D&D General What Constitutes "Old School" D&D

[AbdulAlhazred]

You've seen one now,: I've had trainign costs forever, though we don't do the cost variance based on "how well the character was played"; the costs are the same for everyone.

Right, the whole "rate the player's performance and punish them" mechanic was, to put it bluntly, absurd. I have seen a few sporadic and failed attempts to use training costs with the '1.0' factor. We really didn't play a lot of modules, so my suspicion is we weren't as rolling in gold as one would expect if all you did was go from B2 and on through to the A, G, and D series like many people did. Later modules were especially treasure-heavy though from what I recall (late meaning things like White Plume Mountain, lol). As GM I never had all that much trouble finding ways to pry gold pieces out of the PC's hands anyway. Henchmen and bases always really sucked money.

Yes, finding and scooping the enemy's spell books is vital! (I thought my players were going to kill me once when they found the spellcasting Vampire they'd just beaten had carved his spells into the inside of his stone coffin, in effect making his coffin into his spellbook...)

Nasty bastard! I mean, they can still copy them, as they camp in the middle of the undead infested dungeon burning up light and etc.

In one place the DMG is crystal clear as to what spells a raw 1st-level character knows to begin with: Read Magic plus one at random from each of three short lists - Offensive, Defensive, and Other. At the DM's option a 5th spell, random from the three lists combined, may be given. That's how I've done it since forever.

Yes, that is true, but I started playing long before the DMG existed! (well, it seemed 'long' back then...) We had a PHB which describes min and max spells/level and a "chance to know each listed spell". Those are explained, but the resulting system isn't really workable, and without any DMG rule in the beginning things were fairly murky at best. D&D itself didn't explain anything about spell acquisition, nor Holmes. I'm not sure about B/X, that came later.

But in another place (either PH or DMG, forget which now) there's that very confusing bit about minimum spells known and rolling through until you get the minimum. I've always ignored this.

Well, I went back and re-read it. Its actually QUITE CLEAR, and I am 100% sure that I understood it back then, because I have a printout of a BASIC program that would let you fill out an entire AD&D character sheet "by the book" and it implements the full monty! What you do is maintain a list of ALL spells that exist in the entire campaign, whatsoever (there's the one hitch that technically this is an open list, oh well). When you roll up a PC you make a %chance to know against ALL OF THEM (really you can wait until you run into a spell, but conceptually this is an inborn trait of your PC). All spells thus fall into one of two categories, ones you can understand, and ones you cannot. The min/max values feed into making those two categories. If you go through the whole list once and fail to reach the min, you can reroll some until you reach it. If you hit the max during your list traversal, you stop and thats it, you cannot learn more. Now for the fun kicker! If your INT changes "relatively permanently" you START OVER AND DO IT ALL AGAIN. All of this is repeated for each spell level. TECHNICALLY if your INT changes you could suddenly find that your entire spell book is now gibberish to you, and there is no defined game process by which you can reverse this! (I guess a Wish would obviously do the trick).

So, like I say, its not really a very workable system. I mean, I never ran into anyone that actually implemented it (aside from my Basic program written for some very early PC type computer). IIRC we generally just used the DMG to establish what you started with (and it states you get a new spell EVERY LEVEL) and then if you found a spell or wanted to trade or whatever you could roll % to know and if you hit the number you were able to figure it out and copy it to your books. We didn't actually record which spells people had rolled against, instead we just let you roll each time you found a unique instance of a spell. I don't think we ever paid attention to the MIN number, but at least in theory we might have enforced the MAX number. I doubt too many people ran wizards that were both dumb enough to have a max that you were likely to run into AND survived enough levels to bump against it!

That is correct as per the book I think. It's how we too have done it all along.

Yeah, one of the very few generous elements of the DMG, which is mostly Scrooge's How to Spoil Player's Christmas, lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I suppose it’s the look of the products for me. If you showed a newbie mint copies of 3e and told them this was the latest version of the game they’d believe you. It looks like a modern production. 2e while a lot more modern looking than 1e is clearly not new. I guess it’s the art, the tables, “role-playing“ meaning your class and alignment rather than playing a personality. Dungeon crawling, black and white art, lots of tables, Judges Guild, dice where you had to colour in the numbers. All these are old school to me. Products like Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms were a clear departure from that style. Ravenloft was too. A certain sense of the mystery was lost when things began to have a polished professional look

Ravenloft definitely was a point where the look and feel of the products became a good bit more 'slick'. In general the earlier 1e books and other stuff that came out before the mid-80's are definitely in a more amateurish class (though compared with the original game they are still much slicker). Part of it is just that towards the mid-80's layout migrated from physical cut-and-paste where you basically didn't get redoes to being done in something like Aldus on a Mac where you could play around with stuff and try a few layouts, tweak, resize, etc. The overall look and feel of EVERYTHING, not just D&D, really changed around that time. You can see that in the layout of 2e, which flows much more naturally and has a lot more structure. 1e books don't even have chapters!

