Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of Role-Playing!
Today is Part 43 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.**
Now we will proceed to the Magic/Maps Determination Table:
This first table is rather odd since in the previous Treasure Types Table we looked at, only a few of the Treasure Types have a map as an option. So what is the purpose of this table if the split is already defined. Well one thing I did not mention before as I was saving it for here, is that under the column on that previous table titled Maps or Magic, many of the items in that column say "any." I have heard of people who interpreted that as any Magic Item, but it means any item - Maps or Magic. In those cases we use the above table to see which it is.
Since I love Maps I would have added this is it was not already there. A map is one way to give the players some information about possibilities that are available. A good map in my opinion will have at least a dozen points of interest and can have many more than that. It sparks questions from the players, gets them thinking creatively and helps them decide what they want to do. For many of us, decision making is quick and easy, but for many, especially those who have not had a chance to experience open-ended sandbox free-form gaming, the plethora of choices, when they are used to only a few or even only one choice can be paralyzing. Maps whether as part of a treasure or even obtained at the beginning of the game can help break through that paralyzation.
Next up we have a table for the main types of Magic Items and types of Maps.
So looking at the first table we have a 20% chance of Swords, 15% chance of Armor, but only a 5% chance of Misc. (not swords) Weapons, which IMO is way to small. A 25% chance of Potions, 20% chance of Scrolls, 5% chance of Rings, 5% chance of Wands/Staves and 5% chance of Misc. Magic.
While I only used the tables for short time before I stopped using them completely, except for when I am introducing complete newbie's (i.e. never played any RPG before), I have always continued to build and tweak tables and the beginning was no exception. I reduced the chance of Swords to 10% and increased Misc. Weapons to 15% which ensured a much greater variety of weapons in the game. I changed Potions to 15% and Scrolls to 10% and increased Rings, Wands/Staves/(and Rods), and Misc. Magic to 10%, 10% and 15% respectively. This ensured a much greater variety of all types of Magic items in the game.
The maps were 60% Treasure Map, 30% Magic Map and 10% Magic & Treasure Map. So of course I had to fiddle around with this. I changed all of this as follows:
01-50 (50%) Treasure Map
51-80 (30%) Magic Item(s) Map
81-90 (10%) Treasure & Magic Item(s) Map
91-95 (05%) Magical Map - the map itself is magical
96-00 (05%) Miscellaneous Map
Next up was the Magical Swords Table:
You will note that there is a 35% chance of a Sword +1, 17% chance of a Sword -2 (Cursed Sword) and these two alone constituted 52% of all Magical Swords. On the other hand there was a 5% chance of a Sword with 2-8 wishes. I thought this was really out of kilter and so I set about massively revising this table, but not really to use the table, I started early on to use tables as an easy repository of ideas. This repository of ideas was something I would read through now and then to bring them fresh to my mind and to see if any new ideas were triggered. But I soon stopped using the tables to determine what Treasure/Magic/Maps/Swords etc were present.
First of all Cursed Items, they are scattered all throught the tables and I never liked Cursed Items as a referee as there is something just wrong about them being common. So I reduced the odds of a Cursed Item to 1% per item. I would through in a few Cursed Items early on so the players were aware of the problem, but after that I went with the low odds of Cursed Items. I also thought the chance of Wishes was way too high so I also reduced that to 1% as well.
The first revised table had a maximum of a 5% chance of any one item, the second revised table reduced that to a max of 1% of any one item. Then I moved on from there and eventually Greyhawk came along and the official items combined with the homebrew items multiplied exponentially and greatly increased the number of tables.
Later I will go into some things in a lot more detail when we get to the section titled Explanations of Magic Items. But for now I will note that Swords had a +1, +2, or a +3 to Hit, but no damage bonus except when it named a specific monster or type of monster, then it also had a damage bonus.
Next up is the table for Armor:
There are only 7 Options, so pretty sparse. Although it is not stated anywhere, right away I added armor type and shield type which increased the variety. I would note here that playing BtB can be pretty bland in places and I think that was intentional, since there is initially in the first few pages of Volume 1 Men & Magic so much emphasis placed on it being your game, i.e. go innovate.
But there was 30% chance of a Shield +1 and a 30% chance of Armor +1 which takes up 60% of the table. Of course it is less stark when it is Leather, Chainmail or Plate, but still you can add a lot of variety to the table fairly easily. Especially pre-Internet with access to a university library and a group of widely varied academic majors.
Tomorrow we will continue on.
