Classic Railroad Adventuring: How to Roll Dice on a Train

After many days in the wilderness, hounded relentlessly by the vociferous demons of Blogger OCD, 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 Hommlet. I didn't actually bring a copy of the modge when I fled my home so I had to run it from memory; I'm pretty sure I got all the encounters right--which just means that I am a nutjob.

This all came about because the hobos--am I going to get in trouble for calling them that?--saw my collection of D&D books. One of the dudes apparently follows the BX Blackrazor blog because he mentioned JB's post on how he runs AD&D combat. He asked if I followed 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. 

Anyway, doing this forced me to codify my own AD&D combat rules which I now present to you, bored reader:

Surprise party

In a post a couple years back I famously, and rather embarrassingly, revealed my deep-seeded ignorance of the AD&D surprise rules. But you know what, up yers cuz' I like my version better. Each side rolls for surprise; if one side rolls a 1 or 2 (usual indicators of surprise) 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 zero segments--a negative result indicates the other side is the only one experiencing surprise. Except I'm capping the surprise party at 3 segments like the table on page 103 of the PHB misleadingly hints, because otherwise there is the potential of up to 5 segments of surprise and that seems a bit extreme.  

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 along 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. If the d20 rolls are equal, then the strikes are truly simultaneous. This should only matter if one of the combatants lays down a death blow on the other.

Movement before melee

It always struck me as a tad preposterous that, in a one minute melee round, you could only move ten feet--not quite 3.5 strides for most humans--and still have enough time to engage in melee. Back in the day we house-ruled that you could move up to half of your move and still roll your 20-sider. 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 practiced DMs might, but I'm not interested enough to bother.

In the case of an initiative tie, those attack rolls which beat the opponent's hit first.  

Missile Fire Rate

Unlike multiple melee attacks, I do feel like missile fire rate is worth parsing out because you have to take time to reload. Generally, darts take at least three segs to reload and aim, arrows and daggers take four segments at a minimum; everything else goes off with the regular initiative roll. 

 

Exception: if you spent your last round, or part thereof, preparing to launch you can go during the first segment, or any segment thereafter. 

 

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 best chance of avoiding damage is to not get hit. 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. 

How to Play AD&D Part XVII: Hirelings--Sages

Something weird was going on in Gary's campaign that compelled him to write 20 paragraphs of rules for running sages in AD&D. 

First off we have tables for determining how much knowledge your local sage has. Briefly, each sage has a major field of knowledge, say Humanoids & Giantkind. Within this major field, a sage will have 2-4 Special categories--rolled on a random table of course. So your H&G major could have a specialization in the biology and languages of Humanoids and giants.   

We also learn that Sages require significant space: a useful sage must have living quarters, a library, workroom, and a study, each room to be at least 200 sf. So 800 sf at the minimum. Not terribly huge, but why must every sage have a separate study and library? And what the heck goes on in a history major's "workroom"? More importantly, why do we care? We just wanted to find out if it's true that orcs have forked penises, what do we care how big the sage's house is? Stick with me, Gary has a reason.

Next we learn about the characteristics of a sage: for instance sages roll 1d8 for their STR and add 7, which means their range is 8-15, which is actually stronger than the norm. Surprising given the sedentary nature of their labors.  They also have exceptionally high Int--makes sense--and Wis--makes less sense--but shit Con and Cha--also makes sense I suppose if we're going to generalize and stereotype, 70s style. 

They also have access to spells up to levels 3-6; not bad considering they are not actually members of a spell casting class. Gygax equates certain fields to certain class of spells--Nature studying sages would have druid spells, supernatural studies indicate MUs, and experts on the physical universe and/or deviant sex would have clerical spells. 

Also, sages have 8d4 hit points. Not bad.   

There are also rules for when PCs hire sages as employees--as opposed to just asking for a consultation. Remember those space requirements mentioned a few paragraphs ago? This is where they come into play: as an employer, you are now required to provide the sage with adequate space to ply its craft. 

This raises the question of who the heck was hiring sages as permanent employees? I honestly can't fathom a reason why anyone would want to do this. Well, it wasn't spell casters because only fighters, rangers, paladins, thieves, and assassins may hire a sage as an employee. Apparently the Brotherhood of Sages (an actual thing) won't allow them to take a permanent gig with a wizard. 

Further, sages will only accept permanent employment offers that are lifelong! You can't just hire a sage for a year or two or ten; once you hire a smarty-pants know-it-all sage, they're on your payroll until they kick off this mortal coil. How many sages with this arrangement end up getting murdered by their patron once they are no longer needed?

Consulting with a sage, however, is open to anyone, spell caster or not. However, Sage-work is a tiring business--sages require 1 day of relaxing and recuperating for every 3 days spent answering a question. And such employment cannot last more than a week or the sage will then be unable to answer any further questions for at least one month!  How the heck did these chumps get through grad school?

All this tells us that finding expert advice was such a valuable commodity in Old Man Gygax's campaigns back in the day that he felt the need to create elaborate rules for sages dispensing knowledge. But you know what else this tells us? It tells us that somebody in Lake Geneva was gaining such an undue advantage from these sage rules and Gygax had to shut that crap down!

 

How to Read the AD&D Rules XVI: Keen-eared individuals

Readers:     After sleepwalking through the year, here comes Dice Chuckles with some year-end filler to meet his stoopid multiple-of-six-posts-for-the-year mandate, hoo-freakin'-ray.

Me:             Stick it, ya hose bags. This one is actually super important.  

Readers:     Really?

Me:            Of course not, I'm writing about a 45 year old book that folks stopped taking seriously 35 years ago. Of course none of this matters. But please read on anyway or the plutocrats on the Dicechucker Enterprises Board of Trustees will replace me with a Neo-Otyugh with psionic capabilities.

Readers:    Fine, carry on. But only because we don't want to experience a Psychic Crush while tending to the compost.

Me:             Thank you. You won't regret it. Probably.

Did any of you know that in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons of the First Order, there is a chance that your character might be granted a 5% or 10% bonus to hear noise? No? I never knew this either, but it's right there on page 60 of the Guide for Mastering Dungeons. How do you determine if your character is a "Keen-Eared Individual"(KEI)? The procedure is quite simple:

"Use chance of hearing noise to determine if a character is keen-eared the first time he or she listens at a door, and if it is indicated, tell the player to note the fact for his or her character." EGG, DMG

Got it. The first time your PC rolls to hear noise, determine if keen-earedness is indicated, what could be simpler? And while you're at it, determine whether they are 5% keener of ear than your regular schmoe or if they are 10% keener. How is that determined? C'mon folks, Gary just wrote six paragraphs about listening at doors; we know how many people can listen at a single door, how long it takes to listen at a door, how many attempts can be made at listening to a door, how much time it takes to recover from the strain of door-listening; can't you figure anything out for yourselves?

How to Read the AD&D Rules Part XV: A Surprising rule about Encounter Distance

Remember this old gimmick where, in a fit of hubris, I tried to clarify and paraphrase the AD&D rules into a more concise text? Remember how badly I failed? 

It was pretty laughable, yes, but it also helped me understand rules that I never knew that I didn't know. Unknown unknowns, if you will. Most egregiously, I completely misunderstood the whole surprise segments thing. You can read the whole dreaded affair if you like. Or not, my feelings won't be hurt. (sniff)

In classic D-Chux fashion, I'm dragging this old pony out of the glue factory to abuse it some more, because I started reading the DMG again and, a few pages on from the surprise rules, I encountered the rules on Encounter Distance. Read on if you dare, my fellow dice chuckers...[pardon the horror show antics, this post was supposed to go up before Halloween but I overslept]

Distance

As in, how far apart two parties are when they come into contact. You might think this would be obvious based on the terrain, lighting, where the DM planned for the monsters to pop up in the dungeon, etc, but the DMG leads off the discussion with this sentence:

"When encounters occur, the distance between concerned parties will be 5"-10" (d6+4) subject to the following modifying factors..."

