Quote from: Justin Alexander;439644Oh c'mon. You know better than that. Doom is an idiot and a troll. He's just going to wait 3 pages, shift the goalposts again, and then lie about what people said. Maybe throw in a little selective quoting to give a patina of truthiness to his bullshit.



The best part was where he pulled a little absurdist sleight-of-hand to add an extra 8+ guys. Not that 18 guys make an army, either, but I'm assuming he'll just keep doubling the numbers every couple of pages.

The original claim, remember, was "if they had hirelings to absorb the brunt of battle". Only later were 10 footmen offered up as one example of a group of followers that could "absorb the brunt of battle". The obsession over that particular number is indicative of trolling tactics.

"10 guys! That's ridiculous! It's an entire army of guys! And once you put those 10 guys on a slippery slope, there'll be even MORE of them! Plus you can't even find a printed reference to exactly 10 guys, so clearly there must have been 0 guys!"

I think the only thing of interest left here is the taking of side bets to figure out how many posts Doom can go before claiming that somebody's account has been hacked.

That is a litle absurdist to be honest and it was AM that proposed 10 guys on the inital post

It's not difficult AM wants to show that AD&D and 4e have a similar level of lethality if you play AD&D properly which means that typically a group of 5 or 6 PCs has 10 hirelings.
If you accept that AD&D's base playstyle was to have about this number of hirelings then he is right, in fact AD&D is less lethal than 4E at low levels.

(and the account hacking joke was just Riffing off Ben's post that Dungeondelver had hacked his account - you have to keep up with eall teh crappy posts if you want to participate in the debate )

just sayin....

Quote from: jibbajibba;439647You see you are bieng a bit disingenous yourself

Absolutely not, and I feel sad that you see it that way because it is the farthest thing from the truth here.

Quote from: jibbajibba;439647The claim was that Hirelings were baked into the DNA of AD&D.

I propose they were not and I think that has been proven.

No, that wasn't the claim, and if we can't agree on that then that's cool.  I can agree to disagree with reasonable people, and I consider you a reasonable person.

However, I disagree with your assessment and assert that 'hirelings were baked into the DNA of AD&D' is absolutely true.

Quote from: jibbajibba;439647You can hire hirelings and there are rules for them but the claim was effectiviely that that was more than just an option amongst numerous options. The Claim was that that was ther default baseline playstyle. Now to this I take exception and I think the case has been made that this is simply not the case.

I disagree with this assessment and assert that it has been proven without a doubt that for a time it was indeed part of baseline AD&D game play.

Quote from: jibbajibba;439659It's not difficult AM wants to show that AD&D and 4e have a similar level of lethality if you play AD&D properly which means that typically a group of 5 or 6 PCs has 10 hirelings.
If you accept that AD&D's base playstyle was to have about this number of hirelings then he is right, in fact AD&D is less lethal than 4E at low levels.

That's extrapolation, mate. AM didn't say AD&D and 4e have the same level of lethality either. Just that 1d3 Ogres against 1st level characters is not necessarily a TPK, which is true.

Beyond that, it's like comparing apples and oranges, to me. Lethality in both games are relative things: it's relative to the player's skill, how the systems emphasize "skill" in vastly different ways (i.e. how you overcome certain situations in each game), and so on.

So saying that one is less lethal than the other solely based on a number of hirelings is BS. The particulars (in players, circumstances, DM etc etc) make too much of a difference in each scenario.

Quote from: jibbajibba;439659(and the account hacking joke was just Riffing off Ben's post that Dungeondelver had hacked his account - you have to keep up with eall teh crappy posts if you want to participate in the debate )

For the record, I'm Ben right now, but you never know when thedungeondelver will take over (it's actually a running gag that goes back to the Knights & Knaves alehouse when I made an uber-raving post about AD&D and T. Foster joked that thedungeondelver hacked my account ).

Quote from: Benoist;439649I don't think he's disingenuous at all. We all agree that hirelings were an available resource in AD&D.

That was never the question.  No one here was trying to say hirelings and henchmen don't exist, simply that they are not an integral part of routine play. To the degree that the argument is presented that it was a normal and expected aspect in a majority or even plurality of games, that argument is incorrect.  Characterizing the previous argument as simply whether or not NPCs are available is disingenuous, and provides cover for the people who made that claim, and became ever more shrill in defence of their statements in the face of clear evidence it was not the case.

