Tag: RPGs

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.

In older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, there was the concept of a zero-level Fighter: not as good as a 1st-level adventurer, but better than Normal Men (also a term from older editions).

I got daydreaming about zero-level equivalents for magic-users, clerics, and rogues. People with perhaps insufficient potential to ever advance to 1st level but potential, nonetheless.

But what could they do that Norman Men could not? Something I want to explore via microblogging, here. So more to come.

TL;DR: -2 AC penalty.

As I revealed in my storyline, Elmö’s Obligation, Xenograg has a taboo that his head must be bare to perform sorcery. Obviously, this includes helmets. So I have always been curious about how Dungeon & Dragons Armor Class (AC) is/should be adjusted when a combatant is sans helmet.

I never agreed with Advanced D&D’s no-called-shots-except-in-the-case-of-bare-heads rule. This is literally not exceptional enough of a case.

The house rule I have seen most often is a -1 AC penalty. It is one I have used, but it feels insufficient.

Then the answer came to me while I was thinking about the difference between a (chain) mail shirt, which is medium armor in D&D, and (chain) mail armor, which is heavy armor. What is the difference?

How much of the body is covered by the armor.

Therefore, foregoing head protection lowers your Armor Class one category. In Old School D&D clones, this equates to a -2 penalty.

It is the simple elegance and clarity of the explanation that tells me this is the correct answer.

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.

From a practical point of view, most distinctions made between “magic,” “psychism,” “sorcery,” “witchcraft,” “psionics,” “shamanism,” or “miracle working” are simply not relevant to magic in the real world, although as artificial distinctions, the terms are useful for anthropological classification and to add variety in games.

— Authentic Thaumaturgy, p. 19

Author’s emphasis.

Humanoids would wear their personal wealth as (gold|silver) chain necklaces rather than carry it as coins.

A Mage or Cleric of any rank above Apprentice will always be able to do magic better than a Warrior or Thief or Assassin of equal experience points and equal Psi Potential, simply because the non-Mages and non-Clerics are amateurs—not because they are some sort of psychic cripples.

— Authentic Thaumaturgy, p. 25

Author’s emphasis.

Many years ago, I was the Computer Statistician of my High School’s varsity football team. It was an unique position on the managerial squad. One of our coaches had purchased a software application for analyzing opposing teams’ offenses. Team scouts would collect the kind of data the application could analyze. My after-hours job was mostly data entry of any newly-arrived scouting reports but, more importantly, of running the analysis report of our next opposing team as soon as all relevant data was entered.

These reports were printed out on wide fan-fold paper because the bulk of each one was numerous ASCII grids that corresponded to lateral field positions. These simple graphics helped non-technical coaches interpret the results—statistical breakdowns of behavioral tendencies in an opponent’s play-calling. The breakdown categories were the traditional ones scouts and coaches use without computers: 1st-and-10, 2nd-and-long, et. al.

So I learned early that computers could be used for more than just playing games. They could be used as tools to help me play other games better. Even games that had nothing to do with computers.

I had found Dungeons & Dragons in Middle School, and already knew a few things about probability and statistics. I had been an user of computers, though mostly for playing games. I had even hacked game data once or twice. That only made the game easier to play; it did not make me a better player.

As the football seasons progressed, I watched those reports be used by the coaches to make our team play better through adaptation to our opponents’ patterns of play. Knowledge was power.

All that led to computer programming. My first original programs were various tools and toys for or related to D&D. I still write them in my leisure time, today. I intend to blog about them someday. See the Game Programming category for those posts.

…[The Native American] self bow and the seventeenth-century musket had comparable effective ranges (50 yards optimum, 100 to 150 yards at the outside)….

…For Amerindians, because the bow or the musket had to serve in both war and the hunt, something in the technology had to satisfy the needs of both pursuits…. A musket ball was less likely than an arrow to be deflected by vegetation, and it also had a greater kinetic impact on the target. A deer hit with an arrow receives a very deep wound…, which, though eventually lethal, might require the hunter to pursue the bleeding deer for some distance. In contrast, a musket penetrates flesh, shatters bone, and creates a larger wound cavity. It “smacks,” whereas an arrow “slices….” A military musketball at 50 yards hits a target with 706 foot pounds of kinetic energy. An arrow from a typical modern bow hits at 50 yards with 50 to 80 foot pounds of energy. This is more than enough to penetrate flesh and tissue and produce a killing wound, but it is much less likely to drop an animal in its tracks.

