2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day Fifty-Nine

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of Role-Playing!

Today is Part 4 of my series of looks at OD&D starting with Men & Magic - Volume 1.

OK, today I am going to talk further about the races. As noted there are four "official" races for player characters: Men, Dwarves, Elves and Hobbits.

Dwarves: Dwarves may opt only for the fighting class, and they may never progress beyond the 6th level (Myrmidon). Their advantages are: 1) they have a high level of magic resistance, and they thus add four levels when rolling saving throws (a 6th-level dwarf equals a 10th-level human); 2) they are the only characters able to fully employ the +3 Magic War Hammer (explained in Book II); 3) they note slanting passages, traps, shifting walls and new construction in underground settings; and 4) they are able to speak the languages of Gnomes, Kobolds and Goblins in addition to the usual tongues (see LANGUAGES in this book).

This brings us to level limits. Level limits have generated an enormous amount of heated arguments on the Internet and on forums specifically. I used level limits and not one player ever complained about level limits. Dwarves, elves and hobbits all have level limits and as we played we ran into those level limits. No complaints, not one. As the referee I appreciated that. So you know what I did as the referee? 

I created ways for those level limits to be bypassed without being asked or being lobbied to do it. I used the game feature called the Quest. It is useful for a lot of things. Unlike a Geas, where the player has no choice, with a Quest the player has the option of refusing and doing something else. Some powerful figure makes an offer that if the character(s) does some great deed, they will be granted the ability to grow more powerful at the expenditure of great effort. I always found that these Quests which happened at rare intervals were a player favorite and IMO were much better that just saying no level limits.

Another thing here is that dwarves may only be Fighting-Men. Later we added thieves to the mix. But I did not go hard and fast with limiting dwarves to the fighting class or rather what I did was gave dwarves magic that was only concerned with forging weapons of great power which gave them the ability to also identify magic weapons at 5th level. Dwarves are also very good at choosing the best of mundane weapons and excellent at caring for their weapons. 

Also Dwarves, Elves and Hobbits were referred to in OD&D as non-humans as the term "demi-humans" was still in the future.

Elves: Elves can begin as either Fighting-Men or Magic-Users and freely switch class whenever they choose, from adventure to adventure, but not during the course of a single game. Thus, they gain the benefits of both classes and may use both weaponry and spells. They may use magic armor and still act as Magic-Users. However, they may not progress beyond 4th level Fighting-Man (Hero) nor 8th level Magic-User (Warlock). Elves are more able to note secret and hidden doors. They also gain the advantages noted in the CHAINMAIL rules when fighting certain fantastic creatures. Finally, Elves are able to speak the languages of Orcs, Hobgoblins, and Gnolls in addition to their own (Elvish) and the other usual tongues.

A couple of things about elves, I allowed the player to run an elven character as a Fighting-Men or as a Magic-User or as both at the same time. Now the way this played out was an elf that did not have magic armor stayed out of the fighting, or at least tried to, unless at low levels they chose non-combat spells, in which case they went with armor. And unlike humans, they could freely use all bows as weapons. Once they gained magic armor, then they could freely function as both classes at the same time. 

I did this as my personal preference because for me I felt it was ridiculous to do it any other way. I am not aware of anyone else that did it that way which is fine. I also did the Quest thing with elves and hobbits the same as I did with dwarves. I will also note here that even being granted the ability to go up a level, went with requiring triple the XP to be earned too.

Hobbits: Should any player wish to be one, he will be limited to the Fighting-Men class as a hobbit. Hobbits cannot progress beyond the 4th level (Hero), but they will have magic-resistance equal to dwarves (add four levels for saving throws), and they will have deadly accuracy with missiles as detailed in CHAINMAIL.

If you look at Chainmail, you see that they can fire a stone as far as an archer shoots. So  I did not allow hobbits to use bows, but they could use slings. As for the deadly accuracy part I did not spend a lot of time trying to parse what that meant and how to implement that. I just eyeballed it and gave hobbits a +3 to hit with sling stones and have never changed it. This is another thing that generates Internet arguments. This is what I use and you may use whatever you want.

Now this next thing also tends to be contentious:

Other Character Types: There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top, i.e., a player wishing to be a Dragon would have to begin as, let us say, a “young” one and progress upwards in the usual manner, steps being predetermined by the campaign referee.

My impression is that very few people do this. IMO this is a very fun and beneficial part of the game and I recommend it. I have had players that wanted to play different things and I have always accommodated them. I have previously posted on my forum and in January of this year here on the blog with what I did for Dragons. This was a little more complicated because IMC Dragons are Immortal. To keep it short, I gave dragons a three phase life cycle with two chrysalis stages to separate them. At level 12, the window for adventuring closes and they go into chrysalis and when they come out of that they go off to find a mate and dragon adulthood. At that point they are retired and become an NPC or as we said bitd a Ref Character.

Doing these types of things early on lead to something else that I did and that is that all monsters IMCs have variable hit dice. Let us say that per the rules a monster is 4 HD, then some will be 1-3 HD, most will be 4 HD and some will be up to 7 HD. When the characters (I did not use PC bitd either) ran into this monster I might tell them that these monsters looked a lot more robust and a lot tougher than usual. I introduced this into my game very early on. I also invented a lot of monsters for my game that were not in the rules.

This was so that my fellow referee would be challenged as much as the other players. Plus I found that the uncertainty was very beneficial to the play of the game and that it made the players think more about what they were doing. Both myself and my fellow referee, played our monsters as valuing their own lives as much as the characters valued their own and we also played them as using tactics and strategy. Monsters made the most of their "home field" advantage as it were. Even goblins and kobolds should never be a pushover encounter IMO. In the wilderness monsters are often defending their turf. In a dungeon monsters might be serving for pay or they might be slaves. Sometimes the status of the monsters can be used to the players advantage.

Tomorrow I will tackle Alignment!