I got it way wrong. In case you haven't been reading, I spent a week or more passing along misinformation about AD&D Surprise rules. After a jolting bit of input from some folks the other day, I realized my mistake and decided to give Surprise the Alignment Language treatment. But on doing so, I wanted to make sure I covered all the required terrain, which lead me to read this sentence at the bottom of the left column on pg 62 under Factors Contributing To Surprise:
"The overall result would not materially add to the game--in fact, the undue complication would detract from the smooth flow of play."
While EGG wrote this in reference to listing modifications for a variety of in-game situations that might lead to surprise it should really be extrapolated to encompass the entire sadistically convoluted segment-based AD&D Surprise Party. Never has a more apt sentence been written in description of not just the surprise rules, but also unarmed combat, psionics, weapon vs. AC modifiers, and a host of other rules chaff proliferated by the same pen that crafted this poignant quote.
Ha! Do Psionics now!
ReplyDeleteWhat Carl said.
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(just by the way: I LOVE these rules in AD&D. Yeah, they take some getting used to, but once you have 'em down, it's tough to go back to a "simpler" game. The unarmed combat rules in particular are as fascinating and fun as they are archaic and complex)
JB, I'm a pretty big fan myself. I use the heck out of the Surprise system. My players love it. One of them is a Barbarian and another is a Halfling Thief, so duh -- they LOVE surprise.
ReplyDeleteUnarmed Combat -- the Barbarian loves to punch and wrestle things and I use it often for monsters. Grappling and Overbearing are two of my favorite monster tactics. They're super-effective! Unearthed Arcana offered a simplified unarmed combat system, but I use the old system in the DMG.
Psionics, though? My players won't even roll for it! Can't wait until the Mind Flayers show up. :D
Dice Chucker -- I fudged surprise in AD&D back to B/X style in olden days. We'd roll a d6 if surprise was possible and on a 1 or 2, you were surprised for a round. Same for monsters, but you had to "prove" that you were able to actually surprise the monster. Unless you were or had a Ranger. Then it was 1 in 6. It worked, and we never gave it a lot of thought after that.
When I picked up AD&D again after a long hiatus, I was inspired by Anthony Huso to fully give RAW a try (thanks for the link JB, if you're reading this). It had been so long since I played and so much of my old "house rule" mental baggage was gone and I re-learned the game from the books.
It's a quirky system, but I think viewing it as unified system is a mistake. AD&D is a collection of minigames that sometimes appear to share rules and mechanics, but don't really.