Rogue Rant: Suck it!

No, not her.

Like most of you, I like to pretend that I don't give a crap about the edition wars; as if they're beneath me and all that. Yet also like you, I actually prefer the older, mustier versions of the game to those 21st century editions that the kids are rabid about these days.

That's where our similarities end, however, because unlike you I've actually found indisputable evidence to support my personal bias. You see, post-Gygaxian versions of D&D are objectively inferior for one simple reason: the Rogue. Introduced, I believe, in the much-vaunted 2nd edition of Advanced Big D [EDIT: it was 3rd ed., not 2nd {EDIT EDIT: I've now been informed that rogue was introduced as an archetype in 2nd ed. but not a class, whatever that means <EDIT EDIT EDIT: Now I'm being told that Rogue was a "group" in AD&D2, not an archetype. Did this ever have any value?>}], rogues are essentially thieves with a coat of paint to give them somewhat less illegitimacy.  Or something.  

I don't really know why they changed the name, but I do know that it has been scientifically proven that any edition of D&D that includes a class titled "Rogue"--regardless of any other merits it may have--is clearly the product of an inferior mind and should be derided mercilessly at every opportunity excepting only those situations when simply ignoring it seems more palatable.

I can almost rationalize why TSR [EDIT: it was Wizards, not TSR] might have decided to change the thief moniker--presumably cuz of its criminal baggage--this was around the same time that the title of Deities & Demigods was changed to Legumes & Lorries after all [EDIT: Actually it was much later than this].  But rogue?  Couldn't you try not to suck so bad at naming stuff?  Sure, thieves, by definition, tend to steal stuff; that could be kinda' off-putting to some.  But at least "thief" points to a skill set that has potential value in a dungeon setting.  Rogue, however, is just a disposition of scoundreliness. While that may be fun to run in the tavern, what the fug good is that gonna do a party of adventurers?  Who needs a jaunty-capped seducer of barmaids when your six levels deep in the Acrid Tomb of Malcontents?

DM: The chamber is filled by a viscous, burbling, black blob; it reeks overpoweringly of vomit and strychnine and seems to be sliming its way toward you.  What do you do?
Roger the Rogue: I flash my most menacing grin and offer a defiant witticism.
DM: Ok, roll against your "Crack Wise in the Face of Danger" ability.  While you've got your 20-sider handy go ahead and make a save vs. flesh-eating bile.  

Truly though, the term rogue has come to mean an outlier, someone who lives beyond the norms of society, who is possessed of an attitude of nonconformity.  While definitely more open ended than "thief," this makes no sense at all as the name of a character class.  What you have is a class that specializes in not doing what's expected of it.  While there's no reason that you can't count on a well appellated thief to climb walls, decrypt codes, or defuse bombs for the good of the party, all you can expect from your rogue is that s/he/y's going to give you lip if you ask them to do something:

Fred the Fighter: I try to open the door on the west wall.
DM: It's locked.
[The rest of the party looks meaningfully at the "Rogue"]
Rachel the Rogue:  Stick it ya' buncha' hosebags, I'm not your lapdog. [Leaps onto a nearby table sending crockery flying and raises a fist in the air]  Fight the power!

D4 Thieves Can Suck It Revisited

It would seem that my endless back-linking to this post from last year has finally sparked a debate--yes, around here, a single comment constitutes a debate.  

Ugh. Not him again.

In a nutshell, folks generally seem to agree that the thief class's fast level advancement compensates for their sub-prime hit dice.  I don't agree with that. Sit tight and I'll tell you why.

I'm of the school of thought that your hit point potential (aka hit dice) at the outset of your career--which is to say at level 1, not level 4--are a product of your background, and therefore there is some basic assumption about your background that justifies your hit points at inception.  For instance, Fighters are hardened from combat training and perhaps even actual warfare--especially if we take the "veteran" level title literally,as some do--and thus warrant heightened hit dice.  Magic Users, meanwhile, earn their pathetic pyramidal hit dice either from a sedentary life of study, or from contact with the soul-sucking arcane forces of the universe, or some other wussifying factor.

But what is there about the thief class that should make them universally sub-normal in the HP-category?  Sure, some of' em--even a lot of them--might be underfed pipsqueaks who stole their last meal from a fruit cart.  But even so, thieves are out-and-about, actively sneaking around, climbing stuff, and, if they come from the illicit branch of the class, they're probably even getting in more than their fair share of fights: administering beat-downs on deadbeats and narks when they're not rumbling with rivals; whatever it takes to get ahead in the world.  They are survivors.  All of which should at least allow for a normal hit point potential at the outset; but saddling thieves with d4 HD negates this sort of thief.  While there is definitely room for malnourished street urchins, why should they be the sole model for the class? 

