OD&D Feb 16th: Holmes Basic Day (Anniversary of J. Eric Holmes' Birthday)

cavalier973 said:

Necrotization protocol initiated

One of the best rules in Holmes is that first level magic users and second level clerics may scribe spells they can cast onto scrolls. This adds additional options for these classes at low levels.

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5 Torches Deep includes this rule, and the players in my three year campaign used it frequently.

I agree that it's a nice rule, although I think it's important to balance the costs to make it affordable without letting them have an excessive supply. One advantage of 5TD in this regard, is that, like Shadowdark, it's roll to cast. Between that and the spells overall being a bit weaker than OD&D/Holmes/B/X spells, casters commonly walking around with an extra 10 or more spells on scrolls wasn't too crazy. Because they were less powerful and didn't always work.

In Holmes, like the other TSR versions, an M-U takes 2500xp to hit 2nd level and monster xp is going to be a small percentage of that, so you can expect them to accumulate more than 2000gp even before they hit 2nd level, which is 20 1st level spell scrolls, other costs of living set aside. And that's clearly the best thing for them to spend that gold on, especially since Holmes doesn't allow them to acquire new spells for their spell book other than by gaining a new one each level.

The more I think about treasure for XP the more I think OE and 1E were smart to grant xp for magic items kept and used, which reduces the amount of treasure you need to hand out, even before you get into other wealth mitigation mechanics like carousing or cost of living, or shenanigans like taxes, equipment cost inflation, and robberies.

cavalier973 said:

Necrotization protocol initiated

One of the best rules in Holmes is that first level magic users and second level clerics may scribe spells they can cast onto scrolls. This adds additional options for these classes at low levels.

Click to expand...

Do I remember correctly that clerics couldn't cast spells at first level? Which kinda made their whole purpose moot until they leveled up....

David Howery said:

Do I remember correctly that clerics couldn't cast spells at first level? Which kinda made their whole purpose moot until they leveled up....

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Turning Undead is still powerful. And at first level Clerics are just as good as Fighters in combat, with the sole exception of having a D6 HD instead of a D8. All weapons do a D6, Clerics have full armor use and shields. They can't use edged weapons, but that only starts to matter once magic weapons are found.

Mannahnin said:

Turning Undead is still powerful. And at first level Clerics are just as good as Fighters at combat, with the sole exception of having a D6 HD instead of a D8. All weapons do a D6, Clerics have full armor use and shields. They can't use edged weapons, but that only starts to matter once magic weapons are found.

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so long as no one gets hurt, yeah, they're fine... but healing spells are needed the most at first level. Considering that B2 was the module that came in the box (and was likely the first adventure for a lot of groups), they must have run away a lot to heal up naturally (slowly) until leveling up...

David Howery said:

so long as no one gets hurt, yeah, they're fine... but healing spells are needed the most at first level. Considering that B2 was the module that came in the box (and was likely the first adventure for a lot of groups), they must have run away a lot to heal up naturally (slowly) until leveling up...

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Well, at first level if a character gets hit at all they've got (in aggregate) about a 50/50 shot of being dead, so in a sense healing magic actually matters less at first level.

But yeah, IME with OD&D and B/X there are definitely more short jaunts and retreats to town to rest up at 1st level, though the MU spells (especially the encounter nuke Sleep!) and encumbrance tend to be at least as big limiters as HP.

IME, unless the DM spends a lot of time on travel to and from the dungeon, at first level you might be making two or three delves in a single session. Going back frequently to rest, refresh resources, hire new hirelings and recruit new PCs to replace the dead...

David Howery said:

Do I remember correctly that clerics couldn't cast spells at first level? Which kinda made their whole purpose moot until they leveled up....

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I think that adventuring parties were expected to explore carefully, and avoid combat, if at all possible.

Not all monsters that were encountered were automatically hostile, so it was possible to talk your way out of a dangerous situation, or bargain for passage, etc.

Even if combat ensued, the morale system could mean that the monsters run away after one of them gets killed.

Except for undead monsters. Undead monsters were mindless and relentless. The cleric made encounters with the undead survivable.

