Zylarthen is 10% Off for D&D's 40th Anniversary

Late to the party as always, I'm making this offer with only 30 minutes to go for the birthday in Chicago, and of course I've already missed it for the East Coast (the exact first release date of 26 January, 1974 is an estimate from Jon Peterson). But we'll do this for 24 hours or whenever I get around to changing it, whichever comes last.

The physical volumes look great. If you liked the PDF's, I think you will love the booklets. They lie flat beautifully without breaking the spine. To quote one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies-The Third Man-"You can pick them up and put them down anytime!"

Xylarthen (spelled with an "x") was the first player-character example mentioned in the original edition. Happy 40th birthday, Xylarthen! And rest in Peace, Gary and David.

Zylarthen and OD&D

I thought I would take a page or so to compare Seven Voyages of Zylarthen with its parent, OD&D circa 1974-75.

Changes, expansions and additions include:

1.    A big change in the original trinity: Thieves replace Clerics. We did this for a number of reasons that I won’t argue for here, but I think it “fit” both with our own goals and the spirit of the original. Zylarthen Thieves are a bit different—simpler in conception, perhaps—than some of the standard offerings, but owe much to the discussions of Thieves and Thief abilities by some of the old school bloggers. In turn, spells are shuffled around, as might be expected. Turning Undead becomes something that any character can theoretically do (with a holy symbol) but that enhances the importance of wisdom (that perennial “dump-stat”). And healing, as well as “surgery” becomes a sort of group activity, as opposed to being relegated to Clerical “medics”.

2.    A simple but I think robust mechanic for differentiating weapons in an interesting and meaningful way while for the most part preserving the original conception of all weapons doing the same 1-6 hits of damage.

3.    A more “realistic” but also (I hope) simple and playable set of encumbrance rules with the goal of enhancing “resource management” decision-making. The equipment list is somewhat expanded to include additional essential items (and a few whimsical ones) but hopefully avoids the temptation of “item creep”.

4.    A different take on treasure and experience points that (hopefully) goes a bit towards “solving” some of the issues involving living expenses and player-characters accumulating “too much” money, as well as creating additional interesting decisions for the players. As with a number of other items, the idea is not completely original but makes liberal use of some of the ideas that have been floating around the old school blogosphere for some time.

5.    A relatively unique take on player-character and monster languages that makes knowing extra languages more meaningful while making the question of which monsters speak what more interesting and unpredictable.

6.    Enhanced tactical combat options, including rules for doing additional damage, fighting with two weapons, weapon breaks and more, while keeping things as simple and intuitive as possible.

7.    Rules for going to negative or (as I call it) zero hit points that preserve the relative lethality of OD&D combat (yes, you very well might die) but that also create some interesting situations and decisions.

8.    Greatly expanded content for some of the “lost” or barely mentioned monsters in OD&D such as Amazons, Witches, Vikings, Androids, Martians and others (including gods and goddesses), as well as new or somewhat new takes on a few standard and giant insects and animals. There is also additional detail on potential hirelings, troop types and non-player character parties. These are accompanied by comprehensive and thorough monster level and wilderness encounter tables in the old school style.

 

9.    An original method for creating wilderness maps and expanded or clarified rules for wilderness adventuring, using the (often neglected) suggestions from the third little brown book as a springboard.

Major areas of continuity include:

1.    De-emphasizing the “make or break” importance of ability scores (in line with the original edition) and thus offering a relatively small and clear list of potential bonuses and penalties.

2.    Drawing the line at three (or six) classes and preserving the “race as class” concept.

3.    Preserving the rough outlines of the original level and experience point progressions while offering all new level titles (for both Lawful and Chaotic characters) up to “name” level.

4.    Preserving the original “pre-inflation” mechanic of 1d6 damage and 1d6 hit dice for player characters and monsters, along with a general bias against multiple attack routines.

5.    Clearly compiling and integrating all or almost all monsters and spells from the first one-and-a-half or so years of the game—with a few twists given the absence of player-character Clerics (there are still non-player character Evil High Priests, of course!) and a small number of semi-new spells for Witches.

Bringing things back to the “fairy tale” illustrations of John Dickson Batten, I wanted a game that my children could play, to some extent free of (as I see it) the sort of overpowered pumped up videogame or “anime” vibe of many contemporary games as well as some of the gothic or darker elements present in others. That, in and of itself, is not a criticism of, say, brilliant “adult” approaches such as Carcosa or Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but I felt there was an unmet need for something on the other side of the scale.

Announcing Seven Voyages of Zylarthen!

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen is finally available, either via download or in four saddle stitched volumes of 48-64 pages each, published by Campion & Clitherow.

Happy dungeoneering! Guard the innocent! Avenge the wronged! May you find heaps of gold at the end of your path, or at the least a memorable and heroic demise! But above all, God grant that you find wonder everywhere!

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen is a “neo” not a “retro”-clone. It takes the original 1974 version of the game as a template. But the goal was not to merely clone the mechanics or content per se. As will be seen, a number of major changes and additions, as well as many minor changes and additions were made. They were made not with the intention of grafting onto the original “modern developments and improvements in role-playing design” as someone might have put it, but to re-imagine the original in the spirit of old-school play, circa 1974-75.

