War!

As you can probably tell from both of my earlier posts today, there are soon going to be some large, pitched battles in my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. This isn't something I'd imagined some months ago, when we began entering the final stages of the campaign, but here we are. This turn of events makes sense, of course, given the way events are unfolding. However, I can't deny that this prospect fills me with a bit of apprehension. As I've said on many occasions over the years, I've never been a wargamer of any kind, despite my fascination with and some knowledge of military matters. I say this with some regret, both because this lacuna in my game education has no doubt skewed my perspective on certain things and because it leaves me somewhat at loss in knowing how to handle occasions of mass combat within a RPG.

That's why I'm turning to you, my readers, for thoughts and suggestions on how you have handled wars and large-scale battles in your roleplaying game campaigns. What rules or approaches did you use and how well did they work? Did they mesh well with the RPG you were playing? I'm honestly curious about every aspect of this question, since I have such limited experience with it in my own campaigns and would appreciate learning from those of you who've successfully incorporated mass combat into yours. 

That said, I should make a few things clear about my own preferences as a referee. Between my dislike of combat as an activity in itself and my feeling that most RPGs have too many rules, I have a natural aversion to any kind of mass combat system that plays out like a wargame. If I wanted to play a wargame, I'd play a wargame. What I want – and this may be impossible – is a solution that doesn't require me or the players to learn a whole new set of rules to simulate their characters' involvement in a big battle. Additionally, I'd like for what the characters do to have an effect on the outcome of the battle, even if they're not directly involved in everything that happens. I realize this is likely asking a lot, but I have lots of smart and knowledgeable readers, so maybe one of you can point me in the right direction.

To date, the only RPG I've ever played that had a decent set of mass combat rules was Pendragon and, even there, I wasn't wholly satisfied with the results. The main virtue of Pendragon was that the participation of the player characters still used the standard combat rules and the results of their individual battles had some impact on the final outcome of a larger fight. I didn't have to keep track of lots of wargame-y rules to adjudicate the battle satisfactorily. That's more or less what I want here, though, as I said, I may be asking for too much. 

Your thoughts on this matter are thus greatly appreciated. 

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "How to Finish Fights Faster"

Along with falling damage, psionics, and alignment, articles about unarmed combat were a commonplace in the pages of Dragon during the years when I subscribed to that venerable gaming magazine. There's probably a reason for that: unarmed combat in AD&D was, in my experience, pretty much universally admitted to be unusable as written, a fact even Gary Gygax acknowledged on more than one occasion. Despite that, no single alternative system ever really took root, with most referees employing a welter of different approaches, some based on the official system, some based on earlier articles from Dragon, and some created whole cloth. That's what playing D&D was like during my formative years in the hobby -- a crazy mix of stuff all drawing inspiration from the same base and then running off in whatever direction one deemed most fun. Consequently, I can't help but chuckle at all the folks decrying the existence of "so many retro-clones," since, to my way of thinking, what we have now is pretty much what we've always had. The only difference is that, nowadays, it's easy to print up, prettify, and sell your interpretation of D&D to others, whereas, in the past, each referee had a photocopies and stapled collection of house rules he shared with anyone willing to listen.

Perhaps because no single alternative to AD&D's execrable rules emerged, it was inevitable that the redoubtable Roger E. Moore would eventually offer his own unarmed combat system. His article, "How to Finish Fights Faster," appeared in issue #83 (March 1984) and takes up only four pages, one of them being a humorous illustration of four rotund halflings attempting to bring down an eyepatch-wearing humanoid, who looks more annoyed than inconvenienced by his diminutive opponents. Moore divides unarmed combat up into three modes: pummeling, kicking, and grappling. Pummeling is straight up fisticuffs, with or without the use of aids, like dagger pommels or metal gauntlets. Kicking is, well, kicking and grappling is attacking to subdue. All three modes are fairly simple to use, working more or less like the normal AD&D combat system but with certain modifiers and special cases unique to them. This is particularly true of grappling, which has a number of different moves detailed, each of which has further modifiers and effects.

