My Top 5 Fixes for OD&D

On the OD&D forums, there’s a thread asking for everyone’s “top five” fixes for OD&D. I answered there, but thought I should preserve the answers here for posterity. Most of my fixes involve more than one change, so I suppose some might consider that “cheating”.

Assuming we’re starting from the original three booklets as the base, I now make these changes before adding any supplemental material (from Greyhawk, for example.)

1. Corrected d6-only hit dice progression. Fighters get 1d6 per level up to 10th. Magic-Users get 1d6 every other level. Clerics are in between (2 dice every 3 levels.) M-Us and Clerics get a “loaner” hit point on levels where they don’t get a hit die. “To Hit” chances are based on hit dice, sort of like a loose interpretation of Target 20.
2. Situation Rolls. All the various probabilities for surprise, listening at doors, opening stuck doors, wandering monster rolls, and so on are regularized to 5+ on 1d6. Anytime I decide something could go wrong with an action or players have a slight chance of escaping a bad situation, I pretty much use that roll.
3. Magic Scrolls. Only magic-users can make magic scrolls of any type, including cleric scrolls. Magic-users can use any scroll type, Clerics can use cleric magic scrolls, and anyone can use protection scrolls or curses. Magic-users can make scrolls at any level, as per Holmes Basic, but only of spells they know or research. Spells above 6th level can’t be memorized, only cast from scrolls.
4. Clerics Without Spells. Clerics don’t memorize spells, but use the Turn Undead roll to pray for miracles. Use the reaction roll table as a replacement, 2d6 + 2 * (cleric level - spell level or undead hit dice). 9+ means spell is cast or undead is turned. The first time a cleric gets a 6-8 result, the spell asked for is cast, but never again for the rest of the adventure. On a 2, the cleric falls from grace and loses all powers. Praying at an appropriate shrine and otherwise fulfilling religious duties erases all penalties and starts over if a 9+ on the reaction roll is rolled. (The link is to the first post of many about using Clerics Without Spells, but these rules represent my current thinking.)
5. Corrected Armor/Shields. Leather armor has no move penalty for fighters, -3 Move for everyone else. All metal armor halves base Move. Magic-Users (and some custom classes) halve Move again and must rest 2 turns out of every 6 when wearing metal armor because of fatigue. (I use this general fatigue rule elsewhere, too.) Shields shall be splintered, but only for fighters.

The hit dice fix was something I talked about back when I was doing the clone project/Liber Zero, but is kind of spread out across several posts. Situation rolls also showed up in that discussion, but long-time readers will recognize that 5+ on 1d6 roll as something I’ve used in many, many posts.

There are certainly other, lesser fixes, some of which are still in the midst of being tweaked. Some things I also add are background professions, special abilities of weapons that take effect when damage is 5+ or when a critical hit is rolled, changes to Read Magic and the way spells are learned.

Most of the changes to damage, combat, and ability scores from Greyhawk are ignored. Thieves are still being tweaked, but they get the same hit dice as Magic-Users. A lot of custom classes wind up being Thieves or Clerics with replacement abilities. New spells from the supplements might require reworking before I use them, but new monsters and magic items are generally OK.

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Re-Thinking XP and Hit Dice

I did not have any spare writing time this week, so here’s just a quick note about XP. I like using these three XP progressions the best:

Level	Fighter XP	Cleric XP	Thief XP
1	0-1,999	0-1,499	0-999
2	2,000+	1,500+	1,000+
3	4,000+	3,000+	2,000+
4	8,000+	6,000+	4,000+

Now, previously, I figured out that magic-user XP works out to 125% of fighter XP. But I’m tempted to simplify things this way: get rid of the fighter XP column entirely and express all XP in terms of two columns:

Level	XP	Hybrid XP
1	0	0
2	1,000	1,500
3	2,000	3,000
4	4,000	6,000

Basic mundane classes, like thieves, use the main XP column. Heroic mundane classes, like fighters, shift down one row. Those in between, like clerics, shift over one column instead. And full-fledged spell-casters add the two columns.

