Why Are Kobolds So Slow?

My players had a bad run-in with some kobolds tonight.  The party threw some flaming oil into a room where the kobolds were, killing two and prompting a failed morale roll.  The kobolds retreated out of the room and set up an ambush down the hall.  The players spent some time hemming and hawing before over-extending and rushing down the hall, causing the fighter to get surrounded and dropped by kobold spearmen.  It looked like the situation might spiral out of control but the party won initiative, allowing them to get the critical sleep off.

I hadn't realize just how slow kobolds are until I was retreating down the hall with them.  They're as slow as a man in plate but they only have AC 12!  It's kind of remarkable.

Goblins are also quite slow, at 60' speed.

One explanation, the in-world explanation, is that they're short and have stubby little legs.  But halflings get 90' speed in the monster entry (and 120' as PCs)...

I'm thinking maybe there's a game-reason.  Kobolds and goblins are the weakest and first humanoid monsters most players meet.  They're the ones players are most likely to over-extend into.  Their lack of speed limits their ability to pursue and punish player over-extensions - they might get the fighter and the cleric, but the MU and the thief might actually be able to outrun them if things go bad.

Orcs, on the other hand, have 120' speed - a big step up.  This might be a bigger deal than the full 1 HD in making them more threatening to low-level parties than goblins.  When you start meeting orcs, the training wheels are off and they can give a good chase even if you're lightly-encumbered.

It's kind of an interesting alternate lens on differentiating weak humanoids from my previous approach - maybe the significant mechanical differences are already there, and I've just overlooked them.

Swords Against Scheduling

I've been running my in-person game pretty open-table style.  Once a week I send out a four-question survey to my player pool asking "if we gamed on (mon|tues|wednes|thurs)day, would you make it?  Yes / no / maybe".  If we get three players for a given night, then we game.  I've been very surprised at the degree of flakiness; so far in ~six weeks we've had two sessions dip from 3 expected players down to 2.  I don't think I've ever seen a session-failure-rate due to flakiness anything like this before.  This post is speculating about explanations.

Many (most?) of my players are young men, early-career, between one and three years out of school with this as their first job.  It's been a bad job market in this field for the last year or two.  One of the more common excuses for flaking is that more work suddenly popped up and they're working late, in the hope that if they work hard now they won't get laid off next year.  In fairness, when I was their age, I dropped D&D entirely as a hobby for a couple years to focus on work.  So I respect the impulse to work hard early-career and solidify their positions, but the way in which they don't keep their commitments does bother me.

Amusingly, the players of chaotic characters have been flaking at a higher rate than the lawful guys.

Another hypothesis is a generational change in culture, perhaps arising out of differences in the pandemic experience between those who were in college at the time and those who were working at the time.

A third possibility is that maybe new campaigns / player-groups are always sort of like this and it's just been so long since I played with anyone but family or the Old College Stalwarts that I'd forgotten about it.  It may just take time to distill a core of reliable players, to winnow the chaff from the wheat.  The July 4th holiday certainly didn't help with building campaign momentum.

Finally, I must consider the possibility that this is all my fault.  Maybe my game just isn't that interesting or that fun.  Maybe by making it open-table, with no real penalty for no-showing and no social pressure applied by other players for people to show up, I've brought this on myself.  Or the opposite, that maybe I've taken too strong a hand in recruiting players and scheduling sessions, and really maximal respect for player agency would require them to self-organize in the West Marches style, at which point players would be applying social pressure to each other to honor their commitments.  If I do want to maintain my current role in recruiting and scheduling, I could probably also "solve" the problem of session-failure by either expanding my player-base (eg going from 8 total players on the roster to 12) or by lowering the bar and running sessions for two players, which also gets more viable as they level and get access to henchmen (as happened last week; only two showed but they were game to give it a go anyhow, and one of them had hit second level the previous session, so I allowed him to hire a 1st-level MU and they made good progress with three bodies in-world).

Notes from Three Sessions of OSE

I've gotten a weekly-ish game off the ground at the office after work lately.  We'll see if it survives the 4th of July disruption. I've done a lot of theorizing since the last time I actually ran a game and figured it might be fun to keep a kind of scorecard around how well those theories are working in practice.

Wandering monsters as lurking threat - this has worked great.  I don't think they've met a wandering monster head-on yet; instead they hear doors opening and closing and motion in the distance and they haul ass to get away from it or hunker down and hope it wanders somewhere else.  There is one group of enemies who they have heard and seen tracks of but never met face-to-face, which have developed a fearsome reputation which may or may not be accurate.  The monster you don't see is much scarier than the monster you do see.

15-room dungeons - mixed success.  I've built two levels in this style with a third in progress.  Their exploration of the dungeon has been very slow; in three sessions I think they've seen seven rooms, so about half of the first level.  Consequently I have been somewhat lazy with prepping further material.  I do think 15 rooms is a good size to play with a theme without it overstaying its welcome, at least on the DM side; I can come up with 15 interesting ideas riffing on a theme, but 30 would be pushing it.  Whether it overstays its welcome on the player side remains to be seen I think.  I do think the 160ft by 160ft level/tile size that I proposed in that post is too small; the first level, which I built to that size, feels a bit cramped to me.  The second level is a bit larger, maybe 200x200 and feels more right, at least to my sense of how a dungeon level should feel.

How 1st level play is supposed to work - Seems accurate so far.  I started them off with 3d6x100 XP each, which made 2nd level clerics and thieves possible from the start but in practice nobody rolled one.  The cleric and thief just leveled at the end of this last session.  They have been playing very cautiously; in three sessions they have evaded three? random encounters, successfully retreated from two combats (one via closing a door in front of enemies without fingers, the other by blocking a passage with oil - they are learning), and only fought and won two combats (one via sleep and the other via strength of arms, at the cost of the life of one fighter).  The great bulk of the treasure they have recovered so far was from a special/puzzle room where one possible outcome was treasure and another was giant spiders.  So I think our limited impression agrees with the idea that first level is "won" on unguarded treasure.  It's been interesting to see how at first level, characters can be broadly divided into "MUs (with sleep)" and "everyone else, who are bags of HP, AC, and mundane equipment".

Resting in the dungeon - too soon to tell. I've provided securable areas to do this in, and have informed the players that resting in the dungeon will require rations and clean water if they want to go overnight and recover spells, but they haven't done it yet.  I'm still not totally sure how wandering monster rolls will work with this, but I do have one or two things on the table for the second level that may pose a threat to bunkering characters.

No henchmen - This is working well I think; players are assuming their own risks and playing more cautiously than the hireling meatgrinder games we had with ACKS.  I'm almost loathe to introduce henchmen now, but I think by the time PCs start hitting 3rd level, having 2nd level replacements on deck rather than having to go back to 1st will make a lot of sense.

Infravision and mapping - Too soon to tell.  I haven't allowed demihuman classes yet, since they weren't in the OSE quickstart rules.  We almost had an elf the other day; the fighter and the MU both couldn't make that day but we had a new player who rolled Int and Str both around 14.

Switching Initiative Systems

So I'm looking again at running OSE at the office after work.

On reflection I really do enjoy the chaos of ACKS' individual initiative system, and would be quite sad I think to adopt OSE's individual initiative, which is rolled once per combat.

I've been thinking some about multi-layered combat systems; combat systems as modules at different levels of abstraction which can be swapped between much like Traveller's mini-games.  Traveller has its main combat system, Snapshot at a higher level of detail, Striker at a greater scale...  We see this also in Chainmail, which is really at least three combat systems all in one book; the mass combat and man-to-man scale combat systems both use basically the same core mechanics, but then the jousting minigame is its own thing.

It has me thinking about under which circumstances one might choose to use individual initiative vs initiative by side (and, more generally, whether it makes sense to have another higher-detail combat system like AD&D's, Snapshot's, or Boot Hill's for single combat).

An even more amusing possibility than choosing between individual and by-side initiative for a given combat would be to move between them as a combat evolves.  Using initiative by side while the party is acting cohesively makes sense.  Once people start breaking morale and breaking ranks and the plan goes to hell, maybe it makes sense to switch to individual initiative.  As the combat becomes more chaotic, switch to an initiative system which evokes and adds to that feeling of chaos.  Maybe an encounter where the party lost surprise starts in individual initiative.  And maybe successfully rallying the party gets you back into by-side initiative.

