The reason why AC was descending in early editions was because of a holdover from wargames, and spec. naval wargames. In those, First-class armor was better than Second-class which was better than 3rd-class etc... that's also why it's called Armor Class.
Yep. And it's super easy to figure out once you get the hang of it. In OD&D it was basically (although not quite) 18 minus your hit dice, roll that number and you automatically hit, and different armors had different lower numbers. It's the charts and graphs that confuse people.
The same thing goes for stellar brightness. The brightest stars were said to be of the first magnitude, next came those of the second magnitude, and so forth. It's defined more precisely now; the brightest (nighttime) star in the sky, Sirius, has a magnitude of -1.46. (The Sun has a magnitude of -26.71.)
So at 11:30, my understanding of this rule is that since it says your stat is only increased *for experience gain only*, it does not actually increase your prime requisite stat. Rather than reduce your wisdom by 2 to add 1 to intelligence as a magic user, you can add 1/2 (one for every 2) of your wisdom to your intelligence for the purpose of determining the XP bonus from your prime requisite. So with 14 Intelligence and 7 Wisdom, you would add 1/2 of your wisdom to intelligence for a total effective prime requisite score of 17, allowing you to claim the 10% XP bonus
@@DaraelDraconisMaybe... you don't get to use every single point of that stat to consider the bonus, only the amount above that? So if you can use 3 for 1 (so long as it doesn't reduce below 9) and you have 15, that is 6 above 9 allowing you to count 2 extra points?
@@justinbremer2281 that would at least be a coherent reading of the text! Whether or not it's the intended reading, of course, we can't know unless we ask someone who was there.
Judging from the fact that there were both minimum *and* maximum known spells, and the fact that 65% using three D6s could very easily be translated to a DC of 7 with practically identical odds, I think I can see what they were intending with known spells; It seems like during character creation, they wanted you to roll on each spell, and if you got a 7 or higher, you knew that spell. The maximum and minimums, then are for normalizing particularly lucky or unlucky characters; if you got a 7 or higher on 9/11 spells, you'd have to ditch one to get to 8, and if you only got a 7 on four or fewer spells, you got to pick an extra one or two until you hit 5. The minimums and maximums don't make sense otherwise if you just picked your spells, as they'd just say "you know X different spells", like they do with known languages, instead of giving you a range. Only taking the minimum also doesn't make sense as the spells are not arranged in any particular order except for chronological. (It would also make lower intelligence magic users *better* because they'd be more likey to be able to roll the lower order spells, and if those spells were meant to be more powerful/complex, how does that make sense? Especially for the "it should be obvious" attitude these rules were designed with; smarter characters being *worse* at smart skills then dumber ones is the *last* thing they'd let slide under these rules.) Also; I can't believe Magic Missile wasn't a Base game spell, that's so odd to me, especially with the extreme restrictions of being a magic user on your combat abilities. I will say, though, I do quite like how the weapon hit table makes certain weapons more or less likely to hit certain armor classes, that's actually a really cool way to distinguish weapon types meaningfully, and even imply lore around the types of weapons in the world. The fact that daggers have the highest bonus to hit against no armor makes their widespread ownership make sense, and the charging lance having a *Huge* descending bonus against increasing armor classes subtly tells you who would use that kind of weapon... It also means that wizard duels are won by whoever shanks the other first and that's fucking hilarious. And I'm honestly going to defend the decision to make carrying capacity expressed through gold coins, as D&D was primarily designed as a Dungeon crawler where you raid monster dens for loot as a professional career. Having an immediate shorthand for how much an item's weight is VS how much gold it's worth seems like it'd actually be a fairly useful tool to keep players from stopping for 10 minutes every single room to sort out their inventory. Basically the equivalent of the "Weight" and "Value" stats being right next to each other in Skyrim 's UI, for a more modern example. Players have always, and will always, be loot goblins.
According to the book *Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons*, the only company that made and sold D20s in small batches sold them as part of a polyhedral set. TSR employees would pull out the d6 and d20, put them in the box set, and donate the rest to local schools and other charities. Eventually, the rules were updated to use the rest of the dice.
It's honestly amazing D&D ever got off the ground, really. Role-playing games are weird in that even now, the traditional way to learn how to play is via some kind of live mentor; learning to play purely from books seems to be relatively uncommon. Looking forward to your eventual Best Gratuitous Nudity in a TTRPG video, should you ever choose to make such a thing.
@@Cr4z3dhe said edition, so whilst the monster manual had exposed boobs, the edition became squeamish about it. so he is correct in stating that 0e was the only edition to not be swayed by north western human ideals of decency.
"Armor Class goes down for no particular reason." The naming is a holdover from tabletop wargaming, and the math formula was made that you take your base "to-hit" and subtract their armor. You roll above that. So if my base "to-hit" is 18, and the target has 4 AC, then I need to roll 18-4=14 or higher.
Using roll high or roll low mechanics in a game doesn't really matter. but D&D did both and it was a little confusing. Nice thing was AC was a small number, usually positive, sometimes negative. Having the table on your character sheet was easier than THAC0. But kind of a pain if you dropped your shield.
@@viktord2025 The authors of 1st ed have a way of writing rules in a way that made them look more convoluted and complicated. Sometimes you are randomly subject to the stream of conciousness of Gygax and the others. The weirder parts are the sudden thief skills in percentages, the great heap of polearms and using a target matrix here and there.
It usually takes a bit of gold to get goons. But when you're an MU and won't buy all those weapons anyways... Dogs is another option. I know 2e war dogs are pretty expensive with a monstrous 2HD.
the save against spells (80%) and a 15 or higher on a d20 (25%) are not calling for the same save. One is referring to the OG rules of specifically surviving a certain spell that changes your physiology. The other is a different save against any spell casted at you you want to resist. So for instance, if you are in a fight and you wish to enlarge yourself, you have an 80% surviving. Someone else wants to shrink you against your will, you have to save against spell (25%), you roll your save and you got a 14( effectively like rolling a 30), so you fail. You now have to save again against the spell killing you, which is an 80% chance to survive.
It was assumed you knew what everything did in the war game, and that you knew how to GM. There's a reason no one actually goes back to this and everyone acts like it was Basic then "The dark times." OSR even tries to ignore Original D&D existed. They also ignore AD&D and 2e, which annoys me more since those were actually good.
with every supplement tacked on it was some sort of proto-ad&d except still puppetting a wargame under everything believe me this isn't even the worst part that it's confusing, it's that every supplement has mathematical errors either in logic, conversion, typos, sometimes everything at once, each on top of the previous' issues! (that includes chainmail fantasy and the first 3 "LBB") one of the weirdest that still cripples 5e to a point today is that the original matrix for attacks in chainmail fantasy gives way more importance to magic items than what was erroneously ported in the maths of od&d, even a first "+1" item was supposed to have significant boosts, so it cripples the intended character evolution as in OD&D the majority of your character growth is through magic items in design
To be clear, you aren't supposed to play with EVERY supplement. They were used more like a "try this if it sounds cool" type of bonus content, not as an actual update to the rules.