Hit dice requires a slightly trickier table. Here, each level has two rows. Again, use the hit dice in the main HD column for basic mundane classes, but use the first of the two rows. Shift down one row for heroic mundane classes. Hybrid classes shift over one column. Full-fledged spell-casters use the same HD as basic mundane classes.

Level	HD	Hybrid HD
1	1	1
	1+1
2	1+1	2
	2
3	2	2+1
	3
4	2+1	3+1
	4+1
5	3	4
	5
6	3+1	4+1
	6
7	4	5+1
	7+1
8	4+1	6
	8
9	5	7
	9
10	5+1	7+1
	10+1

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Adversity Rolls

I sent off two articles for the upcoming issue of Fight On!, a weapons critical system and the Leech class (with rules for injury and disease. Both are reworked versions of material I've posted here, but I changed so much, I really want to talk about it here. I'm going to hold off, though, for the most part. But I could go into more detail about one element that only gets a paragraph or two in the articles: adversity rolls.

The idea of adversity rolls starts in an easy-to-overlook section on attributes in Men & Magic:

Constitution 13 or 14: Will withstand adversity
Constitution of 9 - 12: 60% to 90% chance of surviving
Constitution 8 or 7: 40% to 50% chance of survival

No real explanation, although an earlier comment about "how well the character can withstand being paralyzed, turned to stone, etc." suggests that this is the early version of the system shock roll, or a Constitution  check. What I decided to do was to use this, or something like it, to resist or recover from critical injuries and disease.

• Damage > Constitution = Critical Injury
• 3d6 > Constitution = Catch Disease (after exposure)
• 3d6 <= Constitution = Critical Injury or Disease Healed 

It's typically a 3d6 roll, but Minor Diseases (Cough, Sneeze, Sniffles) only use 2d6, and some serious stuff requires 4d6 or more. It's a very tiny disease system, compared even to the simple suggestion I posted ages ago: no disease levels, not much disease detail, just two broad types of disease:

Minor Diseases lower reaction rolls, reduce surprise chances, or have other nuisance symptoms that don't prevent adventuring. Roll every day to recover. 

Major Diseases prevent the use of a body part or incapacitate. Roll every week to recover; if a vital organ is affected, a failed roll after the first week means death.

All of this so far is much longer than what I actually wrote in the article. But what I wanted to focus on here was the way you catch diseases. I don't see the point in having too much disease in the game, especially at the start. There's the obvious exposure to filth, and  there's infection from not cleaning and bandaging wounds. All mostly avoidable. But I make a brief notation in the article that dungeon diseases have a level equal to half the dungeon level (if associated with a place) or half the monster's hit dice (if passed on by a monster's attack.) The obvious example is mummy rot, although that is specifically a magical disease, not curable by bed rest or mundane treatment (but Leeches can cure it.)

(In the article, I didn't mention whether to round up or round down. In truth, I was undecided. But I'm thinking now it should be "round up".)

The implications of this? Diseases on the 4th level of the dungeon would be 2nd level, with 2d6 adversity checks to resist or recover. In other words, these would be minor diseases, mere symptoms like an annoying cough that could spoil surprise, or a rash that could provoke negative reactions when bargaining with merchants. On the 1st and 2nd levels of the dungeon, there probably shouldn't be any diseases to worry about, not even ear seekers and rot grubs.

On the 5th level, that's where you could encounter major diseases, tainted waters that could put you away for a couple weeks or blind you. Or a 5 HD giant lizard could have an infectious bite that makes an arm or a leg useless until you recover.

Ear seekers and rot grubs are combo monster-and-disease. The revised ear seeker would be 3 dice monster that attacks the ear, success means it crawls inside, damage is ignored except to compare it to Constitution to see if the victim goes deaf in that ear. Every week, make an adversity roll to see if it reaches the brain, where it does damage and causes unconsciousness. A second failed adversity roll means death. 

