Oozes and Other Bunker-Buster Monsters

There was a discussion on the osr subreddit the other day about players resting in the dungeon, and it occurred to me that if you iron spike or bar a door shut so you can rest but roll an ooze on the wandering monster table while resting, it might just be able to get through under/around the door and disrupt your sleep.

Thinking about whether there were other types of monsters that could do something similar, incorporeal undead and swarms also spring to mind.  Maybe vampires if you let them go gaseous voluntarily.  Any of your burrowing enemies like ankhegs, grey worms, purple worms, thoqqas, and xorns, though those will mostly be loud and noticeable.

There's an interesting parallel with Deep Rock Galactic here, where they introduced several enemies (the bulk detonator and the oppressor) explicitly to counter the strategy of building bunkers.  These enemies can "force the door" by digging and are either difficult to damage from the front or explode massively.  It kinda makes me wonder whether some of these classic D&D monsters that might plausibly pass through doors were originally developed as counters for resting in dungeons.

I think this has interesting implications for how you build random encounter tables for dungeon levels.  If there's a "bunker buster" monster on your table, then the party is at risk of having their sleep disrupted if they barricade-and-rest on that level.  I went looking for AD&D 1e's tables but still haven't found them.  In OD&D Book 3, there's only the Ochre Jelly on the 3rd level table (though there sure are a lot of MUs who might be able to knock in a door).  Moldvay / OSE is much more interesting through this lens, with the following levels container the following potential bunker-buster monsters:

1. Nothing really (green slime isn't motile so doesn't count)
   
2. Grey Ooze.  Pixies hiding in the room you're bunkering in to prank you in your sleep would be pretty funny but I'm not sure it really counts.
   
3. Ochre Jelly and Shadows (Gelatinous Cube too but it probably can't fit under doors?), Basic Adventurers potentially
   
4. Grey Ooze, Ochre Jelly, and Wraiths.  Rust monsters too, depending on how exactly you do your spiking.  Expert Adventurers also possibly.
   
5. Black Pudding, Ochre Jelly, Spectres, Expert Adventurers, possibly White Dragon
   
6. Black Pudding, Purple Worm, Vampire, Expert Adventurers, possibly Red Dragon.
   

By the end there a solid quarter of possible wandering monsters are possible bunker-busters.  But holing up in the top levels of the dungeon is probably pretty safe!

If players quietly rest 8 hours in the dungeon, they'll get 3 wandering monster rolls per hour, or 24 total rolls.  Since the probability of a monster on each roll is 1 in 6, you expect four wandering monsters.  So if a quarter of your table for a given level is bunker-busters, then resting will usually fail.

ACKS has heuristics for building dungeon wandering monster tables, with one-third beastmen, one-third mindless/animals, and one-third "men and monsters".  It would be interesting to add a heuristic around bunker-busting enemies as well.  If you have one on a 1d12 table, then it won't come up in 70% of rests (assuming 4 wandering monsters are rolled; there's a long tail of bad luck in the wandering monster checks).  Two out of 12 means something gets through the door in 52% of rests.  At three out of 12, the door only holds in 32% of rests.  I think I kinda like 2 in 12 - you can do one ooze and one incorporeal undead, swarm, or burrower, so there's some variety, and rests are pretty close to a fair 50/50 shot.  Or if you count Rival Adventuring Party, then the interruption isn't necessarily unfriendly, but it might still be an interruption.

Reading Holmes Basic

No standardized ability score modifiers like in B/X.

Trading down ability scores to boost prime reqs sounds like it's literally trading down here, not just "counting as" (vs the ambiguous "use" language in OD&D)

No explicit mechanical modifiers from Charisma are evident, either in the section on ability scores or in the section on reaction rolls (DM's discretion to give a bonus for a high Cha).

Thieves are not truly good and are usually referred to as neutral or evil, so that other members of an expedition should never completely trust them and they are quite as likely to steal from their own party as from the Dungeon Master's monsters.

How's that for setting expectations?

At the Dungeon Master's discretion a character can be anything his or her player wants him to be. Characters must always start out inexperienced and relatively weak and build on their experience.

Looks like balrog's back on the playable menu, boys!

If a character is killed, then for the next game the player rolls a new character. The new character, of course, starts with no experience. A character may be allowed to designate a "relative" who will inherit his wealth and possessions (after paying a 10% tax) on his death or disappearance.

So there's none of the "once per player" inheritance business here that we see in B/X.  Having to wait until next session to bring in a replacement character is rough though!

Retirement of a successful character is explicitly called out as a reasonable thing to do.

Hiring mercenaries and henchmen is brought up quite early, just as it was in OD&D.  Searching for candidates seems quite expensive but the minimum cost to hire is quite low.

Monsters can be hired as henchmen if they're of the same "basic alignment."

Subdued monsters are "salable."

Two-axis alignment, law/chaos and good/evil.

Players may choose any alignment they want and need not reveal it to others. Note that the code of lawful good characters insures that they would tell everyone that they are lawful.

Do they have to tell everyone they're good, though?

One free language per point of Int over 10.  Wizards are all massive polyglots I guess.

Movement rates in the dungeon seem unusually high - an unarmored and unencumbered man can move 240' per turn rather than usual 120, with armored characters moving 120'.  In OD&D you might manage 120' in armor, but there's nothing pointing to 240' while unarmored and unencumbered.  Looking at 1e, we have 120' for light armor down to 60' in plate.  This would help address the complaint that dungeon movement rates are unreasonably slow...  Ahhh, but in OD&D you could make two moves per exploration turn (according to my notes anyway).  So this is about the same total as OD&D's movement rates, just as a single move per turn.

There's a note about reducing the chance to find secret doors on lower levels of dungeons.  Don't think I've seen that before.

Still has the "drop stuff when surprised" rule from OD&D, but now it's only 1-in-6 instead of 1-in-4.

Wandering monster check every three turns rather than every two.  This also lines up a wandering monster check with the rest turn.  Not sure how I feel about this.

The number of wandering monsters appearing should be roughly equal to the strength of the party encountering them. First level adventurers encountering monsters typically found on the first level of a dungeon should be faced with roughly equal numbers, i.e. a party of three would encounter 2-6 orcs, 3 - 1 2 giant rats, etc. However, if the party were second level, or the first level monsters were encountered on the second level of the dungeon, the number of wandering monsters encountered should be doubled. In a like manner, the number of monsters should be tripled for third level adventures or in the third level of the dungeon if the monsters appearing are first level. If justification is needed, simply consider that a small party is relatively quiet, thus attracting less attention than a large group, and powerful characters will similarly bring more numbers of monsters.