Solving First Level - Resting in the Dungeon?

The natural product of two recent lines of thinking - figuring out how first level is "meant" to be played, and monsters that counter resting in the dungeon.

Notably, in Moldvay there really aren't any monsters on the first dungeon level's wandering monster table who hard-counter resting in a room where you've secured the door.  This means a first level party with only one sleep a day actually has a lot of leeway to recover that critical spell.  Traverse the dungeon to the stairs to the second level, hole up and recover the sleep if you had to use it to get there, go down to the second level and look for unguarded treasure, pop back up when you've spent the sleep and recover it safely near the top of the stairs...

Your ability to take out a lair is still quite limited, since your max sleeps per day is still only one, but your ability to survive wandering monsters is much improved.  And then rations and water become a limiting factor on the duration of your dungeoneering expeditions - though camping in pitch blackness in a sealed room in a haunted underworld certainly sounds...  demoralizing.  Not that torch smoke in an enclosed space sounds much better.  You start out with torches and fresh rations and then upgrade into lanterns and iron rations as you get the money for them...

There are probably amusing tradeoffs in waste management too - a 12-person party produces a fair bit of excrement per day.  If you leave it lying around it might attract vermin and molds.  If you pack it out with you then it costs encumbrance and might attract monsters with strong senses of smell.  Dare you use the dreaded dungeon bathroom, based on real FLGS bathrooms?

Surviving Fifth Level: The Heist Hypothesis

In another instance of recording bright things people have said in the ACKS discord, Arbrethil had some thoughts in response to Surviving First Level: The Heist Hypothesis and since he still hasn't started a blog (hint hint), I guess I'll record it here.

My players often break your assumptions (hiring lots of henchmen) [ed:to be fair, this is Moldvay's position and I'm just trying to solve it], but I've also definitely seen heist type play happen.  And I think when it does, it's often in the wilderness, where treasure hauls are bigger and random encounters are checked less often.  Certainly the odds of winning a wilderness fight are worse, but evasion lets you get away most of the time if it's not a fight you want.  And if you can find a good lair - stupid ogres that you can distract and bamboozle, or a lone dragon that can't both pursue pesky adventurers and guard its lair - that can be enough to level the thief on its own.  The other piece of the puzzle that stands out to me is the utility of a massed spear charge. Even if only three of your five characters can make a spear charge, if you win initiative you've got solid odds of cleaving through a dungeon-sized band of beastmen.  Once you can hire a few additional characters, a high AC PC-led dungeon phalanx trumps most any random-encounter sized band of beastmen on dungeon levels 1-2 even without magic support.
So I think your analysis of them going down to 2nd level pretty much checks out, and wilderness heists are like that but in every way moreso.

Emphasis mine.  I think the points about spear charges and high-AC phalanxes are good ones in ACKS specifically, though spear-charges can also work against the players if they encounter organized and appropriately-armed opponents.  The really interesting point (and one which cuts across both ACKS and OSE/B/X) is that that low-wilderness-level play is often very heist-like.  My Bjornaborg game was very treasure-map-centric once it got into the wilderness levels; get to the treasure, kill whatever's guarding it (if anything), and get back to town with it, avoiding encounters whenever possible.  And intuitively, it seems like there should be some parallels between low-dungeoneering-level and low-wilderness-level play, in that you don't have all the tools for either yet, under a theory of spell/class design where new abilities tend to be appropriate for the phase of the game where they become available.  To gather intel, you don't have Invisibility at 1st, and you don't have Wizard Eye at 5th.  To slow pursuit, you don't have Web at 1st, and you don't have Wall of Fire at 5th.  So it sort of makes sense that a style of play appropriate to the early-dungeon phase might re-appear in the early-wilderness phase, because you're in a similar lacking-tools situation.

This might also have something to do with my players' frustration with low-wilderness play.  I have never run 1st level before.  They've never played 1st-level OSR games before.  So we've never had to "solve" 1st level.  Hence, having to learn 1st level's lessons at 5th level instead.  But by 5th, you're more invested and the stakes are much higher; if you're learning heist play at 1st and you mess up, oh well, new characters are easy.

I wonder if this is the whole root of the problems I've been having with running wilderness game for literally a decade at this point.  It would be pretty funny if for all my theorizing about wilderness as dungeons and hiding maps and resource models and microsandboxes, the real answer was "make sure your players have had to survive 1st level."  A simple, practical, culture-of-play thing with unexpected consequences being the answer would be so perfectly on-brand for the OSR that I wouldn't even be mad.

But since, we're here and theorizing - there are some important differences in the resource model between 1st in the dungeon and 5th in the wilderness.  Fireball is pretty analogous to sleep - except that often in the wilderness you can regain fireball most days.  So that's a tremendous difference in your ability to deal with repeated encounters in a single expedition.  On the other hand, there's still some similarity in tackling lairs; one fireball isn't going to win a wilderness humanoid lair fight any more than a single sleep is going to win a dungeon lair fight.  And this is what drives the back to the heist dynamic - it's really about inability to take lairs head-on, since that's where the treasure (hence XP) is.  On the other hand, the ability to replenish fireballs daily opens up Fabian options for gradual lair reduction during a single expedition not available in the dungeon at 1st level.

The mercenaries-and-hirelings situation also bears examination through this lens.  Mercenary troops in the low wilderness levels probably serve about the same function are hirelings at 1st level; you're not going to be able to acquire and finance enough of them of high quality to rely on them alone to take out humanoid lairs, but they can even your odds against humanoid encounters, and at least help hold the line, pin the humanoids, and help prevent you from being overrun.  I'm really curious whether Moldvay would push against the use of mercenaries in the low wilderness levels in the same way he pushes against hirelings right out of the gate, so that players learn to do without them rather than using them as a crutch.  It seems worth considering to me; we certainly had fights in low-wilderness that my players "cheesed" with massed troops and then I got butthurt and wrote a long post about it.  I guess maybe I should go read Expert and see if Moldvay expresses an opinion on this.

In any case - thanks again Arb for pointing this parallel out!

1e's Time in the Dungeon

The introduction to the AD&D 1e DMG mentioned that it's reasonable to omit random encounter wandering monster rolls if you understand the purpose of random encounters and it doesn't apply.  It doesn't tell you what that function is, though.  So I went looking for it and sadly didn't find it.

Instead, I found the table of how long various actions in dungeon exploration take.  It's split across a page boundary (pages 96 and 97) so I have reproduced it in text here rather than as a screenshot:

• DOOR - search for traps: 1 round
• DOOR - listening for noise: 1 round
• ROOM - mapping, and casually examining a 20'x20' area: 1 turn
• ROOM - thoroughly searching after initial examination: 1 turn
• SECRET DOOR - checking for by simple tapping of floor or wall, by 10'x10' area: 1 round
• SECRET DOOR - thorough examination for means to open, by 10'x10' area: 1 turn

I was very surprised to see the time-costs of some of these actions listed in rounds (which in 1e are minutes, 10 per turn, not 6-10 seconds) rather than turns.  I went back and checked and B/X (well, OSE) simply doesn't have times listed for any of the interactions with doors, and doesn't distinguish between types of searching - it just says that searching a 10'x10' area takes a turn.  I think I had been running listening at doors, searching them for traps, and searching for secret doors as taking a turn each.  I'm not sure how I feel about breaking the atomicity of the exploration turn and allowing it to be subdivided further into rounds.  I also find it very amusing that on page 97 shortly after this table of suggested times to perform these actions, Gygax complains about players who search everything and listen at every door.

Assume that your players are continually wasting time (thus making the so-called adventure drag out into a boring session of dice rolling and delay) if they are checking endlessly for traps and listening at every door. If this persists despite the obvious displeasure you express, the requirement that helmets be doffed and mail coifs removed to listen at a door, and then be carefully replaced, the warnings about ear seekers, and frequent checking for wandering monsters (q.v.), then you will have to take more direct part in things. Mocking their over-cautious behavior as near cowardice, rolling huge handfuls of dice and then telling them the results are negative, and statements to the effect that: “You detect nothing, and nothing has detected YOU so far —“, might suffice. If the problem should continue, then rooms full with silent monsters will turn the tide, but that is the stuff of later adventures.