Admittedly, my counter-argument assumes that a Normal Person gets 1d6 HP, a tenet of AD&D that might not have existed in Basic.  Holmes, to the best of my knowledge, was mum on the topic; the only corollary I've found being the bandits in the monster section, though they get 1d8 hit points, making them actually better off than their AD&D compatriots--and making d4 thieves look even more pathetic by comparison.  I can't speak to the Original rules or the Moldvanian or Mentzerian versions; they may very well insist that all normals get d4 hit dice.  If such is the case, you may ignore everything I just said.

XPs For GPs: Demi-humans

I won't lie to you, I don't award XPs for GPs and I never have.  Old schoolers praise the crap out of XPs for GPs as the be-all end-all of XP systems, but really, it's very deeply flawed premise and we all know it.  Dare I say it... XPs for GPs can suck it.

That's why OSRians started requiring players to actually spend the money before they got XPs every time they returned a case of Mountain Dew empties for the deposit.  This notion has much more to offer, but, as it applies to demi-humans, I'd like to take it further; to do something with it that will make demi-humans feel more different from humans.

One of the prime differences between humans and demi-humans, I'm thinking, is their particular relationship with material wealth.  Us humans, we like wealth for the power of buying whatever the heck we want, be it hot tubs, influence, chain mail, cock rings, what have you.

This oughta' get ol' Blodgett up to 5th level

Elves are indifferent to the baubles and gew gaws that impress the other adventuring races.  Rather, they prefer the beauty of the ephemeral arts such as music, performance art and ice sculpture.  If they do invest in things of long term value, it will be in the preservation of sacred places; stands of ancient trees, significant rock formations, that sort of crap.  As such, they gain XPs only for those GPs spent commissioning works of poetry, songs, or flower arrangements, and the creation and maintenance of nature preserves, public parks, and gardens.

For dwarves, the value of wealth is not the spending of it, but the hoarding.  They derive ecstasy from the gathering and stockpiling of precious metals, gems and other products of the earth.  XPs are not actually earned until treasure is safely stashed either in a secure financial institution, the vault of a trusted ally, or a dwarf's own personal storage structure; somewhere where it is safe from being spent.  Many "dungeons" are actually the treasuries of dwarves of legend.  Bonus XPs can be earned for transforming gold and gems into fine jewelry, ornamental weapons and other such eccentricities which can be given as gifts or worn about.

Halflings view material wealth as a means to domestic tranquility; as such, they gain XPs only for GPs spent on the acquisition and improvement of real estate.  This ties halfling characters to place in a very measurable way.

As you can see, humans can drop their cash in G'hawk, Mordor, or Lankhmar, and it doesn't much matter.  But for demi-humans, their wealth will be closely affiliated with a place somehow.  Either in the grove of oak trees in Sherwood Forest that Melf has endowed, the treasure hoard and associated safeguards that Gimli has stashed under Mount Fuggitt, or the plantation that Poblo Fraggins owns in Aquilonia, demihumans have some sacred place that they need to be tend to.  Or they can just forego XPs for GPs; which is fine by me.

PS.  The photo was swiped from http://pinterest.com/wandans/hobbit-ty-homes/.  They've got other photos of hobbitty places if you're into that sort of thing.

Men Without Cloth: Non-Holy Clerics

You are not a clergyman.  You have no interest in tending the flock for some narcissistic deity, much less converting more sheep to the cause.  Despite your divine powers, pious is not a word that applies to you.  You don't pay for your miraculous abilities on bended knee.

Get off your high horse, Turpin.

Forego edged weapons?  Bishop Turpin can suck it.  No, you come by your powers by other means, and you pay an even darker price than the ritualized humiliation mainstream proselytizers are subjected to.

Rather, you've made a Faustian deal that saved your Aunt Stacy's knitting store from foreclosure and now some pompous, immortal a-hole owns your soul.  You know that using the "divine" powers for which you paid so dearly ever-increases your malicious patron's grasp on your being, but you can't check your self-destructive behavior.  Or maybe that's his growing influence at work.

Or maybe your grandfather was the byproduct of a tryst between Zeus and a rather adorable parlor maid. Though you've never met Great Granddad and he certainly doesn't know of/care about your mortal existence, you've inherited enough nascent divine favor to crank out the occasional heal wounds or fire storm.