The revised rot grub is likewise 3 dice, attacks exposed flesh (or crrawls around looking for an opening,) and does damage; damage > Constitution means it burrows into the flesh and infects, followed by weekly adversity rolls to see if it reaches the heart. A second failed adversity roll again means death.

Both are still pretty serious, but there's plenty of warniing and time to address the situation. What I always hated about the official ear seeker and rot grub is that they had such byzantine rules and unusual cure restrictions, which add nothing.

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Disease and Ability Drain

When I proposed handling ability drain in the previous post by testing for a worsening condition instead of deducting points from the ability score itself, I was thinking all along “I could use this for diseases, too.” But before I do, I want to make a correction to the draining process for undead and other monsters, since it will be relevant to diseases. I had it so that you roll dice equal to the monster’s hit dice, with the victim being fatigued, paralyzed or slain if the roll is higher than their Strength or Con. This means that the typical vampire is rolling 7d6 to 9d6, which is doable – still a slight chance of not being drained – but pretty rough; shadows, though, would be unable to affect characters with Strength 15 or higher.

It might make more sense to scale it a bit differently:

• Up to 3 Hit Dice: roll same number of d6s, add +/- hit points to roll
• 3+1 to 4 Hit Dice: roll 3d6, ignore +/-
• 4+1 to 8 Hit Dice: roll 4d6
• 8+1 to 12 Hit Dice: roll 5d6
• Per 4 Additional HD: +1d6
• Multiple Attackers combine their hit dice

So, a single shadow rolls 2d6+2, two or three shadows attacking a single victim roll 4d6, four or five shadows roll 5d6, and six or seven shadows roll 6d6, making them more dangerous to deal with. A vampire will be rolling only 4d6 or 5d6, which is almost half what I suggested previously, but a lone vampire is still formidable.

Diseases fall into tiers that resemble this revised dice progression:

• Trivial: 2d6 >= Con to infect
• Minor: 3d6 >= Con to infect or progress
• Severe: 4d6 >= Con
• Crippling: 5d6 >= Con

A Trivial disease doesn't interfere with the character’s performance, but has an obvious effect: spots, runny nose, gravelly voice, pale complexion, and so on. It’s basically fluff, but might be a sign of something worse. Characters with Con 13 never catch trivial diseases unless something else has made them susceptible (being Cursed, for example, may add 1d6 to any disease rolls.) No hit points may be recovered naturally while a character is ill.

A Minor disease attacks either a specific body part (skin, lungs, head, muscles in limbs) or the blood or vitality (acts like being drained by a shadow.) While afflicted, the character is at Move 3, must rest twice as long every hour, and has to roll to avoid sneezing, scratching, or losing temporary control of an afflicted limb when they try to use it (5+ on 1d6.)

A Severe disease prevents movement unless the character makes a 5+ on 1d6 roll for every attempt or turn, and prevents using an afflicted body part. Crippling diseases cause permanent loss of the afflicted body part, which means death if a vital organ like the heart is the target.

Each disease description is a one-liner describing the maximum level and organ targeted, such as “severe lung disease”. All diseases appear to be Trivial when they first develop, although the GM may be rolling 4d6 or 5d6.

The GM secretly makes makes the roll on first exposure, to see if a victim catches the diseases, and every day thereafter. Each time a roll is failed, it progresses one level (from Trivial to Minor to Severe to Crippling.)

If the roll is exactly equal to the victim’s Con, the disease lingers at the current level, but if the roll is less, it improves one level. When a Trivial disease improves, the illness is over.

I've mentioned a couple modifiers to disease type before:

Fast diseases roll every hour instead of every day.
Slow diseases roll every week. Slower diseases might exist (roll every month or every year.)
Wasting diseases cause 1 hp damage per failed roll when they reach their maximum severity.
Spreading diseases spread to adjacent body parts if a failed roll includes doubles.

