D&D General Lethality, AD&D, and 5e: Looking Back at the Deadliest Edition

[Snarf Zagyg]

I remember when I first started hanging around old school and OSR forums ~15 years back one of the guys had a signature to the effect of "Old school players are afraid of two things: Energy Drain and s*** that turns your ass to stone."

I would add a third thing- losing your dice.

I think the thing a lot of people forget about AD&D is that there were some truly fearsome monsters. Some of the worst that people often forget about or overlooked include these five-

Banshee- What? What's so bad about a banshee? Well, the Banshee is outdoors. The Banshee is evil. And the Banshee can wail, and everyone within 30 yards must save vs. magic or DIE.

Ghost- Seriously, in addition to the whole Magic Jar thing, they touch you, and you age 10-40 years. Assuming you make your system shock check. No. Save.

Intellect Devourer- Not just because of the psionic attack (ugh, remember psionics in 1e?). Because they had 6+6 HD, and you needed +3 or higher weapons to damage them, and even then ... they did 1 point of damage on a hit. 1 point. Also, the only spells that would effect them (other than protection from evil to keep them at a distance) were fireball (no damage, would drive them away as bright light), lightning bolt (1 pt of damage per die), death spells (25% chance of success) and power word kill. A ninth level spell.

Morkoth- Make a save vs. spells at -4 after you enter the lair. Fail, and you are devoured at the leisure of the Morkoth.

Night Hag- In addition to all the other abilities, and they have a lot, they can fire three magic missiles a day for 2-16 damage. And turn ethereal at will. Which means that your party just your spellcaster.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

It was just as deadly as I wanted it. But character death doesn't bother me.

Fortunately it is easy to make 5e and it’s variants deadly too

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

Much more an easy come-easy go system, which I like.

Yikes I hated that! We ditched those rules almost immediately.

 

[Andvari]

The 2e version is pretty much the same:

In Rules Cyclopedia for Basic D&D, the description of protection of evil states enchanted creatures include monsters that can only be damaged by magical weapons. So that would include wights and vampires. And enchanted creatures cannot attack a person affected by the spell in melee. So this may be a case of posters applying the Basic definition of enchanted creature to the spell in AD&D.

 

[Plaguescarred]

My experience with AD&D 1E-2E is also that its they're most lethal as you died at 0 hit point. We ended up using various form of houserules to correct that, and in 2E using optional rule At Death's Door for the same reasons. Eventually, the following editions also eventually addressed those aspect of the game in 3.X, 4E and 5E core rules.

Other than dying by hit points loss, AD&D 1-2E is also more lethal than 5E because it has a lot more save-or die effects. Such fate resting on a single die roll are very rare in 5E and since the new millenium all the spells, monsters, traps, poisons and diseases etc rarely have the capacity to kill a character with a single successful attack roll or failed saving throw.

There is things worse than dying in AD&D 1-2E, level drain is so hurting when a single die roll could make you loose one or two hard-acquired levels of adventuring hit by some monster every round...

 

[Alzrius]

I would add a third thing- losing your dice.

A buddy of mine had his car broken into last weekend. The thief took his iPad, his sunglasses, and his dicebag, which had dice he'd been using since he started gaming.

Last I checked, he wasn't so much saddened by the loss as he was blinded by rage.

 

[Maxperson]

That was mostly my experience too, at least in 2e. Mages were always very careful with stuff like fireball or lightning bolt, mostly due to the HP many PCs had. A 5th level mage launching a lightning bolt carelessly into the 5th level bard PC with no constitution bonus stood a chance of killing them.

We only let @Snarf Zagyg do that once before we got wise to the fact they were doing it on purpose come to think of it.

My experience more closely aligns with @Lanefan's. We tried not to hit the party with fireballs and lightning bolts, but sometimes the area was smaller than we thought or we misjudged an angle and the spells hit the group, especially in theater of the mind where we might be envisioning things slightly different than the DM was. As for launching missile weapons into melee, we avoided that 95% of the time, but sometimes the PC was going to die if we didn't take the chance and shot anyway and hoped.

 

[Oofta]

I would add a third thing- losing your dice.

I think the thing a lot of people forget about AD&D is that there were some truly fearsome monsters. Some of the worst that people often forget about or overlooked include these five-

Banshee- What? What's so bad about a banshee? Well, the Banshee is outdoors. The Banshee is evil. And the Banshee can wail, and everyone within 30 yards must save vs. magic or DIE.