Emphasis mine.  Whaaaat. Scaling number of monsters appearing by party level independent of dungeon level.  Wild.  How do the monsters know that there are powerful characters about and to gather up more guys?  I don't know.

Treasure is usually divided equally among members of the party and therefore the experience is also. If, for some reason, one character gets more of the loot, such as a thief stealing gems from the saddle bags on the way home, then he should get the additional experience points.

Dohohoho.  Emphasis mine.  Again, further precedent for giving players control over how XP from treasure is allocated.

"Using or hurling missiles" is called out as a special ability for monster XP calculation purposes.  That's...  kinda reasonable, really.

XP from monsters can be reduced if they're killed by a character of higher level than their HD.  Presumably this happens before XP is totaled and allocated?  Are you supposed to track who struck the killing blow against each monster?  But it's not lossy if you just soften 'em up and then let your 1st-level henchman finish the job?  No wonder this rule fell by the wayside.

Wait dwarves don't cost any more XP to level than regular fighters, and since the level cap is only 3 that doesn't matter either.  Dwarves OP, plz nerf.

The second roll in turning is to determine number of undead turned, not number of HD of undead turned.  I kinda like that, since the target number already scales with HD.

It's really funny that they don't get around to explaining the different flavors of "level" (character level, dungeon level, spell level...) until we're already quite a ways in, after random encounter tables for different dungeon levels and a discussion of leveling characters.

MUs require "at least 1 day" to prepare spells, and can't bring their books into the dungeon.

BUT MUs can make scrolls, starting at first level.  So that's interesting; I had heard that Holmes had this rule about early scroll creation, but it makes more sense in the context of needing "at least" a full day to re-memorize spells.  And also notably, none of this is aimed at mid-level wilderness play, since Holmes only goes up to 3rd level.

There is a reading of this text (at least up to this point) indicating that fighters can't use potions - in the class description it says they can use magical arms and armor but do no other kind of magic, and then there's this list of magic items that MUs can use which includes potions right in among wands and staves.

Spell research success chance is a brutal 20%.  But again, that might not be intended to remain true for levels out of scope for Basic.

He gets to choose the spell he will memorize from his books and he does this before the expedition starts off

(emph mine) Yeah now we're thinking in expeditions.

% chance to know and min and max number of spells known by Int are much more AD&D than B/X. Makes Int a lot more important for MUs than in B/X, but also gives them probably more options at low levels (when a B/X MU might only know 1-2 spells, as many as he can memorize), but those options are likely to be worse, since your DM is like 90% likely to pick sleep for you in B/X.  This is an interesting change; I don't recall seeing anything like this in OD&D.

God I don't want to read all these spell descriptions.

No clause in Light about using it for blinding.

Have to roll to hit with Magic Missile I think?

Explicitly no save on Sleep.

Huh, Ray of Enfeeblement.  And it's a bit jank, in a system where monsters don't actually have Str scores.  Amusingly, no such clause for what happens if you cast the Strength spell on a monster.

Wow Web is 10x10x20 feet, instead of a 10' cube.

Good lord do we really need all three of Ventriloquism, Magic Mouth, and Audible Glamer?

Third level spells are listed but not described, so I don't get to see if Fireball expands to volume.

It sounds like clerics don't need to spend time "studying" to prepare their spells (eg the full day to recover), but also don't get the ability to make scrolls at 1st.

Nothing in Cure Light Wounds about removing paralysis.

Bless could be read to be single-target.

Putting melee attack resolution before the combat sequence, it almost sounds like in melee you get an automatic counterattack against anything that attacks you (but after their attack has resolved).

Ouch, direct hits from burning oil are 1d8 on the first round and then 2d8 on the second round, rather than 1d8 each of the two rounds in eg B/X.  50% more total damage!  On the other hand, it is also made clearer that igniting thrown oil is a separate attack, so the action economy is actually worse than igniting and then throwing in B/X - twice the actions for 1.5x the damage.

Also, unless in a very high roofed area, all slinging, as well as long range fire, is not possible

...  what?  Slings are the thing that you're gonna penalize indoors, not archery?  I get that clerics are supposed to have weak offense but this is just silly.

Whoa, slow combat movement speeds - "an unarmored man can move 20 feet per melee round, a fully armored man only 10 feet".

Light weapons such as the dagger allow two blows per round

But...  if all hits do 1d6 damage, why wouldn't you use a dagger?

Ooookay yeah this combat sequence is much Chainmail-ier (but using d20s for to-hit), very different from the initiative-by-side that is stock in both B/X and 1e.  Initiative is just straight Dex, and DM rolls it for monsters on the spot, but if your Dex is close enough to that of your opponent, then you both roll d6s for it.  There's an option to forego an attack in order to parry, but your weapon can break if you do.  It isn't really clear when characters not engaged in melee, making ranged attacks, or casting get to act.

No mention of morale.

6-12 adventures to gain a level of experience is given as guidance.

Skimming monster entries.

Why do dwarves and elves in the monster entries do 1d8 and 1d10 damage, but 1st-level dwarf and elf PCs don't?  Strength doesn't even modify damage here!  ...  I'm not sure it even modifies to-hit, come to think of it.

Gelatinous cube doesn't actually paralyze, just anesthetizes on a failed save vs paralysis.  So you could get eaten without realizing it, rather than freezing up.  Kinda interesting twist.

The only indication that ghouls are undead is that they're on the cleric's turning table.  The description just calls them humanoids, and doesn't note that they're immune to anything unusual!

Several monsters mention Cure Disease in their descriptions, but that's the only place it's mentioned!

Purple worms swallow whole if they beat your AC by a mere two points!  Brutal!

The description of the effects of magic weapons on wights is very strange; magic arrows do double damage, neat.  Magic weapons do "full" damage and add their bonus to damage.  Does that mean max damage on the die, which is similar to double damage in expectation?  Are wights just especially vulnerable to magic arrows for some reason?  We'll never know.

I still don't think I've seen a to-hit table by HD for monsters.

10% of magic swords are cursed.

Randomly-rolled scrolls can be of the effect of a random wand, potion, or ring (with some exclusions like three wishes).  That's actually pretty neat.  I don't know what the duration of a scroll of, say, water walking or fire resistance is, when it would normally last as long as you kept the ring on.

Magic armor is actually quite rare, and it's on the same table as misc weapons.  Armor +1, shield +1, and armor -2 are each 2% of magic item rolls.

No mention of sentient swords or artifacts ):

One player should map the dungeon from the Dungeon Master's descriptions as the game progresses. This is easiest done if he uses a piece of graph paper marked North, East, South, West with the entrance to the dungeon level drawn in near the center. One of the players should keep a "Chronicle" of the monsters killed, treasure obtained, etc. Another should act as "caller" and announce to the Dungeon Master what action the group is taking. Both mapper and caller must be in the front rank of the party.

