further away: +1 damage at 16 Strength, and -1 at 5.

This happens to dovetail nicely with Supplement I: Greyhawk, up to 16 anyway. But Greyhawk goes nuts and gives +2/+2 at 17 and +2/+3 at 18 - with a chance that the 18 Strength fighter's bonuses can go even higher. I don't like that so much. I'd rather follow a slower pattern, and give +2 to hit at 17, and +2 to damage at 18. That's idiosyncratic, but I think it works better for me.

My rationale behind this is the observation that Holmes fighters are way underpowered compared to Moldvay fighters, due mainly to strength, but I don't care for either the Moldvay or Greyhawk strength charts. Mine is simpler, and fits right in the sweet spot for me.

One of my least favorite additions is Greyhawk's modification of Armor Class by Dexterity score. It actually was supposed to represent an active parry, and only apply versus one opponent per round. But this addition wound up changing the definition of Dexterity; it stopped being a measure of hand-eye coordination and nimbleness of fingers, and became a measure of general agility. That doesn't really make sense, though; the two aspects are not firmly linked, and it's not a coincidence that Caltech's Warlock rules added Agility as a separate ability score. D&D never followed suit. But I'm not for using Dex to modify AC.

(This is one of the reasons I like Blue Book conceptually; it's easier to add than to subtract, and since Blue Book assumes Holmes, I can get rid of Dexterity bonus to armor class just by not adding it in the first place.)

Which leaves Charisma. Holmes says that Charisma is supposed to modify the reaction roll. OK, great! But how? He doesn't say. Moldvay actually breaks from his standard here and gives an OD&D-like +1 for 13-17 and +2 for 18, with corresponding -2 for 3 and -1 for 4-8. This is the one place where Moldvay ability scores actually go along well with the dice roll type, since +2 on 2d6 is a very significant boost.

Now, that's a lot of thought to give a few ability score bonuses. But I really think it's worth figuring it all out. As I've run a good bit of older D&D, I feel like Blue Book D&D is really very close to what my sweet spot is for the game rules, and it's really a question of tuning all the elements so the game works just like I want it to.

Some World-Building

Image from Wikimedia Commons

In addition to my B/X campaign, I've been working on some concepts for a combination of a world setting and a megadungeon. But it's a bit different from what I've been doing previously. I want to talk a bit about where I'm thinking of going in terms of world creation, theme and influences.

A big thing thematically that I want to achieve with this setting is to do a world that is, at the same time, both recognizable as Dungeons & Dragons, and isn't at all a generic fantasy setting. Hence the deinonychus above.

What I'd really like to get down is a science fantasy world that doesn't have a gonzo, crazy-go-nuts feel. I know that's an odd balance to hit when your goal is wizards and laser rifles, but I feel that it's a time-honored part of Dungeons & Dragons that should still be able to take itself with a modicum of seriousness. Part of that is doing things like dinosaurs but having them be scary rather than wacky. Again, hence deinonychus.

The basic assumption of the Dungeons & Dragons setting is that it's a pseudo-medieval world. I'm not going with that, although the PCs still look and act basically the same. The underlying idea is that the main human civilization are themselves literally aliens. The world that the PCs (well, their ancestors) come from is a high-magic world with all of the standard fantasy trimmings. They no longer live there. During the magical equivalent of a global thermonuclear war, the Second Empire opened a gate to another world. The first brave and hardy settlers had wizards helping them; much of their resources and knowledge were lost, but fragments remain. Now it is two centuries later, and the human realm (name TBD) has gone into a semblance of normal life.

So there are several sources of monsters. One is the other civilizations of the world that the humans came into; at this point the one they have the most contact with are lizardmen, who live in a vast swampy kingdom to the south of the human settlement. They have some weird technology, mostly a mix of found tech from previous civilizations – nothing orderly and modern, but enough that humans pose no fundamental threat to them.

As to the megadungeon itself, it's a multi-level dungeon that happens to be built near the ruined and long-since buried capital of an Atlantis style civilization, a mix of high technology and high magic. There are tribes of primitive blue-skinned humans living underground, the descendants of the last survivors of this world; they are savage and have no memory of their lost homeland, only a sort of religious worship of some of its artifacts.

I want to play a lot with megafauna in this setting, both dinosaurs and giant creatures. I'm particularly inspired by this description from Holmes's manuscript (reproduced on the Zenopus Archives):

Giant rats, spiders, scorpions and other horrors are naturals for dungeons. The Dungeon Master should adjust the monster's hit dice to the depth below the surface and assign a suitable armor class. These creatures fight ferociously, have special abilities, and there are many interesting possibilities.

