2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day Sixty-One

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

Today is Part 6 of my series of looks at OD&D starting with Men & Magic - Volume 1.

As we get further into this we find this:

Changing Character Class: While changing class (for other than elves) is not recommended, the following rule should be applied: In order for men to change class they must have a score of 16 or better in the prime requisite (see below) of the class they wish to change to, and this score must be unmodified. A Cleric with a “strength” of 15, for example, could not become a Fighting-Man. In any event Magic-Users cannot become Clerics and vice-versa.

While I have never really had players who wanted to change class there is another issue that I will get into later in this series about elves compared to the other races and about changing class, multi-classing, dual-classing and such things.

Next up is Determination of Abilities:

Prior to the character selection by players it is necessary for the referee to roll three six-sided dice in order to rate each as to various abilities, and thus aid them in selecting a role.  Categories of ability are: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Constitution, Dexterity, and Charisma. Each player notes his appropriate scores, obtains a similar roll of three dice to determine the number of Gold Pieces (Dice score × 10) he starts with, and then opts for a role.

Did you catch that? The original rules specify that the referee rolls up all the abilities for the players. I can tell you that we never did that even one time bitd at our tables. Everyone always rolled up their own characters. We did however roll 3d6 in order and used them that way. If you had rolls of 8, 3, 3, 5, 4 and 6 you did not complain or whine about it, you played it. Part of that was the style of play. One there were no class minimums and two the game tested the player much more than the ability stats. So while you could play a three Intelligence as a complete moron, that was a choice not a requirement and it was the same across the board. Since it was voluntary, quite a bit of the time we played to the stats; however, no one ever let that effect party survival when it was on the line.

The thing we did not do was use the stat as a reason to be a jerk. I do not recall ever hearing the phrase, "But that's what my character would do!" used at all, let alone as an excuse for being a jerk at the table. IMHO people who do that are not your friends and they are not people you want to play with. You may feel differently and I have no problem with that at your table.

Our game involved a lot of laughter, joking, puns and kidding around. But it was a lot like real life, when things get serious, all that stops and you all get serious. So our game ran the gamut of things just like we did outside the game. One moment we could be in a room full of laughter and the next moment someone got a call about a death in the family and we all banded together. Someone volunteered to let their professors know where the person was, some of us piled in a car to drive the person two hours to an airport to fly home and went back to pick them up when they returned, etc. In game worked like that too. I have heard some games are 100% slapstick and jokes and other games are 100% super serious. We were more ourselves in that the game was more of a real life mix of how people really interact. Our immersion in the game was very deep and could be a roller coaster of emotion from joy to fear. Sometimes when they were in a dungeon the room would get quiet and you could have heard a pin drop with people literally all leaning forward totally focused.

It gives an example character and comments that the player would have progressed faster as a Cleric with that Wisdom of 13 (5% bonus to XP) but the player went with their preference of a magic user with an Intelligence of 11 (no XP bonus).

Next is the Explanation of Abilities which features no real surprises that I am aware of. It does state for XP only you can swap certain scores around to adjust your prime requisite so that you could get an XP bonus. I never used this, my personal opinion is that it is silly. Let us say that I was a Cleric with a 12 Strength and a 12 Wisdom, so no XP bonus, but I could pretend that I had a 9 Strength and a 13 Wisdom and get the 5% XP bonus. So your numbers did not really change, it was just a loophole to give you more XP.

Dexterity applies to both manual speed and conjuration. It will indicate the character’s missile ability and speed with actions such as firing first, getting off a spell, etc.

This means that Dexterity would affect Initiative. We decided in the interests of maintaining a fast moving game to dispense with importing a house rule for Initiative and just went with all actions are simultaneous. I will comment on the effects of that when I talk about combat later.

Charisma is a combination of appearance, personality, and so forth. Its primary function is to determine how many hirelings of unusual nature a character can attract. This is not to say that he cannot hire men-at-arms and employ mercenaries, but the charisma function will affect loyalty of even these men. Players will, in all probability, seek to hire Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, and/or Clerics in order to strengthen their roles in the campaign. A player-character can employ only as many as indicated by his charisma score:

For instance with a Charisma of 9 you could only attract 3 hirelings of unusual nature, but you could hire 50 men-at-arms. Charisma would affect the loyalty of these men-at-arms.

In addition, the charisma score is usable to decide such things as whether or not a witch capturing a player will turn him into a swine or keep him enchanted as a lover.

Even in college back in the mid '70s we kept our game pretty clean in this regard, from the standpoint of sex our game was mostly PG. That was not because we were all PG outside the game, we just did it that way. 

Finally, charisma will aid a character in attracting various monsters to his service.

Yes, in OD&D you can attract monsters to your service. This was a very fun and useful part of the game. Something that my players were always on the lookup to do. The women all wanted to ride a unicorn or a pegasus, while the men wanted to hippogriffs or griffins. This was a feature for a few months at one point and then we moved back to horses and mules and looked for other types of monsters to recruit.

Next up is Bonuses and Penalties:

What do you notice? XP bonus is +5% or +10% at the high end, but as the low end the XP penalty is -10% or -20%. The maximum Constitution bonus was +1 hit point to each hit die. Average of below average Constitution reduced the survivability of the character and Constitution  of 6 or less resulted in a -1 to each hit die subject to minimum of 1. With Dexterity you could get a maximum of +1 or -1 to hit with missile weapons. But striking is the absence of any bonuses to combat for strength. Now this would all change dramatically with the Greyhawk supplement, there was a minimum of adjustments in the original game.

I mentioned Languages before, I will just add that there was no language penalty for low Intelligence, but you did get a bonus language for every point of Intelligence above 10. This is in line with the average score on a 3-18 scale being 10.5, so rounded down 10 is dead average. Although 9-12 was the average range for everything else, for languages, 11 was above average.

Tomorrow we will talk about Non-player characters(NPCs) although we never used that term even though it was in the rule books. The reason is that the players never read the rule books, so the players called them ref characters and so we referees always referred to them that way too. FWIW, I always preferred the term ref characters. We also for that matter never used the term Player Characters (PCs), we  either said what is your character doing often by character name since we played 16-24 hours a week or we just said what are you doing often blurring the distinction between player and character, it was fast and it IMO aided immersion, although of course the word immersion for what we experienced was never used by any of us at the time.