Math, history, and design of old-school D&D
Here's an observation I just made, that came up from a friend's question about the 1E AD&D rules for a big project they're working on. Ultimately this highlights the less-than-optimal state of editing in those books. You may know that 1E AD&D did not have a "natural 20 always hits" rule, but it did show a repeating sequence of 20's in the to-hit tables (DMG p. 74-75): A few pages later, there's a…
As you'll know if you followed the spring season of Dan's Olde Time Minis Show , I've been playing the classic Star Frontiers game all this year, and enjoying it immensely. To me, running a roll-low percentile system seems like a breath of fresh air. My players have called out as highlight the interesting intelligent races and cultures for both PCs, and in the standard Volturnus campaign, the…
Hey, it's been quiet around here lately... too quiet. Maybe we can get some new D&D material up soon. In the meantime, hopefully you've had a chance to catch some of Dan's Olde Time Minis Show over on the Wandering DMs YouTube channel ? For Season 1 I dug into collecting & duplicating the 1980's Star Frontiers PC miniatures, which I'd never had a chance to do before -- partly inspired by the…
The long-time passion project of my Wandering DMs partner Paul Siegel is currently funding on Kickstarter! Fearful Ends is a rules-light, story-centric roleplaying system for horror themed games. It features nihilistic stories about characters discovering impossible horrors. It aims to allow players to roleplay characters that experience mental or emotional collapse in a safe play environment that…
The D&D cartoon first appeared on CBS 40 years ago this week! Man, 1983-1984 were really great years for our hobby. Here's a link to the blog and an hourlong video interview by Mark Evanier, who wrote the pilot script and series bible" News From Me (Mark Evanier)
I've vaguely known for a long time that there was some essential problem with the system for horse encumbrance in early D&D (O/AD&D). But I hadn't personally done the accounting to pinpoint where the issue was; I recently went on a deep dive on that point. Big thanks to the folks on the Wandering DMs Discord server for pointing out the problem in OED and helping me think through this reasonably.…
Last year I wrote an academic paper formally solving Gary Gygax's Jousting game, as it appears in the original edition of Chainmail: Rules for medieval miniatures (1971; and prior to that in The Domesday Book newsletter). This paper was presented at a conference of the International Computer Games Association ( ICGA ), namely, Computers and Games 2022 ( CG2022 ) -- and recently published in the…
I'm constantly fascinated by the novel rules detail in OD&D Swords & Spells. There's a bunch of stuff in there that can be interpreted as updates or clarifications to the core D&D rules -- stuff that often failed to matriculate forward into later versions of the game. Ironically, it's the only little-brown-book I had as a kid, until I got a copy of the other stuff well past 2000 A.D. Here's one:…
Consider the O/AD&D Superhero -- a.k.a, the 8th-level Fighter. If you blink you'll miss it, but in multiple places in early texts it says that fighters of that level can automatically see invisible enemies. (!) Here's the Fantasy Reference Table from the Chainmail game (included by reference in multiple parts of Original D&D), with key parts highlighted: Now, you might possibly think that's a typo…
I had an experience the other day where, trying to resolve an issue, office A told me it's the job of office B, office B said to talk to office C, and C said I had to talk to A. This is not uncommon. Things are pretty chaotic. The next time you lay out a dungeon or lair of a bunch of chaotic monsters, consider the chaotic people and institutions in your own life, and see if injecting some of those…
It's something of a common gag that in the earliest D&D dungeons, all of the hallways were composed of 10-foot cubes -- but it's not true (notwithstanding the customary backstory to the gelatinous cube). If you look in the right places, Gygax was surprisingly consistent about the shape of his hallways -- and they look like the image at the top of this post here. This is from the original Temple of…
Last week on Wandering DMs we had a smashing chat with one of our favorite repeat guests, Matt Finch of Mythmere Games. As I write this, his Kickstarter for the new Swords & Wizards Complete Revised edition is entering its last few days -- you should check it out if you can. Matt is both epically knowledgeable about old-school D&D, and also impressively generous with his time and wisdom. After the…
I recently had an opportunity to run AD&D module A4, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords , for the first time. This is of course the culminating adventure in the classic A-series Slavers tournament, famous for stripping the PCs of literally every resource and forcing them to outhink their way through a pitch-black labyrinth after being abandoned/ sacrificed to its horrors. We chatted about it a bit…
