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Wednesday, March 4, 2020

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

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

Today is Part 9 of my series of looks at OD&D starting with Men & Magic - Volume 1.

Today we are going to look at the Tables for "Statistics Regarding Classes":


This first table is for Fighting-Men and again the level titles are listed. I do not know about anyone else but we used these in game, referring to the Level Name rather than Level 1 or 5 or 8. Instead of 10th Level Lord, we used Lord Baron.

A Veteran was 1+1 dice or 1d6+1, but a Warrior was 2 dice or 2d6. At 5th level the +1 showed back up and then at 7th level it was 7+1, 8+2, 9+3 and then 10+1. I gave them a minimum of a +1 at every level and 10th level instead of 10+1 I made it 10+3. There are rules that we get to tomorrow about progressions for levels about what is in the tables. For Fighting-Men I ignored that and even though we did not play above 10th level, I extended the table to grant Fighting-Men and Additional Hit die up to 14th level at 14+3 or 14d6+3 and from that point on would have added one Hit Point per level plus any Constitution Bonus at each level which would have been for some an additional Hit Point..

*The Fighting Capability column I will look at in the post on Friday.*

And of course Fighting-Men do not get spells.


We typically retired characters at 8th to 10th level max. So we did not have to worry about what to call a 12th level Wizard and since we stopped at 10th level we replaced Necromancer with Wizard.. The Magic-Users Dice for Accumulative Hits, I left as is.

*The Fighting Capability column I will look at in the post on Friday.*

The last column is the Number of Spells and the Level of the Spells available at each Level of the character. In OD&D spells only go to Levels 1-6 for Spell Level for Magic-Users. At 1st Level they get One First Level Spell and at 12th Level they get One Sixth Level Spell. Since we only played to 10th Level I deleted the first line of the spell column and shifted the column up one step which meant the Magic-User got 2 spells at 1st Level. At 10th level instead of 4,4,3,3,2,0 for spells I changed that line to 5,4,3,3,2,1.


We replaced Patriarch with Archbishop, Patriarch 9th Level with Cardinal and then used Patriarch for 10th Level.

The Clerics Dice for Accumulative Hits, I changed 9th level from 7+1 to 8 and 10th level from 7+2 to 8+2 to make them a bit tougher and had we played to higher levels I would have given them 11 dice at 16th Level versus 9+2 for the Magic-Users and 14+5 for the Fighting-Men.

*The Fighting Capability column I will look at in the post on Friday.*

The last column is the Number of Spells and the Level of the Spells available at each Level of the character. In OD&D spells only go to Levels 1-5 for Spell Level for Clerics so the last column is always a zero.. At 1st Level they get zero spells and at 10th level then get 3,3,3,3,3,0. So again since we only played to 10th Level I deleted the first line of the spell column and shifted the column up one step which meant the Cleric would get one spell at 1st Level and then added a line for 10th Level that read 4,4,3,3,3,0.

One thing to bear in mind about some of my increases is that my campaign was pretty deadly, so even though the characters avoided combat by using other options at every opportunity, if they did get into a battle it was always very tough. Even though the Claw, Claw, Bite attack was not present in OD&D and did not appear officially until the Greyhawk Supplement, I used it from the beginning in 1975, that is one of the ways I refereed differently from my friend the other referee. It made trolls much more deadly. I will talk about that more when I get into Book 2 - Monsters & Treasure.

Tomorrow we will look at most of the rest of this section and then Friday we will look at the Fighting Capability column.

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