Post by aldarron on Apr 8, 2010 20:29:03 GMT -6
One of the hardest parts of writing Dragons at Dawn was recreating Dave's pre D&D combat system. I'm sure there is lots of curiosity as to how I came up with the combat table and other features. So I wrote this little essay (okay, not so little)...
So, its 1970 and you are Dave Arneson. Your friend Dave Wesely is leaving for the army and has given you permission to run his Braunstein games. You decide you want to do something different, something medieval. So you come up with Blackmoor instead of Braunstein. First you run a couple small scale miniature battles to get comfortable with the differences in a medieval setting, and then, around Christmas, you run a full scale medieval “Braunstein.” Most of your players love it and it starts to grow into a campaign instead of a 1 off game. This complicates things because you think the players should be able to progress and advance themselves if they survive and you need to make rules for that. Another problem is individual combat which is quickly becoming more and more a part of the game. You’ve been using the prototype Chainmail rules published in the Domesday book, but you don’t really find them suitable. Perren’s mass combat rules require everything to be converted to a unit type and really aren’t made for the small groups you are working with, nor are they particularly suited to fighting against the mythological beasts you like to throw into the mix. Also, the guys don’t like that their characters die after one hit. You look to other sources for inspiration and assign the players hit points, an idea you had been developing for a Civil war ironclads game. Likewise Hit Dice, a cumulative measure of the firepower of a ship in your Ironclads game, you now assign to the players and some of the monsters.
So it goes for a few months until “Chainmail” is released as a booklet and you buy it. Inside you discover something new “The Fantasy Supplement” which seems like it is almost tailor made for your Blackmoor game. There are a dozen monsters and rules for magic, but most importantly, the combat system for monsters is easy and direct and will fit right in with what you have been doing. You begin to use it right away. Using the number of hits it takes to kill a hero (4) or superhero (8) in the new CHAINMAIL rules as your basis for HD, you decide your players should be able to progress from mere mortals to hero’s so you come up with the idea of experience points and three levels – Flunky, Hero, Superhero.
The new monsters are welcome additions but over the past few months though you have been developing your own monsters and you begin to add them to the Fantasy Combat table. Soon the combat table fills several sheets of paper and is clearly unmanageable. What to do?
You could start from scratch, rework the whole thing but you think it would be better to keep using the numbers and stats you’ve got if you can. The problem, as you see it, is giving each monster its own entry. You could just say that a given new monster is the equivalent of an old one on the charts but that’s messy and similar to converting everything to troop types in the Perren section of the Chainmail rules. The solution really is easy, you go back to your concept of Hit Dice and just assign a Hit Dice rating to each type of monster, that way you automatically know what is equivalent to what.
Trouble is, you can’t just plug them into the Fantasy Table charts because that chart is not a linear progression. The numbers are all over the place and what you would like to have is a nice linear progression table like the ones you commonly use in wargames and like the combat odds table you have been working on for your naval game.
(At this point we must move from history to speculation. What did Arneson do next? I don’t know. Maybe he just made up his own table. Or maybe he did what follows below.)
You study the Fantasy table to see if there is some way you can reorganize it around your idea of Hit Dice – the combat strength – of the monsters instead of their names. Your players are mostly playing mortals and heroes. Most of the time it will be them fighting the other monsters and humans. Your players progress from heroes to superheroes, and you notice that on the fantasy table a superhero has a two pip advantage over a hero. You also notice that, on average when a creature fights against itself it takes 8.23 or more to hit. When a hero fights some other fantastic creature they need a little more than 9 or better to hit. The superhero averages exactly 9 and most other creatures also average around 9. You can work with these numbers. You number your combat table from 1 to 20 (or something) on both the x and y axis. You decide you like equal or roll under numbers better so you mark a 5 (instead of the equal or roll over 9) in column 1,2; 2;2 and so forth; then you take that average of 2 pips differences over 4 columns and fill it all in. Then you check the numbers. You find that, more often than not, your new chart matches or comes within 1 pip of the to hit number of the fantasy table but you now have a nice linear progression you can use with any new monster just by knowing its HD. You try the same thing with 6 (8) but notice the variance from the to hit numbers on the fantasy table is greater so you decide to stick with 5 (9) as your equal vs equal to hit number.
(now, we return to history)
For a variety of reasons you don’t like to share game mechanics with your players. For one thing, they can’t argue with you if they don’t know the minutia of the rules. You keep the details of the combat system to yourself.
A year later it’s 1972 and your Blackmoor game is still going strong. You have been collaborating with Gary Gygax on your naval game. Now its called Don’t Give up the Ship and its’ changed a bit, no longer being a civil war ironclads game, instead being set during the Napoleonic Era, but most of your naval rules are still in there as well as the basic idea behind your combat system.
Partnering with Gary is a great opportunity for you. He is ten years older, well known and published, including being the coauthor of the Chainmail rules you have been using. You decide to try to interest him in another collaboration – your Blackmoor rules. At Gen con that Fall you introduce him to the game and teach him how to play. You just let him adventure as a character in a short dungeon. He’s hooked and a new project is born.
Gygax of course has his own ideas about combat and makes a simplified version of his man to man system using weapon vs Armor Class. To speed things he drops the weapon types and uses level vs Armor Class instead and develops new charts he can use with his d20, thus creating the Alternate system that became the standard for D&D.
