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Post by cadriel on Apr 25, 2014 9:10:56 GMT -6
I've been considering doing something similar, except I'm going to cut all of the classes and just have an "Adventurer". Then it will be the players choice what they spend their gold on: magic, miracles, henchmen, castles, etc. I'm either going with the OD&D prices for research and scrolls, or the B/X costs (as I've read them in Basic Fantasy). The B/X costs are more expensive, so if the OD&D prices prove to cheap I'll go with them. I haven't read the Cleric thread, but I'm going to make Cleric's function the same as the Magic-User, except they'll "buy miracles from the church". It will give them a more historical feel, and the Cleric will obviously have to follows rules of the church, alignment, etc. Yeah, I thought about putting everything down to one class, but all the quotes I've read from Arneson are pretty clear that there were separate magic-users and fighting types very early on. I'm still kicking ideas about but I'm pretty confident on the fighting-man / magic-user split. My instinct is to use the OD&D costs for scrolls at early levels and then maybe go up as the PCs go up in level. I really need to look at the differences in wealth assuming GP-for-XP to make it workable at different levels. Oh, no worries about that. I have plenty of LBBs and B/X manuals.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 24, 2014 17:33:29 GMT -6
I don't think magic (or any other) adjustments need be a problem for 2d6 resolution, we just need to recognise that 2d6 is coarser grained than is 1d20. Each pip on 2d6 on is worth an average increment of 9.1%, so almost twice as much as each pip on a d20. Therefore, a +2 sword in d20 terms should have a +1 adjustment in 2d6 terms. A +1 adjustment (in d20 terms) could either be ignored as simply too minor or, if you wanted to get fiddly, could apply a +1 adjustment to 2d6 only when an even number is rolled (50% likely). This technique would maintain the fidelity of those finer grained d20 adjustments quite closely. Sure, that's just another way of putting my comparison - either you are making big steps and magic items are more powerful, or you are making small ones and they're less significant. This is pretty much the most important ramification of the charts you guys are working out; the probabilities themselves are pretty similar, although not identical. It's the way the other elements interact with the coarser grained interpretation that merits closer analysis. It's a relatively small tweak in terms of the armor / shield groupings but there is a bigger change for magic items. How your games work, of course, should be your decision. I just find it curious to analyze combat numbers and not look at how they interact with other parts of the system. Understanding that is key to making the decision that works best for you. Gygax and Arneson both used versions of the ACS throughout the time that OD&D was developed. We can say very confidently that the magic items in Monsters & Treasure were created with the ACS in mind rather than the Chainmail man-to-man tables.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 24, 2014 12:12:38 GMT -6
I first learned from the next-to-last beginner's box, and so I've always used roll-under your ability score on 1d20. Since I like to have a character list and attack / saving throw matrices in front of me, I almost never tell players what they are rolling for; usually I just ask, "Can you roll a d20 for me?" (or sometimes a d6) and note the result. Then I'll probably roll another die or two, and then tell the players what has happened. It works because I know what they rolled for, even if they don't. There's no confusion because I don't say, "Roll under your Wisdom," or "Roll over such-and-such," I just ask for a d20 roll.
This method works well with the philosophy of, "tell me what you're doing and I'll tell you what to roll." It lets the referee figure out exactly what they should be calling for instead of bogging the game down in a morass of modifiers and rules and exceptions. Some trust is required but I find it's rewarded.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 24, 2014 7:45:33 GMT -6
I think the 2d6 table is intriguing; if nothing else it makes the gradations between levels make sense.
But what I'm wondering is how you'd treat magical weapons and armor under this system. For instance, say a Veteran is facing off against a Hobgoblin (AC 5). Normally he needs a roll of 8 or better to hit. But if we give him a Sword +1, what do we go to? If the Veteran needs a 7 to hit, the Hobgoblin is effectively AC 7. If we make the Hobgoblin's AC 6, then the Veteran's magic sword does him no benefit and he still needs an 8.
