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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KirayaTiDrekan" data-source="post: 6549328" data-attributes="member: 6755061">Dungeon Masters Guide - Part 3Originally published August, 1979Version being read and reviewed: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Dungeons-Dragons-Dungeon-Masters/dp/0786962410/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1416628500&sr=8-12&keywords=Dungeon+Masters+Guide" target="_blank">Dungeon Masters Guide 1st Edition Premium Reprint</a> (July, 2012) I'm going to try to speed this up a bit and zoom through the next few sections so I can get back to a more regular posting schedule.  This book may be a beloved classic but its organized like a...like a something that isn't very organized.Character abilities and races get a brief overview from the DM's point of view before we move on to discussions on how to adjudicate the various class abilities.  Random tables for followers gained at high levels are up first, with clerics, fighters, thieves, and assassins all having relatively straight forward tables but rangers getting a complex series of tables that could see the ranger getting a flying mount, a mundane NPC, an animal, or even a storm giant!  The paladin's warhorse gets a special section of its own as acquiring it is an adventure in and of itself.  After an in depth discussion of adjudicating thief and assassin abilities (including poison use), Gary discusses using monster as player characters.  Unlike later editions which have all had supplements with rules for this sort of thing, Gary provides only the barest of guidelines here.  The assumption is that the primary motivation for wanting to play a monster is munchkinism, not any desire to explore a significantly different sort of role.  The section also emphasizes the human-centric nature of the game and that human characters in a fantasy setting are fantastical enough without allowing monster PCs.  Being a fan of monster characters and later supplements like the Complete Book of Humanoids (2nd Edition) and Savage Species (3rd Edition), I find the tone taken here to be a little off-putting.  Lycanthropy also gets a fairly significant chunk of space in the book with a few rules to back up the idea that willingly playing a lycanthrope is a bad idea.Alignment, alignment, alignment.  How many alignment debates have their been online and even in individual game groups?  I think a lot of the debate surrounding alignment stems from the extensive rules found in this book for it.  Alignment rules diminish with each edition until, now, they are practically non-existent in D&D 5th Edition.  DMs are encouraged to graph each player character's alignment...wait what?  Am I back in high school geometry...only graphing behavior?  This boggles my mind.  The "stick-up-the-rear" LG Paladin stereotype seems to originate here as DMs are told to not allow the other PCs to conveniently "fool" or distract the paladin while they indulge in nefarious, non-LG activities.  And changing alignment invokes a level drain penalty?  Whaaaat?  And don't get me started on alignment languages.  I'm glad those went away.  They never made sense to me.After a discussion of money (keep PCs poor so sayeth the book), we get in to detailed descriptions of hirelings and mercenary troops with sages getting the most detail.  We then move on to Nodwick...er...I mean henchmen.  Henchman seem to be a pretty big deal in this version of the game and their loyalty has a complicated system of percentages that I don't even begin to want to figure out.Time was the single most important thing in the whole game, at least according to page 37.  A campaign is meaningless without properly keeping track of time.  Reading a little more in-depth here, it seems that DMs were expected or at least assumed to have more than one group of players in their campaign worlds and so careful track of time was necessary to prevent overlap and paradoxes and such.  This also makes sense with the whole 50 player thing from the original edition.  Spells are talked about next.  Clerics have an increasingly hard time getting their spells as they gain levels as the highest levels are all granted by DM...er...deity fiat and if the cleric has been misbehaving the deity can say "no."  Magic-Users have a slightly easier time of things, though, which spells they find and can thus attempt to add to their spellbooks, is still entirely up to the DM.  The metaphysics of spellcasting are more detailed in this edition than I remember from any other edition.  Apparently, all spells draw on energy from the positive or negative energy planes.  We then get into adjudicating specific spells.  Adventuring in the wilderness doesn't hold too many surprises, other than a fairly detailed look at aerial adventuring and combat as well as naval adventuring and ship to ship combat.  We round that off with a brief look at underwater adventuring (which has seemingly always been overly complicated, regardless of edition).  A brief discussion of the planes includes a note about crossing AD&D over with TSR's other games of the time - Boot Hill (old west), Gamma World (post apocalyptic), Metamorphosis Alpha (sci-fi), and something called Tractics which I have never heard of.  And, finally, we have the combat rules, conspicuously missing from the PHB.  Although relatively complex, AD&D combat doesn't seem anymore complicated than 3.5 combat, really.  Just some slightly different math (and lots of tables to consult).  We also have psionic combat with the defense modes and attack modes and...ouch.  Its ironic that the psionics rules hurt my brain.  The discussion of saving throws takes an interesting turn, first going in to the rule's origins in wargaming and then discussing why they exist - the PCs are the protagonists and thus should have a chance to escape even certain death, hence the need for saving throws.  Poison saves get into the discussion of the abstract nature of hit points.  I'm reminded of the "damage on a miss" debates that raged across the D&D corner of the internet during 4th Edition and the D&D Next playtest.  Poison saves are an all or nothing save (i.e. Save or Die) because of the hit point abstraction.  Either the poisoned weapon actually scratched you and you die from poison (failed save) or the weapon didn't actually cause any physical harm despite reducing hit points (successful save).  After briefly covering intoxication we get in to insanity, along with a random table and descriptions of various sorts.  I find insanity mechanics in RPGs to be troublesome for a variety of reasons.  Mental health is a real concern and turning various aspects of it into game mechanics that are poorly researched and are often played for laughs is not something I'm ok with.  However, the inclusion of such mechanics was pretty common in this era of RPGs (here in AD&D, Call of Cthulhu of course, and Palladium's first offerings in the early 80s to name a few, proceeding all the way to the 90s and Vampire: The Masquerade's exceedingly bothersome inclusion of the Malkavian clan of vampires).  Thankfully, most modern RPGs have done away with this sort of thing.Experience Points are a bit more complicated here than they would be in later editions.  Monster XP is based not only on its level/hit dice but its individual hit points.  The more HP it has, the more XP its worth.  This was also the era of gaining XP from treasure, with a generally 1 to 1 ratio of gold piece value to XP.  The benefit of this system, though, was that the DM could control the rate of level gain pretty easily via the amount of treasure gained in adventures.  Of course, that also meant that player characters tended to end up with more gold than they knew what to do with by level 5 or so (since you couldn't buy magic items).  Gaining levels here is not automatic - the DM is encouraged to charge extra time and money for training based on how well the character roleplayed their general role and alignment.  "Poor" players thus end up having a hard time leveling up, regardless of XP.    We shall stop here for tonight and try to push through another chunk of the book next time.Next up: Dungeon Master's Guide (1st Edition) (Part 4)</blockquote>

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