ADMIN EDIT: Added some breaks between paragraphs
So, its 1970 and you are Dave Arneson. Your friend Dave Wesely is leaving for the army and has given you permission to run his Braunstein games. You decide you want to do something different, something medieval. So you come up with Blackmoor instead of Braunstein. First you run a couple small scale miniature battles to get comfortable with the differences in a medieval setting, and then, around Christmas, you run a full scale medieval “Braunstein.” Most of your players love it and it starts to grow into a campaign instead of a 1 off game. This complicates things because you think the players should be able to progress and advance themselves if they survive and you need to make rules for that. Another problem is individual combat which is quickly becoming more and more a part of the game. You’ve been using the prototype Chainmail rules published in the Domesday book, but you don’t really find them suitable. Perren’s mass combat rules require everything to be converted to a unit type and really aren’t made for the small groups you are working with, nor are they particularly suited to fighting against the mythological beasts you like to throw into the mix. Also, the guys don’t like that their characters die after one hit. You look to other sources for inspiration and assign the players hit points, an idea you had been developing for a Civil war ironclads game. Likewise Hit Dice, a cumulative measure of the firepower of a ship in your Ironclads game, you now assign to the players and some of the monsters.
So it goes for a few months until “Chainmail” is released as a booklet and you buy it. Inside you discover something new “The Fantasy Supplement” which seems like it is almost tailor made for your Blackmoor game. There are a dozen monsters and rules for magic, but most importantly, the combat system for monsters is easy and direct and will fit right in with what you have been doing. You begin to use it right away. Using the number of hits it takes to kill a hero (4) or superhero (8) in the new CHAINMAIL rules as your basis for HD, you decide your players should be able to progress from mere mortals to hero’s so you come up with the idea of experience points and three levels – Flunky, Hero, Superhero.
The new monsters are welcome additions but over the past few months though you have been developing your own monsters and you begin to add them to the Fantasy Combat table. Soon the combat table fills several sheets of paper and is clearly unmanageable. What to do?
You could start from scratch, rework the whole thing but you think it would be better to keep using the numbers and stats you’ve got if you can. The problem, as you see it, is giving each monster its own entry. You could just say that a given new monster is the equivalent of an old one on the charts but that’s messy and similar to converting everything to troop types in the Perren section of the Chainmail rules. The solution really is easy, you go back to your concept of Hit Dice and just assign a Hit Dice rating to each type of monster, that way you automatically know what is equivalent to what.
Trouble is, you can’t just plug them into the Fantasy Table charts because that chart is not a linear progression. The numbers are all over the place and what you would like to have is a nice linear progression table like the ones you commonly use in wargames and like the combat odds table you have been working on for your naval game.
(At this point we must move from history to speculation. What did Arneson do next? I don’t know. Maybe he just made up his own table. Or maybe he did what follows below.)
You study the Fantasy table to see if there is some way you can reorganize it around your idea of Hit Dice – the combat strength – of the monsters instead of their names. Your players are mostly playing mortals and heroes. Most of the time it will be them fighting the other monsters and humans. Your players progress from heroes to superheroes, and you notice that on the fantasy table a superhero has a two pip advantage over a hero. You also notice that, on average when a creature fights against itself it takes 8.23 or more to hit. When a hero fights some other fantastic creature they need a little more than 9 or better to hit. The superhero averages exactly 9 and most other creatures also average around 9. You can work with these numbers. You number your combat table from 1 to 20 (or something) on both the x and y axis. You decide you like equal or roll under numbers better so you mark a 5 (instead of the equal or roll over 9) in column 1,2; 2;2 and so forth; then you take that average of 2 pips differences over 4 columns and fill it all in. Then you check the numbers. You find that, more often than not, your new chart matches or comes within 1 pip of the to hit number of the fantasy table but you now have a nice linear progression you can use with any new monster just by knowing its HD. You try the same thing with 6 (8) but notice the variance from the to hit numbers on the fantasy table is greater so you decide to stick with 5 (9) as your equal vs equal to hit number.
(now, we return to history)
For a variety of reasons you don’t like to share game mechanics with your players. For one thing, they can’t argue with you if they don’t know the minutia of the rules. You keep the details of the combat system to yourself.
A year later it’s 1972 and your Blackmoor game is still going strong. You have been collaborating with Gary Gygax on your naval game. Now its called Don’t Give up the Ship and its’ changed a bit, no longer being a civil war ironclads game, instead being set during the Napoleonic Era, but most of your naval rules are still in there as well as the basic idea behind your combat system.
Partnering with Gary is a great opportunity for you. He is ten years older, well known and published, including being the coauthor of the Chainmail rules you have been using. You decide to try to interest him in another collaboration – your Blackmoor rules. At Gen con that Fall you introduce him to the game and teach him how to play. You just let him adventure as a character in a short dungeon. He’s hooked and a new project is born.
Gygax of course has his own ideas about combat and makes a simplified version of his man to man system using weapon vs Armor Class. To speed things he drops the weapon types and uses level vs Armor Class instead and develops new charts he can use with his d20, thus creating the Alternate system that became the standard for D&D.
ADMIN EDIT: Added some breaks between paragraphs