But...  my brother in dice, you set the time cost to perform these actions so low that players would be stupid not to search for traps and listen at every door.

Maybe it's stupid to require a turn to listen at a door - but it works well and it's an actual choice!  And if it takes a turn to listen at a door, search it for traps, or try to pick a lock, then maybe you really don't need the no-retry clauses.

This does force me to consider that maybe I should give the party "free" attempts at finding secret doors in passing, assuming that they're tapping as they go because it's quick, and then make a successful turn-length search primarily for finding the mechanism of action / trigger.

There is also an interesting bit in here:

A gnome, for instance, must remain relatively quiet and concentrate for a turn to detect facts about an underground setting. Likewise, a dwarf must work at it. An elf doesn’t detect secret doors 162/3% of the time by merely passing them unless he or she is actually concentrating on the act. A character with a sword must have it out and be thinking about its power in order for the weapon to communicate anything to him or her. To sum it all up, DON’T GIVE PLAYERS A FREE LUNCH! Tell them what they “see”, allow them to draw their own conclusions and initiate whatever activity they desire.

Emphasis mine.  I think grouping in the use of magic sword detection abilities with these inherent racial abilities is telling about the expected frequency and ease-of-use of sentient swords.  There are no swords with detection abilities on table III.G. Swords on page 124 - swords with detection abilities only arise from the Sword Primary Abilities table for "unusual" (sentient) swords on page 167.  In conclusion, further evidence that the sentient sword rules are significant and have a purpose.

Surviving First Level: The Heist Hypothesis

I'm still trying to figure out what a reliable or intended strategy for surviving 1st level is supposed to look like.  In part so that I can design a dungeon that supports it, or at worst not design a dungeon that accidentally hard-counters it.

Assume for the sake of argument a Big Four party of fighter, MU, cleric, thief.  Total XP required to get them all to 2nd is 7200.  Assuming stats roughly typical for 3d6, with +5% prime reqs all around and not much else, bringing us down to about 6850 XP.  Assume also that we're following Moldvay's advice to not let new players lean on hirelings as they learn the game.

A single dungeon encounter of 2d4 (average 5) goblins is a pretty fair match outside of the party's one sleep per day.  3d4 (average 7.5) skeletons are liable to get messy if the cleric fails the turning roll.  And those are both bite-sized random encounters with pocket change at best for treasure.  Lairs are much bigger, and dividing and conquering them requires shared languages, decent luck with reaction rolls, and ideally multiple humanoid lairs to pit against each other - but we can't count on getting that from the stocking tables.

Fighting monsters for their treasure seems like a pretty bad idea at 1st level.  You don't have any healing resources and your one sleep might be best used to survive a fight that you didn't want to be in, rather than offensively to win a fight that probably won't have treasure.  Oil and war-dogs are great and all, but...  is that really the intended solution?

Is it possible that you're meant to spend first level skulking about, looking for trapped or unguarded treasure and avoiding almost all encounters?

Well...  I'm not sure the math works out.  In ACKS, the expected value of an unguarded treasure on the first level of a dungeon is 870 GP, so you'd need about 8 unguarded treasures to get everyone to 2nd, for that cure light and extra sleep per day (the thief, incidentally, will level after only about four such treasures).  Buuut between trap rooms and empty rooms, about 9% of rooms (1 in 11) have treasure but no monsters.  So on average you'd need to explore 88 rooms on the first level of the dungeon to level by unguarded+trapped treasure, and that's assuming no casualties to traps, random encounters, stumbling into lairs, etc (granted, also assuming no monster XP - but if you're avoiding lairs and start heading for the exit when you've burnt your one sleep on a random encounter, you're talking maybe 25-50 monster XP per expedition). 88 rooms is huge for the first level of a dungeon - when I'm building standalone non-mega dungeons, I often have about that many rooms across three levels.  But it's sort of plausible that one could build a ruin that large, all of dungeon level 1.  88 rooms is also going to take quite a lot of play time to get through - my players in Rat-hell were exploring maybe 10 rooms per session, so we're looking at 9 sessions without any resets from casualties.  That seems like a long time to spend at 1st level.

The situation is much worse in OSE.  It's still 9% of rooms with treasure but no monsters, but the expected value of that treasure on the first level of the dungeon is a paltry 160gp - about a fifth of what it is in ACKS.  So you'd need to explore over 400 first-level dungeon rooms to level everyone off of unguarded treasure in OSE.

Is the answer to go deeper?  If you're already adopting a Robinsonian posture towards monsters, and the unguarded loot is better at lower levels, maybe this isn't crazy.  And traps don't necessarily scale up when you go down; ACKS' list of traps is the same for 1st-3rd dungeon levels, and OSE doesn't specify.  2nd level unguarded treasure in OSE has an expected value of 492 gp (about triple), while in ACKS it's 1491 gp (almost double).  And many of the random encounters on the 2nd level dungeon table are still susceptible to sleep - 5 2HD lizardmen vs 9 HD affected on average by sleep, for example.  So a 2nd level random encounter isn't necessarily any more of a game-ender than a 1st-level one is...

With ACKS' treasure numbers, I could see a dungeon with 30 rooms in the first level and 30 rooms in the second level yielding enough unguarded/trapped treasure to get a party to 2nd.  'course, in those 60 rooms you've got about 20 monster rooms, of which probably 2 are lairs...

There is also the question of surviving the traps.  In 60 rooms, we're talking about 20 traps (of which 6-7 have treasure).  Most of the "treasure traps" are threats only to whoever interacts with the treasure, but some of the "room traps" are threats to the whole party at once.  In 20 trapped rooms, we'll probably pull the "room fills with poison gas" one at least once, and it could easily happen twice.  Saves at 1st are pretty bad (we should expect ~1.5 survivors based on saves).  Finding and Removing Traps at 1st is also pretty terrible.  The Trapfinding proficiency in ACKS is actually a huge boost at this point in the game, almost doubling the thief's chances of successfully finding or removing a trap (granted, it's 15% chance of success to 25%, which is still not great).  ACKS also removes the poison gas room trap, though the falling bricks from the ceiling for 2d6 is arguably worse at this point since Petrification and Paralysis saves are slightly worse than Poison and Death, and its average damage is still going to be enough for the vast majority of 1st-level characters.

On the other hand, when you frame Finding Traps as "15% chance to detect non-monster TPKs before they fire", thieves start to sound pretty good.  It's not a high chance, but it's better than nothing.

Half-Levels

So I've been thinking about running a game at the office in the spring.  And I'm contemplating starting it at 1st level.

I have never run a game starting at 1st level, in any edition, that I can recall.  And I'm worried about the wild fragility of 1st level characters, and that 2000 XP is a lot if you're taking regular casualties.  You could easily end up having to earn something like 5k XP each before getting any particular character to 2nd level, losing it all over and over again.  I don't know that I want to spend that much time running super-low-level dungeons, never mind trying to retain players during massive attrition of PCs.

Reserve XP is, of course, an option, particularly with the interpretation where it isn't spent when you bring in a new character.

But another thought that occurred to me was that we could instead make 1st level more granular.  The big difference between 1st and 2nd is that your HP doubles, in expectation.  And you'll always gain at least 1 HP.  What if, at XP halfway between 1st and 2nd, you gained 1HP?  And then when you hit 2nd, you lose that 1 bonus HP but instead gain a rolled hit die?

1HP doesn't sound like much.  Even for a fighter it's 20-odd percent on average.  And for a 1st-level wizard, it's a 40% increase in HP, on average.

So it's kinda like 1.5th level.  And then Arbrethil on discord pointed out that going from 2nd to 3rd is also a really big power bump, between 2nd level spells and a further 50% increase in HP (even without ACKS' fighter damage bonus increase).  So maybe we need a 2.5th level too...

(If we did Iron Heroes-style hit dice, where d6 got turned into d4+1 and d8 into d4+2, we could be even more granular - could cut 1st level for fighters into four segments, one with d4+2 HP, then d4+3, d4+4, d4+5, and then finally 2d4+4 at 2nd level)

It also occurs to me that, in light of the big increases in survivability already taking place from 1st to 3rd level, maybe it's actually OK to delay improvements in saves and to-hit until 4th like B/X does.  I don't know that continuing to do big jumps in to-hit and saves every couple of levels makes sense after that point, but at the very beginning it almost seems defensible.

