OD&D How do you interpret Yellow Mold spores?

[Michael Linke]

The entry says you "must make a save vs death ray or choke to death within 6 rounds." It seems like a lot of old rules interpretations hinge on where/when/whether the editor felt a comma was appropriate.

The most immediately obvious interpretation is that you make a save when the spores hit you, and if you fail, you know you have 60 seconds to "live". This makes a 25 XP monster terrifyingly deadly for low level characters.

Another interpretation, which i will probably adopt as a permanent house rule, is that the character begins choking as soon as he or she is hit by the spores, and continues to choke until a successful saving throw vs death ray. If the character chokes for 6 rounds without recovering, they die. This interpretation is less immediately lethal for low level characters, but could make these creatures consequential obstacles for higher level characters. They're very likely to shake off the choking before dying, but will be incapacitated (and noisy) for at least a round. A few of these in a room could temporarily neutralize a character, especially if the monsters in the room are Undead, and immune to the effect.

 

[Ath-kethin]

We've generally played it as if you fail the save, you have 60 seconds to live. Some epic finales have happened in those six rounds.

Really I like your second interpretation better, though. It just never occurred to us.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Speak with Plants.

 

[Larnievc]

The entry says you "must make a save vs death ray or choke to death within 6 rounds." It seems like a lot of old rules interpretations hinge on where/when/whether the editor felt a comma was appropriate.

The most immediately obvious interpretation is that you make a save when the spores hit you, and if you fail, you know you have 60 seconds to "live". This makes a 25 XP monster terrifyingly deadly for low level characters.

Another interpretation, which i will probably adopt as a permanent house rule, is that the character begins choking as soon as he or she is hit by the spores, and continues to choke until a successful saving throw vs death ray. If the character chokes for 6 rounds without recovering, they die. This interpretation is less immediately lethal for low level characters, but could make these creatures consequential obstacles for higher level characters. They're very likely to shake off the choking before dying, but will be incapacitated (and noisy) for at least a round. A few of these in a room could temporarily neutralize a character, especially if the monsters in the room are Undead, and immune to the effect.

In older editions there were a lot of save or die situations. Poison would kill you stone dead, paralysis and petrification were all basically instant death.

This is just an example of that. Your house rule is better for modern games, though.

 

[NotAYakk]

In OD&D, treat "save" as "your character is dead. You have a chance -- a chance only - to save the character". This is doubly true of save vs death.

You screwed up. Here is a hail mary to mitigate your screwup.

When defeating that yellow mold you are supposed to never inhale the spores. If you have, you already lost the fight.

You just get a hail mary "save" to not die.

A box with no clues that has yellow mold in it should be treated like a box with any other instant death in it; "rocks fall everyone dies".

Now for the mold, a way to cure it, not breathe, kill it out of range are all ways to win the encounter.

Breathing the spores is a loss.

At high levels your saves become more reliable, and your HP enough to soak some otherwise instant death effects (like dragon breath). But the product of time invested times death chance grows rather than shrinks, so the cost of having to make a death save grows even when you have a 95% success chance.

 

[Michael Linke]

In OD&D, treat "save" as "your character is dead. You have a chance -- a chance only - to save the character". This is doubly true of save vs death.

You screwed up. Here is a hail mary to mitigate your screwup.

When defeating that yellow mold you are supposed to never inhale the spores. If you have, you already lost the fight.

You just get a hail mary "save" to not die.

A box with no clues that has yellow mold in it should be treated like a box with any other instant death in it; "rocks fall everyone dies".

Now for the mold, a way to cure it, not breathe, kill it out of range are all ways to win the encounter.

Breathing the spores is a loss.

At high levels your saves become more reliable, and your HP enough to soak some otherwise instant death effects (like dragon breath). But the product of time invested times death chance grows rather than shrinks, so the cost of having to make a death save grows even when you have a 95% success chance.

The game never gives you a choice about whether you breathe the spores. It just says you have a 50% chance of being affected.

 

[NotAYakk]

The game never gives you a choice about whether you breathe the spores. It just says you have a 50% chance of being affected.

You chose to get close enough to the spores. That is where you lost.

Again, the DM can say "rocks fall, everyone dies". If they gave no way for PCs to know that rocks would fall, then they kill the PCs.

If they gave ways for the PCs to work it out that rocks would fall, or that there would be a risk, then that is a hazard.

Then you add in a save for PCs to survive despite already having failed. So now it is "rocks fall, save vs rocky death".

The DM should still make it possible in world to know of the rock fall danger. Was the tunnel so unstable sound could make it fall? Then a silence spell (for example) or carefully removing your metal armor and muffling your footfalls would avoid the hazard.

Having breathed yellow spores, you lost the pre-mitigation game. Having lost, you have a chance to not lose they character, but it isn't a great one.

This requires using yellow mold as a hazard more than as a monster.

 

[Michael Linke]

How do you teach the players (or characters) that, in world, yellow stuff on the floor will kill you without making the yellow mold a pointless obstacle? If it's too deadly, characters just avoid it. If there is a steep, but non-lethal cost to stepping in it, then you open the players to making a hard choice about whether to do so.

 

[Stormonu]

As an aside, isn’t a round pre-3E a minute long, so you have 6 minutes to live, not 60 seconds?

 

[Jack Daniel]

As an aside, isn’t a round pre-3E a minute long, so you have 6 minutes to live, not 60 seconds?

6 rounds is 6 minutes in AD&D, 60 seconds in OD&D, and 36 seconds in d20 D&D.

How do you teach the players (or characters) that, in world, yellow stuff on the floor will kill you without making the yellow mold a pointless obstacle? If it's too deadly, characters just avoid it. If there is a steep, but non-lethal cost to stepping in it, then you open the players to making a hard choice about whether to do so.

Yellow mold kills. That's what it does. That's the players' problem to deal with, not the DM's. If the players are clever, they'll bring a variety of tools to bear: wet cloths tied over their faces to make it less likely they'll breathe in the spores, and copious quantities of oil and lit torches that they can hurl from more than 10 feet away so that they can destroy the stuff without risking death.

If a patch of yellow mold is cutting off an unexplored dungeon-passage or even hiding a bony corpse still clutching a shiny treasure in its skeletal hands, the decision of whether or not to contend with the deadly mold is hardly "pointless."