Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Things I Misunderstood in AD&D

When I was a kid starting out gaming, I didn't have a lot of resources to turn to. No internet, no discussion groups, not a lot of fellow gamers. So some things I just didn't get, or understand, or wholly misunderstood. Here are a few I remember.

Men are mean. It's true. The Monster Manual says so. Under intelligence, it says stuff like "Mean: average to very." I figured, okay, they're average to very intelligent, but mean. Fair enough.

Knowing the "mean" in terms of "average" is probably still not something most 10 year olds know. Or maybe they do, now, but no one corrected me back in the day. And it never occurred to me that this was odd enough to go look the word up.

So, men are mean. My NPCs are still, on average, mean.

Night Hag Rides. It was decades after I first read Night Hags (also in the MM) that I stumbled across the phrase "hag ridden" and realized it had a connection to sleep paralysis. The whole odd actually being on the person's ethereal back thing is still a little odd to me. But as a kid, I just thought, what the heck? And moved on. We never, ever used Night Hags or their special power if they happened to show up in an adventure. It was confusing, we didn't get the reference, and thus it was left aside.

"1 of each magic excluding potions & scrolls." Oops. Good thing so few monsters have treasure type U or V. Because I read that as one roll on each table. Yes. On each table. One on rings, one on rods/staves/wands, one on weapons, one on artifacts, one on each of the miscellaneous magic item sub-tables. Every. Single. One. That's 11 items.

I just assumed that those monsters were supposed to have great hordes of magical treasures, 70% of the time. The other 30%? Nothing. Like I said, good thing those monsters were rare. And that we generally ran modules.

Lucern Hammers are for clerics. What? It says it's a hammer. We ignored most of the odd polearms because we didn't know what they were, but this was clearly a hammer. We were victims of the "put in everything Oakshotte mentions" syndrome without knowing it until we hit those illustrations in the original Dungeon Masters Adventure Log. Suddenly, no more hammers doing 2-8 instead of 2-5.



There is other stuff I didn't "get" but which are so oddly written nobody seems to have gotten - treasure types being for wilderness only (er, why is that?), the helmet rule (you can choose hit locations?), how initiative worked (we thought we got it, but we didn't), encumbrance, etc. But my total misunderstandings? The ones I remember are above.

8 comments:

  1. Oh, I think we thought the same thing about those treasure types. It's been so long since I used a treasure type though, I'm not sure what the correct course of action is...

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    1. I think everyone did. It's oddly worded (saying using the TT in a dungeon is "not generally recommended") and stuffed only in that one spot. The alternate course (use the per-dungeon-level treasure rules) isn't clear. Nevermind Basic D&D makes it crystal clear that the Treasure Type for a monster is used whenever it is encountered, not just outdoors.

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  2. Man, I think i am STILL confused. How DO you do TT U or V?

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    1. I honestly don't know. I'm away from my books, but I'd hazard it wouldn't be technically wrong if you rolled once on rings, once on wands, once on misc, once on swords, one on armor, and once on misc weapons. It's still a lot, though, and more than I'd want to give out. I'd probably at most give a 70% chance to each, not all-or-nothing. I wonder if it makes more sense looking at earlier (OD&D) materials? I may have to take my white box off the shelf when I get home.

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    2. This seems to agree with my suggested way of doing it:

      http://www.mithrilandmages.com/utilities/1ETreasure.php

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    3. I remember my first DM being totally convinced that a Mace was this spray can that released a gas that made people cough and choke, but didn't do any real damage (he asked his Mom what Mace was).

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    4. I don't even understand how we didn't make that mistake, too.

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  3. OD&D treasure types ended at Type I. It wasn't until AD&D MM that types J- appeared. I mainly was a fan of Basic and things were much clearer there. It spelled out wilderness vs dungeon number appearing and lair vs carried treasure, two key things that were super-obscure in AD&D.

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