But I'll probably chicken out and start them at 2500 or 3000 XP like I usually do.

Magic Swords, Proficiencies, and the 1e DMG

This is actually like three short posts about magic swords rolled in to one.

• I've been thinking about trying to organize some in-person D&D, and OSE is probably an easier sell than ACKS in this part of the world.  So in the absence of proficiencies, my previous post about magic items in place of proficiencies has been back on my mind.
  
• If I also wanted to keep cleaving in an otherwise mostly-stock B/X game to give fighters some of their OD&D multi-attack mojo back and help them scale into the high levels, that might also be a good thing to attach to magic swords.  At first wag, something like three cleaves per round per point of bonus seems likely to keep pace with 1 cleave per HD at least up to name level.  This has a number of other interesting properties:
• Fighters and thieves almost certainly get cleaves sooner than clerics as a consequence of the treasure tables being magic-sword-heavy.
• Non-champion low-HD humanoids are unlikely to cleave.  Might want to grant bigger monsters some inherent cleaves, much like how they have magic weapons for the purpose of damaging other invulnerable monsters.
• This also creates an interesting qualitative distinction between "mooks who could easily be humans in rubber masks" and "supernatural monsters who can kill everyone in a mead hall in a couple rounds".
  
• Mid-level rival NPC parties with magic weapons are cleave threats.
• On the downside, antithetical to "Steel isn't strong, boy.  Flesh is stronger...  What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?"
  
• Second, there was a discussion in discord recently about sentient swords.  Thinking about magic swords through the lens of "class proficiencies for fighters and thieves that clerics and MUs don't get", sentient swords are actually a restricted form of spellcasting for non-caster classes.  I think they're really important, that using them should generally not be a hassle, and neglecting to roll for them is a contributing factor to caster superiority.  The whole ego / conflict of wills mechanic is to keep high-level powers out of the hands of low-level fighters, and to keep fighters from amassing too many spell-like abilities by having multiple sentient swords. 
• I've been skimming the 1e AD&D DMG recently, because it also keeps coming up in various discussions.  I went and looked in the treasure tables because I was curious about how it handled sentient swords, and several things struck me:
• 25% of swords are "unusual" (sentient).  This is in the same ballpark as B/X's 30%, but much higher than ACKS or later editions.
• "All abilities function only when the sword is held, drawn, and the possessor is concentrating on the desired result."  This isn't "ask the sword nicely to use its powers".
  
• AD&D computes willpower score differently - sum of a character's Int and Wis scores plus their level (with the level bonus reduced by damage taken).  This means that cap for character willpower/personality score is basically unbounded!
  
• A "typical" random sentient sword has about 13 Int, empathic communication, two detection abilities and an Ego of 3 or so, and is reasonably useable even by a low-level fighter of average mental stats.
• "N.B. Most players will be unwilling to play swords with personalities as the personalities dictate. It is incumbent upon the DM to ensure that the role of the sword is played to the hilt"
• har har
  
• Reading the 1e DMG's magic swords, I was also struck how a number of them had effects that activate on a natural 20.
• This wraps back around to limiting the scope of proficiency-like exceptional cases by making them magic items.  Rather than taking Weapon Focus in order to get the ability to crit, it's a property of some swords.
  
• Making crits a property of magic weapons means monsters aren't critting PCs, which is the usual trouble with critical hit rules.  Except for that tiny subset of monsters with eg Swallow Whole abilities that trigger on a 20 - it's probably OK to have it as an exception for, again, big scary supernatural monsters.
  
• It also means you can have a variety of critical hit special effects, like vorpal's save-or-die vs the sword of life stealing's level drain on crit, without needing a complex critical hits table or system.  These effects can also be quite fantastical, since they're magical in origin.
• This might also be a reasonable way to handle combat-maneuver like effects.  Magic hammers that sunder weapons on a natural 20, axes that break shields, rapier of disarming, magic shield that knocks foes down when they nat 1 against you, ...
• Magic swords might also be a reasonable way to sneak backstab multiplier scaling into B/X, where even a max-level thief only does x2 damage.  idk whether I'd want to make just particular backstabbing swords that boost it, or something as simple as "a thief backstabbing with a sword +1 multiplies the die roll by x3 instead of x2, +2 -> x4, +3 -> x5".
  

An Alternate Basic Elf

Last post about redoing the Basic dwarf got me thinking about elves too.  I've been discontent with Basic's elf for a while.  Fighting as a fighter and casting as an MU is cool, and I don't oppose having a class like that, but it has never really felt particularly elven to me.  Casting and fighting is necessarily but insufficient, maybe.

So an alternate proposal:

• Drop their max armor to chainmail, but leave their weapon selection alone (in Chainmail, elves got to use all manner of magic swords, and I think it fits).  Why do elves make fancy mithril chainmail?  Because they don't wear plate.
  
• Drop melee damage bonus, as a mirror of dropping dwarf's ranged damage bonus.  This puts the elf and the dwarf on similar footing in melee, since the dwarf gets damage bonus but less access to magic weapons, while the elf has better access to magic weapons but no damage bonus, and then the human fighter is slightly better than either.
  
• Add Hiding in Shadows and Moving Silently as a thief of their level (may I remind you that in Chainmail, elves were invisible?), maybe only usable in leather or lighter armor.  Maybe throw in Hear Noises too, but keep Backstab as just a thief thing.
  
• Drop Darkvision; having Moving Silently plus Darkvision is asking for trouble.  Darkvision makes more sense as just a dwarf thing anyway.
  
• Swap casting as an MU to something more like divine casting, with an appropriately elven spell list.  Healing, illusions, enchantment, magical music, plant manipulation, etc.  A bit of cleric, a bit of druid, a bit of illusionist, cover all of the elf flavors (high, wood, and dark).
  

So then we end up with something more like a bard or a ranger than a wizard in plate.  The really thorny bits here are assembling a spell list (I'm not totally happy with this one from ancient days but it might be a starting point) and figuring out the XP value.  Some combination of Wis, Str, Dex, and Cha prime reqs and minimum stats.

An Alternate Basic Dwarf

I've been playing Deep Rock Galactic lately and it has me thinking, predictably, about dwarves.  One complaint I have heard about dwarves in Basic is that they're basically just Fighters but strictly better.  They get darkvision and better saves and the extra XP to level is not that big.  I have a proposal for if I were to roll my own Basic.

Dwarves are good fighters but they don't generally do it full-time like human fighters do; they just fight in defense of the vault, or in reclamation efforts of fallen fortresses.  They have a civilian job, or at least training in it.  We could restrict their weapon selection to something like picks, axes, hammers, maces, daggers, and crossbows.  This is more meaningful than it might initially appear; at low levels it means that they can't use spears from the back row, and at high levels it means their to-hit and damage are likely to be slightly worse than a human fighter's, since there are many fewer misc magic weapons than magic swords.  They lose out on intelligent weapon special powers too (but it's sort of weird for a suspicious, cantankerous dwarf to trust the sorcery of intelligent weapons, so I'm OK with this).

(I certainly have never played a dwarf fighter with an evil sentient sword who got into a tremendous amount of trouble.  No sir.)

If playing with ACKS' fighter damage bonus, one could also remove ranged damage bonus.  Between limited ranged weapon selection, loss of ranged damage bonus, and lack of access to lances, dwarves may be strong in the dungeon (which makes sense) but will suffer in the wilderness levels.

But I'm not out to just take things away from the dwarf; I would also like to make it dwarfier.  In exchange for these losses in fighting, we might consider giving the dwarf the ability to open locks and remove traps as a thief of their level.  They have the mechanical aptitude, and they have all the avarice of thieves.  If elf is our fighter/MU class, maybe dwarf should be our fighter/thief class.  It might also be fine to just give them a flat ability that doesn't improve with level, like their Hear Noises bonus.

A fun final touch might be to give dwarves a bonus to forcing stuck doors, breaking locked chests open, and other "smashing inanimate objects" activities.  They have the weapons for it, the mining background, and the knowledge of how things are constructed and hence of their weak points.

Magic Items = Stealable Proficiencies?

I was thinking about how it's a huge pain in the ass to generate leaders for brigand camps, because they might reasonably be expected to have ability scores, class and level, proficiencies (feats), and magic items.  And that's just for the fighters.

