Quote from: estar;1002808[ATTACH=CONFIG]1855[/ATTACH]

I believe you! It's just a horrible piece of information to be missing from the rules. As Skarg's frustration can attest to.


Skarg, yes, when I said abilities I really should have said "level" -- though in OD&D what level a character is really is their ability in combat.

See ester's note about the damage sentence being missing on p. 19 in some editions (yikes!)

If you look under the Attack Matrix Chart you will see a notion about how other classes move through the columns of the matrix. It's a ridiculous chart as laid out with that little notation underneath. But there are differences by classes. Please understand I'm not here to defend or excuse the editing or layout of the original books. This is why I sought out a DYI-better-edited edition!

Yes, as far as I can tell the limit of Daggers for M-Us will effect mostly magical loot. Additionally, however, circumstances will matter whether one is at an advantage with a sword over a dagger (see my post above about Referee judgments).

Thanks a lot, folks! I think I am understanding better my core question of what the White Box is and what the missing context is. It's hilarious that I managed to get the edition that didn't have the damage rule.

Even though I could never get past it's quirks to find a game I could use, it still holds some nostalgic charm and mystery in how random and analysis-resistant its content is. Even when it seems to be explaining something in detail, there often seem to be omissions or multiple possible interpretations, or unexplained missing contexts.

Quote from: Skarg;1002821Thanks a lot, folks! I think I am understanding better my core question of what the White Box is and what the missing context is. It's hilarious that I managed to get the edition that didn't have the damage rule.

Even though I could never get past it's quirks to find a game I could use, it still holds some nostalgic charm and mystery in how random and analysis-resistant its content is. Even when it seems to be explaining something in detail, there often seem to be omissions or multiple possible interpretations, or unexplained missing contexts.

Wizards sells the PDFs which have been laid out again so they are as clean as we are going to get. And you can get the supplements for reasonable prices as well. Plus they are small enough to make it reasonable to print out a hard copy. I did that with Greyhawk for a while until I scored a copy for myself along with Eldritch Wizardry. The only one I am missing is Swords & Spells.

I was able to buy in the store back in the day, Chainmail, The Collector's edition White Box, Blackmoor, and Gods, Heroes, and Demi-gods. Until 2008, I used Chainmail the most because of the Jousting Rules, still one of the better takes on Jousting out there.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;1002816I believe you! It's just a horrible piece of information to be missing from the rules. As Skarg's frustration can attest to.

And it was never printed on the Reference Sheet which had plenty of room to do so.

Quote from: GameDaddy;1002815Amazing, but not surprising. I actually never used that chart to hit in any of my games, even back in 1977. The first thing I could afford to buy were the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets

You used to be able to buy pristine copies from the Different Worlds website but one too many OSR bloggers posted about it and now they are gone. You get a PDF on RPGNow. I concur that it is very useful and highly recommend to anybody that running an OD&D campaign to get it. It just that handy even if you don't use the Judges Guild additions.

Quote from: Skarg;1002821Even though I could never get past it's quirks to find a game I could use, it still holds some nostalgic charm and mystery in how random and analysis-resistant its content is. Even when it seems to be explaining something in detail, there often seem to be omissions or multiple possible interpretations, or unexplained missing contexts.

I can't stress enough that if you are willing to embrace rulings not rules it is quite playable even superior to subsequent RPGs who try to be "less complex" for example Microlite d20.

Quote from: estar;1002854I can't stress enough that if you are willing to embrace rulings not rules it is quite playable even superior to subsequent RPGs who try to be "less complex" for example Microlite d20.

This is the point I've been trying to make as well.

I have a copy of those rules...maybe I should try playing them straight out of the box. Never played "OD&D." I remember being confused by the "Explanation of Abilities" section where it kept saying things like "Clerics can use Strength on a 3 for 1 basis in their prime requisite area (wisdom), for purposes of gaining  experience only." Anybody out there want to tell me what the heck that is supposed to mean? I'm missing something or that sentence and the surrounding sentences is assuming I have information not provided there.

The OD&D books are a lot of fun to read and totally usable as the core rules for a game IF you already know how to play. If you don't, they are pretty hopeless. And I personally think it is stupid to pretend we don't all know why: they are just really badly written and organized. ('gasp!!!'). It's not like no one had ever written an instructional manual for a game before. Or, say, a paragraph in English. Gygax was a genius and we all owe him tons. And I love his goofy syntax and creative way with words. But the dude simply could not explain shit in anything like a straightforward and rational way.

