Practical Tactical - Which Edition of D&D is Best?

I find myself attracted to some of the older versions of D&D based on the speed of play. If you are tactical combat person, I would suggest either D&D (Red Box) or the Blue rules by Holmes. I lean towards the Red Box because that was the game of my time.

I prefer a role playing style game and as a consequence gravitate to AD&D, Rules Cyclopedia or 3.5. 3.5 does what I want, but I like the quickness and expansiveness of Cyclopedia more. What I often do is mash Cyclopedia with AD&D. It's quick, sloppy and as expansive as I need, without the clunks that come with 3.5. I allow for all of skills and spells in Cyclopedia, but with all the classes and races from AD&D. In some very rare cases, I have allowed the races and classes from Cyclopedia in AD&D with zero modification. That gets weird and really isn't any better than what AD&D offers from its class choices.

Which is best? Well, the one that you play. No other opinion is possible on that. Outside of capturing the flavor of your campaign, the rule sets are flexible with enough abuse.

One of the things that changed between the editions was the numbers of players at the table. When I was playing AD&D I had as many as 12 players in the action. I never split the party unless someone said: "I need a break." If that happened, it was assumed that those players on break would be left behind and not a part of the action, no matter what. This was problematical in the respect that sometimes the second half of the party failed to progress after the first part of the party. Things would get weird.

I never developed a solution for this. What would actually happen is that half of the party would go eat or turn into DJs for a couple of hours, which meant they were observers, not players for the duration. For the most part, they were pretty good at self-moderating, meaning they knew what happened to the rest of the party, but would behave in character, as if they didn't know. They were a great bunch of people.

In any event, as you look at the newer rule sets, the number of players has dropped off from 6-9 or 6-12, down to a mere 4. I hate that because it removes some rather practical tactics from the players hands. When you are operating 12 characters, who are supported by perhaps some torchbearers, porters and a few followers and hangeroners, things slow way down.

I don't mean the game play, but the natural measure of time was slower. Things were done in Turns of 10 minutes each. Being so long, it made sense to have the characters in a marching order which changed and evolved during that 10 minutes.

The lead character would be a thief or ranger. The first wave of characters were usually fighters. The second wave were the squishy magic using types mixed with missile type characters. The last rank was often the weaker fighters. In my campaigns, the players usually did 3 blocks of 4 characters, so they could fit down a 10 foot wide hall. Many times, characters would swap out of positions to meet certain goals. It was very effective.

If you suppose just 4 characters, those parameters vanish.

Being a role playing yet tactical minded person, I would encourage my players to take the time to succeed.

One thing I could never account for but very much wanted to was "evolution" of fighting formations. Say for example, the thief ducking back between the two fighters behind him, so they could deal with a threat. My solution was to simply make sure they had the time to do such things or create scenarios where surprise prevented such things but was not immediately fatal.

When playing encounters for any edition of the game, the DM has to make sure that nearly any scenario cannot be thrown into a "party kill" condition on a single turn, or worse, a single die roll. It takes a bit of creativity to create these story points while maintaining the believe-ability of the scenario.

I recall a particular vicious combat between some hobgoblins and the party. The thief got caught trying to disable an already disabled pit trap. The hobgoblins had triggered the trap and decided to spike the lid in the closed position. They snapped off the tops of the spikes and covered the area with garbage. The thief botched all of his rolls, except a save vs Dexterity to avoid plunging to his death. He was dangling by his fingertips as the battle raged over him.

Wicked fun.

In the very next session, the magic user had exhausted most of his offensive spells early on, but the thief came up with a deliciously fiendish use for his remaining spell, Passwall.  The wizard unleashed the spell at the floor in the middle of a group of hobgoblins. Two fell in and one was left dangling by his fingertips. Turn about is fun, eh?

Beautiful.

That created some interesting DM rulings and decisions by the party. I decided that the wizard could simply end the spell immediately killing those inside the hole or he could ease it closed which would allow the hobgoblins to crawl out as the hole. The party ended up with 3 hobgoblins acting as retainers because their chieftain had a policy of not negotiating for prisoners. I had to call in reinforcements to make the last battle a reasonable challenge, but the players loved every nail biting moment.

Ah... the twists, turns and complexity from what should be a simple set of rules (but probably isn't).

If you are interested in packing the party with NPC types or give your players secondary skills, try out my home brew rules called Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners. If you desire some interesting locations for your campaign, I have two rule set agnostic map sets called Kobold's Folly and the Compass Rose Inn. As final offering, I have an old, old characters sheet for use with AD&D and Unearthed Arcana.

Timely podcast

I love  Aaron Mahnke's Lore podcast. This week, it's about Kobolds. One part history, one part myth, Lore is a wonderful journey to the the darker things. Lore also has wonderful background music by Chad Lawson.

Funny, I just released a little map about kobolds.

Truth or Tall Tale Tuesday (TOT3) - 1 in 3

Molly’s husband asked if they had a thermometer because he wasn’t feeling well.

Her initial answer was “I am feeding two babies because I am their mother, not yours. I am not the keeper of thermometers so you need to go look in the bathroom.”

Several minutes later, her husband comes back downstairs and asks, “Do we really need three thermometers?”

She turned to see him with a glass thermometer in his mouth and replies “You have one in three chance of wanting me to answer.”