Today is Part 43 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.**
Now we will proceed to the Magic/Maps Determination Table:
This first table is rather odd since in the previous Treasure Types Table we looked at, only a few of the Treasure Types have a map as an option. So what is the purpose of this table if the split is already defined. Well one thing I did not mention before as I was saving it for here, is that under the column on that previous table titled Maps or Magic, many of the items in that column say "any." I have heard of people who interpreted that as any Magic Item, but it means any item - Maps or Magic. In those cases we use the above table to see which it is.
Since I love Maps I would have added this is it was not already there. A map is one way to give the players some information about possibilities that are available. A good map in my opinion will have at least a dozen points of interest and can have many more than that. It sparks questions from the players, gets them thinking creatively and helps them decide what they want to do. For many of us, decision making is quick and easy, but for many, especially those who have not had a chance to experience open-ended sandbox free-form gaming, the plethora of choices, when they are used to only a few or even only one choice can be paralyzing. Maps whether as part of a treasure or even obtained at the beginning of the game can help break through that paralyzation.
Next up we have a table for the main types of Magic Items and types of Maps.
So looking at the first table we have a 20% chance of Swords, 15% chance of Armor, but only a 5% chance of Misc. (not swords) Weapons, which IMO is way to small. A 25% chance of Potions, 20% chance of Scrolls, 5% chance of Rings, 5% chance of Wands/Staves and 5% chance of Misc. Magic.
While I only used the tables for short time before I stopped using them completely, except for when I am introducing complete newbie's (i.e. never played any RPG before), I have always continued to build and tweak tables and the beginning was no exception. I reduced the chance of Swords to 10% and increased Misc. Weapons to 15% which ensured a much greater variety of weapons in the game. I changed Potions to 15% and Scrolls to 10% and increased Rings, Wands/Staves/(and Rods), and Misc. Magic to 10%, 10% and 15% respectively. This ensured a much greater variety of all types of Magic items in the game.
The maps were 60% Treasure Map, 30% Magic Map and 10% Magic & Treasure Map. So of course I had to fiddle around with this. I changed all of this as follows:
01-50 (50%) Treasure Map
51-80 (30%) Magic Item(s) Map
81-90 (10%) Treasure & Magic Item(s) Map
91-95 (05%) Magical Map - the map itself is magical
96-00 (05%) Miscellaneous Map
Next up was the Magical Swords Table:
You will note that there is a 35% chance of a Sword +1, 17% chance of a Sword -2 (Cursed Sword) and these two alone constituted 52% of all Magical Swords. On the other hand there was a 5% chance of a Sword with 2-8 wishes. I thought this was really out of kilter and so I set about massively revising this table, but not really to use the table, I started early on to use tables as an easy repository of ideas. This repository of ideas was something I would read through now and then to bring them fresh to my mind and to see if any new ideas were triggered. But I soon stopped using the tables to determine what Treasure/Magic/Maps/Swords etc were present.
First of all Cursed Items, they are scattered all throught the tables and I never liked Cursed Items as a referee as there is something just wrong about them being common. So I reduced the odds of a Cursed Item to 1% per item. I would through in a few Cursed Items early on so the players were aware of the problem, but after that I went with the low odds of Cursed Items. I also thought the chance of Wishes was way too high so I also reduced that to 1% as well.
The first revised table had a maximum of a 5% chance of any one item, the second revised table reduced that to a max of 1% of any one item. Then I moved on from there and eventually Greyhawk came along and the official items combined with the homebrew items multiplied exponentially and greatly increased the number of tables.
Later I will go into some things in a lot more detail when we get to the section titled Explanations of Magic Items. But for now I will note that Swords had a +1, +2, or a +3 to Hit, but no damage bonus except when it named a specific monster or type of monster, then it also had a damage bonus.
Next up is the table for Armor:
There are only 7 Options, so pretty sparse. Although it is not stated anywhere, right away I added armor type and shield type which increased the variety. I would note here that playing BtB can be pretty bland in places and I think that was intentional, since there is initially in the first few pages of Volume 1 Men & Magic so much emphasis placed on it being your game, i.e. go innovate.
But there was 30% chance of a Shield +1 and a 30% chance of Armor +1 which takes up 60% of the table. Of course it is less stark when it is Leather, Chainmail or Plate, but still you can add a lot of variety to the table fairly easily. Especially pre-Internet with access to a university library and a group of widely varied academic majors.
Tomorrow we will continue on.
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