OED Fantasy Rules v1.04 Released

As many of us head back to work and school, I wanted to share the labors of some gaming work that I've done over the summer. In that spirit, I've updated my Original Edition Delta house rules to version 1.04, and made them available on the main page of the OED Games website.

If you check it out, among the main changes you'll see is that I've split off the Player's Rules from the Judge's Rules into two separate documents. This allows you to hand the short core version of the rules to interested players (the former fits on one sheet of paper, actually), and consider the slightly longer set of behind-the-screen suggestions for judges (what I personally play by) on your own. Another reason this seemed to make sense is that the player's rules seem to have become pretty stable in the last few years of playtesting, while the judge's rules are still somewhat in flux (in fact, at the end you'll see a short list of planned still-to-come future expansions).

The other big formatting change is that I've started adding extensive endnotes to all the rules, citing classic rules, outside articles and interviews, pulp literature, and blog posts where these ideas germinated and got tossed around -- along with various difficult points considered, "proud nails", and so forth. The hope is that this helps others ("gaming archeologists", as Prof. L. Schwarz calls us) to track down where these ideas came from more quickly, help them get a grip on the various issues being balanced, and save others time from re-doing the same scholarly research over and over again. (Of course, just ignore the section at the end if that's not your bag.)

As for the game rules themselves, you'll find some very-small edits to the Player's Rules, like a slightly streamlined presentation of the weapon and encumbrance mechanics. The Judge's Rules has a lot more new stuff, like consolidations of the research on player statistics, monster metrics, exploration, combat, and rewards that we've seen here on the blog (and some more besides). I've tried to go through and share most of the copious margin-notes that I have in my copies of the OD&D LBBs, that no one has ever seen before. There's also a new Player Aid Card and even a promotional flyer (under Add-Ons) if you want to share the drama with others.

Hope that's helpful to some of your games! As always, thoughtful feedback and comments on what you see are warmly welcomed here. Hope everyone has a safe and rewarding season coming up.

Original Edition Delta Fantasy Rules v1.04 at OEDGames.com

Gygax on Slings

Earlier this year, I had a post inspired by some scholarly research that said, perhaps counter-intuitively, that slings were at least as powerful a missile weapon as bows, and perhaps moreso -- although the amount of training required for slings was far more extensive and difficult than that needed for later types. I just realized that, like many other topics, Gygax was far out ahead of this one, with a two-page article on exactly that subject in the last Strategic Review, Vol. II, No. 2 (April 1976). He writes:

With great practice the slinger could achieve respectable accuracy — perhaps as excellent as that performed by a well-trained bowman. So on the counts of range and effectiveness the sling was at least the equal to the ancient bow (and just as equal to the medieval bow too), but it was somewhat slower in its rate of fire. Perhaps the telling factor regarding the sling was usage. While it was known by most peoples, few really specialized in its use. Because, like the bow, it required constant training and practice to use effectively, certain peoples constantly supplied most of the slingers to ancient armies — notably the Rhodians and Balaerics. As so many more peoples used the bow, it is natural that the latter would be more commonly found. Also, while it is possible to train troops to the use of the bow so as to make them at least passable archers within a reasonable period of time, the sling (as do the longbow and composite horsebow) requires familiarity and training from youth. Perhaps the disadvantages of slower rate of fire, fewer users, and long training for accuracy eventually caused the sling to be completely displaced by the bow in the Middle Ages, but it certainly wasn’t due to that weapon’s ineffectiveness against the armor of that period. Had slingers been available during the medieval period their ability to employ the shield, their ability to function in wet weather, and the relative ease of procuring or manufacturing missiles (as opposed to arrows or quarrels) would have made them popular contingents until plate armor came into fashion again in the Fourteenth Century. It is worth noting that the Spaniards who encountered the sling in America found this Incan weapon but little inferior to their own arquebuses, that it could hurl a missile which would kill a horse with a single blow, and these slung stones could shatter a sword at 30 yards.