Emphasis mine.  I've been thinking for a while that it probably makes sense to make treasurer or quartermaster an official party role, nice to see precedent.  Putting the mapper up front is a rule I haven't seen before!

You are sure to encounter situations not covered by these rules. Improvise. Agree on a probability that an event will occur and convert it into a die roll — roll the number and see what happens!

(emph mine)  You're alright, Holmes.  You got a hard job, to be a bridge between OD&D and AD&D, and you really tried to make the first three levels of OD&D a little more accessible.  And the results have some rough edges, but you have the right spirit to the end.  You're still thinking of the game like a gamer, rather than in Moldvay's literary terms.

I'm not reading this whole sample dungeon right at this moment but the map is nicely jayquayed!  Honestly much of the art in this book has been quite good.  The inner cover with the wizard, fighter, and pig-faced orcs.  The lizardman riding the giant lizard.  The beefy minotaur vs the fighter with the curved sword.  There's a cartoony streak in here but it's kind of endearing.  I think the only pieces I really don't like are the grey ooze and this tiny, mostly-empty picture of what I guess is supposed to be treasure on page 33?

Oho, here's the monster to-hit table, at the very end!

Grim Dawn's Dungeon Blockers and Ye Olde Evil Doors

Grim Dawn does a couple of things in its dungeon that are sometimes annoying but fundamentally clever.  There are no randomly-generated maps in Grim Dawn.  The closest thing is a randomly-generated infinite dungeon, but each level is drawn from a pool of fixed level maps.  Given that a typical character runs through all of the campaign content in the game several times, in the traditional Diablo model, one would expect players to develop highly-efficient routes through the campaign area maps.

In order to prevent these repeatedly-traversed campaign zones from becoming stale without having to resort to random generation (with the difficulties that that would entail, like nonsensical outputs), the Grim Dawn devs have put places on some maps (mostly dungeons and towns, but a few wilderness areas) where random blockers can appear.  Piled of burning garbage, doorways that are full of rocks, that sort of thing.  They have the potential to appear in a fairly small number of carefully-selected spots in each dungeon, they're re-randomized per session (save and reload, basically, which also returns you to town), and generally you can't see them until you get fairly close to the spot they're blocking.  What all this means is that you can't consistently run optimal routes that you plan out before entering the dungeon.  There's a good chance that any such planned route will be blocked and you'll have to detour off it and then find a way back onto it, and your detour might also be blocked!  This means that finding paths remains gameplay even with hundreds of hours in the game and tens of runs through each area.  There are real choices and problem-solving in path-selection even when you have perfect knowledge of the unrandomized parts of the underlying level.  So despite having a constant underlying structure, navigating these areas remains engaging.

This seems like something which, obviously, could be adapted to OSR dungeons.  As DMs, we're under the same pressures to reuse content that Grim Dawn's devs were, and fully-procedural dungeons carry similar difficulties.  And it would be consistent with the No Homework ethos - no homework'd plan to traverse known parts of the dungeon will necessarily survive.  Reducing the rewards for homework is likely to reduce the amount of homework done.

Another clever, engaging thing that Grim Dawn does in its dungeons is find any excuse to have enemies "appear" in close proximity or behind you while you've engaged enemies in front of you.  Zombies, skeletons, and giant insects burrow out of the ground behind or around you.  Spiders drop from the ceiling.  Wraiths and outsiders materialize out of thin air.  Often these animations take long enough that if you're in motion, you can leave these appearing monsters in the dust and never have to deal with them.  This works great if you're running a nice planned path...  but when you run into a blocker and have to backtrack, or run into stern opposition, these guys can really catch up with you.  So blowing past them is a gamble, and they serve as a sort of potential energy mechanic.

But obviously, it would be silly to have goblins just appear out of nowhere near and behind you.  Unless...

Enter the much maligned stuck/evil door.  Obviously, goblins can come out of it on short notice!  And where better to place planned-path-breaking blockers than in doorways?  You could place your careful cut-points in hallways, but your dungeon already has all these doorways!  But it's not quite the same, because they're not blocked per-expedition, and a party can retry opening them.  Right?

Well...  not necessarily.  Looking at OD&D and the 1e DMG, it really isn't clear how long it takes to open a stuck/evil door, and doesn't explicitly say that it can be retried.  Not being able to retry forcing would give you a good reason to bring out the axes and exercise the door-breaking mechanic, so in a certain light the door-breaking mechanic's existence might be circumstantial evidence for rejecting retries on forcing doors.  And indeed there are apparently folks who play without permitting retries to open stuck doors - this post from Knight at the Opera, down in the "Dense Megadungeons" section, takes this position, and examines the effects on potential paths through the dungeon.  A door which the party failed to open on the first d6 roll was stuck closed to them for the rest of that expedition into the dungeon.  Knight at the Opera mapped out the paths that four expeditions had taken as a result of doors that they couldn't open.  Their patterns of exploration ended up deeper and more linear in structure than the patterns of dungeon exploration I'm used to seeing, because if they found a room with three doors, probably only one of them would open, so they explored where they were able, subject to door luck.  And obviously a door amenable to being opened by the party could then also be reopened within the same expedition (though it might require a roll that could be retried).

It's still not quite the same as Grim Dawn's dungeon blockers, but if you change the probabilities to something like 1 in 6 doors stuck (for the party) in any given expedition, I think you'd end up with a similar disruption of planned paths through explored areas and a similar excuse to have monsters sneak in behind parties, without wildly altering the pattern of exploration.  One complication is that you may want to leave all areas accessible during any given expedition, which could require sometimes rejecting a roll's result (if a stuck result would block the last path to an area).  But that's a rather principled sort of rejection of a random result, and one with good gameplay consequences (probably?).

The Caller and the Vietnam Hypothesis

In order to command well, we should know how to submit. He who submits with good grace will eventually become worthy of command.

- Cicero, On the Laws.

There was a post on the osr subreddit the other day asking about the caller.  This post is an elaboration of my comments on that post.

In what seems to be my idiom lately, I decided to go have a look at what OD&D and 1e said about the caller, and was a bit surprised at what I found.

OD&D makes only a brief mention of the caller on page 12-13 of Book 3, where there is a dialogue between the DM and the caller, in which the caller describes a series of actions the party takes during exploration.Curiously, none of the other players say anything.

