Tag: 1e-AD&D

I have lately been pondering cavalry lances in D&D. I never see them used. (I never see mounted combat, either, but nevermind that now.) With a charge attack scoring double damage, a lance is the most powerful melee weapon. Yet no one uses them.

Although there has never been a rule for it, one reason I never used a lance was because they usually break—are supposed to break. A Player Character needs to carry more than one. (Missed opportunity to have a person-of-hench as a squire.)

A magical lance that does not break is a danger to its wielder. It should be impermanent in the same way magical arrows are. (You should find 1d4 lances +1 in a treasure trove. 😁)

My pondering led me to the conclusion that the best application of magic here is overcoming the need for spare lances; all my Player Character truly wants is another, unbroken lance. A lance that magically reassembles after breaking is too fanciful for my tastes. Conjuring a new lance is the simplest solution. Since the lances are not the permanent magical item, something else needs to perform the conjuring.

And so I give you: the Gauntlet of Lances!

Gauntlet of Lances

Wondrous Item, Rare

A gauntlet for the right hand that creates in its grip a nonmagical wooden lance (of appropriate size).

Letting go of the (presumed broken) lance causes all pieces of it to disappear.

Game Master’s discretion as to what level of action is required for a wearer to conjure a new lance.

As you may have guessed, my musing on zero-level magic-users is based upon Old School concepts. These are appropriate cantrips (again, from AD&D’s Unearthed Arcana):

I concur with Aaron the Pedantic that Attack Cantrips Are The Worst. I do like modern systems’ inclusion of ritual casting. A practical definition of spell slots is the special preparations for when you need to cast a spell in a time-constrained situation. Every spell should be castable via multi-minute ritual—perhaps even attack spells. Being able to throw a Fireball or Lightning Bolt at a castle every 10 minutes is not that far from gunpowder siege cannon.

As is all-too-normal these days, two Web searches on the identical keywords yielded different results. My search for “zero-level magic-users” before I posted Part 1 did not surface their mention in AD&D’s Unearthed Arcana rulebook. Here it is:

I do not remember this passage at all. I only remember zero-level options for the Cavalier class; also in Unearthed Arcana, but it was included in the original Dragon Magazine #72 article on the class.

It is very close to what I was thinking.

My first edition of Dungeons & Dragons was the 1981 Moldvay Basic but I quickly fell victim to Gygax’s marketing of Advanced D&D. It was years before my brother and I found anyone else who had the game, so all I had was the TSR products as-written. The 1983 World of Greyhawk boxed set was the one and only campaign world, then. The encounter tables in the Glossography became unforgettable as they set the bar for NPC experience levels. The entry for “Men, Patrol, Knights” is the best example of this:

Ignore the high-level officers. The average knight is at least a 4th-level Fighter. His squire is 2nd- or 3rd-level. Even the serjeants are 1st-level Fighters, which is meaningful as AD&D has the concept of “zero-level” for commoners a little better at combat (e.g. militiamen) than the rest. Other entries in those tables have similar experience level distributions.

Regardless of rules edition, these are high levels for average warriors. Knights are elite professionals, true, but all of them in (what 5th-edition D&D calls) Tier 2? D&D presumes that all character classes will be present in equivalent distributions, so Tier 2 spell-casters will also be common. Porting these levels as-is into 5e would not change my point at all. One of my many quibbles with 5e is its continued power inflation from 3e. Even more than with character classes, I disagree with Knights being 8d8+16 HD opponents and peasants having 16 Hit Points.

This has a huge impact upon the rest of a campaign world. How many of us have carried these assumptions into our own custom worlds? It has taken me years (decades!) to truly see that knights, for one, can still be feared killing machines at lower experience levels. That even comes with a bonus: they also become mortal, which every non-hero should be. If you are keeping the spell-caster equivalency, this also lowers the magical power level of your world—a very good thing, in my opinion.

In 5e terms, I see a squire as a 1st-level Fighter. An average knight would only be a 2nd-level Fighter. Higher levels are still available for experienced knights, of course. Against peasants and militiamen, a 2nd-level Fighter is a sufficient killer but is also at risk of being slain by a few enemies working together.

For further discussion on this topic, I highly recommend JB’s (B/X BLACKRAZOR) blogposts Hit Me Baby One More Time, 1st Level Magic-Users, and One Man Army.