The musket has similar advantages against humans. Much of a human target is limbs, especially when walls or trees are used to cover the trunk of the body. An arrow wound to the leg or arm is rarely lethal, although it can be debilitating. But a musketball strike to the arm or leg may shatter the bone and is more likely to carry debris into the wound, lead to infection, sepsis, and death.… In the immediate term, a man with a shattered leg or arm, flung to the ground by the weight of a musket shot, also makes a better target for being taken prisoner…. Unable to flee, he becomes vulnerable and may hold up his fellows trying to carry him away from the field…. More obviously, bullets cannot be dodged, whereas arrows in flight over any distance (especially on an arcing trajectory) can be seen and dodged. Modern film footage of the Dani people’s arrow and javelin battles in New Guinea shows this process clearly, and numerous European witnesses commented on the Amerindians’ ability to dodge arrows.

— Empires and Indigenes, pp. 56-58

Emphases mine.

Players of fantasy RPGs should note the quoted effective range for bows. Many games have much longer distances, but those are derived from battlefields where archers are loosing volleys at large enemy formations. Gamers should further note the ease of dodging an arrow at anything beyond short range.

I thought about D&D a lot while I was reading it, because I think the case can quite easily be made that The Iliad is the most D&D thing ever written other than D&D itself (or, vice versa, that D&D is the most Iliad thing ever written other than The Iliad itself, except obviously Mazes & Minotaurs?). What is Achilleus, other than a 20th-level fighter in comparison to the 1st-4th level Trojans he dispatches with ruthless ease? What are the Achaean invaders, if not murderhobos in search of booty, glory and XP at the expense of all else? How else can the behaviour of the protagonists be explained, other than that they are being controlled by the kind of wild uber-machismo that often overtakes groups of teenage D&D nerds?

— On High Level Warriors, Gods, Mortals and More – Monsters and Manuals

Once Orcs are not about the ancient threat of Neanderthal dominance,

Once Vampires are not about the nightmare of rape and the violation of our sanctity,

Once the immortal Lich is not about horror of structures of law and tradition which were invented by men who were dead long before we were born,

Once Werewolves are no longer about the terror of our inner animalistic impulses overwhelming us,

Once Zombies are not about our innate and unending fear of the implacable advance of gluttonous death,

then they are just housecats that we can kill from behind the safety of our +2 blade that adds two to our to hit roll, allowing us to strike at the monster if we roll an 8 or higher.

— On Cultivating the Fantastic – Hack & Slash

Author’s emphasis.

Thank the gods for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, else I could not have linked to the source blogpost.

What are the two things that are most important to know about a stranger? Or a group of strangers?

Social psychologists know. But so did the early authors of D&D.

The stereotype content model, elaborated by Susan Fiske and other social psychologists, describes how we organize beliefs about other people and social groups—traits and stereotypes. Over the past 20 years, dozens of studies have supported the idea that two key traits, warmth and competence, are major players in our attitudes and behaviors toward other groups.

Warmth is how cooperative the group appears to us. Competence is how strong—how able to do meaningful things—they look. So, jolly halflings might be seen as high in warmth but low in competence. Dour dwarves are the other way around, not very warm but very good at what they do. Kobolds, maybe, are low in both.

When two groups meet in an adventure, the rules of most early forms of D&D have them sizing up each other precisely on these two dimensions….

— Morale and Reactions – Roles, Rules, & Rolls

So, you’re playing D&D and you’re fighting some orcs. All the orcs are armed with feather dusters, so they [are] actually incapable of harming anyone. And your DM doesn’t give [experience points] for combat, so they’ll yield [zero XP] upon death.

This combat is a waste of time. You’re just rolling dice until the orcs die.

The encounter is shit because the encounter has no impact.

Impact: the ability to permanently change the game. The opposite of impact is fluff.

…

— Impact – Goblin Punch

Author’s emphasis.

…[It] might just be that good and evil are moral extremes embraced by a select few. Good is prized because it’s laudable, not to mention rare. Evil is reviled because it does harm and threatens all others regardless of their philosophical bent. But neutrals predominate….

GOOD characters aren’t simply decent people. They’re philosophically committed to advancing good, fighting evil, and bringing justice to others. Indeed, their attentions are for others, and they act with deep compassion and mercy for the downtrodden. This is the questing white knight. The one beloved by good folk and resented by the wicked.

Everyone wants to go to Heaven, but no one wants to do what it takes to get there, and herein lies the high regard champions are held in. Few want the job!

…

— Shifting to Neutral (‘Cause Most of Us Are) – Pits Perilous