The author then lists off the following six factors: 

1. Line of sight, 
2. Noise, 
3. Actual Area, 
4. Planned or unplanned appearance, 
5. Surprise, and 
6. Light. 

Which is to say, use your head and figure out where first contact is most reasonably going to occur.  And because even a novice dungeon-master will be able to determine where contact will occur without even thinking to consult with the rules, this entire section has never been read by anyone.

And since no one ever read this section, no one uncovered this tidbit:

"Surprise can only be a factor in close encounter situations. If either or both parties are surprised, the distance must be either 1" to 3" or it must be less as determined by the actual area modifier." DMG, some page.

Or, as a loquaciousness-deprived person might put it: 

Parties must be within 30' of each other in order for surprise to occur.

Seems like a pretty important piece of information, right? But, even though Gygax just finished writing 12 paragraphs of befuddling text about surprise, he decided to obfuscate even further this crucial piece of information by placing it in a separate, and entirely superfluous, section of the book. 

How to Read the AD&D Rules XIV: Grappling with Non-Lethal Combat

In my rush to pummel you with VATAPGOA last time, I overlooked some of the basics of unarmed combat. For instance, I kept calling it "unarmed combat." Of course that's not the term that was actually used in the original Guidebook for Masters of Dungeon-like Structures; rather, it was called "non-lethal and weaponless combat." Henceforth I shall call it some variation on that terminology. Or I'll make up another acronym, how about NLAWC? Too bad, I'm running with it. 

I also failed to mention that there are three different forms of weaponless combat: 

• Pummeling
• Grappling
• Overbearing

Pummeling is, obviously, punching, and grappling is wrestling--WWE style. Overbearing is that loud jackass who won't shut up about their stupid opinions. Yes, I included this list just for that punchline.

But D-Chux, what makes this combat non-lethal? 

I forgot to mention that only 25% of any damage inflicted from a punch or grapple is actual, "permanent" damage--50% of Overbearing damage is permanent, but overbearing tends to inflict a lot less damage than the other 2 forms of NLAWC. The rest will be temporary dmg which heals at a rate of 1 hp per round. 

So if you punch a guy for 4 dmg, he subtracts 4 from his HP total, but 3 of those pts are going in the temporary file, and he'll get one of them back next round. If he takes no more damage in the fight, he'll have all 3 temporary HP back in 3 rounds/minutes. He'll have to sleep off the last hit point over night. 

If you get knocked to 0 or less HP, you're out cold. You regain 1 HP per round, so if you get punched down to -3 HP, you will be conscious once you've returned to 1 HP, or 4 rounds. Unless your permanent HP have been reduced to 0, in which case you're dead. It can happen; non-lethal combat is not always non-lethal.

One more thing: First Attack Initiative is determined by following this order of operations: 

1. surprise, 
2. charging to attack, 
3. higher dex, 
4. higher die roll. 

It doesn't say what die to roll but presumably it's the standard initiative roll. There's also this weird sentence:

"Whichever first occurs determines the first attack for the round, so in most cases the pummeling attacker will go first in the first round." [L'emphasis est de moi]

Huh? Are pummeling attackers inherently more likely to surprise their opponents? To have higher dexterity? How does the second half of that sentence make any sense? If JB or someone can explain that to me I'd greatly appreciate it.

Next week we'll get into Grappling and Overbearing, I promise.

How to read the AD&D Rules Part XIII: Pummeling you with VATAPGOA

You all thought I was dead after that Cuthbert's Day party at Malishefski's place, right? Ha, I'm back.

Today's topic is, of course, unarmed combat. And more specifically, the art of Pummeling. We didn't use these very much back in the day because, like psionix, they just seemed like a different game. Also, they're clumsy and not always clear. Instead of rolling a 20-sider to hit, you roll percentile dice and apply a bunch of modifiers, much like DragonQuest, Star Frontiers, Top Secret, Gangbusters... I played all of those games to some extent back in the day so, by the mid 80's at least, the AD&D unarmed combat rules were no longer completely alien. But, barring the occasional barroom brawl, rare was the occasion that we turned to pg. 72 of the DMG.

Let's see just how much chaos unarmed combat brings to the game:

The first thing you have to do is determine your VATAPGOA. What the heck is that? It's your: Variable Applicable To All Pummeling, Grappling, and Overbearing Attacks. It's right there on page 72 of your Fungeon Masters Guide. And no, no one actually called it VATAPGOA, but they should have. 

This is done by taking "the number of the column he or she uses for weapon attacks." What the hell does that mean? My guess is that you turn to the combat matrix for your class (pg. 74 of the DMG), find your level in the column headings and count the number of columns from the left. So a 5th level cleric would be column 2, as are 1st level fighters, goblins, and 10th level MUs.

Combat columns for clerics

To this is added a "secretly rolled" d6 if you're attacking or d4 if defending. Why is it kept a secret? To add work for the dungeon master. What do you do with this number? You add it to either the chance to hit or to the die roll for determining the result of your successful hit. When on defense, you subtract your number from the opponents roll. You get to choose how to apply your VATAPGOA--I'm just gonna' call it V-Tap from her on out--prior to each attack. So if you're in a barroom brawl and you're duking it out with Elmo at the Welcome Wench, and you each get 2 pummeling attacks a round, you are making this decision at least 4 times per round, twice on offense and twice on defense. Considering that 3 out of the 7 possible results allow you to strike again, it's likely to be even more than 4 times.

While I get that V-TAP is trying to incorporate combat aptitude into unarmed combat, but it's so clumsily handled and amounts to so little--even a 9th level fighter gains only a +6% bonus--it's far more cumbersome than useful. You're having to:

1. look up your combat column number
2. roll a d6 for attacking and a d4 for defending and add these to your column number. And since these are, for some inane reason, kept secret, the DM is doing this for every brawler and having to track who rolled what for attack and defense.
   
3. decide whether to add/subtract the variable to the to hit or result roll
4. roll to hit
   
5. if you succeed, roll the result
6. add attackers V-TAP and subtract defender's V-TAP... as appropriate, bearing in mind that only the dungeonmaster knows the result of your V-TAP die roll.
   

In case it's unclear, we never used V-TAP in our unarmed combat. It's already convoluted enough without this added layer of confusion.

Let's get to the meat then:

Pummel

That jerk sitting next to you at the bar just called your mother a half elf; what are you gonna do about it? Deck the bozo in the chops, that's what! How? First you have to determine your Base Score to Hit, or BaSH. Yes, I made this acronym up too.

For pummeling, BaSH is the opponents AC x 10%. There are modifiers based on Dex, Strength, the armor the attacker is wearing (less is better) and the mobility of the defendant. Even an average combatant is likely to have a +20 bonus. Which is to say that every blow is landing in a barroom brawl.

Got it. But how much damage am I gonna do?

Unlike regular combat where once you successfully hit your opponent you roll a die and the result is the amount of damage, to determine damage in unarmed combat you roll % dice again. This roll is also modified by your strength, opponents armor and general mobility. A successful strike results in a "glancing," "solid," or "crushing" blow and will inflict between 2 and 10 points of damage. Furthermore, a crushing blow automatically stuns your opponent. But if your modified result is less than 20 then you do no damage. So a successful hit can still result in no damage--and is very likely to do so if the defender is wearing heavy armor which raises the question:

Couldn't we skip the whole Base Score to Hit and just roll on the results table? 

Seriously, this would massively de-complicate unarmed combat in AD&D. You would only have to configure modifiers once for each blow, you would no longer have to decide which die roll to apply your V-TAP toward, and you still get to deliver crushing blows to your opponent. I am absolutely trying this out in my next game where unarmed combat comes up. Which never happens.

