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

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

Today is Part 8 of my series of looks at OD&D starting with Men & Magic - Volume 1.

Before we start today, I want to remind you that the game engine is Arneson, but many of the mechanics in OD&D are not the mechanics of Blackmoor. OD&D is the Gygax interpretation of Blackmoor and Arneson. So some things such as spells the "Vancian" fire and forget trope is two things. One it is a reinterpretation of how spells worked in the fiction of Jack Vance and it is also considerably different from spell use in Blackmoor, but more on that later.

Next up is Levels and the Experience Points needed to Level Up. Btw the common use of XP for Experience Points was not actually written anywhere in OD&D.

Now looking at the table above a few things (once I learned to play) struck me as rather odd. It is obvious (at least IMO) that the XP tables are not even remotely balanced at all. While I really do not care about balance that much, I am going to comment on it here because it does address some of the complaints about Magic-Users being so weak at low levels compared to Fighting-Men and then at high levels it is reversed and Fighting-Men are the weak ones, at least that is what everyone says.

So the "weakest" Class(M-U) requires the most XP to go from 1st Level to 2nd Level. As a side note the Class that gets to  fight and cast spells requires the least XP to make that jump.

So the XP for each class doubles each time up to 5th level where respectively they require:

Fighting-Men (16,000) Magic-User (20,000) and Clerics (12,000)

Then at 6th level the Fighting-Men doubles again going up by 16,000, but the Magic-User gets less steep of a climb going up by 15,000, while the C starts to get steeper by going up 13,000.

At 7th level the Fighting-Men doubles again going up by 32,000, while the Magic-User (who is getting a lot more powerful now) only goes up another 15,000 and the Clerics doubles going up by 25,000.

From this point it really gets worse, the Fighting-Men goes from 64,000 to 120,000, but the Magic-User only goes up another 25,000 and the Cleric doubles going up from 50,000 to 100,000.

Now that is as far as the table goes for Clerics. But for a Fighting-Men to go from 8th level to 9th requires 120,000 XP, but for a Magic-User it only requires another 25,000. Yes a Magic-User can reach 9th level, before a Fighting-Men reaches 8th level.

Now a little later it says:

Levels: There is no theoretical limit to how high a character may progress, i.e. 20th-level Lord, 20th-level Wizard, etc. Distinct names have only been included for the base levels, but this does not influence progression.

But they give no guidance on the XP needed to reach higher levels so each table had to decide what they thought would work best.

Now how would you change this if you wanted to, especially given how the Magic-User power level ramps up. Let us assume that you keep the Fighting-Men progression as it is. Here is one possible way that I whipped up, I think it would work, although it would need to be play tested. I think it would address the perceived power imbalance. Bitd I never worried about it, no one complained and since it was not broke, I saw no need to fix it. But for those who think it is broke, here is a potential fix.

Now this gives the Magic-User an easier path at the beginning, but then as they become more powerful it slows them down. Clerics keep some of their advantage at the beginning and then I brought them into line with the Fighting-Men.

Tomorrow we will get into Hit Point progression for each class and the aquistion of spells at each level.