I really love that bit about "have special abilities." Yes, you know what a fire beetle is in a standard D&D world, but the beetles in this world might be based on the bombardier beetle.

Future posts will talk more about this as I flesh out the world and solidify more of its aspects. But I'd be interested in reading what thoughts and ideas folks have for developing this kind of setting while keeping it feeling like a more or less logical world, not a zany mish-mash.

Reconstructing Holmesian Combat

The Holmes "Blue Book" rules are well known as the original "Basic" rules for D&D, a bridge between OD&D and what we now know as the "classic" line – B/X, BECMI and Rules Cyclopedia D&D. They also have assorted references to AD&D, although few rules actually reference the advanced version in anything more than a one-liner.

Over the last few months, the Zenopus Archives have been excavating a typed manuscript that Holmes had turned over to TSR, before (relatively arbitrary) changes were made to the original. You can read the whole series here; it has gotten up to the monster section and is revealing that the original picks were a bit more diverse and OD&D-inspired.

But here I want to focus on Holmes's combat system, because it kind of went astray in the TSR version. The blue book is infamous for a rule that makes daggers super-weapons and two-handed swords virtually useless. It also makes fighters (always d6 damage) less useful than most monsters, who do variable damage. But this turns out not to be how Holmes actually intended it. Instead we find that Holmes didn't actually include damage in his monster listings and assumed that everything had 1d6 for damage and for hit dice. This draws things even and actually puts a first level fighter at a slight advantage over the orc, particularly if said fighter has a high Constitution score. Statistically it works out about the same as OD&D's 1d6+1 hit points for the fighter at first level.

Order of combat was based on Dexterity just as in the published blue book. Zenopus points out the OD&D basis of this rule, although Holmes used it more strictly than the OD&D FAQ implies. But where it gets really interesting is in Holmes's description of the melee round. He described it precisely - "Each round consists of an exchange of two blows with ordinary weapons." When this was excised from the blue book as printed by TSR, it made a muddle of the dagger rules, which simply followed normal weapons such as the sword in striking twice. Two-handed weapons and missile weapons only went once in a Holmes round.

This is a much more workable system than the published blue book, which slowed two-handed weapons down to 1 strike per 2 rounds, while leaving daggers at full speed. It also has a number of interesting implications. First, it makes melee combat quite powerful in comparison to using spells and special abilities, since the latter goes off only once in a round; melee characters are working twice as fast as their spellcasting counterparts. Second, it makes parrying an attractive option: a PC can opt to make two strikes in a round, or one strike and a parry, or even to do a double parry.

An interesting wrinkle is that TSR added the concept that shields do not count toward AC when retreating; it's a rather cumbersome rule that seems more in line with some AD&D combat than basic or OD&D. Also, through some analysis of the examples of combat, Zenopus comes to the conclusion that magic-users can't cast spells the round after they are struck in combat. This follows a rough order of spells, missile fire, then two bouts of melee.

This is one of the more interesting combat systems devised for D&D. It needs some tweaking, particularly in the case of morale, and it needs a rule to make two-handed weapons worthwhile, but it's got significant advantages over the system presented in the published blue book. The double melee attacks per round and parry rules make for some rich tactical choices, and create the potential to expand to extra attacks at higher levels without throwing everything out of whack. You can give fighters 3 attacks for every 2 of lower level opponents, without it seeming absurd or doing AD&D's odd alternating. It would also work well with claw/claw/bite type attack routines that the Monster Manual is fond of without making the monsters using it unbeatable attack machines. At the same time, it preserves the simplicity of OD&D's d6 based damage and hit dice, without making fighters underpowered. Moldvay fighters are much better than their blue book counterparts, but in the original Holmes combat system they actually come out looking pretty good.

Once Zenopus's series is done, I think this may create the basis for a really robust set of Blue Book D&D house rules, which I could see becoming a go-to for my future games.

On Holmesian Initiative

WHO GETS THE FIRST BLOW?

When two figures are brought into position 10 scale feet (or less) apart they may engage in melee. The character with the highest dexterity strikes first. If the Dungeon Master does not know the dexterity of an attacking monster he rolls it on the spot. Subject to the limitation of heavy weapons the two figures exchange blows in turn until the melee is resolved. If dexterities are within 1 or 2 points of each other, a 6-sided die is rolled for each opponent, and the higher score gains initiative — first blow.

Attackers who surprise an opponent or who approach him from behind always get the first blow. Characters who are wounded continue to strike valiantly until they are killed or the melee ends in their favor, unless they choose to break off the combat and flee. If combat is broken off, the fleeing party must accept an attack without any return on his part, the attacker adding +2 to his die roll for hit probability, and the armor class of the fleeing party can not include a shield.

- Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, Edited by J. Eric Holmes

The initiative rules above comprise the relatively simple "Dexterity based" rules from Holmes. It leads to a situation where combat takes place in a relatively static order, with each player announcing what they do in order by Dexterity. But as I've been thinking about it, the rule could actually work better in practice than the OD&D FAQ method of simply rolling off (which was duplicated in AD&D with some complications, and without them in Moldvay).

First: there is the question of monster Dexterity scores, which can be cumbersome to deal with. But monsters already have scores which are roughly on the scale of Dexterity - simply multiplied by 10 - in their Movement rates. In fact, this is probably the biggest utility those rates will have; chases are rarer than fights and it gives fast monsters a much more significant advantage. It's also less arbitrary than rolling Dexterity for a given monster. So the rule of thumb is movement rate divided by 10.

Second: This system works best if you treat every melee as an individual conflict. Rather than simply raffling through Dexterity scores each round, the referee should note which combatant went first and proceed through each mini-melee on the field. Dexterity is only referenced, and dice only rolled for ties, when first engaging an opponent. So three fighting-men taking on four orcs will be considered three separate melees, with the fourth orc having to compare Dexterity scores with the warrior he is going up against. But if a cleric arrives and wants to go up against the fourth orc, they compare scores again.

Third: For reasons of tension and balance, I think spell-casting should always be subject to a roll-off, and being hit in a round should stop a spell from being cast for the rest of the round. So if a magic-user is trying to Sleep a group of goblins, the one who reaches him can roll off to see whether it can try to attack the M-U and disrupt his spell. This accomplishes the goal that Gygax was getting at with AD&D initiative without the enormous difficulty.

Fourth: Note the attack of opportunity in the Holmes rules. It's worth noting that this actually accomplishes everything the 3.x rules were trying to do, again with far less complication. Let's say a fighting-man is trying to guard a magic-user behind him. An orc tries to sneak by and whack the magic-user. The fighter can try to enter melee with the orc, and if his Dexterity is 12 he gets a roll-off; if it's higher he enters melee with the orc. In those cases, if the orc tries to get to the magic-user and hit him, he has withdrawn from combat with the fighter and takes an attack at -2. So this really makes guarding a character or objective a function of initiative, which makes sense. Fighting-men are guards, but if only if they're fast enough and not already engaged.

Finally: When expanding Holmes, I think one of the natural moves is to give fighting-men extra attacks at higher levels. These can be treated as if the fighting-man is in melee against two separate creatures. So if a fighting-man at 5th level with 10 Dexterity is fighting an orc (MV 120 for Dex 12) and an ogre (MV 90 for Dex 9), the orc goes before him, but he goes before the ogre each time. If he had Dex 12, he would roll off once (for him versus the orc) and always go before the ogre.

With these points in mind, I think Holmes initiative can be the most straightforward way to run initiative in classic D&D. I'd still avoid the weapon speed rules which are a crude version of what wound up in AD&D, but it's worth using initiative with the tweaks.

Moldvay and Holmes, and Fighters

I've been running games using the Moldvay basic set recently, and using the variable weapon damage rules therein, which are basically similar to the ones found in Supplement I: Greyhawk except that Moldvay doesn't differentiate between damage to small, medium and large creatures.

In Moldvay at least, variable weapon damage enforces the use of swords. A Moldvay sword (or a Greyhawk or AD&D one) does 1d8 damage, or 4.5 damage on average. Since an average 1 HD monster has 4.5 hp, the Moldvay fighter with a sword will kill it in one successful hit (this is enhanced by the likelihood of +1 or more to damage due to Strength). In Holmes the monster hp amounts are the same, but the fighter will only do 3.5 points of damage to it (1d6), leaving it 1 hp.

With Holmes, an orc has AC 7 and the fighting-man hits it on a 12 or better (45% of the time). Moldvay orcs have AC 6, but an average fighter should have Strength between 13 and 15 (due to additional points from other scores) and likewise hits on a 12 or better. On the whole, a fighter should hit an orc every other round. So the Holmes fighting-man should kill an orc in 4 rounds, while the Moldvay fighter takes closer to 2. If we assume that the average fighter has 4.5 HP and AC 4 (chain+shield) and the orc does 3.5 damage, the Holmes fighting-man is likely to win with 1 hit point left, while the Moldvay fighter has a good chance of getting out without a scratch.