Or you're just a guy who's found a cosmic loophole that's allowed you to hack into the server of the divine realm. You've spliced into Odin's cable box and you're watching ESPN: Old Norse on The All-Father's dime.  Maybe one day Asgard's IT staff will secure its wifi and damnation will be served.  But, increasingly, you're coming to believe that the gods are just guys like you; guys who've figured out how to hotwire the cosmos to their advantage.  Guys who've achieved immortality by convincing the world that they're something special, and who've come to believe in it themselves.

Of course, you can limit yourself to the holier-than-thou, preaching-the-faith-in-exchange-for-cure-light-wounds scene if you want to.  And maybe you can justify why your sermonizing n' moralizing minister is wandering through the 5th level of FU2: Asylum of Turgid Munchkins helping a party of infidels murderize a colony of troglodytes and scarf up their treasure--spoiler alert: not likely.  But the point is, there are other options besides the worn out catholic-priest-with-a-mace that those TSR beardos foisted on us way back when. Try one on for size.

d4 Thieves can suck it

Can you spot the incompetent weakling?  The eyeliner should be a dead giveaway.

During my brief tenure in Holmesian D&D no one ever played a thief; partly because we thought they were bad guys and we all still wanted to be good guys at that point, partly because--shamefully--we had no idea how to roll percentile dice and, thus, could not figure out how to determine the success of thief abilities.  No, my first encounter with the thief class didn't happen until months later, after I had read The Hobbit and started playing D&D of the A variety.  As such, in my experience, thieves have always, always, always drawn their hit points from six-sided dice.  To this day, when I see these B/X retroblasters with d4 hitpointed thieves it makes me double over in agonizing cognitive dissonance.

Even if I accept that a lot of gamerfolk prefer Moldvanian D&D over all other forms, I still can't, in my mind, justify d4 thieves.  What exactly did they do to deserve such shoddy hit points?  They're only slightly better off than MUs in the armor category, with whom they share  hit dice, and yet they lack their magical potency.  Clerics, meanwhile, get better Hit dice, but also get to use bitchin' armor and spells along with combat acumen near to that of fighters.  The payoff for thieves is, ostensibly, a bunch of reusable abilities, but their chance of success with these is pretty atrocious.  And if you abide by Moldvay's overly stringent rule that, in the event of a failed "move silently" roll, the thief will be the only person in the vicinity who can't hear himself blunder across the dungeon floor, then you've got an absurdly impotent character class.  Why saddle them with such horrid hitpoints?  Why?

Game of Thrones: The Tediocracy of Westeros

So I started watching Game of Thrones last night and I have to ask... when does it start to pick up?

While I hadn't really been able to get into the books, when I heard that HBO was making them into a series I was pretty excited to see what they'd do.  After the success of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire and countless other dramas, I gave a lot of weight to the HBO endorsement and was certain that this show would be superb.  And the rave reviews from geeks and non-geeks alike seemed to bear this out.  But by about the halfway point of the first episode, I kept thinking "I'll give this five more minutes before I put in Goldfinger."

While I never pulled the trigger on the Bond movie, this had more to do with the inertia of my lazy ass lying on the couch late on a Thursday night than any on-screen magic.  The characters are competently acted and impressively adorned, but I neither loved nor loathed any of them and felt nothing but apathy toward the various dramas that were unwinding around them.  When can I expect to start to give a shit about this made-up kingdom and its made-up drama?  Do I need to power through another episode or two before the gears start clicking or is it safe to say that the magic is lost on me?

One Other Thing I learned While Obsessing Over Hommlet:

The real bad guys of Dungeon Module T1 The Village of Hommlet are not Lareth and his band of Scary Men or even the evil traders back in town.  No, the true villains of Homlet are the two captive merchants in Lubash the Ogre's pantry.  "How do you figure, D-Chuckles?" you ask? Here's how: these two dudes promise their rescuers

"large rewards for their release, vowing to send monies to Hommlet as soon as they return to Dyvers."

Four weeks after their rescue, a passing caravan will deliver to the PCs a sack laden with--wait for it--one hundred silver pieces. Are you kidding me?? That's only 5 freakin' gold pieces at AD&D exchange rates, just barely enough cash for the entire party to split a half gill of Ulek Elixir at the Welcome Wench.*

A hundred platinum would have been a worthy reward, sealing a bond of mutual goodwill between merchants and party; 100 gold would have been a respectable gesture--at least fueling a nice post-dungeon bender.  A friggin' thank you note would have been appreciated--it's always nice to know that your good deeds are remembered.  But 100 silver?!  That's just an insult.  If I were a PC I would be all "Screw the Temple, let's hunt down those cheap-ass merchants!"