The issue of "concentration" for spellcasting has come up a number of times in my OD&D games lately. For those somewhat more familiar with the current-edition of D&D, two reactions are halfway common: (a) surprise that a "concentration" mechanic existed in OD&D, and/or (b) surprise that it's so infrequently required for spells in OD&D. At any rate: Yes, Virginia, concentration was a requirement…
Blogger ahabicher at Papier Und Spiele occasionally takes a really close look at my Book of War rules for classic D&D wargaming, and I think it's really helpful to get the perspective of someone who cares so much about D&D mass combat who isn't me. This week he's done a test of a battle between two tribes of warring goblins -- done twice, once in Chainmail, and once in Book of War, to see how they…
Hey, did you know there's an official Original Edition Delta Character Record Sheet available on Roll20 ? Yessiree Bob, there sure is. This a joint work between myself and Jameson Proctor (Campaign Games, Forts & Frontiers), to whom I'm immensely grateful for starting this project. The sheet's actually been online for over a year at this point, but I just recently found some time to make all the…
I've been working on refining spell descriptions (again) lately -- for hopefully upcoming expanded releases of the OED Book of Spells and Book of War rules. (E.g., we started testing top-level spells in mass battle play in the BOW livestream sessions the other week.) A couple of recent testbeds brought to mind the question: what's better for expressing the area of a circular spell effect, the…
I've gotten a chance to play the Dragon's Lair arcade game on my PC (finally in the last week or so). I can't emphasize how ground-breaking this game was when it showed up in arcades back in 1983 (40 years ago as I write this). Up to that point, we'd only seen 8-bit sprite-based games with digital audio blips. Consider the top games from 1982 (per Wikipedia, "the peak year for the golden age of…
We frequently marvel at how sketchy the advice was in Original D&D (and other early editions) was for the number of monsters, amount of treasure, and expected rate of PC advancement in the dungeons. There are a few semi-secondary sources that give estimates for advancement rates -- and it's rather remarkable how widely they differ. This is even though they all date from a time…
Recently on Wandering DMs we had a neat conversation about slime-type monsters in classic D&D. Now, in Original D&D, a couple of those infamous monsters are said to split into smaller slimes if they're hit by any physical weapons (Vol-2, p. 19). For example, the Ochre Jelly: "hits by weaponry or lightning bolts will merely make them into several smaller Ochre Jellies". And likewise the Black…
Is this a hot take? In the D&D discourse, you'll see a common piece of rhetoric, and it goes like this. DM Alice says, "I don't want to allow X in my games; I think it's unreasonable". And DM Bob calls out Alice like this: Alice says that she doesn't permit X in her games. But Alice accepts Dragons in her game! So that doesn't make any sense! I call this the "because-dragons" argument. The next…
One of our Wandering DMs Patrons on our Discord server made a great observation: In AD&D Module WG4, The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun , at one point Gygax calls for a roll-under-Dexterity-on-4d6 to avoid a net trap. More generally, it's been reported in play at tables run by Gygax and Kuntz that they would commonly call for checks in this fashion to roll 3d6 (you know, the same way you generate…
This is Part 3 of our exploration of different ability-generation methods in O/AD&D, and the chances for creating characters of different desired classes. The last installment was all about 1E AD&D according to the core books (PHB 1978 and DMG 1979). Today we'll be inspecting the Unearthed Arcana supplement that came out six years later (1985), the last year of Gary Gyax's tenure at TSR, as the…
This is Part 2 of looking at statistics for how likely various start-generation methods are to qualify you for desired classes in early D&D (partly inspired by our recent chat on Wandering DMs ). Last time we looked at stat-generation in OD&D (3d6-in-order, maybe with a few point-swaps allowed) and the various sub-classes presented in supplemental material (ultimately resulting in the same list of…
On the Wandering DMs a few weeks ago, we had a neat conversation about the history of generating ability scores for D&D across the various editions. This brought to mind a post I've wanted to make for a long time: in early D&D, what are the odds of qualifying for desired character classes, given the various methods presented for generating abilities? A few folks have worked on this problem…