Alternate Weapons and Combat Rules for Seven Voyages of Zylarthen and OD&D

The first edition of Seven Voyages of Zylarthen features melee and missile attack tables by weapon, not class or level. Additional to-hit adjustments are then made for higher-level characters or situational factors. All weapons generally do 1-6 points of damage. 

Here are the two main charts from the revised Electronic Edition and booklets:

I designed the weapons and combat system the way I did for three reasons:

1. I wanted to simulate how different weapons performed against different types of armor—not merely that all weapons become less effective the better the armor, but that certain weapons perform relatively better (or worse) against certain types of armor such as mail or plate. Rather than add yet another set of annoying bonuses or penalties (as was done in Greyhawk and the AD&D Players Handbook), I decided to “bake in” the effects to the main attack charts. Thus, swords and pointed weapons generally have lower target numbers to hit against unarmored or lightly armored opponents but are much less effective against mail and plate (or their creature armor equivalents such as dragon scales). On the other hand, axes and heavy blunt weapons come into their own against metal armor. Another way of putting this is that the declining “curve” on the charts is flatter for axes and heavy blunt weapons. 
2. Not only did I feel that this added more realism to combat (without losing much in playability) but it also gave more meaningful choices to players in their weapon selection. No more were, say, the mace and hammer clearly inferior to the long sword. Swords might be good all-purpose weapons, but if you were going up against heavily armored humanoids or creatures with tough hide or scales, an axe, mace or morning star might be a better bet. 
3. I was able to preserve the original conception of all weapons doing 1-6 points of damage - which, as a purist designing what was in some ways a hyper-purist game, I felt was important - while nevertheless including a mechanism for distinguishing between the effectiveness of different weapons. As a side-note (and this may be annoying to some), I also thought it was more OD&D-ish to base the combat mechanism around a central somewhat mysterious and (I hoped) in practice mathematically uncrackable chart (all those varying to-hit numbers).   

(I wrote about the historical treatment of weapons vs. armor in OD&D and AD&D here, here and here.)

Recently, however, I have come to feel that the original Zylarthen system may have been too fiddly, as well as arguably not representing the differences between weapons with sufficient magnitude. Thus, it is difficult if not impossible to memorize the charts, and the differences in the "to hit" numbers usually only amount to, say, 5% or 10% (a few pips on a twenty-sided die), which may not appear to matter as much as it should.

So I devised a new alternate system.

The main change is this: All weapons now have, all things being equal, the same chances to hit. Thus, for a 1st level character, the to-hit numbers follow the standard 10/11/12/13/14/15/16/17 progression against armor classes 9//8/7/6/5/4/3/2. This sequence is easily memorized. Though, in fact, if one wishes to suspend purity considerations by substituting an ascending armor class system - 10/11/12/13/14/15/16/17 - it becomes even easier to calculate, where the armor class simply becomes the chance to hit for a 1st level character.

This returns the to-hit numbers to the original OD&D and AD&D scheme.  

What now are the most important combat differences between weapons? There are two: 1. Weapons now have differing damage dice. And 2. some weapons—most edged and pointed weapons—have their damage die halved for attacks against the better types of armor—5, 4, 3 and 2 in a descending system, 14, 15, 16 and 17 in an ascending system or, to put it non-mathematically, metal armor (mail or plate) or the equivalent in creature terms.

This, for better or worse, is obviously much more OD&D Greyhawk than OD&D three little brown books. I suppose history might be repeating itself.

Of course, the above aren't the only combat differences, given that other considerations from Zylarthen have been preserved: Some weapons perform better or worse against large creatures, for example. And there are still other important non-combat considerations. Cost is one of them, though cost often still has an inverse relationship with weapon durability (the “optional” weapon break rules are, in my view, an important part of the overall system). Encumbrance is another. And there are various special rules that add to (or subtract from) the value of certain weapons.

OD&D purists (or, rather, hard-core purists who opposed even some of the changes in weapons and combat offered in Greyhawk) may be annoyed.

But I suppose people who enjoy rolling different-sized polyhedrons for damage will presumably be pleased.

