Historical Analysis: D&D Prices Then and Now (Is 5e the Most Expensive Edition Ever?)

To me, a middle-aged person who started purchasing Dungeons & Dragons Rulebooks forty years ago, the contemporary product offerings of Wizards of the Coast seem wildly overpriced.

I bought the AD&D Players Handbook in 1978 for $9.95. By the end of the next year, I would own all three AD&D rulebooks, having paid a total of $31.85. At that time, the "whitebox" set of the original three "little brown books" was still being sold for $14.95. Just a few years before, it had retailed for $10.00 - a price that many contemporary reviewers thought was quite high for a mere game, especially one that did not contain a board or pieces.

Today, the three D&D 5e "core" rulebooks sell for a combined list price of $149.85.

Now of course I realize that there has been a fair amount of inflation since 1979 (or 1974, when the first edition of D&D hit the market), but has there been that much inflation? One wouldn't have thought so.

So I decided to find out.

In fact, prices have gone up by a factor of 5.3 since 1974, and by a factor of 3.2 since 1979. (That prices almost doubled in that five-year period, as seen from those numbers, shows that inflation was raging in the seventies.) See the CPI Inflation Calculator, here.

I should note that merely adjusting for inflation doesn't give you the full story about people's purchasing power. Among other things, it doesn't look at how much money people actually have. One might assume that average wages and incomes have risen at least as fast as inflation over the last forty years, but that may not be the true for certain groups, including, arguably the sorts of groups - teenagers, students, younger wage earners, etc - who make up a large proportion of the RPG market. Still, adjusting for inflation is a good place to start.

From this point on, when I talk of prices or use the terms expensive, inexpensive and so on, I will be referring to inflation-adjusted 2018 dollars.

For the fun of it, I made a chart of some of the most well-known versions of D&D, with their original prices as well as their inflation-adjusted prices. As you can see, I also made a second chart featuring some of the "retro-clones." Which editions are or were actually the most (or least) expensive? Is 2018 a good time to be a D&D or RPG purchaser (in terms of prices) or were things better back in the day?

Here are some of the most interesting things I got from the charts:

First Impressions:

• In terms of its list price (3 x $49.95) D&D 5e is in fact the most expensive version of D&D ever published.
• However, if you purchase it through Amazon, where you get almost a 50% discount, it ends up being the least expensive, at least among the editions that feature three hardcover books. (I should note that while there was some book and game discounting going on before Amazon, the magnitude was generally nowhere near as high.)
• Starting with AD&D in 1977-79, each successive hardcover edition would be a bit more expensive, culminating in D&D 5e, which cost almost 50% more than its first ancestor (going by its list price, at least).
• The original 1974 edition sold for less than half of the price of any of the successive five hardcover editions.
• However, if you add in the three supplements - Greyhawk, Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry - the prices are comparable.
• Unsurprisingly, the "Basic" editions have always been the least expensive (and thus, given certain assumptions, have been the "best deals"), coming in at anywhere from 50% to 15% of the hardcover sets
• You can buy hardcover reprints of the original AD&D 1st edition volumes on DriveThruRPG for substantially less than they cost back in the day ($74.85 vs. $103.41). Not sure about the quality, but there it is.

Pages and Words:

The above analysis changes somewhat if one looks at page and word counts. Of course, some would argue that more pages and words don't necessarily make a game product better - they might even make it worse. But for the sake of argument, let's assume they add value to the product at a constant rate.

• The original edition of Dungeons & Dragons may have been at the time, one of the longest game rulesets ever published, coming in at 45,000 words - almost certainly longer than the typical rulebook for, say, any of the Avalon Hill or SPI "monster" wargames of the period, and, I assume, judging from Chainmail, substantially longer than the typical set of miniatures rules.
• Five years later, the three AD&D game books would utterly crush that record, coming in at over a half-million words. I can't imagine how this wouldn't have meant that AD&D was by far the longest set of game rules published in the history of the world. Yet, oddly, as far as I can remember, few seemed to have remarked on this. Though role-playing was still new, and though the first AD&D rulebook - the 1977 Monster Manual - was stunning in its quality and scope, I don't remember anyone saying, "uh, guys, should anyone really be playing a game with a set of instructions 500,000 words long?" It seemed a completely natural and logical development, and is, of course, taken for granted now. But the more I think of it, the more I think this is extremely odd.
• With AD&D there was a massive leap in price to, I assume, near record levels for games. How many relatively self-contained games had ever cost more than $30?
• On the other hand, if looked at in terms of the number of words per dollar spent, AD&D constituted a massive leap in value - at least compared to earlier versions. You got six times the words for your dollar with AD&D than you got from the little brown books.
• The successive three-volume hardcover sets would all offer comparable word value - 4,000 - 6,000 words per dollar.
• However, the number of pages in each book took a large leap with 3rd edition (and the number of words per page dropped off somewhat proportionately). It looked like you were getting more content even though you weren't. Of course, if fewer words per page meant more pictures per page, one could argue that you were in fact getting more content.
• Words peaked at close to three-quarters of a million with edition 3.5. That's more words than are in the novel War and Peace.
• Curiously, edition 3.5 was the only multi-volume edition to feature three books containing exactly the same number of pages - 322 each, depending on how you count pages.
• Not counting D&D 5e at the Amazon discounted price, the best value (in terms of words per dollar) of any D&D edition was the Rules Cyclopedia.

