AuldDragon's AD&D Blog

Hey folks, unfortunately I was unable to get a deity done this month. Strangely enough, it’s hard to write when all you can do is itch after breaking out in hives from new detergent! I’ll definitely have one ready to go next month, however. Apologies!

Hello everyone, I want to thank you all for the comments and views you’ve given the project over the years, and let you know that I have created a new Patreon account specifically for the project for those who wish to show their support for the project in that way. A long term goal for the project’s Patreon page is to start commissioning artwork similar to what was found in the Faiths and Avatars series of books as well, and that is listed on the Patreon page. The new Patreon page can be found here:
https://www.patreon.com/MonsterMythology

If you would rather support the project by donating to me on Ko-Fi, you can do so here:
https://ko-fi.com/aulddragon

Thanks for all the years of support everyone!

I’ve been rather busy this month and wasn’t able to complete a deity unfortunately, but for those looking for other AD&D things involving me, I appeared as a guest host on episode 141 of the THACO’s Hammer Podcast (I last appeared on episode 84). You can get the podcast on iTunes, or from their website here.

In addition, for those unaware (since I don’t advertise it much here), I am currently running a 2nd Edition Spelljammer game that is livestreamed on Twitch.tv every Saturday at Noon Eastern Time (GMT-4 during the summer). Past broadcasts are available on my Youtube Channel in the Playlist category Dungeons & Dragons Actual Play Sessions.

So I was doing some cleaning up, and I found my collection of Dragon Dice, a collectible/trading dice game TSR published back in the mid 90s. It was an attempt to get into the market dominated by Magic: The Gathering, but with something different (they were also trying with their own card games, such as Spellfire and Blood War). What makes Dragon Dice especially famous is that the head of TSR at the time tried to get a cheaper price from the manufacturer (as the first run of 35,000 sets sold out entirely at GenCon), and they would only do so with a large order…of one million sets (not dice, *sets,* which consisted of a good number of dice each, and it was the starter pack, not the expansion packs).

Needless to say they couldn’t actually sell that much, and it was a contributing factor to the downfall of TSR. I learned since I found my dice that they are still being sold; apparently another company is still selling the sets, which are apparently from that enormous run (they purchased the surplus when WotC was going to landfill them).

All of that is to segue into me trying to sell my collection, which you can see here:

Full list of the individual dice below the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the years since Wizards of the Coast replaced AD&D 2nd Edition with D&D 3rd Edition, I’ve seen a lot of invectives hurled at THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class 0). It is considered frightening; when people mention an old computer game that uses it, such as Baldur’s Gate, almost invariably someone will say something to the effect of “Oh god, THAC0!” But THAC0 shouldn’t be frightening, and it isn’t even a difficult system. At its heart, it is a simple form of algebra, and quite beautiful.

Take for example a situation where a 3rd level fighter comes across an orc wearing scale armor. To figure out whether the fighter hits the orc, there are three components: the fighter’s THAC0 of 18, the orc’s Armor Class of 6, and the Attack Roll; they function much like the sides of an algebraic equation:

AC | THAC0 | Attack Roll
The relationship between these sides is as follows: AC and THAC0 are both descending from a positive number to a negative number, while the attack roll is ascending. The correlation between these numbers makes the system easy to use and flexible.

With these numbers, there are actually two ways of figuring out what numbers need to be rolled to determine  whether the orc is hit. The most common way is to modify the THAC0 score with the Armor Class. Since you are essentially moving from one side of an equation to the other, you subtract the Armor Class from THAC0, resulting in a modified number of 12 (i.e. it becomes THAC6, or To Hit Armor Class 6; in this way you could say you are “solving for THACx” as in an algebra equation). Another way to do it is to treat Armor Class as a bonus to the Attack Roll; i.e. add the AC of 6 to the number rolled; if it is larger than the THAC0, it is a hit. In either case, you can see that a roll of 12 or higher hits.

In more advanced scenarios, there are modifiers to the rolls. Such modifiers will always be bonuses or penalties; as described above, such modifiers can be applied to any one of the three “sides” (so long as they are only applied once). A bonus to a creature’s Armor Class can be seen as a penalty to the THAC0 or the Attack Roll, while a bonus to an Attack Roll can be seen as a bonus to THAC0 or a penalty to Armor Class. Take for example the following scenario:

The fighter is under the effects of a bless spell while using a sword +1, gaining a total +2 bonus to hit, but the orc has donned a ring of invisibility, which penalizes attacks against it by -4. These numbers can be applied to any individual aspect of the system (so long as it is only applied once). For example, one can apply these numbers to the orc’s armor class, resulting in an AC of 4 (6, +2 for the bless and sword to 8, then -4 for the invisibility to 4). Alternately, one can apply these numbers to the THAC0, resulting in 20 (18, -2 for the bless and sword to 16, then +4 for the invisibility to 21); this number would then be used instead of the original 18 to determine the fighter’s ability to hit an AC of 6. Finally, these numbers can be applied as modifiers to the attack roll; using the original THAC0 of 18 and AC of 6, the number rolled on the die would be penalized by -2 (+2 for the bless and sword, -4 for the invisibility). In most circumstances, individual modifiers would be added to different sides, however; one-time or short-term bonuses or penalties (such as the bless spell and the invisibility, cover, terrain, etc.) are best applied to the attack roll, while long term or semi-permanent modifiers are best applied to the Armor Class or THAC0 (Dexterity or Strength modifiers, magical weapons and armor, spells that will stay in effect for a whole battle, etc.). This results in a flexible and easy to use system, that also teaches or reinforces basic algebraic concepts.