I never used Moore's system, so I can't comment on how well it plays in practice. I suspect it probably works better than AD&D's official system, but not as well as others. I say that, because it includes a lot of specificity in certain areas (grappling, for example) that necessitates either a good memory or referring to the article to adjudicate. That's not a bad thing in itself; there are lots of rules in D&D that require reference to a rulebook to handle. However, I'll admit that I find it baffling that unarmed combat rules so often wind up being much more complicated than armed combat. Why is it that we can accept that all it takes to adjudicate an armored fighting man's attack against an opponent is a 1D20 roll compared to a chart, followed by a damage roll if successful but we demand saving throws and percentage chances and so forth if he wants to throw a punch or wrestle someone to the ground?

Initial Thoughts on Dragonbane

As I mentioned at the start of the month, my ongoing Dolmenwood campaign is on a short hiatus while one of the players is away traveling. In the meantime, another member of the group has kindly offered to run a few sessions of Dragonbane, Free League's fantasy roleplaying game, and I’ve taken the opportunity to step out from behind the screen and join as a player. I jumped at the chance, not only because Dragonbane has been on my radar for a while, and this seemed like the perfect time to give it a try.

For those unfamiliar with it, Dragonbane is the modern English-language evolution of Drakar och Demoner, Sweden’s first major fantasy RPG, originally released in 1982. That game was built on Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing (BRP) system, adapted under license and inspired in part by Magic World and RuneQuest. Over the decades, Drakar och Demoner went through numerous editions in Sweden, each refining or reshaping its rules. In 2023, Free League acquired the rights and reimagined the game as Dragonbane, distilling its BRP roots into something faster, lighter, and more accessible. While it retains the BRP hallmarks, like skill-based resolution, opposed rolls, it swaps out percentile dice for d20s and favors simplicity wherever it can.

While I’ve played my fair share of BRP-based games over the years, most of my fantasy RPG experience comes from Dungeons & Dragons and that likely shapes how I see other systems in the genre. That said, Dragonbane feels immediately familiar in all the best ways. Like older editions of D&D, character creation is fast and to the point: you choose a kin (i.e., race), a profession (class), some skills, and you’re good to go. It's more straightforward than making a character in RuneQuest and only marginally more involved than in D&D. You can feel the BRP ancestry throughout, but almost everywhere the system has been pared back to emphasize ease of play. The use of d20s streamlines resolution, and Dragonbane replaces modifiers with “boons and banes,” a system akin to advantage and disadvantage.

All of this is well and good, but what pleasantly surprised me was the combat system. I’m someone who often finds combat a necessary but uninspiring part of roleplaying games. I don’t dislike it outright, but I rarely look forward to it. In Dragonbane, though, combat has consistently been fun: brisk, dynamic, and full of opportunities for clever play. In fact, I’ve found myself anticipating combat encounters, which is not something I say lightly. It’s almost as if the Dice Gods are mocking me for having just written a post about my ambivalence toward combat mechanics. If so, I don’t mind. I’m grateful to have found a system that’s helping me understand what I do enjoy in RPG combat.

Each round, a Dragonbane can move and act. Special weapons or abilities can bend the rules in flavorful ways, but the core loop remains fast and approachable. Initiative is determined with cards rather than dice and reshuffles every round, introducing a layer of unpredictability. There are ways to act out of turn or swap initiative order, which adds some tactical flexibility. Beyond that, there are other mechanical wrinkles, such as morale checks, weapon breakage, special maneuvers, that bring the system to life without bogging it down.

That, for me, is what stands out about the Dragonbane combat system: it hits a sweet spot that’s hard to find. Too often, combat systems fall into one of two traps: they’re either so streamlined that they feel flat or they’re so loaded with options and subsystems that the pace suffers. Dragonbane threads the needle rather well in my opinion, offering just enough crunch to make combat engaging, but not so much that it becomes a slog. Whether this will remain my considered opinion over the long haul remains to be seen, but so far, it’s been a delight.

I Hate Combat

Here’s a confession that might get me kicked out of the old school clubhouse: I hate combat in roleplaying games.

There: I said it. 

Now, I’m – obviously – not saying combat never has a place at the table. I've refereed sessions where battles were tense, dramatic, and even thrilling, with cunning ambushes, panicked melees in cramped spaces, last-stand battles with high stakes for all those involved. If you want, I can recount plenty of examples of fun, memorable combats from almost any campaign I've run in recent years (and some from well before that). However, those are the exceptions, the golden flecks in the gravel.

