Yesterday’s post about hovering at death’s door got me thinking about AD&D’s system shock rules. In the 1st Edition Player’s Handbook, these rules read:

System Shock Survival states the percentage chance the character has of surviving the following forms of magical attacks (or simple application of the magic): aging, petrification (including flesh to stone spell!), polymorph any object, polymorph others. Example: The wicked necromancer polymorphs (others) his hireling into a giant roc, with the rather foolish agreement of the changee; the hireling must make a saving throw based on his constitution score using the table above. Assuming he survives, a further saving throw would have to be made if he was again polymorphed or dispelled back to original form. The saving throw must be equal to or less than the percentage shown.

Resurrection survival shows the percentage chance the character has of being successfully raised from the dead or resurrected by a cleric. The score of the percentile dice must be equal to or less than the number shown on the table, or the character fails to be revivified and is completely and totally dead forever. Remember that a character can never be raised from the dead/resurrected a total number of times in excess of the character’s initial constitution score.

Reading through these rules again prompted a couple of thoughts.

First, wouldn’t re-introducing some sort of save-or-die effect for polymorph spells pretty much instantly solve the balance problems those spells have in 3rd Edition? This is a pretty good example of how the long, slow retreat from lethal consequences in D&D can have some really bad tack-on effects when those lethal consequences were serving as an important balancing mechanism.

Second, the degree to which order has been imposed onto the Gygaxian chaos of the early rulebooks. It’s easy to look at big examples (like getting all the numbers pointed in the same direction) and ignore the multitude of smaller adjustments made over the years: For example, 2nd Edition just quietly smoothed away the fact that you have one set of saving throws resolved using a d20-roll-under mechanic determined primarily by class (but adjusted by race and ability score) and a completely different set of saving throws resolved using percentile dice determined by ability score. And even retro-clones like OSRIC follow suit.

Nor, in my opinion, is this something that’s limited to published rulebooks. Gygax was an effusively creative fellow, but his rulebooks are dizzying affairs of the contradictory and the imparsable. I’ve talked before about the fact that the ur-game of D&D basically requires you to impose your will upon the rulebooks in order to play, and I think, when confronted with AD&D, we all tend to quietly gloss over the grosser oddities while sorting everything into a more comprehensible order. And I think that’s true even when we don’t really think about the fact that we’re doing it.

As a final thought, here’s the same set of rules in AD&D2:

System Shock states the percentage chance a character has to survive magical effects that reshape or age his body: petrification (and reversing petrification), polymorph, magical aging, etc. It can also be used to see if the character regains consciousness in particularly difficult situations. For example, an evil mage polymorphs his dim-witted hireling into a crow. The hireling, whose Constitution score is 13, has an 85 percent chance to survive the change. Assuming he survives, he must successfully roll for system shock again when he is changed back to his original form or else he will die.

This may be the perfect example of the shift from AD&D1 to AD&D2: Like most of the rules, this one is essentially unchanged. But in changing a roc into a crow one gets an immediate sense of how AD&D2 rulebooks were turned into vanilla.

I was recently reminded of the clusterfuck release of the D&D Essentials line. (Designed to reduce the cost of entry to the game while reducing confusion over what books you need to buy in order to play, it has increased both cost and confusion.)

If a genie put me in charge of Wizards of the Coast, this is what I would have released instead:

Three boxed sets, each containing:

• A rulebook with all the rules necessary for a complete tier of play.
• An adventure book with a complete adventure path designed to take you through the entire tier. (Preferably using node-based or hexcrawl-inspired design. This would probably necessitate abandoning or modifying the delve format to make this work with a reasonable page count.)
• A set of dice and a solo adventure pamphlet in the Heroic Tier box.
• Whatever other goodies (character sheets, tokens, power cards, miniatures, handouts) I can get away with and still hit a price point somewhere in the $30-50 range.