The Holmes rules are fairly pitiless for our fighting-man. There's a lower chance of Constitution bonuses to hit dice, no Dexterity modifier to armor class, and no Strength bonuses to hit or to damage. A Holmesian fighting-man with scores of 13 in each score has only a Dexterity bonus to hit with missile weapons, while a Moldvay fighter with 13s in all three scores has +1 to hit, damage, AC and hit points. Plus, the Moldvay fighter's sword does d8 while the Holmes fighter's does only d6.

Looking at this situation, where I've said before that Holmes is clearly the magic-user's favored system, Moldvay seems to favor the oft-overlooked fighter. But one simple tweak could change the whole game: running Holmes, which is strongly rooted in OD&D, with d6 for hit dice. The earliest printings of the rulebook didn't have this, per Zenopus Archives, and without following it we find our Holmes fighting-man is much more capable. Now he kills orcs at the same rate as his Moldvay counterpart, and we didn't need to use Strength bonuses or variable damage.

The side effect of this is that clerics, who can't use swords, find themselves more or less at parity with fighters at low levels. Of course, clerics advance more slowly in fighting, and more importantly they can't use magic swords - which are far and away the most common magic weapons. The parity is sort of a good thing, though, considering how few spells clerics get at lower levels; it's sort of like they start off even but fighters branch off to more fighty stuff while clerics go towards more cleric-type doings.

The other advantage that Holmes has is that it's not locked into the B/X ruleset which does not feature multiple attacks. Pretty much any multiple-attack rules the referee chooses can be worked more easily into Holmes, using 4th level ("Hero") as the trigger point. So while Moldvay does have advantages for the fighter, Holmes is probably more amenable to being tweaked in the right direction.

Arnesonian Magic System

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In First Fantasy Campaign, Dave Arneson describes in a brief thumbnail the original magic system he used in what would become Dungeons & Dragons.

In Blackmoor, magic followed the "Formula" pattern for most magic. The reason behind limiting the number of spells that a Magic User could take down into the Dungeon was simply that many of the ingredients had to be prepared ahead of time, and of course, once used were then powerless. Special adventures could then be organized by the parties to gain some special ingredients that could only be found in some dangerous place.

Progression reflected the increasing ability of the Magic User to mix spells of greater and greater complexity. Study and practice were the most important factors involved. A Magic User did not progress unless he used Spells, either in the Dungeon or in practice (there was no difference) sessions. Since there was always the chance of failure in spells (unless they were practiced) and materials for some spells were limited (determined simply by a die roll) the Magic User did not just go around practicing all the time. The Magic User could practice low level spells all the time, cheaply and safely, but his Constitution determined how often he could practice without rest. Thus, the adventurers might want a Magic User to come with them only to find him lying exhausted.

So to progress to a new level, one first learned the spells, and then got to use that spell. There was no automatic progression, rather it was a slow step by step, spell by spell progression.

It strikes me that this is not entirely gone from OD&D - magic-users preparing scrolls (only at wizard level) for 100 GP/level at a rate of 1 week/level seems to take a page from Arneson's non-Vancian style of preparation. Holmes took it even closer by allowing scroll creation at first level, following the same rules as OD&D. By the book, you could actually get pretty close to Arneson's spell system right there.

Taking a step back, the Vancian system is one that has survived not so much out of sentiment but because it is dead simple to use in a game. Like hit points and armor class, the specific rationale is second to the fact that the system is very effective in game. It limits the magic-user in a readily defined fashion and keeps the bookkeeping manageable.

For many players, though, Vancian casting is a weird limitation. It requires tactical choice, which is good, but very little flexibility. Once out of spells, the MU is useless. A lot of alternative systems such as spell points try to alleviate this by making the MU super-flexible. But with this advantage the game tilts entirely in favor of the spellcasters, who already get powerful at high levels with Vancian casting.

I like Arneson's concept because it invokes a bit more resource management than traditional Vanciancasting. A spell is not just an investment of a spell slot, but is a permanent resource bought with money and/or effort, and available to the magic-user as long as he or she is alive. The decision to use or not use a prepared spell is one that has lasting consequences and cannot be idly cast just to use up a spell for the day.

To use this I think the OD&D pricing is a good start. The prices are about right where an MU will not suddenly become super-powerful, and the referee might give a free spell or two at the game's start to speed things along. Also, an alternative method of preparing spells from ingredients that the MU has to search for at low levels might be a natural source of adventure fodder. The spell components for AD&D are one possibility, as are randomly determined components a la Arneson.

In practice, then: spells would cost 100 GP/level, but take only 1 day/level to prepare. The trade-off is that more spells can be prepared than could be cast. Magic-users would have alternative but difficult methods of finding ingredients. A spell, once cast, is used up. Beginning characters would have 2 spells already prepared. Characters can only cast spells of levels they would be able to cast per the OD&D Magic-User chart (i.e. level 2 at 3rd, etc). I'm also thinking that after some time a spell could start to go unstable.