One final note about the beauty of THAC0: With one exception, each group advances on a mathematic progression. Warriors advance one point every level, priests advance two points every three levels, rogues advance one point every two levels, and wizards advance one point every three levels; all starting at 20. The exception is the monster progression, which gains two points every two hit dice, starting at 19, with creatures less than 1 HD having a THAC0 of 20. Setting aside the slight variation of the monster progression, this regularity adds to the elegance.

On the gaming aspects of this system, the progression of both Armor Class and THAC0 from a positive number to a negative number means they are logically constrained, being limited to the opposite negative number of the starting positive number. This aspect keeps the numbers grounded and tied to specific aspects of the physical game world (while still being abstract), whereas an unlimited system completely severs the system from the physical world of the game.

I’ve seen a lot of talk on forums over the years about “Balance” with regards to Specialty Priests. In general, most of the arguments, in my opinion, are ridiculous or (at best) looking at the issue in the wrong way.

The arguments tend to frame it as if all priests should be equally appealing to players, with equivalently powerful abilities at specific levels, and similar sphere distributions. But why should that be the case? Gods can represent a wide variety of portfolios, some of which work well for adventurers, some of which do not, but are by no means less crucial to the fantasy society they are designed for. Gods of fire, magic, luck, and healing will probably be more appealing to players and more useful on adventures than gods of peace, architecture, or history. For that reason, a DM creating specialty priests for the latter powers should not feel they have to choose specific powers that will draw players to want to play them. As adventurers are only a small subset of the population, those other priests would be quite useful to society as a whole, in addition to being useful to adventurers as NPCs between adventures, and their powers should reflect what the populace would look to them to do regularly. And, of course, some players may want to play them, just for the added challenge; there’s nothing wrong with that.

Besides some portfolios being better aligned to adventuring careers, certain portfolios align better with certain spells or abilities. For example, deities of music or love may get access to the power to charm person, but a deity specifically of enchantment/charm magic will probably get charm person earlier or get more daily uses of it, because the spell more closely aligns with the deity’s portfolio. Is this unbalanced? Not at all. It takes into consideration what the deities represent. One should expect that a deity of a very specific subject matter would grant priests greater powers over that subject matter than a deity that is much more generalized, or a deity whose portfolio only touches upon the matter. Similarly, the former two gods may get some other enchantment/charm spells from the wizard spell lists, but the latter deity, as a power specifically of that type of magic, may open that whole school of magic to his priests. Meanwhile, the former two deities would grant abilities that the third would have no access to at all. In fact, having more spells available to a priest can be a curse in disguise, as they have harder choices to make when praying for spells, and may be more likely to take specialized spells that turn out to not be very useful in upcoming situations. Usually only ample time to prepare and knowledge of what is to come truly turns a large spell selection into a significant advantage.

Of course, that’s not to say that a specialty priest of a god of meteors should be allowed at-will use of meteor swarm at first level. There are, after all, multiple types of game balance, and that would clearly violate one of them. But there’s also no rule that says certain powers, such as meteor swarm, can only be granted at Nth level; with suitable restrictions, or with greater usage or flexibility, powers can be granted at a variety of levels without causing problems with gameplay.

I’m sure all of you are by now aware of the new offering of PDFs of prior editions of Dungeons & Dragons over at dndclassics.com. However, I’m not sure how many of you had an opportunity to take advantage of WotC’s last offering that ended around 2007. Personally, while I was generally disappointed by the scan quality of those older releases, they were priced properly at $5 each. This new offering doubles the price of most AD&D and OD&D releases at $10 (baring those that were cheaper when released, which is mostly adventures and of lesser interest to me); even if the scans are perfect and incredibly high resolution, they’re not worth that, when hard copies of many of the books are often only slightly more than that. I’m not even willing to purchase one to compare quality; I would have if they were $5, and I would be willing to replace a number of the PDFs I do have if the quality was significantly improved. Finally, two stores offered the PDFs during the last offering: Paizo and Drive-Thru RPG (called RPGNow back then, I believe). This time, the PDFs are only offered through dndclassics.com, which is run by Drive-Thru RPG. I have heard repeatedly that if someone bought a PDF years ago that is amongst the current offering, they can download the new version for free. So on top of gouging for PDFs now, they are also screwing over a significant number of people who just happened to buy from the other store. There is very little that I can imagine to prevent a credit being given to people who bought from Paizo, as Paizo almost certainly had to make sales information available to WotC, which I would think would include the ability to verify order numbers and the like. If they did not, then they could easily have been able to lie to WotC over how many PDFs were sold, thus pocketing all the profits on the sales. Therefore, WotC should have access to what  was ordered before, or have a way to verify what was ordered before, and issue credits. Not doing this means that either WotC doesn’t care about their customer base (a definite possibility) or Paizo is refusing to assist with the information to spite D&D, which is to a degree against their own interests, considering how many people might want to convert old D&D adventures and settings to Pathfinder for their own use.

Overall, I’m incredibly disappointed and not a little bit angry over how this has gone.

The first posts I’ll be making on this blog will be reposts from threads on The Piazza, so there is a single source of information for these subjects.  Feel free to ask questions and leave your thoughts!