Havin' a Psionic Blast Part XII: Devouring Your Intellect

It's balls.

Today I'd like to take some time to talk about the psionic adversaries of the Monster Manual. There was a whole ecosystem of monsters in AD&D intended to make being a psionic character dangerous, much like rot grubs and ear seekers existed solely to kill off corpse-looting and door-listening characters. 

First off, see the list of attack and defense modes below showing the letters associated with each mode? (posted somewhere on this page, I hope) These letters are important because they are used as a shorthand for denoting the psionic powers possessed by the monsters in the Monster Manual. It should also be noted that the letters demarking modes in the MM do not, on at least a couple of occasions, match up with the powers listed or described in the monster write-up under the stat block. 

As a for instance, the infamous Mind Flayer only has 1 psionic attack listed: "B", which is Mind Thrust. This is significant because Mind Thrust does not affect non-psionic beings so they're really not going to be flaying many minds, right? But if you read the description underneath the monster stats, it states that M. Flayer's "most feared attack mode ... is the mind blast [sic] of psionic power." Clearly that is supposed to be A. Psionic Blast.

Other Monster Manual Oddities:

Stolen from GM Binder

Brain Moles can cause "Permanent insanity in non-psionically endowed creatures employing psionic energy through spells or magic items." SP even though their one attack mode is B, Mind Thrust, they can still get you if you're using a helm of telepathy or using a spell to do psionic-adjacent things. More on this in a later post.

Cerbral Parasite feeds off of a character's psionic strength without the character knowing what's up. And they reproduce as they feed so, after a while, your psionic strength is getting sapped at an extraordinary rate. They cannot be attacked psionically, so you gotta' cure disease to get rid of 'em.

Demogorgon splits its psionic strength between its two heads which is cool because that's 2 psionic attacks and defenses going on at once. But each head has a strength of only 150, which gives an attack strength of only 75, which is not that great. 

Type III Demons have only one attack and one defense mode: E. Psychic Crush and F. Mind Blank. As G. Thought Shield is the only defense you can use whilst attacking with Psychic Crush, Type III demons cannot both attack and defend at the same time. A huge weakness, to be sure. Or, possibly, this was another case where the letter does not match the intended mode but, since the defense mode is not mentioned in the description, we'll never know.

Some larger Grey Oozes can use Psychic Crush, though their psionic strength can be as low as 21 which... still gives you a 50% chance of taking out one of Demogorgons heads in a single blow.

Intellect Devourer not only does this monster have the creepiest illustration in the original Monster Manual (see illustration above) but, like the Mind Flayer, it also has a discrepancy between attack modes listed by letter: "CE", and those described in the text: Ego Whip and Id Insinuation, which would read "CD". 

Thought Eaters don't actually have psionic ability but they do consume the psionic ability of others. Sadly, the MM doesn't tell us how they do it or at what rate, just that it can be done. But this is the first time anyone ever noticed because no one ever included a Thought Eater in an encounter.

Yellow Molds, are similar to grey oozes in that when they form large colonies they can become psionically active. If such a colony senses psionic beings within 120' they can blast them with "the most powerful form of id insinuation." The most powerful Id Insinuation turns any psionic-folk in a 20'x20' area with a Psionic Strength below 260 into a Robot controlled by the victor. That means that a yellow mold could take over each head of Demogorgon at once! It makes one wonder, though, what would it mean to be a robot in service to a mold colony?  [Thanks for the assist, Grodog]

 

 

Havin' a Psionic Blast (Rules Pt. XI): Attack and Defense Modes

For those keeping score, this is, finally, my actual 300th post.

 

Yesterday, with the help of Ponce the Paladin, we demonstrated how one determines whether you have psionix and what your Psionic Strength is. Did I mention that half of your attack strength is dedicated to Attack and half to Defense? No? Well now I have. On with it.

Today we're going to talk about the meat of Psionics: Attack and Defense modes. There are five of each and they are descriptively named and lovingly--if not particularly usefully--described in the text of the PHB. But you have to crack open the DMG to the two matrices on pages 76-77 to see what actual effects the attacks and defenses are going to have. 

Attacks against another psionic being who has an operable defense mode in place are only going to impact the defender's Defence Strength--except Psychic Crush which has a small chance of killing even a defended being. But once the poor slob is out of Def Str, that's when the real fun begins. Now you switch to the second matrix and that Mind Thrust that has been slowly depleting your defense for all these rounds suddenly is crippling your psionic abilities for weeks at a time, causing you to slip into a dazed and/or confused state that disallows any psionic usage, or blasting through your Attack strength--or hit points!--like a chainsaw through your neighbor's white picket fence.

Attack!

Listed below are the attack modes, with the attack strength cost in parentheses. Each time you Blast something Psionically, that depletes your Attack Strength by 20 points while Thrusting someone Mindfully costs a mere 4, and so forth.

A. Psionic Blast (20): Can kill opponents who have a very low psionic capacity as well as simple-minded non-psionics; otherwise it can cause a dazed and/or confused state or insanity. Affects all creatures in a cone 60' long, 20' wide at base. Can only be used against non-psionics if your current Attack Str. is 100 or more.

B. Mind Thrust (4): This is the battering ram you use to beat down your opponent's defenses either by doling out big wads of psionic damage or rendering attack or defense modes unusable. Like Ego Whip and Psychic Crush, Mind Thrust affects only one individual.

C. Ego Whip (7): Generally a less effective Mind Thrust that costs more to use, though a powerful ego whip vs. a defenseless opponent can cause permanent loss of psionic ability. Also has decent range.

D. Id Insinuation (10): This power seeks to take over the opposition, turning them into "robots" controlled by the attacker. It is also effective at depleting defense strength. Unlike most other psionic attacks, this one affects all psionic individuals in a 20'x20' area rather than just a single target. It also has the longest range of any attack, up to 18" at long range.

E. Psychic Crush (14): This one kills your opponent dead--or does nothing at all. The chance of a straight-up kill is not very high if the opponent is using any defense mode so it works best if you're either attacking an unsuspecting psionic or one who has no ability to defend itself. 

Let's call up Ponce the Paladin and see how he's doing. He's rolling d100 against a table to determine how many attacks he gets; Ponce rolls a 62, that gives him 3 attack modes.  With a maximum attack strength of 41, he's going to need to attack on a budget so he takes Mind Thrust, the cheapest attack  mode.  At his paygrade, Ego Whip is never going to be cost effective, so he passes on that. Likewise, Psychic Crush won't provide much chance of an instant kill--except against other psionic weaklings like himself--and will quickly deplete his own strength, so he takes Id Insinuation for its range and area of effect. Psionic Blast is also pricey--a single blast will use half of his Attack strength--but at least it might daze or confuse a modestly endowed opponent, allowing him to make a run for it, so he pockets that as well. 

De-Fence

And your Defenses; like Attacks, the cost per usage is given in (parentheses):

F. Mind Blank (1): Cheapest and least effective defense mode--except it is the best all around defense against Id Insinuation attacks for an individual.

G. Thought Shield (2): Another cheap defense mode, generally better than Mind Blank, but it's real advantage is that it's the only defense you can use while simultaneously attacking with Psychic Crush.

H. Mental Barrier (3): A step pricier and more effective than Thought Shield--except against Id Insin, which it is slightly worse at. It's most interesting characteristic is in the intriguing description: 

"A carefully built thought repetition wall which exposes only that small area."    What small area is "that" area that is left exposed?? I need to know!

I. Intellect Fortress (8): The big jump in price reflects not only that this is a much more effective defense mode but, also, it protects everyone in a 10' radius, which includes providing your non-psionic friends a +2 saving throw bonus v. Psionic Blast.

J. Tower of Iron Will (10): The Cadillac of defense modes in almost every way. Even though its protection radius is only 3', it offers a hefty +6 save bonus to your closest chums vs. Psionic Blast.  