AD&D 1e largely replaces the term "caller" with "leader". A dialogue demonstrating exploration on pages 97-100 of the 1e DMG does include separate voices for Leader Character (LC) and Other Characters (OC). The OC voice seems to do a fair bit of asking questions of the DM, undertaking combat actions, and in a few cases undertaking independent actions when separated from the party. There is also a note after one of the LC's proposals ("The other players concur") which indicates that this dialogue is perhaps not intended to capture the full discussion at the table, just what passes between the DM and players (but on the other hand, there are also lines that are more or less just other characters agreeing to a plan proposed by the leader, so the text is somewhat inconsistent). The LC does seem to have a very active role in proposing courses of action.

The 1e PHB also makes a few mention of party leaders. The heading "Obedience" on page 106 notes,

The leader and caller of a party might order one course of action while various players state that their characters do otherwise. Your DM will treat such situations as confused and muddled, being certain to penalize the group accordingly.

(emphasis mine).  It is foreign indeed to modern gaming sensibilities for any player to give orders to the party as a whole. I have often thought of callers as sort of like the chairman of a committee, responsible for keeping the party moving coherently, but perhaps "elected expedition captain" is closer to the original role.  Maybe "caller" is meant as in "shot-caller".

This doesn't seem like something that would work well with the sort of people I have historically gamed with - contrarian engineers suspicious of all authority, who can't take orders even from the people paying them without arguing (to be fair, a big part of the job is figuring out which orders are impossible and pushing back on them).  But it probably worked for some sort of player, once - but what sort?  And then I remembered that I had read of a game at West Point that used a caller in very much this commanding style (with a second-in-command even, I believe).

Maybe, like careful dungeoncrawling and Tucker's Kobolds, this commanding way of playing the caller comes out of the American experience in Vietnam, where a broad cross-section of men were exposed to giving and receiving orders as a consequence of the draft.  And like careful dungeoncrawling and Tucker's Kobolds, maybe its decline in the '80s reflects the spread of the game beyond its original audience of historical wargamers and veterans.

Traveller, Open Tables, and Boot Hill

There's been some discussion of Traveller on ACKS discord lately and it has me thinking.

All of the Traveller campaigns I've run or played in have been of the "crew of a single ship, small-cast" model.  And Mongoose Traveller, at least, explicitly encourages this with the party skill package.  But what would an open table Traveller campaign look like?  How would you make that work?

If I thought adapting ACKS to open-table play would be tough, Traveller seems a whole 'nother animal.

The biggest difficulty, obviously, is ships.  If there is no party-as-a-whole to own a ship, do you instead have individual players hold the leases on ships?  But then what do you do in a session where no player who has a ship is present?  Is this what the rules for paying for passage are for?  And likewise, what do you do if multiple players with ships are present?  Do you just both go to the same place, convoy-style?  Do you let one ship sit idle?  But then you're paying loan for something you're not using, which brings up another point - if you're a loan-holding player and you can't make a session but time passes in-universe, then what?

Maybe it's best to assume that ships sitting idle are doing boring local deliveries that just break even.

I suppose another answer to the trouble of ships would be "the party (as in the whole playerbase) is a corporation", with ships, debts, and treasury held in common.  But then what if some particular session's subparty really screws up and gets the ship destroyed, or loots the party treasury?

(I suppose another solution to the ship problem is to break with tradition and embrace jump-capable small craft, allowing you to move a party but not a whole lot of gear on a much smaller budget than a typical starship)

Another difficulty - what do you do if you do have a ship-holder at a particular session, but no pilot?  Here again, a seldom-used rule might be relevant: salaries for various crew positions on MgT1e page 137.  The rules in Pirates of Drinax for hiring NPCs would help too.  But it could get weird if the NPC part of your crew is getting paid salaries while the PC part of your crew isn't, and weirder still if you pay different PCs different rates.

Cost of Living for different PCs with different SOC stats (MgT1e page 87) also poses difficulties.

There also isn't really a good Traveller equivalent of a megadungeon.  I suppose one could build an enormous wreck to explore over the course of a campaign, but megadungeons benefit from being fantastical environments which admit lots of internal variance; in a simulated "real" space, you can't do that, so it risks getting dull. 

On the other hand, open table Traveller could be a lot of fun, in part on the basis of variety between planets.  One of the things I liked about Traveller is that it can vary a lot adventure to adventure; it's easy to do Firefly one session, Alien the next, and Mad Max after that.  And in an open table environment, with a broad set of players with different preferences and different skills, it seems like such variation might be more welcome than in a higher-continuity campaign.  It might even be a good excuse to bring out some of the supplements from time to time - if you don't have a ship this session, sign on for a short tour with some mercs and do Hammer's Slammers with Striker this session, or do a stint of private eye work and bust out Agent.

But the point about salaries brought another things to mind: Boot Hill's campaign structure as described in the books, where each player is doing their own thing and you occasionally convene to resolve combats.  A subsector with one or two high-tech or industrial worlds and a smattering of low-pop worlds starts to look rather like the Boot Hill campaign map, with a central "city" and a smattering of ranches, homesteads, and mines.  An X-boat route is a lot like a telegraph line, while an established jump-1 trade route has a certain resemblance to a railroad (using something like warpgate stations instead of ship-mounted FTL really starts to look like a railroad, in that you have to build expensive infrastructure and only service certain spots).  And like Boot Hill, Traveller admits high-volume automation of NPC generation; the process is more complicated, but the output is still simpler than most characters in D&D-type games (particularly if you prune some of the softer noncombat skills / go back to Classic Traveller).  Lining up the passage of real time with the passage of game-time like in OD&D's campaign rules puts the "one week per jump" rule in a new light (I don't know that you'd really want to do 1:1 time, but it's an interesting idea.  2:1 might be more reasonable, so you can do a week in jump and a week in port per IRL week).

A lot of interesting options open up when you break the notion of "party", move to a big cast of PCs with conflicting interests, and maintain campaign-time.  Multiple PC-run mercenary companies, possibly deployed against each other from time to time?  Some players playing at Merchant Prince scale, some players playing individual crewmen of ships and earning salary?  Cat-and-mouse games between PC leaseholders and PC jump tracers?  PC pirates and smugglers who accumulate bounties vs PC bounty hunters, like Boot Hill's dynamic between lawmen and outlaws?  PC belt miners claim jumping each other?  Your hit the motherlode of radioactives and next thing you know you're hiring PC mercenaries to keep the PC pirates off of you.

There's a whole weird world of ways of playing when you let each player play their own subgame which interacts with other players' subgames, and it seems under-explored in tabletop games.  If you don't want to deal with ship mortgages, or asteroid mining, or whatever, there's no party dragging you into dealing with that particular mechanic.  On the other hand, "many players independently playing their own interacting subgames in spaaace" may have also just described EVE Online.  But there's something to be said for games that have below Dunbar's Number of players and a flexible referee.

