Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of Role-Playing!
Today is Part 51 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.**
Today we start our look at Wands and Staves (and Rods):
Staves are more powerful than Wands and have more possible charges. In practice I made a percentile roll for Wands to see how many charges they hand and for Staves I made two rolls and added them together. Note that as Metal Detection and Other Detection Items did not have a limiting number of charges, neither did a Staff of Healing(or the other two either). Did you know that a Staff of Healing started out that powerful. When we get to the description tomorrow, note what the real limitation is.
This is more powerful with 1,000 pieces of gold being required for detection vs 5,000 that was mentioned earlier in another section.
If they do not know you are there, this cannot function. So it cannot prevent both groups being surprised. It also does not work if they will not be enemies until they find out that the Magic-User is the guy who killed their second cousin's friend two years ago.
Handy, but slow.
Also so slow you must thoroughly cover the area.
A lot more useful because you can move around and are not limited to just the initial range of the spell.
I forwarded that name level characters get a +4 on their saving throw against such Magic, as do monsters of similar power.
Today is Part 51 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.**
Today we start our look at Wands and Staves (and Rods):
Staves are more powerful than Wands and have more possible charges. In practice I made a percentile roll for Wands to see how many charges they hand and for Staves I made two rolls and added them together. Note that as Metal Detection and Other Detection Items did not have a limiting number of charges, neither did a Staff of Healing(or the other two either). Did you know that a Staff of Healing started out that powerful. When we get to the description tomorrow, note what the real limitation is.
This is more powerful with 1,000 pieces of gold being required for detection vs 5,000 that was mentioned earlier in another section.
If they do not know you are there, this cannot function. So it cannot prevent both groups being surprised. It also does not work if they will not be enemies until they find out that the Magic-User is the guy who killed their second cousin's friend two years ago.
Handy, but slow.
Also so slow you must thoroughly cover the area.
A lot more useful because you can move around and are not limited to just the initial range of the spell.
I forwarded that name level characters get a +4 on their saving throw against such Magic, as do monsters of similar power.
Shiver me timbers, sorry could not help myself. (Hey it is snowing a little tonight.)
We will continue on tomorrow.
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