I’m still basically a purist, but I’m comfortable with these changes and feel that they make for a good alternative combat system. I’m even warming up to the idea of ascending armor class . . .

Here are the new charts. They should be read against the background of a few other relatively minor changes—I’ve slightly adjusted the weapon class and encumbrance for a few weapons, for example. And there is now a two-handed sword!

Here is a quick summary of other rules, relevant to the above, from Seven Voyages of Zylarthen:

Encumbrance: Each "dot" or unit of encumbrance is equivalent to 2-10 pounds. Most characters only get 25 to work with, with movement declining from 13 to 12 to 9 to 6 to 3 for every five units. Carrying any item with an encumbrance of 3 or more means that you can only move at a maximum of 9. And keeping in mind that you're probably also wearing armor or carrying food (or gold) or simply trying to keep your encumbrance low so you can do thiefy things or whatever, an extra "dot" or two can often make a big difference.

Weapon Class: Under the initiative rules, the person or creature with the highest weapon class always attacks first. Subsequent rounds feature an initiative die, with ties going to the person or creature with the lowest weapon class. This obviously gives the advantage to long weapons in short fights. For long rough and tumble melee brawls not so much.

Weapon Breaks: In Zylarthen, weapons have a chance if breaking not on a fumble but on a critical hit (getting a really hard strike in may have consequences for your weapon) as well as when inflicting death blows against heavily armored or high hit dice creatures. The chance of breakage then depends on the weapon's cost (a good stand in for durability, I think) with swords and great swords having only a 1 in 20 chance of breaking, going up to 3 in 20 for daggers, spears and the like. Obviously magic weapons are largely immune. I think this makes good intuitive sense as well as tracking historical accounts of knightly duels. Often opponents would change weapons multiple times during a fight due to breakage. While things probably won't often come to that extreme in Zylarthen, dungeon explorers are well-advised to carry spares with them, especially when using cheaper weapons.         

But getting back to the alternate rules themselves, I feel that the changes reflect well the philosophy that no weapon is either pointless or perfect. All have advantages and disadvantages. Here is a quick summary.

Dagger: A great all around utility weapon. Virtually everyone has one. It's the only weapon with no encumbrance, at least if multiples are not carried. Once in close-combat it is almost as effective as a sword. It can be used in an off-hand along with another short weapon. And in extremis it may be thrown.

Axe: This weapon has many of the same advantages as a dagger as well as being a passable armor cracker.

Mace: The best armor cracker for only 1 encumbrance unit.

Sword: A good all-around weapon that does the highest potential damage of any of the 1 encumbrance unit weapons. It can be used with a shield, buckler or off-hand dagger or axe.

Hammer: The best one-handed armor cracker.

Battle Axe: The heavy two-handed axe deals out more average damage (however they are armored) of any weapon.

Long Sword: The best one-handed weapon, if price is no object, for fighting an unarmored or lightly armored foe. And it performs as well as an axe against plate.

Staff: We've improved this weapon a bit, giving it some of the defensive bonuses of a shield or buckler and knocking its encumbrance down from 3 to 2. Thus a Magic-User can now run at almost full-speed without having to drop it.

Morning Star: Sort of a cheaper and lighter battle axe for those armor crackers who don't want to be too weighed down. Its length will also allow one to usually attack first on the first round of melee.

Great Sword: I felt the game needed this. The long sword wielded with two hands didn't offer enough of an advantage. However, unlike the Fighting Man's nuke of Greyhawk and AD&D, it's encumbrance of 3 may be a negative for some players. Plus while it holds its own against heavy armor, it's not as effective in that context as a hammer, morning star or battle axe. Still, it partly make up for that by getting a +2 damage bonus against dragons and other large creatures.

Spear: This cheap weapon has a number of advantages, including enabling its user to almost always attack first in the first round and doing double damage against a charge. And it's much more effective when wielded with two hands. Unfortunately, they break a lot.

Pole Arm: Sort of a super spear, but perhaps too heavy to seriously consider taking on a dungeon delve. We've increased its encumbrance to 5.

Lance: Nice if you have a horse.