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Famous Sayings About Hit Points, Part II

"If hit points are luck, they shouldn't take so long to heal."

...Because all scientific experiments have shown that we recover luck faster?

Luck is a concept almost everyone believes in, even the ones who claim they don't. But it's not a measurable thing. We have no data on it, so we can model it however we please.

In OD&D, you regain hit points at a rate of 1 every other day, a little faster in AD&D. That's because Gygax and Arneson didn't want to model ordinary shmoes miraculously surviving death several times a day, every day, for weeks and months on end without break. They wanted hit points to feel like a precious resource, even when you've amassed a lot of them. If you want to model something different, change the rate of recovery, already, but stop complaining about the default being "wrong".

And if you think a slow recovery rate must mean hit points must be purely physical damage: Why aren't you incapacitated when you lose half your hit points? You can keep barreling along with 1 HP left, if you feel like it. You just won't regain hit points until you rest... And you can interrupt your rest any time you want.

Healing Wounds

On the post about changing Cure Light Wounds so that it only heals damage from wounds and not other sources, azmountaintroll replied "It would require tracking wounds separately from general HP loss. GM's call as to whether the extra bookkeeping is worth it."

But does it?

I suppose if you read the part that says "Removes one wound from a character" literally, as exactly one wound from a multitude of individual wounds, that would imply a lot more bookkeeping. I should not have worded it quite that way, but I was just aiming for a quick discussion, so I was lax in my wording. Also, the wording may seem to be saying that each wound has a hit point rating ("You take 2 points of damage to your leg",) but that's not the intention at all; you still have hit points as a general pool, plus notes that say you are wounded.

... Except maybe there wouldn't even be any notes. For the record, if I were using this form of Cure Wounds, I'd be using the wound system implied in the called shots and edged weapons posts (as well as the posts on the Leech class.) Most physical attacks do wounds to the body; individual wounds are not tracked, just the fact that you are wounded; on occasion, you may take a wound to the head, arms, or legs, which may cause temporary or permanent effects.

The thing is, I'm not sure why you'd have to write down anything other than permanent wounds, and there are basically only four of those (two arms and two legs.) Occasionally, a rare extra like "Left eye missing". Permanent wounds to the head or torso are effectively instant death wounds, so there's no need to track them. Temporary wounds are only important for the temporary effects that go away once treated.

If a character has hit points missing, surely your memory is sharp enough so that you remember whether that character was in physical combat recently? And surely, while a combat is going on, you can remember if a character was hit on the leg? For extended effects, the GM can write down "limping" on scratch paper, crossing it off once treated. We're not really talking about major wound tracking.

Healing That Doesn't Always Heal

Here's a little something to think about: what if we changed the wording of the Cure Light Wounds spell, and the other healing spells to match, so that it said this:

Cure Light Wounds: Removes one wound from a character, plus up to 2-7 hit points of damage. Has no effect on characters who are not injured, even if they have suffered hit point loss.

How would that change the game?

Hit Point Tracking Procedures

I ran another poll on both The RPG Site and RPGNet. This time, the question was "How do YOU track damage?" I was specifically looking at the popularity of two procedures:

1. Subtract damage from hit points, death at hp <= 0
2. Tally damage, death when total >= hp

The first seemed to be overwhelmingly common, based on how people describe combat examples, damage or recovery house rules, and things like negative hit points. It sort of puzzled me, because the second seems obviously easier and is mathematically identical: take "hp - X <= 0" and add X to both sides, then reverse the order, and you get "X >= hp".

So what I was expecting was that there would be hardly any votes for procedure #2. Actual breakdown was:

• RPGNet: 26 to 8 ((76% versus 24%)
• The RPG Site: 11 to 1 (92% versus 8%)

The RPG Site thus met my expectations: only one person (not me, since I skipped voting) keeps a damage tally. What was shocking was that about 1/4th of the people on RPGNet keeps damage tallies. Was not expecting that many people. Also, the discussion about Procedure #2 was interesting.

