The players in my OD&D open table periodically ask me, “Are there any magic items for sale?” Not certain of how I want to handle that, up to now I’ve been fairly content to simply say, “Not yet.”

It’s a question I’ve also struggled with in my Ptolus campaign: On the one hand, positing a setting where wandering mercenaries go delving into dungeons in order to pull out vast hordes of wealth which frequently include magical treasures, allowing the PCs to sell those treasures, and then concluding that there’s no way to buy magic items seems unreasonable. (Although running a campaign where the PCs really are the sole sellers of magic items in the whole world seems like it could be potentially fascinating, albeit completely different from a typical D&D campaign.) On the other hand, I think it can be quite evocative to see what the “competition” has been bringing in.

As far as Ptolus goes, I’ve largely been handling it in an ad hoc fashion. And I feel like it’s been a mild success in evoking the wider sense of a setting in which delvers are plumbing the depths of the vast catacombs beneath the city. But I’ve also longed for a better/systematic way of handling it, and now my OD&D campaign has raised the demand to a figuratively fever pitch.

The method described below hasn’t been heavily tested yet, and it does require a fair bit of prep for larger communities. (Although there are some methods for breaking that prep up into manageable chunks if you find yourself needing to generate it on the fly.)

THE LOCAL MARKET

The local market can vary quite a bit. While it could be a generic “magic mart” there are lots of other options: In small communities, it might be nothing more than Bob who has a couple of magical items stuffed in a trunk that once belonged to his adventuring grandfather. Local churches might have a supply of divine items. It might be an eclectic collection of antiquities dealers, pawnshops, down-on-their-luck magicians, and the like. It might be a secretive cult of black-robed alley-dwellers. The local mage’s academy might buy up all the items that come into town and then re-sell them (along with new creations) at a mark-up.  There might be specialty fences trying to evade the local prohibitions on the dissemination of dangerous magical weaponry.

THE LOCAL SUPPLY: You can determine the initial supply of items in a community by randomly determining magical treasure once per 1,000 inhabitants. (So in a community of 40,000, you would make forty checks.) If appropriate, you can vary this according to the treasure type of the predominant population. Or you can just go with a flat 50% chance.

In OD&D, for example, a typical human settlement of 30,000 people would use Treasure Type A (40% chance of any 3 magic items) and you’d made the check 30 times.

For AD&D1, you might want to use Table II.B on pg. 120 of the DMG in combination with the random check.

For D&D3, you’ll need to figure out what level to roll using the tables on pg. 52-53 of the 3.5 DMG. (You might try randomizing that by rolling 1d20.)

(Note: You’re not generating a list of every single magic item in town. You’re just generating the stuff that’s currently available for sale.)

THE MARKET LIST: When you’re done, you’ll have a list of items currently available for sale in town. Where the PCs will need to go (or what they’ll need to do) in order to procure a particular item on the list is up to your discretion.

MODIFYING THE MARKET LIST: Obviously, anything the PCs buy should be removed from the market list and anything they sell should be added to the list.

Adding Items: At set intervals (either once per session or once per some set amount of time in the game world), roll on your treasure tables again once per 10,000 inhabitants. (So if you rolled 40 checks originally, the market fluctuates using 4 checks on a periodic basis.) Items generated in this fashion are added to the local market — either due to new finds from local adventuring parties or new creations from local wizards.

Removing Items: Count the number of items you just added to the market. Modify that number by (1d10 – 1d10) and then randomly remove that number of items from the market.

(For example, if you generate 8 new magic items and then roll (9 – 3 =) 6, you would remove (8 + 6 =) 14 items from the market. If you had rolled (2 – 6 =) -4, then you would have removed (8 – 4 =) 4 items from the market.)

NOTES

In practice, generating the initial list of items may be a bit time-consuming for larger communities. But keeping the list updated after that point shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

If you find yourself needing to use this system on the fly, you can de-centralize the local market for magic items and reduce the load by generating only the supply available at each potential “outlet”. If the PCs don’t find what they want from Aldric One-Eye, of course, they might go check with the local fences from the Thieves’ Guild… but that should give you time to generate the short list of what the Thieves’ Guild has on hand. (Simply jot down which items can be found where on your market list for future reference as necessary.)

