Why a Silver Standard?

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen uses a silver standard. That is, the prices for adventuring items are quoted in silver pieces and the experience points needed to gain levels (which approximately track the numbers of OD&D) match up with silver pieces, not the gold pieces of OD&D.

It's not original.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess does it. And even Gary Gygax himself implied that he might have done it if given the chance to do Dungeons & Dragons over again.

Why?

Well, first of all, it's more historically accurate. Silver has always been much more plentiful than gold (while remaining rare, with additional stocks difficult or costly to obtain) and thus better suited to minting coins. Here are some rough facts:

1. The silver penny of Medieval, Renaissance or Tudor times in England was about the size and weight of a modern dime.
2. The silver shilling (worth twelve pennies) was about the weight of an Eisenhower Dollar, though with a somewhat smaller volume.
3. Very very roughly, and taking into account expected oscillations, debasement and subsequent inflations, in-kind payments and so on, a shilling was often equal to a day's wage of a farmer or manual laborer. Or conversely, it was about what you needed to pay for a day of food and shelter. People often cut pennies into quarters to pay for cheap items.
4. Historically, gold was always 5-20 times more valuable by weight. Or since gold was twice as dense as silver, 2-10 times more valuable by volume.
5. Thus, depending on the ratio of gold to silver, one could carry a year's salary in a belt pouch and a large fortune in a small sack.
6. Silver shillings or gold sovereigns—'pound' coins equal to 20 shillings—weighed about half as much as the 1/10th of a pound stipulated in OD&D and AD&D. (For much of the period in question, 'pound' and sometimes even 'shilling' were so-called units of account, rather than names for actual coins.)

For More Things in Heaven and Earth (my '16th century' proto-Zylarthen) I created a very fussy (but fairly historically accurate) table of coin weights and values:

(An encumbrance 'item' is roughly equal to five pounds of weight, similar to the encumbrance scheme of Zylarthen.)

It was wise to jettison the above for Zylarthen, but I will probably use it in my pending 'Tudor' or 'Elizabethan' supplement.

However, much more important than 'realism' was the way that the monetary values and exchange rates of OD&D completely undercut a robust and varied coin system. Since even mundane and cheap items were expressed in terms of gold, it wasn't clear what purpose copper and silver really served. Why would any but unintelligent monsters hoard such coins? But the Dungeon Expedition example in The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures along with of course the Treasure Tables themselves, seemed to suggest that they did—'The chest with the poison needle is full of copper pieces—appears to be about 2,000 of them'. It was as if modern day gangsters did much of their business in pennies, going around with sacks of them, keeping them in elaborately protected safes, etc.

So for Seven Voyages of Zylarthen I, so to speak, shifted things one column to the left, with the standard metal of account now being in the middle of the other two. I kept the variance in values from lowest value coin to highest value coin at 1:50 the same as in OD&D, though this is much narrower than the 1:200 variance in AD&D that many of us are most familiar with. Here are the relevant comparisons:

OD&D:

AD&D:

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen:

The 1:5 copper to silver exchange rate allowed copper pieces to still maintain some meaningful value and give men and monsters a reason for hoarding them. On the other hand, I wanted gold to become something truly valuable, sort of like the status of gems in OD&D, which I thought made more sense both from the standpoint of 'realism' as well as how gold is usually treated in fantasy stories, fairytales and the like. Basically I wanted to give it more allure than just something you use to buy a coil of rope with.

I've heard that referees wanting to switch from a gold to a silver standard often run into opposition from their players—'he's taking our gold away!'. So I would be interested to hear from any Seven Voyages of Zylarthen play testers out there as to how the silver standard has worked in practice.

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UPDATE ON TEAM OLA: A number of wonderful and generous people have pledged $500 since last Wednesday to sponsor my Chicago Marathon run in support of the Our Lady of the Angels Mission on Chicago's West Side. Thank you again! I am very grateful. 

I still have $500 to raise by Marathon day, Sunday, October 12th. Only four days left! If you haven't already done so, please consider sponsoring me in support of a group that does great work! Any gift of $75 or more will launch either the four Seven Voyages of Zylarthen physical booklets or a cool Steve Prefontaine DVD on an inexorable trajectory towards your home. My donation page is here:

Donate to Team Member Oakes Spalding (again, it goes directly to the Mission, not me).