Has anybody used this kind of system? Any thoughts on potential side effects? Maybe some differentiation in the pricing?

Blue Book and B/X: Magic-User Spells

I want to start to examine Blue Book D&D and see where it differs from B/X D&D with the Moldvay set. I'll start with Magic-User spells, since they have some meaty differences.

Holmes has several more spells. At first level, Dancing Lights and Enlargement are added to the list. At second level, we gain Audible Glamer, Darkness (a reverse Light), Magic Mouth, Pyrotechnics, Ray of Enfeeblement, and Strength. Also, Tenser's Floating Disc uses Tenser's name in Holmes where it doesn't in Moldvay.

Charm Person is much more powerful in Holmes, because the ranges wind up being longer for most Intelligence scores. Light in Holmes lacks specific rules about being cast at a creature's eyes, leaving this as a ruling for the referee to make. Magic Missile is superficially worse because it needs a roll to hit. But Holmes only wrote "Higher level magic-users fire more than one missile," and it's never expanded on in the Cook/Marsh Expert set, so the spell could allow more missiles than in Greyhawk and Moldvay. So a house rule that would make the spell more useful would be one missile for every three levels beyond first, getting your second missile at 4th level - and making it a pretty useful spell at higher levels.

Protection from Evil has the same function in Holmes and Moldvay, but in Holmes it's a better spell because it doesn't explicitly break if the caster attacks a monster. Read Magic lasts two turns instead of one turn. Sleep works differently in Moldvay than Holmes. In Holmes, if creatures are up to 1+1 HD, then 2d8 creatures are put to sleep; if they are up to 2+1 HD, it's 2d6 creatures; if they are up to 3+1 HD, 1d6 creatures, and for 4+1 HD, only one creature is put to sleep. In Moldvay there are 2d8 hit dice worth of creatures unless the creature is 4+1 HD, in which case it is only one. The probabilities work out fairly similar and Moldvay's way is simpler, but Holmes's has the OD&D pedigree.

Continual Light is the same as Light in both versions, with the same addition in Moldvay. Holmes is less philosophical about evil for Detect Evil, presumably because that edition actually has an evil alignment - although it still is detecting "evil thought or evil intent," not alignment as such. Interestingly Moldvay adds traps to poison as not being evil. There aren't a lot of restrictions on ESP in Holmes about concentrating a full turn or getting thoughts jumbled up, but otherwise the spells work the same, so it's simpler for Holmes.

Invisibility in Holmes is again better - you can cast a spell without breaking it, so long as you don't "strike a blow." Clearly the referee has some leeway on this, but by default it's not as restrictive. In Holmes, Levitate can be cast on another character, while in Moldvay it can't. Motion in Holmes is also 60' per turn up, where in Moldvay it's only 20' up or down. Mirror Image is one of the few spells that got better in Moldvay, where it specifies that an attack on the caster always hits an image instead. Holmes has no such stipulation, just that each image disappears if hit.

Holmes's Phantasmal Forces is the magnificent spell from OD&D, which does real damage if it is believed, and has none of the saving throw jibber-jabber, although a living creature touching it will dispel it. Web works about the same in both Holmes and Moldvay but covers twice the area (10'x10'x20' instead of 10'x10'x10') - not coincidentally that should be two dungeon blocks on a 10' map instead of one.

From a spellcaster's perspective, Holmes (which frequently follows the LBBs although often adding bits and pieces to them) offers mostly stronger spells than Moldvay. In Moldvay there is more of a tendency to spell out exact consequences, which in my opinion really takes spells like Phantasmal Force(s) down in overall power. Between the scroll rules, the spell descriptions and the spell learning rules, Holmes makes magic-users a bit more powerful.

The thing I really enjoy about Holmes versus Moldvay is that Holmes was more reserved in his spell descriptions. This leaves a lot more room for player and referee creativity and interpretation. The wide-open nature of Phantasmal Forces versus its relatively tame Moldvay version is probably the most dramatic example, but Invisibility which I see as one of the most powerful M-U spells for a dungeon exploration game is also much more wide open.

Blue Book D&D

I've long had a love for Holmes basic D&D that is second only to my love of original D&D for inspiration. At the table, Holmes is simpler and cleaner in many ways, but it requires some expansion past 3rd level. The easiest way to do this is what I call "Blue Book" D&D - Holmes Basic plus the Cook/Marsh Expert rulebook.