If you know OD&D and 1E AD&D well, a reasonable interpretation of the latter is that it is basically just an edited version of OD&D (plus the supplements), where some effort was finally made to turn all that word salad into a string of logical operators. If you want to enjoy some history, or pursue your view of how the game can be played, then OD&D is great. If you want to understand what the fuck is actually going on in this game, you will do better to read AD&D and either play that, or go back to OD&D with an understanding of how things work.

Quote from: Dumarest;1002867I have a copy of those rules...maybe I should try playing them straight out of the box. Never played "OD&D." I remember being confused by the "Explanation of Abilities" section where it kept saying things like "Clerics can use Strength on a 3 for 1 basis in their prime requisite area (wisdom), for purposes of gaining  experience only." Anybody out there want to tell me what the heck that is supposed to mean? I'm missing something or that sentence and the surrounding sentences is assuming I have information not provided there.

There are two common ways of interpreting this.

1) It trading points in one ability score for another. Note according to page 11 you can only reduce an ability to 9.
This is straightforward and how Holmes in the Basic Boxed Edition choose to interpret it.


2) It allows abilities other than your prime requisite requires to add in with your prime requisite to count toward your bonus XP.

For example Bob the Fighter has a 12 Strength, 10 Intelligence, 13 wisdom, 10 Constitutions, 9 Dexterity, and a 12 Charisma
According to page 11 you have no bonus to earned XP with a 12 strength. But.. you can take 3 points of Wisdom and count it as +1 strength for the table on page 11. Thus making strength count as a 13 and you now can earn +5% XP. You can only count those points of Wisdom 9 or more.


For example Bob the Fighter has a 12 Strength, 13 Intelligence, 13 wisdom, 10 Constitutions, 9 Dexterity, and a 12 Charisma
In this case Bob can count 4 points of Intelligence as +2 to strength, and 3 points of Wisdom as +1 to strength giving him a 15 strength on the Page 11 chart thus giving him +10% to earned XP.

This example is a good one as it shows the fuzziness of OD&D which for many is a downside. Back in the day when confronted with this people just made up something that made sense. Resulting in regional variations of D&D. Several Judges Guild Modules based on tournament modules like Of Skull of Scrapfaggot Green illustrates by including a list of "This how we are going to play OD&D" rules in the module. The genesis of AD&D in part was fueled by the incessant questions TSR was bombarded with.

However this is not back in the say and we have umpteen editions of D&D to use as inspiration to figure out how to make the above and other fuzzy work in your own campaign. Plus OD&D has been and continued to be discussed to death which also a resource to use to figure out how you want to handle this. Hence my earlier statement about you need to be comfortable with idea of rulings not rules. Because even when you figure out your take on the fuzzy stuff there still remains stuff like what you do when the fighter wants to climb a wall, the magic user pick locks, and the cleric wants to haggle the price down of a mace with a merchant.

Right, rulings, etc... That doesn't answer the question...

What did Gygax actually mean by that Str/Wis thing?  It can't be unknowable, we're not talking about hieroglyphics from the Tomb of Ramesses II, people are still living who played with the man using his rules.

Quote from: Dumarest;1002867I have a copy of those rules...maybe I should try playing them straight out of the box. Never played "OD&D." I remember being confused by the "Explanation of Abilities" section where it kept saying things like "Clerics can use Strength on a 3 for 1 basis in their prime requisite area (wisdom), for purposes of gaining  experience only." Anybody out there want to tell me what the heck that is supposed to mean? I'm missing something or that sentence and the surrounding sentences is assuming I have information not provided there.

Yes, say for example your Cleric has a strength of 16 and a Wisdom of 14.  At Character generation time, the player can opt to trade three strength points for a point of wisdom, thus this character would have a strength of 13, and a Wisdom of 15 instead, which would be just enough for the cleric to earn a 10% Bonus for on all experience points earned. The other reason to tradeoff exceptional high scores to boost marginal scores is to play the character you want to play, suppose for example, you had a character with an Intelligence of 12, and a Wisdom of 14, and wanted to play a magic user. at Chargen you could trade Wisdom for Intelligence on a 2 for 1 basis, so four points of wisdom would provide two points of intellgence. Your Wizard would have an Intellgence of 14, and a Wisdom of 10. He/She would get a 10% experience point bonus, can learn to speak, read, and write more languages.

With the Greyhawk supplement I, Intelligence determines how many spells a caster can know at any given time, as well as how many spells the caster can learn. Knowing the spell meant the caster could write the spell in his/her spellbook and add it to his/her learned list. With an Intelligence of 14 for example our mage would have a 65% base chance to know any given spell after reading it out of another wizard's spellbook. He could then either copy the spell into his/her spellbook while spending 1,000 GP for the components of a 1st level spell so that he/she could read or memorize it later, or he/she could immediately memorize the spell in order to cast it at some time during that day... and after successfully acquiring the spell has a base 65% chance each day of memorizing the spell.

