I was going to say that hahaha but well, it wouldn't matter much in an era when a mechanic for ability checks didn't even exist (depending on dm style)
Yes. One of my hirelings survived an ambush and I need to stat him to give him a better chance of surviving and getting help. He was so much better than his employer.
As a DM back in the late 70's and early 80's, the resources that are available today just weren't there. So we had one major rule. Whatever the DM said, was the rule. Period. No arguing. After all, we wrote our own campaigns and an excuse could always be weaved into the scenario which could suddenly and inexplicably change a rule or two in order to keep the story moving forward or to divert complete and utter disaster that would end the evening with everyone dead..... unless everyone being dead was part of the story line ... in which case everyone died despite their saving throws.... The main purpose of the DM (for us at least) was not just a neutral referee to determine what happened based on the role of the dice, but also to ensure the the game play be enjoyable by all by providing a scenario that was immersive and told a story where discovering the ending was half the fun. So, in the words of Miracle Max, characters weren't dead...they were mostly dead. And mostly dead means a slightly alive.
A few notes about ability scores in OD&D. While not having any direct result on combat/ specifics mentioned in the rules other than those listed... it is expected that the 'referee' will use them as a gauge to determine success for other things. For example, jumping over pits, the referee might say, "You have a base 50% chance of success +5% for every point above 13. Or whatever else the referee decides to 'make up' to resolve the situation. Early D&D was not codified and this gave Refs a lot of flexibility to resolve in game tasks. Also note that GOLD PIECES were worth XP on a 1 for 1 basis. This is very important, and progression goes much quicker than you would expect when applying this.
@@Ben-jl2rhI’ve always said that the point of xp in a game is to encourage the players to engage with the parts the designer thinks should be rewarded In this sense, the point of old school D&Ds xp system is you are mostly rewarded for having a successful adventure, and that is defined as coming away alive with gold in tow, regardless of how much blood you spilled to get it. Later in AD&D you could sell some treasure and the gold you got translated to xp as well. But if you sold say a wand of fireball, you didn’t get the xp for finding the wand, you just got the gold value in xp. So in a way if you have treasure that a DM rules would get you the gold value you received in xp, you kinda can buy level ups. In a weird way. But I’m not sure if that existed yet in Original D&D The last time I did that was a short game I ran. The players hunted a bear and sold its fur to a trader in the nearby town, and I ruled they got the gold value in xp split between them all. It wasn’t much but they hadn’t done much, it was a very easy kill for them.
@@zigmenthotep I had little idea what was going on at that time, never having seen an RPG before, but hell, yes we enjoyed it! After a few weeks the DM got the full set of books and we basically played it for about 10 hours every Saturday for a few years (with occasional forays into the original Traveller and Runequest 1). After that we had a bit more variety.
@@zigmenthotep One thing about AD&D (before it had numbers) was the random dungeon tables at the back of the Dungeon Masters' Guide - you could walk along a 10'x10' gridded dungeon map randomly rolling rooms, corridors, contents, monsters, treasure... The concept of 'preparation' was vague back then...
@@WulfCorbett I think that whole confusion about what books/editions worked with what was a common experience in the early days. I know my first group played with a mix of White Box and AD&D stuff that the DM essentially nailed together with homebrew rules, and most of the other long-term gamers I know have similar stories. It's hard to describe to folks who've lived with the internet all their lives how tough it was to get accurate info about "nerd hobby" stuff back in the Seventies and Eighties.
@@richmcgee434 A shout out to the guys in Chaosium back in the days though, I typed (actually typed) numerous letters to them about RuneQuest rules questions and got back page upon page of answers. And that was trans-Atlantic, I'm in Scotland. I still have them... somewhere...
I always tell people when I introduce them to OD&D that most of the numbers on the character sheet is for when something goes wrong. You're not going to be surviving a lot of fights in 0e, especially at level 1, but thankfully the majority of xp comes from the acquisition of treasure with only a comparatively paltry reward for combat. Consequently most players naturally begin to shy away from unnecessary fights after a while. Not a perfect or balanced game by modern standards at all, but it has a way of self-correcting and functioning.
in OD&D you rolled your total hit dice for HP every level and took the higher result. at the second level you roll 2d6 and take the rolled result or 5, whichever was higher. the accumulation of HP by roll one more Hit dice and add it to the total was added in the Greyhawk supplement of OD&D.
