I stumbled across these in a post over on Troll Lord’s messageboards:

Gary’s OD&D House Rules:

For a score of 15 or over:
STR: +1 to hit and +1 to damage if a Fighter
INT: +1 1st level m-u spell
WIS: +1 1st level cleric spell
DEX: +1 to AC, and +1 to move silently
CON: +1 HP per HD (same as a Fighter class gets, +2 if a Fighter)
CHA: +1 (positive) on reaction checks

HPs: Characters are only unconscious at 0 HPs. For each level a character may have a minus HP total equal to the level, so a 1st level PC is dead at -2, a 2nd level at -3, etc.

Given the recent Reactions to OD&D essays, I thought it might be of interest. These help spread a little love around the prime requisites, fix the oddly incomprehensible rules for Constitution, and gives Charisma a front-end effect as well as a back-end effect (Charisma already had a really important role in governing follower loyalty in OD&D).

From Volume 1: Men & Magic, pg. 5:

Number of Players: At least one referee and from four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign, but the referee to player ratio should be about 1:20 or thereabouts.

From Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure, pg. 3:

* Referee’s option: Increase or decrease according to party concerned (used primarily only for out-door encounters).

And from Volume 3: Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, pg. 16:

Large Party Movement: Parties numbering over 100, including pack or draft animals, will incur a 1 hex penalty. Parties over 1,000 incur a 2 hex penalty.

These passages, colletively, refer to a style of gaming quite distinct from the modern standard in which a “campaign” refers to a stable group of roughly half a dozen players. And, in point of fact, they refer to a style of gaming quite distinct from that found in most of the published modules from TSR.

OPEN TABLE: The first distinction of classic play is the open table. When Arneson and Gygax talk about a single campaign involving fifty players, they don’t mean that they lived in mansions with massive gaming tables where 50 players could huddle around a battlemat.

Under the open table model of gaming, the adventuring party was fluid. This Saturday your companions might by Bob, Steve, and Lucy. Next Tuesday it might be Steve, Suzanne, Ben, and David. And then on Wednesday you might get together with the DM for some solo play.

This kind of mass participation in a single campaign had a significant impact on how scenarios were designed: The dungeon complex was never designed to be “cleared” or “won”, because if you cleared the dungeon complex where was Tuesday’s group going to go?

And this extended beyond dungeon play. The entire campaign world was a limitless sandbox made interesting not only through the creative faculties of your DM, but also through the actions of your fellow players.

OPEN DMING: Both Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign and Gygax’s Greyhawk campaign featured co-DMs who would run adventures within the same setting and for the same players. For example, Rob Kuntz, who receives special thanks on the title page of Men & Magic, is known for having become Gygax’s co-DM for Castle Greyhawk and co-designing several levels of that infamous dungeon.

It was also common for characters to adventure in both Arneson’s campaign (which was based in Minneapolis) and Gygax’s campaign (which was based in Lake Geneva). And this kind of “campaign visitation” was common.

In fact, my gaming buddies and I used to do the same thing when we started playing: We each had our stable of personal characters, and these characters would be used interchangeably in all of the campaigns we would run (and we all had our own campaigns).

(On a tangential note: Some people ascribe this style of play as having been lost in the mists of time, but I’m not sure that’s actually true except on a personal level. Certainly as I started to place a higher value on verisimilitude and coherent character arcs, the “illogical” nature of campaign-swapping meant that I abandoned this style of play. But on those rare occasions when I’ve seen younger players, they often have the same carefree style of freeform gaming that I used to have.

So if this is something that you miss or that you want to have again, consider simply embracing it anew.)

MULTIPLE CHARACTERS: Part and parcel with all this is that it was apparently fairly typical for players to have more than one character playing in the same campaign. Sometimes they would be playing them simultaneously, but it was also quite typical for you to be playing one set of characters on Wednesday and a different set of characters the following Monday.

BEYOND DUNGEON-CRAWLING: You know what I’m tired of hearing? That D&D is a game about “killing things and taking their stuff” and nothing else.