* According to the handy conversion tables at the back of my notebook that I have not bothered to ever use in a hundred years there are 4 gills to a pint, so a half gill is [avert your gaze--mathifying taking place] ... 2 ounces or approximately 66 mL if your feeling metric-dependent.

Thursday of the Castle Keeper: SIEGE this!

Hey SIEGE engine!  Looking for an easier way into the castle?  Next time try the damn drawbridge!

Presenting the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System©:

Rather than rolling either a 12 or an 18 on d20 to determine success, using the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System© you need to roll an 11 or higher on d20.* This applies to virtually everything you want to attempt**--even combat!  Since not all tasks are created equal, each action you attempt has a challenge level.  But to keep in the drawbridge theme, we'll call it the Bascule--combat Bascules are commonly referred to by the acronym AC.  Just like a real Bascule, which is the counterweight in the drawbridge, the Bascule in the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System© balances the difficulty of the task at hand with the likelihood of the character achieving success. Exceptionally easy tasks can be assigned a negative bascule.

How to use the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System©:

1. Add the Bascule (or opponents AC in combat) to 11; this is your target number.  Roll this number or higher on a 20-sider to succeed.  
2. Add ability bonuses/penalties, combat bonuses, and/or appropriate levels to die roll.  If the total equals or exceeds 11 + Bascule/AC, you did it!  Climb the wall/roll damage/take half damage/whatever.  Roll less than 11 and you get to roll up a new character while the rest of your party is left to the task of parsing out your belongings. 

Converting SIEGE Engine to the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System©: 

Combat: Subtract 10 from AC, add AC to 11 -- this is your target number.  Or, since AC in C&C is derived by adding all your armor bonuses to 10, you can just leave off adding 10 in the first place
Other: depending on the primeness of your attributes you will need to add either 1 (primed) or 7 (un-primed [ouch!]) to the appropriate Bascule.

Next week we'll discuss how to convert AD&D combat to the BARBICAN Combat Resolution System©, a subsidiary of DRAWBRIDGE, LLC and Dice-Chucker Productions.

*This represents a 50% chance of success for a normal--which is to say, not-cool--person.  It is also the minimum requirement for a 0-level human to hit AC10 (no armor) in AD&D; i.e. it is the bedrock upon which all combat is built.  Thac0 can suck itself raw.
**Assuming of course that the activity you are attempting has, in the Castle Keeper's sound opinion, a reasonable chance of failure.  It is up to the Castle Keeper and, to some extent, the players to decide when to use the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System© and when to just role-play the situation instead.

Top Ten Things That Suck About AD&D

Stirges: They really suck.

Since many of the things in Rients's poll last week didn't really irritate me too much--they were mostly things that were either inconsistent or overly cumbersome but easily ignored, or else inoffensive to me--famously, demi-human level limits--I wanted to get in a few jabs at my personal AD&D bugbears.  So here's the Caveman's Top 10 things that suck about AD&D:

10.  Grand Master of Flowers--Reason enough to retire your monk before he gets to 17th level.
9.  Pole arms--I took 3 years of high school French in a futile effort to figure out why someone would ever bother to use a  guisarme-voulge, bec de corbin, fauchard, or ranseur. Also, how long did it take everyone to realize that it wasn't kosher for your cleric to use a Lucerne Hammer?
8.  Ring Mail--Five pounds heavier and twice the price of studded leather yet you got the same protection.  At least padded armor and splint mail were slightly cheaper than their significantly less-cumbersome AC-mates.
7.  Wisdom--"A composite term for the character's enlightenment, judgement, wile, willpower, and intuitiveness." Which is a very long winded way of saying "Dump stat."
6.  Chance to Know each listed Spell--"I rolled an 87, crap! My 18 Int MU just isn't smart enough to figure out how to cast Mending."
5.  One minute melee round--DM: Ok, roll for intitiative... you win, roll to hit. Player: I swing at the orc... got a 7.  DM: You miss.  He swings back and hits for...  2 points of damage.  Well, we've still got 51 seconds to kill; wanna' order a pizza?
4.  Illusionists can't cast evocations--No, I don't really care about this one.  Curiously, it is true.
3.  Ten coins to the pound--Are they made of unrefined ore?
2.  The Character with Two Classes--Human's with ambitions to branch out beyond a single class were denied the normal multi-classing option.  Rather, they had dual classing--multi-classing's scoliosis-riddled, imbecilic step-sibling.  If your 9th level thief cum 1st level MU finds any traps in this dungeon he can forget collecting any experience.
1.  Alignment Languages--Several people in the comments section of Rients's column mentioned this one as the pinnacle of sucktacticness/nadir of coolness and I have to agree.  Where did this idea even come from?