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Friday, October 29, 2021

Archery in old school D&D





Archery sucks in early editions of D&D and here's why; it's either under powered or over powered, depending on rules and interpretations of rules. This actually includes all ranged weapons, bows just seem to suffer the worst because of their commonness of use. 


I don't know Chainmail well enough to comment on the relative effectiveness of archery in that game, but I am quite familiar with most iterations of TSR era D&D/AD&D. 


The game seems to be originally designed to emulate the early medieval period, up to, just barely, the high medieval period. The bow didn't dominate the battlefields of medieval Europe then. Cavalry was only beginning to really dominate. Heavily armored and well armed, they took a small fortune and years of time to train properly, and even then, often fought on foot, because of siege warfare being more common than pitched battles on open ground.


Similarly, most of D&D, especially at lower levels, is traditionally spent in dungeons. Bows are mostly useless in dungeons, because encounter ranges are so short. AD&D giving bows a better rate of fire actually makes this worse, because people are loathe to give up their multiple attacks per round weapon, and the missile attack adjustments for Dexterity are better, making them seem like a more viable weapon to higher Dexterity characters.


Don't fall for this. You'll get stuck in a cycle of retreating from enemies (to try and avoid melee), and firing into melee. In the first case you end up basically disengaged from the combat, in the second you become an active hazard to your own party.


So, to avoid this, remember (or learn about) the period D&D was based on, and that trained melee fighters are the kings of battle. This is the post-Roman western European world, with the Viking age, and a host of other hordes invading, endemic internecine warfare and small kingdoms built by previous barbarian tribes on Roman ruins. Largely the bow is a tool used for hunting, they mostly weren't strong enough to have their arrows penetrate armor, and the kind of regular training as groups like the English used at Agincourt were centuries away yet, and the technology of the longbow itself was still a new thing; it's armor piercing arrows were also a long way from being invented.


D&D was designed with the vision of people playing characters like Beowulf or Conan, or maybe King Arthur and his knights. The vision wasn't to have snipers dominating the battlefield. You can play that, but you are fighting the system, instead maybe, if you absolutely do not want to play a heroic front line fighter type, but still want to be a fighter, there are a couple of small fixes. Crossbows. Loaded and ready, they go before initiative in some D&D. Rate of fire is terrible, and variable weapon damage makes them worse, but you're only taking the one shot at the beginning of combat. Drop it and switch to a melee weapon (perhaps handed to you by your trusted henchman or hireling), but one with reach; a spear or a polearm, and fight from the second rank. No penalties, still in the fight. Remember the bow's rate of fire was a trap to lure you in.



The caveat here is that D&D grew to include stuff from out of it's original vision, stuff from the later medieval period, the renaissance and reformation periods, and even the early modern world; and from diverse cultures from around the world and a hefty dose of the purely fantastic, so it became possible to make a viable archer type character for D&D (much more easily than you could a swashbuckler type) and when you do, depending on the rules set an interpretations, they will then completely dominate the field.


Once weapon specialization becomes an option, and specialized arrow types, the archer gets deadly. Most dungeon combats take place at close range, but to a bow specialist they are usually at point blank range within 30' they are +2 to hit and +2 to damage, and roll double damage, making a specialized archer get two attacks/round at 1st level, with each attack doing 6-16 points of damage, assuming normal arrows[(1d6+2) x 2]. Given that an archer is more likely to be a higher Dexterity character, and that players tend to play advantages and forget disadvantages, he's likely to be hitting at something like +6/+6, and rolling d8s instead of d6s for damage, possibly with a Strength bonus added (bows built for Strength cost more, but are still possible at lower levels). Wait until this guy is a few levels higher, and has a bow built for Strength to match his Gauntlets of Ogre Power or Girdle of Giant Strength, and he's getting 3 attacks per round at that +6 to hit, now with a +8 to damage on each of those attacks while using Sheaf arrows, maybe magic Sheaf arrows. 


Let's say this Archer is 7th level, equipped with normal sheaf arrows, Gauntlets of Ogre Power, and a Bow built for up to 18/00 Strength. When within 30' of his target he's doing up to 3x (2d8 +8 ), at 18-32 points per hit, that comes to a maximum of 96 points of damage per round. That's enough damage to potentially take down a huge, ancient red dragon by himself in a single round, at 7th level. I say potentially, because even with his probable attack bonuses of +6, he still only hits 55% of the time (-1 AC for a Red Dragon), and his average damage per hit is only 25 points, so the odds are he only does 50 points of damage in the first round, leaving a little bit for the rest of the party to do.


This will be exacerbated if we don't use the weapons vs. AC chart, the rules for firing into melee (which most groups forget in practice), or the rules for cover and/or concealment. These are all AD&D things (although similar rules may have cropped up later in the D&D line with BECMI or Cyclopedia and I just don't recall), but so is weapon specialization. 