Has combat and treasure-hunting always been a part of the game? Sure. But the game is about a lot more than that, and it always has been. For example, here’s the description of the fighting-man class from Men & Magic:

Fighting-Men: All magical weaponry is usable by fighters, and this in itself is a big advantage. In addition, they gain the advantage of more “hit dice” (the score of which determines how many points of damage can be taken before a character is killed). They can use only a very limited number of magical items of the nonweaponry variety, however, and they can use no spells. Top-level fighters (Lords and above) who build castles are considered “Barons” (see the INVESTMENTS section of Volume III). Base income for a Baron is a tax rate of 10 Gold Pieces/inhabitant of the barony/game year.

The idea that successful characters were destined for more things than dungeon-crawling was part and parcel of the game. There are rules in OD&D for stronghold construction, political assassination, the hiring of specialist tradesmen, baronial investments (in things like roads, religious edifices, and the like), assembling a naval force, and so forth.

And when you realize that this type of “realm management” play was an integral part of the original gameplay of D&D, then tables in which “40 – 400” goblins were capable of appearing begin to make sense: Sometimes you were a bunch of 1st level nobodies trying to root out the local goblin gang that had taken root in hills north of the village. And sometimes you were a band of nobles riding forth at the head of your host to wipe out the goblin army marching on your barony.

Now take a moment, if you will, and consider the type of game that arises when all of these elements are true: Some of the PCs have become the local nobles. Others are still lower level dungeon-delvers. And the entire world is developing and evolving as a result of their cumulative actions.

OFFICIAL SUPPORT

Ironically, this style of play never received any meaningful support from TSR. Not even in its earliest days. Have you ever seen a module with 400 goblins in it? There are a few glimpses of it here and there — in the Wilderlands campaign setting from Judges Guild or B2 Keep on the Borderland. But for the most part, the type of game being played by Arneson and Gygax — the type of game that led to the codification of the D&D rules — was not the type of game that was being supported through published modules.

Partly this is because that style of game is organic in its nature. You can’t actually capture the essence of the Greyhawk or Blackmoor campaigns, for example, because they were always evolving. (When Wizards of the Coast published Jonathan Tweet’s Everway, a member of the company memorably said something to the effect of, “If we could just include a copy of Jon in every box, we’d sell a million copies.” They couldn’t and they didn’t.)

But, on the other hand, that shouldn’t stop you from publishing the raw material from which a rich sandbox campaign could be played. But the Wilderlands campaign from Judges Guild is probably as close as we’ve ever gotten to that.

What stood in the way? Well, partly the resources. Publishing such a product in a single volume would have been a huge investment. And by the time TSR was capable of pursuing such an investment, that style of play was already becoming “outdated”, Arneson was long gone, and Gygax was already beginning to lose his control of the company.

And even if the resources had been available, such an undertaking would constitute an incredibly large and complex project. Gygax himself spent 30+ years trying to get Castle Greyhawk into print. It has never happened.

So what got published instead? Tournament modules. The earliest TSR modules — stuff like the A series, G series, and S series that we now think of as classics and defined the concept and format of what a “module” is — were all designed for tournament play. And tournament play is almost precisely the opposite of the type of game that Arneson and Gygax were running: The scope is limited (because you have to finish it within a single convention slot), the outcome premeditated (because the next round of the tourney was already designed), completion anticipated (so that scoring could be done), and the impact to the wider world nonexistent (because there was no wider world that could be effected).

For better or for worse, those were the modules that the gamers at home were buying. And they became the models around which their games were fashioned.

And, hand-in-hand with that, the mechanical support for those styles of play were purged from the rulebooks. 3rd Edition — designed by old school grognards working for a company which was, at the time, run by another grognard — saw a return of some of that lost mechanical support. But 4th Edition, of course, has reversed course once again.

The designers of 3rd Edition understood the value of open-ended, fully-supported play. You can see it in Ptolus (the campaign setting Monte Cook used to playtest the 3rd Edition rules). The designers of 4th Edition, on the other hand, openly proclaimed that the game was all about killing things and cited that getting back to those “roots” was one of their primary design goals.

Talk about your false premises.

Back to Reactions to OD&D

In my essay “Festishizing Balance“, I talked about the ugly side of balance: The point where the obsessive desire to measure up against some arbitrary baseline results in people needlessly acting against their own best interests.

But I also made a point in that essay of making it clear that balance is also an important element of game and scenario design. On the other hand, a lot of confusion arises because people actually mean very different things when they talk about “balance”. In my Reactions to OD&D yesterday I talked about Gygax looking for a “very different type of balance” than the balance of mechanical equivalence.