Now back to Ponce; he rolls on the table for defenses and gets a 29: three defense modes are available to him. Interestingly, you get 2 defense modes at the minimum. Cheap is always good and you can't get cheaper than Mind Blank, so that's done. [EDIT: As Faoladh points out in the comments below, everyone with psionics gets Mind Blank as one of their defenses whether they want it or not]. Ponce, being a chivalrous sort, also needs to be able to protect a fair maiden--should he ever meet one--from Psionic Blasts, so he needs one of the area of effect defenses; he takes Tower of Iron Will, ostensibly for its better protection but also because it gives him reason to keep the maidens within 3' of his person. Creep. 

What to do with number 3... he doesn't have Psychic Crush as an attack so there's really no reason to take Thought Shield.  Mental Barrier is still pretty cheap and a lot better than Mind Blank at defending against Mind Thrusts and Ego Whips so that decides that. 

Havin' a Psionic Blast: How to read the AD&D rules Part X: Psionics

Let's get this out of the way at the outset: on their own, I think psionics are pretty freaking' cool. Although almost universally ignored back in the day, psionics didn't fall by the wayside because they were too byzantine or clumsy or whatever, they withered on the vine because they seemed like you were playing a different game entirely. It was a fun game, but it just didn't fit with the rest of the D&D vibe.

Back when I was a kid, my gang's first batch of AD&D characters--all multi-classed elf munchkins with 19 Dexes and 18/72 Strengths--also miraculously succeeded at acquiring psionics even though elves are not on the short list of PC races that could be psionic (Humans, Dwarves, Halflings). We went around Psionic Blasting everything in town that we hadn't already Psychic Crushed. It was fun for a while but a few months later we graduated from munchkin gaming and psionics disappeared from our D&D experience ever after.

Enough of my self indulgence. Here's how to read the Psionics rules starting on pg 110 of the PHB:

The rules for acquiring psionix are actually pretty straight forward. You need an Int, Wis, or Cha (the psionic trinity) of 16 to have even a 1% chance of getting psionics. The author then lays out in analog form the possible additions to your roll, it woulda' been helpful to make a table like this:

Even if all three are 16, that's still only a 1% chance.

but he didn't. No big deal, at best, with 18s at I, W, and CH, you get a 9% chance of being psionically gifted. So even if you banish your best rolls to the classic dump stats, you still only had a slight chance of being rewarded. 

e.g. Ponce the Paladin has a 17 Cha (minimum for paladins at the time), 15 Wis and 12 Int. Because one of those scores is 16 or higher, he gets to roll for psionics. He needs a 00 roll on d100, and rolls a 99. Close but no cig--"Wait, I get a 1/2% bonus because of my 17 Cha." he pleads. The Book says to ignore fractions, but we're all gamers here, we can handle fractions: roll a 10 sider, if you get 6 or higher you're in. Ponce rolls and gets another 9! Welcome to the Psionix Club, Ponce.

So you're one of the lucky few who managed the roll, or, more likely, your Dungeonmaster just said "Fine, you can have psionics." Now what? You have to determine your psionic strength; this is done by rolling d100 and adding 1 for each point of I, W, and/or CH exceeding 12. If two of those scores exceed 12, double the total bonus, if all three are 13 or higher, quadruple the crap out of the number. 

Ponce rolls his 100-sider for psionic strength and gets a 25. To that number he adds (17-12=)5 points for his Ch, plus (15-12=)3 for Wis for a total of 8, doubled because 2 ability scores are >12 for a bonus of (2x8=) 16. 16+25 = 41.

Had Ponce's Int been 1 pt higher he'd have had a 9 base bonus, further, he would have been able to quadruple it for a total bonus of 36 to the d100 roll. Sadly, Ponce was not smart enough to be that smart so he's stuck with 41. This number is doubled to get total Psionic Strength, so Ponce has 82. It's called "psionic ability" in the PHB, but that strikes me as rather ambiguous, so I will be using Psionic Strength or Capacity henceforth.  

What do you do with your psionic strength? You attack people with it, you defend yourself [and maybe your cronies] with it, or you use spell-like functions called "disciplines" that allow you to do a lot of really cool things for just a few points of psionic strength per round. Given that you're probably not encountering other psionic beings every day, more often than not you're just using those disciplines to do cool things like telepathy, teleportation, telempathic projection, telekinesis, or maybe one of the disciplines that don't start with "tele-". 

But really what made Psionics cool was the combat, and I'm running out of room here so we'll get to that tomorrow in what will also be the 300th post here at DiceChuckles Entertainment.

How to read the AD&D Rules Part IX

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.

Surprise Party Redux: Surprise rules part 3 (HRAD&DR Part VIII)

I'll admit that the 1 minute melee round renders a bit of sense from the segment-based Surprise Party. In all the other D&Ds that just give you a free round of surprise, the round is only 10 seconds or less, so you're effectively just giving them a free segment. If you ignore, for the moment, the "why?" of one minute melee rounds, having the surprised party stand inert for a full 60 seconds seems a bit ridiculous, and it also seems ridiculous that, with a full minute to molest the surprised party, the Surprisors would only get to attack once, so EGG broke it down to segments. 

Why not just give the surprisers one free segment to act? Well, with AD&D's ridiculously slow movement rates, on most occasions they'd be too far away to take advantage of it (again: please ignore the larger question), so Gary devised the multiple segment Surprise Party, allowing the Suprisors to charge into combat and whack away at the inert dupes. But then he realized that 4 or 5 segments of surprise could easily TPK even the most seasoned of gaming parties, as Quisling and Schlomo discovered last week, so he gives a Dexterity bonus in the form of the Reaction Adjustment to allow high Dexed combatants to get out of surprise early. Surprise was going to be somewhat less deadly for PCs who were crafty enough to fudge their Dex rolls, which, given the AC, missile attack, and [universally house-ruled] initiative bonuses affiliated with a high Dex, was most of us back in the day.

On a related note it strikes me as a bit odd that the Surprise Dice Difference table (above) in the DMG only goes up to 3 segments even though it should go up to 5 (6-1). There's nothing in the text that caps the Surprise Party at 3 segments, and the table doesn't indicate that you should do the math to figure out 5-1, 6-2, and 6-1 on your own, though, obviously, you can. It would have taken very little effort to add 2 more rows to complete the formula and yet they chose not to. Was Gary trying to subtly suggest that beyond 3 segments thar be dragons?

...or maybe the added rows would have forced the printers to shrink the already tight margins down from 1/8" to 7/64", and they just weren't willing to go that far.

Rift in time: Surprise! in action (How to Read... Part VII)

While a lot of folks have commented that when they played AD&D back in the day they swapped out a lot of the more confusing gibberish for simpler rules cribbed from the Basic books. Well, probably because we didn't play Basic D&D long enough to actually learn the rules, my gang went a different direction: we did not use surprise rules at all. Unless one party was lying in ambush or actively sneaking up on the other, or one party was clearly distracted or drunk or asleep--surprise was not a state of being that existed. The side that got the drop on the other based on the situation had a free round to assault the stooges. Rolling for Surprise! at the start of every encounter seemed like just another complication in an already complicated rule set.

But the point of today's post is not to lecture you on the olden ways, but to deliver up a demonstration of Surprise! in action. Continuing on the example from last time when Schlomo, Quisling, and the rest of Party B were surprised by Party A...

 Example of Surprise

Six-siders are rolled for surprise:

Party A: 5

Party B: 1

Party B: is surprised for 5-1= 4 segments.

Today we're going to run the above scenario through as it might happen at the gaming table. Party A is a group of six gnolls patrolling their sector of the dungeon, and Party B is a group of six low level adventurers arguing about how to split up the treasure they just secured after killing the ogre in room 14. They are:

Schlomo Slow-mo, Cleric, Dex 4: -2 reaction adj.

