2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day One Hundred and Four (Updated)

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

***** See bottom of post for an update

Today is Part 47 of my series of looks at OD&D starting with Monsters & Treasure Volume 2.

**For those coming in, in the middle of this series I am giving you my take on OD&D during my first exposure starting in Sept of 1975. For this first part it is just the first three books of the original woodgrain box set and prior to obtaining the Greyhawk, Blackmoor and later Supplements.**

First up today is Armor:

****(See update at the bottom) This is pretty short and sweet. If you have Plate +1 and your opponent rolls a 15 on a d20, that 15 is reduced to a 14 and you check the result on the combat table. I never did this, I always did it as Plate is AC 3, so plate +1 is AC 2, so even in the original game if you had magical plate and a magical shield it was possible to have a negative AC. I have read that some were bothered by the concept of negative AC, but as I dealt with negative numbers in math it bothered me not at all.

It also says if the shield bonus is greater than the armor bonus there is a one-third chance that the shield comes into play for the additional AC benefit. But that is not very clear, are they saying if you have Plate +2 and a Shield +1, then there is no benefit from the Shield? In practice I chose not to care what their thinking was, it was not worth spending time trying to figure it out.

I just ran it this way: If your opponent was in front of you or on your Shield side the Shield gave full benefit to AC, if your opponent was on your weapon side or behind you, then the Shield gave no benefit. IMO that was fair to the character and to the monster, it was fast and you did not waste time comparing bonuses and checking for a 1/3 chance each round.  In practice, if you are fighting one opponent then you will keep moving to bring the Shield into play, if you are fighting more than one opponent, then you will not be able to do that if we assume they are not idiots. If they are behind you, you likely do not know they they are there.

This brings me to a point about combat, do your players call out things during combat, when their character can see something another player character does not? Regardless of the character names, do your fighter assign simple one syllable nicknames and yell out things like "D! Behind you!" That gives the character the chance to attempt to shift his position with his current opponent to avoid a blow from behind with a bonus to hit.

Another point that is not covered is Helms. IMC Armor automatically includes a Helm, it is not a separate item it is part of armor. Magic Armor will also have a Helm that goes with it. If a character for whatever reason is not wearing his Helm, IMC his AC dropped two steps, for example from AC 3 to AC 5.

On to Miscellaneous Weapons:

Now unlike Swords, these weapons (unless noted otherwise) all have a damage bonus to equal their to hit bonus. So weapons (unless noted otherwise) would be +1H and +1D, +2H and +2D, and +3H and +3D. Note that in OD&D sans supplements bonuses only went up to +3 for magical weapons both swords and miscellaneous.

Magic Arrows have a +1H and a +1D unless specified otherwise for the monster and so usually do 1d6+1 or 2-7 points of damage. Given the statement about bonuses above I immediately had arrows of +1, +2 and +3 as treasure options.

Magic Bows confer no damage bonus on a to Hit bonus. I also added +1, +2 and +3 options. The Magic Bow bonus and a Magic Arrow bonus are additive.

Available bows are Short Bow, Composite Bow and Long Bow. I did not have a Medium Bow, and that still seems weird to me. Also had a Crossbow and a Heavy Crossbow. (In year four of the game, I introduced Hand Crossbows for a Bard, kind of a one shot pistol.)

Now since we had different types of bows that meant the arrows or quarrels(crossbow) were for a specific size bow.

I also added in Magic Slings and Sling Stones with similar bonuses.

Axes were odd, it was noted to treat all targets as medium range. So I split axes into a Throwing Axe which is the one in the rules IMO, a regular Axe which was a one handed weapon, but not designed to be thrown so it was a -2H if thrown and while this affected the to hit ability even with the magical bonus taken into account, it still got the magical bonus to damage if you did hit.

Then I added a Battle Axe which was longer handled and could be used one handed or two handed. If used two handed it did an additional +2D and this was for magical and mundane alike. Also a Battle Axe could be thrown, but only with a two-handed throw. This was also at a -2H.

I also added Daggers to this table and a Throwing Dagger. A Throwing Dagger like a Throwing Axe had not penalty for being thrown.

A +3 War Hammer was the pride and joy of Dwarven Fighters as it had a double range when thrown and it returned automatically when used by a Dwarf. It also did two dice of damage when used by a Dwarf and an extra +3D against a giant. It had no damage bonus against other creatures as it does two dice of damage.

So I also added to this table Maces and Morning Stars.

Spears were treated like Axes and Hammers as throwing weapons with an applicable damage bonus for being thrown. Note that impalement damage is double or even treble.

So I ran it Spears can be thrown, but Boar Spears could not be thrown. Tip, when facing Trolls you wanted to have a Boar Spears because otherwise the Troll would just push himself down the Spear to get at you. 

I also added Tridents, Nets, and Javelins. Also added a Quarterstaff, Whips, Bolas and Caltrops.

Added a Lance (for Jousts) and a Heavy Lance for combat. The Heavy Lance did two or three Dice depending on the impalement force as per Spears. When we get to Book Three - The Underwrold & Wilderness Adventures you will see why I added Lances.

****Update: Although it does not change the way that I house-ruled and ran it, here is a better interpretation of the way the Armor Rule works. Back in 1975 I took hit dice in this context to mean the d20 to hit roll. Here an analysis by Ian Borchardt looking at the actual Hit Dice of the monster:

What I was going to say is that the LBB magic armour bonus doesn't work the way you say, because it reduces the hit dice of the attacker. Since the monster attacking table is gathered in columns of 2 HD, magic armour may not actually affect the attack chance. For example a +1 weapon won't affect anything with an even number of hit dice.

So whilst the effective modifier is to increase the number required to hit by +1 for each +1 bonus of the armour, since each descending column has a increases the number to hit by +2, it might not actually apply in every case.

There is also the interesting aspect that there is an ultimate limit to the effectiveness of armour in this method. For example you typical orc ignores magic armour totally, since you cannot reduce the hit probability beneath the lowest column.

If you also extend this to apply to characters (which is technically an extrapolation since characters use level rather than hit dice) it is also an interesting effect to.

That said, everyone I know played it as a direct modifier to AC - even before Greyhawk came out and made that the official method.

[It would also be interesting applying the magic sword bonus to the level/hit die of the character on the attack matrix in the same sort of manner (although the effective bonus would be less), since magic weapons would also depend on your class' combat ability for their final effectiveness.]

And tomorrow we will get to Potions.