Issue #88 (August 1984) presents a lengthy article by Arn Ashleigh Parker that uses physics -- complete with equations! – to argue that neither the as-published AD&D rules nor the purportedly Gygaxian revisions to same from issue #70 adequately reflects "the real world." Here's a scan of some of the equations Mr Parker uses in his article:
Amusingly, issue #88 also includes a very short rebuttal to the above article by Steve Winter. Entitled "Kinetic Energy is the Key," Mr Winter argues that, if one considers the kinetic energy resulting from a fall, you'll find that its increase is linear, thus making the original system a surprisingly close fit to the "reality." He makes this argument in about half a page, using only a single table (albeit one that draws on the earlier equations). While I agree with Winter that the original system is just fine for my purposes, it's nevertheless interesting that the author also makes his case on the basis of physics, as if the important point is that AD&D's rules map to facts about our world. It's a point of view I briefly held as a teen and then soon abandoned, for all the obvious reasons. Back in 1984, though, this was the height of fashion and many a Dragon article proceeded from the premise that the real world has a lot to teach us about how rules for a fantasy roleplaying game ought to be constructed ...
We definitely had some “Bobs” whose obsession was physics and “realism” around at the time. Combine that with the intellectual heft many gamers brought to the table and…well…we were graced with articles like these. Silly, but at the time, yes, it was all the rage.
ReplyDeleteHmm... don't have the full article so...
ReplyDeleteBut what really deals the damage is the stop at the end, so what we care about is how "long" that stop takes (a mattress lengthens the time to full stop). Hence the case of the air-stewards that fell off a plane and survived (CON18?)
NERDS RULE :-)
That could have spawned a whole series of articles on how landing surfaces affect falling damage!
DeleteI had a character survive a 500 foot drop, because I knew DragonLance forced my DM to make it so. Tasselhoff physics.
ReplyDeleteWhich makes me realize that maybe Gygax was on to something when he tried to prevent players from having access to the main rules in the DM's Guide. Players who had to trust the referee for life or death rolls (or the appearance of rolls) would find the calculations irrelevant to play.
I'm reminded of the fact that TSR Spelljammer (man, I hate having to specify that) seriously discussed the viability of high HP characters being able to survive a fall from orbit. IIRC anyone over ~70HP had a decent chance of soaking up the 20d6 falling damage, but you needed something to protect you from the reentry heat as well.
ReplyDeleteSo many of these articles have a decent idea but want you to add 4 pages of rules to your game. I can say zero of these ever made it to my table, even if I enjoyed the article.
ReplyDeleteLike for falling, I think d6 per 10' is reasonable for 10'-20'. After that, make it a saving throw to survive. Done.
I'm increasingly begining to think that the biggest changes in D&D are less about rules change and more about culture change. I wasn't alive back then, but do we have a sense if there was a significant chunk of the gaming population clamoring for extremely dense, specific rules like this, or is this more likely Dragon running up against a deadline and grabbing reader submitted content from a "Bob?"
ReplyDeleteIn short, yes, there were many of us that wanted to added verisimilitude. We enjoyed both, but were a Rolemaster over AD&D group because we liked both the broader range of character skill mechanics and the greater pretend-realism offered by the crunchier system.
DeleteI’d say it’s gone back and forth over the years. Early on, we had more of a connection to the war gaming roots of D&D, and that tended to be more simulationist. You are correct that the biggest change has been cultural, which has reflected that of society at large. Early gaming tended to be more masculine. It tends to be much more feminine these days. As far as rules of today, I’d struggle to find one that wasn’t used or considered as a house rule by gamers in the 70s and 80s.
DeleteI suspect it was closer to the latter. AD&D especially was played not with house rules, but with a catalog of official rules that were ignored. Basically, we trusted the referee to adjudicate the role-playing and to keep things going mechanically with dice or the illusion of dice. We read Dragon, but we played D&D. (In fact, my group(s) hardly discriminated between B/X and AD&D, things were so loose.)
DeleteI think the dilemma was that the business content of TSR that kept them afloat was "moar rules and modules" when the mechanic of spells, combat, class skills and ten-foot-poling were really all we needed - if that - once we had the concept and essence of the game laid out before us.
It was fun to buy boxes of clattering junk, miniatures, arcane rule systems and $6 modules, and profitable to TSR...but we literally needed none of it outside of a dog-eared copy of Holmes and some dice. Heck, we didn't even buy graph paper half the time: wide-ruled spiral notebooks were fine.
And when you fell off a cliff, we didn't need to roll or calculate for the DM to adjudicate a spectacular, flamboyant, detailed, hilarious and very permanent death.
Although, I would say, Rolemaster had the fun built in for such a scenario. One game we played involved a magical prosthetic, nuclear powered hand on a Drow in our party, given to him by some visiting space marines following a particularly unfortunate diplomatic encounter that ended with an incinerating amputation. Well, one day, on the top of a mountain, the hand critically fumbled and detonated in a rather large thermonuclear explosion.
We didn't need a nuclear physicist to calculate for us the odds of having just unexpectedly experienced an epic self-TPK of some long-running high level characters. However, for effect, the referee had us suffer - and read aloud - every single "66" crit from the Crush (Arm's Law) and every elemental 66 and 100 crit (Spell Law), in order A thru E.
It was spectacular. But we didn't need to do any math.
Ok, so just read James' original article, and obviously Mentzer is not just a random "Bob" (I've never met him, so who knows if he's on the spectrum or not). Was Mentzer working at TSR at the time? Its kind of shocking to me how many of D&D's early architects spent their free time just trashing each other. Follow up culture question: how many players at the time were following what was essentially workplace drama thinly disguised as arguments about mechanics? Because 40 years later, that is a way more interesting way to read this than as just a straight rules mod.
DeleteSlavish devotion to real world physics is not in keeping with a game meant to model adventure stories. Total disregard for real world physics will sometimes shatter suspension of disbelief. A happy medium is necessary. The original falling damage rules are fine; the DM may need to describe a character's lucky or providential fall (a la the Prague Defenestration or the people who've fallen from airplanes).
ReplyDeleteAny rule: does the additional complexity add enough to the play of the GAME so as to make it worth it?
ReplyDeleteMy favorite object-lesson-as-game is Jason Morningstar's Drowning & Falling (still available on DrivethruRPG).
ReplyDeleteThis looks amazing. Morningstar is never not entertaining
DeleteReminder to older OSR players: over one in four seniors fall each year, oftentimes with serious consequences. If that doesn’t inspire you to create a random table, are you really an OSR player?
ReplyDeleteI’m sorry….but you lost me at “physics”. What did I miss?
ReplyDeleteAh D&D! "So you know that game we play with the Spellcasting Wizards, Flying Firebreathing Dragons, and meetable Deities? We really need to make sure the physics of the falling damage is scientifically accurate." LOL
ReplyDeleteI’m just a little amused that the number one Traveller fan doesn’t like algebraic equations! I always had a soft spot whenever those things popped up, hoping if i didn’t get it yet, i would someday.
ReplyDelete