TSR Blast from the Past- How to Go Full Monty Haul in AD&D

[Emerikol]

I think one holy trinity my group had was the combination of a short sword of speed, with a longsword, both with high pluses (+3, +4) and a girdle of giant strength or ogre gauntlets.

You could hit three times in one round and the penalties didn't matter that much on the to hit with all those pluses. Routinely did over 100 hit points per round. It is why I jokingly said the wizard will win a ranged battle but if the fighter is close and wins initiative he will drop almost any class in one round.

 

[Emerikol]

Also one of the ways I made my deities stronger was to give them what I called multiplicity. It would start at maybe a 3 or 4 and go up to 6 for a greater deity.

What is allows was that many actions for that being. All greater deities also could cast any and all spells. So a deity could drop 5 meteor swarms at his feat while teleporting without error away. On his home plane the deity had massive ability to summon allies.

So killing deities went right off the table. I did at some point allow avatars to be weaker versions of the deity because killing an avatar was not really killing the deity. I didn't want a campaign world at that time where a deity was killable.

I also liked stronger dragons. I thought 3e beefed them up nicely. I don't have ecological dragons though. They are magical and are really somewhat like deities of the prime material plane. If they die they return in 100 years. There are no babies. There is one dragon of each color. All of them are ancient.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I think one holy trinity my group had was the combination of a short sword of speed, with a longsword, both with high pluses (+3, +4) and a girdle of giant strength or ogre gauntlets.

You could hit three times in one round and the penalties didn't matter that much on the to hit with all those pluses. Routinely did over 100 hit points per round. It is why I jokingly said the wizard will win a ranged battle but if the fighter is close and wins initiative he will drop almost any class in one round.

Out of curiosity, how did you use both weapons? Fighting with two weapons was restricted to using either a dagger or a hand-axe as the second weapon (DMG), absent alternate or additional rules (Dragon Magazine, UA, etc.).

I'm assuming you're using post-DMG (1e) rules, because the short sword of speed is one of them fancy items that didn't exist back then.

 

[Emerikol]

Out of curiosity, how did you use both weapons? Fighting with two weapons was restricted to using either a dagger or a hand-axe as the second weapon (DMG), absent alternate or additional rules (Dragon Magazine, UA, etc.).

I'm assuming you're using post-DMG (1e) rules, because the short sword of speed is one of them fancy items that didn't exist back then.

It may have been 2e. There was an off hand penalty and the off sword had to be shorter. So short sword and longsword. I played a lot of both those editions.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

It may have been 2e. There was an off hand penalty and the off sword had to be shorter. So short sword and longsword. I played a lot of both those editions.

No worries! In my experience, there is a lot of conflation between all the various TSR-era rules because they were interoperable, and most people just mixed-and-matched as needed. Plus, um, it was a long time ago. As the youth say, "Bruh, you're old."

I think the only reason I still have such a clean barrier in my mind with the rules is that I was one of the few insufferable jerks* that didn't really incorporate the 2e rules when they came out.


*I know, this is a shocking revelation. I'll get the smelling salts out.

 

[James Gasik]

I always wondered why the dagger and the hand axe were specifically the only weapons one could employ in the off-hand. It seems awfully specific, and why exempt (as examples) the club or jo stick?

 

[coyote6]

I think the only reason I still have such a clean barrier in my mind with the rules is that I was one of the few insufferable jerks* that didn't really incorporate the 2e rules when they came out.

*I know, this is a shocking revelation. I'll get the smelling salts out.

Is it one-upmanship if I say I have never even played AD&D 2e?

I also recall dual wielding drow before the Forgotten Realms box set came out (to say nothing of Salvatore's novels) - because of Dragon Magazine articles.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I always wondered why the dagger and the hand axe were specifically the only weapons one could employ in the off-hand. It seems awfully specific, and why exempt (as examples) the club or jo stick?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Is it one-upmanship if I say I have never even played AD&D 2e?

Naw. If you want to go Full Grognard, you have to stroke your beard and say, "AD&D? It was all downhill once they started releasing supplements to the Little Brown Books. Supplements? Real D&D players don't need to SUPPLEMENT THEIR IMAGINATION! Harumph."

 

[Mannahnin]

I always wondered why the dagger and the hand axe were specifically the only weapons one could employ in the off-hand. It seems awfully specific, and why exempt (as examples) the club or jo stick?

I think it's a combination of emulating source fiction (The Grey Mouser and Fafhrd both famously used a dagger in their off hands, see their entries in Deities & Demigods or Legends & Lore*) and an editorial judgement that other weapons are too long and unwieldy to be used the same way. The Jo Stick and Club per the PH weapons chart are each about 3' long. A dagger is around 15" and a hand axe roughly 18".

Note that Gygax uses another signal/latin abbreviation in the weapons chart which Snarf didn't cover in his article on the subject. "c." for "Circa", meaning "around" or "approximately".

*(an example of a pulp protagonist wielding a hand axe alongside a sword isn't immediately leaping to mind, but I'll bet there is one).