Beowulf was a Monk

An odd thought popped into my head last night or this morning. It came while considering how to have the unique powers and playstyle of the monk class (or "mystic" in BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia parlance) without all of the kung fu and/or wuxia trappings. Consider: which hero of Old English legend...

• ...regularly fought monsters armed with few or no weapons?
• ...performed athletic feats for days on end?
• ...fought completely without armor (on at least one occasion)?

Checking In

Just wanted to check in here to prove that I'm not dead yet. 

As of writing this, it's been almost three months since I last ran my AD&D campaign - all two sessions of it. I was glad to see a group of primarily "new school" players using the "old school" system without difficulty (or at least, with no more difficulty than the Pathfinder on which some of them cut their teeth). However, I've since realized that keeping all of that machinery in my brain was draining for me, so while I will look back at the system with fond memories, I don't see myself running it again in the near future.

In this interval, I have gotten to run a storytelling mini-session: two more Preludes for my Vampire chronicle. The actual second session has proven elusive thus far, but I'm hopeful that it will come - as are most of the players. The setting and the ultra-light rules have proved a good fit with each other.

I've also been putting plans together for a new campaign of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game - the first edition of the D6 version, by West End Games. It's kind of at a midpoint between pure storytelling and pure role-playing, and a recent viewing of the original Star Wars film (the Despecialized Edition, of course) was met with enthusiasm among my millennial peers. Synchronously, just after I acquired The Star Wars Sourcebook and finished some more campaign notes, I spotted the 30th anniversary reprinting of both books at a big chain bookstore - and at a price that would have snagged me instantly if I didn't already own vintage copies. Maybe once I'm able to run more, I'll have more material for blogging.

Old is Gnew

Following on from my previous post about gnomes and dwarves, further work has led to further thought. As I am wont to do, I was meticulously combing through the original Dungeons & Dragons booklets (including the Supplements), for the purposes of assembling the text therein into a single thick Men & Magic volume. The idea was to make something a bit like Mothshade's "Men & Magic Compilation", except in print-friendly digest format and using the original words almost exclusively. Doing so led me to discover rules details I hadn't noticed before, including this little tidbit from page 5 of Supplement I: Greyhawk.

Dwarves are about four feet tall, stocky of build, weigh 150 pounds, shoulders very broad, their skin a ruddy tan, brown or gray, and are of various types (hill, mountain, or burrowers) (such as gnomes).

There it is, in Olde Gygaxian - a statement that gnomes are just a type of dwarves. Gygax would change his mind later with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and future authors would continue to have gnomes as a separate but similar species. But in Duemerus? This is my setting, and my game, so I can do whatever the heck I want. And I want to have gnomes just be dwarves again.

Soundtrack Sunday: Conan the Destroyer

As sorry as I am to rip off Stelios' gimmick here, I wanted to share this one, as I recently re-watched this film. Perhaps you may be thinking, "What? Really - that silly, goofy one with Grace Jones that killed off the franchise for so many years?"

I admit, I'm not too happy about A View to a Kill either. Leaving the shortcomings of certain Bond films aside and getting back on track, it's surprising to hear this caliber of music in a film that is, arguably, more of a parody of the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian than it is a sequel. Fortunately, the one area in which this film was not a huge step down from its predecessor was in the soundtrack. Of course, nothing can really replace Basil Poledouris' stirring themes from the original movie, but here the result was not a complete aural betrayal of everything the first film did right.

Ordinarily, I would embed a video below (as Stelios typically does), but YouTube won't let me embed this one clip. Less fortunate still, this piece of score has yet to be officially released on CD, so I had to use the actual scene from the movie; the orchestral strains are still pretty prominent nonetheless.

Sit back, and enjoy!

A Gnome By Any Other Gname

A slight follow-up to my previous post, with some more musing I've done on the roles of dwarves, gnomes, and halflings in my campaign.

Previously, I've been hamstrung in attempting to make major changes to my game, largely in part due to the ruleset being used (AD&D 2e for some time). I was reluctant to change things due to other elements of the rules taking the specifics of each part into account when making additional material. Admittedly, 2e isn't nearly as strict about this as 3.5 or Pathfinder, but the problem is still there to some extent.

A major advantage of switching to a sparser system (in this case Basic Fantasy, although it could have been original D&D or Dungeon Crawl Classics if different circumstances had prevailed) is that I feel more freedom to build things up as I and my players see fit. The players who have little interest in giving input on the rules - i.e., most of them - find it easier to begin with less and then add more, instead of starting with too much and then having me take it away (which I would have to do if I ran 5e or some other thing).

In the interest of "less", I've been thinking about what exactly a gnome should be in my game world. When most people hear "gnome", they think of the really little lawn jockeys with white beards and pointed hats. The same might be said of "elf", but the cultural impact of The Lord of the Rings is so massive by this point that the roughly human-sized elves come to mind just as easily. Since the Bombadilesque gnomes aren't a firm factor in my game... why not make them Tiny?