The benefit of switching is that #1 is kind of a micromanagement approach: you roll damage, mentally subtract it from your hit points, erase your hit points, and write your new total in; when healed, mentally add the points healed, erase your current hit points, and write the new total. In contrast, #2 has you make tally marks on scratch paper every time you take damage, and you just mentally compare the totals; only time you erase your hit point total is when your level changes, and only time you erase your damage tally is when healed.

However, in the discussions, those that use #1 but acknowledged the benefits of #2 did not mention the physical simplicity. Instead, they mentioned that addition is easier than subtraction, so theoretically #2 would be the better method. The reason why they tended to use #1 instead was because of the feel, the way the damage visibly drops and the player can immediately see how low their hit point score is. I would think that making hash marks on a piece of paper after every hit would have just as much psychological impact, but perhaps physically removing hit points from your total each time you are hit lets you interact more with your hit point score directly, making it feel more real.

Famous Sayings About Hit Points, Part I

"Hit points shouldn't be interpreted as luck because that's what the attack roll and saving throw represent."

Nope. The saving throw and the attack roll represent environmental uncertainties. Making a good roll means that you, the player, are lucky.

When using hit points to represent luck, you are talking about the character's luck.

Edged Weapons

Edged weapons need more TLC. I had some rules once, somewhere, which I can't find, so let's do some new rules as a follow-up to called shots.

Edged weapons can inflict injuries other than mere hits. Called shots to unarmored locations, as mentioned, will sever limbs, making them permanently unusable. If the head is severed, the victim dies immediately, assuming it functions like a normal creature with a head. Most other wounds to unprotected locations cause deep gashes, which are treated as generic crippling injuries (Move 3 and -1 to attacks until healed.) A wielder of an edged weapon can opt to slash instead, which won't cause crippling injuries, but will leave bleeding wounds.

If a victim survives an attack from an edged weapon, there's still bleeding to contend with. An injured character must make make an adversity roll (based on Con) immediately after a combat; if the roll fails, the character dies from blood loss in 1d6 hours. Bandaging the wounds before the character dies may temporarily stop the bleeding (5+ on 1d6,) but roll again at the beginning of every day if the character continues to be active. Dirty bandages may also cause infection (+5 on 1d6, modified by +/-1 for Con.) A leech has a better chance of stopping bleeding, can sterilize bandages, and can also stitch the wounds closed, which prevents further bleeding checks. Ordinary characters can try to stitch wounds, but combat or vigorous activity can tear the stitches (5+ on 1d6.)

Metal armor prevents cuts and severed limbs for any location that is actually covered, basically turning edged weapons into ordinary blunt weapons. Light (leather) armor is gashed by edged weapons, leaving a vulnerable spot that can be target (AC 5) on a second attack; if successful, an attack to a vulnerable spot is exactly like an attack to an unarmored location.

Piercing weapons are like edged weapons, except that they don't cause permanent loss to arms and legs, although they can pierce the throat, heart or brain (AC 3,) causing instant death. They can also cause permanent loss of an eye.

Healing Limits

Every once in a while, someone complains that clerics are way overpowered compared to other classes because they can "absorb more damage" by stocking up on healing spells. I don't really agree with that, but I'm not going to address the argument itself. Instead, I'm going to suggest a fix: characters can only be magically healed once per adventure.

There's some precedent for this. The clerical turn undead ability works only once per creature per encounter, at least in some early versions of D&D. It does have the benefit of not requiring any change to the cleric class itself, just to the way Cure Light Wounds and Cure Serious Wounds are interpreted.

This, of course, reinforces the idea of short expeditions with frequent trips back to town. Some people complain about this, too, although I see it as a desirable feature.

One Hit

I saw this interesting statement in a forum thread: "the concept of one hit point mooks is such a dissociated mechanic that it completely defeats the purpose of an rpg IMO."