And I was thinking, what if we halved the work, and either picked standardized proficiencies for all 9th level brigands and then rolled the magic items, or picked standard magic items and then rolled the proficiencies?

For a second there they seemed sort of equivalent, with the major difference being that you can steal magic items (or pry them from cold dead hands).

And that brought to mind something that had confused me about OSE: the Basic magic item generation rules, which generate an abundance of high-powered magic items like crystal balls, but from a very limited list.  That didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, giving these powerful items to low-level characters.  But if there are no proficiencies, I could sort of see it.  If each PC ends up with one significant magic item by 3rd level or so, then that's sort of like the class proficiency they'd be getting around 4th level.  And then the restrictions on which classes can use which items also start to look a bit like class proficiency lists - wizard-only item, wizard-only proficiency, tomato, tomahto.

The balance between proficiencies/feats and itemization is interesting to consider.  In ACKS, magic items dominate proficiencies in terms of numerical bonuses and eventually availability.  A sword +3 is like... six proficiencies?  Sort of, since you only get the bonus with it and not other weapons?  Arguably ACKS' proficiencies provide smaller but broader bonuses, like +1 to hit with a variety of weapons.

In 3e, magic item bonuses were also mostly bigger numerically than feats', but I'm not reaching any good conclusions on breadth (a +2 sword is a bigger but narrower bonus than Weapon Focus+Weapon Specialization, a circlet of intellect +2 is a comparable but broader bonus than Spell Focus, Cloak of Protection +1 is basically Luck of Heroes).

I could definitely see shifting the balance between these two back further towards magic items (though 5e may have, for all I know - making feats optional might have that effect if they're really seldom used).  Under the conditions that the magic item market is very small and you seldom get them during character generation, a magic item is a reward for something that happened in play.  It's like the "backstory is what happened to you before 6th level" line - instead of writing something on your sheet during levelup, go out in the world and kill some brigands and take their stuff.  Want a horn of blasting?  Go talk to a sage and find out about a local hero who had one, and went to a particular dungeon and never returned.

(It's a bit funny to contrast this with my position from 2011 on getting rid of "standard" magic items and replacing them with inherent bonuses.  I suppose I would rather be inconsistent with my past self than stuck and not evolving.  There is a common thread here though - any standard component of a "build" formulated and achieved off-table, be it feat or magic item, really is boring)

Magic items are also sort of heritable proficiencies, if your next character was your next of kin.  So it's a form of progress which can be preserved across death, much like henchmen.  Having preservable progress lessens that sting.

Looking at magic items like proficiencies might also help explain sentient swords, with their suites of weird powers.  They're a way to give a whole package of special abilities to people other than clerics and MUs (most importantly, fighters and thieves).  It looks sort of like having a higher rate of proficiency acquisition for sword-using classes if you tilt your head just right, squint real hard, and have two drinks (above and beyond the much higher availability of magic swords than other magic weapons, of course).  It's also interesting that in both ACKS and OSE 70% of sentient swords are Lawful - they're clearly meant more for PC hands than the hands of their opponents.  It's funny, because the prevailing culture and expectation around sentient swords tends to be in the Stormbringer vein, where they're usually evil.  I think I gave my players a Lawful sentient sword in the Bjornaborg campaign, but as a player all of the sentient weapons I've found were evil (and I'm 2 for 2 as "Designated Bearer of the Evil Sword" in our parties, which always ends well).  It's also not a 3.x-ism, by rules as written; checking the 3.5 SRD, it looks like 50% of sentient weapons were good, 15% evil, and 35% neutral on the good-evil axis (20% chaotic, 25% lawful, 55% neutral on law-chaos).

This whole thing reminded me of a post from long ago where I noted that henchmen in OSR games sort of fill the role of multi-classing in newer games - they slow down your progression in your main class, but get you a broader range of abilities.  It's sort of funny how that also moved from "a thing that you have to find in the world" to "a thing that you choose during character generation and level-up", in parallel to the shift from magic items to feats.

I can't escape the impression that it has been players, aided and abetted by publishers, pushing to sacrifice No Homework in exchange for control over their customization.

Infravision and Mapping

I lied, the nomad post is still in the works (it's like 80% done but I need to recheck my math and I had to reinstall my OS because I realized my kernel hadn't been updated since October 2018 and it's been an exciting two years for kernel exploits; I haven't copied my sourcebooks back over yet because my cat spilled water on the wallwart for my external hard drive enclosure.  It's been a fun week) but I had a quick thought while taking the trash out.

ACKS goes hard on removing infravision from PC races, because it leads to the party getting split into the infra-haves and the infra-have-nots.  I observed something like this once when I ran OSRIC - the assassins with infravision went out ahead and had all the adventure while the rest of the party hung back and occasionally came running to the rescue.  It wasn't great.  So I tend to agree with this move on ACKS' part.

I've been thinking about trying to run some OSE, which gives dwarves and elves 60' infravision.  I've been considering removing it from them but then I'd have to compensate them or rejigger their XP progression and it would get annoying.

Another issue I've run into while contemplating this is that I like having players maintain their own map of the dungeon (particularly - having one or more players each maintain their own maps representing items in the world that are being maintained by a character with two hands free), and that's annoying to do with VTTs.

Holding both of these in my head, they got to seeming sort of related.  Maybe mapping is one of the secret balance-points for infravision.  Maybe the rule "It is not possible to read in the dark with infravision, because fine detail cannot be perceived", the detail that it's heat vision instead of just light amplification, is important, because it means that if you have scouts with infravision out ahead of the party, they can't be mapping.  If you have a full-infravision party, they still need a light source to map.  So then you either need to have amazing spatial memory, or infravision becomes a fallback for when the light has been extinguished.

It's still not perfect; you could still get into a situation where you have the room-clearing commando group of dwarves and elves and then the baggage train of mapping humans and hobbits.  But it's a thought I hadn't had or heard explicitly before.  Maybe part of the cause when I ran into this problem in OSRIC is that I didn't know what I was doing and didn't make the party make their own map (also didn't throw random encounters at the back half of the party).

OSE Notes

Not quite a review.

Picked up Old School Essentials via Humble Bundle recently.  I don't think I've actually read a B/X retroclone besides ACKS (and maybe skimming Labyrinth Lord).  My understanding is that OSE is quite faithful, so the things I was surprised about were probably things that ACKS changed.  People on the ACKS discord have told me several times that I would complain less if I had actually run B/X, so... maybe I will.

First pleasant surprise was in ability scores.  I like that reaction roll bonus from Charisma caps at +2, rather than +3 in ACKS.  Likewise Dexterity's bonus to initiative.  This comes at the price of ability score bonuses being a little less standard and easy to remember.

They have the rule about trading down scores to raise your prime reqs, but they don't have one about rolling a bunch of sets.  I think it's probably important to only have one or the other of those rules; given one set of 3d6 in order, trading down seems much more reasonable, and parties where half of PCs have an 18 prime req shouldn't be too common.

Alignment languages.  -_-  Also this table introduced with "the following languages are common" includes doppelganger and harpy.  Man.

The art in this book is weird, by which I mean highly varied.  Some of it's cutesy-cartoony, some of it's sober black and white line drawings, the Giant Leech and Green Slime pieces are very...  visceral.  Feels less thematically consistent than eg ACKS or DCC.

Classes

Magic research available from 1st level to all casters.  I guess this was true in ACKS too, for spell research, and I should come back to this when I get to that part of the book.

Turning - rolled on 2d6 instead of 1d20, so I initially misinterpreted this table.  Still, interesting that you can't turn undead of 3HD more than you, while you can in ACKS (on 19+).  No miraculous deliverance here, I guess.  Whoa, and 2* HD gets its own column, for ghouls I guess, so that means a 1st level cleric can't even turn 3HD undead.  Also I have to say that I like making the target value a function of HD rather than creature type explicit.  On the other hand, having the effectiveness of turning on giant skeletons be limited by HD rolled on the 2d6 instead of the turning roll was kind of fun sometimes.  Text is not clear on how often one can turn; I rather liked ACKS' "faith shaken" rule.  Also no option to control the undead.

The THAC0 and save progression is different; ACKS smoothed it, so "+2 every n levels" meant "+1 every n/2 levels".  Here the only difference between a 1st and 3rd level fighter is HP; the gap between "veteran" and "hero" at 4th level is much bigger (and likewise "hero" from 4th-6th vs "super-hero" at 7th-9th).

