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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ilgatto" data-source="post: 9795322" data-attributes="member: 86051">Drat. I can't believe I've literally never seen that table before. From what I gather, it appears to be a very rough guideline for including your own monsters in encounter lists. Which Gygax then immediately goes on to declare null and void by making the ghoul—which would have to be a level I monster if Delta's blog is correct—a level III monster (p. 177). Probably because it's ability to paralyze and then eat the PCs? Which makes one wonder why the giant centipede with its instant kill is already available on level I—though that is perhaps explained because its poison may not have been lethal to begin with (it's just an "animal" in OD&D until the Holmes revision).EDIT: Obviously, I've made a bit of a silly mistake there with the ghoul, for its base xp according to Delta wouldn't be "20", but "65" (according to Appendix E), which makes it a level III monster. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f633.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":oops:" title="Oops!    :oops:"  data-smilie="10"data-shortname=":oops:" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />Yeah. I’ve always wondered whether that’s got to do something with the notion that the number of Hit Dice for monsters and PCs sort of may have been limited to maybe 10 or 12 in OD&D. For example, why do some demons have 10-, 12-, or 20-sided HD in Eldritch Wizardry if not to give them more hit points in a system that’s limited in the number of HD a monster can have? And would a notion like that also explain the weird “HD+x” PCs and monsters can have?The limit also leads to problems when you’re trying to roll up a random dungeon using the tables in the DMG, which can get you to around the 12th level until you literally start running out of monsters and the “attendant monsters” you’ve been doling out since level IX.</blockquote>

Verification