Trimming the Fat II: The Trimmening

Here's the promised followup to my previous post. Last time, I pruned a few extraneous classes, and hung question marks over many more; today, I'll be looking at the typical selection of character races. As with the last post, to qualify here, the race in question must have appeared in the core rules of at least two "editions" of D&D.

Dwarves and Halflings

(First playable appearance: Men & Magic, 1974)

Dwarves have long been a staple of D&D, due to their ubiquity in Tolkien's Middle-Earth stories - major party members in The Hobbit, less so (at least directly) in The Lord of the Rings. These roles have been reversed in the latter, where four of the central characters are hobbits. These two races have often been grouped into similar categories; in original D&D (pre-Supplements), they are both restricted to the fighter class, while AD&D (both 1e and 2e) allow them to be thieves in addition. (1e is unusual in that halflings cannot be clerics, but halfling NPCs are allowed to be druids!)

The reason that I group these two together is as follows: I feel that having both as distinct species is a bit redundant. Short people, sometimes with long beards (including female dwarves, at least according to Gygax), who can't usually be wizards? In my campaign, I've long considered merging the two into a single species, with the subraces having different characteristics; perhaps it's the "Tallfellow" or "Stout" dwarves who are longer in leg and beard.

Elves

(First playable appearance: Men & Magic, 1974)

Elves are pretty much essential components of any high-fantasy game. They look and act similarly enough to humans that the two can conceivably adventure together, but are just different enough that a Referee with any creativity can put vast oceans between the two species just under the surface. (This is another reason that the Vulcans on Star Trek tend to pop up as major characters; in fact, one can easily draw parallels between the two). And if these are different species, not just different ethnicities of humans, then it makes sense that they would have some classes that are harder (or flat-out impossible) for them to pursue. An acquaintance pointed out that, logically, they should also be able to do things that humans can't do, and this is why I think multi-classing (with a few limits) is a good way to differentiate demihumans from humans.

Gnomes

(First playable appearance: Players Handbook, 1978)

Oh jeez... If dwarves and halflings as separate species seems superfluous to me, gnomes are about as useful as a third thumb. Rarely do I see anyone play them; in fact, I've only encountered two gnome player characters in any fantasy RPG I've run or played (one of which is my own PC, Roywyn Raulnor). Considering Tolkien's influence, it seems fairly obvious that their origin lies in Tom Bombadil, but it doesn't really seem necessary to have yet another species of short height and long beards.

"I gnow thee gnot, old man."
(model from Battle for Middle-Earth II)

The main point of interest is that, in AD&D (both editions), gnomes are the only demihuman race that can be illusionists; I concede that my own gnome PC, if ported over to AD&D from her current home of 5e, would be a multi-classed illusionist/thief. But I say just let the combined dwarf/halfling species be illusionists, and free up the gname of "gnome" for fey creatures more resembling those seen on American lawns.

Half-elves

(First playable appearance: Supplement I: Greyhawk, 1975)

Half-elves do technically appear in The Lord of the Rings. Elrond is called "Half-elven", although his parentage has little actual impact on his mortality or the way he is viewed by others (at least from what I read - I read all of The Fellowship of the Ring, but couldn't get through more than about a quarter of The Two Towers). He chose to identify with his elven ancestors, and so he's considered an elf.

If a player character wants to be a "half-elf", that's fine by me, but they have to choose whether that means they will identify as an elf or a human; there's no real reason for such a strong level of incomplete dominance that they're considered a separate race. I get the feeling that the desire for half-elves is largely based on min-maxing, as half-elves get more classes to choose from than elves, but still have some special abilities. In that cast, why not just let elves have more classes, and drop the mechanical differences of half-elves?

Half-orcs

(First playable appearance: Players Handbook, 1978)

Same here as for half-elves. If a Referee wants to let players be a potentially "monstrous" species, just remove the status of full orcs as mindless, faceless evil minions, and let players be orcs. The games in the Elder Scrolls series, starting with Morrowind, did this with great success; orcs are integrated into society for the most part, and their fierce reputation serves them well as soldiers.

Dragonborn and Tieflings

(First playable appearance: Player's Handbook, 2008)

I'm inclined to just say "no". Tieflings have a bit more history, appearing initially in the Planescape setting for AD&D 2e, but dragonborn have no excuse aside from Wizards of the Coast trying to cash in on the humanoid races popular in World of Warcraft. If someone wants to play a dragon-like character, there were already half-dragons for over ten years by the time 4e came out! Also, as Preston Selby pointed out here:

"I just think there's a sort of breakdown in the game when a player can say their character is a half-dragon with a horny lizard-head and a breath weapon, and there is an expectation that the character can walk into a town and an inn with the humans and the halflings and everyone will act like this is totally normal. At that point, the game has seriously damaged its potential for weirdness and wonderment."