 

[Celebrim]

So, like I say, its not really a very workable system. I mean, I never ran into anyone that actually implemented it

We used it but in practice we gamed around at the meta level based on the realization that it so horribly gimped M-U's of low intelligence that there was never really a point of playing a M-U of less than about 17 intelligence. That was the minimum intelligence where you be reasonably assured you could learn essential spells and would have max high enough that you'd be reasonable assured you could know enough spells.

Pretty much we got to a point where we had an informal flow chart on characters where if they didn't qualify as a Paladin, didn't have two 16+'s or one 18 that wasn't charisma, didn't qualify as a Cavalier, didn't qualify as a Ranger, and didn't qualify as an (eventual) Bard we knew that character wasn't going to make it or contribute enough to the party. A cleric without 18 Wisdom was too unreliable. A M-U without 18 intelligence wouldn't eventually become the demigod needed. A fighter without 18+ strength would be half as powerful as one that had it. A character that had two high prime requisites could multi or dual class well enough to be useful, but if you didn't have that you needed to qualify for a prestige class like ranger that was inherently powerful. So if you didn't have those things, you either begged the DM to let you roll up a character worth playing or you made a thief and suicided at the early point and tried begging again if your next character wasn't worth playing. In the long run this trended toward more and more generous methods of stat generation so that players would always have something they were happy playing.

 

[Voadam]

And depending on the level and campaign type you might not have had that chance. A lot of groups were avoiding spells like polymorph, haste, Stone skin, permanency and so many others with high costs/risks. Bur these spells had these costs and risks for a good reason, they were game changers. A well placed haste would turn the tide of a battle in no time, especially with a fighter with 5 attacks pe two round. It would turn him into a lawn mower very fast. Two of these and Ho boy. Add in bless, prayer and chant and hitting was not a problem. And foe some of these, you also needed costly component for your level. 1ed was a lot harsher on caster than any realizes.

Haste was good, but so was lightning bolt. It just required a glass rod and a bit of rabbit fur instead of aging a year.

Polymorph was useful as a save or suck attack spell even if not thrown on your fellow PCs.

I remember thinking through an evil villain work around for permanency 1e con loss risk, magic jar into someone else and use their constitution to power the permanent magic.

Mostly my magic user was fine starting with magic missiles, getting knock, lightning bolt, and charm monster and wall of ice. Many standard spells you see in modules' NPC's spell book are useful and without significant side effects.

A 1e magic user who started off with push as their only random offensive spell was pretty out of luck for a while, but usually they had something at least decent.

 

[John R Davis]

Pay for training.
Memory is fuzzy but I think some AD&D DMs did. I may have done, can't remember!
In SPIs Dragonquest we always paid to train as that was a part of skill etc development

 

[Reynard]

Pay for training.
Memory is fuzzy but I think some AD&D DMs did. I may have done, can't remember!
In SPIs Dragonquest we always paid to train as that was a part of skill etc development

If you did gold for xp, you almost had to. Otherwise your even low level PCs were too flush with cash to bother going adventuring. You got to keep them poor!

 

[overgeeked]

If you did gold for xp, you almost had to. Otherwise your even low level PCs were too flush with cash to bother going adventuring. You got to keep them poor!

A quick and easy fix is to only award XP for gold spent on things that don’t benefit the character directly. You get more engagement with the world and get that cool Sword & Sorcery loop of so poor you have to adventure, flush with gold, waste money like mad, and back to so poor you have to adventure.

 

[Reynard]

A quick and easy fix is to only award XP for gold spent on things that don’t benefit the character directly. You get more engagement with the world and get that cool Sword & Sorcery loop of so poor you have to adventure, flush with gold, waste money like mad, and back to so poor you have to adventure.

Tough to do when that means the fighter spend 2000gp on beer.

 

[overgeeked]

Tough to do when that means the fighter spend 2000gp on beer.

Then the fighter isn't trying hard enough. Start buying expensive rounds for the entire town and you're going to eat through 2000g in no time.

And it doesn't all have to be beer and carousing. It could be anything not directly mechanically beneficial to the character. Repair buildings, bribes, gifts, training, works...anything really.

 

[Voadam]

Tough to do when that means the fighter spend 2000gp on beer.

What's the alcohol budget for this party?

The Romans knew how to level up!