23:12 I may be talking shit RN, but from what I understand about those old books is that thief skills are supposed to be like... extra. It does not mean that thieves are the only people that can do those kinds of things, it means that thieves do it in ways a normal person couldn't. Hidding in shadows is not just hiding, it's basically going invisible inside a shadow, even in plain sight; Moving silently is not just stealth, it's walking without making a single sound, being basically undetectable unless the person can see you; Climbing walls is not just climbing any wall, it's climbing a wall that would be impossible for any other person to climb. Being fair, thief skills do have a point, the problem is that the book fails to explain that, like they do with a lot of other things
Didn't Gygax later clarify that's NOT what was happening, and Thieves had no innate supernatural abilities? Because I'm pretty sure "no guys, the Thief isn't useless, they can go invisible!" is just _cope_ from 70s roleplayers who wanted the Thief class to make sense.
@@Bluecho4 well the description of the skills remains kinda vague all through ad&d2e regarding what the source of the power is, but the function remained the same. So when using Hide in Shadows they only needed a literal shadow and for nobody to be looking at them when making the attempt, with success making them functionally invisible.
Regarding dice, I've read in another RPG an anecdote that D&D was to be played only with d20s but as they where really hard to acquire Gary and co. wanted to use some d20 polyhedral/platonic figures made by a toy company, they talked to the company in hopes of buying lots of "d20s" but the company only sold them in packages and didn't wanted to sell individual "d20s" The first idea was to simply remove all non-20-sided figures, but then they thought it was simpler to change some rules to made use of all the figures That's why the game came with "dice" which you had to write the numbers without a d10 as this is not a polyhedron/platonic figure
Gygax still mantained for years that Hobbit was not public domain even after losing the case, because he claimed that Hobbit was not a term invented by Tolkien, since he just took the name from Old English, "Holbylta", "hole-dweller". And apparently, the court hadn't liked this argument. Probably something to do with the fact that he wasn't just taking the name, but in fact applying it to a creature that invariably resembles Tolkien's hobbits.
You will unsurprised to hear that in our 1976 game, hit locations from Blackmoor and the extremely grnaular time management rules from Eldritch Wizardry were options we chose not to exercise.
Maybe 10 years ago I was going to run a real old school session with my friends. I had the three OD&D books plus some of the supplements printed up. And after trying to go through a game solo to make sure I knew what I was doing. I was so confused by the OD&D and supplements. I ended up running Swords & Wizardry because it was dumbed down that I could understand it, and more importantly I could explain it to a group of experienced D&D players plus a few brand new players. The struggle is real with the old RPGs. They were hard to figure out from the books. You needed to apprentice under another DM to figure it out.
Iirc: Gygax stumbled onto polyhedral dice at a teaching supply store while looking for materials to build terrain with. TSR started selling the dice set because there were no easily-accessible retailers who carried them.
So the fun thing is that TSR had the very problem you had. People couldn't figure out how to play without assistance. This very problem is what led to Dr. Holmes volunteering his services to rewrite the rules and thus created the later Holmes Basic edition box set to originally become a beginner OD&D set. The AD&D mentions were added later for marketing purposes to promote AD&D.
@@Romanticoutlaw it's a store that sells items associated with the classroom - things teachers might need to buy (such as d20s for a math class). They also often sell text books for younger grades, craft materials, etc.
The story I heard on the origin of the polyhedral dice is that Gary Gygax and company lived nearby an advanced school supply store and the polyhedral dice were math supplies - if that answers where you were supposed to get such dice.
In America, the easiest way to get polyhedral dice before they were associated with roleplaying was to order them as educational material through a catalogue of teaching supplies. Platonic shapes!
2:55: Huh. I'm not shocked that non-platonic-solid dice came later after the Platonic ones, but I'm surprised that d10s weren't considered a standard part of the set until after D&D existed. 10 is such a useful number, you know? 4:55: NINETEEN FRIGGIN' EIGHTY?! I could spend paragraphs expressing shock at ye olde RPG mekanichal sistyms, but I'd rather express shock at how long it took for non-platonic regular polyhedra to become dice. Original D&D was basically the first RPG ever; we've had polyhedra for millennia and dice for longer than that.
for consideration, it's more that die didn't have standard "small form factor" versions for anything but 6 until d&d popularized it, for the simple reason that it was easier to make an even polygon with any number of sides and just cut a tube out of it those have reportedly (but also somewhat controversially) existed since roman times, and you can still find them at renaissance fairs
I consider it a minor miracle that this game survived past this point. Even at the time, a lot of these rules (and lack thereof) had to have been baffling.
When people are told about something they don't understand, some will honestly admit their lack of knowledge while others will claim some level of expertise just to avoid losing face for not knowing about it. Especially in small organizations, no one wants to be seen as 'out-of-the-loop' . I imagine much of D&D's early success came from bumbling players blindly trusting equally bumbling DMs. It would explain the initiative on TSR's part to discourage DMs from letting players read the DM's guide. As soon as players know their Dungeon Master is just as lost as they are, all faith in their ability disappears.
@@Oddmanoutre You actually make a very good point. I forgot about that stipulation of early DND. I guess the game worked best when the blind led the blind, lmao.
I've never seen a good breakdown of the prime requisite swapping ration thing. It's baffling. Gary desperately needed a good editor to write these rules for people who had never played before.
I mean, OSE is a retroclone. I prefer Basic Fantasy RPG, which takes the rules from BX/BECMI and applies the modern d20 to-hit and ability score mechanics. It's also free, and has a large group of people adding rules to the game, which are hosted on Basic Fantasy's own website.
Given that removing Gold Coins worth of treasure was how you leveled up in early D&D, using them as a unit of measurement is sensible. You're literally measuring the weight of the crap you're carrying in EXP.
When seeing incredibly convoluted and bad rules like the often mocked FATAL I always wondered where people even come up with the idea that rpgs would look like that, but seeing this I kinda see why he got the idea that spamming pointless tables is how to make a roleplaying game. That said, there is two kinds of games I'd love you to cover. First is the byzantine Exalted system because I sure couldn't figure it out. And the other thing is World of Synnibarr which seems to be completely off the charts insane in more ways than one. Not as gross and awful as FATAL but probably just as "entertaining"
Someone else has already mentioned but at 23:10 Thief skills do NOT limit the actions of other classes. ANYONE can hide, but only a thief can hide with nothing but a shadow ANYONE can try to move quiety, but only a thief can move without making any sound ANYONE can (try to) climb, but only thieves can climb sheer surfaces like castle/dungeon walls without equipment ANYONE can try to pick a lock, but only thieves can do it under duress You can see that with their "hear noise" ability, everyone has a 1-6 chance of hearing noises on the other side of a door, but thieves get better at it over time It would be ludicrous to say that "only thieves have hearing"
The best interpretation I have read of Move Silent is that it negates Listen. If you all decide you move carefully and quietly, the monsters behind a door need to make a Listen check on a d6 much like you. They can definitely blow their check, a humanoid monster has the same Listen chance as you. Hide in Shadow mostly seem to open up weird questions like "What counts as shadow?" and "Can monster infravision negate it?" I interpret it as the abilty to hide in the flimsiest cover. The bottom of a barrel, the shadow of a hedge etc. A place where a non-thief would be spotted, but you have a slightly better chance. Pickpocket had a funky difficulty that scaled with the level/HD of the target. Listen is odd, the chance of a level 1 thief is actually lower than 1 in 6. Lockpicking without a thief skill usually means a crowbar or Bend Bars. I usually decide this is the one thing thieves have alone. 2e added a base Climb ability for everyone. It's not good and does not improve, but thieves can allocate more points. Everyone can climb with rope and gear and time. But a thief can freeclimb a wall right off.