Let’s talk about this for a bit.

CONCEPT BALANCE: Concept balance maintains that all character concepts should be equally viable. In other words, the guy wanting to play Conan the Barbarian and the guy wanting to play Robin Hood should both be equally effective in combat. Why? Because otherwise the system is inhibiting creativity (by making it less attractive to play Conan and/or Robin Hood). In addition, these less effective character concepts serve as “traps” for inexperienced players — they think it would be cool to play Conan, but instead they find themselves always playing second fiddle to Robin Hood. It requires at least some degree of system mastery in order to recognize and avoid these traps.

NATURALISTIC BALANCE: Naturalistic balance, on the other hand, recognizes that not all character concepts are realistically equal. If you’re playing in a realistic World War II game, then the martial arts specialist is just not going to be as combat effective as the guy with a machine gun. (However, naturalistic balance should not be misunderstood as being equivalent to a desire for “realism” in a game.)

SPOTLIGHT BALANCE: With spotlight balance, characters focus on disparate types of gameplay and the balance between them is achieved by the GM making sure that all types of gameplay get an equal share of playing time. For example, when confronted with both Conan and Robin Hood, the GM needs to make sure that there are equal opportunities for both melee specialists (Conan) and ranged specialists (Robin Hood) to show off their best stuff.

THE PROBLEM WITH CONCEPT BALANCE

The problem with concept balance is that it requires you to severely limit either (a) flexibility of character creation; (b) the scope of gameplay; or (c) both.

Many advocates of concept balance will, at this juncture, attempt to degrade the concept of “flexibility” as being the “freedom to play a weakling”. While it certainly can mean that, flexibility more usefully means “I want to focus my character creation resources on gameplay X versus gameplay Y”.

The inherent imbalance of flexibility becomes apparent when you realize that different campaigns will feature different mixes of gameplay types.

A simple example of this is the difference between a campaign focusing on lots of melee fighting in the tightly confined quarters of a typical dungeon (favoring Conan) and a campaign focusing on lots of ranged fighting in the wilderness (favoring Robin Hood). A more complex example of this was the subject of my essay “Death of the Wandering Monster” — certain types of campaigns allow the spotlight balance between fighters and wizards to skew one way or the other.

Let’s make this an extreme example: If you’re playing in a campaign with little or no combat, a fighter is less useful. If you’re playing in an entirely urban campaign, druids and rangers become less useful. If you’re playing in a campaign taking place entirely within an area of antimagic, wizards become less useful.

(D&D makes an easy example for this sort of thing because one major type of character creation resource investment is neatly encapsulated in a single decision point: Class selection.)

There’s no way to “balance” the fact that fighters aren’t very effective in campaigns where there isn’t any combat without either (a) disallowing people from playing a fighter (limiting the flexbility of character creation) or (b) disallowing campaigns that don’t feature a lot of combat (limiting the scope of the game).

This is why many proponents of combat balance often focus exclusively on a character’s combat effectiveness: By narrowing the scope of the game to a single type of gameplay (combat), concept balance becomes possible.

The other way to work around this issue is to isolate each distinct style of gameplay and then make sure that all characters are balanced within each style of play. (This, of course, is another example of limiting the flexibility of character creation.)

THE PROBLEM WITH NATURALISTIC BALANCE

We’ve already touched on the problem with naturalistic balance: It invalidates character concepts and creates potentially unforeseen “booby traps” in character creation that require system mastery to avoid.

The result is that people end up with characters who aren’t fun to play. Combined with the typical modern paradigm of gaming in which character attrition is low, players can end up stuck for a very long time playing characters they don’t want to play any more.

Partial solutions to this problem include allowing players to redesign sub-par characters or switch to entirely different characters. But these are only partial solutions: If someone wants to play Robin Hood and the system doesn’t make Robin Hood a viable concept, then it doesn’t matter how many times you let them re-design the character — they still won’t be playing what they want to be playing.

THE PROBLEM WITH SPOTLIGHT BALANCE

The problem with spotlight balance is that it can mean that characters in spotlight A have to sit and watch while characters in spotlight B are doing their thing.