If you go beyond the White Box and include the Books IV to VI, Greyhawk, Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry, first of all you will get much more classes: Thief, Paladin (GH), Assassin, Monk (BM) and Druid (EW). Second, in Book IV: Greyhawk you will find tables very similar to those of AD&D 1e. This makes a big difference from pure White Box because the character gets much more detail like a +1 on To Hit rolls. MUs and Elves get detailed table about how well and how many spells they can learn. High Dex would give you +1AC/Dex over 14, from 15 (+1) to 18 (+4) (we extended this to the other classes to, not just fighting-men); also Dex 12 gives you a +1 on missle Attacks (we homeruled the rule for AC also applied to Missle Combat, so an archer got those extra bonuses too... we almost never ever had a character with Dex higher than 15 )
It seems most folks who bought the white box back in the day they also got supplement 1 (Greyhawk). The other supplements do indeed create a very complex game that includes a ton of classes, psionics, extraplanar monsters and gods, not to mention rounding out the roster of classic D&D monsters like Beholders, Mind Flayers, Owlbears and displaced beasts. However I have an appreciation for the original rules using the Chainmail game for combat. You roll a bunch of d6’s when you attack or roll 2d6 on a chart listing fantastic creatures (all those classic folklore monsters). Most combats are over in a round or two and there’s always a chance your character could die in any fight. If you are looking for grim and gritty it doesn’t get much grittier than playing characters that are just barely above the average foot soldier in a table top war game.
@@zigmenthotep Character creation was always the first thing I looked at in an RPG (after the theme/subject of course). If I couldn't 'get' the character sheet at first glance it probably wasn't a game I was going to like...
@@WulfCorbett yeah, that's usually one of the first things I check out. If it looks like a tax form, that's a pretty good indication of what the overall game will be like.
So looking back at it; the core attributes of DnD have become kinda standardised over the many decades the game has been around. This is to be expected; popular games stay and unpopular ones die out. However I never really thought of it, but the core attributes here are really well thought out. Intelligence and Wisdom being separate things, even if to distinguish Magic-User and Cleric, is fascinating and gives an idea right then and there how to imagine things. Aoso I love how, disregarding everyrhing else; Dwarves and Halflings can make better Magic-Users than Elves. I just find that funny considering the stereotypes.
I learned my beginnings by playing the og baldurs gate on pc. It was add2 i think.... It used thac0. But for actual table top i learned on 3.5 and switched pathfinder when 4e came out. Dude that ran our early games had been playing since odnd and had adapted things from older editions. Thats made me a very adaptive DM. I will notice mechanics in videogames and use them in my games now. I have always heard how grinding and unforgiving og DnD was thats what brought me here.
Spell focuses are a very 5e thing. Clerics in the beginning didn’t require a special item to do the one thing they’re able to do. Frankly I think the concept is silly the way it’s implemented nowadays.
"...start with the first modern RPG" I'm 54 and remember playing the game, but even so I don't "modern" is a term I'd use for this thing. "First" is right on the mark, though. :)
@@zigmenthotep You'd have to really stretch the definition to find an earlier true RPG, I think. Probably come closest with improv acting experiments than with anything directly gaming-related. Although maybe some of the early play-by-mail wargames might qualify - I know some of the players of those really got into worldbuilding alternate histories and adopting a role as a national leader or series thereof. Some of those campaigns probably predate D&D.
@@zigmenthotep From what I've read about D&D History (see Playing at the World, it really is excellent), the core loop of being 1 person, fighting monsters and getting treasure and getting more powerful, originates with Dave Arneson's Blackmoor which Gary Gygax translated into Original D&D.
1. I'm fairly sure a morning star is an edged weapon and thus cannot be welded by a cleric. A mace is the traditional choice, not sure if there are any others in OD&D they can weild 2. In OD&D pre-supplements, each time you level up, you roll *all* your hit dice. You only rolled one and got a 3, but you should have re-rolled the 5 as well. You get the max of the old value and the new value. So had you rolled a 1 or 2, you'd have stayed at 5 hit points, but any higher would have raised your hit points to 6-9. This isn't stated explicitly in the rules, but it's implied.
@@kaylaa2204 "Thus a superhero gets 8 dice + 2; they are rolled and score 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6/totals 26 + 2 = 28, 28 being the number of points of damage the character could sustain before death." Why are all 8 dice being rolled? Wouldn't the character already have 7 + 1 rolled and would just roll 1d6+1 and add it like in future editions? Also, what's up with going from 8d6+4 to 9d6+1 hp? Are you supposed to subtract 3 and add 1d6? What if you roll lower than 3?The answer is that you're supposed to reroll every level and *every* level you just take the highest of the old max hp and the reroll. That's how it works in Empire of the Petal Throne as well btw, which was released by TSR around the same time and is basically the same rules with a different setting
@@alaharon1233 I don’t think that’s implying that is a single event happening, that passage is giving an example of how hit points are calculated, at least how I read it. However I went to look into what you said about going from 8d6+4 to 9d6+1… Wizard 15th level… oddly that is the only level up where that scenario exists… I gotta say that has me stumped. There’s no obvious manner in which it would be an error.