@@SusCalvin In the DM's booklet in the D&D Basic box set, it says infravision negates hide in shadows (& halfling's freeze ability). You can make it so that you can hide pretty well in some darkness, but you can't stop your body from emitting heat, though that would be a cool thing for magic item to do.
@@SusCalvin I mean rule 0 is always in effect, just by the rules (of becmi) and a bit of in-game common sense it really shouldn't work. Which is why I suggested making a magic item (ring of bodily cooling?) or maybe even a clever mundane item (asbestos cloak) to mask the thief's body heat. Though if you take the 'supernatural' interpretation of thief skills (particularly as it pertains to climb wall) then it could easily be 'fading' like the Mystic ability, which WOULD hide you from infravision
@@Da_maul I like how Veins specifically removed darkvision. Monsters rely on feelers or smell of sonar. Everyone who can carries lightsources. Permanent magic light and magic darkvision is gone. I like to keep thief skills non-mystical. If a real life olympic athlete or burglar can do a thing, I can be successfully convinced to make it a thief skill. If you somehow want a Swim skill to swim like an olympic swimmer or a Drive skill to do evasive driving. I tend to view it as taking opportunities. You can Hide in "Shadows" behind a hedge or behind a curtain. And thieves always have a hard time, if they have a slim chance their skills can work I usually let them try.
Yeah the prime requisite thing is tricky but the general consensus is they didn't say the prime requisite because they assumed you would understand that they share the prime requisite with their parent class, ie Ranger gets strength because it's a kind of fighting man, therefore that applies to the rest. Monk gets Wisdom as a kind of Cleric, and Assassin gets Dexterity as a kind of Thief. This is supported by AD&D wherein it works exactly like this (though oddly Monks are not described as a cleric subclass but their own thing, though they mantain that Wisdom is their prime requisite)
hmm to my knowledge yes you can remove 2 point to get a +1 as long as you follow the restriction (with a 13 in wis you could have get a +1 for an 11 wis). Matter of fact when i first played baldur's gate (the first one), i was like "oh they used the old dnd thingy for character creation but they are just super forgiving and i love this" (you could reallocate all the point with a 1 to 1 ratio and be only concern about min prerequisite). But now that i'm watching the video..I might got that wrong.
IIRC, "Spell Survival" was for certain spells. Sometimes you would save, and you'd still incur a negative effect (just a different or lesser one). In addition, some spell effects would auto-kill you, and spell survival was your chance to avoid instant-death and instead just take the negative effect.
I love that sparse, spherical, staid Beholder on the Greyhawk cover. For some reason I picture it speaking in a valley girl accent and just being so, like, OVER the adventurer thing y'know?
Others have probably mentioned it, but the easiest way to get a d20 in 1974 would be from a teacher supply store or other such provider of instruments of math instruction
23:05 I vaguely remember hearing a retro player / grognard say what the thief % skill chance was a % chance to auto-success. If the auto-success fails, then roll as normal I could be misunderstanding things
I've known lots of people to play evil clerics in these old editions, theres rules for them in OD&D, I have a friend who loves them. I would think they were more utilized as NPCs just because it was less common to yourself play an evil person, but it didn't not happen.
Yeah I don’t think anyone ever played with most of those rules, much less all of the rules. But it was a very comprehensive set of rules with all the supplants and Chainmail, comparable or surpassing in complexity to anything that came later. The only thing quite like the OD&D rules plus supplements in the D&D corpus is BECMI with its multi year rollout of basic rules that got increasingly more complex, but was a bit more integrated as a whole to say the least.
My perspective on the thief skills, which I know is not unique: they are a second-chance roll. If you do it like this, it makes it stronger, which they really need, and it allows every other character to roll for those things while explaining why the thief is extra good. Your character might roll dexterity, but a thief will roll dexterity AND move silently, increasing their chances slightly at first level and drastically at higher levels.
Yes you have the exchange right, rephrased, if your wisdom here was not below average, ie 9 or above, you could exchange it for intelligence on 2 for 1 basis, so lets say it was 9, you could drop that to 7 to increase intelligence by 1, making it 15. I realize it explains in a very verbose way, but it very much is exactly what it says. Basic editions like B/X later reused these exchange rules, and made them much clearer.
I do agree with you about the need for nudity in D&D art. The whole point of D&D is that you can be heroic AND sexy! WotC should learn from BG3 and return nudity to the game... and make it sex-positive. T&A! Sexy Frazetta girls and bishounen boys! All the good stuff! Can I just say how Man & Magic outright states that you are not limited to the listed race options and, with the DM's approval, play neatly any race or monster type? I love it! The parts about prime requisites in Man & Magic are confusing. While I know that this is about shifting ability scores around, but the wording implies that you add fractions of one or two other ability scores to your main prime requisite ability for calculating one's one XP adjustments. i.e. A Cleric with Strength 12, Intelligence 13, and Wisdom 14 would have a prime requisite score of 24 (Str 1/3, Int 1/2, Wis 1/1). And Grayhawk kinda confirms this while talking about Fighter-Men using "raw" Strength for their adjustments, unaffected by Intelligence. It is funny as Intelligence is an iconic dump-stat for Fighting-Men. Although, most of those rules in the supplements, like most of the rules in the Advanced D&D rulebooks, were meant to be houserules you can choose from but were not vary clear about that.
25:20 I didn't think Magic Missle auto-hit in this edition. I think you had to roll as if you had fired a magic arrow. At least, that's how Lindybeige read that spell description.
Oh the spell survival chance is simple, that is not a saving through. Your spell save is for when a save against a spell is called for. But some spells can just kill you, and that is when you do the spell survival thing. AD&D replaced this with System Shock, and this is essentially an earlier version of that, hence why it's so high.
Something existing in ancient history does not mean it was commercially available for thousands of years. And if it was, it wasn't widepsread or common. There's a reason most people outside the TTRPG crowd know there are die above d6.
... which doesn't really matter if you are in the USA in the 1970s, because your local toy store is unlikely to carry archaeological artifacts from ancient Egypt.
You could get D20s in Japan? That's very interesting because most modern japanese games use D6s now and i've heard that was because the others where hard to acquire over there.
Today yoga has been very westernized, but it's just as much a physical activity as it is a mental and spiritual one. And theres different types of yoga, of which what we in the west call yoga is only one discipline. Other forms of yoga including the one we know, I could see as either more or less beneficial to a fighter character. And it's not even just limited to exercise, they're essentially all types of discipline
Yeah the GPE rules kinda assumed that from that chart, a DM or player could reason how much any item should weigh, it wasn't really something all too set in stone. So they just gave that table as a way to reference against standards. To list everything would've been unusual and still wouldn't cover anything a DM could include in their game. At any rate, there's no way you're carrying enough to be any slower than 12" movement, you can be certain you have that right here.
I tried running Alternity when it came out. I was not impressed. I look forward to your interpretation, maybe you'll notice something i missed and it will be less janke.