For example, look at the “decker problem” in cyberpunk games (such as Shadowrun). In these games, non-deckers frequently have to stand idly by and do nothing while the decker characters hack into a computer system. This problem arises partly because of scenario design (hacking frequently happens while nothing else of interest is going on) and partly because of mechanical design (actions taken while hacking take less game time than non-hacking actions).

Concept balancers would try to fix this problem by either (a) getting rid of decker play (narrowing the scope of the game); (b) requiring that all characters be capable of participating in decker play (limiting the flexibility of character creation); or (c) figuring out how to combine decker and non-decker activities into a single type of gameplay.

(For example, I understand that the most recent edition of Shadowrun uses augmented reality to effectively fold hacking into the combat-and-stealth gameplay of a typical ‘run.)

In a more general sense, spotlight balance requires that a GM be capable of designing scenarios involving more than one type of gameplay. In addition, either:

(1) The scenario must allow for both gameplay A and gameplay B to be happening simultaneously, with the GM flipping back and forth between the split party; or

(2) Characters must have at least some abiltiy to participate in all forms of gameplay.

The former, frankly, is non-trivial and requires an experienced and talented GM. The latter, however, can be mechanically achieved and is, in fact, the default method for classic D&D play.

PROBLEM? WHAT PROBLEM?

So, to sum up: The problem with concept balance is that it requires limiting the scope and flexibility of the game. The problem with naturalistic balance is that it offers unfun options. And the problem with spotlight balance is that it requires characters to sometimes NOT be in the spotlight.

But, on the flip-side, there are plenty of people who will stand up and say, “Problem? What problem?”

Some people have no problem with the scope and flexibility of the game being curtailed, if it means that they can have fun within the resulting focus.

Some people have no problem with a game requiring a certain degree of mastery, if it means that they get sensible and flexible results.

Some people have no problem with being an audience to awesome, if it means that — when their turn comes — they get to be awesome, too.

There is no One True Way to be achieved here. All of these forms of balance have their disadvantages and their advantages. Which trade-offs you prefer is going to be a matter of personal taste.

MY SWEET SPOT

With that being said, allow me to use my soapbox to talk about my own, personal sweet spot.

CONCEPT BALANCE: I like immersive roleplay and open, sandbox-style scenarios. Thus I prize both flexibility in character creation and a broad scope of potential gameplay. As a result, I have no taste for the trade-offs demanded by concept balance.

However, that doesn’t mean that the lessons of concept balance should be completely ignored. While I don’t necessarily believe that all character concepts need to be legitimate options, I do believe that all legitimate character options should be viable in the game system.

NATURALISTIC BALANCE: My preference for immersive roleplay and sandbox-style scenarios similarly makes naturalistic balance appealing to me. The need for system mastery, on the other hand, is not inherently appealing to me, but flexibility and meaningful choice both require the possibility that poor choices can be made. Ergo, I’m not particularly averse to the negative aspects of naturalistic balance, while remaining open to its positive aspects.

SPOTLIGHT BALANCE: I like my players to have many different gameplay options for overcoming a given obstacle. And I recognize that giving players meaningful choice in character creation means allowing them to choose where to focus their character creation resources.

Therefore, I embrace spotlight balance.

Fortunately, when you embrace open-ended scenario design, spotlight balance tends to take care of itself. When you give players the ability to craft their own course of action, they’ll defend their own interests and pursue those strategies and tactics which best reflect their own strengths. (You’ll need to watch out for players who get excluded from the group’s decision-making process, but that’s a group dynamic that will cause problems far beyond the issues raised by spotlight balance and would need to be dealt with in any case.)

I also tend to believe that, when spotlight balance is working, the problems commonly associated with it aren’t actually meaningful problems. Even if all of the PCs are perfectly balanced for combat and your entire game is completely dedicated to combat, each PC is still only capable of being at the center of attention for a limited amount of time. (If there are X PCs, then that time is limited — on average — to 1/Xth of the game session.) If you don’t like being an audience for the awesome things the other players are doing, then you’re never going to be satisfied with anything except solo and one-on-one play. (Me? I like having an audience for my escapades and I like watching the clever escapades of others.)

So, in my opinion, most people who protest that they have a problem with spotlight balance acutally mean that they have a problem with spotlight imbalance — in other words, someone else is getting more than their fair share of the spotlight.

