Friday Figures: Fighter Multiattacks

Here's another poll I ran on the ODD74 boards a while back. This dovetails with our article Monday on running mass fights in classic D&D -- we highlighted there how critical for balance purposes the original rule was in which fighters got a number of attacks equal to their level against normal (circa 1 HD) opponents. 

That's not a rule that appears anywhere in the Holmes Basic/B-X/BECMI line, or editions of D&D from 3E on. It's not even explicitly stated for fighters in the OD&D books themselves. It's not a rule that I really like design-wise. So at the time I was myself rather skeptical, and asked the community if they really played by that rule. (On the other hand, it is explicit in Chainmail Fantasy and 1E AD&D, so I wouldn't bother to ask this question in a forum for those rulesets.)

Many of these poll-presentations are meant to spotlight the fact that many pretty basic mechanics in Original D&D have wildly varying interpretations -- that there is no one true OD&D game (even for essential things like initiative, the action sequence, morale, etc.). But this is not one of those things. Somewhat to my surprise at the time, the response here was very lopsided: Almost everyone agreed that was a core rule. We got 16 "yes" votes, only 1 "no", and 0 "other". So I spent a bit of time re-evaluating the evidence, and why I was so far out in left field on the issue.

Briefly, here's where the evidence led me to think maybe "no":

• The multiattacks rule is explicit in the Chainmail Fantasy rules (prior to OD&D); it's the essential way in which heroes & superheroes operate.
• The rule is also explicit in the AD&D 1E PHB (after OD&D); it's given as a key ability for the fighter class and its sub-classes.
• Some people point to a paragraph in OD&D Vol-2 (the Monsters book), p. 5, that says everything gets a number of attacks according to their hit dice vs. normal men. I don't find that to be persuasive, because (a) it's in the monster book and not explicit for PC fighters, and (b) no one I know has ever run D&D combat that way for monsters. 

But on closer inspection, there's two places where Gary wrote about OD&D that imply the intended answer was "yes":

• The Strategic Review #2 has an OD&D FAQ, with an example of combat in which a 4th-level fighter gets 4 attacks per round against orcs (strangely doing so unarmed, but moving on...)
• Swords & Spells p. 1, paragraph 2, notes that a solo 12th level fighter will do 1.2 times the damage given normally for a 1:10 scale figure, which works out to be the same thing. 

So in total: The fighter-multiattacks rule is written into Gary's rules before OD&D, after OD&D, in the FAQ for OD&D, and in the mass-combat rules for OD&D. So in total: yeah, it's pretty clearly a consistent intent there (and another example of his tendency to "implicitly assume rules from the prior edition").

After that is when I realized that in addition, all the monsters in OD&D that appear in numbers of hundreds are precisely the ones that fighters get multiattacks against (excepting gnolls, but then they too were 1 HD in the pre-D&D draft).

A few other interesting tidbits on this topic:

• The one place in OD&D where this rule is arguably given (the Vol-2 passage), says, "Attack/Defense capabilities versus normal men are simply a matter of allowing one roll as a man-type for every hit die...". There are a small number of players who attest that they apply the "roll as a man-type" strictly, so that the multiattacks themselves are all rolled as if the attacker was 1st level. I've never done this, but: it is compatible with the Chainmail mechanic, and it would solve my problem with the discontinuity/double-dipping effect of the rule.
• Some commenters on Monday were worried about how much play might slow down because of all the rolling for the multiattacks -- and I share that concern. Interestingly, the ODD74 forum has reports that at a later date Gygax -- and maybe Arneson, too -- boiled the whole thing down to a single die-roll in this way: if your fighter is level N, then roll a dN, and that's how many normal men you put down. (E.g.: At 8th-level, roll a d8 for total casualties this round.) I think that's fascinating. I still don't want to see your damn d7, though, so don't start with me on that.
  
• Even though I posted that poll a year ago in February (and the poll itself is long closed), interestingly, the conversation is still going on even as I write this!
  

There are several other interesting takes or modifications to this rule. If you have an account, see here for the discussion thread on the ODD74 forums. 

Do you normally use the fighter multiattacks rule? Do you import it to a ruleset that normally doesn't have it on the books (Holmes, B/X, BECMI, 3E+, etc.)? What other novel modifications do you make to it?