Likewise, if the Veteran (with a normal weapon this time) is facing against a Bandit with chain armor and a shield (AC 4), he needs a 9 to hit. If the Bandit has magical armor per the percentage chances given, and we assume that it's +1 Armor, then either the Veteran's roll is adjusted such that he needs a 10, effectively giving the Bandit AC 2, or the Bandit's effective AC is 3, and the Veteran still needs a 9 to hit.
By my reading of Monsters & Treasure, the adjustments should be made to the to-hit roll rather than the Armor Class. So, a Veteran with a Sword +1 needs a 7 to hit a Hobgoblin, while a Veteran with a normal weapon needs a 10 to hit a Bandit with chain armor +1 and a shield. Effectively a +1 bonus is roughly 1.5 times (on average) as potent with this table as it is in the Alternative Combat System's matrices. (That's leaving aside probability and considering only impact relative to armor class.) The impact would be even more severe with a +2, where a Veteran's 6 to hit a Hobgoblin has taken him from effective AC 5 to AC 9.
Swinging magic weapons to shift armor class / table ranks, meanwhile, makes them less effective. Versus the Hobgoblin the Veteran's magic sword has no special effect, and likewise the Bandit's enchanted chain shirt does him no more good against our Veteran with a mundane weapon than a normal one would. We've now halved their effectiveness relative to the ACS.
None of this is a problem per se, but it does need to be considered: either magical weapons become significantly more potent, or much less so, depending on how you choose to resolve them in this system. That's really what you lose when you eliminate the 5% steps that OD&D was built around.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 23, 2014 5:30:24 GMT -6
I've been thinking a lot about the Blackmoor magic system, where spells were researched and prepared (with associated costs and/or hard-to-find ingredients) instead of being memorized, and also the thread here about Dropping the Cleric. It strikes me that both of these could work well together, if magic-users are pretty much able to research any of the spells in Men & Magic. I'm thinking that M-U research would be fairly expensive, with crafting a new spell costing a few hundred GP per spell level, and taking calendar time as well. Finding scrolls and spellbooks can be a shortcut in this process, of course. What I'm less sure about is how to set spell costs. My instinct is to go for 50-100 GP per spell at 1st level, and have higher costs (or ingredients that have to be found rather than purchased) for higher level spells. The other thing I'm thinking is to have some cheap healing available, allowing say 25 GP to be used for a poultice of herbs that can restore 1 HP, but characters are only able to restore a low number (say 2 or 3) of HP per day by this method. Commentary and ideas from people who've used similar rules would be helpful.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 22, 2014 16:18:02 GMT -6
I couldn't care less what you think about it so long as you don't talk crap about it in this thread. You were the one who created a thread about The Silmarillion and seem to have expected universal acclaim for it, when in fact many Tolkien enthusiasts (those who've read HoME at least and understand the issues) have mixed feelings for it at best.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 22, 2014 14:52:27 GMT -6
You must have a tin-ear for language if you haven't noticed how poorly written much of the HoME is and again you don't understand that JRR Tolkien wanted write about the first age using the kind of language we can read in The Silmarillion. Honestly, I'd say you should check your own ear for language if you find The Silmarillion (i.e. the 1977 published volume) to be in any way an exemplar of superior writing. It has no flow from paragraph to paragraph, mostly because large sections of it are actually stitched together from multiple sources. The early sections were not written fluidly; they were from different manuscripts (The Annals of Aman and the Grey Annals, written annalistically, and the Quenta Silmarillion, written as a fluid work, both found in Morgoth's Ring and The War of the Jewels.) In places it goes back to summaries written before The Hobbit, out of general paucity of source material. It's also ironic for you to mock the language of The History of Middle-Earth and laud that of The Silmarillion, when most of the content in The Silmarillion is drawn from the same manuscripts as HoME. The published Silmarillion can and should be considered, not a "primary work" as you put it, but as a composition of Christopher Tolkien on the same level with its manuscript sources in HoME. Now, Christopher had the best position from which to compile it, but its form and flow and the choices made are his and very much not his father's. Tolkien's Silmarillion was never finished, and it does not help us to pretend that the first, deeply flawed attempt his son made to present the material is the real thing. Many Tolkien enthusiasts prefer History of Middle-Earth because it actually does reflect Tolkien's ideas and his priorities. That it wasn't ever completed doesn't diminish the richness of what is there.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 21, 2014 19:54:12 GMT -6
Thanks for the answers! A few more, if you don't mind ...