Javelins: You can take three Javelins with you at a cost of only 1 encumbrance unit, and throw them all in one round (assuming your annoyed opponent doesn't charge you). Not very effective against heavy armor, but you can't have everything.

Sling: A good light missile weapon, especially for Thieves and Halflings (who get a bonus on sling attacks), and you can always try to gather stones if you run out of bullets.

Bow: Not quite as effective as a crossbow, but its lighter. And it can penetrate armor at close ranges.

Crossbow: The king of missile weapons. It's heavy but often worth it.

********

I'll be officially writing up these alternate rules and offering them, along with some of the already existing combat rules and alternate "errata" for some of the encumbrance changes, etc., in a free supplement soon.

It may or may not show it, but I've probably put more thought and effort into weapons and combat than any other aspect of Zylarthen. Perfection is a questing beast, but stupid or "unrealistic" weapons things bug me. This may be a fault.

But to the degree that the game works, I think it does so in part due to the weapons mechanics. Or at least, for me, it does so due to the weapons mechanics. That might be a minority view among  Zylarthen players and readers, but still.

And of course, if one was so inclined, these weapons mechanics are easily usable, without Zylarthen, for OD&D or even AD&D. They're sort of my variation on Greyhawk.   

If you're interested in what I've done here, either from the point of view of being familiar with the Zylarthen rules set or not, I'd love to hear what you think.

Is it an improvement? A sell out? Is there anything I overlooked? What can be tweaked or adjusted to make it better?     

Weapons vs. Armor in Old School D&D, Part III

Author's Note: this is the long overdue third part of a series that I began over eight months ago (Part II was on 17 February). Those interested in the topic are directed to the first two installments here and here (don't worry, these posts are not long by this blogger's current standards).

To recap, some editions of Old School D&D (which I defined expansively as including all editions prior to 3.0) offer a mechanic to simulate how different weapons perform against different types of armor. In other words, they offer not merely a system where tougher armor makes the target harder to hit in general, but a system where some weapons will have advantages or disadvantages over others based on the type of armor involved—leather, mail, plate, shield or no shield, etc. The motivations for adding such a mechanic are to make combat more realistic as well as more interesting, while in the bargain adding more meaningful choices for players in their selection of weapons. I set out these criteria for evaluating the success of each effort (these are stated almost verbatim from Part II):

1. Realism. You want to realistically simulate how actual historical weapons performed against actual historical armor.
2. Playability. You don't want the system to be too complicated or fussy.
3. Enhancing (or at least not impeding) weapon diversity. You want the system to give players more meaningful choices in weapon selection, or at least that the range of choices should not be narrowed any further. So, for example, if in the basic combat mechanic a sword is almost always better then a mace, then ideally the additional weapons vs. armor type mechanic would give players more of a reason to (sometimes) fight with a mace—perhaps blunt weapons are better than bladed weapons against really tough armor, or whatever. Enhancing weapon diversity is almost by definition more 'realistic' in that we know that historical medieval and renaissance fighters used a variety of different weapons. The criterion is also almost self-evidently true in that if all the new system does is to mimic or amlify trends present in the initial mechanic, it isn't clear that there is any need for the new system. For example, if in the original system a two-handed sword does 1-10 points of damage and a dagger does 1-4 points of damage (translating into the sword being more than twice as effective as a dagger), one might wonder whether there is really any point in imposing an additional mechanic stating that, say, against most types of armor a two-handed sword gets an average +x bonus to hit, whereas a dagger gets an average -x penalty to hit, etc. One could have just as easily have simply increased the basic damage of a sword and/or decreased the basic damage of a dagger.

In Part II, I evaluated the weapons vs. armor mechanic presented in the proto-D&D 'man-to-man' combat system of Chainmail, characterizing it apologetically and perhaps reluctantly as a 'failure', at least on balance. The first edition of D&D (the 1974 'three little brown books') did not offer a new weapons vs. armor variant. However the first supplement, Greyhawk, did. It is here that we resume...

