Skeleton/Zombie Hit Dice are Confusing

Last weekend, I was copying some information from my OD&D Reference Sheet roster and realized that the line for Skeletons/Zombies was totally different from what I recalled from the Vol-2 text itself. Then I backtracked and realized that the entry in the 1st Printing PDF was totally different from the 6th Printing. I wrote a whole blog analysis about that, then realized that the folks at the OD&D Discussion forum hashed this out a few years ago. Here I ruthlessly swipe the findings by moderator "waysofthearth" and other researchers:

This hot mess completely changes how I've thought of Skeletons and Zombies in OD&D over the last ten years. To my surprise, their hit dice actually started off at (1, 2), and then through a series of typographical confusions and bum-fungled attempts at correcting the ambiguous use of two slashes, changed to (½, 1) in the main text... and some semi-random permutation of those in places like the Reference Sheets and Holmes Basic. By AD&D Gygax had them back at (1, 2) where they started (and likewise any other edition post-Holmes). In the linked thread, Mike Mornard also testifies that the classical play always had them at those latter values.

So at this point I'm going to chalk up the (½, 1) values as just a never-fully-corrected typo confusion that crept into OD&D, and should likely be ignored. The (1, 2) values are certainly what almost all players of classic D&D are familiar with.

As a result, in the last few days I've changed those values in the OED Monster Database to (1, 2), and thus relievedly have them more compatible with most editions of D&D. At some point I need to inject the edits into other places like assessments, monster level tables, Book of War armies, etc. Glad I looked into this, and big thanks to the OD&D Discussion guys for the invaluable work.


P.S.: It's slightly awkward that with Zombies at 2 HD, the Monster Metrics program assesses them at 1.4 EHD, which nominally rounds down to 1 (the same as Skeletons). Zombies with 2 HD and crappy armor, attacks, and move are either the toughest monster in the Level 1 table, or the weakest monster in the Level 2 table. I guess I'll manually set them to 2 EHD so that they're in the Level 2 table, partly for purposes of tradition and completion.