Where are the level titles ):

Infravision...  hmm.  I think I agree with ACKS on this one, that infravision for PCs is mostly trouble because it circumvents torch logistics right out the gate.  It also makes the dwarf vs fighter contest even better for the dwarf, what with the saves and the fairly low XP-to-level bump.  I guess fighter's domain game is better, in that they can build a stronghold at any time while the dwarf has to wait until 9th, and the domainy rules say that a peasant family yields 10gp/year in taxes (which is...  terrible, compared to ACKS), and the dwarf can only hire dwarven mercenaries (not so bad since there are no market limits, but no heavy cav for you).  Still, rough for the fighter at low levels.

Elf prime reqs are weird, Str 16+ and Int 13+ to get +10%.

Fighters get jack shit but plate, shields, and d8 HD.  Not even +morale for hirelings, unless it's hidden later in the book.

Halflings have a min Con 9+, interesting.  Bonus to AC against big enemies, but otherwise basically Explorers with plate, a level cap of 8, and an "any time they wish" domain game.  "Explorers with plate" is a scary thought, but I guess less scary for lack of fighter damage bonus.

Wow, MUs can only use daggers, no quarterstaves or darts.  Harsh.  And no tower until 11th level.  Oh yeah, and vancian magic, no repertoire.

Thief - can't trade down Strength during chargen, weird.  Traps are divided into room traps and treasure traps; the former are big and protect areas and anyone can find them, the latter are small and mechanical and only thieves can deal with them.  An interesting split; in my own games, it is accurate to say that I use treasure traps almost exclusively, and this is probably niche protection for thieves.  Bleh, percentile thief skills.  And two-letter abbreviations for skills would take some getting used to.

Oh man backstab damage multiplier doesn't scale up, it's just x2 forever.  That makes high-level thieves substantially less scary; their skills still get really good, but you're never going to force a morale check for half HP in the opening round against high HD opponents (assuming morale check for half HP is still a thing), nor are you ever going to insta-kill ogres.

This probably also explains death attack, that assassin ability that I've only ever seen someone use once.  Death attack always seemed dumb when scaling backstab/sneak attack damage was available, but if backstab is only ever x2, then death attack is actually worthwhile.

So now I'm wondering if thieves scale sort of like MUs - at low levels they don't get to do their thing very often (because low skill rolls and few spell slots) but when they do it's often a big encounter win (insta-kill backstab against low-HD opponents forcing morale, or sleep), and at high levels they get to do their thing a lot more often (more spell slots, higher skill rolls) but it's decisive much less often (because high-HD opponents are much more likely to save and have enough HP to not die to backstab).  It would be an interesting experiment to make death attack the default behavior of backstab, such that the parallel with high-HD enemy saves becomes more explicit.

I also don't love that for d6 rolls, you want a 1-to-x, so rolling low is good.  It didn't register when I was reading Dwarf and Elf because their Hear Noises and Find Secret Wotsits are "2-in-6" which could be rolled either way, whereas the Thief table has 1-2, 1-3, 1-4... for Hear Noises.

On the other hand, there's probably an argument from poorly-balanced dice; if half of rolls are "roll low" and half of rolls are "roll high", then even if your dice are badly balanced it should work out in expectation (until you start measuring how unbalanced your dice are and picking different dice for the different types of roll - but if you were already going to measure the unbalance, then it doesn't matter.  I could see it being sensible during the early days of the hobby, when I expect the quality of dice might've been lower and they were harder to come by so you probably didn't have four d20s to choose from).

I'm surprised that in Levelling Up, you don't reroll all your HD every level and take the better of your previous or just-rolled max HP.  I thought I had heard that OSE had that rule.  Must've been some other clone.

Here are my level titles.  But they're not linked to particular levels.  Big bummer.

Oh boy rules for levels >14.  Not something I see using much.

Inheritance - I'm not sure I understand the meaning of "a player may only leave a character inheritance once", and I certainly don't understand the intent?

Equipment

Encumbrance is measured in coins.  This is kinda clever, because it makes it sort of obvious that the stuff you should be worrying about getting encumbered with is treasure.  On the downside, it also seems like kind of a pain in the ass.  Encumbrance is optional, apparently (!?), and there's no encumbrance listed for misc adventuring gear like 10' poles - just armor, weapons, and treasure.

Only three armors, leather, chain, plate.  Nice.  Chain seems kind of crap, since it weighs almost as much as plate but gets 2 points less of AC.

No reach weapons, and 2H weapons act last instead of just -1 to init.  Brutal.  Since variable weapon damage (ie, "2H swords do d10", as opposed to "all weapons do d6") is an optional rule, 2H seems totally worthless under default rules.  OTOH, with the variable weapon damage rule, d10 is much stronger in the absence of fighter damage bonus.  Bonus to hit with ranged weapons at close range.  Maybe part of the reason MUs don't get darts is that darts just don't exist.  Huh, crossbows act last too...  but who uses crossbows?  I don't think there was a class that got crossbows but not bows...  I guess dwarves and halflings maybe, who can't use longbows, are faced with the choice between 240' range and acting last, or 150' range and not acting last.

I like vehicles and mounts as much as the next guy, and it makes sense to have something about them in with equipment because they're things that you buy, but I dunno if rules for vehicle damage, repair, boarding, and ramming needed to come before Combat is explained.  I do like the distinction between ocean-going and unseaworthy vessels.

I love the art for the Camel, and the dwarves? sneaking up on a sea serpent in a ship graveyard is pretty good too.

Magic

Full vancian, and no bonus slots or anything for high Int or Wis.  Can only have spells in spellbook up to number you can cast per day, and you can't read spellbooks captured from enemies "without the use of magic" (presumably Read Magic).  Oof.  I dunno, I like how ACKS encourages wizards to kill other wizards and take their books.  Having to use spell slots on Read Magic is rough.  I feel like this might be a good use for the Scholastic Wizardry proficiency in ACKS; clarify that reading other peoples' books and scrolls requires a roll, and then make Schol. Wiz. give a bonus.

Chance of failure for magic research (both item creation and spell research) is "minimum probability of 15%".  So on the one hand, because that's a Schelling point in the rules, probably about 15% most of the time, which is way more lenient than ACKS (at least for the level ranges we mostly find ourselves in).  But it does give judge discretion to go "that sounds really hard, you can do it on 16+ or 12+ with a special ingredient..."  Oh, and no library or laboratory requirements.  So definitely seems easier than ACKS' research most of the time (but you don't get XP for it).

I'm not going to read all these spells.  What is interesting is that there are fewer cleric spells (6-8 per spell level, instead of 10).  Missing spells:

1st: Command Word, Sanctuary
2nd: Augury, Delay Poison, Spiritual Weapon (but they gain Know Alignment)
3rd: Cure Blindness, Feign Death, Glyph of Warding, Speak with Dead
4th: Dispel Magic, Divination, Smite Undead, Tongues
5th: Atonement, Flame Strike, Strength of Mind, True Seeing

Wow.  Flame Strike, Spiritual Weapon, and Dispel Magic are all pretty solid losses, and we had bacon saved by Augury, Sanctuary, and Delay Poison a time or two.  But it's also not super-surprising; if I had to pick spells that felt the least like Cleric spells, Flame Strike and Spiritual Weapon would definitely be on the list.

On the MU front:

1st: Read Languages and Read Magic are two separate spells, Magic Mouth missing
6th: Lower Water and Part Water are separate spells, Wall of Iron missing

So it looks like MU keeps most of their good stuff.

Know Alignment vs Detect Evil - Detect Evil operates solely on present intent, whereas Know Alignment can tell you what their alignment is (but isn't a wide-area scan).

Bless operates on a "20' square area", weird.  But I guess if you're thinking in 10' squares and don't want to deal with circular areas of effect, it would be convenient.

I actually kind of like the layout of the spell effects.  It's not as lawyerly as ACKS, doesn't go as far into details and edge cases, but it gets the point across.

Cure Serious Wounds nerfed, 2d6+2 with no scaling by caster level.

Raise Dead is obviously much less punitive than RL&L, with no permanent side effects, but the time limit is pretty tight.