And more information is here:

Mission of Our Lady of the Angels

Team OLA page with cool Team OLA Motivational Video

 Cheers again and please pray for me if you can.

Breaking the Other Guy's Weapon

Weapons break.  Battlefields are littered with broken weapons as well as broken bodies.  In my view, most breaks should be essentially random—the result of a critical miss, or some such—or should (sometimes) be the result of a successful kill—ramming that sword into the dragon’s belly was forceful enough to kill it, but also forceful enough to break the sword.

But some breaks are the result of intentional actions in combat using weapons designed to break other weapons.  In my game this would cover larger members of the axe family—the military axe, battle axe and halberd as well as the two-handed sword.

The mechanic would be the same as the disarm mechanic of the previous post, with these differences/exceptions:

The base to break a weapon is 16 (as opposed to the 11 of disarm).

Only average to large axes and the two-handed sword can be used to break a weapon.

Only wooden hafted weapons can be targeted.  (Metal weapons would break on random rolls.  In other words, you can't use that battle axe to slice the other guy's dagger in two, but dagger blades are still pretty vulnerable to being chipped or even snapped off during a turn of furious combat.)

The two-handed sword gets a +4 modifier.  (As I understand it, one of its main uses in Renaissance combat was in breaking up pike formations by lopping the heads off of the pikes.)

Defending with a two-handed weapon gets no modifier.

I’m still working on a chart for random weapon breakage that’s both realistic seeming and simple.  You want a rapier to have a much greater chance of breaking than a mace, but you want to use the existing stats (weight? length? the damage roll?) to simulate that.  You don’t want some extra number—breakability or whatever—fussing things up.  The armor of the defender should also be a factor.  If you're attacking a guy in plate armor with your rapier, there's a much greater chance you'll break the point.  And again there’s that balance question.  You don’t want weapons breaking all the time, but you do want them to break often enough to be something that should be factored into the give and take of play (as opposed to a totally rare and obscure random event).  So does that mean that breaks should on average occur in, say, 1 out of 100 attack rolls? 1 out of 500?  1 out of 1,000?  I’m not sure I know the answer to that.

Disarm Rules

As with any rules set, you want something that will appear realistic without being too complicated.  The particular problem with creating a disarm mechanic, or any mechanic that deals with special combat tactics or maneuvers, is you want to create options that can be attractive and useful (and thus meaningful) but not so attractive and useful that they completely disrupt or unbalance the general combat mechanic.

Let me offer a suggestion (the following is based on a “first three booklets only” OD&D rules set—thus hit dice are 1d6, among other things—and I will use 16^th-century English weapons in one of the examples, but I think it is easily adaptable):

After a successful hit, but before rolling damage, the attacker may elect to try to disarm his opponent.  If the defender is fighting with two weapons, the attacker may choose which weapon to target.

In my view systems that require maneuvers to be declared before rolling to hit add an extra level of unnecessary fussing.  In addition, many if not most “hits” in D&D are not actual weapon strikes but rather successful attempts at getting the advantage of the defender or wearing him down.  Thus, it seems appropriate that a disarm attempt would follow a hit rather than preceding it.

One might object, I suppose, that the fact that someone is wearing, say, plate armor shouldn’t make it easier to potentially disarm him.  I would say three things in response: 1. Combat in D&D is abstract.  That someone is wearing plate, makes them less vulnerable to actual strikes but also perhaps makes them more potentially effective at stopping their opponent from doing various things—their armor means they don’t have to worry as much about, say, using their arm to block a blow (or block a successful disarm).  2. I’m not sure I want a disarm mechanic that would make disarming the guy in plate armor the default attack (since its tough to get at him any other way).  It might be that this would be somewhat realistic, but I think it would change the general combat mechanic in a bad way.  3. It’s simpler.

The base chance to disarm is 11 on 1d20 (50%) with these modifiers:

-1 for every 3 hit points of the defender (what he has remaining, not his total).

