D&D 1E Favorite Obscure Rules from TSR-era D&D

[Alzrius]

I don't recall it being obscure back in the day, or at least not that obscure, but in AD&D there's a special category of scrolls which anyone, of any class or race, can use: protection scrolls.

However, another old AD&D rule (though I believe this one is from AD&D 1E only; see page 127 of the DMG) is that any scroll that the PCs find is 5-30% likely to have its writing fade away immediately if they don't read it as soon as they acquire it. Presumably this is to help with how (page 121): "It is incumbent upon the Dungeon Master to do his utmost to convince players that a cursed scroll should be read. This is to be accomplished through duplicity, coercion and threat, etc. - i.e., any scroll not read has a chance of fading in normal air, but this can be noted by the archaic wording if read in the still dungeon atmosphere."

 

[Reynard]

Odysseus was a farmer in the same way wealthy plantation owners in the American South were farmers. The majority of slaves in ancient Greece were used for agriculture and likely a wealthy man like Odysseus would have had them toiling on his land. It's true that Odysseus tried to feign madness by hitching a plow to a donkey and sowing his fields with salt, but I don't think anyone throught he was regularly plowing fields.

I'm not sure how that is relevant. Having those farming rules in the book would still be necessary for this -- maybe even more so, because we are talking about scale now. But the real point is this: D&D can be and always has been about more than dungeon crawling or questing for some not insignificant portion of players, and it hurts no one to have those rules exist and actually supports others. People complain about how D&D is nothing but a combat simulator, then argue vehemently against anything besides combat getting mechanical representation. "You can't put farming rules in there; we need that space for a seventh flavor of barbarian!"

 

[Mark Hope]

If you aren't wearing a helmet, there's a 1 in 6 chance that any attack will hit you in the head, which is treated as AC 10.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Presumably this is to help with how (page 121): "It is incumbent upon the Dungeon Master to do his utmost to convince players that a cursed scroll should be read. This is to be accomplished through duplicity, coercion and threat, etc. - i.e., any scroll not read has a chance of fading in normal air, but this can be noted by the archaic wording if read in the still dungeon atmosphere."

Also so you had to walk around with Read Magic memorized, so you could immediately read the magic scrolls (lest they fade away).

 

[Celebrim]

They were actually really great, except for two things-

1. They slowed down combat a lot.
2. Given most combat was against monsters, it was always unclear how to translate this.

For that reason, it was a great idea that I never saw used because it slowed down the combats.

Both problems could be overcome but it required some upfront work.

1) Realizing that it would slow down combat, I made PC specific to hit tables factoring in their weapon, strength, specialization and so forth. Armed with that, it actually sped up combat, since half of a players turn tends to be them adding their modifiers repeatedly to their dice roll.
2) This was the hard one, because it required you figuring out the effective dexterity of every monster in the game. Sometimes the effective dexterity was given in the description. Sometimes the effective armor type was given in the description. Once you decided what part of the monster AC was "dodge-y" and what part was "armor-y" you could annotate that monster. That was a one-time cost per monster but it IMO made monsters more fun. Some monsters were easier to hit with short shorts and others with military picks. Incidentally, this concept shows up in 3e as "touch AC" and "flat-footed AC".

I think the biggest problem I actually ran into using the tables is that they made two-handed swords just two good. But they certainly made the one-handed weapons more interesting, as without the table "longsword" is just the king of weapons.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I think the biggest problem I actually ran into using the tables is that they made two-handed swords just two good. But they certainly made the one-handed weapons more interesting, as without the table "longsword" is just the king of weapons.

I think even more than that, having 40%* of all magic weapons be swords and 70% of those be longswords** -- in a game where the magic also adds to the effectiveness of combat and is necessary to even fight certain opponents -- makes switch-hitting to maximize against the WvsAC charts just not many peoples' top priority.
* and a significant portion of the other 60% being archery equipment (the sword guy would also use but not use instead of the sword) or likely-meant-for-the-cleric weapons,
**two-handed sword's only main downfall is they were 1% of magical swords.

