Reading AD&D Player's Handbook

Reading AD&D Player's Handbook

AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide is considered by many an essential book for every DM/GM to read, and while I have skimmed it and found that indeed it's a treasure trove of useful stuff even for my GURPS games, I'm yet to thoroughly read it from cover to cover. So, that's my plan. However, before I do that, I have to read the AD&D Player's Handbook, because parts of the DMG rely on the concepts from the PHB, and I have to be familiar with the PHB to get a more complete understanding. I started playing D&D with D&D 3.0, so whatever I know about AD&D has mostly been picked up via osmosis, as I have no first-hand experience with that edition. Thus, this post will be a directionless stream of observations and comments about the book and possibly the system in general with no real point or goal - I just want to give it a read and point out stuff that I find interesting.

The first thing that caught my eye is the size. AD&D PHB is 130 pages long, while the 3.5e PHB is 330 pages long and the 5e PHB is 322 pages long. Despite this, AD&D has a reputation of being unplayably complex among the modern players. However, so does GURPS, and GURPS is perfectly playable, so I do not trust the hearsay.

I like the foreword here. It does something the 3e and 5e books do not say - it says that the success of a campaign depends not only on the DM but also on the players and tells you how to be a better player. The guidelines for that may seem like common sense to most, but you'd be surprised at how many players disregard this advice and detract from the enjoyment.

If you read the part where the book explains what the game is, you will see that AD&D has a very different idea for how it was intended to be played compared to 3e or 5e. AD&D talks at length about roleplaying, battling monsters, and, most importantly, exploration and interaction with the world. Adventures only start in the dungeons and then are replaced by overworld exploration, town activities, domain management, and mass combat. The book also outright tells you that playing the game itself is a skill, and that multiple characters per player are to be expected. Compare it to the 3.5e PHB that basically has one sentence saying "you are adventurers battling monsters in dungeons." The 5e PHB has a more detailed description that talks about exploration, social interaction, and combat. However, it emphasizes the story component, saying that each adventure is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The six "classic" character abilities are there - Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma. There are four ways of rolling them (described in DMG) and there seems to be no point buy system. Both 3e and 5e only have two ways to determine the ability scores - a random way (4d6 and drop lowest) and an alternative point buy way. Back in the day, when I was playing 3.5e, people were fuming online about rolling stats and I have only seen people use point buy. While I can see the appeal of point buy (I'm a GURPS player, duh), I can definitely see the appeal in rolling for stats as well.

What may seem strange to modern players is that in AD&D you roll your ability scores, and only then check if they fall between the minimum and maximum scores allowed for a certain race, gender, and class. The concept of the ability modifier didn't exist yet, so many ability-based dependencies are non-linear and require tables. What I find strange is that halflings and gnomes have a minimym Strength of 6, but elves and half-elves have a minimum Strength of 3. Perhaps, this is my GURPS showing. There's also some peculiar stuff like "Fighters with STR 16 or higher earn 10% more experience" and their counterparts for other classes.

What caught my eye was the Intelligence Table II.: Ability for Magic-Users. Depending on the Intelligence score, the magic-user has a certain chance to know each listed spell and a minimum/maximum numbers of spells per level. Thus, for example, when you are generating a character, and you want your magic-user to know magic missile, the GM rolls a d100 and if he rolls under your chance value, he tells you "Tough shit, pick a different spell." This is wild, but in a cool way.

Of course, there also are class restrictions that were removed in later editions. Humans can be of any class, but demihumans usually are limited to 2-4 classes. For example, dwarves can only be fighters, thieves, and assassins. Halflings can only be fighters and thieves. Some races also have a level cap for certain classes. I can imagine this being insane to modern players. To be honest, even I'm not a big fan of such restrictions.

The races themselves are quite different mechanically to what they are in the later editions. For example, elves, gnomes, and some halflings have infravision instead of low-light vision. Elves are not immune to sleep and charm spells, but instead have a 90% resistance to them. Gnomes and halflings, just like dwarves, have magic resistance. Halflings also have resistance to poison. Gnomes and even halflings have the dwarven stonecunning ability, but a weaker version of it. Also, demihumans by default know a crapton of languages. For example, elves by default are able to speak elvish, gnome, halfling, goblin, hobgoblin, orcish, gnoll, and Common. That's a lot!