Most of the time, combat is the broccoli on my RPG dinner plate, something I chew through dutifully because I’m told it’s good for me. This is especially true when I'm refereeing games like Dungeons & Dragons and its descendants, which tend to highlight combat. From what I can tell, other people seem to genuinely like combat. After all, it’s in every rulebook and often takes up its longest chapter. Combat's part of a balanced adventuring diet, isn’t it?

And yet I regularly find it tedious. 

Roll to hit. Miss. Roll to hit. Miss. Roll damage. Deduct hit points. Wait. Roll to hit. Miss. Consult a chart. Roll to confirm. Miss again. Meanwhile, someone's scrolling through social media. Combat grinds on, a clockwork of attrition that slows down the pace of the session. The usual momentum of exploration, intrigue, or even character banter gives way to a wargame that’s usually just complex enough to bog things down but not complex enough to be tactically interesting.

I know this sounds like sacrilege, especially coming from someone who inhabits the old school part of the hobby, where monsters are there to be slain and treasure to be pried from their still-warm claws. But even when I was a kid, the parts of a session I looked forward to weren’t the whittling down of hit points or the tracking of initiative. They were everything else.

I loved describing sinister rooms filled with strange objects and watching my friends debate whether or not to touch them. I loved watching them argue about the safest way for their characters to cross a rickety rope bridge across a chasm. I loved their paranoid investigations of hidden crawlspaces and their impromptu diplomacy with bullywugs they were trying to convince of their good intentions (I should write about that sometime). I loved the awkward, funny, surprisingly human interactions between characters and the worlds I'd presented to them.

That’s always been the meat of roleplaying games for me: not the fighting, but the playing. Heck, that's why I'm still here after all these years.

To be clear: I love a good fight. In fact, as a player, I really respect a well-run tactical encounter and have nothing but praise for referees capable of this. A few years ago, for example, I played in a great Rolemaster campaign run by a friend who knew the game – and its combat rules – like the back of his hand. I left that campaign with a much greater appreciation for the unique virtues of Rolemaster and its chart-driven approach to combat. It helped, too, that the referee had a good sense of how to make combats fun, a skill in which I am decidedly lacking.

I often include combats because I feel obligated to do so. Of late, I've noticed this most often in my Barrett's Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign. Since T2K is a military RPG, it would be ridiculous not to have combats, wouldn't it? So, we have them, even though I spend most sessions trying to figure out ways to avoid them. Again, it's not that we haven't had fun and exciting combats in that campaign, because I know we have. However, they're not what interest me and I regularly feel as if combat doesn't play to my strengths as a referee.

Consequently, I sometimes think of combat as a tax I have to pay to get to the good parts of the session, like those unskippable ads on YouTube, except the ads last half an hour and require me to reread the rules on incendiary ammunition. Again.

Now, I understand that some people love combat. For some, it’s what they most enjoy about RPGs. There’s a satisfying clarity in the geometry of battle, the crisp chain of cause and effect, the tactical puzzle. I completely understand that, because, as I said, I've had moments where I felt the same way. So, I salute their enthusiasm. I merely ask that they might forgive me when I can't be bothered to remember the modifier for an attack against a prone target or how much protection a concrete wall provides against weapons fire.

For me, the real excitement comes when players sidestep combat entirely. When they parley, sneak, bribe, confuse, seduce, or otherwise avoid having to resort to swordplay or gunfire. Not only do I cheer those moments for the cleverness they demonstrate, but also because it means I don't have to worry about my own tactical inadequacies. Plus, it's in the unscripted non-combat interactions that the game feels most alive to me. 

So, yes, I hate combat – but only because I love everything else about roleplaying games so much more.

Still, just often enough to make me question everything, a combat shines. The dice align, the stakes are high, the players are desperate, and suddenly we’re not just resolving a skirmish. We’re there, holding our collective breaths, waiting for the next roll. In those moments, I’m reminded why people put up with those incendiary ammunition rules.