Greyhawk came out in the Spring of 1975, only a bit more than a year after the first publication of Dungeons & Dragons—a time in which perhaps only a few thousand copies of the game had been sold. Among other new things, Greyhawk introduced variable damage by weapon--a combat option that was soon to be embraced by most players. In one form or another it would became the default for most subsequent versions of the game (the Holmes 'Basic Set' being the exception). It will be useful to consider this addition here:

Note how, at least if we ignore the ‘space required’ restrictions, these numbers seem to separate weapons into two groups—a small group of weapons that we would always want to use, and a much larger group of weapons that we would never want to use. The two-handed sword is the nuke. Though, there are a few other weapons worth considering if one wants one’s second hand free to hold a shield.  On the other side, many other weapons are relegated to oblivion in that they have 'twins' that seem obviously better, even if only a little bit better, than their alternatives. However, the table does for the first time highlight why the restrictions on normal weapons for Clerics and Magic-Users might actually be onerous. (In the 1974 edition, the onerous consequences had more to do with restrictions on what magic weapons Clerics and Magic-Users could or could not use.)

But from the point of view of historical realism there is much that is odd. For example, why are maces so ineffective? Knights and other accomplished soldiers often went into battle wielding maces (and almost never large two-handed swords—unless they were Scottish). This is presumably because they thought maces were effective in combat, not because they were prohibited from shedding blood, or whatever. So why are they presented as so ineffective here?

Of course, paying attention to the space requirements does modify the above assessment a bit. For example, maybe you can't use that two-hander in many dungeon situations. I think it's fair to say that most referees didn’t and don’t often take this into account. Perhaps they should. But I think it's also fair to fault the authors for providing no further guidance on this in an otherwise fairly detailed treatment of other combat matters. However, the space requirements don't remove all of the oddities. For example, it's still always better to have a sword instead of a mace or a two-handed sword instead of a halberd or flail. Also, the 'space required' caveat doesn't help with the knight counter-example (they usually went into battle in open fields).

In addition, the 1975 supplement introduced a system derived directly from Chainmail for giving bonuses and penalties on the d20 'to hit' roll for different weapons against different types of armor. Here are the relevant tables:

(Note the Arquebus, a holdover from Chainmail, which along with other gunpowder weapons was not included in the weapon lists of any of the early editions of D&D.)

If one compares the Greyhawk table with the Chainmail table, one can see that the bonuses and penalties of Greyhawk were read off of the earlier chart almost verbatim, with slight modifications in only a few cases. So, for example, assuming a 'normal' Chainmail kill chance of 8 or more on two dice, a 7 translated into a +1 bonus, a 6 translated into a +2 bonus, a 9 translated into a -1 penalty, and so on. Now, of course, in Chainmail there was no extra downward slant in the table—a lack that no doubt looked odd to some. Thus, for many weapons in Chainmail you had about the same chance of hitting (and thus killing) an armored man as an unarmored one (indeed you had a slightly better chance in a few cases). But this sort of 'flat' progression in Chainmail translated into imposing the same bonus or penalty on an already downward sloping set of chances in Greyhawk, yielding results that seemed more realistic. Thus, armor now usually helps whatever weapon you are confronting, with different weapons merely having a different rate of change against certain types of armor.

On its face, this is of course an improvement on the Chainmail system, while also preserving many of its virtues. For example, the new system highlights how ineffective most missile weapons are against heavy armor, especially when fired at medium or long range. The option of effectively using a dagger or sword against a 'prone' target remains, although no rules are given for how to get an opponent into that position.

However, the same historical oddities and (in my view) mistakes remain. Two-handed swords and flails are still weirdly misdescribed and are too powerful.


But in my view Greyhawk’s effort was a failure for many reasons, and the evidence suggests that its system for variable weapon effectiveness against armor was rarely used in actual play (early players could help me out by confirming or disconfirming this).

First of all, the historical anomalies and misdescriptions of certain weapons remain. That's the last time we'll mention this, as we've beaten this point to death. (Imagine it being fittingly beaten to death by a modified threshing implement.)