Of course, the entire process can also be considerably sped up by using one of the numerous automatic generators that can be found scattered around online.

Go to Part 2

The description of the original helm of teleportation from OD&D recently struck me as particularly interesting:

Helm of Teleportation: The Magic-User employing this helm must have a Teleportation spell in order to take advantage of the device. Having but one such spell the Magic-User can Teleport himself endlessly about the universe, but if he teleports some other person or object the helm does not function and the spell proper is used. Thus the helm is good only to transport the Magic-User himself. Treat as a non-protective helm if worn into combat.

(A passage which also indicates that “protective helms” should have some beneficial effect in combat, but if there’s any explanation for what the benefit would be the rules are rather silent on the matter. I’ve been thinking about applying a -1 AC penalty for missing helmets. But I digress.)

What I was particularly struck by in this passage was the similarity between its mechanical construction and the construction of reserve feats from Complete Mage for 3rd Edition. Conceptually I always liked the idea of reserve feats (allowing spellcasters to make minor magic-based contributions on a regular basis), but found the actual execution to be rather broken. (Allowing wizards to do 6d6 points of area effect damage per round with no saving throw, for example, no longer qualifies as a minor contribution.)

But it might be interesting to take properly balanced reserve-type abilities and have them accessible via magical equipment (like the original helm of teleportation). I’m particularly drawn to the image of magic wands that don’t have charges, but instead allow you to use specific spells you currently have memorized in a powered-down form.

On the other hand, maybe chewing up an equipment slot would be necessary to keep this sort of thing balanced. Or what if there was a percentage chance that you’d lose your reserve spell whenever you triggered the reserve item? In a semi-similar fashion, AD&D’s helm of teleportation limited the number of uses per day based on the number of teleport spells you had prepared. (So that the item extends your magical endurance, but not necessarily limitlessly so.)

While bantering with Zak at Playing D&D With Porn Stars (NSFW; EDIT: Zak turned out to be a missing stair and then a very well known serial abuser years after this was posted), I came up with a quick-and-dirty system for handling 3rd Edition NPCs:

(1) Give them an arbitrary number of HD. (Let’s say in d8s.)

(2) Assign them an array of ability scores.

(3) Figure out their AC. (Assign a number or do armor + Dex.)

(4) Figure out how much damage their attacks do. (Assign a number or do weapon + Strength.)

(5) Done.

In play, pertinent stats can be easily calculated off HD:

Melee Attack: HD + Strength modifier
Ranged Attack: HD + Dexterity modifier
Saving Throws: 1/2 HD + ability modifier
Skills: HD + ability mod

You could also, obviously, precalculate these values if you were feeling fancy. But where this is really useful is when you’re trying to keep up with your PCs on-the-fly. If you can quickly jot down:

HD 7; Str 16, Dex 12, Con 14, Int 11, Wis 10, Cha 8; plate, longsword

Then you’ve got enough information to run the NPC.

If you want to class up the joint a little bit, it’s pretty easy to slap a few class abilities on there. And here’s how you do spellcasters:

(1) Look up how many spell slots they have.

(2) Write those numbers down.

(3) Open your PHB to the spell lists and pick spells as they cast ’em.

So you might jot down:

Wizard 8; Str 8, Dex 14, Con 10, Int 18, Wis 14, Cha 11; 4/4/3/3/2

And that’s enough to run the encounter.

It’s a pity that old school monsters didn’t include ability scores, because otherwise this system would allow you to instantly convert them on-the-fly.

One potential mode of “old school” play is the idea that “everybody starts at 1st level”. Combined with each class having a separate experience chart table, individual experience awards, and open gaming tables it was pretty typical for adventuring parties to have a pretty wide variance in their levels. This, of course, isn’t “balanced“, so it’s come in for a good deal of scorn in the past couple of decades. Most groups today allow new characters to be rolled up using the party’s current level and keep everybody in lock-step through unified XP awards.