D20s were used for scientific uses, usually two at the same time to simulate a d100 and had the faces of 0-9 twice. Players would mark one side to represent the tens place so it would be a true D20.
The thing about the lack of skills or adjacent skill like abilities, like Thief Skills, is that OD&D assumed character competence for a lot of actions, and player intelligence/skill to think of solutions with what they had and what their surroundings were. At least before the Thief class was introduced. However even with the Thief class, it’s widely interpreted that Thief Skills aren’t meant to mean that only thieves can climb walls or move silently etc, but that only thieves can do so without having to adjust themselves. Like thieves can attempt move silently, without having to take off loud armor, or climb walls without the assistance of climbing gear. The rules for OD&D are just extremely difficult to understand unfortunately, so a lot of people are just not gonna be able to know what they can and can’t do, since it goes into depth about some things, but are fairly vague or light on other things.
An anti-cleric by the rules is literally just any chaotic cleric. There's nothing saying a player can’t be a chaotic cleric, unless you as a GM rule that players cant be chaotic. I suppose there’d be value in treating them exclusively as monsters but I think it’s a better interpretation that the anti clerics are those clerics which serve chaos, and this is supported by later rules.
The sanest way I can interupt the Illusionist is that their Prime requistites is Intelligence but they need 15 dex to qualify, for assassin's I guess my interruptation would be to stack Modifiers for all 3 and you need 12 or higher in all but like this is obviously like impossible to parse.
There's less clear skills here. Sometimes you could roll against attribute with a d20. I'm not sure how specifically Int would determine if a PC can take a certain action. And what actions they mean.
Thief skills are not meant to be a universal skill system. Thieves are the utility class. They are not things you as an MU are trained to be able to do effectively. You can always try, but you're likely to have limited success. What do you do? It's in your name, those spells you have, your magic, that is what you do. Classes back then were roles essentially, you have a particular playstyle that is very careful, you start off weak and reliant on clever and conservative use of your spells, as you slowly advance into more powerful magic, and eventually earn the status of one of the most powerful potential characters in all of early D&D.
I wonder how many clarifications on this exist out there... Given Gary Gygax answered questions personally by phone at that time I guess they didn't see fixing all the ambiguous things as a priority. The answers probably exist somewhere, though some might only be in someone's head.
I appreciate the OG rules having Assassins be neutral. I always remember being kinda upset they got made Evil Only later, which for me sorta messed with the idea of like, a James Bond type who does indeed have a license to retire people. Even back as a kid I thought that was weird. Interesting how it wasn't *always* like that(and tended to get fixed in much later editions, I think 3rd was the last time they forced the Evil alignment by RAW-we of course never followed it.)
In od&d the only alignments were Law, Neutral, and Chaos. It was more about what side of an eternal war you were on. Good and evil existed as concepts, but were too individual in comparison.
@@slaapliedje uh... Classes are sub-templates in GURPS: F1 and uh... Car Driver is a class of the Vehicle Operator template. Yeah, that's it. That's clearly what I meant. Don't you feel silly now.
Yep. I know Type V demons and harpies, along with Blibdoolpoolp, had visible boobs. (There could be other examples; those are just the ones I can recall.)
How is a Lvl 1 Fighting-Man already a "Veteran" and then progresses to "Warrior" and later "Swordsman". It seems like those 3 terms were accidentally put in the opposite order. (Or Gary Gygax didn't know what a veteran is, which seems unlikely)
I love D&D, but I have no desire to go back that far. AD&D 1st edition was where I started, and it has plenty of janky mechanics. I think AD&D 2nd edition is more my speed, but I do enjoy the newer editions.
Wait wait, you quit right before we could find out what happens when psionic attacks are used against a character with no psionic strength points left!
The reason why AC was descending in early editions was because of a holdover from wargames, and spec. naval wargames. In those, First-class armor was better than Second-class which was better than 3rd-class etc... that's also why it's called Armor Class.
thats super interesting
Yep. And it's super easy to figure out once you get the hang of it. In OD&D it was basically (although not quite) 18 minus your hit dice, roll that number and you automatically hit, and different armors had different lower numbers.
It's the charts and graphs that confuse people.
Look at AC9 and the result needed for a hit. AC9 requires a 10. 10+9=19
Look at AC3, it needs a 16 to hit. 3+16=19. 19-AC= a hit.
Ahh, that makes more sense, they're supposed to be moreso literal "Classes" than just a roll-to-hit, like "tiers" of Armor.
The same thing goes for stellar brightness. The brightest stars were said to be of the first magnitude, next came those of the second magnitude, and so forth. It's defined more precisely now; the brightest (nighttime) star in the sky, Sirius, has a magnitude of -1.46. (The Sun has a magnitude of -26.71.)
Wow! Those psionic attacks really work! My head hurts like hell after going through that!
5:52 the secret artistically skilled dwarf subtype: The Drawf.
Just a tribute to the number of misprints in the original books..My Favourite being the "Minionions of Set" in Gods Demi-gods and Heroes
So at 11:30, my understanding of this rule is that since it says your stat is only increased *for experience gain only*, it does not actually increase your prime requisite stat. Rather than reduce your wisdom by 2 to add 1 to intelligence as a magic user, you can add 1/2 (one for every 2) of your wisdom to your intelligence for the purpose of determining the XP bonus from your prime requisite. So with 14 Intelligence and 7 Wisdom, you would add 1/2 of your wisdom to intelligence for a total effective prime requisite score of 17, allowing you to claim the 10% XP bonus
But then what's the "so long as it does not reduce" bit?
@@DaraelDraconisMaybe... you don't get to use every single point of that stat to consider the bonus, only the amount above that? So if you can use 3 for 1 (so long as it doesn't reduce below 9) and you have 15, that is 6 above 9 allowing you to count 2 extra points?
@@justinbremer2281 that would at least be a coherent reading of the text! Whether or not it's the intended reading, of course, we can't know unless we ask someone who was there.
Judging from the fact that there were both minimum *and* maximum known spells, and the fact that 65% using three D6s could very easily be translated to a DC of 7 with practically identical odds, I think I can see what they were intending with known spells;
It seems like during character creation, they wanted you to roll on each spell, and if you got a 7 or higher, you knew that spell.
The maximum and minimums, then are for normalizing particularly lucky or unlucky characters; if you got a 7 or higher on 9/11 spells, you'd have to ditch one to get to 8, and if you only got a 7 on four or fewer spells, you got to pick an extra one or two until you hit 5.
The minimums and maximums don't make sense otherwise if you just picked your spells, as they'd just say "you know X different spells", like they do with known languages, instead of giving you a range.
Only taking the minimum also doesn't make sense as the spells are not arranged in any particular order except for chronological.
(It would also make lower intelligence magic users *better* because they'd be more likey to be able to roll the lower order spells, and if those spells were meant to be more powerful/complex, how does that make sense? Especially for the "it should be obvious" attitude these rules were designed with; smarter characters being *worse* at smart skills then dumber ones is the *last* thing they'd let slide under these rules.)
Also; I can't believe Magic Missile wasn't a Base game spell, that's so odd to me, especially with the extreme restrictions of being a magic user on your combat abilities.