QuoteNow this is the part where we do not have agreement. Guys like me, AM, Drohem, Justin clearly believe that is the case. You, Lamb, don't. Since we each provided extensive evidence to support both our sides of the issue, I honestly think we're unlikely to reach a consensus on this aspect of the debate.

You can believe it all you want.  The hard facts are that Jibba's summary after Doom's ample evidence to demonstrate is absolutely correct.  It is certainly a facet of play, one that many groups partook of, undoubtedly.  The error is the one frequently committed, and especially by those who initially propounded the idea:  individual experience can somehow be extrapolated to an axiomatic statement.

QuoteI'm guessing this comes from the way I and AM and others think of OD&D and AD&D in the same logical line of thought, that AD&D is the Gygaxian extension of OD&D, if you will, whereas you and Lamb are considering the AD&D game as interchangeable with 2nd ed. This comes from our differing perspectives.

That is certainly a valid perspective.  AD&D was a similar game to the original, but many, many aspects of gameplay were subsumed into the whole rather than spotlighted in turn; AD&D was much more seamless than OD&D.

Classes, hit points, armour class, spells, dungeons and so on have been with us since the beginning.  That is the DNA, that is what makes the game D&D.  Unarmed combat, henchmen, running a kingdom and waterborne adventures are part of the fabric, but they are not what defines D&D; they have come into favour and fallen out in equal turns.

Quote from: StormBringer;439669That was never the question.  No one here was trying to say hirelings and henchmen don't exist, simply that they are not an integral part of routine play

...at 1st level. That's the point Frank highlighted. The whole debate was whether a 1st level party routinely had hirelings and henchmen. Frank's point was that most 1st level party would lack the means to have them. One of the very few points salient to answer that question in this thread is, I believe, Justin's when he pointed out the CHA-table in Men&Magic.* Now, whether you think parties routinely featured PCs with CHA 17 is another matter.

As to the prominence of hirelings and henchmen at levels above 1 - and by prominence I really mean 'assumed baseline' as in AM's post - I can see that, grant that. If you look at the first 20 or so issues of Knights of the Dinner Table, that's the central meme. And that cartoon was targeted at mimicking AD&D play. That it mimicked it successfully was one of the reasons of its success. If the cartoon highlighted an element of gameplay that didn't feature widely in people's experience, the humour would have largely fallen on deaf ears, I think. (Compare later KoDT issues, when the humour focuses on game elements comparatively less current in campaigns, like the bag of holding.)

* Though, to be honest, I find the ongoing conflation of OD&D with AD&D in this thread (currently under the guise of them being culturally continuous games) more misleading than helpful, given the discrepancy in assumed party size. The monetary (and other) means available to a first level party to get 10 hirelings/henchmen would seem to differ drastically, depending if we're talking about 4, 8, or 20 PCs.

Quote from: StormBringer;439669Classes, hit points, armour class, spells, dungeons and so on have been with us since the beginning.  That is the DNA, that is what makes the game D&D.  Unarmed combat, henchmen, running a kingdom and waterborne adventures are part of the fabric, but they are not what defines D&D; they have come into favour and fallen out in equal turns.

That's your point of view, not mine. You are drawing lines in different places than I do. After, the whole "ample evidence" thing is frankly just a question of bias on your part. I too have my own bias, obviously. If you look at the thread, you'll see that evidence has been provided supporting BOTH points of view in this thread.

Which makes me say that in the end, it's a question of perspective.

Quote from: Windjammer;439672...at 1st level. That's the point Frank highlighted. The whole debate was whether a 1st level party routinely had hirelings and henchmen. Frank's point

No. That's not Frank's point. Frank's point is to shit all over the thread. That's *it*.

Quote from: Aos;439658Hopefully, this thread will burst through the Earth's crust and enter the Pellucider before we run out of oxygen.

My mistake, we seem to have tapped into an infinite supply of hot air.
I'm going to make a zeppelin!

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;439609So yes, I really do think that AD&D1e (which hails from 1977) is closer to OD&D (1974) than any basic edition except the Holmes version.

