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 ...

 Slime time! Our monster today is the gray ooze from the Basic Set. Despite the sheer bulk of the black pudding, the gray ooze may well be the most dangerous of the slimes and oozes I've covered so far. Gray ooze is said to look like wet stone, making it difficult to see. One might well expect a bonus to surprise opponents because of that, but apparently it's only a flavor detail here, not something to be represented mechanically. That might be just as well, considering... The monster's stats don't immediately impress: its AC of 8 makes it easy to hit, and 3 Hit Dice, while a lot for Basic-level parties, doesn't take too long to whittle down. If you can stay alive long enough, that is, because this thing is bringing some serious hurt. A gray ooze secretes powerful acid that inflicts 2-16 points of damage on a successful attack. After that, it does 2-16 points per round automatically, in addition to automatically destroying non-magical armor. (Magical armor can hold ...

 One of the tropes of D&D, and fantasy RPGs generally, that I've come to dislike the most is the cosmopolitan society depicted in so many settings and adventure modules. It's arguably reached its apotheosis in modern iterations of Dungeons & Dragons and its close kin, in which not only dwarves, elves, and halflings, but orcs, lizardfolk, elemental-kin, half-demons, and even more outlandish beings regularly coexist closely with humans and each other, socializing, working, cohabitating, even interbreeding freely. Even in older products, as well as more recent OSR and OSR-adjacent material, however, the trope is in evidence. Try to think of the last human village or stronghold described in an old TSR or newer OSR product which actually featured a human smith instead of a dwarf. Setting aside that most wildly overused cliche, though, you'll generally find that almost every predominantly human settlement will have enclaves of non-humans, and NPCs prominent enough to warr...

 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...