I don’t know the initial reasoning for making clerics achieve 2nd level before being able to cast spells. There was a “narrative” reason (the cleric had to prove faithfulness through level 1), but for the mechanical reason, I expect that it had something to do with game balance.

Addendum: for an example of how awesome “Basic D&D” clerics could be, I recommend 3d6, Down the Line’s youtube play cast. They have several, but their current game is the megadungeon, “The Halls of Arden Vul”. They just posted episode 111 of this delve.

cavalier973 said:

I think that adventuring parties were expected to explore carefully, and avoid combat, if at all possible.

Not all monsters that were encountered were automatically hostile, so it was possible to talk your way out of a dangerous situation, or bargain for passage, etc.

Even if combat ensued, the morale system could mean that the monsters run away after one of them gets killed.

Except for undead monsters. Undead monsters were mindless and relentless. The cleric made encounters with the undead survivable.

I don’t know the initial reasoning for making clerics achieve 2nd level before being able to cast spells. There was a “narrative” reason (the cleric had to prove faithfulness through level 1), but for the mechanical reason, I expect that it had something to do with game balance.

Addendum: for an example of how awesome “Basic D&D” clerics could be, I recommend 3d6, Down the Line’s youtube play cast. They have several, but their current game is the megadungeon, “The Halls of Arden Vul”. They just posted episode 111 of this delve.

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Mechanically they were a Gish fighter mage, they could do both fighting and casting but not as well in either category as either dedicated class.

cavalier973 said:

I think that adventuring parties were expected to explore carefully, and avoid combat, if at all possible.

Not all monsters that were encountered were automatically hostile, so it was possible to talk your way out of a dangerous situation, or bargain for passage, etc.

Even if combat ensued, the morale system could mean that the monsters run away after one of them gets killed.

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Remember that this is a Holmes thread, and Holmes omits morale rules (despite mentioning morale in the Bless spell description and in the Hobgoblin entry).

Apart from that, this is all true, though to some extent it's become OSR dogma and isn't necessarily representative of how people generally played back in the day. OD&D also had no Morale rules for monsters, and I knew a ton of people who didn't use them in AD&D. In the modules a lot of encounters and monsters were described as automatically attacking/automatically hostile, so the precedent was set for a lot of tables that reaction rolls weren't always used.

I agree that the above is generally how it should be played, and absolutely makes low levels more survivable and prevents them being a monotonous meatgrinder.

cavalier973 said:

Except for undead monsters. Undead monsters were mindless and relentless. The cleric made encounters with the undead survivable.

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One interesting thing a couple folks have observed is that the core three original classes each have a way of mitigating certain dangerous/numerous foes, but each has different criteria.

• Clerics Turn Undead
• M-Us can Sleep groups of non-undead foes, or a single nasty individual up to the power of an Ogre, (they also get access to Web as a 2nd level and Fireball as a 3rd level spell, so their ability to deal with groups continues to scale up)
• Fighters get their "sweep" ability to make one attack per level against groups of 1HD or less creatures (nerfed to only creatures under 1HD in 1E)

cavalier973 said:

I don’t know the initial reasoning for making clerics achieve 2nd level before being able to cast spells. There was a “narrative” reason (the cleric had to prove faithfulness through level 1), but for the mechanical reason, I expect that it had something to do with game balance.

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The narrative reason I heard instead was that this allowed for worldbuilding where common village priests could be treated as Clerics but not actually have healing or other spells. Higher level Clerics were therefore more special and their magic not as commonplace.

The mechanical reason does seem like a balance thing. As Voadam said, they were the original combo fighter/caster class ("Clerics gain some of the advantages from both of the other two classes (Fighting Men and Magic-Users)" - first sentence of the class description from Book I of OD&D), so they got a little more limited in their spells. Turning Undead was still powerful at 1st level, though. At first level a Cleric in Holmes almost strictly superior to a Fighter, mechanically.

“Remember that this is a Holmes thread, and Holmes omits morale rules (despite mentioning morale in the Bless spell description and in the Hobgoblin entry).”

I missed that, probably because I didn’t actually read the Holmes rules, but just assumed. And, we all know what happens when we assume.*

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*we get things done more quickly, but not necessarily more accurately