OD&D plus its supplements plus material from The Strategic Review and early issues of The Dragon (Rangers, Illusionists, Bards, some monsters, etc.) was a sort of AD&D Lite. It really was considered very close. So close, that many people playing OD&D plus supplements never really switched to AD&D. WE just added stuff we liked from the first three AD&D books top our games as the books came out.

As the whole concept of playing RAW was alien to most of us, minor details like OD&D starting at AC 9 and AD&D starting at AC 10 did not bother us the way they probably would many players today. The many differences were considered minor -- no more a problem that the different house rules used by different GMs.

Quote from: Windjammer;439672* Though, to be honest, I find the ongoing conflation of OD&D with AD&D in this thread (currently under the guise of them being culturally continuous games) more misleading than helpful, given the discrepancy in assumed party size. The monetary (and other) means available to a first level party to get 10 hirelings/henchmen would seem to differ drastically, depending if we're talking about 4, 8, or 20 PCs.

It's not misleading, it's a valid point depending, again, on the perspective you choose to adopt. Given that one game is the direct extension/compilation of the other's supplemental material, it's not a stretch to adopt this perspective at all. What's not helpful is to constantly rewind in the conversation to re-debate points where there was consensus.

Besides, the typical party size in AD&D is 6 to 9 or 10. What this requires to have 10 spearmen is for each PC to hire 1.5 spearmen, i.e. spend FIVE GOLD PIECES A MONTH. That's far from being out of reach of 1st level PCs, if you ask me.

Quote from: Windjammer;439672...at 1st level. That's the point Frank highlighted. The whole debate was whether a 1st level party routinely had hirelings and henchmen. Frank's point was that most 1st level party would lack the means to have them. One of the very few points salient to answer that question in this thread is, I believe, Justin's when he pointed out the CHA-table in Men&Magic.* Now, whether you think parties routinely featured PCs with CHA 17 is another matter.

As to the prominence of hirelings and henchmen at levels above 1 - and by prominence I really mean 'assumed baseline' as in AM's post - I can see that, grant that. If you look at the first 20 or so issues of Knights of the Dinner Table, that's the central meme. And that cartoon was targeted at mimicking AD&D play. That it mimicked it successfully was one of the reasons of its success. If the cartoon highlighted an element of gameplay that didn't feature widely in people's experience, the humour would have largely fallen on deaf ears, I think. (Compare later KoDT issues, when the humour focuses on game elements comparatively less current in campaigns, like the bag of holding.)

* Though, to be honest, I find the ongoing conflation of OD&D with AD&D in this thread (currently under the guise of them being culturally continuous games) more misleading than helpful, given the discrepancy in assumed party size. The monetary (and other) means available to a first level party to get 10 hirelings/henchmen would seem to differ drastically, depending if we're talking about 4, 8, or 20 PCs.

Adventurers could easily afford hirelings at first level.  The real cost was in equipping them- at about 6-7gp each (that's leather armor and a spear).

Quote from: jibbajibba;439659It's not difficult AM wants to show that AD&D and 4e have a similar level of lethality if you play AD&D properly...

I'm not sure it's a "similar level," just that both can be lethal or not so lethal depending on the circumstances.

Seanchai

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;439691Adventurers could easily afford hirelings at first level.  The real cost was in equipping them- at about 6-7gp each (that's leather armor and a spear).

Indeed, in Benoist's AD&D PbP game here on this site, my 1st level dwarf fighter could afford to purchase all of his equipment and hire and equip a light crossbowman hireling.

Quote from: StormBringer;439669You can believe it all you want.  The hard facts are that Jibba's summary after Doom's ample evidence to demonstrate is absolutely correct.  It is certainly a facet of play, one that many groups partook of, undoubtedly.  The error is the one frequently committed, and especially by those who initially propounded the idea:  individual experience can somehow be extrapolated to an axiomatic statement.

Indeed, the inverse is also true.  Well, except for the following part: 'Jibba's summary after Doom's ample evidence to demonstrate is absolutely correct.'

Though I don't really give a crap about the right answer to this discussion, I just read this:

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2011/02/retainers-in-moldvaycookmarsh.html

It may add smething useful. Or not.