Now, the classes. Each class usually takes up less than a single page. There are only five base classes (cleric, fighter, magic-user, thief, monk) and five subclasses (druid, paladin, ranger, illusionist, assassin). What I find interesting is that classes are much less uniform than in the later editions. Some classes have 29 levels, some have 14, some have 26. And even experience points required to reach a certain level vary by class. Upon attaining a certain level, characters of every class begin to attract followers and most also may create a stronghold of some sort. This again reinforces the idea of switching from a dungeon-delving adventurer on low levels to a domain ruler on higher levels that was more or less completely dropped in later editions. Some classes, such as druids and monks have interesting restrictions in that there can be only a specific number of druids or monks of a specific level, and to level up, you have to go find a druid/monk of a higher level and beat him up. Amazing.

The Establishing the Character part describes something I haven't seen in any rulebook before - what your character should do first. Enter the settlement, find a place to live/make headquarters, buy equipment, locate other party members. It also encourages hiring hirelings, which seems to be a lost art nowadays.

The equipment section says that shields count only against 1-3 attacks per melee round, depending on the shield size. Also, it says that the shield only applies against attacks from the front or left. Does this mean that facing is a thing in AD&D? That's interesting.

One aspect that seems important in AD&D is henchmen. These are more-or-less devoted NPC followers of your player character. They adventure with you, you pay them a wage, you supply them with equipment, you give them a share of treasure, and they gain XP to grow in level. In D&D 3.5, something like this was done via the Leadership feat, and if you've ever been in any online discussion circles back in the day, you probably know that that feat was considered super overpowered and banned in 99% of the games. In AD&D, henchment were the norm. I like that.

Even the PHB states that keeping a strict time record is crucial in the campaign. DMG is notorious for saying this in all caps. And it's true!

There seems to be fewer spells than in the 3.5e PHB, but many spells also can be reversed. For example, if you can cast create water, you can also cast destroy water - they are learned as a single spell. In D&D 3.5, this concept was reserved for truenaming utterances, but you may recall that the truenamer class was barely playable, so the concept was wasted.

Most spells familiar from D&D 3.5 are there, sometimes under a different name, but there are some that didn't make it into the later editions, such as Snake Charm or Chariot of Sustarre. I didn't read most of the spells in detail, but something caught my eye - the Haste spell says that it ages the recepient. But by how much? To find this out, I had to find the Aging section of the DMG, and apparently Haste ages the subject by 1 year. The section also lists other spells that age the subject or caster, such as Alter Reality, Gate, Restoration, etc. This is super cool. In GURPS, a spell that grants a level of ATR definitely could use something like this. This age cost reminds me of the Divine Intervention spell from Might and Magic that ages the caster 10 (or 20?) years. There are also some weird ass spells like Distance Distortion.

The Successful Adventures part is full of player advice for how to be a successful adventurer. It outlines something like a procedure and a checklist of what you should think about before setting off. This is good stuff.

Now, before I check the appendices, I have to point out something interesting. The combat rules are not in the PHB! Players are actively discouraged from purchasing and reading the DMG, so they aren't really supposed to know how combat works right off the bat. It's all behind the DM's screen, and the players will understand the rules more the more they play, gaining player experience. I'm not really sure how that'd work in something like (A)D&D, but I know that it can indeed work in GURPS, where everything is grounded in reality. You, the GM, may ask the players for their actions in a natural language and then translate them into the game mechanics. As for AD&D, we'll see! I haven't read the combat chapter of the DMG yet.

The first appendix covers psionics. That's right, psionics are in the core book. There is no psion class, but every human (and possibly dwarven and halfling) character may roll d100 during character generation. The better his mental abilities, the better the chance of him having a psionic gift. Psionics have attack/defense modes and psionic disciplines. Thus, they work somewhat like the D&D 3.0 (not 3.5) psionics.

The next appendix adds the bard class. What is interesting here is that bards are druidic spellcasters and not arcane spellcasters. This is much closer to the real world Celtic bards that were used as inspiration than the more generic version of the bard class of the later editions. In the later editions, the druidic connection was dropped entirely, aside, possibly, from the Fochluchan Lyrist prestige class.

And the rest are cosmological tables, reference sheets, and suggested ways to divide treasure.

Overall, this was an interesting read that shed some light on the "old school" playstyle. I've seen some stuff that would be considered wild by modern standards (not that I like the modern standards). Next up, I will have to read the DMG to absorb the wisdom of Gary Gygax and see what I should do to BrOSR-ify GURPS.