I will say, though, I do quite like how the weapon hit table makes certain weapons more or less likely to hit certain armor classes, that's actually a really cool way to distinguish weapon types meaningfully, and even imply lore around the types of weapons in the world. The fact that daggers have the highest bonus to hit against no armor makes their widespread ownership make sense, and the charging lance having a *Huge* descending bonus against increasing armor classes subtly tells you who would use that kind of weapon...
It also means that wizard duels are won by whoever shanks the other first and that's fucking hilarious.
And I'm honestly going to defend the decision to make carrying capacity expressed through gold coins, as D&D was primarily designed as a Dungeon crawler where you raid monster dens for loot as a professional career. Having an immediate shorthand for how much an item's weight is VS how much gold it's worth seems like it'd actually be a fairly useful tool to keep players from stopping for 10 minutes every single room to sort out their inventory.
Basically the equivalent of the "Weight" and "Value" stats being right next to each other in Skyrim 's UI, for a more modern example.
Players have always, and will always, be loot goblins.
According to the book *Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons*, the only company that made and sold D20s in small batches sold them as part of a polyhedral set. TSR employees would pull out the d6 and d20, put them in the box set, and donate the rest to local schools and other charities. Eventually, the rules were updated to use the rest of the dice.
It's honestly amazing D&D ever got off the ground, really. Role-playing games are weird in that even now, the traditional way to learn how to play is via some kind of live mentor; learning to play purely from books seems to be relatively uncommon.
Looking forward to your eventual Best Gratuitous Nudity in a TTRPG video, should you ever choose to make such a thing.
That's basically just F.A.T.A.L. Also he's not entirely correct, the original Monster Manual for AD&D 1e was _very much_ not afraid to show nudity.
@@Cr4z3dhe said edition, so whilst the monster manual had exposed boobs, the edition became squeamish about it. so he is correct in stating that 0e was the only edition to not be swayed by north western human ideals of decency.
@@IsaacMyers1 Super curious if there were any exposed penises in those early books. The video only showed boobs.
AD&D DMG did too @@IsaacMyers1
"Armor Class goes down for no particular reason."
The naming is a holdover from tabletop wargaming, and the math formula was made that you take your base "to-hit" and subtract their armor. You roll above that.
So if my base "to-hit" is 18, and the target has 4 AC, then I need to roll 18-4=14 or higher.
It's this simple, but people make a mountain out of a mole hill
@@viktord2025no, they made tables out of equations.
@@viktord2025 DnD players do be like that
Using roll high or roll low mechanics in a game doesn't really matter. but D&D did both and it was a little confusing. Nice thing was AC was a small number, usually positive, sometimes negative. Having the table on your character sheet was easier than THAC0. But kind of a pain if you dropped your shield.
@@viktord2025 The authors of 1st ed have a way of writing rules in a way that made them look more convoluted and complicated. Sometimes you are randomly subject to the stream of conciousness of Gygax and the others.
The weirder parts are the sudden thief skills in percentages, the great heap of polearms and using a target matrix here and there.
With so much CHA and leftover Gold, that goblin would have been steamrolled by 4 tough henchmen
Magic-Users with high charisma are definitely the main characters of 0E.
@@russellharrell2747 That's why they always become BBEG's.
@@kapnkerf2532 exactly haha, the player facing mechanics reflect the fiction
It usually takes a bit of gold to get goons. But when you're an MU and won't buy all those weapons anyways...
Dogs is another option. I know 2e war dogs are pretty expensive with a monstrous 2HD.
Picture people saying "Lest's play some D&DRFMWCPPPMF"
the save against spells (80%) and a 15 or higher on a d20 (25%) are not calling for the same save. One is referring to the OG rules of specifically surviving a certain spell that changes your physiology. The other is a different save against any spell casted at you you want to resist. So for instance, if you are in a fight and you wish to enlarge yourself, you have an 80% surviving. Someone else wants to shrink you against your will, you have to save against spell (25%), you roll your save and you got a 14( effectively like rolling a 30), so you fail. You now have to save again against the spell killing you, which is an 80% chance to survive.
15:20 you highlighted the wrong row for your Charisma on the table! Audio was fine though, and the video as a whole is excellent.
These videos are some of my favorite. I get to look into a ttrpg system without having to really get into them!
Jesus the original dnd was so confusing from the sounds of it. The height rules for combat and that entire matrix is where I got incredibly lost
It was assumed you knew what everything did in the war game, and that you knew how to GM. There's a reason no one actually goes back to this and everyone acts like it was Basic then "The dark times." OSR even tries to ignore Original D&D existed. They also ignore AD&D and 2e, which annoys me more since those were actually good.
with every supplement tacked on it was some sort of proto-ad&d except still puppetting a wargame under everything
believe me this isn't even the worst part that it's confusing, it's that every supplement has mathematical errors either in logic, conversion, typos, sometimes everything at once, each on top of the previous' issues! (that includes chainmail fantasy and the first 3 "LBB")
one of the weirdest that still cripples 5e to a point today is that the original matrix for attacks in chainmail fantasy gives way more importance to magic items than what was erroneously ported in the maths of od&d, even a first "+1" item was supposed to have significant boosts, so it cripples the intended character evolution as in OD&D the majority of your character growth is through magic items in design
To be clear, you aren't supposed to play with EVERY supplement. They were used more like a "try this if it sounds cool" type of bonus content, not as an actual update to the rules.
@@graveyardshift2100 except for mayber greyhawk, which essentially became the foundation for basic and advanced.
@@graveyardshift2100 That makes sense.
23:12 I may be talking shit RN, but from what I understand about those old books is that thief skills are supposed to be like... extra. It does not mean that thieves are the only people that can do those kinds of things, it means that thieves do it in ways a normal person couldn't.
Hidding in shadows is not just hiding, it's basically going invisible inside a shadow, even in plain sight;
Moving silently is not just stealth, it's walking without making a single sound, being basically undetectable unless the person can see you;
Climbing walls is not just climbing any wall, it's climbing a wall that would be impossible for any other person to climb.
Being fair, thief skills do have a point, the problem is that the book fails to explain that, like they do with a lot of other things
You have it exactly right. I like to explain the difference as the thief having Batman skills while everyone else has normal person skills.
i thought that was just how modern osr players interpreted it.
Didn't Gygax later clarify that's NOT what was happening, and Thieves had no innate supernatural abilities? Because I'm pretty sure "no guys, the Thief isn't useless, they can go invisible!" is just _cope_ from 70s roleplayers who wanted the Thief class to make sense.
@@Bluecho4 well the description of the skills remains kinda vague all through ad&d2e regarding what the source of the power is, but the function remained the same. So when using Hide in Shadows they only needed a literal shadow and for nobody to be looking at them when making the attempt, with success making them functionally invisible.
Agreed @@lkim100
Regarding dice, I've read in another RPG an anecdote that D&D was to be played only with d20s but as they where really hard to acquire Gary and co. wanted to use some d20 polyhedral/platonic figures made by a toy company, they talked to the company in hopes of buying lots of "d20s" but the company only sold them in packages and didn't wanted to sell individual "d20s"
The first idea was to simply remove all non-20-sided figures, but then they thought it was simpler to change some rules to made use of all the figures
That's why the game came with "dice" which you had to write the numbers without a d10 as this is not a polyhedron/platonic figure
Gygax still mantained for years that Hobbit was not public domain even after losing the case, because he claimed that Hobbit was not a term invented by Tolkien, since he just took the name from Old English, "Holbylta", "hole-dweller". And apparently, the court hadn't liked this argument. Probably something to do with the fact that he wasn't just taking the name, but in fact applying it to a creature that invariably resembles Tolkien's hobbits.