I'm so tempted to make a long "well, actually..." comment about how the context of OD&D in 1974 isn't the same as it is for RPG's in 2020, so it can't be judged on those terms. But I will forbear.
@@zigmenthotep True that. It winds up feeling like you're criticizing the first guy who made a wheel. Sure, it's not quite as smooth as you might like and you'll probably need to make something to attach to it for it to really work, but the potential is there. :)
I don't know if you see this, but my "Bonuses and Penalties to Advancement due to Abilities" table looks different from yours, i am trying to make a character and my table says: 9-12= average, +1 or +2 ad 5%, and +3 or more add 10%, my problem is that i don't have a chart in my book that tells me what qualifies as a +1,+2 exetera
Your nit-picking is valid, and so many fans squawked that changes were made! The game branched off into the boxed "Basic" D&D which had an independent existence until 1991, and the hardcover books of the Advanced D&D which is now the only thing. What have we lost over the years? The greater risk of character death lent more excitement, your characters were NOT movie-stars whose cinematic existence was guaranteed. Chargen is getting more complicated, branching into too many non-human races for Special Snowflakes to be one-of-a-kind Furries, and too much emphasis on back-story.
Well complaining about the new edition is an important tradition in the RPG community. I'm sure there's people complaining about the changes made from 4th to 5th edition... I've never actually heard someone doing it, but I'm sure they're out there.
@@zigmenthotep Really? Well, here you go then: I did not like the changes from 4E to 5th, and feel their design philosophy of trying to compromise to please fans of every edition led to a game that feels designed by committee and satisfies very few of the players who know any of the early editions. 4E wasn't perfect, but it at least knew what it wanted to do and how to achieve that. 5th is the edition that finally drove me away from D&D to 13th Age, which is justifiably called D&D 4.5E owing to retaining the best parts of 4E while streamlining combat enormously and emphasizing roleplaying again - something which 4E did not do very well. Between 13th Age and the slew of OSR-inspired rule sets out there I can't see myself going back to 5th edition, period, and when they inevitably grind out 6th I'm going to be very wary about investing in it. That's something I've never had to say since I started back in 1977-ish. Even 4E (which I had grave doubts about pre-release) turned out to be something I didn't know I'd always wanted, and while it was certainly a radical change it didn't result in me jumping to Pathfinder as so many 3/3.5 fans did.
@Rich McGee 4th and 5th edition basically had the same design goal: Making Dungeons & Dragons more accessible to a wider audience. 4e knew what it wanted to do because it wanted to be a tabletop version of World of Warcraft, having a large number of strictly defined abilities with focus on secondary effects and defined roles (tank, DPS, healer, crowd control) and an aggressive release schedule to keep pumping new content into the game. But all that content ended up making something just as, if not more, bloated and cumbersome than 3.5. 5e on the other hand just tried to make a simpler version of D&D and not overloading it with constant additions (5 years in and 5e has 14 classes versus 4e's 26, each of which required a long list of powers, paragon paths, and epic destinies), which for better or worse they did, and given the goal of creating a more widely appealing product it was much more successful.
@@zigmenthotep If we're looking at it from a business standpoint 5th edition's sales figures per product are good, but still don't compare favorably to the early 3.0 or even 3.5 core products, and overall the restricted number of releases means total volume of sales across the line is lower than 4E and far behind 3/3,5. None of the editions have been actual losses for Hasbro/WotC, but 3.0/3.5 is still the standout. 5th may well catch up eventually, but I question how long it will be till 6th inevitably rears its head. 5th has had six years, and the edition churn has trended generally faster over the years the years if you ignore OD&D. AD&D & 2nd both had about 11 years, 3/3.5 together had about 8, 4E had 6 with Essentials (which was sort of 4.5). 5th has approached the new output curve more carefully than any edition to preserve audience demand better, but I'll still be surprised if it gets another 2 years on the shelves.