The Retro-Clones:

For purposes of this analysis, I'm ignoring the fact that many of the clones are also available in free or extremely inexpensive PDF versions.

• All the retro-clones seem to offer good value compared with their D&D parents. Yet, for most of the clones, if value is expressed in terms of word count, their value is merely comparable with the various Wizards of the Coast "core" books, if even slightly less.
• Part of the philosophy of the clones is that less is in fact more. But still.
• In terms of pages and words per dollar, the incredibly massive OSRIC and the incredibly cheap Delving Deeper are the undisputed champions. Blueholme Prentice Rules also deserves a mention.
• The three members of the "100,000 word club" (at least on this chart) - Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry Complete and my own Seven Voyages of Zylarthen - are all roughly comparable in terms of overall price and words per dollar. (By the way, the words per dollar figure for the Labyrinth Lord hardcover edition, four rows down on the chart, is in error. Instead of "6,260" it should read, "3,130".) Much of the variance presumably reflects the different formats - hardcovers vs. paperbacks vs. booklets.
• Zylarthen's monster book contains 35% more words per page than its non-monster books (I think this is because its "stat blocs" are presented in prose as opposed to table form, and there are no other tables in the volume). I suspect Zylarthen is relatively unique in this as it is the reverse of the phenomenon you get in the five multi-volumes editions of AD&D and D&D where the monster books are often 35% or so less "meaty" - presumably due to having more pictures and stat blocs. You can't see this from the charts but I just thought it was a minor (obviously, very minor) weird and interesting fact.
• You can buy physical versions of the two relatively "straight" clones of the three little brown books - Swords & Wizardry Whitebox and Delving Deeper - for one-fifth and one-tenth, respectively, of what the three little brown books cost back in the day.
• Or, you can buy a PDF of the original Dungeons & Dragons whitebox itself for one-fifth of what you would have paid for its physical instantiation back in the day.
• Life isn't all bad.

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.

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

Moldvay Basic

A comment on the last blog post made me want to do this.

Here are the attack progressions to hit Armor Class 2 by level for ten games--the three major OD&D versions and seven contemporary clones:

Dungeons & Dragons (0e) (1974-78)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1e) (1979)

Moldvay Basic/Cook Expert Dungeons & Dragons (B/X) (1981).

OSRIC (2006)

Labyrinth Lord (2007)

Swords & Wizardry (2008)*

Swords & Wizardry White Box (2009)*

Lamentations of the Flame Princess (2010)*

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen (2013)*

Delving Deeper V4 (2014)

Those with an asterisk list things in attack bonus form rather than table form, but for the sake of this comparison all will be listed in table form.

For OSRIC I used version 2.2. I assume the numbers are the same across all versions but I may be wrong on that. For Swords & Wizardry I used the recent 'Complete' edition, which may or not have different numbers from the original 2008 edition. The numbers for Delving Deeper are from the most recent edition, which differ somewhat from those of earlier editions.

I hope I didn't make any mistakes.

Looking at the tables a number of things leap out. Some things were not surprising. Some were.

I'll make some comments tomorrow. But I welcome any comments or observations anyone would like to make.

(If you turn your phone sideways, I think these will exactly fill up the screen. You probably already knew that. But I didn't.)