And Traveller covers two of Boot Hill's weaknesses: lack of information on economy and yields of various activities (if anything Traveller refs are spoiled for choices, across the various editions) and political difficulties around the Wild West setting.

Playing with AD&D's Weapon-vs-Armor Table

Delta had a good post the other day about what he believes to be a big error in the weapon-vs-armor table present in the 1e DMG (and as far as I can tell, identical to the one in Supplement 1, Greyhawk, which I noted in passing).

I think Delta is correct, that the modifiers were just taken by looking at the difference between 8+ and the target number for each entry, which means that (for example) maces aren't particularly good against heavy armor, and that in general you get very un-Chainmail-like outcomes for a table nominally derived from Chainmail.

But Delta doesn't quite follow through to publishing a revised table.  He asks at the end if that's something that people would like to see.  And I was curious so I decided to have a stab at it myself.

First I converted each of the target numbers on 2d6 into a probability and then into a target number on d20.

 

TN 2d6	% hit	% miss	TN d20
5	83.33	16.67	4
6	72.22	27.78	6
7	58.33	41.67	9
8	41.67	58.33	12
9	27.78	72.22	15
10	16.67	83.33	17
11	8.33	91.67	19
12	2.78	97.22	20

 

Then I filled those d20 target numbers in for each weapon:

d20 target numbers	No armor	Leather	Shield only	Leather +shield	Chain	Chain +shield	Plate	Plate +shield
Dagger	6	9	12	12	15	17	20	20
Hand Axe	9	9	12	15	17	17	19	20
Mace	12	12	12	15	12	12	9	12
Sword	9	12	12	15	12	15	17	19
Battle Axe	12	12	12	12	9	9	15	17
Morningstar	6	6	9	9	6	9	12	12
Flail	9	9	9	9	6	9	6	9
Spear	12	12	15	15	17	17	19	20
Pole arm	6	6	6	9	9	12	15	17
Halberd	12	12	12	9	6	6	9	12
2H Sword	6	6	6	6	4	4	6	9
Mounted Lance	4	4	4	4	6	9	12	15
Pike	12	12	12	12	12	12	15	17

Finally, I converted those target numbers into modifiers relative to the baseline target number to hit that type of armor in Supplement 1 (10+ for No Armor, 12+ for Shield Only, 17+ for Plate+shield, etc)

	No armor	Leather	Shield only	Leather +shield	Chain	Chain +shield	Plate	Plate +shield
Base to-hit:	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
Dagger	+4	+2		+1	-1	-2	-4	-3
Hand Axe	+1	+2		-2	-3	-2	-3	-3
Mace	-2	-1		-2	+2	+3	+7	+5
Sword	+1	-1		-2	+2		-1	-2
Battle Axe	-2	-1		+1	+5	+6	+1
Morningstar	+4	+5	+3	+4	+8	+6	+4	+5
Flail	+1	+2	+3	+4	+8	+6	+10	+8
Spear	-2	-1	-3	-2	-3	-2	-3	-3
Pole arm	+4	+5	+6	+4	+5	+3	+1
Halberd	-2	-1		+4	+8	+9	+7	+5
2H Sword	+4	+5	+6	+7	+10	+11	+10	+8
Mounted Lance	+6	+7	+8	+9	+8	+6	+4	+2
Pike	-2	-1		+1	+2	+3	+1

This seems somewhat unnecessarily complicated, though, since you have to check both a modifier for the armor and then a modifier for the weapon.  I rather like the big table of d20 target numbers - sum your adjustment from Str, magic weapons, and level, subtract for defender's magic armor and rings of protection, roll your d20, add your bonus, and look up in the table what you need to hit.

I don't know that these direct conversions by probability are actually reasonable within the context of balancing weapon choices for AD&D.  The heavy weapons get some really big bonuses to hit, and they don't have the counterbalancing factors that they did in Chainmail's man-to-man combat system, where opponents using lighter weapons could parry or attack multiple times in a round against opponents using heavier weapons.

Maybe the Thief is Intentionally Bad

I was thinking about how thieves are bad, and then I remembered that they originated in Supplement 1, which was remarkable to me for its adversarial tone and the fact that it cared a lot about alignment.  Thieves were required to be Chaotic or Neutral, and Supplement 1 was all about giving nice things to Lawful paladins and making life hard for Chaotic characters.

Maybe the thief being bad is Working As Intended, WONTFIX.  Maybe it's just a big codified middle finger to people who play Chaotic, and we've all collectively forgotten.

OD&D Notes, Supplement 1: Greyhawk

Or, half-jokingly, "where everything went wrong".

 

Initially I expected to make this post part of the series on reading OD&D, but after reading Greyhawk, I think there's a clear line between it and the LBBs, tonally.  I think this is also where I would draw the line between OD&D and AD&D.

Characters:

Paladins added as a subclass available to lawful fighters.

Thieves added.  They must be Neutral or Chaotic, and Lawful characters can't hire them on a permanent basis.

Greyhawk seems to care a lot about alignment.  I get the feeling that somebody had had too many rat bastard players and was trying to get them to behave.

Open Locks works on magical closures.

Remove Traps is explicitly "small trap devices (such as poisoned needles)"

Demihumans can be thieves, and have no level limits in Thief.

"Thieves of the 3rd level and above are able to read most (80%) languages, so
treasure maps can be read and understood by them without recourse to a spell."

Notably, this doesn't say "thieves have an 80% chance of reading treasure maps" - it says that they can read 80% of languages, and can read treasure maps without casting a spell.

Backstab scales up with level, to x3 at 5th, x4 at 9th, and so forth.  I think this is Right And Proper and I'm extra confused why Basic (as represented by OSE) got rid of this.

Ugh percentile skills.

Demihuman level limits are increased for demihumans with 17-18 in the class' prime req.

Dwarves and elves have definitively acquired infravision.

Oh boy racial bonuses to thief skills.

Half-elves have arrived.  They're a lot like elves but without infravision, higher fighter level limit, lower MU level limit.  Who asked for this?

 

"There are no half-elf clerics, for in this regard their human side prevails.  However, half-elves with a basic wisdom score of 13 or more may also become clerics."

No half-elf clerics, or only half-elf clerics with high Wis?  Why choose when you can say both?

Updated monsters-by-alignment table for new creatures added.  I'm surprised lizardmen and beholders are exclusively Neutral.

Here's more harping on Chaotic players.  "While there is no rule to apply to groups of chaotic players operating in concert, referees are urged to formulate some rules against continuing cooperation as fits their particular situation, but consideration for concerted actions against chaotic players by lawful ones should be given."