Hey what sheet or program did your use for your character sheet. I’m thinking of running an OG Dnd session next year for my group(like a 50th anniversary thing) and that looks amazing as a sheet
The elf thing is actually very easy to explain How it works is at the start of the adventuring day, ie when you sit down at the table and are about to have your characters head out, you decide whether you will act as a fighter or magic user. That’s basically it. It’s less poorly explained than dual classing in 1e and even that’s more or less comprehendible Also you did get the constitution right. It assumes that it’s implied to be 9 - 60% 10 - 70% 11 - 80% 12 - 90% The slower progression in my opinion has advantages over what many games are now. A critique I have of 5e is it gives the player TOO MUCH, Too fast. The point of old school games isn’t amassing power, the point was having an adventure with your friends. And the more you played, you saw a slow, natural progression. And it was hard to get that power, only to make it all the more brag worthy when you got something big It also means in practice the difficulty scales a little better. Not perfect but better than some modern games. Your character sheet here isn’t who your character is. That will be seen in play. This sheet is only trying to be a way to adjudicate rules. Nothing more, nothing less. And in some respects, that is very freeing as a player. At any rate this character is way better than you realize. There’s alot of growth in those 5 levels. Also, in a real game, you’d have more magic than that by 5th most likely. More interesting stuff than just a +1 mace that’s for sure.
I play edition 1.5. Seeing as fighters grew more powerful with weapon proficiencies, I do spellcasters completely different. My own house rules. Clerics and druids get their gods favor. Meaning they can pray for their spells as they need them. If you have 2 first level cleric spells, in my world that means you can pray 2 times for whatever 1st levels spell you need at that moment. Magic users are super weak. To bolster that, the way I do mage spells is that you pick your spells you want to learn. You roll tonsee if yiu can learn it. If you fail, the spell is to complex for you, if you learn it you have it in your arsenal all the time and can use it as much as you want. This may linit the total amount of different spells you know, but once you memorize them you dont "forget" them after casting. That always seemed dumb to me. A 20th level mage forgets how to cast light after he has used it his whole life? No. Thats dumb and never made sense to me. Sorry my typing is so bad. Using my phone and I have arthritis.
Me…being me…despite these ability scores, would have made a fighter….because (and modern gamers may often lose sight of such) this is exactly how you may have a party of all or mostly fighters…. Yes…they all have the same hit dice and ‘to hit’ but they’re not all the same! One is strong, one is charismatic, one is extremely dexterous, one is wise….. that leads to a lot of fun stuff, just that alone. Heck…you’re already in the realm of the Three (four) Musketeers! Heheh! 😁
Gary and Co. felt that they needed to preserve the human-centric worldview of the typical fantasy world, with non-humans playing a lesser role. Demi-human level limits persisted for 25 years until 3E opened the floodgates for anything being a player character with unlimited advancement.
Nothing says old school gaming like "I can choose one additional language and I choose mermaid".
Ah, the melodious language of mermaids: guttural choking noises and ultrasonic screeching.
Those ability scores... are not typical. That character is a god in OD&D. lol
Yes, I have a miraculous ability to roll really well for characters that I'm never actually going to use.
I was going to say that hahaha but well, it wouldn't matter much in an era when a mechanic for ability checks didn't even exist (depending on dm style)
@@zigmenthotep 5
Yes. One of my hirelings survived an ambush and I need to stat him to give him a better chance of surviving and getting help. He was so much better than his employer.
@@rolanejo8512 what a surprise to see you here
As a DM back in the late 70's and early 80's, the resources that are available today just weren't there. So we had one major rule. Whatever the DM said, was the rule. Period. No arguing. After all, we wrote our own campaigns and an excuse could always be weaved into the scenario which could suddenly and inexplicably change a rule or two in order to keep the story moving forward or to divert complete and utter disaster that would end the evening with everyone dead..... unless everyone being dead was part of the story line ... in which case everyone died despite their saving throws.... The main purpose of the DM (for us at least) was not just a neutral referee to determine what happened based on the role of the dice, but also to ensure the the game play be enjoyable by all by providing a scenario that was immersive and told a story where discovering the ending was half the fun. So, in the words of Miracle Max, characters weren't dead...they were mostly dead. And mostly dead means a slightly alive.
A few notes about ability scores in OD&D. While not having any direct result on combat/ specifics mentioned in the rules other than those listed... it is expected that the 'referee' will use them as a gauge to determine success for other things. For example, jumping over pits, the referee might say, "You have a base 50% chance of success +5% for every point above 13. Or whatever else the referee decides to 'make up' to resolve the situation. Early D&D was not codified and this gave Refs a lot of flexibility to resolve in game tasks.
