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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9798747" data-attributes="member: 4937">There was a thread going around recently about "Did you play AD&D RAW?" and my answer was summarized as, "Well, we tried most of the time but generally there are enough different readings of the rules that two different groups could both claim to be RAW and yet use different rules."  So in my case, by a pretty short time after UA I was treating anything that could be a PC classed NPC as a PC classed NPC.  So those Dwarves were just straight up fighters with d10's for HD and CON bonuses.  And while that's all house rules, I do also think that the intention of raw is to give them XP as HD = <classlevel>+1 HD monsters and for them to use the THAC0 table for 4th level fighters not the one for 4HD monsters.  I more than make up for that THAC0 difference by post UA assuming all fighter classed NPCs are specialized or even double specialized in the weapon they are holding, but pre-UA I think the intention was that to use fighter tables for classed monsters in the monster manual because pre-UA didn't have as much power creep.Note that I only did this for races that could be taken by PCs under the RAW.  I didn't do this for Goblins for example, even after I started having Goblin PCs.  Goblins and other such things advanced as "monsters" and not fighters using their own progression and the monster "to hit" tables.4+1 HD from the Locanth Leader with the powers and abilities of 4th level fighter and 3+1 HD for the assistants with the powers and abilities of 3rd level fighters.    I think this is pretty straight foward and literal - "treat as a 4th level fighter".This is a 4+4 HD monster with casting ability of an 8th level cleric, which in general I would not consider "major spell use" but "minor spell use" since the cleric spell list is largely defensive until about 9th level (at which point I would consider the cleric list "major spell use").  This is not a 6HD creature or there wouldn't be a distinction between HD and casting ability.Same for the guards.  They are 3+3 HD with casting ability of a 6th level cleric.  The casting ability is a SAXPB and not a determiner of HD.I'm not understanding the contradiction between these two things.  A 3+3 HD creatures rolls three dice then adds +3 to the number rolled.  Generally when I triple something I triple all the terms.  So here Gygax is probably just abstracting away two ideas.  First that "average' svifnebli are 3rd level fighters, and second that average members of their species have 15 CON.  This yields 3 HD + 3 (from d10s per HD) + 3 (from +1 hp per HD from CON bonus).  I'm a bit surprised leaders have 4+7 instead of 4+8 but whatever.I think you are looking for consistency that was just never intended.  I'd imagine in the rare case of a 0th level Svifnebli they'd have 1d6+1 hit points, but there isn't really anything that suggests Gygax ever used 0th level for anything but humans.  Young sveifnebli would be 1st or 2nd level fighters probably with 1+2 and 2+4 HD IMO, but that's just pure speculation.  And it doesn't really matter, because you don't have to write out examples for them because they are speculative and when you did you could make the rules whatever you wanted.</blockquote>

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