Quisling the Quickling, Thief/MU, Dex 17: +2 reaction adj.

Spungoir the Spelliferous, MU

Furdok of Burd, Fighter

Kuburt, Monk

Rajoo, Ranger

As already determined the entire party is surprised for 2 segments after which time Quisling, thanks to his +2 reaction adj. will move out of surprise, except this time Quisling goes against his nature and actually stays loyal to his countrymen. Two segments later everyone except Schlomo will awake from their stupor. Schlomo, whose pitiful dex afflicts him with a -2 rx adj., will have to wait until segment 7 before he's paroled.

The Gnolls have a move of 9" and are 20' away so they won't even be in stabbing range until surprise segment 2. Wait a second, with a move of 9 inches you can cover most of 18 feet in 2 segments? Fear not, we'll have a How to... session on Movement in AD&D soon.

Segment 1: Two gnolls lob spears at Party B (not Cardi B) before advancing. One hits Furdok while the other bounces harmlessly off the wall. Gnoll 6 fires a heavy crossbow for 7 dmg. killing Spungor the Spelliferous--now the Lifeless. The rest of the gnolls move 1/10th of their move, getting 9' closer to the party. Yes, 9' in 6 seconds is p-a-i-n-f-u-l-l-y slow but there are probably several paragraphs somewhere in the DMG where Gary explains that movement in AD&D does not represent actual spacial displacement over time, but is a conceptual representation of  yada yada yada. 

Segment 2: The gnolls now move into melee range and start swiping at Party B. The two who tossed the spears last time choose to charge the party allowing them to cover twice their movement and still get an attack. This makes the other gnolls wonder why they didn't do that in the previous round. [It's probably because they're following this blog series and we haven't covered charging yet.] Anyway, there's one gnoll for each party member because Gnoll 6 is hanging back reloading the heavy crossbow at 3x the normal speed. Let the slaughter begin!

Segment 3: Quisling--"Quiz" to his friends, at least to the ones he hasn't betrayed yet--is no longer surprised, so Gnoll 3, who had attacked him the previous segment can no longer get in those sweet "telling blows." They have to roll initiative at this point, even though everyone else is still involved in Surprise. 

                Quisling: 4, Gnoll: 2. 

Quiz gets to swing first, rolls a 5 and misses with his short sword. Gnoll 3's turn but she says "Screw that, if I attack you I'm done for the round. There's a guy standing next to you who'll be surprised for at least 2 more segments, I'm attacking him instead." She cuffs Schlomo up side the head with a morningstar.

Segment 4: The gnolls keep whaling on the still-surprised party members, some of whom are not looking so hot. Quisling has shot his wad bolt, um, you get the idea, for the round and should, by standard melee protocol, be feinting, parrying, and dodging blows from Gnoll 3 for the next 54 seconds. But Gnoll 3 chose instead to attack a still-suprised party member and therefore remain involved in the Surprise Party. Quisling has fallen into a rift in the melee continuum: he has already used his one attack for the round, but his co-combatant has decided not to return the favor. Does Quisling have to dance around pretending to dodge and parry blows that no one is delivering? That's preposterous. Does he get to deliver another blow on Gnoll 3? Gnoll 3 isn't surprised so segment-based telling blows do not apply, but they do apply to his surprised comrades--don't do it Quisling! He resists temptation and wanders away from combat. [No kiddies, opportunity attacks do not exist in AD&D; for all its flaws it at least has that going for it.]

Segment 5: Everyone but Schlomo is now un-surprised. If not for Slo-mo Schlomo, we'd start a new round here, but since he's still got 2 more segments of inaction, the Surprise Party continues and we're gonna' use the same initiative roll from segment 3. That's ok by Party B since Quisling won that roll; they start retaliating for the punishment they've taken. Most of the gnolls now engage in normal melee, Gnoll 5 drops Furdok of Burd with a blow from his zwei-handed sword, but Gnolls 3 & 4 are still attacking poor Schlomo rather than join the regular initiative. Quisling, still occupying the rift in the space time continuum, takes this opportunity to cast a 1 segment spell, magic missile, at Gnoll 3.

Segment 6: There are still 2 gnolls who insist on beating on poor Schlomo, and Gnoll 5, having used his regular melee attack to kill Furdok during the last segment, decides he wants to go back to the Surprise party and attack Schlomo too. The players all cry foul but the DM persists and Gnoll 5 swings at the beleaguered cleric anyway, hitting for 3 pts of dmg. Schlomo--shockingly--withstands the blow and, even worse for the DM, the players will absolutely use this decision against him in the future.

Segment 7/New Round: Yahweh smiles on Schlomo today, for he has miraculously survived 10 attack rolls from the gnolls and is finally unsurprised. A new round begins and initiative is rolled, much to the chagrin of Gnoll 6--remember her?-- who has finally finished reloading that stupid freakin' crossbow. She will certainly be razzed for this in the mess hall tonight. The PCs, who are busy filing a meta-gaming complaint against Gnoll 5, lose the initiative. Rajoo and Kuburt both fall under gnollish battle axes leaving just Quisling and the sluggish and heavily battered Schlomo to face off against six gnolls. Quisling regrets not betraying his chums when he had the chance.

"The Telling Blow" or, How to read the AD&D rules Part VI: Combat, Surprise

Since no one wants to read a spell by spell re-cap of AD&D, I'm skipping ahead to the meat of the matter: Combat. We're now looking at the DMG folks, page 61. Huge chunks of text in full-justified paragraphs; I have as much difficulty wading through this stuff now as I did when I was 11. 

Paragraphs 1, 3, and 4 all go on about the 1 minute melee round; as long as you understand that melee rounds in AD&D are 1 minute long then you need not read them. And paragraph 2 starts out: "As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage..." so you can stop reading there if you don't need to hear that sermon again. Just like that we're at the bottom of the page where we find the first step for encounter and combat:

Surprise

1. Determine surprise: each party rolls a d6, if either or both parties roll a 1 or 2 then the party that rolls lowest is surprised. 
   

So, surprise dice are rolled and:

Party A: 6

Party B: 3

Neither party is surprised. 

 

Party A: 1

Party B: 3

Party A is surprised 

 

That seems simple enough, right? Too simple for a game called Advanced D&D so Gygax wrote 12 freaking paragraphs of obfuscation on the matter, ensuring that all but the most tenacious of rules lawyers would look elsewhere--like Basic D&D--for a simpler rule or ignore surprise rules altogether. 

Now, I can condense Gary's Compleat and Comprehensive Treatise on Inflicting Surprise on One or More Parties During an Encounter in the Strategic Fantastical Roleplaying Game of Advanced Dungeons, and/or Dragons to a couple of paragraphs for you [Edit: No I can't.], but even that will be painful to read so for those not wanting to waste another moment of their lives on this topic, rest assured that most folks just gave the surprisers 1 free round of action while the surprisee's stood/sat/lay their in stunned silence.

Diehards Only

Have we got rid of all the lightweights? Good, let's dig in:

Like I said, each party rolls a d6 for surprise. If one or both parties roll either a 1 or a 2, then the party that rolls higher is supposed to subtract the low-roller's dice roll from their own, the result is how many segments of free action they have before the surprised party can react, segments being 1/10th of a round which, as Gary has just spent 3 very lengthy paragraphs explaining, are 1 minute long.  [A segment is 6 seconds long, equal to a round in modern D&D, so you 5e kids are finally in your comfort zone]. It looks something like this:

 

Party A: 5

Party B: 1

Party B: is surprised for 5-1= 4 segments.