How do we fix this? Don't use Unearthed Arcana? Don't play 2nd edition AD&D? Tough to say really. I am not sure it can be fixed in AD&D, without changing the rules to disallow specialization, bows built for Strength or non-standard arrows.


Saturday, January 23, 2021

How I Started




I skipped a “Year in Review” type post this year, in no small part because 2020 pretty much sucked. I live in NY state, so we were among the first that really got slammed by the pandemic, although not near where I live. Here it's only just starting to get really bad. 


It has put my home game on an indefinite hiatus again, we skipped from March to August of 2020, and now we have not played since early December. We started this campaign because I wanted to run Stonehell and I had a group of people large enough to start, if we played old school with retainers and were smart. So far we've gotten in 24 sessions, which is pretty good considering the pandemic.


I started dating a woman, got engaged. It was pretty fast, but I think we're good for the long haul. Planning a wedding for after the pandemic. We already shared some hobbies, but I got her into D&D, she's played in my campaign since August, as I recall. Her name is Sarah, I imagine she'll be mentioned her more often, as I blog more, which seems likely, since I am not playing D&D, so my D&D thoughts pretty much come here to be shared.


Now to the topic of the post -


How I started I've mentioned in several previous posts, mostly at the start of my blog as a thing, and I assume anyone reading this has gone back and read all the previous posts (lol), but I'll go over it again, since it's the thing to do today.



1. The year you began, and with which role-playing game?


I started, I am reasonably certain in 1981, with Holmes Basic D&D. I can link it to me seeing Excalibur in the theater with my friend Chris Gorton. He saw I had really liked the movie and suggested we play D&D together. I was surprised he had a copy of the game, I had been looking for it locally for a year or more by then, having seen it in ads in “Boy's Life”, the scouting magazine.


2. Did you figure it out alone, or were you introduced by a lone but experienced GM, or by joining a preexisting group?


Kind of both. I was introduced, a week or so after seeing that film together, by Chris, but he wasn't great at explaining the rules, and it was a super short introduction. I managed to find and buy a copy of Holmes Basic within a month or so, as I had already been saving my allowance up for it when I found it. I don't recall the price exactly, but it had to have been around ten dollars or a little more to make me have to save up. I spent a bit of time failing to grasp what was going on, and eventually, between me questioning my friend Chris, reading the rules myself, and asking my dad what he thought, I figured it out, with significant missteps along the way.


3. What was your first group like? Was it private among friends, in a game store, or in a club? Were they older, younger than you? Did their style of play shape the way you played later?


My first group lasted one session, Chris was DM, we played at my parent's house. I was the youngest player, the rest were two to three years older than me. It went alright, I guess. Chris was an interesting DM, compelling, but he ricocheted between Monty Haulism and Killer DM syndrome. Survive a session and you were a demigod, but the odds were not in your favor. I really learned the game playing with my dad, one on one, me DMing him as he controlled a party of PCs running through the “Keep on the Borderlands”, tons of mistakes along the way, but we learned from them and kept moving on. My dad never really got the game, and fantasy wasn't his thing, so he didn't really play much after those first games, but it was nice of him to try bonding with me over my interests. Ultimately my friend Tim MacDougal was DMing a game within walking/biking distance of my house and I started playing with him and his group, and ran a side campaign mainly with my next door neighbor Scott Whitmore, following a similar formula as I had with my dad. Scott ran a single PC as a leader of a party of NPCs and I ran a lot of half baked dungeons that I made up as I went along most of the time. For what it's worth Tim was doing the same thing for the group I was playing in. He really influenced my DMing style. Eventually I took over DMing duties from Tim, so he could get some playing time before he left for the army.


4. Your favorite role-playing game. (Was it the game you started with?)


First edition AD&D would be my best answer I guess, although none of us ever really ran it by the book, rules as written, probably because we couldn't understand it completely. It is technically a different game than Holmes Basic D&D.


5. Anything else you want to share reflecting the impact of how you started on how you play(ed).


None of us were wargamers going into this, especially not miniatures wargamers, so we missed the unwritten memo about using tons of Henchmen and Hirelings and thought our characters were supposed to be heroes from the get go. The end game was not spelled out for us either, so we just kept on playing as we had been, going against bigger, badder monsters in search of better and better loot. The answer to the question “Why do you adventure?” was “For riches and glory”. We didn't have a lot off angsty backstory (or any really at all for a starting character, really just more of a basic “my guy is a viking” or “I'm a Dwarf”). Lack of wargaming experience made our play different I think than was intended, but ultimately, D&D at least, kind of went in the direction my generation had been taking it. Too far maybe, but that's just my opinion. I have spent a long time trying to come back to the older style of RPG gaming, we use retainers pretty extensively now, we only used them to fill player gaps in the past. I am working on a domain game for my players. The world is original and, because I've DMed in it for forty years now, pretty easy to get immersed in. I can run my game in a style tailored to the players and how they want to play, everything from the character immersion thespian heavy style to the wargamer-ey third person role-playing. I rarely do voices though.