Sleep is still as good.

You can cast Invisibility on objects and it's permanent.  This could not possibly be exploited.

Phantasmal Force seems stronger, since psychosomatic effects last for 1d4 turns instead of ACKS' 1d3 rounds.  Kind of unreasonable, but compare to Web I guess.

Fly duration is randomized, glorious.  Does the caster roll it or do I get to roll it in secret?

Fireball is 20' radius, glorious.  Hmm, no expand to volume clause though, which is odd because Lightning Bolt still bounces.

No aging clause on Haste, whoa.

Wall of Fire is duration: concentration, no good for covering retreats.

Teleport has a 10' range, now you don't have to poke people to teleport them to their deaths.

Death Spell has a lower HD cap (7 vs 8).  Disintegration can disintegrate a whole ship!

Done with spells.

Adventuring

Party organization: Class and level mix recommendations, party caller, mapper, system for divvying up magic loot between party members when it's contested.  Nice.

Ten coins per pound - big honkin' coins.

The Encumbrance page is probably the most "hrmmm" page of the book for me.  Not tracking weight of misc adventuring gear (or having a fixed weight of 80 coins) seems like it would remove a substantial strategic element from the game (balancing military oil vs torches, choosing what equipment to dump if you find a lot of treasure).  But I do appreciate the simplicity of it.  I wonder if it's worth having a catch-all "misc adventuring gear" weight that covers sacks and backpacks, and then having weight for a small subset of adventuring gear where tradeoffs are easy to come by (consumables, maybe?  Oil, torches, spikes?).

Or you do 100-coin kits.

But, when these rules are in use, they're much less lenient for the main thing that they care about, extracting treasure.  In ACKS, with 1000 coins per stone, you can carry out a couple thousand GP on top of your gear, per character, while maintaining 60' speed.  Here, you're hard-capped at 1600 coins per character, so if you're not finding platinum, it's going to take a couple expeditions to go from (say) 4th to 5th level (8000 XP for a fighter -> 5 fully-laden expeditions of just gold pieces).  So leveling is probably slower?  Compared to ACKS, your exploration movement is pretty close until your find treasure (faster for thieves and wizards, similar for heavily-armored characters), and then your speed drops much more aggressively.  Interesting.  Maybe this preserves tradeoffs adequately.  It's always surprising to me how a one-page Optional Rules module like encumbrance or variable weapon damage can have big consequences for the way the game plays.  Complex systems.

Mm, roll under again in ability checks, and auto-fail / success on 20 and 1.  Not a big fan.

Death at 0HP.  Unforgiving.  No clause on natural healing about safe / sanitary conditions.

Drowning example on light armor with a light load seems awfully merciful.

I like the Sequence of Play Per Turn sidebar / box.  I do have a soft spot for programs and flowcharts though.

So there's this note about how undead don't make noise and aren't detectable by listening.  If infravision operates by heat, should undead be invisible to / high chance to surprise infravision too?  That would be a fun piece of dungeon ecology, where monsters, who rely on infravision, are extra-afraid of undead because they're considered sneaky.

"One chance" clauses on room searching and door-listening - per expedition, presumably?  Not for the character's lifetime?

Traps don't make attack rolls, always hit - nasty.  Wonder if they allow saves.

I like that it specifies that random dungeon encounters are at 2d6x10 feet and headed towards the party.  Position and vector.  This puts some immanence on the blips.

OK, I get it now - these subsections are organized alphabetically, which is why Climbing comes first and Wandering Monsters come last, even though the latter happens a lot more often / is more important than the former.  That's an interesting choice.  I don't like that it leads to forward references (like Flying wilderness movement pointing to Overland movement, which you wouldn't've read yet since it comes after), but this probably doesn't matter in play for this particular case, because you're likely to do a lot of normal overland movement before flying becomes a possibility, so it should be familiar by then.

Hunting and foraging are much less merciful than ACKS, because "the party has a 1-in-6 chance of finding enough food for 1d6 human-sized beings" rather than each individual forager having a chance.  So wilderness adventuring is much less sustainable and must rely more heavily on rations...  but encumbrance from rations isn't tracked, so it's just a question of expenses.  Maybe that's fine though?  But with the amount of money people accumulate by wilderness level, and the lower emphasis on cash-sinks like domains and libraries and reserve XP, I don't really see 15gp/person/week for iron rations being that big a deal (incidentally, I do like that rations are priced per week).

The "surrounded" rule on wilderness surprise is interesting (If a group of three or more monsters gets surprise, they may surround the party).

Wilderness visibility is cursory but does hit the important bit, of "3 miles to the horizon in open terrain".  Encounter distance doesn't vary by weather or terrain.

It's sort of interesting that waterborne adventure gets equal pagecount / emphasis with dungeon and wilderness adventuring.

It's weird that surprise doesn't change encounter distance for dungeon encounters, but does for wilderness and waterborne.

Wilderness evasion table looks pretty similar, might need a spreadsheet to suss out subtle differences.  Not feeling it a the moment.

Combat

Monster morale is optional too!  Nooo monster morale is very important for keeping fights decisive!

Each side rolls init each round.  I like every round, I dunno about each side acting together.  Maybe it's not so bad if you have a caller.  Individual init available as an optional rule.  I guess it does make sense if you put the first initiative roll before the reaction roll, when the side as a whole decides to fight, run, or talk.  I suppose one could do per-side initiative for that initial choice, and then individual initiative per combat round.  I do like that per-side initiative makes dexterity somewhat weaker, as it is a strong stat in ACKS.  I could see the argument that per-side initiative doesn't change that much because monsters were already acting as a side before, it's just that the PCs all win together or lose together.  Implications for interrupting spellcasters?  Half the time all the party's spellcasters will be totally safe from interruption, when the party as a whole wins.  A bit "double or nothing".

The Combat Sequence Per Round suggests that everyone on a side moves, then missile attacks happen, then spells are resolved, then melee attacks happen.  This is very different from the turn structure for 3.x or ACKS, but I think it makes a lot of sense for initiative by side, imposing some order on the otherwise potential chaos of simultaneous action by n players.

I don't think I really grok the implications of fighting withdrawal and retreat yet in a by-side initiative system.  You have to pre-declare them, and then if your side wins init you get to move away (and then maybe attack someone else if you withdrew - implied by retreat noting that you can't attack), but then enemy can pursue on their move, OR the enemy wins init, they get to attack you, and then you get to move (and attack if withdrew and anyone within reach).  Maybe the important things are 1) enemies know that you declared to withdraw and can target you selectively if they win init, and 2) if you declare retreat you can't attack and are easy to hit (but if you declare withdraw, you can still attack in the round after moving "up to" half your movement, and 0 is less than half your movement, so you could declare, not move, and then attack whatever you're engaged with?  But that seems counter to the intent; there's not much reason to not declare withdraw if you can just remain engaged and attack.  I guess if you declare withdraw and the enemy also declares withdraw/retreat, then whoever loses init can't pursue, since it does specify "moves backwards"?).

I'm probably trying to lawyer something that was not intended to be lawyered here.  The reasonable response to "I declare withdraw, things are looking OK, I want to move 0 and attack" is probably "No, you committed to withdraw, you have to withdraw."

"Movement and attacking may be combined in the same round" is pretty ambiguous; presumably it means that you can move and then attack, not that you can move, attack, move.

Attacks from behind only ignore shield AC; I like ACKS' "ignore shield and +2 to hit".  Blindness is unable to attack instead of -4 which is probably reasonable really.  I like that there are rules for dropping stuff from flying monsters, this is something my players tried in ACKS and I didn't have rules for it.

A notable omission: charging.  Looking around a bit, it seems like you can charge for double damage with a lance on horseback, and some monsters like gorgons, elephants, and rhinos have a special charge attack, but for most people and monsters, charging isn't a thing.  This means that the ability to set a weapon against charges is not very important either.  Spears are still Not Bad though; they're one of the least expensive and lightest-weight d6 weapons, and they have the best range of any thrown weapon except javelins, which deal less damage.

Retainers, Hirelings, and Domains

Retainers / henchmen don't check morale ):  But what of Wiglaf's speech?  On the other hand, they do desert after adventures more often than in ACKS probably.