The minimum number of spells our INT 14 caster could know is five, meaning at the beginning of the game, the player gets to pick five first level spells that can be added to his/her spellbook as part of their "Wizard" training. After that, it costs dearly to add new spells to spellbooks in the range of thousands of gold pieces, even for first level spells.

The maximum number of spells our INT 14 caster could know is eight, meaning he/she could learn up to eight 1st level spells, but first, even reading the spell from another spellbook, the wizard only has a 65% chance of "Knowing" how to cast that spell. If he fails to know, he cannot cast that spell as long as he/she remains that level.

Once the character leveled to 2nd level he/she could make another attempt to learn that first level spell again, and has a 65% chance to successfully do so, and then spending the required gold on components to cast the spell, can add it to his/her spellbook.

One of the houserules for my games was three strikes and your out, if you fail to learn a spell with three attempts, you'll never be smart enough to successfully learn the spell and have to find another spell to add to you spellbook. Gaining spells, even after leveling up,  was never an automatic or guaranteed process in original D&D. One had to learn the spell from another wizard, visit a magic unioversity or college and gain access to the a magic library, or research how to prepare and cast the spell from scratch.

Spell research and creating entirely new spells was very popular, very time consuming, and very expensive, which provided ample motive for wizards to join on treasure hunting expeditions, as well as providing down time, where the wizard player would leave his wizard in the village while researching a new spell, and play some other character class for awhile.

I had a folder chock fuill of characters of various levels, and would switch out whenever the wizard character needed a few weeks or few months to research a new spell. When I mean researching a new spell this would be a custom designed spell, one that was not already in the D&D books, Men & Magic or Underworld & Wilderness Adventure. It would be a completely new spell with new effects, and new saving throws, and/or different types of damage.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1002877Right, rulings, etc... That doesn't answer the question...

What did Gygax actually mean by that Str/Wis thing?  It can't be unknowable, we're not talking about hieroglyphics from the Tomb of Ramesses II, people are still living who played with the man using his rules.

And so we enter the rabbit hole. Sorry for teasing you but in a nutshell there not a definitive interpretation of how OD&D plays even when you limit it to things similar to what Dumarest asks. I been following all this since 2008 and there hasn't been a resolution. In many cases there are a limited set of choices where is agreement that it could be one of the possibilities listed.

People look at things like

1) Strategic Review
2) Early issue of Dragon Magazine
3) What Gygax said (which is not often due to the fact he was trying to answer questions about things 30 to 40 years ago).
4) And it turns out often what Gygax the RPG author says is different that what Gygax the Dungeon Master does.

Quote from: GameDaddy;1002878Yes, say for example your Cleric has a strength of 16 and a Wisdom of 14.  At Character generation time, the player can opt to trade three strength points for a point of wisdom, thus this character would have a strength of 13, and a Wisdom of 15 instead, which would be just enough for the cleric to earn a 10% Bonus for on all experience points earned.

And yet it says on page 10

Quotefor purposes of gaining experience only.

Your interpretation of changing the attributes would have it gain the other bonuses given to high attributes.

But then in support of how you view things

QuoteNote: Average scores are 9–12. Units so indicated above may be used to increase prime requisite total insofar as this does not bring that category below average, i.e. below a score of 9.

I don't about other folks but this sounds like about a trade of X points of one ability for 1 point of another. But yet there that pesky "for the purpose. ... only"

And in terms of how it looks in-game it make sense that a fighter with a high intelligence and wisdom should have a bit of an edge. That fighting is not all about being the strongest person around. That having wits and foresight counts as well at least in terms of earning experience.

And to be clear, I am not saying you are wrong. Only that in the case of OD&D several sections have two or more reasonable interpretations for what they mean.

It sounds to me like a Cleric with an 18 Str and 12 Wisdom can count as a 15 Wisdom for experience gained.

He trades 3 for 1 down to a minimum of 9. 18-9=9, 9/3=3, so +3 to Wisdom only for experience gained.

His stats are 9 Str and 15 Wis for the purpose of exp bonus only.

The actual stats remain 18 Str and 12 Wis for everything else.

In other words, Str is a secondary exp stat for Clerics.

Still would be easier to just ask Gronan or whoever, if he remembered if he ever saw anyone do that when playing with Gary.

IMO, you can go way the hell overboard with this "rabbit hole" stuff.  These are not the writings of Nostradamus.