In short, he agrees with all of our recent scholarship except on the issue of slings also possibly being as fast or faster in fire rate than bows (which is reflected in his AD&D rule that gives slings half the rate of bows). He even includes the following illustration, with the caption, "ASSYRIAN SLINGERS, swinging their slings parallel to their bodies, stand behind the archers in this drawing based on a relief from Nineveh showing one of the campaigns of Sennacherib (704-681 B.C) Their place in battle suggests that they outranged archers.":

Testing unbalanced dice in water

I've written about how to use standard statistical procedures to test for unfair dice a few times in the past (one, two, three, four). As noted in the last of those linked articles, for a d20 this probably involves some hundreds of dice-rolls at a minimum to get a test of sufficient power.

Here's a clever and much faster way of doing a check for unbalanced dice. This is from a video sent to me a while back by reader Ro Annis. Get a bowl of water, pour salt in to increase the buoyancy factor, and throw your dice in. If they repeatedly and consistently spin up the same face, then that die is obviously unbalanced. Like the second die in the video here.

I can imagine a few corner-cases where this may not suffice -- like if the die is balanced by weight, but the faces are malformed so as to bias the rolls on a table. But this is a great and fast way to do a first-pass check. Thanks, Ro!

Saturday Software: Giant Packs in Javascript

A few weeks back I shared my Java application for generating giant packs in Gygax's classic G1-3 adventures. Reader Random Wizard then took my code and made an online version in Javascript at his Kirith.com site. Pretty sweet!

Giant Packs Online Generator

800th Anniversary of the Battle of Dover

Today is the 800th anniversary of the Battle of Dover -- what some repute to be the first-ever use of sailed-vessel tactics in naval warfare. Break out your favorite sailing rules and have a toss to observe!

Eustace the Monk once belonged to a monastic order, but he broke his vows and became a pirate along with his brothers and friends. His early successes at this endeavor attracted many lawless men and his pirates became a menace to shipping in the English Channel. The English opponents of Eustace credited the man with "diabolical ingenuity"...

Read more at Wikipedia.

Exploration Movement Rates

How long would it really take to explore a dungeon or cave? I'm just talking moving through the place and roughly mapping the perimeter. Not included: Searching through chests, desks, libraries; looking for secret doors; disabling puzzles or traps; spelunking through tunnels; etc. It does presume at least being on the lookout for possibly dangerous animals or enemies. It's hard to say how you'd even be able to measure this.

Here's the best stab I can take at it so far: the U.S. National Park Service has a very nicely laid-out website for Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. In particular, it details over a dozen different tours on the site, including specifics for duration, distance, and difficulty. From these we can compute the average speed on these cave tours:

Method: The first four columns above are transcribed from the NPS website; "difficulty level" is an enumeration I added for the different difficulty descriptors; and speed is calculated as expected. Side observations: The "Trog" tour is, perhaps ironically, for kids only. The "Violet City Lantern" tour uses only open-flame lanterns (no modern lights) so as to recreate the experience of exploring the caves -- and living in an underground tuberculosis hospital that was located there -- in the early 19th century. (This latter sounds like among the most interesting to me!)

Conclusions: The speeds on these tours range from a minimum of 0.2 mph to a maximum of 1.5 mph, with an average of 0.7 mph. There is effectively no correlation between difficulty level and speed (R² = 0.04). For example, the "Easy" difficulty tours include both the slowest and the fastest speeds. There is a statistically negligible trend for the more difficult tours to be a bit faster.

Can we use this as a metric to properly gauge dungeon exploration speeds? Obviously, the experiment lacks many things: They are all safely pre-mapped routes, no one is in fear of being attacked, they're being led by knowledgeable guides, etc. On the other hand: The tours all have to account for civilians in all kinds of shape, they are organizing fairly large groups, the guides are stopping for discussions and questions, they're being environmentally careful (unlike tomb-robbing adventurers), they go up-and-down through rugged cave areas (whereas dungeons are mostly level constructions), etc. I'm sure the data is biased one way or the other, but I can't tell which.

Let's look at the exploratory move rates in OD&D. First, recall that standard human walking/marching speed is around 3 mph (from whence we get the "league" unit). OD&D sets basic encumbrance levels and move rates on Vol-1, p. 15 (and these are basically copied from Chainmail), with the exploratory turn movement in Vol-3, p. 8. This latter is described as "ten minutes to move about two moves -- 120 feet for a fully armored character". In summary we get this:

So that's pretty slow; only about 1/4 mile per hour for unburdened men; or, approximately equal to the slowest (and easiest) tour at Mammoth Cave Park. Of course, AD&D reduced the rate even further, dictating not "two moves" but only a single move of 10' per inch in a 10-minute exploration turn -- that is, half again slower than the numbers in the table above (1/8 mph at the maximum). The OD&D rate is slow, while the AD&D rate is very slow.

