After a few days spent being chased through the wilderness by vociferous demons I came across a railroad track and managed to hop on a passing freight train. I shared a boxcar with a couple of old school , Depression-era hobos; they showed me how to make a proper bindle and I took them through V. of Homm. I didn't actually bring a copy of the modge when I left home so I had to run it from memory but I'm pretty sure I got all the encounters right--further proof that I am a nutjob.
This all came about because they saw my collection of D&D books. One of them apparently follows JB's blog because he mentioned his recent article on how he runs AD&D combat and asked if I used similar rules. I started to explain my house'd version but, eyeing my collection of hand-carved cedar dice, they asked if we could just play.
Doing this forced me to codify my own AD&D combat rules.
Surprise party
In a post a couple years back I famously, embarrassingly, revealed my deepseeded ignorance of the AD&D surprise rules. But you know what, I like my version better. Each side rolls for surprise; if one side rolls a 1 or 2 then subtract the die roll from the other side's die roll, this indicates how many segments they are surprised. A 0 result equals mutual surprise--nobody does anything for a segment or two--a negative result indicates the other side is surprised. Except I'm capping the surprise party at 3 segments like the table on page 103 of the PHB misleadingly hints at.
Also, I'm eliminating the 30' surprise limit on the grounds that you could have a situation where a party enters a 40' x 40' goblin barracks and achieves surprise on all the goblins within 30' but the ones on the far wall are not surprised. You would be rolling initiative against folks who are 40 feet away while all the nearby schmucks stand like pawns on a chessboard.
Initiative
Standard d6 for each side, no dex bonus.
In case of a tie, whoever rolls higher on their melee attack roll (raw d20 before bonuses) gets in the first telling blow. This should only matter if one of the combatants lays down a death blow on the other. If the d20 rolls are equal, then the strikes are truly simultaneous.
Movement before melee
It always struck me as a tad preposterous that, in a one minute melee round, you could only move ten feet--less than 3.5 strides for most humans--and still have enough time left to engage in non-charging melee. Back in the day we house-ruled that you could move up to half of your move and still roll your 20sider. It served us well as kids and I'm sticking with it as an old man.
Multiple attacks
You've got three attacks per round? They all happen at the same time; before your opponent if you win initiative, after if you lose. I could make the effort to internalize the variables like other, more practices DMs might do, but I'm not interested in it enough to bother.
Missile Fire Rate
Giants hurling boulders
AD&D rules say that dex does not apply to hurled boulders. I'm going to commit some blasphemy here and say that Gygax got this exactly wrong. I don't care what kind of armor you're wearing, you get hit by a massive boulder, you're crushed. Your only chance of avoiding damage is dodging the thing. Therefore, use only dex and magic bonuses to determine AC from boulder attacks, e.g. Wismodolum the Gnome fighter illusionist has a 16 Dex and +2 chain mail. Wismo gets to use the +2 bonus but not the chainmail armor value; so AC is 8, plus 2 more for dex = AC 6. Giants are also -4 to hit gnomes so that little bastard effectively has an AC of 2 vs Giant-tossed boulders.
Anyway, we made it through the moathouse and the Lareth encounter before getting chased off the train somewhere near Tierra del Fuego.
No comments:
Post a Comment