Also note that GOLD PIECES were worth XP on a 1 for 1 basis. This is very important, and progression goes much quicker than you would expect when applying this.
I are you saying I can *BUY* level ups in OD&D?
@@Ben-jl2rh Lol.. no. Only treasure found during an adventure is worth XP.
@captcorajus So it's like that one Super hero table top game where you can use XP rewards as items or money instead of giving the players XP?
In my OD&D game, I always let my players roll under their Ability Score for a check. Seems to work pretty well!
@@Ben-jl2rhI’ve always said that the point of xp in a game is to encourage the players to engage with the parts the designer thinks should be rewarded
In this sense, the point of old school D&Ds xp system is you are mostly rewarded for having a successful adventure, and that is defined as coming away alive with gold in tow, regardless of how much blood you spilled to get it.
Later in AD&D you could sell some treasure and the gold you got translated to xp as well. But if you sold say a wand of fireball, you didn’t get the xp for finding the wand, you just got the gold value in xp.
So in a way if you have treasure that a DM rules would get you the gold value you received in xp, you kinda can buy level ups. In a weird way. But I’m not sure if that existed yet in Original D&D
The last time I did that was a short game I ran. The players hunted a bear and sold its fur to a trader in the nearby town, and I ruled they got the gold value in xp split between them all. It wasn’t much but they hadn’t done much, it was a very easy kill for them.
Never played these REALLY early RPGs, I started with AD&D, except the DM didn't have the DMG yet so we used a mix of D&D & AD&D for a few weeks...
Did they work together? I haven't really looked much into pre-3rd AD&D.
@@zigmenthotep I had little idea what was going on at that time, never having seen an RPG before, but hell, yes we enjoyed it! After a few weeks the DM got the full set of books and we basically played it for about 10 hours every Saturday for a few years (with occasional forays into the original Traveller and Runequest 1). After that we had a bit more variety.
@@zigmenthotep One thing about AD&D (before it had numbers) was the random dungeon tables at the back of the Dungeon Masters' Guide - you could walk along a 10'x10' gridded dungeon map randomly rolling rooms, corridors, contents, monsters, treasure... The concept of 'preparation' was vague back then...
@@WulfCorbett I think that whole confusion about what books/editions worked with what was a common experience in the early days. I know my first group played with a mix of White Box and AD&D stuff that the DM essentially nailed together with homebrew rules, and most of the other long-term gamers I know have similar stories. It's hard to describe to folks who've lived with the internet all their lives how tough it was to get accurate info about "nerd hobby" stuff back in the Seventies and Eighties.
@@richmcgee434 A shout out to the guys in Chaosium back in the days though, I typed (actually typed) numerous letters to them about RuneQuest rules questions and got back page upon page of answers. And that was trans-Atlantic, I'm in Scotland.
I still have them... somewhere...
Wow you rolled pretty well.
I always tell people when I introduce them to OD&D that most of the numbers on the character sheet is for when something goes wrong. You're not going to be surviving a lot of fights in 0e, especially at level 1, but thankfully the majority of xp comes from the acquisition of treasure with only a comparatively paltry reward for combat. Consequently most players naturally begin to shy away from unnecessary fights after a while. Not a perfect or balanced game by modern standards at all, but it has a way of self-correcting and functioning.
Believing that a rule set can balance your game is a fallacy anyhow. If you don’t have a referee that can make good judgments, it still will not work.
in OD&D you rolled your total hit dice for HP every level and took the higher result. at the second level you roll 2d6 and take the rolled result or 5, whichever was higher. the accumulation of HP by roll one more Hit dice and add it to the total was added in the Greyhawk supplement of OD&D.
This does not appear in Greyhawk.
Loved this series. Please do more episodes
If you go beyond the White Box and include the Books IV to VI, Greyhawk, Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry, first of all you will get much more classes: Thief, Paladin (GH), Assassin, Monk (BM) and Druid (EW). Second, in Book IV: Greyhawk you will find tables very similar to those of AD&D 1e. This makes a big difference from pure White Box because the character gets much more detail like a +1 on To Hit rolls. MUs and Elves get detailed table about how well and how many spells they can learn. High Dex would give you +1AC/Dex over 14, from 15 (+1) to 18 (+4) (we extended this to the other classes to, not just fighting-men); also Dex 12 gives you a +1 on missle Attacks (we homeruled the rule for AC also applied to Missle Combat, so an archer got those extra bonuses too... we almost never ever had a character with Dex higher than 15 )
I'll be covering most of that in the upcoming Swords & Wizardry video. I should probably read up on the supplements for the sake of comparison.