I have a strong dislike of mook rules, but the use of 1 hit point isn't a problem to me. And it's certainly not dissociated from the fictional reality, to me. I chalk this up to the different ideas about "hits". To my way of thinking, one hit equals one kill. Well, a one in six chance of a kill. If anything, it's the damage roll that's dissociated.

The Lone Hero

There's been some discussion in a couple places about an ideal "real swords & sorcery RPG". I'm mulling over some stuff about that, and will be posting more.

But one of the side issues that has come up is the idea of making D&D more amenable to the "lone hero" playstyle. Although it's possible to play D&D as a solitary PC exploring a dungeon (Mike Mornard brags about the time he played a solitary 1st level magic-user in Gary's dungeon,) this kind of play isn't quite like the lone hero we sometimes see in swords & sorcery or sword & planet stories. Solitary heroes usually get struck down quickly.

I think there are a couple changes you could make to D&D's combat and hit point system to make this kind of play easier.

1. Multiple simultaneous opponents as in OD&D, but: Drop the 1 HD or less restriction; only require one attack roll and one damage roll; deal the same damage to all opponents..
2. Multiple attackers with the same HD make only a single attack roll against a PC at +1 to hit for two attackers, +1 for each doubling of the numbers. Only roll damage once.
3. Hit points are now fatigue, not damage resistance. Hits taken are erased after every rest. Hits taken greater than or equal to hit points means the defender drops, unconscious.
4. Any damage roll of 5+ means physical injury to one body part (penalty when using injured limb.) Bump this up to crippling injury (can't use limb, possible death when aiming at vital organs) unless defender is wearing metal armor on location. Edged weapons actually sever limbs instead of crippling them.
5. Physical injuries require time to heal. Roll a d6 after a week of recuperation and add your Con modifier; 5+ means all simple physical injuries are healed (7+ means no scar.) Crippling injuries are reduced to simple injuries. On a result of 1, one injury becomes permanent and stops healing.

The last three changes make multiple combat encounters easier to survive, but still carry some risk, even instant death or lost limbs. I'd probably let players choose where they receive an injury, or which injury becomes permanent on a bad recovery roll. I'd probably even let players choose whether to drop unconscious or fight on, with any successful attack against them after that point being an automatic injury.

The first two rules changes means that a solitary hero can fight multiple opponents without a lot of risk. With one attack roll and one damage roll affecting all opponents simultaneously, it's easier to fight your way through hordes of enemies. Taking only 1d6 damage total, regardless of the number of opponents, means that increasing the number of opponents doesn't mean almost certain death.

Damage Tracker Options

One of the background projects I've been working on is a redesign of the damage tracker I did a while back. The idea behind the damage tracker is that, rather than erase hit points after every hit that does damage or every healing spell or rest period that restores it, you can put a paper clip on the side of a sheet to mark the amount of damage done. Damage changes from a math problem to something no more difficult than moving the top hat 10 squares in a game of Monopoly.

The original tracker, though, is in color, and it's not completely optimal, so I've been wanting to redo it. I see two main possibilities:

1. Do index-card-sized individual sheets. You use one sheet/card per character. It would have space to write the character's name, and perhaps some additional spots for quick reference for the GM, if the GM is handling damage. The downside is that the sheet gets discarded when the character dies.
2. Do a letter-sized sheet for multiple characters. When tracking damage, multiple paper clips are used to attach little square tokens with character names or initials. This version is easy to reuse, but the little squares of paper become a nuisance when a character's name is removed (because the character dies or is completely healed.)

Either way, I think the format would be to put the numbers 1 through 10 along the long side of the card or sheet, with some multiples of 10 along one of the short sides.

There's also the matter of tracking those so-called status effects. Some people think these imply too much bookkeeping, but they become greatly simplified if you use the paper clip approach. I think the sanest route here would be to list the most common effects along one of the remaining sides of the card or sheet, each in its own box, so that you can mark the appropriate effect with a paper clip (plus a token with the character's name, if using option #2.) Double up the paper clips to indicate a very bad effect; a tripled effect means a permanent loss, so that gets written on the character sheet itself.