Molly is now officially the keeper of thermometers in her house.

***This is a switch up for Truth or Tall Tale Tuesday. This story is both true and not true. My sister in law relayed this tale to me at a party. She told it as true but was drunk. When I asked her about it later, she had forgotten all about it and was pretty sure it was a humorous story she made up.

Writing is Art

This section is for rough works, slightly better than drafts, but still incomplete experiments. As experimental works, they should not be taken as true, or factual, even though each item does contain a bit of fact. In many cases, these experiments have been abandoned because I couldn't figure out where they were going or in some cases, what the rules or boundaries were.

Occasionally, poetry will appear. I'm sorry, I'm not good at it but sometimes it pops into my head.

Blindness

Again, this is a semi-fictional story about my time in high school. All of the named people are real, some of the facts are real, but the timeline and criticality of events has been altered to make an effective story. 

     In 10th grade, I had a homeroom teacher named Mr. Camhi. He was the 12th grade English teacher. How he drew that assignment was beyond me. He was exceptional at homeroom. In 9th grade, I had come up with a scheme to skip school that wasn’t merely good, it was unstoppable. I would come into Mr. Camhi’s class, turn in my note for the prior day’s absence and then turn in my book report for the week and write it on the chart in the corner. Each report was an extra ten points in my final grade, and there was no limit to the number of reports I could turn in.

     It didn’t take Mr. Camhi long to figure out that I skipped school as much as I read books. Back in 1987, it was not common for children to type homework, let alone use a computer. But, I did. Not only did he notice that, he also noticed that I skipped a lot of school. He did not notice that I made $10 a book report from classmates. He was merely a high school teacher, but I was a student of high schooling. I had everything figured out. Or so I thought.

     One day he commented that every book I read was science fiction and I should try something else. I couldn’t say that I was reading other things because someone would have picked up the fact that I was selling papers to fund my extracurricular activities. The funny thing was, I wasn’t really reading anything other than science fiction until Mr. Camhi called me out. Sure, I was writing book reports on the Great Gatsby, The Milagro Beanfield War, and the classic, Killing Mister Griffin for other students for weeks before Mr. Camhi caught up with me. I wish I could say I stopped, but the money was too good.

     But he did affect a change in my behavior. He gave me a book called The New Centurions. It blew me away. It is the story of a rookie cop and his African-American girlfriend, in LA during the 1960s. It could not be further from what I had been exposed to previously. I wanted to know more about this sort of American life, one so distant from me, that I had to put off my shenanigans to use the library at school.

     I lived in that room for months. I noticed every time I was in the library, Mr. Camhi was in the library, too. There was a noticeable lack of 12th grade students with him. He also carried around a bowl of salad. Usually, his appearance was preceded by a disappearance of the librarian. This man was skipping his lunch to keep tabs on a student that had stopped skipping school, but was skipping classes to read everything about racial issues from the 1960s, in the library. I didn’t mind if he didn’t. He was a very welcome person to direct my searches in the card catalog.

     As the 1960s came to an end, so did 10th grade. And with the coming of the new school year, I escaped Mr. Camhi’s watch. However, a second teacher became my keeper.

     Mrs. Cross, my Spanish teacher took on Mr. Camhi’s role. She would have me transcribe her notes and worksheets into Braille. I would spend a few minutes each day with Perkins the Brailler, before ditching out to Perkins the Restaurant. I hung out there so much that they offered me a job as dishwasher. The downside of this was, I couldn’t go there to skip school. They said as much, which was emphasized by the Amherst Police, who drove me back to school.

     I was rather diligent as her assistant. I made sure that she had not only her notes transcribed, but also had a steady stream of trustworthy students to escort her to and from classes, since I was occupied elsewhere.

     One day, she cornered me in her office. She complimented me on my transcription skills. I never made a mistake, in English or Spanish when Brailling.  She thought that was unusual since I couldn’t read phonetically. She was fascinated by how I was able to “read” items she asked me to transcribe for her class, while also struggling with simple handouts she had not let me read and memorize ahead of time. She commanded me to come to her office and transcribe those handouts. Another several months of truancy was wasted. Eventually, I wised up and transcribed the whole workbook so I could visit my new favorite daytime haunt, “Your Host”, on Main Street.

     Mrs. Cross whupped that out of me in rather short order. Since I had an unstoppable method of skipping school, I was rather frank with her as to where I spent my time. She asked me to steal her a menu, as she went there often herself. When I brazenly delivered it to her, as requested, she clucked her tongue. She asked, “Where is this from?”

     “Your Host,” I said.

     “You’re smart, but not that smart.” She held up the menu. “It hasn’t been ‘Your Host’* for quite some time. Can you tell me what is really called?”

     I was silent because I really couldn’t ¡SEE! where it what it said.

     “You have dyslexia and you don’t even know what you can’t see. Funny that you see for me and I have to see for you.”

     I wish I could say that I stopped skipping school, but I continued to be blind for a very long time.

     However, even blind, I knew that I had very special people looking out for me, seemingly, for no good reason that I could discern.

     In 2010, I returned to school and the blindness lifted. Thirty years after graduation, but not too late.

* Many of the local “Your Host” restaurants had opted to stay in business under the name “our Host”.