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Wednesday, June 3, 2020

2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day One Hundred and Fifty-Four

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

This next part is a short section and Arneson calls it:


How to Become a Bad Guy
(Basic Procedures)

OK, you are all here, that is great. First, I must confess that this title is a bit misleading which you will understand shortly. Second, if you are a hard core BtB zealot, you might want to skip this post, because it is going to offend your sensibilities greatly. I am happy to have you read it, but you have been warned! ;)  Third, when I first read this section I was quite frankly thrilled because I had been running my own variation of this since the very first game that I refereed. 

So off we go:


OK here we find out that the monsters have variable hit dice and also advance in levels very much as do the players. He begins here to tell us how it all works. So while he is not really going into how a player would become a bad guy at this point, he does start laying out how the monsters work.


Here he lays out advancement for the monsters. Now he  says you take the Hit Dice and the AC and multiply by 1000. So I am not sure what we are doing with the AC in this calculation and I would love to hear from anyone who does. He gives an example and obviously the progression would look different for each monster.

If I were going to do this, I would assign each armor class points, say 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and so on or 1.0, 1.2, 1.4 and so on.

So he says that a creature can never be more than 10 times as powerful as its 1st level version. So that tells you how it all scales from orcs to dragons.


Then you call look at the Dragon section to see just how something like a Dragon was handled and credits the Dragons which we will look at later to Richard Snider. We also find out that the Special Characters (read really powerful) are limited in numbers appearing.


Now here he touches on how to become Bad Guy by defining what a Bad Guy and a Good Guy are.

The most defining thing is Good Guys take prisoners and Bad Guys do not. So you just look at what the players do when these situations come up and they sort themselves.

So yeah, if you slit the throats of those orcs that were slept by your Magic-Users, you are a Bad Guy. So if you were just in the middle then you did not get to use the most powerful items. 

I also like this, both the Good Guys and the Bad Guys were obligated to try to kill the Neutrals - everyone in the middle. Of course the Neutrals would know they could surrender to the Good Guys and live, but not so with the Bad Guys.

Now what is it that I have always done in my game as a referee? I have always given my monsters variable hit dice. For instance, in OD&D an ogre was 4 HD +1 or a maximum of 25 HPs. My ogres can have up to 80 HPs. I did this for all of my monsters. I did not write down how many points it required for them to advance by levels. But having 1st Level and High Level versions of my monsters is something I did from the beginning. For instance my Dragons could have up to 25 HD. 

Every time I find something were I was kinda sorta thinking like Arneson from the beginning, it buoys my faith in my instincts. Especially since I was learning about these similar things 30+ years after the fact. Arneson and Hargrave are the two people I measure my creativity against. (There are many others I could mention Kuntz, Ward, Wesely, Barker, but for me these are the prime ones) This has the effect of making me continually strive to up my game and do new things I have not done before.

Oh and why would BtB people not like this section? I have been told by a number of BtB zealots that having variable hit dice (levels) for monsters is cheating because the players know by what monster it is whether or not they can beat it, but to me the whole point is they should not be able to look at men or monsters and be sure. Because when they are not sure, they will be more creative in getting what they want without combat. Or more attentive to gaining an advantage before combat.

Tomorrow Svenson's Freehold.

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