So, which option do people think would be the most useful?

Binary Effects

One of the things I've been mulling over about effects like "tired" or "injured" is whether they should have a binary impact, rather than a numeric penalty.

I've always disliked the strictly-defined effects that crept into RPGs (including late 1e AD&D and subsequent editions. Stuff like "-2 to this" or "-3 to that" or even worse, "-3 to this, -1 to that". (or the beneficial equivalent, such as feats.) Because of course you have to look up all that crap. To my way of thinking, it's not worth the effort in a game. What I want are rules that make stuff happen, but I don't care about rules that precisely distinguish between different degrees of penalty. As a result, the three-stage effect system I've been talking about in this blog for a couple years went from "all penalties are -1 at the first stage and -2 at the second stage" to "all penalties are -1, but the first stage is brief while the second stage is extended."

But what I'm thinking is doing away even with this explicit rule. Like any situation, if being injured, tired, confused, frightened, or suffering some other effect seems like it would be worth a penalty (or a bonus,) it is. GM's decision. But the only guaranteed effect would be to prevent or allow certain actions, or to trigger various events. Thus, an injured hand can't be used until the injury is seen to, while a very injured hand can't be used until healed; an injured leg forces the victim to hop (treat as max encumbrance;) an eye injury blinds, a stunning blow prevents actions and movement.

Dead-Simple Aging Rules

All this talk about level drain reminded me that I once proposed the aging attack used by ghosts is a good alternative for those who absolutely can't abide level drain. And, although I have some aging rules I like a lot, I got to thinking and came up with super-simple rules for aging that just about anybody could get behind.

1. No age states, other than informally (less than 18 = young, more than 65 = old.)
2. No penalties for age, it's just cosmetic until character dies of old age.
3. After age 65, roll 1d6 anytime character gets sick. On 5+, character dies. Add +1 to roll for every 15 years.

Optionally, use step 3 when recovering from injury; on 5+, the character never fully recovers and is left with a crippled arm or leg or addled brain.

Dwarves and elves have an effective age, comparable to human ages. Divide magical aging by three for dwarves, 10 for elves. Others, use the same rules.

Who Likes Level Drain?

The RPG Pundit claims that people who like level drain are victims of false nostalgia for nostalgia's sake:

... is there anyone who actually LIKES level-draining no-save monsters? Really? I think no one really likes these. Its stupid. Its not a clever mechanic, the kind of risk it creates is not an exciting in-game risk (like poison, or attribute drain, etc), but rather something that steals away your accomplishments.

Well, I like it. Because it isn't stupid, and I can't see how it's any different than injury or poison. And certainly I like it better than attribute drain, which I think is an annoying mechanic. (Really? You want seven hit point pools instead of one?)

Now, The RPG Pundit is one of those people who has opinions about what other people's opinions are. He's not impossible to deal with, as some other people like that are, but yeah, sometimes it makes him say stuff like this. No one really likes level drain, and you're lying if you say you do. Because even though you say the risk is exciting, you aren't really excited by it.

Poison Rules

For the record, here are my potential house rules for poisons, based on the previous posts.

1. Simplified Judges Guild approach to poisons (hit dice of poisonous creature = damage per round and number of rounds of effect, delayed for 10 - HD rounds, default effect is sickness.)
2. Save means half damage and no sickness.
3. Collecting or manufacturing poisons for later use requires d6 situation roll to avoid accidental self-poisoning (except for alchemist, witch, or assassin.)
4. Poisons last 1 week and cost at least 100 gp/HD equivalent.
5. If a creature struck by an envenomed weapon makes the first save, the venom has worn off or been wiped off and won't affect anyone else.
6. Social reactions are varied and can't be generalized.