1) How was treasure hidden? Were there things like crates, barrels and so on in the rooms that you had to actively search, or was it mostly in obvious places like treasure chests? And were the rooms sparse and bare, or was there often "stuff" (not necessarily treasure) around?
2) Did you guys ever use lamp oil offensively? Either as grenades or to light fires on the ground / on existing things?
3) What were the weird things you remember from Greyhawk and Blackmoor? Stuff that stands out above the monsters and map-exploration - what were the payoff places you got to?
4) Out of pure curiosity, did Gygax ever talk in "Gygaxian" when he ran games? That is, did he use a lot of words that seemed drawn from a thesaurus when describing stuff? Or was he very plain-English matter-of-fact and only using that kind of mode when he wrote?
Edit to add: 5) Were non-locked doors always stuck?
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Post by cadriel on Apr 21, 2014 15:22:33 GMT -6
Tolkien improved as a writer between The Hobbit of 1937 and The Lord of the Rings of the 1950s, in fact he improved over the course of The Hobbit and the later chapters are very close in tone and effect to LotR. He desperately wanted to get The Silmarillion published after The Hobbit and when this proved impossible he desperately wanted The Silmarillion published to accompany The Lord of the Rings in some form, perhaps as a fourth volume. For those who care about language, as I do, and think that ideas and language are intimately related, it should be said that The Silmarillion is a tightly structured compilation of well written material intended to cover the First Age in a coherent span. The History of Middle-earth on the other hand has a skeleton structure where long tales are loosely latched together, and those tales were written very early, typically before The Hobbit , and read like first drafts and frankly are poorly written in the main. Lets just say no publisher in his right mind would have published anything from The History of Middle-earth before The Silmarillion was published. This is not to say the ideas within the stories are poor, they are largely the same ideas conveyed with epic density in The Silmarillion. Personally I consider the HoME to be an appendix to or sources for The Silmarillion. I do appreciate being able to explore the ideas at greater length but lament the fact that they were not re-written post 1950s. The published Silmarillion isn't what you are claiming it is, though. It's a relatively hurried attempt to put the full legendarium into a form that could be published in the wake of JRRT's death. It's quite clear in places (particularly in the jarring chapter "Of Aulë and Yavanna") and frequently within individual chapters where emendations and additions from disparate manuscripts have been made in the process of stitching together a book out of its constituent parts. The structure, and chunks of the text, is roughly taken from the "Later Quenta Silmarillion" as published in Morgoth's Ring and The War of the Jewels, but that peters out before the "Great Stories" begin (i.e. Beren & Lúthien; Túrin Turambar; and the Fall of Gondolin). The versions of the Great Stories in the Silmarillion are weak, particularly Gondolin, with Túrin having come out the best. Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay are considered to have written Chapter 22, "Of the Ruin of Doriath," virtually from whole cloth. Personally, having read The History of Middle-Earth, my preference is for the work of the younger Tolkien, and I consider The Book of Lost Tales my favorite. Yes, it's rough and unpolished compared to the later versions he would work out, but it's grander and broader in vision, far more epic and less concerned with reconciling heroic mythology with Catholic theology. Tolkien became obsessed with the "marring of Arda" by Melkor's rebellion, and worked out changes (many of which appear in the published Silmarillion) to reflect this concept. It's older (in human terms), heavier, more "mature" and obsessed with the tragedy of loss, but also hews closer to the concept of Original Sin. The published book is, with a few exceptions, selections from The History of Middle-Earth, mostly from Morgoth's Ring and War of the Jewels, with additions from elsewhere when needed. It's told in the wrong way, and it's forced into a single Quenta Silmarillion when Tolkien clearly no longer intended that.. Charles Noad suggested this order for the book: Quenta Silmarillion* Concerning the Powers: Ainulindale Valaquenta The Great Tales: The Lay of Leithian Narn i Chin Hurin The Fall of Gondolin Earendil the Wanderer The Later Tales: Akallabeth Of the Rings of Power Appendices: The Tale of Years Of the Laws and Customs among the Eldar Dangweth Pengoloo Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth Quendi and Eldar * Of the beginning of days; Of the coming of the Elves; Of the flight of the Noldor; of the return of the Noldor; of the ruin of Beleriand This would have allowed the work to stand as a true composite, and given proper weight to the Great Tales. The published version is an unfortunate mélange, an attempt to cram too much of the legendarium into a literary form in which it no longer fit.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 20, 2014 16:15:45 GMT -6
1) What kind of tricks and traps do you remember from Gary's Greyhawk?
