One simple houserule I use during character creation is to simply treat any 1 rolled as a 2. "The House Rule Register" might become an ongoing feature on this blog, so I made a tag for it. It means that: The minimum ability score is 6, which I think should be the baseline anyway. But the chances of getting extraordinary (15+) scores are not increased, and there is only a +2.77% added chance of rolling a 13 and a +1.39% increased chance of rolling 14. No one starts with 1 hp unless they have also have CON 6-8 and rolled a 1 or 2 for HP. Minimum starting gold is 60 gp. I initially went with re-rolling all 1s as that seemed a bit more fun, but the implications of that are a bit wider reaching. For clarity, here's the chart for proabilities for "at least" outcomes in anydice, respectively for "3d6", "3d6 treating1s as 2s", "3d6 re-rolling all 1s" and "4d6, drop lowest". There is a whopping +16,47% of rolling a 13 when you re-r

I've been running our group through the sandbox presented in "The Vanilla Adventure" using classic D&D with some houserules, strict 3d6 in order, no re-arranging or re-rolls. I sprinkled in a few other modules (Hole in the Oak, Incandescent Grottoes, Gatehouse on Cormag's Crag. might add more). Before I go further into the review, let me just say that the actual play experience has been a blast so far. The players are loving the open-ended nature of it and all the things going on and have taken it in vastly different directions from session to session. And though the module has significant gaps it also has enough meat to help me as DM to navigate all that with more ease than anticipated. The sandbox is well-sized and with a number of dynamics going on that this can go in a number of different directions, sometimes simultaneously. The main threat, dragons, my group managed to contain early by sheer luck. In the space of our last session, they moved from recovering

Smaller numbers are better. It's not always  true in RPGs, but it is generally true. It's easier to work with in terms of calculation, but perhaps more importantly it makes it easier to intuitively gauge the significance of the numbers. You can feel the impact of a +1 on 1d6 more than you can on a d20. The older I get, the more I appreciate smaller numbers. The art quality in OD&D may be lacking, but the art direction  was pretty dang good. Number creep started with Greyhawk, continued in AD&D, really took off with 3e, before being scaled back a bit in 5e, with its notion of "bounded accuracy". 5e's notion of bounded accuracy still yielded a greater inflation of numbers than Classic D&D (Holmes, B/X, BECMI, Cyclopedia) which held back a bit on that front but still had slightly higher numbers than pre-Greyhawk D&D. One of the most obvious parts where number inflation took off is hit points. And in this regard, I quite appreciate the HD scale in OD&a

I've analysed and critiqued the concept of Hit Points in the past . The gist of the critique is that whilst hit points conceptually are mostly "hero points", mechanically they are treated entirely as "wound points". And that grates. The 10th level fighter with 60 Hit points who loses 80% of his hit points will need seven weeks to recover those 48 hp lost,  assuming a basic 1 hp/day of recovery . Meanwhile, the 1st level fighter with 5 hit points who loses 80% of his hit points (and was near death with just 1 hp left) will need just four days to make a full recovery. Besides the incongruence of this, it also has the mechanical downside of necessitating magical healing at higher levels for the game to be at all functional. Art for the entry is from the old Swedish "Drakar och Demoner" supplement Torshem. I've seen various elegant and less elegant attempt to remedy this, from healing HP equal to level per day (as 3e faultily suggested) to each added d

 I know, I know. Addition is easier than substraction, what kind of backwards grognard do you have to be to like descending AC in 2024? I get all that. But hear me out for a moment. My argument is that whilst ascending AC may be marginally easier to calculate to begin with, descending AC offers something different - A more intuitive appreciation of what the numbers mean  and how they are bounded. AD&D Armors We'll start at the very beginning. Before that, even. An early draft for the first version of D&D: Target20  was basically the original conception. Deduct AC from 20 and you have your attack target roll. Which is of course also how one converts descending AC to ascending. One wonders why they didn't just include this explanation to begin with, alongside a +to hit modifier, instead if messing with THAC0. The math in the draft is a bit off, but it suggests another, even more intuitive, layer. If we stipulate that one must exceed the AC and not just meet it, it means t

There are three armor types in classic D&D (B/X, BECMI, Cyclopedia). Leather (AC7), Chain (AC5), Plate (AC3).  In terms of classes, fighters, elves, dwarves, halflings and clerics can use all armor, thieves only leather armor and magic-users no armor. This is important, because this frames why people wear the armor they do. Why would anyone wear leather armor? Because they can. That means thieves. Thieves can wear leather, magic-users can not and that gives thieves an advantage. It's also cheap and only weights half what chain weighs. There are no real downsides to wearing light armor over no armor, except weight. There is rarely much reason to wear chain armor though. Plate mail is only slightly heavier and pricier and any class able to wear chain can also wear plate. In other words, chain is almost never a meaningful choice. It's going to be all Clyde Caldwell for this entry. It's All AC5, baby. So maybe we should find some reasons to make the choice between chain and

 We've all read S. John Ross' seminal Medieval Demographics Made Easy  [MDME],  I presume. I for one adore S. John Ross and have spent long hours on his excellent gaming blog .  Trouble, his piece not as usable as it presents itself to be. At least not for the kind of fantasy setting that seeks to emulate a world with some measure of wilderness to explore.  Ross' baseline seems to be pre-Black Death 14h century Europe. But I don't consider this to be a good era to use, since it reflects a time where the remnant frontiers of Europe were basically non-existent and internal development in terms of arable land and infrastructure fully exploited. I would rather look to the 11th century, which strikes a good middle ground between being solidly in the high Middle Ages, but not yet having maximized its population, arable cultivation and development potential. There were still frontiers, tribal lands and unexploited and unexplored lands to find, alongside well developed lands. I