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Showing posts with the label AD&D

Ailments for the Poor Fighter

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I discussed the poverty of options for the poor fighter recently. And concluded that extra attacks seems to be the go-to solution for giving the fighter something extra. I think it's a poor solution. For one, I think breaking the action economy is generally undesirable. It makes it the impact of a lot of other bennies exponential, it slows down combat and adds tactical decision-points that mostly don't really add anything to the combat experience, other than the fighter being better than he was. I also think it is a bad fit for the low resolution of the D&D combat round. A round is already 6-60 seconds long (depending on edition) and we are supposed to understand that the attack roll and subsequent damage roll is the sum of a rally of blows exchanged. So how does extra attack fit into this? It seems to me a high-resolution manoeuvre retrofitted into a low-resolution attack sequence. As I see it, extra damage is a mechanic that plays much better into this abstraction. Four E

Streamlined Mechanics aren't all they are made out to be

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I'll tell you what I instinctively disliked the first time I opened the 3e Player's Handbook:  Priest spell levels going all the way up to 9th level.  Now, the reasons for this change seem fairly obvious to my mind. It streamlines spell progression for priests and wizards and makes it easier to gauge power level of a priest vs wizard spell.  But are those actually good  reasons? Is streamlining in and of itself a positive? Perhaps being able to gauge power level is useful, but tangentially so if so. How often do you need to compare a priest spell to a wizard spell and determine how powerful they are compared to each other?  As for streamlining spell progression between wizards and priests - This may seem useful as it makes progression transparently equal (getting rid of different XP tables was another move to ensure everybody progressed at the same pace. An alleged virtue I would question the virtue of), but it belies a point that is central to the argument of this blog post: H

Standing up for D&D's Gen X: 2e (Part 2)

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This is part 2 of a 2 part series. Part 1 is about 2e rules. Part 2 is about 2e 'culture'.  Here's my dirty little secret that I never told anyone before: I actually really liked the Complete Book of Elves. I am just going to leave that bombshell hanging in the air and return to it later in this post, in the hope that the shock value of that statement will minimise the impact of what I am going to say next. The aesthetic of 2nd edition expanded and improved the D&D genre of fantasy. I am going to interject here and say that this post covers two 'cultural' parts - Genre/aesthetics and Style of play. Right now we're obviously talking the first part, but I will get to the second further down. Alright, back to the topic at hand: Let's ignore the masochistic"I prefer the cheapass sketches to top of the line artists" argument that you see 1st editioners espouse every now and then as insular nostalgic nonsense and go to a second point:  Most 1e grogn

Standing up for D&D's Gen X: 2e (Part 1)

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This is part 1 of 2 about 2nd edition. Part 1 will focus on the rules aspects. Part 2 on the nebulous 'culture' aspect of 2e. Out there in real life, I just about made the cut for an elder millennial. But in terms of DnD generations, I am very much Gen X - The Forgotten Generation.  Sandwiched in between the cantankerous curmudgeons of the B/X and AD&D 1e old schoolers who from their loftily perched blogs, abrasively champion their refined and sophisticated simple gaming ways and dour-weird piss-bag adventure aesthetics (all hail Erol Otus!) and the guileless charoppers of 3e that revelled in posting "build guides" on message boards for prestige classes and tricked out feat chains, considered Wayne Reynolds real cool and thought planning out their Conjurer 3/Incantatrix 10/Fatespinner 4 15 levels in advance to be a fine act of character development Is the un-championed generation X of 2nd edition romantic railroaders and the sad fools who learned their naive D&

Ability Score Improvements have been a terrible addition to D&D

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This is going to be one of them rants I fear.  It relates to my previous meditation on the heft of levels across various editions  and my recent contemplation on ability checks in B/X , specifically my desire have the unmodified numbers mean something in and of themselves, rather than something purely to derive other numbers from that do  have mechanical relevance. In a way, this posts is like a concluding remark on the heft of levels in TSR vs WotC D&D. To summarise, if the mechanical relevance of ability scores are almost always somewhere on a scale of -3/+5, why do we bother with rolling 3-18 instead of just using the derived numbers to begin with? Why has that never changed? And why do I have a firm impression that there'd be a great outcry if it were ever changed in a future edition? And it occurred to me that ability scores do have a relevance in the unmodified form, one that has remained across all editions - They are the formative narrative components of the character s

The Nebulous Heft of Levels in TSR vs WotC D&D

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One thing that weighs favourably towards TSR D&D rulesets for me is the different experience of character levels. Character levels in TSR D&D just strike me as having far more heft  to them, than levels in 3e onwards.  I remember being much more proud of my AD&D fighter reaching 5th level than I ever was of reaching much higher levels in 3e or 5e. And it's not just due to nostalgia. The achievement felt more significant, as if 5th level in AD&D meant more than 9th level does in 5e. Not only in terms of my investment as a player, but also in terms of what that meant for the character in the world. A 7th lvl fighter in B/X or AD&D setting is a big deal to my mind. A force in the world. A 7th lvl fighter in 5e strikes me as a somewhat more run-of-the-mill character. The AD&D 7th lvl fighter seems somehow further removed from 1st lvl than the equivalent 3e/5e character, It's a nebulous impression that is hard to explain or justify. And I am partly writing th