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Thursday, February 17, 2022

How to read the AD&D Rules Part XXIV.D

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.



3 comments:

  1. What Carl said.
    ; )

    (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)

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  2. 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.

    Unarmed 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.

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