Secondly, the Greyhawk scheme is too complicated and fussy. You start out by comparing your class and level with your opponent's armor class (the basic OD&D combat mechanic), but then you have to look at the new chart to see if you get an extra bonus or penalty (on top of any other bonus or penalty due to magic, tactical position, etc.). But you only get this bonus or penalty if the referee judges that the armor class of your opponent is sufficiently 'armor based' to warrant it. (Even at this early date, the idea of 'armor class' had diverged from being an actual class or type of armor—as it was in Chainmail—to often being at least partly based on other 'defensive' characteristics of the target—its parrying ability, speed, size or even just innate power or ability to soak up damage.) For the majority of melee weapons and armor types the bonus or penalty changes things by no more than 1 point anyway, so one might forgive the referee and players if they ask why the extra work is really necessary.

Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, the mechanic doesn't increase weapon diversity or player choice. Now, I admit that it might initially look like it does. So for example, it might be argued that with the new mechanic we can see a reason why a mace might sometimes be preferable to a sword—it's more effective against plate armor—or why a flail might sometimes be preferable to a halberd—it can reach around shields and penetrate armor better than a halberd can. But I submit that it suppresses weapon diversity, often in odd ways, if considered in total. For example, there is now even less reason for a Fighting-Man to even consider using anything but a two-handed sword. The mace might seem to beat out the sword against plate armor (though it isn't clear that this would make up for the sword's higher damage roll) but if one looks more closely, the new bonuses and penalties create new and worse problems. Why ever choose a mace when you could instead choose a hammer (which gets that extra unexplained +1 against AC 5)? Or for that matter, why ever choose a hammer when you could choose a military pick, which is much better against tough armor while inflicting the same damage as a mace or hammer?

Without sounding too critical, I honestly doubt that the authors of Greyhawk--Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz--thought very hard about these issues or problems. After all, the to hit bonuses and penalties were so clearly taken from Chainmail, without really modifying them in the slightest, even though the underlying combat mechanics of Chainmail and OD&D were very different—a 2d6 curve is differently shaped than a 1d20 curve, to give one obvious example. Perhaps Jon Peterson or one of the players from those early days can tell us whether the Greyhawk weapons vs. armor option was ever really used for OD&D by the authors or any of their early players. The effort looks to me like it was merely another combat option offered to sort of fill things out in the apparent interest of enhancing 'realism', but composed quickly and without any playtesting. I might be wrong. But if I'm wrong, it frankly makes the result difficult to justify or explain.

So, I would have to say, unfortunately, that the variable weapons vs. armor mechanism proposed by Greyhawk was ultimately a failure.

On to discussing the AD&D attempt in Part IV...

OD&D Attack Progressions Compared (Originals and Clones), Part III

'The Classic Dungeons & Dragons Game' (1994)

The painting above is from the cover of the last 'non-Advanced' Dungeons & Dragons edition to be published before the special category was discontinued. A few years later TSR would be sold to Wizards of the Coast and the Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons lines would be folded into 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons--a game quite different from what had come before. The Dungeons & Dragons line (as opposed to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line) had itself undergone a number of changes--from the introductory 'Holmes' edition in 1977, to 'Moldvay/Cook' in 1981, the revised 'Mentzer' edition of 1983 and the various permutations of 'Basic', 'Expert', 'Companion' and 'RulesCyclopedia' versions which followed. However, one thing that stayed almost precisely constant during that time was the attack progressions of the various classes. The sequence of 2, 3, 2, 2, 3 point increases per step (for Fighting-Men a step was three levels, for Clerics and Thieves four levels and for Magic-Users 5 levels) was modified slightly to change the 3 point increases to 2 point increases. But otherwise the algorithm presented by Gygax and Arneson in 1974 remained the same (at least on the 'non-Advanced' side) for twenty years.

So, why do such things matter? In two previous posts here and here, it was hinted that perhaps they didn't. Virtually all old school originals and clones have numbers that are similar, with all following the same general pattern: It gets easier to hit as you go up in levels but different classes get better at different rates. Fighting-Men progress the fastest, followed by Clerics and then Magic-Users. Thieves are sometimes like Clerics and sometimes like Magic-Users.