Glances at the title: Oh cool.
*Reads the full title* : .....OH.
You will unsurprised to hear that in our 1976 game, hit locations from Blackmoor and the extremely grnaular time management rules from Eldritch Wizardry were options we chose not to exercise.
Maybe 10 years ago I was going to run a real old school session with my friends. I had the three OD&D books plus some of the supplements printed up. And after trying to go through a game solo to make sure I knew what I was doing. I was so confused by the OD&D and supplements. I ended up running Swords & Wizardry because it was dumbed down that I could understand it, and more importantly I could explain it to a group of experienced D&D players plus a few brand new players.
The struggle is real with the old RPGs. They were hard to figure out from the books. You needed to apprentice under another DM to figure it out.
Iirc: Gygax stumbled onto polyhedral dice at a teaching supply store while looking for materials to build terrain with. TSR started selling the dice set because there were no easily-accessible retailers who carried them.
So the fun thing is that TSR had the very problem you had. People couldn't figure out how to play without assistance. This very problem is what led to Dr. Holmes volunteering his services to rewrite the rules and thus created the later Holmes Basic edition box set to originally become a beginner OD&D set. The AD&D mentions were added later for marketing purposes to promote AD&D.
I remember reading somewhere that you could get d20s and other non-d6 dice from education supply stores?
the hell is an education supply store? Lmfao
@@Romanticoutlaw it's a store that sells items associated with the classroom - things teachers might need to buy (such as d20s for a math class). They also often sell text books for younger grades, craft materials, etc.
The story I heard on the origin of the polyhedral dice is that Gary Gygax and company lived nearby an advanced school supply store and the polyhedral dice were math supplies - if that answers where you were supposed to get such dice.
In America, the easiest way to get polyhedral dice before they were associated with roleplaying was to order them as educational material through a catalogue of teaching supplies. Platonic shapes!
2:55: Huh. I'm not shocked that non-platonic-solid dice came later after the Platonic ones, but I'm surprised that d10s weren't considered a standard part of the set until after D&D existed. 10 is such a useful number, you know?
4:55: NINETEEN FRIGGIN' EIGHTY?!
I could spend paragraphs expressing shock at ye olde RPG mekanichal sistyms, but I'd rather express shock at how long it took for non-platonic regular polyhedra to become dice. Original D&D was basically the first RPG ever; we've had polyhedra for millennia and dice for longer than that.
for consideration, it's more that die didn't have standard "small form factor" versions for anything but 6 until d&d popularized it, for the simple reason that it was easier to make an even polygon with any number of sides and just cut a tube out of it
those have reportedly (but also somewhat controversially) existed since roman times, and you can still find them at renaissance fairs
The d20s back then had 1-10 twice (or 0-9). So you could have d10s that way. In fact they didn't go up to 20 until a while later.
Yup. Sorcery enters English from the Middle French 'Sortier': One who casts lots (i.e. throws dice) to divine the future.
@@Oddmanoutre which in turn comes from the latin word "sors" meaning "fate"
I consider it a minor miracle that this game survived past this point. Even at the time, a lot of these rules (and lack thereof) had to have been baffling.
Well they were the only game in town, and that carried them until they were the game with name recognition.
When people are told about something they don't understand, some will honestly admit their lack of knowledge while others will claim some level of expertise just to avoid losing face for not knowing about it. Especially in small organizations, no one wants to be seen as 'out-of-the-loop' .
I imagine much of D&D's early success came from bumbling players blindly trusting equally bumbling DMs. It would explain the initiative on TSR's part to discourage DMs from letting players read the DM's guide. As soon as players know their Dungeon Master is just as lost as they are, all faith in their ability disappears.
@@Oddmanoutre You actually make a very good point. I forgot about that stipulation of early DND. I guess the game worked best when the blind led the blind, lmao.
Chance to know spell is your chance to learn them. When you try to copy a scroll to your spellbook, you roll this or the attempt is wasted.
Mutants and Masterminds! Mutants and Masterminds! Mutants and Masterminds!
That would be fun
I've never seen a good breakdown of the prime requisite swapping ration thing. It's baffling. Gary desperately needed a good editor to write these rules for people who had never played before.
I mean, OSE is a retroclone. I prefer Basic Fantasy RPG, which takes the rules from BX/BECMI and applies the modern d20 to-hit and ability score mechanics. It's also free, and has a large group of people adding rules to the game, which are hosted on Basic Fantasy's own website.
I feel like you should have embraced chaos, and tried to make the Bard you were allowed.
29:10 nuh-uh-uh, you forgot to mention the most important chart! the weapon vs armor class modifiers! :^)
(which in that case are 0 anyways)
It's right here 19:20, I just got it out of the way earlier.
Given that removing Gold Coins worth of treasure was how you leveled up in early D&D, using them as a unit of measurement is sensible. You're literally measuring the weight of the crap you're carrying in EXP.
It could facilitate the answer to the question, "What can I afford to drop in order to carry more loot?"
@@jarrettperdue3328 ^This, exactly.
2:1 is 2 intelligence from 1 of prime requisite.
When seeing incredibly convoluted and bad rules like the often mocked FATAL I always wondered where people even come up with the idea that rpgs would look like that, but seeing this I kinda see why he got the idea that spamming pointless tables is how to make a roleplaying game.
That said, there is two kinds of games I'd love you to cover. First is the byzantine Exalted system because I sure couldn't figure it out. And the other thing is World of Synnibarr which seems to be completely off the charts insane in more ways than one. Not as gross and awful as FATAL but probably just as "entertaining"
Bump
I'm morbidly curious, but too busy to look into those games
Hope the Flumph sees your comment and looks into them
Finally, it's time to... MIND BATTLE
Someone should do a scanners based rpg with this mecanics
16:28 the 2 in 6 chance of opening doors doesn’t suggest they are stuck or locked or anything 😊
Someone else has already mentioned but at 23:10 Thief skills do NOT limit the actions of other classes.
ANYONE can hide, but only a thief can hide with nothing but a shadow
ANYONE can try to move quiety, but only a thief can move without making any sound
ANYONE can (try to) climb, but only thieves can climb sheer surfaces like castle/dungeon walls without equipment
ANYONE can try to pick a lock, but only thieves can do it under duress
You can see that with their "hear noise" ability, everyone has a 1-6 chance of hearing noises on the other side of a door, but thieves get better at it over time It would be ludicrous to say that "only thieves have hearing"
The best interpretation I have read of Move Silent is that it negates Listen. If you all decide you move carefully and quietly, the monsters behind a door need to make a Listen check on a d6 much like you. They can definitely blow their check, a humanoid monster has the same Listen chance as you.
Hide in Shadow mostly seem to open up weird questions like "What counts as shadow?" and "Can monster infravision negate it?" I interpret it as the abilty to hide in the flimsiest cover. The bottom of a barrel, the shadow of a hedge etc. A place where a non-thief would be spotted, but you have a slightly better chance.
