D&D 1E Favorite Obscure Rules from TSR-era D&D

James Gasik said:

I've heard a lot of DM's who ran games in the pre-Thac0 area mirror this exact sentiment, that knowing things like "how likely am I to hit an enemy" shouldn't be in player-side information. When I started playing, the DM's never really felt the need to hide that information, in fact, a friend of mine owned a "Player's Screen" that had attack matrix information on it for each class, so I never really understood why anyone felt that this wasn't meant to be player information. There's an argument for keeping the game simple by not having players track all kinds of information, but, just looking at my old character sheet, it has spaces for every possible adjustment to your "to hit" chance listed on it. While it doesn't actually reference the base number, that's still a lot of information!
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Weapon bonuses, bonuses for various conditions, weapon speed, adjustments vs. AC, it's all here, so it certainly can't be an attempt to speed up play.

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I've seen sheets like that and for me-as-player that's far more than I want. Never mind I've yet to see a game that used weapon adjust vs AC.

Kudos to the sheet's designer for putting in a place to track hit points gained per level, though; as in a game where levels can be lost this is important information that I sometimes have to cajole players to keep track of.

James Gasik said:

So what's the actual advantage to concealing this mechanic? Obscuring AC? Wouldn't you learn that just by asking which "weapon vs. AC" adjustment applies to an enemy in most cases?

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Obscuring AC to a point, along with making the game a shade less mechanics-focused for the players. I figure looking after mechanics is mostly my job as DM.

James Gasik said:

And for that matter, how does someone report the results of their attack in this scenario? "I rolled a 15 on the die, and my total bonuses are +5 and I'm a level 6 Fighter?".

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Well, in theory I'd already know the character's a 6th-level Fighter or a 4th-level MU or whatever; after all, I do DM them every week. But otherwise yes; tell me your roll and whatever plusses you're putting on it (as those change all the time) and leave the rest to me.

And yes, to-hit bonuses change constantly. Front-line characters change strength each day or part-day (there's a spell for that called Strength); people cast things like Prayer (+1 to hit and damage), Faerie Fire (+2 to hit an illuminated target), and so forth in some combats but not others; characters don't always use the same weapon in every combat and sometimes change weapons mid-battle (switching from the +2 sword you just dropped to a +0 backup changes your to-hit bonus), and so forth.

Lanefan said:

I've seen sheets like that and for me-as-player that's far more than I want. Never mind I've yet to see a game that used weapon adjust vs AC.

Kudos to the sheet's designer for putting in a place to track hit points gained per level, though; as in a game where levels can be lost this is important information that I sometimes have to cajole players to keep track of.

Obscuring AC to a point, along with making the game a shade less mechanics-focused for the players. I figure looking after mechanics is mostly my job as DM.

Well, in theory I'd already know the character's a 6th-level Fighter or a 4th-level MU or whatever; after all, I do DM them every week. But otherwise yes; tell me your roll and whatever plusses you're putting on it (as those change all the time) and leave the rest to me.

And yes, to-hit bonuses change constantly. Front-line characters change strength each day or part-day (there's a spell for that called Strength); people cast things like Prayer (+1 to hit and damage), Faerie Fire (+2 to hit an illuminated target), and so forth in some combats but not others; characters don't always use the same weapon in every combat and sometimes change weapons mid-battle (switching from the +2 sword you just dropped to a +0 backup changes your to-hit bonus), and so forth.

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It feels like that puts a lot more work on the DM than having the players be able to simply say "I hit AC x". Then again, I'm a big proponent of going the further step of just telling the players what AC they have to hit. Even though they quickly seem to forget that I've told them such, lol.

Just last Sunday, about 5 minutes after explaining that an enemy was immune to poison (a fact they gathered from examining what the creature ate and drank), I had to gently remind my Druid player why casting a spell called poison volley might be a bad idea!

James Gasik said:

It feels like that puts a lot more work on the DM than having the players be able to simply say "I hit AC x". Then again, I'm a big proponent of going the further step of just telling the players what AC they have to hit. Even though they quickly seem to forget that I've told them such, lol.

Just last Sunday, about 5 minutes after explaining that an enemy was immune to poison (a fact they gathered from examining what the creature ate and drank), I had to gently remind my Druid player why casting a spell called poison volley might be a bad idea!

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I once DMed a game where an Elven wizard tried to cast Sleep on a bunch of Elves. (It was 3rd edition, so the chance of failure was 100%; I have an idea it might have been "only" 90% in previous editions.)

I guess I'm an evil DM, because I didn't stop him from trying.

(If it had been a human wizard I'd have applauded the determination not to metagame, and allowed some sort of roll to realise it wasn't going to work. Not going to do that if you're actually playing an Elf!)