Retainers are paid a flat wage per day or per adventure (be still my low-continuity heart), but no such wage is listed, but a half-share of treasure rather than a sixth like in ACKS.  L0s can level into any class (...  presumably not a demihuman class, though that would be pretty funny).  Can't pile up Fanatical loyalty bonuses since loyalty rolls are just pass/fail.  Check loyalty after each adventure, and on a failure they "won't work for the PC again."  But other PCs can hire them.  That seems a little harsh, I could see working for a previous employer again but not for at least one adventure and you have to re-hire them.

Mercenary wages include supply costs.  Armorers are straight profit, since they cost 100gp/mo and can produce a suit of armor per month (worth 500gp in the case of plate), and that's before you add assistants and blacksmiths; with four assistants at 15gp/mo each and two smiths at 25gp/mo each, for a total cost of 210gp/mo, can produce four suits of plate per month.  It seems kind of bullshit that if you interrupt an animal's training it can't learn any more tricks.  I dislike that sages are fallible; I like Courtney's position from Downtime and Demesnes, that sages should be expensive but an ultimate source of truth from DM to players.  I like having spies be used for spying on groups or people, rather than for rolling in sick hijink cash, but they're also 4x the cost that they are in ACKS.

The mercenaries vs purple worm art is pretty good.  And in a system without cleaves, the worm probably isn't really that threatening to massed troops.  I do like that the construction procedure is a bulleted list.  Half a page of domain rules, only concrete numbers are how big an area mercenaries can patrol and tax revenue per settler.  Structure prices are broadly similar to ACKS', except for civilian buildings which cost about double.

Monsters

Statblocks are very dense.  I like that saves and THAC0 are in the statblocks.  Putting Number Encountered at the end is odd, especially between treasure and XP (which are both "end of combat / end of adventure" concerns and belong together).  I think there's a reasonable case for putting combat stats first because you refer to them multiple times in a single combat, but having to dig Number Encountered out of the monster listing after rolling a random encounter seems annoying.  Wilderness Lairs are just 5x as big as a dungeon lair; less complex lair / organization structures than ACKS (no gang champions for demihumans, just lair leaders...  and honestly I might be OK with this simplification.  Might miss witch-doctors though).  No "percent in lair"?  I like that it's explicit that 20% of sentient monsters speak Common.  There are some treasure types for like "goblin pocket change" individual-monster treasure.  Seems kind of annoying that these individual (crappy) treasure types are the highest letters, but that's backwards compatibility for you.

I like that behaviors are pulled out as bullets in monster descriptions; very Trilemma.

I'm not sure how I feel about having average HP in the stats.  I like rolling HP, but recognize that it can be a hassle.

I like the art for Bears.  Big cats are inquisitive.  Cave locusts can spit.  Dervishes are likely to ask Lawful characters to join their holy war.  I don't love the layout on Djinni - the Magic Powers block is really big.

No Dog entry ):  RIP war dogs, not only not on the equipment list, not even in the monsters section.

Dragons are primarily by color, with age as a secondary thing that you can tweak.  Breath weapon does dragon's current HP in damage, so injured ACKS dragons have more dangerous breath weapons than comparably-injured OSE dragons, but full-health ACKS dragons have less dangerous breath weapons than full health OSE dragons.  Dragons may pretend to be asleep - ouch.

Dragon Turtles are still king.  With good art, too.

The elemental statblocks are kind of a mess.  It's not as bad as it could be though.

Maybe Giant Ferrets are the new war dogs.  Wait I've had this thought before.

"After paralyzing a target, ghouls will attack others" rather than just whaling on the paralyzed guy.

Giants are treasure type E+5000gp.  I like that +n thing.  It's weird that they're all E; I bet ACKS did a pass over hoard types and changed things up there (giants in ACKS are mostly N, gnolls are G instead of D, examples probably abound).

More types of golems.  Lizardmen are canonically man-eaters.  I like that the Demon Boar is under the lycanthrope entry.

Rust monsters immune to nonmagical damage.  So much for "send the mage in with a wooden quarterstaff".  Not that they can use staves here anyway.

Tarentella, with dancing poison, is a hilarious monster.

"Water termite"?  With an ink cloud ability?  Wat.

It seems like monsters are worth less XP, too - Wight is 50 in OSE vs 80 in ACKS, Wolf is 25 vs 35, Wyvern is 850 vs 1140, Zombie is 20 vs 29.

Encounter tables

1d20 for dungeon encounters, rather than 1d12, with more chances for potential friendlies like Traders, Halflings, and Nobles.  And tables going down to dungeon level 8.  No notes about rolling on an adjacent level table and adjusting the number encountered.  Wilderness encounter tables look broadly similar to ACKS' but organized slightly differently.

NPC parties are generated at Basic or Expert level, rather than picking a party level and generating around that.  NPC parties are more likely to be Chaotic in OSE than ACKS.

NPC strongholds and reaction to travelers is interesting and fits nicely with "NPC domains are the next step up from wilderness monster lairs in danger, make a reaction roll".

DMing Stuff

Kinda skimming here.  Expected rate of advancement is 3-4 sessions for at least one PC to reach 2nd level (presumably a cleric or thief).  Disagree with their stance on excess wealth, that DM should find a way to dispose of it (although I suppose if you must, it is best to offer them a choice between money and trouble, as suggested).  Sort of disagree with keeping stats secret, in the vein of rolling everything in front of the screen.

I like describing rooms by square counts rather than in feet.  Notes on running monsters and NPCs are decent - basically just "don't play dumb, but don't preemptively counter stuff that these monsters haven't seen the PCs do before".

Mist trap that doesn't do anything is trolling hard.  Most traps do give saves.

Wilderness can be mapped on either hexes or graph paper.  More and more these days I'm leaning towards a grid; it's just so much easier to program around.  Recommended distance between base town and dungeons is one day's travel; certainly for a starter dungeon (or I guess for a deep mega that is going to be a campaign tentpole).

Base town - "possibly more advanced services such as curing diseases or even raising the dead".  Sounds very "not available by default".  Which I guess is why there are no spellcasting services on the equipment or hireling tables.

Treasure usually accounts "for 3/4 or more of the total XP earned."  No XP for magical treasure, no option to sell it.

Awarded XP is always divided evenly - bummer.  And it sounds like retainers actually cost a full share of XP, but only get half of that, which is a pretty strong deterrent to relying heavily on them.

Treasure

Wow, treasure types are totally disorganized rather than roughly ordered by value.

Retainers may agree to be test subjects for magic item identification, but only if they can keep the item.  That's great.  No real rules for identification.

I do like that gem values are condensed a bit, though I think the expected value is lower.

Separate Basic column on magic item tables that generates lower-level items; more potions, fewer scrolls, and more misc weapons.

50% of magic armor is chainmail.  Magic armor weighs 50% less rather than 1 stone (100 coins) less per bonus.

Bags of Holding, Gauntlets of Ogre Power, Helms of Telepathy, Crystal Balls, and Rings of Invisibility are all Basic items.  Daaang.  Maybe the relatively-high availability of solid items in the low levels helps differentiate characters who lack proficiencies and who have a much coarser-grained THAC0/saves curve.

Potion of Longevity can occur in random treasures.  But there aren't rules for aging so it doesn't matter much.  I guess it's basically poison to an adventurer in their early 20s.

30% of magic swords are sentient (versus single-digit percentages in ACKS), plus a 5% independent chance of special purpose+sentient.  Lawful and Chaotic swords of purpose are basically save-or-die on hit against target of purpose; Neutral swords of purpose give you a merger +1 to saves against enemies that it hates.  Amusing.

None of the misc magic weapons are cursed.

Conclusions

And we're through!  There's some pretty good art in the Index, bit sad that it ended up back here.  Author's notes on things he clarified or corrected from B/X reinforce the feeling that it's a darn faithful clone.

Characters seem weaker across the board here than in ACKS.  I do think the MU gets a pretty good deal of it (vancian is annoying, but you can still cast as many sleeps per day), as do the demihumans with infravision.  Complaints that fighter and thief are weak seem totally justified.  I wonder if what I want is somewhere about halfway between B/X  and ACKS; small damage bonuses for fighters and bring back cleaves, backstab multipliers that do rise but slowly, drop infravision, more logistics and gear tracking than B/X but less logistics than ACKS, simple domains.  A Half-ACKS'd Hack, if you will.