I would release these boxes on a 6 month schedule. 18-24 months after the core set went on sale, I would release a new “Heroic Adventure Pack” which would contain everything in the core set but with a different adventure path. 6 months after that, a new paragon tier expansion would be released (with a new adventure path but the same rulebook).

Depending on sales performance, I might phase the old versions of the products out. But the goal would be to have:

1. A single, consistent box that says “DUNGEONS & DRAGONS” on the front cover.
2. All other products are clearly labeled “EXPANSION PACK”, making it clear which product you need to buy to start playing. (The one-and-only product that doesn’t say “Expansion” on it.)
3. To have “all the rules” you just need to pick up any combination of HEROIC-PARAGON-EPIC.

The idea is to time your product release schedule to encourage people to play through a complete 1-30 campaign and then restart a new 1-30 campaign when the next sets starts cycling through.

And, yes, the scheme is specifically designed so that people end up with multiple copies of the exact same rulebooks. I would make it a point to not even change the cover art on them. I want you to think of them as duplicates, because that increases the likelihood that you’ll loan them to your friends or even give them away.

This sequence of box sets is the core of your game line. Everything else supports them as advanced options. For example, the Heroes of the Blank Blank line could offer new character class options (possibly tied back into the current sequence of boxed sets).

Dungeon’s DDI would be used to offer an alternative track of play: Each month should contain an adventure path scenario, a heroic tier scenario, a paragon tier scenario, and an epic tier scenario. Over the course of any 18 month stretch, you’d be offering 2-3 full tracks of 1-30 play (boxed sets, Dungeon adventure path, and plug-and-play Dungeon content).

One interesting side effect of using an encumbrance system simple enough that it actually gets used is that it tends to highlight places where the underlying mechanics don’t actually work right.

These problems, generally speaking, can be mostly seen in the largest creatures. For example, rocs are supposed to serve as mounts for storm giants. But rocs can only carry up to 7,456 pounds while flying and storm giants weigh 12,000 pounds according to the Monster Manual. (And that’s assuming that the storm giant is naked.)

I often have a strong desire, once I start tinkering with a sub-system like this, to tweak things in an effort to find solutions for these sorts of problem. But this can be something of a primrose path: Fixing the underlying problem here requires changing the design of the roc, the storm giant, or both. It’s not something that can be solved at a systemic level, and while the abstraction of the encumbrance by stone system fixes some of these problems; it also introduces others.

One tweak you might want to look at, though, is allowing flying creatures to carry up to a medium load when using the encumbrance by stone system in order to give them a larger margin of error when dealing with the abstraction of the system. (On the other hand, this really only seems to be a problem with Huge or larger mounts carrying Large or larger riders due to the cubic weight gain of larger creatures. Since this is a situation which rarely applies to PCs or their mounts, it can probably be safely sweeped under the rug labeled “I Don’t Really Care” ninety-nine times out of a hundred.)

Now, if you’re really tired of reading about encumbrance rules at this point… you’re in luck! I’m all done. My next post will have absolutely nothing to do with encumbrance.

But first:

Luke Encumbered

That backpack looks pretty full, so call it 3 stones. And Yoda can probably be classed as a halfling at 2 stones. Call it 5 stones and Luke is moving at 9″.

It’s so easy!

As I’ve mentioned a couple times recently, I’m in the process of playtesting some rules for hexcrawling. This is something I’ll probably be talking about in more detail at some point in the near future, but one key element in testing the system was figuring out how do characters move through the wilderness.

In most traditional hexcrawling systems, this question is resolved by navigating the hex map: You move through the wilderness by indicating the next hex you want to go to.

I, on the other hand, specifically wanted to play “hex blind”. I find the abstraction of hexes useful as a GM for mapping and keying a region, but I don’t want the players to “play the abstraction”. But once “I want to go to that hex” was taken off the table, the question became (a) how do you navigate the wilderness and (b) how can we resolve that in an efficient and interesting way? What we slowly hashed out is that people navigate the wilderness by:

• By going in a particular compass direction (“I go north!”)
• By heading towards or following a visible landmark (“We’ll take the road” or “I’ll head toward the mountain I can see on the horizon”).
• By using a map
• By aiming for a familiar destination
• By searching for a location they think is nearby
• By searching a general area looking for anything interesting.