What I will concede is that spotlight play is not something that can be mechanically enforced within the traditional structure of a roleplaying game. (It can be mechanically enabled, but that’s different.) Ultimately the GM, working in concert with the group dynamic, must make sure that the spotlight gets turned to each PC in turn. This is something that must be managed in the moment. It can’t even be easily quantified. Knowing where, when, and how to focus a spotlight depends on the tastes of your players and the circumstances of the session. It’s a matter of pacing and narrative need, coupled with practicality and an honest gauge of players’ current interests, attention, and energy. It’s more an art than a science.

As a final note, I’ll point out that the exact mixture of concept, naturalistic, and spotlight balance depends on the game and the campaign concept I’m running at the time. Just as there’s no One True Way, in my experience there’s also no One Size Fits All solution to these issues.

If you came to D&D with 3rd Edition, chances are you don’t know what “prime requisites” are.

In OD&D each of the three classes — fighting-man, magic-user, and cleric — had an ability score as a “prime requisite”. These prime requisites served two purposes:

(1) In order to change classes, you needed to have an unmodified prime requisite score of 16 or better in the class you wanted to change to. (Although this rule was “not recommended”, except for elves who had the racial ability to freely switch at will between fighting-man and magic-user at the beginning of each adventure. It is open to interpretation whether elves needed to have the necessary prime requisites in order to do that. There is also the oddity that magic-users cannot change into clerics and vice versa… but nothing stops them from first changing to fighting-men and then changing to the other. But I digress…)

(2) If you had a high prime requisite score in your class you earned additional XP. If you had a low prime requisite score your XP was penalized, as described on the “Bonuses and Penalties to Advancement due to Abilities” table:

In later editions, certain classes also had minimum ability scores and prime requisites that had to be met. For example, in the 1st Edition of AD&D in order to “become a paladin a character must be human, have a strength of not less than 12, a minimum intelligence of 9, a wisdom of 13 or more, a minimum constitution of 9, and not less than 17 charisma”.

GYGAXIAN BALANCE

In the currently predominant culture of gaming — where the fetishization of balance is, at best, barely lurking out of sight — this entire design schema is impossibly alien. It’s practically anathema. Why would you take a PC who was already more powerful than the other PCs (because they have higher ability scores) and make them even more powerful (by giving them XP bonuses)?

And when you get to classes with minimum ability score requirements, things seem to become even less comprehensible. Many of these classes were just flat-out better than the other classes. So now you’re taking powerful characters, making them more powerful by giving them access to better classes, and then allowing them to advance more quickly to even more power by giving them XP bonuses.

I’ve seen people point to this as an example of Gygax being “incompetent”. These people annoy me because they’re missing the point: Gygax didn’t fail to balance character vs. character. That just wasn’t one of his design goals. He was trying to accomplish something very different.

The first thing you’re seeing here is Gygaxian naturalism. Why are the guys with better ability scores able to access more powerful classes? Because they’re more talented.

There is a balance being modeled here, but it’s subtler than the mechanical equivalence at the beginning of a Chess match.

Basically Gygax was saying: “Look, Character A has more talent than Character B. The ability scores tell us that. So that means that Character A can get into major league baseball and Character B is going to be stuck in the minor leagues. And that means that Character A is going to earn more money.”

At this point modern afficionados of “balance” will protest, “But if Character A is in the major leagues and Character B is in the minor leagues, then they’ll never get to play on the same field!”

And Gygax would say, “Look, kid, you’re abusing the metaphor.”

Because, at this point, we need to understand the other fundamental underpinning of OD&D play: Darwinian attrition.

DARWINIAN ATTRITION

In OD&D it was assumed that PCs would die. In fact, it was assumed that the vast majority of PCs in the campaign would end up dead.

This had two important impacts on the way the game was played and, thus, the way the game was designed:

(1) On the one hand, if your character “sucked” compared to the other PCs, it didn’t really matter all that much. After all, he was probably going to be dead sooner rather than later. Dungeons were dangerous places.

(2) On the other hand, the mere act of survival was something to be lauded. Longevity was an achievement. And achieving that longevity with a “sucky” character? Ah, that was something to be lauded even more! It was like playing with a handicap.

This is something that gamers familiar with the modern paradigms of design sometimes struggle to understand, so let me try to explain by way of analogy. Imagine that you’re playing Name That Tune:

Me: I can name that tune in 8 notes.
You: I can name that tune in 6 notes.
Me: I can name that tune in 5 notes.
You: I can name that tune in 4 notes.
Me: Name that tune!
You: Aw, man! I have to name that tune in only 4 notes, while you could name it in 5 notes! It’s not fair! My character is much less powerful than yours!