We have nothing against retro-clones (in fact we're all in favor of them) but part of the rationale for our approach was that retro-clones of “the three little brown books” have already been done and done well—most obviously by Delving Deeper and to a slightly lesser extent (in terms of precise cloning) by Swords & Wizardry White Box and Labyrinth Lord Original Edition Characters. There wasn’t really any point (for us or our potential audience) in trying to do the same thing. So the idea was to, so to speak, look at things from the “inside out”—emulating more of the spirit and the aesthetic of the original version while changing or (with humility) “fixing” and expanding on some things in line with that spirit. There’s at least a two parts fairy-tale, one part pulp science fiction and fantasy tone to the original that we feel was a big part of the original attraction of the game but that is not precisely captured by the rule mechanics or even the basic content of the text per se. In our opinion, much of it was quickly lost in later editions. The fairy-tale aspect was what motivated us to use the wonderful art of John Dickson Batten for all four volumes.

I’m happy with the result. Lulu did a fabulous job with the physical product. The creamy covers and high-quality paper show off the simple but elegant "old-school" font and the Batten drawings to great effect. And the saddle stitch binding allows one to easily lay any of the volumes flat for reference. We hope you will be proud to own it. The result fills a gaming niche for us, and I hope it will do so for others, while at the same time being a respectful tribute to the earliest version of the original game.

PDF’s of all four volumes are available for free download from Lulu. Just click the link above or to the right. Of course we recommend that if you find the virtual product to your liking, you’ll consider purchasing the physical booklets.

Since I’ve learned so much from the commentary and discussions on the blogs, groups and boards, any feedback would be enjoyable for me, and of course helpful.

Cheers!

Oakes

Twenty Years After

Well, actually only two.

First, let me answer my own question, posed more than twenty-six months ago:

Yes.

For reasons 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Somewhat for reason 8. And not so much for reason 1.

I've taken the time-off (an odd way of putting it, admittedly, since the original blog only existed for two weeks) to write a "neo-clone", Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, which I'll be releasing in a few days.

I started with a desire to write a pseudo-16th century variant of OD&D, but that gave way to a potentially richer re-imagining of the original game, with more of an emphasis on its fairy tale and even pulp science fiction aspects. I wanted to create something that even my new children could enjoy (in a few years, of course). The original idea is being reworked into a "supplement".

This blog will exist as a portal to the game, and as an occasional space to pontificate, but I doubt I'll have a lot of time. My wife and I are preparing for the arrival of two more children. We've gone from 0 to 4 in a bit more than two years, with me starting at the age of almost 48. That's two sets of back-to-back twins conceived through "natural" means. The odds of that are a bit higher than qualifying for an AD&D Paladin by rolling 3d6 in order, I think. :)

Here are Oliver and Lydia, riding the Chicago "L" on the way to Mass at our lovely St. John Cantius. They were no more than two months old when I took a hiatus from the blog. God willing, they will have two new brothers no later than the first week of May.

At the age of one-and-a half Lydia emerged from the bedroom to catch me watching the remake of Conan. She took one look at it and made the sign of the cross (which gets it about right, I think). Their most recent pastime is to creep into my office and filch my dice, which they then joyfully and madly roll on the kitchen floor until they inevitably disappear under the stove. Then they creep back into the office to steal some more.

Thank you to those who followed and commented on the early posts, and apologies for letting you down in any way. I've noticed that at least one of those commenters, Zenopus, has gone on to be a major player in the blogosphere, offering all sorts of nifty stuff of historical interest.

May your Feast of the Epiphany be peaceful and joyous!

Oakes 

Should All Weapons Do 1d6 Damage?

For the fun of it I thought I’d dissect the arguments for the OD&D pre-Greyhawk/Holmes Basic/S&W Whitebox convention that all weapons should do 1d6 damage.  For each argument, I’ll make the positive claim and then offer a critique in the next post.  We’ll see where we end up.

1. Should all weapons do 1d6 damage?  Why not?  Combat is abstract.
2. In a certain sense all weapons do the same damage in the end.  Being fatally stabbed by a dagger is just as bad as being fatally stabbed by a two-handed sword.
3. It’s simpler.
4. Rolling different kinds of dice (as well as different numbers of dice) for each weapon distracts from the “ballet of combat”.  Having all weapons do 1d6 focuses attention on the combat not on the dice.
5. Having some weapons do more than 1d6 damage introduces an annoying sort of inflation into the game.  If, for example, the damage done by a two-handed sword is increased from 1d6 in Men & Magic to 3d6 damage in Greyhawk (at least against large creatures), then to be fair (or rather, in the interests of realism or consistency), many of those large creatures must have their damage increased as well.
6. Having all weapons do 1d6 damage introduces more diversity in the choice of weapons.  From the point of view of fantasy role-playing, this is a good thing.  If weapons do different amounts of damage, players will gravitate to only a few of them--those that do the most damage.  That’s a bad thing.
7. Having all weapons do 1d6 damage allows you to come up with other reasons (more fun and more realistic) to choose some weapons over others—some weapons you can charge with, others might be better at piercing armor, etc.  This is healthy.
8. It’s a feature of the original game.  How could Gygax and Holmes have been wrong?

Am I leaving any out?

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?