And so forth.

Eventually I figured out that all of this could be mechanically boiled down to two methods:

1. Navigation by compass direction
2. Navigation by visible landmark

Accompanied by some guidelines on “how you find something” in the wilderness (based on whether it’s a familiar, unfamiliar, or unknown location). So far these core guidelines seem to be covering our bases.

(Of course, this assumes that wilderness exploration is the desired mode of play. If exploration isn’t desired, then there are easier/better ways of structuring a journey from Point A to Point B.)

DUNGEON vs. UNDERWORLD

I mention all this merely as a prelude for my main point of interest this afternoon: Navigating the underworld.

Let me quickly explain what I mean by “underworld” by contrasting it to the traditional “dungeon”.

In a dungeon, the players’ navigation of the environment can be handled in an essentially literal fashion: They see a door and can go through it. They see a hall and can go down it. They see a corner and they can turn it. (This is one of the reasons why dungeons are great for new DMs: They don’t need to worry about framing, transitions, or pacing.)

But this only works in dungeons because there is a certain density of cool stuff within the complex. Poke around a corner or two and you’ll find something interesting to interact with: A monster. A trap. An inscription on the wall. Strange tracks. A magical effect. Whatever.

So by “dungeon” I’m referring to any complex where the density of cool stuff is high enough that navigating the complex “room by room” is interesting. It should be noted that this has nothing to do with the size of the complex: A megadungeon can be very, very large indeed. But it’s still a dungeon, because it rewards that “room by room” method of navigation.

By “underworld”, on the other hand, I’m referring to a complex where the density of “cool stuff” is small enough that “room by room” navigation won’t be rewarding. Consider Moria from Lord of the Rings, for example: It’s a vast complex that takes the Fellowship days to traverse, but in all that time they only find a half dozen or so interesting things. Running that on a turn-by-turn, room-by-room basis would be incredibly boring.

NAVIGATING THE UNDERWORLD

Okay, so let’s pretend that we’re standing at the entrance to an underworld complex. The first question the needs to be asked is, “Why are we going in there?”

• You’re trying to find some specific location within the underworld.
• You’re trying to get through the underworld to the other side.
• You’re following the trail of someone (or something) which has gone in ahead of you.
• You’re just mucking around down there and hoping to find something interesting.

First question: Anything I’ve missed on that list?

Second question: How would you go about doing any of those things? I mean this from a purely in-character perspective, for which a few thoughts occur to me:

• You have a map.
• You generally know that your destination is in a particular direction. (For example, in Lord of the Rings Gandalf knew they needed to head generally east and up to reach the far door.)
• You can follow tracks or other signs.

Other thoughts?

This is all the foundation stuff on which mechanics can later be built. Such mechanics seem to be fairly trivial if you’re willing to remove player agency (“gimme some Dungeoneering checks to see if you find the Golden Crypts”), but more complicated if you want to let the players actually explore the complex by making choices about how they’re proceeding.

Another key element of all this is the handling of transitions to the “dungeon”-type complexes within the underworld. (See Thunderspire Labyrinth or the original D series of modules for a couple different approaches to this sort of underworld exploration.) This seems to be fairly easy if you’re just willing to fall back on the metagame and say, “Okay, you’ve reached the interesting bit.” And then transition back to the more familiar room-by-room sort of thing.

But this can be limiting and jarring. What sorts of things would “naturally” attract greater attention and, thus, provide a more natural transition between exploration modes? Finding recent tracks? Noticing a glint of gold? Encounter creatures?

OBSERVATION

The monster lists in the 1st Edition Monster Manual are basically 100 pages long (page 6 to page 103).

CONCLUSION

Gimme a d100. Let’s see what’s lurking in these 124 miles of wild mystery.