At that point, discrimination by non-fire-breathing humans and dwarves isn't necessarily based on irrational, prejudicial fears (although there's probably an element of that); it's a very rational fear that the dragonborn might sneeze too hard and burn down your house!

I realize that this gets into the same thorny area as X-Men (as much of a prick as he was, Senator Kelly was right when he referred to powerful mutant teenagers as "weapons in our schools"). This is why fantasy and sci-fi can only use metaphors for racial and religious discrimination up to a point.

Ack, back on topic: I don't think dragonborn should be a "standard" species in the kind of games I like to run. As always, these are just my opinion, not some kind of holy pronouncement.

The Tally

Playable: Dwarves (including Gnomes and Halflings), Elves, Humans, possibly Orcs

Reheated Leftovers

My previous post on the lack of creativity in the modern "hobby" reminded me of a quote from Ed Wood:

"So, uh, you made the movie, and now you wanna make it again?"

The urge to remake old stuff for each new edition is funny to me. We've had versions of The Temple of Elemental Evil for AD&D (the original version), 2e (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil), 3e/3.5 (in both module and computer game formats), 4e (twice!), the D&D Adventure System boardgame (which is based on 4e's mechanics), and 5e.

The only place where such retreading is this common is in the movie industry, although I have to say that (for the most part) things have slowed down a bit since the heady days of the 1920s through the 1940s, when a movie might be remade several times within the same decade.

I'll just leave this here...

Z is for Zombies

I've mentioned zombies before, but I wanted to bring up something that has always been a sticking point for me: the use of the word "zombie" in a fantasy game. I've never been a huge fan of it, to the point that not a single one of my NPCs has ever uttered the word. With the way that pop culture of the last ten years or so has been swarming with the things - both figuratively and literally - I find that it's much too easy to ruin the immersive nature of the game by reference to a common term. (Incidentally, I also have this problem with Ktulu* after Steve Jackson Games started the wave of plush toys... even though Cthulu Dice is one of my favorite quick-play party games.)

Before I started playing tabletop RPGs, I ran into this issue. I got around it then by following the lead of the original Night of the Living Dead, and referring to shambling, reanimated corpses as "ghouls". I'm still a fan of this idea, as it's just vague enough that there's no precise definition. A "ghoul" might be a carnivorous corpse, or a roaming undead necrovore. The only issue is that a "ghoul" in D&D terms refers to a very specific type of monster, that is often semi-intelligent and not usually created to serve a necromancer or "evil" cleric.

I've already demonstrated to my players the lethality of even a relatively small group of zombies, although some of them feel that that specific scenario was unfair; but that's a story for another time. Perhaps there's a good way to keep them scary...

* Yes, I spelled it the way Metallica spelled it. No, there isn't a particular reason. I just like footnotes.

W is for Wizards of the Coast

(Apologies in advance for getting this post out late. I'll be posting the "X" post later today, so don't worry that I've started shirking my bloggerly responsibilities.)

Some people - past and present - seem to have heralded it as the end of an era when TSR was bought out by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. It's true that AD&D 2nd Edition would soon be on its way out, and the 3rd Edition would make some changes that not everyone liked, but it's not hard to realize that these changes were almost entirely evolutionary.

Grid combat? Six-second rounds? Attacks of opportunity? Those all originated (in official AD&D products, at least) in the Player's Option supplemental rulebooks, specifically Combat and Tactics. The Option books came out in 1995 - at the same time as the revision of AD&D2, and two years before the buyout.

I love this cover; it should have been the cover
to the revised PHB, since it shows actual combat
instead of just busting down a door!

Besides, Wizards of the Coast did keep AD&D alive for several years. They released a booklet allowing for the conversion of AD&D characters to the new 3rd Edition rules (which was slightly iffy, but a nice gesture). They released a number of supplemental books, such as The Scarlet Brotherhood (meant for Greyhawk, but could be used for any setting) which updated and revised the Assassin and Monk classes for the new rules. And, they released an adventure module (The Apocalypse Stone) which allowed DMs to end their 2nd Edition campaigns in a blaze of worlds-ending glory.

Alexis of The Tao of D&D, in his most recent podcast, suggested that the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons movie would never have happened if TSR had still been around as an actual company. I feel that he's both right and wrong on this point. On the one hand, the particular movie that was made is not very good, and it does a poor job of conveying what a good D&D campaign is like (although I just ran the Fast Play Game based on the movie last night, and I succeeded in introducing a complete neophyte to the hobby with great interest). On the other hand, the movie that might have been made in the 1980s - with Gygax's direct involvement - would have been far, far worse, as I read in this article from The Escapist.