(My Ptolus group, however, has experienced a 1-3 level variance due to a variety of reasons. I have not found this be inherently traumatizing.)

Having played a megadungeon OD&D campaign for awhile now, however, I’ve found that there are a few mitigating factors in practice:

First, the open gaming table combined with super simple character creation results in everybody running a “stable” of characters. They can self-select whichever character is the best match for the current group or roll up an entirely new character depending on whatever is most appropriate.

Second, due to the lethality faced by 1st-level characters, players rolling up new characters want a couple higher level characters to accompany them. It greatly increases the odds of survival and the pace of advancement.

Third, it doesn’t actually take that long to “catch up”. For example, in the time it takes a 5th level fighter to reach 6th level, a 1st level fighter will reach 5th level. (And will catch up and become 6th level before the more experienced fighter reaches 7th.)

With all that being said, I’ve been giving some thought on how you can make the level gap more palatable.

In Eden Studio’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer roleplaying game, they compensate for the power difference between the Slayer and the Scooby Gang by giving the weaker characters additional drama points. Could this be adapted? Let’s say lower level characters get +1 inspiration points per difference in level? (So a 3rd level character adventuring with 6th level characters would get 3 inspiration points to spend per session.)

Inspiration points are a dissociated mechanic, obviously, but they could represent all sorts of things: It’s the guy who’s inspired to greater heights by Superman’s example. Or picks up a few tricks from sparring with D’Artagnan. Or gets an assist from Bruce Lee during the melee. But, basically, you’re rubbing shoulders with some elite dudes and some of it is wearing off.

Mechanically, we could simply use the existing action point mechanics for 3rd Edition. Alternatively we could continue taking our page from Buffy and allow for an inspiration point to be spent much more significantly:

• I Think I’m Okay: Restores half your lost hit points.
• Righteous Fury / Time to Shine: +5 to all actions for the current combat.
• Dramatic Editing: Actually alter the game world. (“Hey! There’s a secret door over here that leads us to the back of the goblin encampment!” “Good thing somebody dropped some holy water over here!”)
• Back From the Dead: Return from the grave through resurrection, a clone duplicate, a long-lost twin, or whatever else strikes their fancy.

Some of these look like they would exceed my “tolerance threshold” for D&D. Others wouldn’t. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

One of my long-standing concerns with the D20 system was the skewed probabilities of opposed group checks. For example, consider the example of a PC making a Move Silently check opposed by an NPC’s Listen check where both characters have the same skill modifier. In this scenario, a single PC attempting to sneak past a single NPC has a 50% chance of succeeding.

Compare this to a situation in which 5 PCs are attempting to sneak past 5 NPCs (with, again, all of the characters involved having the same skill modifiers). This effectively becomes a check in which the 5 PCs are rolling 5d20 and keeping the lowest result, while the NPCs trying to detect them are rolling 5d20 and keeping the highest result.

The average roll of 5d20-keep-lowest is 3. The average of 5d20-keep-highest is 17. That 14 point differential means that it’s virtually impossible for a party of characters to sneak past a group of evenly matched opponents. (And even sneaking past a single watchman is difficult as the average party roll of 3 is opposed by an average roll of 10.)

Of course, the odds are actually worse than this: A successful stealth attempt will also usually require a Hide vs. Spot check, so you need to succeed at not one but two checks at these outrageous odds. And this assumes that the PCs all keep their stealth skills maxed out (which in practice they won’t, particularly since it’s so pointless to do so).

The argument can certainly be made that this is realistic in some sense: A large group should have a tougher time sneaking past a sentry than one guy and more eyes means more people who can spot you. But I would argue that the probability skew is large enough that it creates results which are both unrealistic and undesirable.

In practice, the effects of the skew are obvious: Group stealth attempts quickly drop out of the game. When stealth is called for, it takes the form of a sole scout pushing out ahead of the rest of the group. And when the scout becomes too fragile to survive when the check finally fails, stealth stops being a part of the game altogether.

Since I’d prefer stealth to be a potentially viable tactic, a solution is called for.