Fighters get to add Str to attack and damage, and low Str penalizes everyone melee to-hit and damage.  18/%% strength has arrived.  Str now modifies encumbrance.  A character with 3 Str only loses 100 coins of carrying capacity (they can still carry 650 at full speed).

Int now modifies maximum spell level, number of spells known, probability of knowing a given spell.  11 Int is still good enough to learn and cast 6th level spells though (versus, say, 3e, where you'd need 16 Int for that).

Fighters with 15+ Dex can basically add Dex-14 to their AC.  Only fighters though, not anybody else (even thieves).

"Charisma scores of 17 or greater by fighters indicate the possibility of paladin
status IF THEY ARE LAWFUL from the commencement of play for that character."

Lay on Hands can also cure disease, which is neat.

Paladins are immune to disease, but not to fear.  They get +10% on saving throws, can detect evil to 6" / 60', and if 8th level or higher can "dispel evil (spells, undead, evil enchanted monsters, and the like) simply by ordering it hence".

They can summon a warhorse but it can't be replaced for 10 years.

They have to give away treasure and magic items, except for their personal armor, shield, up to four weapons, a stronghold of up to 200kgp in value, and up to 200 retainers, which is not much of a vow of poverty.

"Gifts must be to the poor or to charitable or religious institutions, i.e. not to some other character played in the game."

lol.  But also this kind of lawyery is a big part of what makes it feel like AD&D instead of the LBBs or Basic.

High Con scores now get more HP per HD (it capped out at +1 per die in Book 1, up to +3 at 18 here).

Con is now a hard cap on number of resurrections, I guess the percent probability of surviving resurrection wasn't doing its job hard enough: "your constitution score is also the number of times you may be resurrected; this, of course, excludes wishing and other means to revitalize your body without recourse to a resurrection spell"

 

Chaotic retainers, and retainers serving chaotic characters, take loyalty penalties.

Thief XP table.

Different HD sizes by class.

Wow thieves are squishier in the limit than MUs.  Thieves cap out at 10d4 and gain +1/2 HP per level thereafter, while MUs cap out at 11d4 and gain +1 HP per level thereafter.

Use of d8 HD for monsters recommended, but then provides kobolds as an example with 1d4.  Perplexing.

Tables for spells known and per day for wizards up to 22nd level and clerics up to 20th.  7th-9th level arcane spells and 6th-7th level divine spells added.

Thief skills table.  They don't actually get finding traps.  I say again: thieves don't get anything for finding traps, only removing them.

XP rewards from defeating monsters revised - looks much lower for weak monsters and similar for strong monsters.  Eg, per Book 1 killing an orc would be worth 100 XP.  Here (and hereafter, in OSE and ACKS) an orc is only worth 10 XP.

Henchmen now earn half XP.  "It is absolutely mandatory that experience for non-player characters be computed, bonuses added, and then the whole reduced by 50%"

Equipment:

Weapon vs armor to-hit table adapted from Chainmail.

Arquebus is on the table, curiously enough, as is "horse bow" (in addition to short, long, and composite bows).

Weapon damage now varies by weapon and by size of the target (man-sized vs larger than man-sized).

Polearms are noted as "not usable in dungeons as a general rule"

2H swords kick ass, 1d10 points against men and 3d6 against big creatures.

Longswords aren't shabby either, with 1d8 vs men and 1d12 against big creatures.

I really don't understand the logic (gameplay reason) behind making damage different against big creatures.  Were people only using light weapons?

Oh man this table for weird stackings of magic armor and magic shields up to +5.

This rule about when magic shields apply looks an awful lot like facing.

Monsters now also deal different amounts of damage and have different numbers of attacks each.

Spells:

 

Spell lists much expanded - Magic Missile, Shield, Web, Strength, Darkness, Explosive Runes, Summon Monster, Suggestion, Ice Storm, Fear, Legend Lore, Snake Charm, Silence 15' Radius, Prayer, Speak with Dead, plus all the high-level spells.

Extension is a new one to me - extend the duration of a lower-level spell.  First stab at metamagic.

Charm Person duration nerfed.

Sleep clarified to offer no saving throw and not affect undead.

Magic Missile doesn't actually say it automatically hits.

Web has a range of 30' and a duration of 8 hours.  Stronk.

High-level MUs can attempt to detect and remove Explosive Runes.

Summon Monster basically suggests rolling on the random encounter table for a particular dungeon level.

Charm Monster duration nerfed.

Ugh they're specifying between "turns" and "melee turns" in these durations.  Super error-prone.

Limited Wish cannot create treasure.

Spells Simulacrum and Clone are both present, basically just weird limited resurrections.

The Power Words have arrived.

Time Stop stops time in an area, except for the caster - creatures from outside the area can still enter it, but will be frozen.  Also the duration is random and rolled secretly by the DM.

Gate lets you summon "an ultra-powerful being (such as Odin, Crom, Set, Cthulhu, the Shining One, a demi-god, or whatever)".

Summon Monster 7 can summon a lich, who is a 20th level MU, which means he could cast Summon Monster 7, and summon another lich, who casts Summon Monster 7, ...

It seems like the original intent of Silence wasn't to use on enemy casters - "This spell allows the user to either cast Silence upon himself and his party so as to move with no sound or to cast the spell upon some object or thing to silence it. Duration: 12 turns. Range: 18”"

Prayer is weird, it just inflicts a saving throw penalty to targets in the area.  At least the penalty scales up (very slowly) with caster level.

Speak With Dead - answers are recommended to be riddles.

Animate Objects, Blade Barrier, Word of Recall, Speak With Monsters, Conjure Animals.

Aerial Servant is new to me, send a double-strength flying invisible stalker to abduct someone.  Very "jerk-ass DM abducted my PC to put a geas on him".

Holy Word's effects aren't alignment-specific, they only care about the HD of the targets.

Restoration, recover a level drained by undead, is a 7th level cleric spell, up there with True Resurrection, and incapacitates the caster for 2d10 days.

Monsters:

Vampires "from the Middle East" are invisible but can't charm.  OK then.

Elementals are now immune to +1 weapons and attacks from monsters of less than 4HD (unless those creatures have magical abilities).

Druids appear as a monster but not a class.  They are combination MU/clerics.

Tritons are upgraded mermen.

Bugbears appear!  They are "of the "giant class", being great hairy goblin-giants."  They get +1 to surprise.

Ogre Magi "are properly Japanese Ogres" and regenerate 1HP per melee round, plus a bunch of spell-like abilities.

Storm giants can cause storms.

Liches are typically 18th level MUs.

Harpies can charm with a touch.