This tracks two things: It’s harder to disarm powerful characters.  It’s easier to disarm anyone when they are fatigued.  The hit dice (though not hit points) of the attacker are taken into account in the initial to hit roll.  Again, the -3 is based on the “pre-inflationary” original three-booklets.  If one is using a Greyhawk, Classic or AD&D sort of mechanic, one could make it -1 for every 5 hit points.

+/- 1 for the difference in weight between the attacker’s weapon versus the defender’s weapon.

Given the weapon weights in my game, this is not as potentially radical a modifier as it might seem.  In my view, the weapon weights in all versions of D&D are too high.  For example, a two-handed sword is pegged at 15 lb. in Men & Magic and 25 lb. in 1^st Edition AD&D.  A halberd is pegged at 15 lb. and 17½ lb., a longsword at 5 lb. and 6 lb.  But I would make these weights much lower—8 lb. for the two-handed sword, 7 lb. for the halberd and 3 lb. for the longsword.  I believe this is more historically accurate.  See the excellent What Did Historical Swords Weigh? at the excellent ARMA site.  Or go to your local Target, buy a 25 lb. container of cat litter and imagine yourself effectively wielding something that heavy.

I understand that some rules sets choose not to track weapon weight.  I think this makes sense in terms of the encumbrance mechanic (I like and use James Raggi's system in his Lamentations of the Flame Princess), but I think tracking weight can have value for other purposes--such as disarm rules.  If keeping track of weapon weight bothers anyone, then one could just have the referee declare a modifier on the fly ("using a two-handed sword to try and dislodge that short sword?  You get a -5")

+4 if the attacker is wielding a weapon that is designed to be effective at disarming.  In my setting this would include the black-bill and forest bill—polearms with all sorts of nasty hooks and curves on their blades.

-4 if the defender is wielding a two-handed weapon.

If the disarm is successful, the weapon will fly in a random (1d12) direction and land 1d20 feet away.

Any thoughts on this?  Does it get the balance right?

Fighting with Two Hands

Here are the two-handed fighting rules for MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH--my OD&D/S&W Whitebox 16th-century knockoff, in progress:

For those trained in the martial arts (all player-characters, among others), combat always makes use of both hands.  Even a bare hand can be used to grab or deflect most weapons under the right conditions.  However, if you have a free hand, it’s better to have it wield some sort of useful item than not, whether it’s another weapon, a shield or another parrying item such as a cape, a torch or even a cloth hat.  Possible fighting styles include:

Two-handed weapon:  No combat bonuses or penalties.

One-handed weapon and buckler:  No combat bonuses or penalties per se, though the buckler will confer an additional armor point if you are not wearing plate armor or a breastplate.

One-handed weapon and parrying item:  Permissible parrying items include a cape, a leather gauntlet, a torch or a cloth hat.  (The latter only counts if opposing a dagger or rapier.)  Impermissible parrying items include a lantern or a pistol.  Permissible parrying items confer no combat bonuses or penalties.

One-handed weapon and second weapon:  If you are wielding an average or larger weapon (3 ft or longer in length) the second weapon cannot be longer than ⅔ the length of the main weapon.  Otherwise it can be up to the same length.  (Thus you can fight with a backsword and a ballock knife, or two ballock knives but not two backswords.)  On any natural roll of 7, the second weapon will do 1d3 of damage (whatever the usual damage of the weapon).  If this roll was a hit, then the damage will be in addition to the damage of the main weapon.

Case of rapiers:  Fighting with two rapiers gives you a penalty of -2 to hit but improves your armor class by 2.

One-handed weapon only:  If none of the above conditions apply, but your opponent does satisfy one of them, then he will be at +1 to hit.  The reverse also applies, of course.

Greetings!

Over the last year, I have immensely enjoyed and learned from many of the OSR blogs.  So I thought I would try my hand at it.  One of my goals is to sharpen my thoughts about gaming and game design—a process that will hopefully include receiving feedback from other old school gamers—in part to help me put together an old school Dungeons and Dragons variant with a 16^th-century setting.  But I’m also fascinated by the history and evolution of the game for its own sake, and I think it’s interesting and fun to think and talk about it.

Tomorrow I’ll have a few questions to ask about Xylarthen.

Cheers!

Oakes