The AD&D appraisal show is back on the road. Today is about classes and it's a bit long, so here is the  tl;dr - a high level run-through and review of the classes, priests get the most attention, we look at the weird asymmetrical XP progression inherited from 1st edition where warriors are the slowest to advance from 7th to 14th level and wrap up with what racial requirements and certain classes means for the implied AD&D world.  Alright, let's get to it. Don't tell me you seriously believed we were done showcasing art from the revised core rulebooks? Few things are more defining for a DnD game than its take on classes. And in 2e, we find probably the best take on it that has been done. Presentation-wise, they are, finally, organised into the sensible class categories the game has been asking for ever since OD&D introduced the spuriously defined notion of 'sub-class':  Warrior (Fighter, Ranger, Paladin) Wizard (Magic-User, Specialist) Priest (Cleric, Dr...

Besides the semi-immortality of PCs , that is. I bet you're dying to know. The answer is its pluralities of disassociated choices and disassociated designs. Short and sweet, this could be my shortest blog entry for a long while. Who knew blogging was this easy? Let's just party instead. Alright alright, I'll go into some detail to explain what I mean. Others have gone into more detail  about disassociated mechanics . Briefly a a disassociated mechanic is a mechanic that does not refer to an event being resolved in the fiction. "I cast Charm Person " is an example of an associated mechanic. You take an action in the game world and something happens in the rule mechanics (a save vs spells) that then affects the outcome in the fiction too. Most infamous of disassociated mechanics is Trip attacking oozes in 4e , where the action of "tripping someone" in the fiction is wholly secondary to the mechanic initiation and outcome. But 4e has of course often been de...

 A frequent objection given against my rants against certain post-TSR trends in D&D is that my rants do not target the system per se, but rather table behaviour. That it is possible to use it in a different way and not go where the game is implicitly inviting you to go. I call this phenomenon of game invitation "system nudging". The basic idea is: If you have rules in the core system for how fighters may build a stronghold, then you will see this happening more often than in a system that does not make this part of its core rules. In other words, although the system is not necessarily telling you that you should  do this, it is nonetheless nudging   you in that direction. It's basically the system telling you how it wants to played. How often does this happen in Classic D&D vs 5e? The mortality rules for each set will give you a good idea. There are degrees of nudging, and types. Some are intentional, others accidental because the developers didn't consider ...

 Every once in a blue moon, I have the urge to doomscroll The Vaults of Pandius .  A bit like with Greyhawk and its online community , the Vaults of Pandius were at one point the primary way for me to explore the world of  Mystara  at a time when what I had of published materials were Mentzer's  Expert Set , the In Search of Adventure module anthology, loaning the  The Grand Duchy of Karameikos  Gazetteer when I could from the library and prodigious access to Dragon Magazine at the local library, where I was seemingly the only loaner ever interested in the older issues. The original adventure path. I have an irrational amount of love for this book. I will need to review it at one point. When I discovered the Vaults, it was like a world opening up to me, of a swathe of gamer archeologists who have studied the setting in depth and extracted a bunch of nuggets for me to take in, in the absence of a cohesive setting book to help make sense of it all. I sp...

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...