It's not the DM's job to tell players how to run their characters. Allow them to make errors, it's part of the game.

Fortunate Son said:

Re: save modifiers for attack strength, they were included in the entry for the attacker rather than a generally applicable rule. The way that early editions scaled attacker power was through increased damage output rather than save modifiers. Once that is established, you can't reasonably add general save modifiers for attacker power because it has an exponential effect on average damage output.

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That's a fair enough point for effects which cause HP damage, but only applies for those effects. Lots of other stuff doesn't. Poison, paralysis, petrification, most spell effects...

Lanefan said:

Given how often saves are modified for some reason or other unknown to the players, it's faster for me to just get them to roll the die, tell me their bonuses (I'd bloody-well hope I know what class and species they are by now!), and let me figure it from there.

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The few times modifiers came up I just said them. "Save versus poison at -2".

Species sure I know them, but remembering what the tallfoot halfling gets bonuses on versus the drow versus the svirfneblin adds up and is complicated by items and such and compounds the cognitive load on me individually the more people there are in the party.

I can figure things out each time but it would be at least a small speed bump. I could just ask them to roll and tell me the result, but if I were to want to handle it all on my end as a DM I would want a copy of everybody's character sheet for having the bonuses already done out over just a chart.

Lanefan said:

I'm not sure it speeds things up much, and I don't like the idea of moving what IMO should be DM-side mechanics to the player side. Same rationale as why I didn't like BAB in 3e; it moves the combat matrix - which should be DM-side stuff - over to the players.

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Even if I had copies of all their sheets I would be individually going through the process of looking up what they need each time and shuffling through the stack of character sheets while they have one sheet in front of them with the target number and can all simultaneously be doing the check instead of me doing it serially so when I get to them they say "18, I pass, 13 I miss, 12 I pass." rather than them saying "18" and me figuring out if they pass then moving on to the next and them saying "13" and me figuring out they miss, then the third saying 12 and me figuring out whether they pass or fail .

All we need is to find out if they pass or not. Both processes get us there.

For me I prefer the combat to be quick paced focused on action decisions, rolls, and descriptions. I consider even small unnecessary speed bumps annoying detriments. I would prefer to move past resolution quicker than have combat time with them waiting for me to process their die results.

I prefer this combat mechanic stuff to be PC oriented, I am a B/X and 2e and 1e character sheets guy over 1e core books on this one.

I appreciate the 1e core book goal of immersion by putting more mechanical stuff behind the DM screen so the players just make decisions and roll dice but I prefer to get to immersion by description and speed of resolution so that people are more in the flow of the moment rather than trying to get there through player uncertainty on mechanics and having some people figure out mechanics based on results or having been DMs themselves.

Mannahnin said:

That's a fair enough point for effects which cause HP damage, but only applies for those effects. Lots of other stuff doesn't. Poison, paralysis, petrification, most spell effects...

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Sure, but it still prevents a universal mechanic. And with some of those other saves (I'm looking at you, poison!) the severity of the effect increases with monster hit dice.

I'm not saying such a mechanic is inherently bad, I'm just saying it's hard to implement in a system that isn't built for it. Which is why it didn't appear until a complete mechanical redesign occurred for 3e. Every other edition up until that point was supposed to be backwards compatible, so they were kinda stuck.

Fortunate Son said:

Sure, but it still prevents a universal mechanic. And with some of those other saves (I'm looking at you, poison!) the severity of the effect increases with monster hit dice.

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What do you mean?

Poison was usually save or die in severity. Any other effect for poison was relatively rare. The modifier was usually on the save, not the severity of effect.

Giant centipede poison at 1/4 HD is "often not fatal" because it is at +4 to save, not because the severity is not save or die for a 1/4 HD monster.

1+1 HD large spiders (size small) have "relatively weak in most cases" poison at +2 on the save or die.

2+2 HD huge spiders (size medium) have +1 save or die poison.

Mannahnin said:

Eh. I don't think that's quite it. The TSR era saves were based on what was attacking you, but took no account of how powerful the attack or attacker was. A save vs Dragon's Breath AKA Breath Weapon was the same difficulty no matter whether it was from a baby dragon or an ancient. A save vs Charm Person was the same difficulty whether it was a first level apprentice casting it or an archmage.

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Magic resistance. If that 1st level wizard met something with 50% magic resistance, the charm person automatically failed since magic resistance was adjusted upwards by 5% per level under 11, resulting in 100% resistance. On the other side a 20th level wizard adjusts that 50% downwards by 45%, resulting on a failed spell 5% of the time.

Yes you are correct that the saves aren't adjusted by power of the caster, but level of the caster did matter when it came to casting spells. At least some of the time.

In 2e, at least, the large and huge spiders had type A poison.