 

The surprisers, in this case Party A, have 4 segments to act. During each segment of surprise they can move 1/10th of their full movement rate, avoid, parley, and, yes, melee attack the crap out of your ass as if each segment was an entire round! As Gary puts it, because the surprisees are inert, the surprisers can get in "telling blows" in just a 6 second window. This gets back to all the dancing around and feinting and what have you that goes on in a 1 minute melee round.

We're not done yet though because each surprised individual modifies its time in the surprise zone based on their Dexterity. Remember attack/reaction adjustment? Attack is clear, add that to your to hit roll when attacking with missile weapons. This is where the reaction half of he equation comes in: if your party is surprised, each individual adds its dex adj. to the surprise roll for determining how long they are surprised. As an example:

Only 2 members of party B (above) have exceptional dexterities: 

Quisling the Quickling, Dex 17, +2 rx.

Schlomo the Slow-mo, Dex 4, -2 rx adj.  

• Note: because of Schlomo's egregiously low Dex, we know that he is a cleric. We can surmise from his name that he is likely a rabbi.
• Further note: it is unlikely in the extreme that anyone would willingly put a 4 on Dex because that would also give you a |3| AC penalty,* i.e., Schlomo's chainmail and shield would give him an AC of 7 instead of the typical 4. That's bad, new schoolers.
  

*When you're digging around for the "absolute value" symbol you truly appreciate what a pain in the ass descending AC is.

Quisling adds 2 to the surprise roll, which was 1, so: 1+2=3, less than 5 so he is still surprised, but only for 2 segments. And, true to his name, he uses the segments gained to sell out the rest of his compatriots before they can become un-surprised.

Schlomo on the other hand subtracts 2 from the surprise roll; he is surprised for 6 segments and is the last to understand the treachery of his erstwhile colleague.  

Missile Fire During Surprise

In the PHB discussion of surprise Uncle Gareth informs us that 

"Physical attacks during surprise are also possible on a 1 segment basis, whether the form is by weapon, projectile, or method intrinsic to the creature." 

which sure seems to imply that you can launch missiles at a rate of 1 per segment. However, by the time he wrote the DMG he must've realized that just because you can get in more telling blows when your opponent is in a state of stunned surprise doesn't mean you can crank a heavy crossbow 20 times faster.

Instead, the DMG informs us that during surprise you can launch missiles at 3 times the normal rate. Sadly, rate of fire for missiles is given in rounds not segments, so we're going to have to do some math. There are 10 segments in a round and 10 isn't divisible by 3 so the math is not going to be pretty. Stop making up excuses and get on with it DChucks:

You can launch 2 arrows from your composite short bow per round so in a surprise situation you can fire 3x2 = 6 per 10 segments which simplifies to 3 per 5, or 1 every 1.666 segments or, basically, 1 arrow every other segment. Now do the same for the rest...

If Gary didn't hate us so much he would have just made a handy table like this:

How much damage would a heavy crossbow

have to do before you would consider using one?

Did I cover everything? I'm not sure, so next time I'll run a sample surprise encounter to see how this all works in action.

How to Read the AD&D Rules Part V: Title Redacted

Also: page 24 of the DMG.

For this part you'll need to go to your local government surplus store and procure a military grade Dark Black marker, regular black won't do; it has to be so dark that no light can escape it's pull. Now go to page 34 of the Players Handbook and, without reading them first, thoroughly blot out paragraphs 2 and 4--paragraph 3 is ok--under the Character Languages heading. I said don't read them! If you understand the language you are reading you will do this or align yourself with forces most foul.

Now, just to be safe, turn to page 29 and do the same to the first primary ability of assassins, it's right there on the bottom of the left column, just above the Minimum Fees for Assassination table. It continues on the top of the right column so make sure to get that bit too. You can leave the list of alignments there if you wish; it's fairly harmless on it's own. Done? Excellent. That's all for today. School's out, run along kiddies.

No idea why this is here.

How to Read the AD&D Rules Part IV: Weapons

We're looking at weapons today kiddies so open to page 37 of your textbooks. You'll notice two tables on this page: 

1. Weapon Proficiency Table:

This table lets you know the following:

• how many weapons you can be proficient with depending on your class, 
• how much worse you are at hitting things when attacking with a weapon in which you are not proficient, and 
• how long you have to wait to get a new weapon proficiency. 

Nowadays everyone is proficient in all the weapons all the time, but I actually like that folks weren't as effective with weapons that they'd never actually used before. 

and 2. Weight and Damage by Weapon Type:

This economical table gets it. Except for the Speed Factor business.

The second table tells you how much your weapon weighs. None of you are going to track your encumbrance, but at least you can meaningfully contemplate whether your footpersons mace is worth its weight in gold.

More importantly, this table tells you you're going to do 2-16 pts of damage to large creatures with your Bastard Sword. If you don't want your fighter to do 2d8 damage against ogres then close the book now, AD&D is not for you. 

Those of you who took a gander at the weapon price list on page 35 are probably wondering why you can't buy such weapons as the Chauves Souris, Ransom, Rhonca, Rhoncie, or Runka. Fear not gentle reader, this table assures us that those implements are all covered under "Ranseur."

Notice the ** next to the "spear" listing. These asterices indicate that 

"This weapon also does twice the damage indicated to any opponent when the weapon is set to receive their charge." 

When you consider that in AD&D anyone who travels more than 10' to engage in melee is, technically, charging, and that weapon length determines who strikes first in a charge situation, and spears are 5-13' long... the spear becomes a very intriguing weapon, no? Does that mean that spears were preferred among savvy gamers? Heck no! Why not? Well, since that thing about only moving 10' to engage in melee was roundly ignored, "charging" only came into play when you were on horseback and carrying a lance. 

On the next page we have another weapon table: Weapon Types, General Data, and "To Hit" Adjustments

"General Data" includes how long your weapon is and how much space you need to use it; information you can probably figure out how to use on your own, right? But then there's a column labelled "Speed Factor." Nowhere is this explained but that's ok because if you use this information while playing a game called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons then you are, by definition, playing 2nd edition.

The table goes on to list combat adjustments based on the armor class of the opponent. Since the ACs listed only go from 2-10, it seems obvious that this is intended to simulate the relative effectiveness of certain weapons against specific armor types, e.g. a staff is not going to be very effective vs. a guy in platemail, and a -7 adjustment reflects that. What's less obvious is whether your staff is also -7 to hit a guy with Bracers of Defense AC 4 who has a 16 Dex (-2 AC adj.). You could--and should--ignore this business based on inadequate information and overly complicated rules but really you're going to ignore it regardless because in the heat of the moment you're not going to remember to apply these modifiers.  

At the bottom of the table is a separate section just for missile weapons. This section includes the already obsolete AC adjustments mentioned above but also throws in some very useful info such as Fire Rate and Range. Penalties for launching missiles beyond short range are only mentioned in an underhanded footnote:

"Armor Class Adjustment is based on the weapon or missile being discharged at short range. Adjust by -1 for medium ranges, -2 at all long ranges."

So underhanded is this note that I never noticed it before today, the 21st of January 2022! This note is noteworthy because these range modifiers were overruled by the combat matrices on page 74-75 of the DMG; under each table it is noted that missiles are -2 at medium range and -5 at long. So there was a brief period between the publication of the PHB in 1978 and the DMG a year later when archers were 15% more effective at hitting targets at long range.

Fire Rate seems pretty self explanatory and is even explained in a note under the table but the folks over at GGNoRe were confused by it and they're a pretty seasoned bunch, so I'm guessing that folks coming at this from later editions are not necessarily going to realize that each round you can fire your long bow twice, throw 3 darts, or launch half of a bolt from your heavy crossbow. Does this mean that no one ever used a heavy crossbow? Yes, that is precisely what it means.

How to Read the AD&D Rulebooks Part III: Character Race and Class

The title sounds like a seminar offered by the sociology department, no? Rest assured, we're not getting into heavy topics here at Dicechucker Taverns. We will be looking at pages 13-17 of the Players Handbook; which deal with race and class selection. Why not pages 18 & 19? Probably because the cat was on my lap and I couldn't reach my PHB so I had to do this from memory. 