2) In either Dave or Gary's games, did any of the disease rules ever come up? If so, was it ever anything more than getting some unspecific "disease" and needing a Cure Disease spell cast on you?
3) If you were winning a fight against a group of humanoids (goblins, orcs etc), and some stragglers surrendered, what did you guys do with them? Or did monsters that failed morale checks just beat it and run?
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Post by cadriel on Apr 17, 2014 18:03:01 GMT -6
kent, when you talk about the "brevity and density" of the Silmarillion I guess this is referring to the published book titled The Silmarillion, which is an invention of Christopher Tolkien and not of JRRT himself. A number of Tolkien enthusiasts have noted that this is at best a flawed presentation of the stories, and certainly not Tolkien's preferred result; putting the whole thing in a final, perfected form was a labor he started in 1916 and didn't finish by his death in 1972. The "feeling of being compiled from several authorities ..." is not a deliberate affectation, but rather the result of its composition; Christopher was using sources from across over 50 years of writing to assemble the final document. Likewise, trying to pin down exactly what Tolkien wanted is difficult or impossible in part because Tolkien changed over a long life, and his priorities changed as well. There were times when he was primarily concerned with the central stories, and times when he was mostly concerned with the subtleties of the world-building and the theological implications of the mythology. The attempt to put it all in one volume results in a mix of material that reflects these different interests, and it suffers from a lack of focus because of this.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 17, 2014 16:20:09 GMT -6
You said you didn't get The Silmarillion so it is not clear why you are going on and on trying to persuade others. I believe you. No; I said I've read it repeatedly, am currently re-reading it, and that I enjoy the actual character-driven stories the most. That's a perfectly valid opinion and stems from reading the Silmarillion and all of the HoME series.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 17, 2014 13:43:08 GMT -6
Certainly it was never intended that people like you would read The Silmarillion. I doubt that a man who called his wife "My Lúthien" wrote The Silmarillion for the sort of people who find more to appreciate in the migration of the Eldalië than the Tale of Tinúviel. It's very clear where Tolkien's heart was in his work.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 17, 2014 12:59:31 GMT -6
It's this board's acronym for the Alternate Combat System as laid out in OD&D. Basically it means "how OD&D combat worked."