Those are pretty simple rules that won't require much fiddling. Bookkeeping is limited to writing a HD number next to any poisoned weapon and erasing it at the end of an adventure. Rule #4 seems like a good general guideline for lots of things. How long do standard rations last? One week. It means that if you are adventuring every week, you envenom weapons and buy new standard rations. If you don't, you don't have access to either while in the dungeon. Rule #5 eliminates the need to track how many times you can use an envenomed weapon. Rule #6 eliminates situations where NPCs have "poison ESP" or unfair rulings to keep players from using poisons "just because". Rule #3 gives a limited special ability to certain classes, but I wouldn't go any farther than that to tie poisons to class abilities, nor would I specify how many weapons can be envenomed on a per level or per class basis.

I also stripped out the different effects for poisons and just made sickness the default. Maybe large creatures would have half action instead of sickness, and giant creatures would only have half move. Specific poisons might be given unusual effects, but these would be indicated in monster or item descriptions (4 HD paralytic poison, 7 HD coma poison.) One thing I might consider changing is: if a creature has a hit point bonus, add that to the damage bonus, but not to the number of rounds. So, 5 HD poisons take effect after 5 rounds and cause 5 points of damage per round for 5 rounds, but a 5+1 HD poison does 6 points/round for 5 rounds.

Poison Effects

I talked a little bit about the Judges Guild poisons and how I would change them to get away from using a table. However, the JG poisons also have additional effects on a failed save, beyond mere damage. The three main effects are:

1. Illness: Unconscious most of the time, limited movement the rest of the time. There's no guideline here for determining consciousness, so I'd require a 5+ on a 1d6 roll to remain conscious for 1d6 rounds.
2. Paralyzed: Conscious and unable to act. I think I'd ruled that the character can still speak, with difficulty. Otherwise, there'd be little practical difference.
3. Coma: Unconscious and unable to act.

There are also two minor effects, Half Move and Half Action, that only occur in a couple places.

I tried to work out some kind of pattern in the table, but then I realized that, aside from the first three poisons listed, we're dealing with fantasy poisons, so we could just reassign the poison effects in a better pattern to eliminate the table completely. Divide the HD of the creature by 3 to get a quotient and remainder. Quotient 0 means the poison only affects man-sized creatures or smaller. If the quotient is 1 or higher, the remainder tells us which effect the poison has (1 = Ill, 2 = Paralyzed, 0 = Coma.) Add the quotient and the remainder and subtract 2 to find the effect on ogre-sized creatures; subtract 3 to find the effect on dragon-sized creatures.

Status and Confidence

I know I still have to do Part Two of the race-and-chase stuff, but I have some other things I'm getting ready to write about, too. And I realized that I need to post the background info needed for these "other things", so that they make sense. Basically, it's a simple version of my current thoughts on levels and hit points.

I've covered the topic before, but I've mostly covered the luck interpretation of hit points, although that's not quite the way I see it now. The hit point roll indicates your luck, but a hit point itself represents tiny things, not skills, exactly, but little instinctive actions a character can do to transform a killing blow into one that only wounds. The swordsman thrusts with his blade, right at your heart, but you twist aside at the last moment and it pierces your shoulder... that kind of thing. It's based on the idea of the attack roll as a roll to see if one of many swings, thrusts and slashes in a one-minute round is actually a killing blow.

What "level" represents specifically is your social status or reputation. When you return from an adventure, the tales you tell in the tavern, and the treasure you start flashing around, changes the way people see you, makes them think of you as more of a bad-ass. The confidence they have in you increases your confidence, which is why your hit dice increase with each level. Heroic status is weighted in favor of fighting monsters, which is why fighters have the best hit dice progression, clerics the second best, and magic-users and thieves come in third; M-Us and thieves have more confidence in learning than public opinion, so they basically trade half their hit dice for improved learned abilities.

But how does this viewpoint affect learned abilities, like spells or skills? That's the topic I want to think about more.