Pickpocket had a funky difficulty that scaled with the level/HD of the target. Listen is odd, the chance of a level 1 thief is actually lower than 1 in 6.
Lockpicking without a thief skill usually means a crowbar or Bend Bars. I usually decide this is the one thing thieves have alone.
2e added a base Climb ability for everyone. It's not good and does not improve, but thieves can allocate more points. Everyone can climb with rope and gear and time. But a thief can freeclimb a wall right off.
@@SusCalvin In the DM's booklet in the D&D Basic box set, it says infravision negates hide in shadows (& halfling's freeze ability). You can make it so that you can hide pretty well in some darkness, but you can't stop your body from emitting heat, though that would be a cool thing for magic item to do.
@@Da_maul There's a whole lot of critters with darkvision and infravision. Too many for me.
@@SusCalvin I mean rule 0 is always in effect, just by the rules (of becmi) and a bit of in-game common sense it really shouldn't work.
Which is why I suggested making a magic item (ring of bodily cooling?) or maybe even a clever mundane item (asbestos cloak) to mask the thief's body heat.
Though if you take the 'supernatural' interpretation of thief skills (particularly as it pertains to climb wall) then it could easily be 'fading' like the Mystic ability, which WOULD hide you from infravision
@@Da_maul I like how Veins specifically removed darkvision. Monsters rely on feelers or smell of sonar. Everyone who can carries lightsources. Permanent magic light and magic darkvision is gone.
I like to keep thief skills non-mystical. If a real life olympic athlete or burglar can do a thing, I can be successfully convinced to make it a thief skill. If you somehow want a Swim skill to swim like an olympic swimmer or a Drive skill to do evasive driving.
I tend to view it as taking opportunities. You can Hide in "Shadows" behind a hedge or behind a curtain. And thieves always have a hard time, if they have a slim chance their skills can work I usually let them try.
Huge Alernity fan here!!!! but no I don't mind waiting.
You criticized modern D&D for not showing topless women only to draw your character with her top on? I see how it is.
Facts, keep spittin' my brother 🗣📢🔥🔥🔥
We can't sexualize women, that's sexist.
Huh, didn't know zigmenthotep drew that picture back in 'Checks signature' 1973.
To be fair, RUclips would not appreciate more breats than absolutely necessary, so picking character art with clothes on is a good move.
Yeah the prime requisite thing is tricky but the general consensus is they didn't say the prime requisite because they assumed you would understand that they share the prime requisite with their parent class, ie Ranger gets strength because it's a kind of fighting man, therefore that applies to the rest. Monk gets Wisdom as a kind of Cleric, and Assassin gets Dexterity as a kind of Thief. This is supported by AD&D wherein it works exactly like this (though oddly Monks are not described as a cleric subclass but their own thing, though they mantain that Wisdom is their prime requisite)
hmm to my knowledge yes you can remove 2 point to get a +1 as long as you follow the restriction (with a 13 in wis you could have get a +1 for an 11 wis). Matter of fact when i first played baldur's gate (the first one), i was like "oh they used the old dnd thingy for character creation but they are just super forgiving and i love this" (you could reallocate all the point with a 1 to 1 ratio and be only concern about min prerequisite). But now that i'm watching the video..I might got that wrong.
I really enjoy these character videos. Have you ever looked at doing a character in games like RuneQuest, Harnmaster or Traveller?
I bought a ton of books for Basic Fantasy, also WOTC put out a book that has original D&D with Greyhawk, Blackmore, and Eldritch Wizardry included
IIRC, "Spell Survival" was for certain spells. Sometimes you would save, and you'd still incur a negative effect (just a different or lesser one). In addition, some spell effects would auto-kill you, and spell survival was your chance to avoid instant-death and instead just take the negative effect.
Great video. Very funny approach, as always. Thx.
I love that sparse, spherical, staid Beholder on the Greyhawk cover. For some reason I picture it speaking in a valley girl accent and just being so, like, OVER the adventurer thing y'know?
Others have probably mentioned it, but the easiest way to get a d20 in 1974 would be from a teacher supply store or other such provider of instruments of math instruction
23:05 I vaguely remember hearing a retro player / grognard say what the thief % skill chance was a % chance to auto-success. If the auto-success fails, then roll as normal
I could be misunderstanding things
I've known lots of people to play evil clerics in these old editions, theres rules for them in OD&D, I have a friend who loves them. I would think they were more utilized as NPCs just because it was less common to yourself play an evil person, but it didn't not happen.
Yeah I don’t think anyone ever played with most of those rules, much less all of the rules.
But it was a very comprehensive set of rules with all the supplants and Chainmail, comparable or surpassing in complexity to anything that came later.
The only thing quite like the OD&D rules plus supplements in the D&D corpus is BECMI with its multi year rollout of basic rules that got increasingly more complex, but was a bit more integrated as a whole to say the least.
I just found this channel. I think it is cool. You should role up a character for Villians and Vigilantes and its new addition, Mighty Protectors.
My perspective on the thief skills, which I know is not unique: they are a second-chance roll. If you do it like this, it makes it stronger, which they really need, and it allows every other character to roll for those things while explaining why the thief is extra good. Your character might roll dexterity, but a thief will roll dexterity AND move silently, increasing their chances slightly at first level and drastically at higher levels.
I’m honestly impressed you’re using the hit location bullshit. I’ve never bothered and I love this game.
I am one of the weirdos that's excited about Alternity!
But I also thought this was fun, so I am not at all upset.
Yes you have the exchange right, rephrased, if your wisdom here was not below average, ie 9 or above, you could exchange it for intelligence on 2 for 1 basis, so lets say it was 9, you could drop that to 7 to increase intelligence by 1, making it 15. I realize it explains in a very verbose way, but it very much is exactly what it says. Basic editions like B/X later reused these exchange rules, and made them much clearer.
I do agree with you about the need for nudity in D&D art. The whole point of D&D is that you can be heroic AND sexy! WotC should learn from BG3 and return nudity to the game... and make it sex-positive. T&A! Sexy Frazetta girls and bishounen boys! All the good stuff!
Can I just say how Man & Magic outright states that you are not limited to the listed race options and, with the DM's approval, play neatly any race or monster type? I love it!
The parts about prime requisites in Man & Magic are confusing. While I know that this is about shifting ability scores around, but the wording implies that you add fractions of one or two other ability scores to your main prime requisite ability for calculating one's one XP adjustments. i.e. A Cleric with Strength 12, Intelligence 13, and Wisdom 14 would have a prime requisite score of 24 (Str 1/3, Int 1/2, Wis 1/1). And Grayhawk kinda confirms this while talking about Fighter-Men using "raw" Strength for their adjustments, unaffected by Intelligence. It is funny as Intelligence is an iconic dump-stat for Fighting-Men.
Although, most of those rules in the supplements, like most of the rules in the Advanced D&D rulebooks, were meant to be houserules you can choose from but were not vary clear about that.
i am going to watcv this whole thing right now
25:20 I didn't think Magic Missle auto-hit in this edition. I think you had to roll as if you had fired a magic arrow. At least, that's how Lindybeige read that spell description.