Much like the CR 4 (!!!) Banshee in 5E. Con save 13 or die.

Ghost- Seriously, in addition to the whole Magic Jar thing, they touch you, and you age 10-40 years. Assuming you make your system shock check. No. Save.

Intellect Devourer- Not just because of the psionic attack (ugh, remember psionics in 1e?). Because they had 6+6 HD, and you needed +3 or higher weapons to damage them, and even then ... they did 1 point of damage on a hit. 1 point. Also, the only spells that would effect them (other than protection from evil to keep them at a distance) were fireball (no damage, would drive them away as bright light), lightning bolt (1 pt of damage per die), death spells (25% chance of success) and power word kill. A ninth level spell.

Morkoth- Make a save vs. spells at -4 after you enter the lair. Fail, and you are devoured at the leisure of the Morkoth.

Night Hag- In addition to all the other abilities, and they have a lot, they can fire three magic missiles a day for 2-16 damage. And turn ethereal at will. Which means that your party just your spellcaster.

Let's see, some other 5E deadly monsters just off the top of my head.

There are plenty of undead that drop max HP on a hit. If your max HP drop to 0, you're dead. If you're unconscious, you may not be able to gain the benefit of a long rest because (emphasis added) "A character can't benefit from more than one long rest in a 24-hour period, and a character must have at least 1 hit point at the start of the rest to gain its benefits." Of course, that's up to the DM, but depending on how you read it you may need a greater restoration (level 5 spell) in order to get back any hit points.

• Specter (CR 1): Can go through solid walls, so have a hallway just have them pop in, attack and go back through the solid wall. Even better yet, come up through the floor so no opportunity attack.
• Vampiric Mist (CR 3): As a bonus, they can attack people in their sleep and because they're a mist they can go through the smallest of cracks.
• Wight (CR 3): in addition to dying, rise up as a zombie 24 hours later.

That's just going up to level 3.

Then you have fun things like

• Shadow (CR 1/2): each hit reduces the target's strength score by 1d4. If strength is reduced to 0, they die. Throw a bunch of these at the typical party with strength as their dump stat and watch PCs drop like flies.
• Intellect Devourer (CR 2): DC 12 intelligence saving throw. If you fail, roll 3d6 and if the result is higher than the target's intelligence they are stunned. Next round the monster starts an intelligence contest - which, since the target's intelligence is now 0 it will automatically win - the target's brain is eaten and the intellect devourer replaces the target's brain.
• Mummy (CR 3): mummy rot, DC 12 con save every time it hits. Can't regain HP so if knocked to 0, can't regain consciousness. As a bonus, lose 10 HP every 24 hours and turn to dust unless you get a Remove Curse, a 3rd level spell.
• Catolebas (CR 5): has a death ray (recharge 5,6) that does up to 64 HP of damage if you fail the DC 16 con save by 5 or more. Reduced to 0 by the ray? Dead.

That's just the low level monsters. So tell me again how D&D 5E can't be deadly just using standard rules if the DM wants? Because you can cherry pick deadly monsters in both 5E and AD&D. There may have been more and there were tended to be more "save or suck" things in AD&D, something 5E backed off on because surfing the web on your phone while waiting to actually get back to playing D&D isn't fun. But the deadliness is still there if you want.

 

[Maxperson]

Ghost- Seriously, in addition to the whole Magic Jar thing, they touch you, and you age 10-40 years. Assuming you make your system shock check. No. Save.

Not just touch. If you even saw the ghost you aged 10 years and then ran away for 20 minutes to 2 hours if you missed a save. Luckily if you were a cleric of 7th level or higher that didn't affect you. Every other class of any level was affected, though PCs of 8th level or higher got +2 to the save.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I would add a third thing- losing your dice.

I think the thing a lot of people forget about AD&D is that there were some truly fearsome monsters. Some of the worst that people often forget about or overlooked include these five- <5 clipped for size>

See also Catoblepas which, if you were subject to its' gaze attack and were not fleeing, would be a no-save death. Green Slime which would kill (and turn you into another green slime, so no resurrection) in 1-4 rounds if very specific removal methods were not employed. Nilbogs which healed from taking damage instead of being harmed. Not to mention the cursed magic items (many of which caused death with no resurrection unless very specific spells were cast immediately). D&D at the time and AD&D in particular had a number of things you could run into that were either deathtraps or at least neigh-insurmountable obstacles unless you knew the specific response or appropriate strategy.