AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

[jolt]

If your DM has you make a lot of stat checks then any stat that's super low becomes a weakness. Published modules rarely did that though so INT and CHR were easy dump stats for any class that didn't require them. The Basic line of games gave you bonuses starting at 13 but in 1E you generally needed at least a 15. STR is even worse in 1E; to get a +1 to both hit and damage you need a 17.

1E wasn't very stat dependent though. It's main purpose was class qualification. How does having an INT of 4 hurt you? Well, it means you're a fighter. Outside of that, it doesn't hurt you at all. There's no skill system and published modules rarely (if ever) ask for stat checks. If anything, modules would say things like, "The party has a 25% chance to notice X, 75% if a thief is present". The other main benefit of stats was qualifying for the XP bonus.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It sounds like you'd do well surviving my games.

When playing a PC, the thing you should be asking is, "How is this character going to die?" and be mitigating against that. For example, it should cross your head in chargen, "What happens to this character if they fall into deep water?" If the answer is, "They drown", then that becomes a leading candidate for how the character will die. You should always be focused on avoiding the ways you can die and less on how you can get better at the thing you are already good at. Sure, being able to generate lots of damage reduces the chance of dying in combat, and that's great, but that's only one way to go out of the game. Sure, a great AC will help you survive combat, but if you insist on wearing heavy armor then you have to start looking at mitigating your issues real fast - you can't run away, you can't swim, you will slip and fall in rough terrain, etc. Not everything can be solved at chargen, but you should already be thinking about it.

The way I see it, if I'm wearing heavy armor and my character drowns, that's on me. But the thing about having a weakness is that you get that tension that makes a game exciting. In a con game, I narrowly avoided that very fate, and it was exciting and dangerous and part of what makes a game come to life. That was 12 years ago and I still remember it vividly, along with the critical hit that defeated the boss right before he was about to complete his evil ritual.

That said, I do not deliberately try to hammer on any character's weak points. I don't want to let my bias influence outcomes. It's just I am a hiker and a caver and I let my setting be influenced by my real world experience, as well as my general simulationist outlook. You will fight on slopes, rough terrain, in water, in incliment weather, and so forth at some point. You will probably need to plan out how to run away as a party so as to not leave stragglers, because if you split the party people will die.

The optimizers tend to die because they optimize only for combat, thinking if they are a big enough hammer than can solve all their problems by hitting it hard enough. They aren't paranoid enough. They aren't creative enough, they don't cooperate well enough, and most of all they aren't thinking about, "How can I die?" except in terms of not winning a combat. I'm not intentionally hammering them, they are just optimizing for the wrong problem.

Oh, I am generally a complete softie. It's not like I'll throw social challenges every session at a combat optimizer. Like combat difficulties, I prefer to mix things up (some fights will be easy, some moderate, some hard, and a very few downright deadly). Same goes for the stuff outside of combat. Sometimes it'll be stuff that's up your alley, sometimes you'll either have to figure out how to work around your weakness, or deal with the higher risk.

I haven't converted the Monk yet in these threads, and I've never allowed them in my games (except in my open table public games). One of the many many reasons for that is the class is optimized for leaving the rest of the party to die, and the players that play it tend to be asking the right questions ("How can I die?") but with a general solution being letting other characters die. If I do convert the Monk it will end up a very different class than the one people are familiar with.

That said, high stats especially in AD&D do make someone who is also a skilled player very hard to kill indeed.

The Monk is assuredly one of the weirdest AD&D classes, behind the Bard. I feel like it's channeling a series of very specific influences that don't always mesh together, nor fit in the game's mechanics.

 

[Celebrim]

The Monk is assuredly one of the weirdest AD&D classes, behind the Bard. I feel like it's channeling a series of very specific influences that don't always mesh together, nor fit in the game's mechanics.

It doesn't help that its mechanics are terrible. It's everything that is wrong with early D&D design wrapped in a toxic package that is worse than the sum of its parts while carrying a bunch of fluff along with it.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It doesn't help that its mechanics are terrible. It's everything that is wrong with early D&D design wrapped in a toxic package that is worse than the sum of its parts while carrying a bunch of fluff along with it.

It's been a hot minute since I looked at the 1e Monk. Egads is it a lot to take in, in so many ways!

 

[Celebrim]

It's been a hot minute since I looked at the 1e Monk. Egads is it a lot to take in, in so many ways!

Oh, it gets worse. Because it is so broken as written it has to be hard nerfed in secret in the DMG requiring a full half-page of clarification and restrictions on their core mechanic. But to make matters worse, that hard nerf depends on an extremely fiddly comparison with the target's weight and height (because otherwise as written they instakill a dinosaur by punching it with a non-trivial chance of success) - things that are not generally firmly specified by most monster or character descriptions. So in addition to a multi-step calculation of die no save that is made with each attack you also have to rule on the size and weight of the opponent. And this is not an unusual problem with the Monk. They have a non-standard chance of being surprised that is done as a percentile, which therefore resists being put on a table and which requires you to be regularly doing not immediately intuitive and perhaps arbitrary multiplication and division with each encounter to correctly come up with the "right" chance of the monk being surprised (see my discussion in the other thread about why surprise can't really be fixed). They are a nightmare at the table out of play at just the procedural level to say nothing of the complete lack of balance with the monk either able to kill anything instantly or be useless depending on what they are facing, the fact that they are glass canons par excellence, the fact that they have a fixed leveling structure that makes every monk identical with no variation, etc.

 

[Lanefan]

It's been a hot minute since I looked at the 1e Monk. Egads is it a lot to take in, in so many ways!

As written, it's a real mess.

We redesigned them from the ground up, with most of their abilities coming as player-chooseable feats or feat chains as they advance in level thus allowing the player to choose what avenues the Monk will focus on. It's made them playable but not overpowered.

 

[Lanefan]

Oh, it gets worse. Because it is so broken as written [...]

Interesting - you see them as broken as written where I see them as mostly pathetic as written.

Could be we're looking at opposite ends of the level scale, though; most of my (somewhat limited) experience with as-written-ish Monks was at low to very low level where they're close to useless.

 

[James Gasik]

I remember a chance encounter with a group of ancient powergamers back in the day where all of their characters were dual-classed humans who started as Monks and then became Magic-Users, which they believed "fixed" the weaknesses of being a Magic-User.

Don't ask me how that worked in practice, my brain broke at the very idea.

 

[Celebrim]

Interesting - you see them as broken as written where I see them as mostly pathetic as written.

Oh, they are absolutely both, and that's true of high level play as well. Assuming they survive the low levels, which like the M-U they probably wouldn't, they turn into something that can either kill what they are facing outright in one round or else are absolutely useless against it.

As an example of the problem, at 1st level I can punch something for 1d3 hit points. Then if it is AC 8 I have about a 15% chance of stunning it for 1d6 rounds, which can be pretty much fight ending right there, and then if they do stun them have an 8% chance of instantly killing them. Neither effect grants a saving throw, so leveling up is no defense against it. So I'm either useless, or I just end the fight regardless of what I am facing.

UPDATE: I haven't seen one survive early levels of play. I did see one who ended up as the henchmen of the Paladin in the group (not sure if that was technically legal or not, but I wasn't the DM and it made sense in world), and it's from that I know about the Monk at mid to high levels 8th-10th is (Paladin at this point is about 13th level). And yeah, it's just a badly designed class that needs a rework.