Jon Peterson put up an excerpt of a letter by Gary Gygax with Mordenkainen's stats.
Me, I went right past the stats to he has a Staff of Power with 192 charges. Well, had, he used 12, so he's down to a mere 180. Yowza.
Okay, okay, I know that staves in white-box D&D can have 200 charges. But coming to OD&D from AD&D, it really jumped out at me seeing it on a character sheet. And the Staff of Power is no slouch of an item, it dramatically increased the effective firepower of a magic-user.
The damage of it doing a retributive strike is god-smitingly powerful, based on Gods, Demigods, & Heroes, too . . .
And he links to an adventure account of Mordenkainen, Bigby, and Yrag. Seems Gygax had MPD.
ReplyDeleteWhat does MPD stand for? And that adventure was published as WG5 Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure.
Delete"MPD" Multiple Personality Disorder.... a joke on the fact that those were all Gygax's characters...
ReplyDeleteAh, okay. Yeah, well, running multiple characters at once clearly wasn't unusual.
DeleteIt definitely wasn’t. Gygax once ran his son Ernie as Tenser in a marathon session to justify an alignment switch, and I’m sure Tenser had his henchmen with him.
DeleteMike Mornard has written about a solo M-U run into Greyhawk, but he quickly charmed an NPC fighter. I've heard that Rob Kuntz played Robilar solo often, but I've also heard he often had monsters he'd suborned into service along for the ride. All of that I'd classify as solo player, but not solo PC. It would just be nice to have a differentiated term for it.
DeleteSolo - One Player, One PC, No NPCs
DeleteSolo Henchmen - One Player, One PC, NPC Henchmen
Solo Group - One Player, Multiple PCs