So today I'm thinking that those movement rates are probably too slow. Consider the following: These days I'm in the habit of using half-hour exploratory "turns". That seems like about the right pace for wandering monster checks, and it's also scaled to the approximate number of encounters per game session (e.g., many tournament writing guides suggest planning on about 7 encounters in a 4-hour game slot, plus time for setup; and in my experience this is roughly accurate). If we set exploratory movement conservatively below the average Mammoth Park tour speed, at say 1/2 mph, then this conveniently converts to nearly MV (in inches) × 100 feet per half-hour. This proposed rate is shown below:

Obviously, that's roughly double the exploratory move rate given in OD&D Vol-3 (and 4 times the rate seen in AD&D). On the other hand, it's half the underworld tunnel move rate specified in module D1-3, on the order of 1 mph  (one mile per MV per day, that is, 12 miles in a day for a person with 12" move). This seems possibly about right. It also seems roughly to scale with what my players cover in real gaming time when exploring and mapping, which I like as a usable rule-of-thumb. Of course, extensive area searches, fighting encounters, etc., add to this simple movement figure. Movement through previously mapped/cleared areas can be at a rate of 5 times this (as in AD&D PHB), so around 2.5 mph, a bit less than normal walking speed.

Can you think of any better way to model dungeon exploration move rates with real-world experimental data?

Saturday Survey: Dragon Breath

I've taken the opportunity to ask a few polls on the AD&D 1st Edition Facebook group. Today: Does the damage from dragon breath get reduced after the dragon takes damage?

The AD&D Monster Manual is certainly ambiguous in its statement that "The breath weapon causes damage equal to the dragon's hit points (half that amount if a saving throw is made) on each and every creature hit by the breath weapon." (p. 30, 1977). This is somewhat frustrating, because the ambiguity could be cleared up with the addition of a single word, either "current" or "maximum". Of course, the D&D Basic line (Moldvay/Mentzer/Allston) does specify "remaining number of hit points" (in boldface in Moldvay p. B34). Somewhat less well-known is the fact that the AD&D Fiend Folio dragons also specify damage by "current hit points" (entries on p. 28-29, 1981). On the other hand, the OD&D language gives a damage amount "per [hit] die", which in the most literal reading leans in the direction of being disconnected from the dragon's actual hit points.

One interesting thing is that a close reading of the texts up to 1978 seems to indicate that Gygax (et. al.) simply had no language available to distinguish between current hit points and maximal hit points for a given character. For example, here is an excerpt from the AD&D PHB section on Character Hit Points (p. 34, 1978):

Hit points can be magically restored by healing potions, cure wounds spells, rings of regeneration, or even by wish spells. However, a character's hit points can never exceed the total initially scored by hit dice, constitution bonus (or penalty) and magical devices. For example, if a character has 26 hit points at the beginning of an adventure, he or she cannot drink  a potion or be enchanted to above that number, 26 in this case.

Note the convoluted formulation "total initially scored by hit dice, constitution bonus (or penalty) and magical devices" in lieu of the shorter, modern, phrase "maximum hit points". You can search all through the MM and PHB and never find either the phrase "current hit points" or "maximum hit points". In the DMG, the phrase "maximum hit points" does appear twice, but in this context it means something totally different than the modern usage -- namely, the maximum possibly rolled, i.e., getting all of 8 pips per die (e.g., paladin's warhorse p. 18; reincarnated badger p. 44). Another example of the ambiguity of not having this linguistic distinction can be found in the discussion of Energy Draining (DMG p. 119).

Back to the topic of Dragon breath. I find that what makes this topic unusually contentious is that whatever convention one is accustomed to playing with, most players will argue that it is "obvious", perhaps mis-remembering some explicit statement in the Monster Manual making it so, and in many cases taking offense at any suggestion otherwise. (Hey, Internet, y'all.) At any rate, asking this question on the Facebook AD&D form prompted an unusually large, boisterous, and lopsided response.

So with N = 142, 84% of the respondents said "No", with only 16% saying "Yes", on the issue of whether dragon breath effect is reduced by damage on the dragon.