It seems most folks who bought the white box back in the day they also got supplement 1 (Greyhawk). The other supplements do indeed create a very complex game that includes a ton of classes, psionics, extraplanar monsters and gods, not to mention rounding out the roster of classic D&D monsters like Beholders, Mind Flayers, Owlbears and displaced beasts.
However I have an appreciation for the original rules using the Chainmail game for combat. You roll a bunch of d6’s when you attack or roll 2d6 on a chart listing fantastic creatures (all those classic folklore monsters). Most combats are over in a round or two and there’s always a chance your character could die in any fight. If you are looking for grim and gritty it doesn’t get much grittier than playing characters that are just barely above the average foot soldier in a table top war game.
I approve of this format
Glad you like it. and hopefully you're not the only one because at least a few more are coming.
@@zigmenthotep Character creation was always the first thing I looked at in an RPG (after the theme/subject of course). If I couldn't 'get' the character sheet at first glance it probably wasn't a game I was going to like...
@@WulfCorbett yeah, that's usually one of the first things I check out. If it looks like a tax form, that's a pretty good indication of what the overall game will be like.
You really ought to roll up a Traveller and Runequest character for comparison.
Really amazing channel, really good production value on theses videos
Hay, is there a pdf for this character sheet
Loved the video, I am very much looking forward to more early D&D content.
Thanks, I'm looking forward to making it. Later D&D content... not so much.
Where is this blank character sheet?
So looking back at it; the core attributes of DnD have become kinda standardised over the many decades the game has been around.
This is to be expected; popular games stay and unpopular ones die out. However I never really thought of it, but the core attributes here are really well thought out.
Intelligence and Wisdom being separate things, even if to distinguish Magic-User and Cleric, is fascinating and gives an idea right then and there how to imagine things.
Aoso I love how, disregarding everyrhing else; Dwarves and Halflings can make better Magic-Users than Elves. I just find that funny considering the stereotypes.
Where did you gather that last part? In OD&D dwarves and halflings can’t be magic-users. It’s a class exclusive to elves and humans.
I learned my beginnings by playing the og baldurs gate on pc. It was add2 i think.... It used thac0. But for actual table top i learned on 3.5 and switched pathfinder when 4e came out. Dude that ran our early games had been playing since odnd and had adapted things from older editions. Thats made me a very adaptive DM. I will notice mechanics in videogames and use them in my games now. I have always heard how grinding and unforgiving og DnD was thats what brought me here.
No holy symbol in that equipment loadout? =0[.]o=
None needed, by the original rules. iirc.
Spell focuses are a very 5e thing. Clerics in the beginning didn’t require a special item to do the one thing they’re able to do. Frankly I think the concept is silly the way it’s implemented nowadays.
"...start with the first modern RPG" I'm 54 and remember playing the game, but even so I don't "modern" is a term I'd use for this thing. "First" is right on the mark, though. :)
Well I'm sure there are older games that could be argued to be role-playing games, but D&D is the first that is inarguably a role-playing game.
@@zigmenthotep You'd have to really stretch the definition to find an earlier true RPG, I think. Probably come closest with improv acting experiments than with anything directly gaming-related. Although maybe some of the early play-by-mail wargames might qualify - I know some of the players of those really got into worldbuilding alternate histories and adopting a role as a national leader or series thereof. Some of those campaigns probably predate D&D.
@@zigmenthotep From what I've read about D&D History (see Playing at the World, it really is excellent), the core loop of being 1 person, fighting monsters and getting treasure and getting more powerful, originates with Dave Arneson's Blackmoor which Gary Gygax translated into Original D&D.
I never played the first edition, but I see a lot of similarities with the red box set (my first)
1. I'm fairly sure a morning star is an edged weapon and thus cannot be welded by a cleric. A mace is the traditional choice, not sure if there are any others in OD&D they can weild
2. In OD&D pre-supplements, each time you level up, you roll *all* your hit dice. You only rolled one and got a 3, but you should have re-rolled the 5 as well. You get the max of the old value and the new value. So had you rolled a 1 or 2, you'd have stayed at 5 hit points, but any higher would have raised your hit points to 6-9. This isn't stated explicitly in the rules, but it's implied.
A Morningstar is a spiked mace, so if anything it's a piercing weapon. Edged weapons have blades that cut, not points that stab.
Who on earth told you to do HP like that? Nothing in the LBBs even begins to imply that.
@@kaylaa2204 "Thus a superhero gets 8 dice + 2; they are rolled and score 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6/totals 26 + 2 = 28, 28 being the number of points of damage the character could sustain before death."
