Gelatinous Icosahedron

 Anyone who's played old school D&D is probably familiar with the potion of poison, one of the items which might be generated by random rolls on the magic item tables. Any potion found might be poison, up to 1 in 8 if only the Basic Rules were used, or a mere 2 in 100 when using the tables from the Expert Set. According to the item description, if any amount of the potion is swallowed, even a sip, the character consuming it must make a saving throw vs. poison or die.  I believe the potion of poison was meant to serve the purpose of risk, making players always a little bit apprehensive about any potions their characters might acquire during an adventure. I believe this in large part because no practical uses were even suggested for the potion of poison; it seemed to be included in the lists only as a "gotcha!" item. While uncertainty and risk are important parts of a good D&D session, it is always preferable to enable players to manage these for themselves, to make...

 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...

 As so often happens, just as I zero in on The Way that I think will solve some glaring issue in the game, along comes a fresh insight or three to send me back to the ol' drawing board. I don't even recall precisely how this insight came to be in my head or whence it originated (it's drawn from more than one source, most likely), but here it is: Fighters in D&D get better at fighting as they level up. They can hit better ACs more often, thus dealing more damage, and they gain hit points in good amounts (dice willing, of course!). This enables them to take on stronger and stronger challenges in combat, as is their job. A 1st-level fighter struggles against orcs and goblins, but eventually becomes mighty enough to make these nothing but light exercise, and to feel confident going up against trolls and dragons. Magic-users in D&D get better at casting spells as they level up. They can cast more spells, they can cast better spells, and they can cast the same old spells...

 Just a quick post about another idea I had for the fighter class, to give it a little more, well, "fight." This would probably be best used to replace the so-called "mook rule" (one attack per level vs. opponents less than one full HD) or "cleave"/"sweep" (make an extra attack when an attack kills the target.) In a nutshell, a fighter may make a single attack vs. a single target, per the rules as written, OR may make attacks against multiple targets, reducing the damage die used by one step for each additional target, to a minimum of d4. So, if a fighter using a d6 weapon is beset by a mob of kobolds, he could either make his usual single attack, dealing 1d6 points of damage if successful, or he could attack two different kobolds, making a separate attack roll for each and dealing 1d4 points of damage on each successful attack. If the fighter is using a d10 weapon, he could make attack a single target for 1d10 damage, two targets for 1d8 each, t...

 It's always bothered me a little bit that falling damage in D&D is something that can be withstood by having more hit points. Sword blows, sure; hit points represent the skill and combat reflexes to turn potential killing strokes into glancing blows and superficial wounds. Arrows are a little trickier, but it's still possible to envision saving oneself from a shot to the heart with honed instincts and conditioned reflexes. Falling, though... gravity and inertia don't give a flying fork about how good a warrior you are. We all fall at 9.8 meters per second squared. There's a certain limit within which it's conceivable that a nimble and trained person can control his landing so as to distribute the force of impact to minimize injury, but if you're falling 50 feet, it's much less likely to make a difference whether you land gracefully or awkwardly. It's possible to model something a bit more "realistic" without abandoning the essential 1d6-pe...

 In a recent post about things I like and don't like about B/X D&D, I mentioned in passing that I don't see initiative as a strictly necessary rule in D&D combat. Another blogger has suggested I expand on that thought, and so in this post, I articulate my case for why initiative is not a necessary component of a functional D&D combat sequence. Initiative, as I see it, can be a useful tool to impart some order and structure to combat. Insofar as it models any aspect of real combat in the game, though, it doesn't do it particularly well. Maybe not particularly badly either, but it's a simplistic and formalized rule for a very chaotic and unpredictable situation. Depending on particular circumstances and how one rationalizes it, it can either make sense or defy sense. It implies that whoever has initiative, if his attack roll succeeds, does all his damage before his opponent can attack in return, so the opponent might be killed before he can even attempt his ow...

 With my B/X Monsters A to Z series ongoing, I've been focusing a lot on B/X D&D. Also, having mostly recovered from my heart attack and triple bypass surgery, we're hopefully going to reconvene our game group for the new year, and at some point I'll be taking my turn at DMing again, and I'm hankering for a good old fashioned sandbox campaign. So, I'm looking at sorting out my likes and dislikes (yes, there are a few) in good ol' B/X, in preparation for codifying some house rules and clarifications. I should make clear that I like far more than I dislike about the game, but as I ponder what changes I might wish to make, the dislikes are going to come to the fore. Like : Character generation. It's quick, easy, and there aren't an overwhelming amount of choices to be made. The most time-consuming part is buying equipment. Some players enjoy that part; for the rest, a small selection of pre-built equipment packages would be an easy fix. Like: The lack ...

 Everybody has an opinion on the so-called Vancian casting system of classic D&D. Some (myself among them) find the idea of "fire-and-forget" spells to be a poor representation of the kind of fiction we want to represent. Some (again, including myself) find it too rigid, and dislike the incentives it provides toward spell selection. And then there are those on the other side of the fence, who like the in-fiction implications (still not a fan) or who see value in such a system for the purpose of promoting game elements of resource management and player skill (for which I do have an appreciation.)  Not a whole lot need be said about the in-universe implications of spell preparation. It could literally be a case of impressing patterns of magical energy (or imprisoning a minor daemon or other entity) in the mind and then discharging it, losing the pattern or knowledge until it is prepared again) but it could just as easily be reskinned as carefully preparing proper reagen...

 The abstract nature of classic D&D combat doesn't lend itself well to calling discrete moves and maneuvers. A lot can happen in a 10-second combat round. Combatants trade feints and parries, with weapons, shields, and body parts. They grab and push and trip. They try to pull dirty tricks like dust in the eyes or stomping on toes. They stumble, maybe fall down, maybe get back up. They may get dazed or stunned momentarily, but shake it off in the same round. All of this is distilled down to an attack roll and possibly a damage roll, because it's assumed the ultimate objective is to hurt the opponent. The specifics of how you get to that point are descriptive only, and don't need to be mechanically codified. I'm not saying you absolutely can't or shouldn't add mechanics for called shots, parries, trips, throws, dirty tricks, and whatnot, but it all runs counter to the idea of abstraction, that the actions of a round ultimately boil down to how much damage is d...

 You thought I was gonna get all political, didn't you? But no, I just want to talk about Constitution in basic D&D, and how it's at least a little bit broken. Constitution, as written in B/X and BECMI D&D, has a much larger impact, for good or ill, than other ability scores. These editions use a modifier scale from -3 to +3. Most modifiers are applied to a d20 roll, meaning they can have, at most, an impact equal to 15% of the die's maximum. That makes a + or -3 modifier nothing to sneeze at, but it's not big enough to render a character either unplayable or insuperable.  Constitution, though, tacks that -3 to +3 modifier onto rolls of d4, d6, or d8. Despite the huge disproportion, nobody ever complains about piling a +3 on top of a d4 at each level, even though it more than doubles the average hit points of such a character (2.5 base, 5.5 after +3 modifier) and it's not really a huge deal to have an exceptionally hale and hearty magic-user have more hit po...