QUICKIE SOLUTIONS

DISTANCE / DISTRACTION PENALTIES: A guideline that can really help the stealther is the -1 penalty per 10 feet that is supposed to be applied on Listen and Spot checks. Keep about a hundred feet away from the guy trying to spot you and you can quickly cancel out the probability skew of the dice.

Unfortunately, these modifiers become kind of wonky, particularly when it comes to Spot checks. On the open plains, for example, the “maximum distance at which a Spot check for detecting the nearby presence of others can succeed is 6d6 x 40 feet”. The minimum distance of 240 feet, therefore, is supposed to impose a -24 penalty and the maximum distance of 1,440 feet impose a -144 penalty.

I’ve tried a few different ways of fixing these modifiers, but am currently just using an ad hoc sense of what the range of the check is.

TARGET NUMBERS: Instead of making these opposed checks, set a target number for the PC’s skill check of 10 + the NPC’s skill modifier. (This essentially halves the probabilty skew.)

GROUP CHECKS: Make only one check for each group. But what skill modifier to use? Using the average value is cutesy, but impractical at the game table. Using the lowest value still effectively takes group stealth off the table. Using the highest modifier means that everyone except the rogue ignores the stealth skills entirely and also creates issues with determining surprise.

And how big can a group be? One guy with a decent Hide check shouldn’t be able to sneak an army of ten thousand soldiers under the nose of a watchtower, but where do you draw the line?

Maybe you could limit the number of people covered by a check to equal the skill leader’s skill ranks? Or impose a -2 penalty per person in the group?

COMBINE STEALTH / PERCEPTION SKILLS: I’ve been folding Hide/Move Silently into a Stealth skill and Listen/Spot into a single Perception skill intermittently since 2002, so I wasn’t particularly surprised when both Pathfinder and 4th Edition went in the same direction. It cuts down on dice rolls and eliminates the undesireable “need to succeed twice” feature of stealth checks.

This does create some interesting oddities around trying to resolve invisibility, and while I haven’t found the perfectly elegant solution yet, this slight corner case is (in my experience) preferable to the constantly degrading effects of splitting the skills.

Using some combination of these solutions tends to mitigate the problem, but I’ve generally been unsatisfied with the hodgepodge fashion of it all. So taking my unified Stealth and Perception skills in hand, I’ve been looking for a more elegant solution.

GUMSHOE’S PIGGYBACKING

I found the roots of what I think may prove a usable mechanic in the GUMSHOE system:

When a group of characters act in concert to perform a task together, they designate one to take the lead. That character makes a simple test, spending any number of his own pool points toward the task, as usual. All other characters pay 1 point from their relevant pools in order to gain the benefits of the leader’s action. These points are not added to the leader’s die result. For every character who is unable to pay this piggybacking cost, either because he lacks pool points or does not have the ability at all, the Difficulty Number of the attempt increases by 2.

Obviously the point-spending mechanics which underlie the GUMSHOE system can’t be translated directly into the D20 system, but the basic structure of a lead character making a check onto which others could “piggyback” was inspiring.

D20 PIGGYBACKING

When the whole group needs to perform a single task collectively (like sneaking past a guard or using group-climbing techniques to scale a cliff) they can make a piggybacking skill check.

(1) One character takes the lead on the check. This character makes the skill check using their normal skill modifier, just like any other skill check.

(2) Other characters can “piggyback” on the lead character’s check by succeeding on a skill check. The Piggyback DC of the check is equal to half its normal DC. (So if the leader is making a DC 30 check, the other characters must make a DC 15 check to piggyback on the check result.)

(3) The lead character can reduce the Piggyback DC by 1 for every -2 penalty they accept on their check. (They must make this decision before making the check.)

(4) The decision to piggyback on the check must be made before the leader’s check is made.

OPPOSED PIGGYBACKING CHECKS: The DC of the check is set by the lead character’s check. Just like any other piggybacking check, only characters who succeed on the piggybacking check benefit.

(To simplify the resolution, you can start by rolling only the lead characters’ checks. After you’ve determined which lead character succeeded, you can call for the necessary piggybacking checks. Anyone piggybacking on the failed check, of course, will fail no matter what their piggybacking check would have been.)