Why are all 8 dice being rolled? Wouldn't the character already have 7 + 1 rolled and would just roll 1d6+1 and add it like in future editions? Also, what's up with going from 8d6+4 to 9d6+1 hp? Are you supposed to subtract 3 and add 1d6? What if you roll lower than 3?The answer is that you're supposed to reroll every level and *every* level you just take the highest of the old max hp and the reroll. That's how it works in Empire of the Petal Throne as well btw, which was released by TSR around the same time and is basically the same rules with a different setting
@@alaharon1233 I don’t think that’s implying that is a single event happening, that passage is giving an example of how hit points are calculated, at least how I read it.
However I went to look into what you said about going from 8d6+4 to 9d6+1… Wizard 15th level… oddly that is the only level up where that scenario exists… I gotta say that has me stumped. There’s no obvious manner in which it would be an error.
Great video. Quick question, did you make the character sheet? if so, is there a link of some sort that we can DL it? Very nice and clean!
What character sheet did you use? I like the way that It looks and would like to use it myself
I'm so tempted to make a long "well, actually..." comment about how the context of OD&D in 1974 isn't the same as it is for RPG's in 2020, so it can't be judged on those terms. But I will forbear.
Well as I said, my nitpicks are irrelevant as they were making something that wasn't really a thing at the time.
@@zigmenthotep True that. It winds up feeling like you're criticizing the first guy who made a wheel. Sure, it's not quite as smooth as you might like and you'll probably need to make something to attach to it for it to really work, but the potential is there. :)
*Not stealing the character*
I don't know if you see this, but my "Bonuses and Penalties to Advancement due to Abilities" table looks different from yours, i am trying to make a character and my table says: 9-12= average, +1 or +2 ad 5%, and +3 or more add 10%, my problem is that i don't have a chart in my book that tells me what qualifies as a +1,+2 exetera
help me find these rules, there's something loveable about old school dnd
Your nit-picking is valid, and so many fans squawked that changes were made! The game branched off into the boxed "Basic" D&D which had an independent existence until 1991, and the hardcover books of the Advanced D&D which is now the only thing.
What have we lost over the years? The greater risk of character death lent more excitement, your characters were NOT movie-stars whose cinematic existence was guaranteed. Chargen is getting more complicated, branching into too many non-human races for Special Snowflakes to be one-of-a-kind Furries, and too much emphasis on back-story.
Well complaining about the new edition is an important tradition in the RPG community. I'm sure there's people complaining about the changes made from 4th to 5th edition... I've never actually heard someone doing it, but I'm sure they're out there.
@@zigmenthotep Ack! 4th-edition! We shall not speak of 4th-edition!
ruclips.net/video/cpmUxfS4LF8/видео.html
@@zigmenthotep Really? Well, here you go then: I did not like the changes from 4E to 5th, and feel their design philosophy of trying to compromise to please fans of every edition led to a game that feels designed by committee and satisfies very few of the players who know any of the early editions. 4E wasn't perfect, but it at least knew what it wanted to do and how to achieve that. 5th is the edition that finally drove me away from D&D to 13th Age, which is justifiably called D&D 4.5E owing to retaining the best parts of 4E while streamlining combat enormously and emphasizing roleplaying again - something which 4E did not do very well. Between 13th Age and the slew of OSR-inspired rule sets out there I can't see myself going back to 5th edition, period, and when they inevitably grind out 6th I'm going to be very wary about investing in it. That's something I've never had to say since I started back in 1977-ish. Even 4E (which I had grave doubts about pre-release) turned out to be something I didn't know I'd always wanted, and while it was certainly a radical change it didn't result in me jumping to Pathfinder as so many 3/3.5 fans did.
@Rich McGee 4th and 5th edition basically had the same design goal: Making Dungeons & Dragons more accessible to a wider audience. 4e knew what it wanted to do because it wanted to be a tabletop version of World of Warcraft, having a large number of strictly defined abilities with focus on secondary effects and defined roles (tank, DPS, healer, crowd control) and an aggressive release schedule to keep pumping new content into the game. But all that content ended up making something just as, if not more, bloated and cumbersome than 3.5. 5e on the other hand just tried to make a simpler version of D&D and not overloading it with constant additions (5 years in and 5e has 14 classes versus 4e's 26, each of which required a long list of powers, paragon paths, and epic destinies), which for better or worse they did, and given the goal of creating a more widely appealing product it was much more successful.