This is discussed in the Expert book, but that takes the boring and prosaic route of overruling everything from Holmes with a quick Moldvay-like hack. I want to talk about another way to do it that doesn't take either 100%.

First: I prefer the Holmes attribute charts. They de-emphasize high attributes that most players with 3d6 stats won't have. However, I'd make three adjustments toward Moldvay. For Strength, 8 or less gives -1 to damage and 13 or more gives +1. For Wisdom, same thing for saving throws versus magic. And for Dexterity, no AC adjustment but apply the ranged modifier to initiative, which I'll get to. Intelligence, Constitution and Charisma work exactly as in Holmes. This gives each stat a use without making 18s the be-all and end-all.

Second: Keep the Holmes division of race and class, but allow players to be the Elf class from the Expert book. All the benefits of race-as-class without the drawbacks.

Third: I'd junk the Holmes 5-point alignment system. It's kludgy and I vastly prefer the 3-point alignment system, which Holmes even drops into when talking about "Lawful Werebears." But it has its defenders, who I would never begrudge their preference.

Fourth: All the scroll and spell learning rules in Holmes are drastically better than in Moldvay. For the rest of magical research, follow the rules on X51. These changes will make low-level magic-users much more useful.

Fifth: In combat, my current thought is individual 1d6 initiative with a Dexterity modifier equal to the ranged attack modifier. This saves the referee from having to roll Dexterity for every single monster, and is a synthesis of Holmes Dexterity-based initiative with B/X's 1d6 system. Variable weapon damage should be considered. While it's easier to roll a d6 for everything, players enjoy rolling their funky dice and monsters usually have damage listed anyway. Finally, parry from Holmes and morale and defensive movement from Expert round everything out. Most morale scores can be eyeballed by using a value from 6-10 depending on how "reliable" the referee thinks the monster should be.

Sixth: Follow Holmes in using only "Remove Trap" as a thief skill. "Find Trap" takes a whole lot of fun play straight out of the game, and the damn thing is a pathetic roll at low levels. Parties have a much better chance to find traps by actively searching a room than by the thief giving them a 10% chance.

Seventh: Elsewhere, let Holmes trump Expert, which fills in the blanks. If anything is missing, I would recommend going to the Ready Ref Sheets, which really complement Expert's wilderness rules quite well when you have to design an interesting locale on the fly.

Eighth: Print out this sheet from the Zenopus Archives, one for the referee and one per player. It's a great reference and will save a lot of page turning.

What I really love about Blue Book D&D is that the differences between the two books provoke choices, and in resolving those differences you wind up fine-tuning your own D&D. Whether you like or dislike race as class, or Dexterity-based initiative, or variable weapon damage, or Strength bonuses - it's all there, and you can pick the tools you like and leave the others behind. A whole range of classic D&D styles can be created just by interpreting how these two books go together.

Of course, from here I think there are a lot of interesting house rules to be made. But that's one way to start with Blue Book D&D.

Dungeon Crawl Updates

So a few updates on Dungeon Crawl, because that's just fun.

First: the Pay What You Want edition of Dungeon Crawl #2 is now in the hot items section of RPGNow! It's not selling for huge amounts of money, but it really means a lot to me that folks are responding and enjoying the content from this issue. The screencap to the right was taken from the RPGNow home page while I was writing this. Thank you to all the folks who've been purchasing this and especially to the great writers and artists who worked with me.

Second: the dungeon I was working on for Dungeon Crawl #3 is getting ... a bit out of hand. Initially it was a 2-faction dungeon with two levels, but now it's a 4-faction dungeon with three levels. Too big to fit into the magazine, at any rate, and I think it's going to define all of its own original creatures between giant animals, demonic rats, goat-headed men and a certain coleopterous species. So I will have to be spinning this off into its own release, and I'm still weighing options on how I want to publish it. If any publishers out there want a 32-page module designed for 3rd level PCs with demonic and Lovecraftian overtones, I'm working on one.

That leaves me without the biggest entry for the issue.

Third: I've decided what I want to do for a dungeon in issue #3. This goes along with the general Holmesian theme I've been going with lately. What I'm thinking now is to create a follow-up, in a fairly similar style of map and overall tone, to the Sample Dungeon on pages 40-44 of the Holmes rulebook. It's a good, open, exploratory dungeon with some interesting NPCs and unique encounters, and I think following it up with a slightly bigger level would be a great 1st/2nd level module.

I'm thinking that the second level of the sample dungeon (I'll probably call it "Beneath Port Town" so as not to use Portown as a name) should use some of the material that shows up in the Holmes text without being explicitly detailed, detailing them and providing them for the adventure. Also some tributes to the original (I'm thinking some remnant of a giant crab, etc) to tie it together more strongly.