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Post by cadriel on Apr 17, 2014 12:42:33 GMT -6
I looked through the Kickstarter again, and wound up pledging for the adventure modules instead of the deluxe reprint. I'd recommend that others who are likewise interested but get sticker shock, take a look. It's $10 for Michael Curtis's module, $30 for a subscription for three additional modules, and when they hit a fifth module as a stretch goal, that should also be available. Unfortunately, there are two caveats. One is that these aren't cumulative with the hardcover; if you want the actual book, you need to fork over $80 for it, plus $40 for the four modules. And the other caveat is that shipping isn't included. I was seriously considering the $120 but at a minimum of $130 for the package I can't do it. The modules are much more reasonable.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 17, 2014 12:07:11 GMT -6
By the way, while I advocate skipping to ch6 if you are getting bogged down, I do think the first five chapters are outstanding. That is where you will come to understand the different Elven races and their relationships to light and how Tolkien conceives of his blessed land and wild dark Middle-earth. Tolkien's mythmaking is not a load of boogaloo as with his imitators. It is coherent and rewards trying to make sense of it with a deeper appreciation of what follows. I disagree with those who suggest The Silmarillion would be improved by focusing on long versions of the core stories. The Silmarillion does not read like entertainment, it is a more a crucial racial history - 'This is who we are. Don't forget it.' The brevity and density are essential and it has the feeling of being complied from several authorities, poets and historians, rather than being the work of a 'novelist'. I disagree, having just re-read those chapters. One of the major issues is that the Valar aren't that interesting, except for Aulë and Yavanna. They're all very well behaved; the closest we come is that Tulkas sulks a bit because Manwë won't let him have it out with Melkor. It's not like actual mythology where there are epic conflicts and disagreements among the gods even though they ultimately acknowledge one as superior. Aulë's bit with the dwarves is good, and Yavanna becomes sympathetic when she makes the plants and animals, but the rest are kind of a waste of a good set of quasi-deities. Mandos has a certain cachet when he speaks doom, but that doesn't kick in until later. There's really not much to the differentiation of the Eldalië. Some elves decide they'd rather stay in Arda instead of going to Valinor, and the Teleri go but hang out on the coast by their ships. The only interesting character to come out of it is Elu Thingol, and if you didn't know he was going to be Lúthien's father later in the book, he's just sort of odd (the only elf of the Calaquendi to go back and live with the Sindar, and the only child of Illúvatar to marry a Maia). For me it reads something like a fictional version of Bulfinch's Mythology - spending a lot of time on laying out the ground work, and then condensing each of the big stories into a chapter or two. My preference is for something more akin to the Mabinogion, a focused telling of the high-impact stories.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 17, 2014 11:36:49 GMT -6
You can't keep a crossbow at nock forever; especially in a humid environment like a dungeon, the string will start to stretch after time. Ten minutes or half an hour, sure; if you keep it drawn for several hours it will lose much of its power. Well, that would be an issue, yes. I was picturing drawing and nocking an arrow before opening an unknown door, for instance, or using it to get a precision shot on a far-off opponent.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 17, 2014 4:04:28 GMT -6
I didn't wind up going through with it, but I think you could do a perfectly horrifying bestiary based on the works of Ulisse Aldrovandi, who was a master of this kind of thing.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 17, 2014 3:54:33 GMT -6
I wrote about crossbows recently on my blog, specifically here. A light crossbow should be the device that a fighting-man can draw back by hand; heavy crossbows are the ones requiring a winch or other device to draw. From my perspective at least, crossbows are best for sniping or keeping at tension to get off a single volley at the start of combat. If someone was reloading a crossbow in the midst of combat, I'd say that a heavy crossbow should definitely have a rate of fire of 1 shot per 2 rounds, with 1 round being used to reload the weapon and 1 to aim and fire. Light crossbows can reload and fire in the same round. Given the ACS, the best thing I think would be for heavy crossbows to give +2 to hit against armored individuals. They were used specifically for their armor-penetrating capabilities, and this simulates that, moving each type of armor down 1 grade - leather becomes totally ineffective, chain as good as leather, and plate as good as chain. I'd rather use that than change the damage type, since once you've punched through armor, trauma is trauma.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 17, 2014 3:32:41 GMT -6
I actually had never gotten into the Silmarillion from the published form of the book; it was too dry - and the parts leading up to the Darkening of Valinor and the theft of the Silmarils are pretty tough reads. I got into it through the History of Middle-Earth series, really falling in love with it once I read The Book of Lost Tales. Beren and Lúthien was my favorite of the stories, with Túrin Turambar second and the Fall of Gondolin third.
