Gelatinous Icosahedron

 A character's spells are an important resource, both for the individual and the party. As such, a big part of the game's challenge comes from managing them well, and different schemes offer different incentives in play. Below, I compare and contrast the differences between some common spell casting systems, with special attention to their effects on resource management and player decision-making. Prepare and forget : The by-the-book method for most older editions of D&D and their modern clones and simulacra. Choose spells for your caster to prepare or memorize each day. Those are the spells you get, and when you cast one, it disappears from the caster's mind until prepared again after a full rest. You can choose to prepare multiple instances of the same spell, if you want to be able to cast it more than once.  In theory, this is Hard Mode resource management: your spells are limited  and  you have to choose them in advance, with imperfect to nearly nonexistent f...

 Crawling up out of the slime and taking to the skies! The griffon is next on our alphabetical exploration of the monster lists. Griffons have a pretty extensive pedigree in real-world mythology, having roots all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. The monster is usually depicted as having the body, tail, and hind legs of a lion and the head, forelegs, and sometimes wings of an eagle. (Wings, of course, are a vital feature of the D&D iteration of the beast.) At least one scholar wrote of griffons that they are "enemies of horses", a tidbit enthusiastically seized upon by D&D's authors. The D&D griffon is a pretty formidable creature. The rulebook entry describes it as a voracious predator, and it has the stats to fill that role quite admirably. Its AC is a medium-tough 5 and its 7 Hit Dice make it bigger and tougher than the lion from which it derives (pardon the word play) the lion's share of its physical form. It can dish out an impressive amount of dam...

 Being able to assess the risk of adventure locations is a vitally important aspect of old school play, especially the sandbox style. In dungeons, this is a relatively simple matter: the danger increases as you descend deeper into the dungeon. Dungeon levels are typically numbered, starting with 1 for the first level, typically the most easily accessible, and progression to higher numbers with each level farther from the main entrance. Monsters found on a given level will tend to have the same number of Hit Dice as th e dungeon level (e.g. on the third level of the dungeon, 3 HD monsters are most common) and more loosely, traps and other hazards become more deadly. The amount and value of treasure also tends to increase with dungeon level. There are some twists on this formula; some dungeons may have additional entrances that lead directly to deeper levels, and some dungeons may be "layered" horizontally rather than vertically, but the overall principle is that players will b...

 We'll roll with the slimy theme for another post, because the next monster is the ever-popular Green Slime. Stats-wise, green slime doesn't look like much. It doesn't even have a proper AC (it can always be hit). It's a bit tougher than a typical 1st-level character, at 2 HD, it moves at a glacial 3' (1'), it doesn't do hit point damage at all, and you'll only encounter a single one at a time. For all that, though, green slime is a deadly threat to the naive and unwary.  It "attacks" by dripping from a ceiling or wall onto a victim, or by being stepped in if on a floor. A fiendish DM might place it in other locations which characters will be tempted to unwittingly touch it. The description says nothing about whether the creature needs to make an attack roll at all; certainly I wouldn't require one for stepping in/touching the slime, but I might make a roll vs. AC 9 for a drip attack. In any case, the slime can dissolve wood and metal in 6 ...