HelgaCon OD&D Postmortem

The last event at HelgaCon last weekend was my OD&D game (Original Edition Delta house rules), and I thought was a whole lot of fun to play through (the scenario is posted a few entries below). We played for 4 hours, and played through 7 encounters in that time (including PC generation, 1 TPK, a second round of PC generation, scenario reset, and a short lunch break). One thing I was really looking forward to is having a group of really sharp, deeply knowledgable gamers bang on my Original Edition Delta, and see what came out of it for gameplay implications. I'll have a post for detailed rules tweaks later on, for now here's the most major points.

What Went Right

1. Not Having Clerics. I love, love, love not having to deal with clerics in my game anymore. In some sense D&D finally feels "true" to me in a way that it never did before. I don't have to worry about gods, I don't have to worry about church hierarchies, I don't have to worry about Bible-themed spell lists distracting from the pulp-like fantasy, I don't have to watch auto-magical full healing over every day's rest. I had one player ask "What gods are there in this game?" and I was pleasantly surprised at what tumbled out of my mouth: "You don't know; it's a mystery." When was the last time you could say that in a game of D&D? And isn't that what magic, fantasy, and the occult are all really supposed to be about - a sense of wonder and mystery?

2. Combat Sequence. In OED I've got a fairly ironed-out combat sequence, in which everyone moves and attacks in order around the table. No attack-of-opportunity "interrupts", no add-on threats on spellcasting, no special charge mechanics, no individual initiative, etc. Importantly, the first round is no-movement, but any other attacks are permitted, which results in an initial phase of missile-fire and spellcasting, before the hand-to-hand fighters crash into melee. (Or occasionally melee is immediate, as we discovered, if attackers pop up right next to you.) This is unique and a bit surprising to players, but it was quickly processed, and again it feels "right" in the way I'd always imagined D&D, without ever seeing it happen in play before.

3. Weapon Rules. I've got a very short, lightweight set of modifiers for each class of weapons in OED (inspired, but massively pruned, from what appears in the Greyhawk supplement). I feel like it did exactly the job I wanted; it provided a morsel for thought for each weapon choice, quickly digested, and satisfying for all involved. It also gave rise to some "emergent behavior" with the following addition: The week before the game, I thought to establish that readying any new weapon takes a full round, with the exception of blades in a scabbard (dagger, sword, two-handed-sword), which can be drawn and used to attack in the same round.

Now, one of my superior players put this together with the no-move-in-1st-round rule (see above) and realized that it would be beneficial to carry a sheathed sword and dagger, and be able to draw-and-throw the dagger in the first round of each combat for free. Now, obviously, the dagger has minimal damage and a short range, and I don't think he ever actually scored a hit with it. But when I think about all the gymnastics that, say, 3E had to go through in an attempt to make knife-throwing viable (feat trees, prestige classes, etc.), this unexpected product of a few simple weapons rules made me very happy indeed.

What Went Wrong

1. Mutually-Assured-Sleep. Okay, so now you've got the sleep spell. When running OD&D I give everything a saving throw, which I thought would fix a lot of problems (see here, item #4; the no-save language didn't appear until Supplement I). The scenario I was running was for 3rd-level PCs, and the master villains were a cabal of 3rd-level witches (magic-users). Thus, almost everybody involved took sleep, which I didn't think would be that much of a problem, since it only affects 1d6 3rd-level figures, and it's also getting a saving throw.

But, to a large degree this turned into an exercise in sleep-fighting. Whoever got initiative (which was the witches, each time) would throw out a sleep spell. And every time I rolled the d6 for number affected (out of the 6 PCs in the game), it came up a "6" (afterwards I tested the die I was using, and it did pass the fairness test stipulated here). The saves are pretty tough at this level, too - while something like "death ray or poison" is given an easier saving throw, sleep just counts as regular "staves or spells" (about 25% success at this level); the first time this happened, the whole party failed their saves. Result: Instant TPK. (On top of all that, sleep also has a pretty long range of effect, as was noted by the later party trying to figure out some defense against it.)

Now, to a certain extent this was a perfect storm of unfortunate dice rolls for the party. In a second encounter, they were able to recover even when the sleep spell took down all but one of them (thanks to some fairly liberal waking-up rulings). But nontheless, it's pretty doubtful that a spell that everyone has to use (at this level, at least) is reasonably balanced.

So, what to do? Part of me wonders if I should instead use PCs of level 4+ for more "heroic" convention play (a lot like the classic tournament module range; and a lot like Arneson's very first campaign using Chainmail rules for "Heroes" as a basis). Perhaps I should rule that sleep uses the easier saves for "stone" or "polymorph/ paralyzation", since the effect largely resembles those (and that may be the easiest preliminary fix). The least desirable option would be to change the spell effect (level?) from the OD&D original source. Or, I could just decide not to worry about it and look at this particular game as a result of extreme dice rolls against the party. This one I truly don't know about.