#od&d

[prokopetz]

Essential OD&D/OSR experiences #137: generating encounter rewards exclusively via the random treasure tables and seeing which equipment slot the fighter thinks a "periapt" goes in.

[oldschoolfrp]

Happy birthday, Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938), here's my annual 3d6 rolled 6 times to generate a D&D character. It's a mostly average roll this year, nothing too terribly low, nothing super high. Rolled in the order listed in the original 1974 Dungeons & Dragons Volume I: Men & Magic, I get:

Strength 9 Intelligence 8 Wisdom 12 Constitution 8 Dexterity 13 Charisma 9

There are only 3 main classes in OD&D without using any supplements: fighting-man, magic-user, and cleric. The first 3 stats are the prime requisites for the 3 classes, and with only wisdom in double digits it seems this fellow would be a better cleric. But note that 9-12 are all considered average scores, with no bonuses or penalties to experience gained and no bonuses or penalties to abilities. This character does receive a +1 for missile fire for having an above average Dex, so being a fighting-man with a bow is an option. (The thief class won't appear until Supplement I: Greyhawk in 1975.)

I still want to let the dice decide the class, so he's a cleric with the title "Acolyte" at level 1, and I'm going to argue that slings are non-edged and therefore allowed so he can use that missile bonus. Only humans can be clerics in these rules, so that's what he is. There's no suggestion that picking a god or pantheon is necessary, and a cleric doesn't commit between Law or Chaos until reaching level 7. He needs a name -- "Brother Eggmus" will do, working in EGG's initials.

A Con of 8 isn't low enough to penalize his hit points. I roll 1d6 and get 3 hp. (Per 1974 rules all classes are assumed to roll d6s for hp. As characters level up, fighting-men gain dice and bonuses faster than clerics, who gain more than magic-users. In 1975 Greyhawk specified different hit dice types for different classes.)

A roll of 3d6 x10 yields 60 gold pieces to start, barely enough to purchase chainmail, a shield, a mace, and a pack, food, water skins, and torches. Sling is missing from the price list, but a note at the bottom says to interpret other prices from the examples given.

With a Cha of 9 he can have a max of 3 henchmen at normal loyalty, and that's pretty much all there is to character creation in 1974.

[boxedfrog]

two by sleeping at last is 100% od&d!bad with his kids

his many kids

do you want a list of all the kids he ends up having/adopting

I WOULD LOVE A LIST :DD

Also I swear we are on the same wavelength all the time because I also have Two on my bbh playlist Lmaoo

awwwhhh qvq

How many kids did this guy have??? Truly just like !bbh lol

[2dmax]

TTRPG Character Portrait Maker

OSR Portrait Maker

A simple and fairly limited OSR-style fantasy RPG character maker for use with The World's Greatest Roleplaying Game or any suitable substit

A simple OSR-inspired character portrait maker I made using picrew.

It’s OK to use for personal use, and even to finish drawing the character yourself if you want. Please share what you make!

[twilightofthesandwiches]

Which Edition of D&D had the best design/artwork of Giant Ants?

First Edition

Second Edition

Fourth Edition

Voting ended onMar 11

[adventuresandshopping]

White Box Dungeon Adventures (on DTRPG)

[man-e-spells]

Okay, listen, here's what I'm thinking

We play OD&D (sorta)

White Box hack as the basis

Barrows and Borderlands for making the characters, albeit tweaked and w/ Knave's slot-based encumberance

Chainmail Hack for the combat (no THAC0, no fuss, just you and a D6 per character level)

And maybe an Outdoor Survival Hack to beef up White Box's wilderness adventure rules

Over Discord, text-based, always-on

What do you think? DMs open if interested, or if you just wanna discuss the idea

[spewagepipe]

The Evolution of RPGs: Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D)

Perhaps the most surprising fact I have learned over the course of this project is that Gary Gygax was widely considered "the rules guy" among the wargaming clubs of Minnesota and Wisconsin around 1970. In this (one and only) sense, he was quite progressive: pushing for miniatures wargames to exit their folk/oral tradition and join the modern world of recording and publishing. So when Gygax read Blackmoor's "battle reports" in one of the wargaming zines, he asked Dave Arneson to visit him and demonstrate the game – whereupon he immediately suggested they collaborate to create the manuscript that would eventually become Dungeons & Dragons. But I found this story surprising because, in reading through the original 1974 version of D&D, I can find no trace of this supposed "rules guy". Just like the Chainmail rules before them, OD&D's rules are written with a miniatures wargamer audience in mind – which is to say, they assume that the reader is used to designing a new system, from scratch, every time they decide to play a new scenario. OD&D is completely unusable unless the reader is prepared to personally contribute an enormous amount of potentially game-breaking design choices. So to compare OD&D to, say, any of Avalon Hill's board games is like comparing a set of guitar strings to a music album. Even with regards to what is actually provided in OD&D, the quality is abysmal. The core concept of the game is so poorly explained that it would be hard for a complete neophyte to tell how any of the material is meant to be used, and that material is frequently unintelligible due to the ambiguities and obtuse phrasing. It is little wonder that such an amateurish-looking effort was rejected by Guidon Games, Avalon Hill, and indeed every other publisher Gygax sought out. Instead, with the help of Don Kaye, he co-founded Tactical Studies Rules so as to publish D&D independently. The final iteration of the rules (now referred to as the "white box" version) was rushed to production, without Dave Arneson's approval, in order to have it ready for GenCon – the humble first step in Gygax's years-long effort to cut Arneson out altogether.

And that, my friends, is the ignoble story of how the first commercially-published role-playing game came to be.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.