To Hit Armor Class 2:

FIGHTING-MAN Level Avg. Avg. Avg. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1-5 6-10 Total 0e 17 17 17 15 15 15 12 12 12 10 16.2 12.2 14.2 1e 18 18 16 16 14 14 12 12 10 10 16.4 11.6 14.0 B/X 17 17 17 15 15 15 12 12 12 10 16.2 12.2 14.2 OSRIC 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 16.0 11.0 13.5 Labyrinth Lord 17 17 16 15 14 13 12 12 11 10 15.8 11.6 13.7 S&W Complete 17 17 16 15 15 14 13 12 11 10 16.0 12.0 14.0 S&W White Box 17 16 15 15 14 13 13 12 11 11 15.4 12.0 13.7 LOTFP 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 15.0 10.0 12.5 Seven Voyages 17 17 17 15 15 15 12 12 12 10 16.2 12.2 14.2 Delving Deeper 16 16 15 15 15 15 12 12 12 12 15.4 12.6 14.0                                                                                                                                                                                                                     MAGIC-USER Level Avg. Avg. Avg. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1-5 6-10 Total 0e 17 17 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 15 17.0 15.0 16.0 1e 19 19 19 19 19 17 17 17 17 17 19.0 17.0 18.0 B/X 17 17 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 15 17.0 15.0 16.0 OSRIC 19 19 19 19 19 17 17 17 17 17 19.0 17.0 18.0 Labyrinth Lord 17 17 17 16 16 16 16 15 15 15 16.6 15.4 16.0 S&W Complete 17 17 17 16 16 15 15 14 14 13 16.6 14.2 15.4 S&W White Box 17 17 17 17 16 16 15 15 14 14 16.8 14.8 15.8 LOTFP 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18.0 18.0 18.0 Seven Voyages 17 17 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 15 17.0 15.0 16.0 Delving Deeper 17 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 15 15 16.6 15.0 15.8                                                                                                                                                                                                                     CLERIC Level Avg. Avg. Avg. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1-5 6-10 Total 0e 17 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 12 12 16.6 13.8 15.2 1e 18 18 18 16 16 16 14 14 14 12 17.2 14.0 15.6 B/X 17 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 12 12 16.6 13.8 15.2 OSRIC 18 18 18 16 16 16 14 14 14 12 17.2 14.0 15.6 Labyrinth Lord 17 17 17 16 16 15 15 15 14 14 16.6 14.6 15.6 S&W Complete 17 17 16 16 15 15 14 14 13 12 16.2 13.6 14.9 S&W White Box 17 17 17 16 16 15 15 14 13 12 16.6 13.8 15.2 LOTFP 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18.0 18.0 18.0 Seven Voyages -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Delving Deeper 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 15 12 12 16.2 13.8 15.0                                                                                                                                                                                                                     THIEF Level Avg. Avg. Avg. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1-5 6-10 Total 0e 17 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 12 12 16.6 13.8 15.2 1e 19 19 19 19 17 17 17 17 14 14 18.6 15.8 17.2 B/X 17 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 12 12 16.6 13.8 15.2 OSRIC 19 19 19 19 17 17 17 17 14 14 18.6 15.8 17.2 Labyrinth Lord 17 17 17 16 16 15 15 15 14 14 16.6 14.6 15.6 S&W Complete 17 17 17 16 16 15 15 14 14 13 16.6 14.2 15.4 S&W White Box -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- LOTFP 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18.0 18.0 18.0 Seven Voyages 17 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 12 12 16.6 13.8 15.2 Delving Deeper 17 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 15 15 16.6 15.0 15.8                                                                                                                                                                                                                     AVERAGES Level Avg. Avg. Avg. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1-5 6-10 Total 0e 17.0 17.0 17.0 16.5 15.5 15.0 14.3 14.3 12.8 12.3 16.6 13.7 15.2 1e 18.5 18.5 18.0 17.5 16.5 16.0 15.0 15.0 13.8 13.3 17.8 14.6 16.2 B/X 17.0 17.0 17.0 16.5 15.5 15.0 14.3 14.3 12.8 12.3 16.6 13.7 15.2 OSRIC 18.5 18.3 18.0 17.3 16.5 15.8 15.0 14.8 13.8 13.0 17.7 14.5 16.1 Labyrinth Lord 17.0 17.0 16.8 15.8 15.5 14.8 14.5 14.3 13.5 13.3 16.4 14.1 15.2 S&W Comp. 17.0 17.0 16.5 15.8 15.5 14.8 14.3 13.5 13.0 12.0 16.4 13.5 14.9 S&W WB 17.0 16.7 16.3 16.0 15.3 14.7 14.3 13.7 12.7 12.3 16.3 13.5 14.9 LOTFP 17.8 17.5 17.3 17.0 16.8 16.5 16.3 16.0 15.8 15.5 17.3 16.0 16.6 7 Voyages 17.0 17.0 17.0 16.3 15.7 15.0 14.0 14.0 13.0 12.3 16.6 13.7 15.1 DD 16.8 16.8 16.5 16.0 15.0 15.0 14.3 14.3 13.5 13.5 16.2 14.1 15.2