Oh the spell survival chance is simple, that is not a saving through. Your spell save is for when a save against a spell is called for. But some spells can just kill you, and that is when you do the spell survival thing. AD&D replaced this with System Shock, and this is essentially an earlier version of that, hence why it's so high.
Polyherdral Dice existed since ancient egypt.
Something existing in ancient history does not mean it was commercially available for thousands of years. And if it was, it wasn't widepsread or common. There's a reason most people outside the TTRPG crowd know there are die above d6.
... which doesn't really matter if you are in the USA in the 1970s, because your local toy store is unlikely to carry archaeological artifacts from ancient Egypt.
You could get D20s in Japan? That's very interesting because most modern japanese games use D6s now and i've heard that was because the others where hard to acquire over there.
Today yoga has been very westernized, but it's just as much a physical activity as it is a mental and spiritual one. And theres different types of yoga, of which what we in the west call yoga is only one discipline. Other forms of yoga including the one we know, I could see as either more or less beneficial to a fighter character. And it's not even just limited to exercise, they're essentially all types of discipline
Yeah the GPE rules kinda assumed that from that chart, a DM or player could reason how much any item should weigh, it wasn't really something all too set in stone. So they just gave that table as a way to reference against standards. To list everything would've been unusual and still wouldn't cover anything a DM could include in their game. At any rate, there's no way you're carrying enough to be any slower than 12" movement, you can be certain you have that right here.
I honestly can't believe it's been that long
Thank you for yet another incredible history lesson! Have you tried to make a course on ttrpg history?
they found a d20 in ancient roman ruins, they have been around for a very long time
Their use, however, is unknown. One guess is incense holders.
It was Prophecy
wow!!! that's amazing!
I cracked up when he said perfectly valid question, and then just ignored any reponse
I'm old enough to remember this system....😮
I tried running Alternity when it came out. I was not impressed. I look forward to your interpretation, maybe you'll notice something i missed and it will be less janke.
D20s were used for scientific uses, usually two at the same time to simulate a d100 and had the faces of 0-9 twice. Players would mark one side to represent the tens place so it would be a true D20.
The thing about the lack of skills or adjacent skill like abilities, like Thief Skills, is that OD&D assumed character competence for a lot of actions, and player intelligence/skill to think of solutions with what they had and what their surroundings were. At least before the Thief class was introduced. However even with the Thief class, it’s widely interpreted that Thief Skills aren’t meant to mean that only thieves can climb walls or move silently etc, but that only thieves can do so without having to adjust themselves. Like thieves can attempt move silently, without having to take off loud armor, or climb walls without the assistance of climbing gear. The rules for OD&D are just extremely difficult to understand unfortunately, so a lot of people are just not gonna be able to know what they can and can’t do, since it goes into depth about some things, but are fairly vague or light on other things.
Always rad!
An anti-cleric by the rules is literally just any chaotic cleric. There's nothing saying a player can’t be a chaotic cleric, unless you as a GM rule that players cant be chaotic.
I suppose there’d be value in treating them exclusively as monsters but I think it’s a better interpretation that the anti clerics are those clerics which serve chaos, and this is supported by later rules.
This is amazing lol
The sanest way I can interupt the Illusionist is that their Prime requistites is Intelligence but they need 15 dex to qualify, for assassin's I guess my interruptation would be to stack Modifiers for all 3 and you need 12 or higher in all but like this is obviously like impossible to parse.
Alternity rules!
I would have taken her as a valid character back in the 70's when I was DMing from that mess of books. They led to many animated discussions.
The reason it descends is because first class is better than second class , it is armor CLASS after all
Do those correlate to the modern 3 core books? The first and second sound like Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual
Rolemaster / Spacemaster / Cyberspace
HARP
All Star Wars Edition
All Edition based on The Lord of the Rings
Oh No. your avatar is ANIMATED.
There's less clear skills here. Sometimes you could roll against attribute with a d20. I'm not sure how specifically Int would determine if a PC can take a certain action. And what actions they mean.
Thief skills are not meant to be a universal skill system. Thieves are the utility class. They are not things you as an MU are trained to be able to do effectively. You can always try, but you're likely to have limited success. What do you do? It's in your name, those spells you have, your magic, that is what you do. Classes back then were roles essentially, you have a particular playstyle that is very careful, you start off weak and reliant on clever and conservative use of your spells, as you slowly advance into more powerful magic, and eventually earn the status of one of the most powerful potential characters in all of early D&D.
Oh hey, you're animated now
I wonder how many clarifications on this exist out there... Given Gary Gygax answered questions personally by phone at that time I guess they didn't see fixing all the ambiguous things as a priority. The answers probably exist somewhere, though some might only be in someone's head.
This is like Pokemon Red/Green for TTRPGs
I appreciate the OG rules having Assassins be neutral. I always remember being kinda upset they got made Evil Only later, which for me sorta messed with the idea of like, a James Bond type who does indeed have a license to retire people. Even back as a kid I thought that was weird. Interesting how it wasn't *always* like that(and tended to get fixed in much later editions, I think 3rd was the last time they forced the Evil alignment by RAW-we of course never followed it.)
In od&d the only alignments were Law, Neutral, and Chaos. It was more about what side of an eternal war you were on. Good and evil existed as concepts, but were too individual in comparison.
exactly. I mean, is an OBGYN doctor who performed dozens of abortions evil? I don't think so.
Have you ever played or did a video on Harnmaster rpg? I would love to see that game done.
Magic-User sounds like Car Driver.
Ha, the magic-user in my GURPS game is a pyromaniac... so he's more like a Magic-Abuser.
they told the mage guild they were gonna practice casting, they just never specified which one!
Car Driver is a perfectly acceptable class in my GURPS: Formula 1 RPG that I just made up
@@ImpalerVladTepes They are referred to as templates in GURPS. 😂
@@slaapliedje uh... Classes are sub-templates in GURPS: F1 and uh... Car Driver is a class of the Vehicle Operator template. Yeah, that's it. That's clearly what I meant. Don't you feel silly now.
Regarding Nudity in DND .... .1e Monster manual 1 had it (possibly the same nudity you showed) as did Deities and Demigods I think.
Yep. I know Type V demons and harpies, along with Blibdoolpoolp, had visible boobs. (There could be other examples; those are just the ones I can recall.)
i hope you make a hunter the reckoning fifth edition character
Adjusted for inflation, that is over 60 dollars.
How is a Lvl 1 Fighting-Man already a "Veteran" and then progresses to "Warrior" and later "Swordsman". It seems like those 3 terms were accidentally put in the opposite order. (Or Gary Gygax didn't know what a veteran is, which seems unlikely)
The d10 did not exist? Well, that would explain why the fighting man had a d8 hit dice then.
I love D&D, but I have no desire to go back that far. AD&D 1st edition was where I started, and it has plenty of janky mechanics. I think AD&D 2nd edition is more my speed, but I do enjoy the newer editions.
although i do would like to try ogdnd i do absolutely hate random character creation
Wait wait, you quit right before we could find out what happens when psionic attacks are used against a character with no psionic strength points left!
that "9-12" for average isn't 9 and 12, it's 9 through 12. so 9, 10, 11, or 12. So 2 above and 2 below the average roll of 10.5