One way to get a handle on the question is to look at an example of one of the most extreme variations between some of the games (again excluding the outlier,  Lamentations of the Flame Princess)--the attack numbers for mid- to high-level Magic-Users in 1e, OSRIC and Swords & Wizardry--and ask whether even that matters. A 10th level Magic-User in 1e or OSRIC needs a 17 to hit AC 2. In Swords & Wizardry Complete she only needs a 13 to hit AC 2. Another way of putting that is a 10th level Magic-User in Swords & Wizardry Complete is twice as effective on the attack as 10th level Magic-User in 1e or OSRIC.

One can I suppose see the justifications for each. High level Magic-Users are so powerful that they need to be taken down another peg in relation to the other classes (so goes the thinking behind the 1e and OSRIC numbers). Or high level Magic-Users are so pathetic in melee (having so few hit points and using such relatively ineffective weapons) that they need a bit of help (so goes the thinking behind Swords & Wizardry Complete).

But again, does the difference matter in the scheme of things? Are mid- to high level games in 1e and OSRIC going to differ very much from mid- to high level games in Swords & Wizardry Complete simply because of the above difference in attack numbers? I would say obviously not. Whatever your attack number, you don't want your 10th level Magic-User engaging in melee very often, and if she is unfortunate enough to find herself in a melee engagement, she'll probably be toast pretty soon anyway, whether or not she has a 20% per turn chance to hit the monster with her dagger or a 40% chance.

So I think it's clear that at a particular level, whether a particular class needs this number or that number to hit (as long as the numbers aren't too different) is really not that earthshaking an issue.

But I think the overall question of attack progressions does matter, or rather matters just as much as any other piece in the puzzle as far as rules sets go. I think it matters largely for aesthetic reasons. Contrast two attack progression tables, one from the three little brown books and the other from OSRIC.

First, the three little brown books:

Now OSRIC:

Actually, OSRIC has nine such tables, one for each class!

Now, to me, the first example is simple, elegant and intuitive, at least after one grasps the step thing. The second looks like something out of a Cal Tech Warlock variation. But the point of the exercise is not to be snarky against OSRIC. I'm sure there are some that prefer the granularity of the OSRIC table and like dealing with charts that look like that. That's okay. (Indeed, some would say that the attack progression presentation in my own game is almost as Cal Techy-looking as OSRIC's).  I'm simply trying to show that even though the actual numbers end up being pretty similar in practice (and even when they don't--such as for 10th level Magic-Users--the practical effect in play is minimal), the different presentations help to create different sorts of effects. The three little brown books are the three little brown books and OSRIC is OSRIC partly due to things like this.

And when I say aesthetics, I don't merely mean the direct visual look on the page. That's important, but there's also the lasting effect on one's assumptions and perceptions with what's going on in the game. OSRIC seems more 'realistic' or even 'naturalistic'. It's important to get these things right, the authors* seem to be saying. Since (presumably) Fighting-Men get better gradually, we should represent this process accurately.* That sort of thing helps to set the overall tone and vibe for the game.

*Of course with OSRIC the authors are to some extent trying to emulate the presentation and substance of 1e, so a bit of the blame (or praise) concerning these things should be placed on Gary Gygax.

A friend of mine commented that he liked discontinuous or 'chunky' progressions because he thought they discouraged a sort of annoying attitude he believes develops in some players--they expect to get a little something for everything, every time. That may or may not be true, or at least may or may not be true for some groups. But the fact that my friend--a very intelligent player and critic of game design--was thinking about it, shows that that sort of thing can matter.

Personally, I think the sort of symmetry exhibited by the three step, four step, five step algorithm--whether presented in table form as above, or in bonus point form as in my own game--fits the non-naturalistic vibe that I prefer. We're not, as it were, looking though a telescope at this world and then charting the results--oh, Fighting-Men progress at this rate, ah ha, Magic-Users progress at this rate, etc. Rather, we're defining these heroic archetypes clearly and simply with the algorithm that we've presented.

No, I don't believe I think too much about these things. But yes, it is wonky. Is there some way to get paid for it?

OD&D Attack Progressions Compared (Originals and Clones), Part II

Cook Expert

First, some quick notes on the tables in the previous post:

1. I didn't use Holmes because it only goes through 3rd level. Since it follows 0e, there's no variation in attack rolls for those levels. (I just noticed Zenopus said pretty much the same thing in his comment on the previous post.)