Okay, the analogy kinda broke down there somewhere, but hopefully the point is clear: Yeah, that guy over there has better ability scores. Are you going to whine about it, or are you going to show him that you can play the game better than he can, scores or no scores?

CHARACTER GENERATION AS GAME

Of course, the argument can be made that the random generation of ability scores has nothing to do with the skill of the players involved. But so what? Were you under the illusion that craps is a game of skill?

See, part of the trick here is that character creation was considered part of the gameplay.

It was gameplay that was fundamentally different from the gameplay that happened once the dungeon exploration actually began, but it was still an important and integral part of the game. Like the rules for setting up terrain in a wargame. Or the bidding in a game of Bridge.

The game that, in my opinion, best understood that character creation was part of the game (and, consequently, is most misunderstood by many modern gamers) is the original Traveller.

In Traveller, all newly created characters start at 18 years of age. You could then attempt to enlist in one of six services: Navy, Marines, Army, Scouts, Merchants, or Other. Successfully enlisting required a successful roll of the dice (some services were more difficult to join than others). Each term of service lasted for 4 years and carried with it the chance of injury or death (determined with another dice roll — some services were more dangerous than others). Depending on what service you had joined, you would gain different skills and training during your term. And once a term was completed, you could opt to re-enlist, join another service, or end your career and start play.

Wait a minute… did I just say that your character could die during character creation? Yes. I did.

I’ve seen lots of people describe that system as crazy. But the concept really shouldn’t be that hard to grasp: Mechanically, character creation in Traveller is a gambling game. You’re gambling the risk of death, injury, or debilitation from age against the possibility for better skills and training.

And the brilliant part of it, frankly, is that Traveller used the gambling mechanics to encourage players to create characters with interesting and intricately detailed backgrounds. What did you do during that term of service? Why did your character choose to re-enlist? What did you do to learn those particular skills?

The original Traveller rulebook may have summed up this approach to game design best when it said:

The Solitaire Game: One player undertakes some journey or adventure alone. He or she handles the effects of the rules as the situation progresses. […] In addition, there are many aspects ideally suited to solitaire consideration. A single player can spend time generating characters, designing starships, generating worlds and subsectors, planning situations, and mapping out ideas to use in later group scenarios.

Under this design philosophy, rolling up characters was more than just a means to an end: It was meant to be fun in and of itself. There’s a little bit of gambling — a little bit of excitement — in that moment when the dice fly and the fate of your character is shaped before your eyes.

THE MODERN PARADIGM

Of course, in most modern gaming character attrition is low. The goal of “survival” has taken a backseat to the development of character, exploration of world, and the telling of stories. And, as a result, some of the necessary elements that make Gygaxian balance work no longer exist.

But I still think we can learn some valuable lessons from Gygaxian balance. There is more to a roleplaying game than mechanical equivalence.

It’s also important to remember that, given the open-ended nature of roleplaying games, true mechanical equivalence can only be achieved by artificially narrowing both the range of potential characters and the breadth of possible or expected gameplay. (4th Edition, notably, does both.)

There’s something to be said for characters with long lives and the long arcs of development that those lives make possible. But there’s also something to be said for the capricious whim of fate that makes victory meaningful because failure is always an option.

And for Arneson and Gygax, both of these things could be true at the same time.

Back to Reactions to OD&D

Let’s start this essay with a couple of quotes from Volume 1: Men & Magic regarding ranged combat. First, from the Alternative Combat System attack matrices on page 20:

Missile hits will be scored by using the above tables at long range and decreasing Armor Class by 1 at medium and 2 at short range.

To put this rule in context for those who aren’t familiar with OD&D, allow me to explain: Both melee and long-range missile attacks use the same attack matrices. But at medium distances missiles receive a +1 bonus and at short ranges they receive a +2 bonus to hit.

Compare and contrast this with 3rd Edition. Here both melee and ranged attacks use the same Base Attack Bonus, but at medium and long ranges the missile fire suffers penalties.