Ultimately the form was flawed. I'm re-reading it now, and it takes so long before you actually get to Fëanor and company doing their thing that it's easy to understand why people get frustrated with it. Really Tolkien should have told the four "core" stories with a framing device, like in BoLT, and then treated the whole "why the Silmarils are important" part in an appendix. The retelling of Túrin in The Children of Húrin is good, but none of that gets me a better version of Beren and Lúthien - I guess BoLT remains my favorite there.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 31, 2014 11:35:12 GMT -6
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Post by cadriel on Mar 3, 2014 15:01:15 GMT -6
In OD&D that is also the case with items. Web, Wish, for instance were magical properties of magical deveices before being spells. That has nothing to do with the price of tea in China. This is about magical effects in dungeons. I think there are some cool ones using the OD&D and Greyhawk spell lists. If you have others based on items or totally independent of published material I'd rather hear about that rather than quibble about what was and wasn't included in the spells.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 3, 2014 11:20:37 GMT -6
I never felt limited to rationalizing weird effects according to spells on a list. Nobody has ever asked why a magical effect exists in the dungeon that their magic-user can't reproduce. I guess I just look at things differently. I'm not saying that every weird effect in a dungeon has to be reproducible given the spell lists in OD&D, rather I'm looking to the OD&D spell lists for things that I can turn into interesting dungeon elements. It came about because I was thinking about the possibilities of NPCs as animals who had been polymorphed. Taking the exercise further, I found that there were a lot of things that are good fodder for dungeon oddities.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 3, 2014 9:01:17 GMT -6
I've done a couple of blog posts riffing on the idea of spells from Men & Magic and Greyhawk having been cast in the dungeon well in advance, creating various weird effects, tricks and traps. The first post dealt with the Men & Magic spells: Spell Effects in the DungeonThe second deals with Greyhawk spells: Spell Effects in the Dungeon, Greyhawk StyleI'm curious what different spells folks here have used to create interesting effects in their dungeons, or other ideas on spells cast in advance.
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Post by cadriel on Dec 26, 2013 5:53:49 GMT -6
I did a bunch of variant lizardmen back in the fourth issue of Fight On! - including venom-spitting ones, lizards that walk on walls, and heavily armored lizards. But yeah, variant lizardmen are always fun
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Post by cadriel on Dec 12, 2013 5:09:09 GMT -6
Is module #5 available in print like the first four?
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Post by cadriel on Nov 3, 2013 12:21:31 GMT -6
I rolled up an entry from the "Goops, Glops and Globs" section when I was doing some restocking in a Stonehell megadungeon game I was running earlier this year. It's a good concept if you want a weird monster and it creates an interesting encounter. I didn't use anything else from the module thus far, although eventually I'd like to play around with some of the chimeric creatures.
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Post by cadriel on Oct 8, 2013 9:27:48 GMT -6
Tweak the "Parry" rule from the Holmes rulebook. Holmes: sacrifice your attack to get -2 for parrying. If the opponent scores exactly what they need to land a hit, your weapon breaks but you take no damage.
1. Increase the Parry bonus for higher level fighting-men. (Maybe +1 per 3 levels) 2. Allow high-Dexterity fighting-men to parry without sacrificing their attacks. Or if you give extra attacks at higher levels, let them use each one either for an attack or a parry. Or allow a free parry if they are holding a main-gauche or dagger in their off hand.
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Post by cadriel on Aug 29, 2013 14:03:32 GMT -6
The point is that one character isn't the same as the next. You get characters who are lucky and have high HP or ones who are unlucky and have low HP. It does tend to gravitate towards the average after a few levels, but it makes the early game have a bit of variety. OD&D characters are already fairly similar mechanically, why make them even moreso?
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Post by cadriel on Aug 28, 2013 7:11:06 GMT -6
I went back through and adjusted a number of things. Part of it is clarification, other parts are based on going back over the D&D FAQ again and the discussion here. I removed Specialists for now.
Character Abilities
All characters are generated with 3d6 in order. One swap may be made between two statistics other than Charisma in addition to the point swapping described in Men & Magic.