@@zigmenthotep If we're looking at it from a business standpoint 5th edition's sales figures per product are good, but still don't compare favorably to the early 3.0 or even 3.5 core products, and overall the restricted number of releases means total volume of sales across the line is lower than 4E and far behind 3/3,5. None of the editions have been actual losses for Hasbro/WotC, but 3.0/3.5 is still the standout. 5th may well catch up eventually, but I question how long it will be till 6th inevitably rears its head. 5th has had six years, and the edition churn has trended generally faster over the years the years if you ignore OD&D. AD&D & 2nd both had about 11 years, 3/3.5 together had about 8, 4E had 6 with Essentials (which was sort of 4.5). 5th has approached the new output curve more carefully than any edition to preserve audience demand better, but I'll still be surprised if it gets another 2 years on the shelves.
How did you determine gold there?
Based on the dices - he rolled 13 on 3d6, and after that multiplied the result by 10.
Hey what sheet or program did your use for your character sheet. I’m thinking of running an OG Dnd session next year for my group(like a 50th anniversary thing) and that looks amazing as a sheet
I recognise this guys voice from somewhere else on youtube, but I cant put my finger on where.
And you never will, mwahaha!
I Cast Lore magic
This is where the legendary game & hero begin. 🙌 😊🎉❤
What an enjoyable vid, somehow.
The elf thing is actually very easy to explain
How it works is at the start of the adventuring day, ie when you sit down at the table and are about to have your characters head out, you decide whether you will act as a fighter or magic user.
That’s basically it. It’s less poorly explained than dual classing in 1e and even that’s more or less comprehendible
Also you did get the constitution right. It assumes that it’s implied to be
9 - 60%
10 - 70%
11 - 80%
12 - 90%
The slower progression in my opinion has advantages over what many games are now. A critique I have of 5e is it gives the player TOO MUCH, Too fast. The point of old school games isn’t amassing power, the point was having an adventure with your friends. And the more you played, you saw a slow, natural progression. And it was hard to get that power, only to make it all the more brag worthy when you got something big
It also means in practice the difficulty scales a little better. Not perfect but better than some modern games.
Your character sheet here isn’t who your character is. That will be seen in play. This sheet is only trying to be a way to adjudicate rules. Nothing more, nothing less. And in some respects, that is very freeing as a player. At any rate this character is way better than you realize. There’s alot of growth in those 5 levels.
Also, in a real game, you’d have more magic than that by 5th most likely. More interesting stuff than just a +1 mace that’s for sure.
Early rpgs really are fascinating.
Awesome video, I like your shade of nail polish btw
What version of dnd are you playing
I jumped ship to Pathfinder about half way through 4e's lifespan.
@@zigmenthotep huh
@@kayplaya86so the answer is 3.75 E unless you count Pathfinder 2nd as D&D 3.9
cool
indeed man if i had those i would also decide to play a none human! Ver,y cool!
I play edition 1.5. Seeing as fighters grew more powerful with weapon proficiencies, I do spellcasters completely different. My own house rules. Clerics and druids get their gods favor. Meaning they can pray for their spells as they need them. If you have 2 first level cleric spells, in my world that means you can pray 2 times for whatever 1st levels spell you need at that moment. Magic users are super weak. To bolster that, the way I do mage spells is that you pick your spells you want to learn. You roll tonsee if yiu can learn it. If you fail, the spell is to complex for you, if you learn it you have it in your arsenal all the time and can use it as much as you want. This may linit the total amount of different spells you know, but once you memorize them you dont "forget" them after casting. That always seemed dumb to me. A 20th level mage forgets how to cast light after he has used it his whole life? No. Thats dumb and never made sense to me. Sorry my typing is so bad. Using my phone and I have arthritis.
neat
Me…being me…despite these ability scores, would have made a fighter….because (and modern gamers may often lose sight of such) this is exactly how you may have a party of all or mostly fighters….
Yes…they all have the same hit dice and ‘to hit’ but they’re not all the same!
One is strong, one is charismatic, one is extremely dexterous, one is wise….. that leads to a lot of fun stuff, just that alone.
Heck…you’re already in the realm of the Three (four) Musketeers! Heheh! 😁
Not a big fan of the nit picks.
Didnt see you roll. Invalid
An 11-foot pole? Ridiculous! Not even funny!
the classes were racist..... WHY!!!
Gary and Co. felt that they needed to preserve the human-centric worldview of the typical fantasy world, with non-humans playing a lesser role. Demi-human level limits persisted for 25 years until 3E opened the floodgates for anything being a player character with unlimited advancement.