Let's hop right into Character Race Table I.: Character Class Limitations. This gloomy table tells you that no, you can't have a gnome Paladin in AD&D, and, yes, folks adhered to this. Sometimes someone would get papal dispensation to run an elven druid or a halfling ranger/assassin or something but it was rare in the extreme and usually limited to the first few months of your dungeon master's AD&D career. 

No gnomes, no halflings. Take it to heart.

This table also informs you of the alignment restrictions for each class. Yes, we adhered to this in as much as we wrote the appropriate alignment down on our character sheets, much as we wrote down weapon speed factors and encumbrance value of our gear initially. More on that later, but you probably get the drift.

Then there's the dreaded Table II Class Level Limitations. While the previous table limited the classes your demi-human could choose from, this one ups the ante by telling you that the gnome illusionist/assassin you settled on when you found out you couldn't be a paladin will be retired once it reaches 7th/8th level. That's insane, right? You'll also see in the footnotes under table II that even if your character did pick a class that was limited to a certain level--pretty much thief is the only class that allows unlimited advancement to non-humans--your character is furthermore restricted based on their ability score in the prime requisite for their class. So your ≤16 Str elf was stuck at 5th level for the last thousand years of its life! Even if she got a gym membership and bulked up to an 18/51 Strength, he was only squeezing 2 more levels out of their career. You'd think Rule 2 (common sense) would come into play again, but we usually a) rolled characters until we got one with at least one 18, and b) retired characters around 7th or 8th level, so level limits weren't really a big deal; see Rule 5. And demi-humans were almost always multi-classed either as F/MU and/or Thief--dwarven fighters being the big exception here, they could reach 9th level--so they still had room to grow in other directions. Also, every race except halflings is allowed to be an assassin.

For reference only.

Confusingly, according to this table NPCs of certain races can be members of classes that PCs can't. NPC dwarves, for example, can be clerics though PCs are denied such access to the divine class. While you might think folks would have incited Rule 2 Common Sense and ignored this nonsense, rarely did you see a PC buck the system on this one. Mostly because those NPC-only exceptions only applied to clerics and halfling druids; clerics in AD&D were henchmen 99.9% of the time--and therefore technically NPCs--and no one wanted to play a halfling, see below, so it's Rule 5 once again. 

Which brings us to Character Race Table III: Ability Score Minimums & Maximums. This stunningly unimportant table summarizes all the minimum and maximum ability scores mentioned in the Ability Tables we talked about in part 1. Let's move on.

Did I mention that there's a mini-psuedo table that shows ability penalties and bonuses for race? No? This subtle little table, more of a list really, tells you that races with Con bonuses also have charisma penalties (Dwarves, half orcs). Yes 5E-ers, ability score penalties were once a thing.

Sadly, there are no more tables in the Character Races section of the book; you're going to have to read the descriptions to get the rest of the info, but it's un-Gygaxianly concise, you can manage this. Gamers of the 80s didn't swing too far from the text here. Early on I remember a debate about whether halfling PCs should benefit from the +3 to hit with missile weapons that the Monster Manual ascribes to them--the ruling is not mentioned in the PHB. We allowed it initially--the poor little dudes are limited to 4th level fighter, at least let them shoot a crossbow like they're 7th level--but at some point it was ruled that since it's only mentioned in the Monster Manual then it only applies to NPC halflings (like the druid thing). As a result, no one ever played a halfling again. Problem solved.

How to Read the AD&D Rule Books Part II: Ability Scores

Did you ever notice that his book says "AD&D"

So you've played some modern version of Big D and for reasons known only to yourself, you've decided to read the AD&D Players Handbook? Or perhaps you're an old timer who's played plenty of AD&D and you just want to heap scorn on some other jerk who played it all wrong? Well you've come to the right place; Uncle Dice Chucker--or D-Chucks as he was known back in the day--will guide you through the rules as they were played not by the pedants in the ivory-paneled basements but by the regular nerds living and dying by the 20-sider on the mean streets of the 1980s.

You've all read part I in this series, right? And you've made a crib sheet with the Rules for Ignoring Rules written on it? No? Here it is:

Good. Let's crack open your Players Handbook, be it the Trampier original, the Easley editions from the mid-80s, or the recent reprints from Lizards of the Toast and learn some AD&D!

First off. you're going to see an ocean of text; fear not, everything between Tramp's illo of a wizard sitting on a giant 6-sider in the woods and the Strength tables on page 9 can and should be skipped over without a thought.  Which lands you on:

Strength

You'll see two tables explaining how your strength score will impact your character's career. And honestly, Table I is not very informative--just tells you the minimum and maximum strength scores for various races, classes, and genders--so the first thing you're going to pay any attention to is Strength Table II.: Ability Adjustments.

If you're coming from 5e or Moldvay Basic you're going to notice that to hit and damage bonuses are pretty stingy in AD&D-land. A 17 strength gets an AD&D character the same bonuses that one would get with a 12 or 13 strength in those versions. But if you were coming from Holmes Basic or the original Little Brown Books, you're thinking:

 "You get a damage bonus for having a high strength?! The gods must love us after all!!!"

But what's up with those weird numbers once you get beyond 18; 18/01-50, 18/51-75, etc.? Gird your loins, you are going to have to make your first foray into Gygax's Quagmire of Prose to find out. Don't worry kids, this trip into the muck is definitely worth it.

Look to the left of Table I, second paragraph, after a few skippable sentences describing what strength is and how to quantify your score in real world terms, somewhere towards the middle you learn that if your fighter has managed to roll an 18 for strength, you then roll percentile dice, and that number is appended to your strength score. Roll a 24, write that next to the 18 on your character sheet and note that you get +1 to hit and +3 damage. Roll an 18/00 and you are a +3/+6 skull-crushing machine!

[It should be noted, kids, that Rangers and Paladins are subclasses of fighter in AD&D and therefore qualify for "exceptional strength."]

Next up on the table we have Weight Allowance. The table says that strength scores of 8-11 grant you a "normal" allowance, everyone else gets adjusted up or down by a certain amount of gold pieces. No, you don't get extra gold pieces for being strong; you get to carry extra gold pieces for being strong. The text below tells us that 10 gold pieces equal 1 pound--good to know--but it doesn't tell us what the normal allowance is that we're adjusting. Nothing on the adjoining page either. You've done your due diligence, it's time to invoke Rule #1. Plus, we all know that Encumbrance rules are the first thing to be ignored from every version of the game so feel free to get started early.

Open Doors: As described on this page of the PHB, this rule is fine; Open Doors is for use when "opening a stuck or heavy door." You have a 15 strength, you get a 2 in 6 chance of opening a stuck or heavy door. You might argue that that seems a bit feeble but there's nothing fundamentally heinous about it.

But this rule gets truly hideous if you look on pg. 97 of the DMG--which I don't advise you to do right now, stay focused!--wherein it says that all doors should be considered stuck or heavy when PCs are trying to open them, even though an exceptionally puny kobold has just effortlessly opened and closed that very same door moments ago. Rules 1, 2 and 3 all apply to the DMG ruling. No one ever played that way outside of Gygax's basement and, as the DM, you have a choice: ignore the DMG ruling or sew a Dickhead merit badge onto your Dungeon Master sash.

There's also bend bars/lift gates, which is fine but probably falls into rule 5 if you are using some other sort of ability check rules. Moldvay basic, I'm told, had some.