 

[Voadam]

1) Realizing that it would slow down combat, I made PC specific to hit tables factoring in their weapon, strength, specialization and so forth. Armed with that, it actually sped up combat, since half of a players turn tends to be them adding their modifiers repeatedly to their dice roll.

How would that work for setting up a chart?

The path to get to the actual weapon modifier had a couple of AC variables.

The weapon to hit adjustments were not versus actual ACs but armor types, the actual AC could be different if an NPC has dexterity or magic bonuses, or if a monster has an AC in that range but no armor, or tough hide that is considered plate mail for the chart regardless of actual AC.

 

[Celebrim]

How would that work for setting up a chart?

The path to get to the actual weapon modifier had a couple of AC variables.

The weapon to hit adjustments were not versus actual ACs but armor types, the actual AC could be different if an NPC has dexterity or magic bonuses, or if a monster has an AC in that range but no armor, or tough hide that is considered plate mail for the chart regardless of actual AC.

Well, I stopped recording monsters by AC alone. My monster entries looked much more like 3e monster entries with explicit Dexterity recorded. And, instead of recording one number for AC I always recorded AC(AB) where AC referred to the effective AC of the monster as would be used by the weapons versus AC table and AB ("armor bonus") referred to the adjustment to the AC. So a monster had something like an AC of 3 (equivalent to plate armor) and an AB of 3 - recorded usually as 3(+3). This would be equivalent to AC 0 sans any weapon versus AC adjustment. When applying the PC vs armor table, they would need say a 10 to hit AC 3 and thus a 13 to hit 3(+3).

That we would get a hint like "tough hide that is considered plate for purposes of to hit" would make it easy to determine the AB. If the monster had AC 5 but its hide was considered plate, then that's AC of 3(-2) whereas if its AC was recorded in the MM as a 1 that's AC of 3(+2). So an AC of 10(+10) is a very different AC of 0(+0) even though in the MM they would have both been recorded in 1e as AC 0. Likewise AC 8(+3), AC 5(+0) and AC 1(-4) are all functionally different even though they could lazily all be recorded as "AC 5".

Absent hints I made judgment calls as to what sort of hide the monster effectively had and that became definitive. That was also used to derive a DEX for the monster. Conversely, if the monster hand 16 DEX in its entry we could infer the AC from the implied armor bonus.

 

[Celebrim]

I think even more than that, having 40%* of all magic weapons be swords and 70% of those be longswords** -- in a game where the magic also adds to the effectiveness of combat and is necessary to even fight certain opponents -- makes switch-hitting to maximize against the WvsAC charts just not many peoples' top priority.
* and a significant portion of the other 60% being archery equipment (the sword guy would also use but not use instead of the sword) or likely-meant-for-the-cleric weapons,
**two-handed sword's only main downfall is they were 1% of magical swords.

True, swords always had an advantage in terms of random generated treasure and I did like the random treasure tables.

But, for NPCs I applied the rules in the appendix for generating PC and NPC parties of higher than first level. Those rules implied an NPC fighter had a chance per level of experience of having a +1 bonus on the weapon he was carrying. So if there was an evil warlord in the dungeon that I thought would be cool to have a halberd or a morningstar then I either rolled for it or just assigned an appropriately plussed weapon.

And that doesn't get into the fact that random generation and treasure types don't really apply technically to placed treasure in dungeons, just to random encounters. So I was perfectly free to put a footman's flail +2/+4 versus shapechangers in a dungeon just because I wanted to, even if such a weapon couldn't be generated by a random table.

 

[Celebrim]

Ok. Favorite obscure rule:

Characters that forced march for more than eight hours a day suffered progressive LEVEL DRAIN as if they had been attacked by a wight. The levels could be recovered by resting but were otherwise just as debilitating.