The rest of the metallic dragons are added.

The "Platinum King of Lawful (and Neutral) Dragons" has 21 HD, AC -3, and a disintegrating breath weapon, while the "Chromatic Queen of the Chaotic Dragons" only has 16 HD and AC 0 (but the action economy of five heads and the tail of a wyvern).

Lizardmen are fond of human flesh.  But again, they're neutral.  I guess bears and lions are neutral too.

Doppelgangers don't have Spell Resistance (it hasn't been invented yet), they just save against spells as 10th level fighters.

Beholders' main body is AC0, the eye-stalks AC2, and the eyes themselves AC7.  So for once it's actually easier to hit the sub-parts.

Beholders are also avaricious.

Displacer beasts save as a man wearing a displacer cloak, which is pretty funny.  Or a 12th-level fighter, against spells.

Rust monsters aren't immune to nonmagical wooden weapons here like they are in OSE.  Another perplexing design decision for Basic.

Giant ticks will pursue and drop on their prey.

Owlbears (pardon me, "Owl bears") are almost entirely bears, with the heads of owls.

"CARRION CRAWLERS: These scavengers will usually attack in order to insure
that there will continue to be a supply of corpses to scavenge".  What.  No.  That's called predation.  Stop.

Nothing about laying eggs in the things they paralyze, so I guess they really don't kill you, you're just stuck until something else makes you a corpse.  That's so dumb.

Gelatinous Cuuuube.  Doesn't actually paralyze you, just anesthetizes flesh that comes into contact with it unless you save vs paralysis.  Nothing about them being perfectly translucent or otherwise unusually sneaky yet.

Giant slugs have super weird mechanics for shooting acid at people, where they just have a % hit chance that I guess is independent of AC?

As golems get heavier (flesh < clay < iron), they also get slower.  Interesting.

Magic items:

Magic swords up to +5 (only Holy Swords are +5 though).  Vorpal, Dancing, and Sharpness appear.

Only fighters can use potions of fire resistance.

Multiple cursed items in pretty much every category.

Rods have arrived, and they're like wands and staves except they have a lot fewer charges.  It's almost like 100-200 was too many?

The Nine Lives Draining sword implementation is actually kind of neat, where it ramps up but then runs out of charges.

Holy Swords make paladins immune to magic, in addition to being +5.

Dragon Slaying Sword +2 does 4d10 bonus damage against dragons of the correct color.  That's actually a pretty OK implementation of "of slaying".

Dancing sword will only start dancing after you've been using it to fight for three rounds, then dances for three rounds, then needs another three rounds in your hands.  It's a partner dance, apparently.

Sword of Sharpness only works for paladins and also provides anti-magic.

Vorpal sword only works for lawful fighters, and also does anti-magic for paladins.  ok_hand.jpg

 

Armor +4 is made of mithral; armor +5 is made of adamantium.

 

Shield of missile attraction only kicks in when "missiles from true enemies are shot at its user in anger."

Why do you hate your players?  What did they ever do to you?

Arrows of slaying, on the other hand, don't do bonus damage or give a save or anything.

Crossbow of Speed lets you shoot in the surprise round, and then +3 init after that.  ...  but isn't initiative still by-side?  How does that work?

Wait but the section on ability scores said "Dexterity affects both the ability of characters to act/react and fire missiles".  That sounds like an initiative bonus!  But there was no table or clarification on it?

Potions of Extra-Healing first appear, healing 3d6.

Oil of Slipperiness is for moving through webs and strands, escaping knots and hugs (owlbear hugs?).  It can be removed by pouring wine on yourself, lol.

Ring of Shooting Stars only works at night under open sky.

Ring of Contrariness makes the user "act in the opposite fashion of normal/requested."  So a typical day with player characters, cats, or small children.

Staves of Striking no longer use charges when striking (nor do staves of power or wizardry).

Rod of Cancellation lets you cancel any one magic item if you can hit it with it.  This kinda feels like a "I'm sick of that player with the +5 armor, I'mma send drow with Rods of Cancellation" Bad DM item.

The first reference to the glaive-guisarme!  In the Rod of Lordly Might description.  It doesn't appear on the weapons tables, there it's still just "polearm".

Rod of Rulership lets you command 1d4+1  x 100 hit dice of humanoids for 10 rounds.  But only in a radius of 10 feet.  That can't be right.  It's a pity it doesn't last for longer, that would be a neat way to acquire an army.

So so so many cursed miscellaneous items.

Luckstone affects rolls for generating treasure.  That's amazing.  How would you even run that with a big campaign of 20 players?  Do you have to roll two treasures when you're prepping, one in case the guy with the luckstone comes to tonight's session and one for if he doesn't?  Was treasure usually rolled at runtime?

Horn of Bubbles is funny at least, rather than "lol the cursed magic carpet wraps you up and smothers you, you die unless you have like a 10th level cleric with Animate Object outside the carpet ready to save you".

 

Talisman of Lawfulness is the first appearance of the effect that became Imprisonment, and does a bunch of damage to people other than lawful clerics who touch it.

Saw of Mighty Cutting: A magical saw which will cut through a normal-sized tree in but 6 turns. Consider a normal tree to be approximately eighteen inches in diameter.
Mattock of the Titans: A great mallet which drives great piles into the ground with but a single blow. It will sunder a standard portal (8’ high, 4’ wide, 2” thick) with one swing. It is too massive to be used in combat by any except Giants, Titans, and the like.
Spade of Colossal Excavation: This shovel will excavate a hole one cubic yard in size in but one turn.

I like these, especially the Mattock.  That's a great example of an item that interacts with exploration gameplay.  I wish we had more like that.

The manuals of skill at arms and gainful exercise and all that arrive.  If you read the wrong class' book, you lose XP and may take damage.  You may even take damage from handling the book.  If you read the wrong alignment's book as a cleric you lose two levels.  

Their covers are blank and impenetrable by either Commune or Contact Higher Plane spells, although a wish will reveal its general contents, and a second Wish would reveal its exact nature. After being read by one individual the work vanishes completely, unless the reader gained no benefit from the contents. In the latter case he cannot rid himself of the item and must hide it away and guard it against use by someone who could gain from it.

And this is a good example of the other thing that makes it feel like AD&D - the "being out to fuck over your players and prevent them from using reasonable tools within the game-world," like Commune.  Advanced Dungeons and Dragons?  More like Adversarial Dungeons and Dragons.

The Deck of Many Things appears!  Interesting that you don't have to take all of your draws at once - the deck only disappears once you've taken a total of four, or you have stated intention to never draw from the deck again.

Underworld and Wilderness:

Some of these dungeon tricks are super-dumb.