Strength 8 or less: -1 on to-hit roll for all melee attacks Strength 13 or more: +1 on to-hit roll for all melee attacks Wisdom 8 or less: -1 on saving throws versus Spells Wisdom 13 or more: +1 on saving throws verus Spells Dexterity 6 or less: -1 on initiative rolls Dexterity 15 or more: +1 on initiative rolls
Allowed Races
Human, Dwarf, Elf, Half-Elf, Hobbit.
Elves may be fighting-men / magic-users. In this case they decide before an adventure starts which class will receive experience for that adventure. Such types may only cast spells in armor if they are wearing Elven Chain (cost: 100 x the cost of normal chain mail).
Level limits are enforced. Any race may be Fighting-Men but only to level 4 (elves and hobbits) or level 8 (dwarves and half-elves). Elves and half-elves may be magic-users but only to level 8.
Nonhuman characters who have reached the limit in levels may not advance further in hit dice, spells, etc. However, they may advance on “to-hit” charts. Hobbits make one advance at 100,000 XP, and all other types make an advance for each 300,000 XP in addition to their total.
Character Classes
The following character classes are available:
Fighting-Man: as per Volume I: Men & Magic Magic-User: as per Volume I: Men & Magic Cleric: as per Volume I: Men & Magic. Must always be Lawful or Chaotic. Druid: as per Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry but follows the cleric hit dice progression from Volume I: Men & Magic. Must be Neutral. Paladin: A fighting-man may become a paladin (as per Supplement I: Greyhawk) but only after having reached 4th level (Hero).
Hit Points
At character creation, if a 1 is rolled for hit points, the player may re-roll.
Upon gaining a level, a player re-rolls all their hit dice. If the total is equal to or less than the character’s current hit points, their total hit points increase by 1 instead.
All character types use one of the hit dice progressions from Volume I: Men & Magic.
Combat
Rounds are 10 seconds long. That doesn’t effect anything, it’s just how long they are.
Initiative is rolled using 1d6 for each side. The high roll goes first. Tied rolls mean that action is simultaneous. Initiative is modified by a high or low Dexterity as noted above.
A character using a long weapon (spear, polearm, halberd, two-handed sword, lance, pike) gets +3 on initiative for the first round of a combat, acting before their group. At this point, a spear or pike may be set to receive a charge, attacking when the opponent closes. In each subsequent round, characters with long weapons have -1 to initiative, acting after their group.
Weapons do 1d6 damage. Two-handed weapons roll two dice and take the better damage. Spears and pikes set to receive a charge do 2d6 damage.
Spellcasters who have lost initiative, and receive damage in a round, cannot cast a spell. Their spell is interrupted, but is not lost.
If a character rolls a natural “20” on the to-hit die, they get +1 to damage. If they roll a natural “1” on the to-hit die, their next roll to-hit is at -2.
Characters firing arrows into melee will have their targets randomly determined by the referee before rolling to hit. This determination will take into effect the relative visibility of each target. The player may ask the rough chance to hit a given target, but not which target they will hit.
Starting at 2nd level, fighting-men may attack once per round per level when fighting against creatures of 1 HD or less (HD of 1+1 counts as more than 1 HD). When the character reaches 8th level (Super-Hero), he may attack twice per round so long as the total hit dice of opponents is equal to or less than his hit dice. Such extra attacks always apply against different targets.
Death and Dying
Characters reaching 0 hit points die. However, death is not necessarily instantaneous. It takes 1d6 rounds for a character at 0 HP to die. For every HP the character was reduced below 0, subtract 1 from the die roll. A result of 0 or less means instant death. While the character is dying, they may not attempt any action, but magical healing (spells, potions etc) may be performed on them. Restoring a character to 1 or more hit points ends the dying state.
Hirelings and Retainers
Each hireling will have a morale score between 2 and 12 determined secretly by the referee. This is adjusted by the “Loyalty Base” score of the character hiring them (see Men & Magic, page 11). During stressful situations, or when being ordered to do something obviously dangerous, this score will be used to determine whether the hireling will perform the action or continue to fight. The referee will roll 2d6 and if the result is greater than the morale score, then the hireling will take action to save himself such as fleeing, refusing orders, etc.
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