So that's roughly where things are at. I'll keep updates on the blog on the progress of Beneath Port Town and the other dungeon as I have them. Also, please don't forget that submissions are still open through June 30 for Dungeon Crawl #3 material! Email me at wrossi81 at gmail dot com with your ideas.

More on Heroic Classes for Holmes

In my last post, I hinted at the idea of using expanded classes in Holmes Basic Dungeons & Dragons that only become available at 4th level. I don't like the term "prestige classes" because, to me, they speak of bloat and excess and character builds in 3.x D&D. Since in OD&D, 4th level equals Hero, I think that Heroic Classes is a more apt title.

The paladin in Supplement I: Greyhawk is, I feel, the archetypal heroic class. It has stringent requirements (17 Charisma, Lawful alignment, few magic items), and a fairly limited set of powers (lay on hands, immunity from disease, +2 to all saving throws, dispel evil at 8th level, Holy Sword, paladin's horse). This is a good template. I particularly like how the "dispel evil" ability is given at 8th (Superhero) level, since that firmly establishes a baseline of 2-3 abilities at Hero level, and another at Superhero.

Druids from Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry would also adapt well; they get a separate set of spells from spell level 2 onward, with the identify pure water / plants / animals and pass through abilities at 4th level, and their shape shift gets moved back to level 8 - when it will be powerful but not overwhelming.

As for a new heroic class, I kind of like the idea of an Alchemist for magic-users. This would be something of a specialist in the creation of magic items - focusing on temporary and rechargeable items at 4th level, and permanent ones at 8th. One thing that would go particularly well with this would be an "identify" ability as a base ability. Of course, making magic items would take significant time and effort, and possibly some hard-to-find items. This pairs particularly well with the Holmesian scroll-making capability.

I think this could work without going too far overboard. I think keeping it sharply limited to 3 abilities plus 1 at 8th is a good way to start. One way to balance things out may be to create different progressions for heroic and non-heroic class characters. Basically, if you're a paladin, you get your abilities but stick with your base fighter progression; if you stay as a basic fighter, you get extra attacks, which are a very big thing in older D&D as I've mentioned before.

Now, the one thing about all this is that it kind of means I need to actually write a Holmes Expert expansion. So there's that. At least I can limit it to 48 pages.

Nostalgia, Rules Choices, and Levels Beyond Third

Jeff Rients did an excellent post reviewing the rule book for basic D&D that I started with, the 1991 Black Box. This was the board game style release of D&D, in several ways: it came with a boardgame style map of "Zanzer's Dungeon" and stand-up counters, and it was the width of a board game instead of a smaller box. There's a certain whiff of nostalgia that gets me seeing that dragon leaping out of the cover that Jeff doesn't get, and rightly so - it's not a great piece of art. Still gets me, because I played through the Dragon Cards four or five times before I actually played D&D with a group, and played some of the other battlemat style adventures as solos. This reminds me of my very start.

What this brought up for me is the question of rules choices. You should know by now from reading this blog that my heart will always be torn; I love original D&D, but I don't run it day to day. I also have become very fond of the Holmes set despite not having started with it - which is honestly the most interesting bit for me, as I think there's an impression that the appeal of Holmes is largely driven by nostalgia. But a stripped-down simple core, to me, is just such a wonderful and elegant thing that I wouldn't mind saying I was going to run games primarily with Holmes from here on out, adding and removing different parts as necessary. S&W Complete gets good marks and I'll keep running it for my current game but my heart lies with Holmes and OD&D.

Part of the reason I think Holmes is so promising is that I think it goes exactly far enough with the game as is. Up until 3rd level, things are fairly set, and you have the low level D&D experience the way it's supposed to be. It's when you hit 4th level - and this is important, since it's "Hero" level - that the game becomes wide open. That gibes with me philosophically, that the game starts to shift when you hit Hero rank.

One later innovation that could really work well with this are the ability to get into specialized classes and abilities only after 4th level. I'm thinking something along the lines of BECMI Companion style Paladin / Knight / Avenger / Druid type subclasses, perhaps expanded a bit, but sharply limited in terms of scope - just a handful of abilities. One central point is that this streamlines character generation but leaves the possibility for more down the road, after the character's personality is more established. With the eleven AD&D classes, unless you dual-class, you're pretty much locked in. I think this would be an interesting direction for an "expanded Holmes" beyond just reincorporating OD&D or AD&D material.