They do make the good point that checking the guts of monsters for treasure should take time.

The monster combination suggestions are pretty alright.  "A Cloud Giant riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex."  Yeah sign me up, I want that in my campaign.

The rust monster appears on the 4th, 5th, and 6th level dungeon monster tables.  I do believe it is the only creature with that distinction.

Conclusions:

 

Boy I really didn't enjoy this one.  Maybe I'll read Blackmoor but after that I think I'm done with '70s era OD&D/AD&D books.

Rival Adventuring Parties and Dungeon Maps as Treasure

Been thinking about mapping more.  Once upon a time, my players encountered a rival adventuring party in the dungeon, fought them, and took their stuff.  At the time it didn't occur to either them or me that that rival party probably ought to have had a map of parts of the dungeon that they had explored.

On the one hand, having rival adventuring parties be a source of intel in addition to magic items makes them a great target.  Stealing their maps might even qualify as a good use for my least favorite thief skill, Picking Pockets, and maps could be a good target for skullduggery in town too rather than just in the dungeon.  I also like that this would allow a DM to provide information to the party about the layout of the dungeon, but there's a good reason for that information to be unreliable - just as the party may make mapping mistakes, so too their rivals.  This casts the players' map into doubt and requires them to resolve inconsistencies.  Some of my favorite mapping moments in previous campaigns have been when multiple players had their own maps and have had to build a consensus map out of their fragments, and having NPC maps as an additional source seems likely to lead to similar moments.

But on the other hand, figuring out what parts of the dungeon each rival party has explored and building unreliable map-fragments sounds like a pain in the ass.  It's the sort of thing that I would probably want to do after the session in which the party captured the map (ie, random encounter result of Rival Party, PCs capture the map, session ends, I figure out where exactly they had been and what they knew).  Maybe this is a good reason for OD&D's Read Languages to specify that it can be used to read maps - "Oh you didn't prepare Read Languages today?  I guess you can't read the map and will have to do it after the session."  Maybe it's normal for adventurers to keep their maps encoded, so that when captured you need to bring it back to town and spend some time deciphering it.  I dunno.

I wonder if the intent for treasure maps in OD&D was for them to be maps of parts of the dungeon, rather than maps pointing to wilderness lairs like I have used them in ACKS.  Looking at the text again it really doesn't say.

Reading OD&D, Closing Thoughts on the LBBs

Part 5 of a series:

Reading Chainmail

Reading OD&D Book I

Reading OD&D Book II

Reading OD&D Book III

 

As with reading Classic Traveller, this was a very interesting exercise.

 

A lot of things were just not covered at all.  The turn structure in combat comes entirely from Chainmail; man-to-man combat gets a single paragraph which is just a reference.  Which leads to another (terrible?) idea for D&D - secret, written orders for your character in D&D combat. Using Chainmail for combat does explain the origin of initiative by side rather than individual initiative, with movement, then shooting, then melee, then spellcasting, as seen in Basic - that's about what a Chainmail turn would look like under the non-written-orders option.

Recovering spells is also never really covered.  It's perfectly possible given the text here that you might only need your spellbook to prepare / choose spells at the beginning of the adventure, and then you get them back every day, but to swap them out you need the book again.  And that would also free wizards to go on naval adventures, or swimming, or out in the rain, without worrying about their precious tomes.

 

I like the idea that counter-spelling is an action that MUs can attempt at any level.  I guess the flow for this under something like ACKS' initiative system might be "declare spells, declare counterspells, if spell-caster beats counter-speller's initiative then it goes off, otherwise counterspeller gets a roll adjusted by level to stop the spell from going off."  This would provide low-level parties with another way to stop sleep by an NPC caster from being a TPK.  Apply modifiers for relative power of the two casters, whether the counter-speller knows the spell being countered, maybe even make high-level spells easier to counter (they are higher "complexity", which sounds like they'd be easier to throw wrenches into).

I like Chainmail's roll-to-cast with the possibility that the spell goes off on the next round, too.  That would also offer a bigger window to counterspell or get stabbed.  I'm not sure whether counterspelling should cause you to lose the spell for the day / the slot, or just to prevent you from casting it that round (or for the rest of that fight / 10 minutes).

It's weird that the "alternate" combat system won out so completely.  I guess if you didn't have Chainmail, then the alternate was the only option available to you.  I'm really surprised that fighters gain THAC0 so infrequently given that they do gain capability every level under the Chainmail combat system.

I almost want to see a TSR D&D variant where THAC0 doesn't improve as you level - you just get more attacks at a rate that approximates the fighter's ability to fight massed troops in Chainmail (and clerics and MUs get more attacks at a slower rate).  It isn't even crazy for a 10th level fighter to make 10 attacks in a 1-minute combat round.  The problem would be building an initiative system where fights between equally-matched opponents didn't just come down to "whoever won init" (although I guess wizard-fights are already like that).  Speed in play would also suffer.

 

It's odd to think that Codex Martialis for 3e was sort of on this track back to Chainmail.

I guess the fact that non-Chainmail combat won out might also explain the disappearance of counterspelling.  And morale only being in mass combat part of the Chainmail book, not in the LBBs, might have been the beginning of morale's status as "that rule everyone forgets".

As others have noted, the implied setting here is suuuper low population density.  Securing a fortress is sufficient to control a 20-mile radius around it - about 540 square miles.  In that 540 square miles you get 2d4 villages, each of 1d4x100 villagers, so a total population of 1250 on average.  Spread across 540 square miles, that's a population density of about 2.3 people per square mile, which is too dense for hunter-gatherer populations for also about 5% of the density of medieval England.  Having that population per 5-mile hex would bring population density up to 60 people per square mile, which is in line with ancient Mediterranean population densities but still well short of the population density of medieval France or the Holy Roman Empire.  I almost wonder if the conventional wisdom, that population density in OD&D is really low, is the result of the textual ambiguity around "territory", which could refer to either the entire barony containing 5 villages, or to each hex containing 5 villages.  Another possibility for making the numbers more reasonable would be to rule that the village population is "urban" and supported by a larger rural population; with 9 rural per urban, you'd end up at 23 people per square mile which is still thin but not crazy thin.

 

I found a lot to like in these rules.  I love the naval combat; I have no desire to own a big wargaming table but this seems like something a VTT could do very well.  I love the up-front emphasis on hiring leveled characters / henchmen.  The dungeon-building advice is way better than I expected it to be at this stage of the game's development.  This whole thing was a lot less opaque than I expected.  There was almost no purple Gygaxian prose and the organization isn't terrible; emphasis is placed on several important topics (henchmen and dungeons, respectively).