True, WotC is responsible for the debacle that is 4th Edition... but that particular cluster of failure is more the fault of Hasbro, who pushed WotC to make a new version of the game (and probably forced them to make it as MMOG-like as possible) after buying them out in turn. WotC is certainly trying to do right by those who have remained loyal to the D&D "brand", and lure people back who jumped ship for Pathfinder (or even earlier cases). The premium reprints are no longer in print to my knowledge, but they can still easily be found relatively cheaply online.*

I salute you, Wizards. You done good.

* Except for the boxed set of OD&D, which (typical of collector's items) has skyrocketed to twice the list price. If I wasn't willing to pay $149.99 USD for a set, who the hell thinks I'll pay $280?

D is for Dragons

Shorter post today; an interesting little side note from my film-watching escapades. In the film Dragonslayer (not a great movie, but definitely worth watching for fantasy gamers), the sorcerer Ulrich says this upon his first meeting with the band of travelers from the kingdom of Urland:

In fact, if it weren't for sorcerers, there wouldn't be any dragons.

I've actually taken some time to think about how this would play out in my own campaign. Any interested readers should do the same.

"If he's ready to lay a dragon in its grave, he's nothing to fear from me."

Power creep across editions

Reading through the Basic Rules for D&D 5th Edition, I am struck by how much more powerful wizards are at low level. Maybe this is just a reaction to my having spent the majority of my reading on B/X D&D and AD&D 2nd Edition, but the important magic missile spell is a good indicator of the relative power level of these games.

In B/X, a magic missile shoots one magical projectile which hits for 1d6+1 points of damage. A first-level magic-user has one 1st-level spell slot, and so the maximum amount of damage they could do in a single encounter without resorting to melee (pro tip: don't) is 7 points.

In AD&D 2nd Edition (and apparently 1st Edition as well), magic missile does 1d4+1 damage. A first-level mage has one spell slot, while a specialist in Evocation would have two; assuming both of these are used for the same spell, the most damage a wizard could do in one encounter is 10 points. A mage would only be able to to half this damage, at maximum.

In D&D 5th Edition, magic missile shoots three missiles for 1d4+1 force damage each! Also, first-level wizards have two spell slots, meaning that they could potentially do up to 30 points of damage in a single encounter - in addition to damage from cantrips like ray of frost! I'm picturing something like the spaz-lasers from The Lords of Magick, rather than the kind of fearful, fragile wizard portrayed in Dragonslayer.

True, the ability to shoot additional missiles was present even in B/X, but there a magic-user had to wait until 3rd level or higher before being able to launch multiple magic missiles!

It sucks having been the DM by default for such a long stretch of time; I find myself wanting to change things (like nerfing this spell, for one thing) as I read through 5th Edition. The reason I don't is that I want to experience this new version of D&D as a player first, and then as a DM. I feel like the new Starter Set will go a long way toward accomplishing this, but I still have to hold my house-rule instincts in check.

Cantrips in AD&D (1st Edition)

Looking over these things as they appear in Dragon magazine (issues #59 through #61, also printed in Unearthed Arcana), I find myself wondering why people think of Gary Gygax as some kind of game-design genius, and say that the game went to pot after he left TSR.

I'll wait for the torches to go out, and the pitchforks to rust, before I continue.

As useful as these are mechanically (some more so than others; couldn't bee, bug, gnats, and spider have been combined into a single entry, since they're almost identical in effects?) I find the detailed descriptions of the verbal and somatic components of these 0-level spells to be more than a little silly. For instance, from the description of the quite handy firefinger cantrip:

The caster speaks a word of power over elemental fire (ron-son, zip-po, or the much revered word, dun-hill), extends the forefinger, and makes a downward or sideways motion with the thumb.
(Dragon #60, p. 19)

Good gods! And I thought some of the material components of normal spells were jokey and anachronistic!

A legendary artifact.

Seriously, this would totally ruin the atmosphere of the game if left as written. I prefer to run a game with a modicum of seriousness, and let any humor come from the players or from the natural order of play (such as a rat exploding when hit with a magic missile for full damage). Just imagine a wizard in a fantasy film - if not The Fellowship of the Ring, then at least Willow - distracting a villain by wiggling their fingers and saying "kitchy-kitchy-coo", causing the villain's nose to be tweaked. (No, seriously, this is the actual description of the tweak cantrip.) Using a piece of copper wire for a message spell seems positively proper compared to crap like this.

Maybe Gygax was trying to alleviate concerns about this game being too violent, but turning a game of swords and sorcery into Harry Potter and the Wiggly Wizards seems like a very bad idea in hindsight. (Some people have expressed similar concern about the wild mage class from 2e's Tome of Magic, but at least that has some kind of actual impact on gameplay.)