As for the "Brown Basic" (which I prefer to think of as Black Box, both are BB D&D), I like the idea of reincorporating a couple of its minor rules. Bed rest restoring d4 instead of 1HP/day seems reasonable, as does the notion of an "Exhausted" penalty ("'Exhausted' foes are +2 to be hit, while you are -2 to hit if exhausted. I'm still looking for a rule on how you become exhausted.") And this is just fun: "Wooden doors can be burned or destroyed in 1d4 turns." There was a section I remember in the Dragon Cards that also introduced the Expert-style roll under stat on 1d20 for ability checks when players improvise.

Thoughts are welcome both on expanding Holmes after 3rd level and on Black Box D&D rules.

Little things

One thing that I've noticed recently in running Swords & Wizardry is a couple of the little things that have an impact on the game. I want to talk about one that comes from S&W and one based in the Holmes rules.

Swords & Wizardry gives fighters the benefit of extra attacks versus creatures with 1 hit die or less. This has a big impact, giving the fighter a serious advantage. Quantity of attacks really matters in old school D&D more than either hit dice or armor class, given how things average out. It also makes a much more significant gap between 1HD opponents and 2HD enemies, which I think I like: the bigger foes are more dire threats. Very interesting dynamic.

This is part of the key of old-school D&D, in whichever edition: if you play with too few PCs, you won't do well. People often look at the game's lethality, particularly in OD&D and "classic" (Holmes, B/X, BECMI, RC), as something that needs to be fixed - but it's fixed by sheer numbers. Quality of troops comes into it in certain ways, mainly in the ability to maintain those numbers, but Mike Mornard's core advice is correct. People wishing to survive the megadungeon should go into it with nine characters.

The other little tweak that's having a big impact is scroll creation, since I use the Holmes rules. It really gives magic-users a feel of not being useless until 5th level, and also helps "fix" their excess of wealth otherwise. The M-U in our Stonehell campaign has been using it for Sleep, which is great for avoiding fights where you're outnumbered.

A quirk of this that I've been thinking about is "inheritance." That is, once an M-U has made a scroll, it's there even if they die. This could come in particularly handy when a higher level M-U dies in the campaign with several scrolls in tact; a fresh replacement (1st level) would still be able to use, say, Web or Fireball or what you will at least once in a game.

So let's open this for conversation. What tweaks have you found to make a relatively big impact in your games?

Holmes on Options

On the OD&D community for BLUEHOLME (an excellent simulacrum available free here) I came across this article, a review by J. Eric Holmes of the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons boxed set edited by Tom Moldvay. It's mostly positive, but Holmes says this:

Character classes: Player characters are restricted to being a Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Magic-User, Elf, Halfling or Dwarf. This probably covers the roles most beginning players want to try, but I am personally sorry to see the range of possibilities so restricted. The original rules (the three little brown books) specifically stated that a player could be a dragon if he wanted to be, and if he started at first level. ... I enjoyed having dragons, centaurs, samurai and witch doctors in the game. My own most successful player character was a Dreenoi, an insectoid creature borrowed from McEwan’s Starguard. He reached fourth level (as high as any of my personal characters ever got), made an unfortunate decision, and was turned into a pool of green slime.

Holmes's own rulebook lived up to that in a minor way, where he talked about other AD&D classes such as witches, illusionists, paladins and assassins. I also like where he mentions "a lawful Werebear" - seeing as werecreatures were part of the early D&D scene.

But at the same time, the more proliferation you have of varied classes, the more you run the danger of getting bogged down in the details. I think the challenge with taking OD&D and Holmes Basic is to add variety to the game without crowding things with rules; even the supplement classes have a bit of bloat on them relative to the pure simplicity of the basic three of fighting-man, magic-user and cleric. The dragon and the Dreenoi give examples, as does the Werebear - these do not need new classes with convoluted mechanics to represent them. The key, I think, is in OD&D's exhortation to start small and work up.

The werebear, for instance, is immune to non-silver weapons, has HD 6 / AC 2 / Damage 3d6. Maybe a PC werebear is only able to transform once a day for limited time at low level, and the numbers start low and advance with level - until at 6th level, they're equal to what is listed. Further growth continues along similar lines.

Not that this is all hypothetical - I have issues of Alarums & Excursions with similar tables for various creatures. But I think it's a lost art, one of many that we have lost over the years, in favor of an approach of building out too many classes. I might write up rules for playing a werebear in the next issue of Dungeon Crawl as an example, and I'd be interested to know what folks have been doing in this regard if they're playing OD&D, Holmes or some other old-school game or clone.

As an aside - Holmes is either wrong or the essay is mildly revisionist. The original rules mention playing a balrog, not a dragon. This was excised in the sixth printing ("Original Collector's Edition") which is also the basis for the PDFs that were (however briefly) made available a few years back.