2. I left some major old school offerings off the list, such as Castles & Crusades, Basic Fantasy and Dungeon Crawls Classics. I did this partly because I am less familiar with these systems but  more importantly because they are not really 'clonish' of 0e, 1e or Basic/Expert.

3. I chose to look at only the first 10 levels because 10 is a round number and because it encompasses most of what I think referees and players are interested in when they look at these games. Also I just didn't feel like adding any more columns to the already somewhat squished ones of the five tables.

Now for my observations and thoughts on the results:

1. After I put the tables together I wrote an excited email to an OSR friend of mine--one of the only people I know who can occasionally be even wonkier than me on these sorts of matters. He wrote back:

Hmm... it looks like a bunch of numbers that are all very similar.

So there it is. The great anticlimactic lesson here is that, with one obvious exception, there isn't really that much difference between the attack progressions of the various editions and clones. Comparing the to hit numbers by class and level from one edition or game to another rarely yields a difference of more than 2 points or 10%.

2. The obvious exception is Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Here, James Raggi made the decision to give Fighting-Men a to hit bonus at 1st level and to increase this bonus at each level, while at the same time never giving to hit bonuses at any level to Magic-Users, Clerics or Thieves. This certainly pumps up Fighting-Men (at the expense of the others). I suppose it's either amazingly brilliant or spectacularly dumb.

3. There seems to be a big change between 0e and 1e, especially for Magic-Users and Thieves. However, part of this is illusory, or rather merely a natural consequence of expanding the normal armor class range such that it went from starting at AC 9 to starting at AC 10. Essentially 1e added an extra armor class at 6. This is because there was a spontaneous movement among the masses to give Studded Leather or Ring Mail plus Shield OR Scale Mail a unique armor class rating*. But if you expand the armor class range from eight ratings to nine ratings but at the same time keep the to hit progression at a smooth one to one, then either you must make it one easier to hit at AC 10 or one harder to hit at AC 2. Gygax elected to go with the latter. So, even though it looks like 1e makes everyone an average of one point worse in their to hit rolls, this difference would have disappeared if we had looked at AC 10 instead of AC 2.

*Not true.

4. 1e is quite tough on Magic-Users and Thieves--the toughest of them all if you exclude LOTFP.

5. On the other hand, if your dream is to be a melee-mad Magic-User, find a Swords & Wizardry Complete game.

6. In the differences among editions and clones, Clerics and Fighting-Men vary the least and Magic-Users and Thieves vary the most.

7. 0e has some interesting results in places. For example, in 0e a 6th level Magic-User has precisely the same to hit numbers as a 6th level Fighting-Man.

8. Basic/Expert precisely tracks 0e.

9. Of the clones (with the exception of LOTFP), all except Swords and Wizardry either precisely track their originals or closely do so. This is to be expected, of course.

10. There's a bit of controversy over what is legally required (or prohibited) in terms of emulating the attack tables of earlier versions of the original game. This is partly because the Systems Reference Document does not contain a protected template for this. Is the mathematical pattern behind an attack table a non-copyright protected rule, or copyright protected substance? Interestingly, OSRIC precisely tracks 1e in three out of the four classes (Fighting-Men differ slightly). Labyrinth Lord and Delving Deeper make small changes from their originals. But they are not necessarily random twiddles. For example, the author of Delving Deeper has a complex but logical, fascinating and satisfying rationale for why the Delving Deeper progressions are in a certain sense faithful (perhaps even more faithful than the original numbers) to the mathematical theory behind the 0e progressions, based partly on what they owe to Chainmail. For my part, in Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, I followed the 0e algorithms precisely but presented them (in my view) quite differently from the original and from the other clones. Thus, for example, instead of a chart containing rows of classes or class levels, my central attack table references weapons (which, if you will, is part of why I think I 'get away with it').

So given 1, above, what difference does any of this really make? Why did I agonize for days over my own attack progression scheme?

(No jokes please.)

With your indulgence, I'll try to answer that tomorrow.