Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8678605" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, the whole "rate the player's performance and punish them" mechanic was, to put it bluntly, absurd. I have seen a few sporadic and failed attempts to use training costs with the '1.0' factor. We really didn't play a lot of modules, so my suspicion is we weren't as rolling in gold as one would expect if all you did was go from B2 and on through to the A, G, and D series like many people did. Later modules were especially treasure-heavy though from what I recall (late meaning things like White Plume Mountain, lol). As GM I never had all that much trouble finding ways to pry gold pieces out of the PC's hands anyway. Henchmen and bases always really sucked money.Nasty bastard! I mean, they can still copy them, as they camp in the middle of the undead infested dungeon burning up light and etc.Yes, that is true, but I started playing long before the DMG existed! (well, it seemed 'long' back then...) We had a PHB which describes min and max spells/level and a "chance to know each listed spell". Those are explained, but the resulting system isn't really workable, and without any DMG rule in the beginning things were fairly murky at best. D&D itself didn't explain anything about spell acquisition, nor Holmes. I'm not sure about B/X, that came later.Well, I went back and re-read it. Its actually QUITE CLEAR, and I am 100% sure that I understood it back then, because I have a printout of a BASIC program that would let you fill out an entire AD&D character sheet "by the book" and it implements the full monty! What you do is maintain a list of ALL spells that exist in the entire campaign, whatsoever (there's the one hitch that technically this is an open list, oh well). When you roll up a PC you make a %chance to know against ALL OF THEM (really you can wait until you run into a spell, but conceptually this is an inborn trait of your PC). All spells thus fall into one of two categories, ones you can understand, and ones you cannot. The min/max values feed into making those two categories. If you go through the whole list once and fail to reach the min, you can reroll some until you reach it. If you hit the max during your list traversal, you stop and thats it, you cannot learn more. Now for the fun kicker! If your INT changes "relatively permanently" you START OVER AND DO IT ALL AGAIN. All of this is repeated for each spell level. TECHNICALLY if your INT changes you could suddenly find that your entire spell book is now gibberish to you, and there is no defined game process by which you can reverse this! (I guess a Wish would obviously do the trick). So, like I say, its not really a very workable system. I mean, I never ran into anyone that actually implemented it (aside from my Basic program written for some very early PC type computer). IIRC we generally just used the DMG to establish what you started with (and it states you get a new spell EVERY LEVEL) and then if you found a spell or wanted to trade or whatever you could roll % to know and if you hit the number you were able to figure it out and copy it to your books. We didn't actually record which spells people had rolled against, instead we just let you roll each time you found a unique instance of a spell. I don't think we ever paid attention to the MIN number, but at least in theory we might have enforced the MAX number. I doubt too many people ran wizards that were both dumb enough to have a max that you were likely to run into AND survived enough levels to bump against it!Yeah, one of the very few generous elements of the DMG, which is mostly Scrooge's How to Spoil Player's Christmas, lol.</blockquote>

Verification