Intelligence

The table tells you that you get extra languages for high intelligence. What is not obvious is that this is only for Humans, and though this is alluded to in an unclearly worded note (Rule 1) in the text above Intelligence Table I, you will not have bothered reading that text because you already know what the word "intelligence" means and that it is the prime ability for MUs, which is what the bulk of that paragraph goes to length explaining. So you'll be excused if you didn't quite catch this point and gave your gnome illusionist (Int 17) 6 extra languages in addition to the ones that come as part of the standard gnome linguistic package.

If you're not an MU [do 5e folks know the term Magic User?] and don't care to speak extra languages, a 3 Int bears no penalty whatsoever, making it, ostensibly, the perfect dump stat. But no one wants an idiot for a character, so you're likely to save a really bad roll for Wis or Cha.

If you are an MU you should note that if you ever want to cast 9th level spells, you'll need an 18 Intelligence score. And even though you can have a 9 Int and be an MU, you will never be able to cast spells higher than 4th level. Flip ahead to the MU class description and you'll see a table on page 26 that tells you that you'll be 9th level before you realize just how stupid you really are.

But we're not done with Int so back to page 10, "Intelligence Table II.: Ability for Magic Users" This is a very silly table, or at least 2/3rds of it is very silly. We pretty much ignored this table back in the day, but what it's supposed to do is limit the spells your MU knows. You've got a column labelled % know spells which you use in cases where your MU finds some poor, dead thaumaturge's spell book. You'd roll your % to know each spell in his book; each time you succeeded you got to write the spell in your own book, if you failed it you put that spell on the List of Shame; spells you just can't seem to figure out. A case could be made that it violates Rule 2: Common sense, and I don't think anyone would argue with you, but it does go some distance to make intelligence valuable to MUs in a practical way, so you decide.

The rest of this table, however, invokes both Rule 1, 2, and 4. The description of minimum and maximum number of spells per level can be interpreted to mean that you're supposed to roll the % know spells business not when you find a dead thaumaturge's spell book, but as soon as you reach 5th level, at which time you will pre-roll against every spell on the 3rd level spell list regardless of whether you've actually found the spell in a dead thaumaturge's spell book or not. In the event that you don't "know" enough spells to meet your minimum or you "know" more than your max. allows, you're supposed to re-roll against every spell on the list until you get a satisfactory result. This exercise does not confer on to you actual knowledge of the spell, merely the capacity to learn the spell in the event that you should ever come across it. I feel dirty just typing that out. 

I'm glad we ignored this back in the day, and you should do so with a clean conscience.

Wisdom 

We all know that, in D&D, Wisdom has nothing to do with how wise you are. Instead, the table tells us that you get a magical attack adjustment--which is a misleading way of saying you get a bonus on saving throws versus people messing with your head; charm person, fear, that sort of thing. Which makes wisdom more like willpower, which is what it has become in the modern era. You don't want a really low Wis or you're going to be easily charmed and a-feared, but otherwise an 8 wisdom is just as good as a 14 wisdom in every way, so this is an excellent dump stat. Which is probably why so many of the sub-classes in AD&D require high wisdom scores; Gary hated PCs. See Rule 3.

Wisdom Table II.: Adjustments for Clerics

Pretty self explanatory. We learn that even though you only need a 9 Wis to be a cleric, you really don't want a Wis lower than 13 because 12 or lower earns you a chance of spell failure every time you try to cast a cleric spell! I don't think I ever knew that. But then I never ran clerics if I could help it. Furthermore, you get bonus spells starting at 13. Pretty self explanatory, so on to...

Dexterity!

Everyone loves dexterity so even though it has a pretty large dead zone--non-thieves with a 7-14 get neither a bonus nor a penalty of any sort--no one wants to be perceived as slow or clumsy. If you can get a 15 on Dex you're getting an AC bonus--yes it says "-1" but that's a bonus in AD&D. Why does a -1 Dex adjustment improve your AC while a -1 shield makes your AC worse? This is AD&D, you've got bigger fish to fry.

At 16 Dex you start getting a bonus to "reaction/attacking adjustment." The attacking part is that bonus to hit with missile weapons that you've been looking for. The reaction part affects how long your character is surprised, which is to say you are going to ignore this because surprise is not explained anywhere near this table (rule 1) and is kind of silly anyway. We'll talk about it further when we get to combat. 

Furthermore, there is some murky text somewhere in the DMG (pg. 64, "Dexterity Bonus and Penalty Considerations") that implies that an individual can apply its reaction adjustment to the initiative roll, though it maybe only applies to missile fire or something? The statement provided fodder for folks to  add the reaction adjustment to all initiative rolls, which was a near-universal house rule. When you consider that every version of Basic D&D rules from Holmes on up gave some sort of advantage to initiative for highly dexterous characters, it was pretty much inevitable.

In AD&D of the first edition, adding dex bonus to initiative tend to give the PCs a significant advantage in combat because, while high dex PCs are fairly common--pretty much every character was putting either their highest or 2nd highest score on Dex--rarely if ever do monsters have there dexterity statted out, so the party was getting the drop on the critters more often than not. Which I think makes a good argument for why you might want to roll initiative with something larger than a d6. Just thinking out loud here.

Dex Table II: Thieves Suck: Pretty self explanatory. You can be a thief with a Dex of 9 but flip ahead to the Thief Function table on page 28 and you will learn that because of dex penalties, your 9 Dex thief will have a 0% or less chance of moving silently or hiding in shadows at first level! You'll also learn that thieves are pretty much incompetent at their jobs until at least 7th level, but we're not there yet.

Constitution 

The table tells us that at 15 you start accruing HP bonuses; they max out at +2 for non-fighters, +4 for fighters. Got it.

Also listed, your System Shock and Resurrection survival chance. Resurrection makes sense, you have a chance of not being resurrected when you die--though it should be noted for the literal-minded that this also includes Raise Dead. I'm all for making death deadlier in D&D; your mileage may vary, so maybe you apply rule 3; you're call.

But what's system shock? Every time your system takes a massive shock from magical effects, you have a chance of dying. What sort of magical effects? Aging, petrification, and polymorph. Every time one of these magical effects is inflicted on you, whether for weal or woe, you have a chance of dying. Not just when it is cast, but when the spell effect ends as well. Dig it:

In an effort to escape from the cliffside studio of Snargrot the Beautician, your character, Mcswiggans the Warlock, polymorphs into an eagle [5E kids don't get your hopes up; in AD&D "warlock" just means 8th level Magic User]. With your constitution score of 12 you have an 80% chance of surviving the shock to your system.

Stated another way, there's a 1 in 5 chance Mcswiggans will die immediately upon transforming into an eagle, but also, should you survive the initial transformation, there's another 1 in 5 chance that you bight it when you change back to warlock. Which, I think, adds up to only a 64% chance of surviving the ordeal. Is that a chance you want to take just to avoid a bad haircut?

Furthermore, aging is problematic because a detestable DM (check your DM's sash for the aforementioned Dickhead merit badge) could have you die from a haste spell [or potion], as aging is a side effect of being Hasted. That is to say, System Shock was an early attempt at nerfing magic. Apply Rule 3 and ignore System Shock Survival.

Because Constitution is not a prime ability for any of the character classes, there is no Consitution Table II. Also true of...

Charisma

You'll quickly realize that henchmen must have, once upon a time, been considered an important part of the game; they were so important that even a pathetic, lowly suckwad with a 3 Cha could not be deprived of the companionship of a good henchperson. 

Were henchfolk actually a big part of the game? Games varied widely but, generally, nobody wanted to be a cleric, so somebody had to hench one to do the healing. So it was important to have at least one in your party. I remember only one campaign where I had more than one hencher and I never had more than two. So the most tangible benefit of a high Cha was pretty useless (Rule 5), making it extra painful for your paladin--min. Cha of 17--to waste such a high roll. 

And Loyalty Base and Reaction Adjustments were only explained in the DMG so Rule 1 applied to them. Though, on reading them now, they're not half bad rules, if one were so inclined as to use them.