One critique of 3rd Edition is that ranged combat specialists are at a significant disadvantage compared to melee combat specialists. How many of those complaints would disappear if you implemented an OD&D-style system of giving bonuses for close range missile attacks instead of penalties for distant missile attacks?

(And how many more would disappear if you took the equally radical step of giving ranged attacks a Dex-based bonus to damage like the Strength-based bonus that melee attacks receive? All of them. But I digress.)

(EDIT: It has been pointed out that the word “decrease” might actually mean that Armor Class is improved against missile attacks at medium and close ranges. I hadn’t really considered that possibility because it seems natural to me that the closer something is, the easier it is to hit with a missile weapon, but it’s certainly true. This, by the way, is why I don’t miss the “lower AC is better” days in the least. Is that +2 a bonus or a penalty? Only her stylist knows for sure.)

And here’s another quote from “Men & Magic”, this one from the “Bonuses and Penalties to Advancement due to Abilities” table (which, like many things in OD&D, is only partly about what it says it’s about):

To understand the importance of these entries, you first have to understand one other thing: There are no equivalent bonuses (or penalties) for melee attacks.

So, once again, we see OD&D giving a significant advantage to ranged combatants compared to their melee brethren. In doing so it stands in contrast with 3rd Edition (where ranged combatants require special equipment, class abilities, and/or feats to even begin equalizing with melee combatants).

It stands in even starker contrast with 4th Edition, where ranged combat has been completely nerfed for the convenience of the miniatures game. And this is slightly ironic because I suspect one of the reasons that OD&D is so friendly to ranged combat is because of its roots in the Chainmail wargame: Chainmail needed to cope with the reality that charging ranged attackers Agincourt-style is, historically speaking, a really dreadful idea. One that people have been willing to repeat time and time again throughout history (World War I, I’m looking at you), but a really dreadful idea nonetheless.

PALIMPSEST INVERSION

Of course, all of this goes out the window if you interpret the OD&D rules slightly different. Here’s a quote from Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure:

Attack/Defense capabilities versus normal men are simply a matter of allowing one roll as a man-type for every hit die, with any bonuses being given to only one of the attacks, i.e. a Troll would attack six times, once with a +3 added to the die roll. (Combat is detailed in Vol. III.)

This little paragraph is incredibly confusing for many reasons: First, the basic combat system is largely detailed in Volume 1. It is not meaningfully discussed in Volume 3 (only Aerial Combat and Naval Combat are given any substantive treatment there).

Second, based on its formatting and context the passage appears to be referring to an “Attack/Defense” entry on the table immediately preceding this text… but no such entry is to be found. It’s actually referring to Hit Dice. (A troll has 6 + 3 HD, hence the +3 bonus it receives.)

Third, the most literal interpretation of the paragraph is “monsters attack like men once for every HD they have”. There are two problems with this: First, the Alternative Combat System has separate attack matrices for men and monsters — so if monsters end up attacking “as a man-type”, what’s the point of the attack matrix for monsters? Second, the text only refers to monsters… which means that monsters get 1 attack per HD, but the PCs don’t. I don’t really see any way for that to be viable, do you?

For the most part, as far as I can tell, this passage is almost universally ignored. Or used only when the Chainmail rules are used for mass combat.

But one way in which it has been interpreted is that everyone (monsters and men alike) get 1 attack per round per HD.

However, by combining that with certain rules from Chainmail, another interpretation also arose: Everyone (monsters and men alke) get 1 attack per round per HD… but only when engaged in melee.

Which, of course, immediately shifts the pendulum of power away from ranged combat and places it rather firmly and definitely in favor of melee combat.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In lump sum, therefore, OD&D serves — in its many-faced way — as excellent fodder for a discussion of how ranged and melee combat should relate to each other.

But this also speaks to one of the broader themes in these reactions to OD&D: There are many who like to talk about “old school” gaming as if it was some sort of unified style of play, but could there be any larger bifurcation of play styles than those created by the disparate interpretations of the mechanics we’ve seen here?

In one set of mechanics, ranged combat has a distinct edge. Smart use of a sling or bow is strongly advantageous, leading to combats being conducted from the maximum possible distance. (And even when the combat tightens up, there’s still every reason to continue using your ranged weapon if you can.)

But in the other set of mechanics, the melee fighters grind up the battlefield — completely outclassing the damage-dealing capabilities of the ranged combatants through their sheer number of attacks per round.

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