But I won’t pretend I’m not secretly hoping someone talks their way out of it instead.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Who Get the First Swing?"

There's that word again -- "realism." As I've noted before, it (and variations on it) were a commonplace of Dragon articles after 1983 or thereabouts. This instance of it appears as part of the subtitle to the article "Who Gets the First Swing?" which appeared in issue #71 (March 1983). The article, by Ronald Hall, is an attempt to produce a "simple yet realistic" alternative to the convoluted and much misunderstood initiative system presented in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. I think almost anyone who ever attempted to run combat in AD&D by the book would have been sympathetic to Hall's intention.

Initiative in AD&D, particularly when combined with the equally obscure rules regarding surprise, was one of those areas where, in my experience, most players back in the day simply ignored the official rules and adopted a variety of house rules. I know I did. My system was a variation on rolling 1d6 per side with modifiers and a dash of common sense. D&D's combat has always been pretty abstract, so it never made much sense to me to fixate on making one of its aspects more "realistic." Unfortunately, in this period of D&D's history, that opinion wasn't held by all, least of all those who wrote articles for Dragon. "Realism" was all the rage.

Hall introduces an attack priority system that makes good use of weapon speed factors -- another aspect of AD&D many gamers dropped -- in order to model advantage such "faster" weapons have in combat. His system is an individual initiative system rather than a group initiative one, which, right there, means it's going to be much more complex than the commonest house rules used at the time. Add to this that there many, many modifiers to a character's attack priority, such as weapon length, dexterity, size, hit dice, among others, and you have a recipe for a system that, despite its claims does require "more work." The other issue is that, like many such systems, Hall distinguishes between manufactured and natural weapons, which necessitates that there be seven pages of supplementary stats to cover the modifiers for all the creatures in the Monster Manual. What one is to do with the Fiend Folio monsters is never addressed.

Articles like this were no doubt extremely well-intentioned, but, even at my most obsessive, I never felt the desire to use them. I understood the logic that leads to creating an individualized initiative system with lots of modifiers and special cases, but, at the end of the day, the result always seems like more work than is necessary for a combat system as abstract as D&D's. I'll readily grant that AD&D is a mess when it comes to initiative and the other complexities it bolted on to OD&D's "alternative combat system." However, articles like this strike me as cures worse than the disease.

Armor as Damage Reduction

One of the first blogposts of the OSR that I remember being widely celebrated and discussed was "Shields Shall Be Splintered!" by Trollsmyth. If you've somehow never read it before, take a moment to follow the link and do so. The post isn't long and the idea behind it is a simple but clever one. 

I found myself thinking about Trollsmyth's post again recently, as I was re-reading a section of Unearthed Arcana that I rarely see discussed. In the Dungeon Masters' Section of the book, you'll find descriptions of new armor types. Among these are field plate armor and full plate armor, which, in addition to filling out the AD&D armor class table all the way to AC 0, introduce two new mechanics into the game that, so far as I recall, doesn't exist anywhere else: armor as damage reduction and damage to armor. 

Here's how those mechanics are described in the description of field plate:

For every die of damage that would be inflicted upon the wearer from any attack, physical or magical, the armor will absorb 1 point of the damage. (On a damage roll of 1, the wearer would take no damage.) For example, the armor will absorb 1 point of damage from the strike of a long sword, and the damage from an ice storm (3–30, or 3d10) would be reduced by 3 points, and the damage from the breath weapon of a 9 HD dragon is reduced by 9 points. However, after the armor absorbs 12 points of damage in this fashion, it is damaged and must be repaired. Until repairs are made, it cannot absorb further damage and is considered one armor class worse in protective power. Damaged field plate may be repaired by a trainer armor [sic] at a rate of 100 gp per point of absorbing power restored, and one day of time per point restored.

Full plate armor functions more or less identically, though its absorption is 2 points per die of damage and it has a total absorption capacity of 26 points before it needs repair. 

A couple of thoughts occurred to me as I re-read this section. Firstly, I had apparently forgotten the rules associated with these new armor types. I suspect that's because, like so many things that later appeared in Unearthed Arcana, I remember more strongly the original appearance of field and full plate in Gygax's "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column in issue #72 of Dragon. Unless my recollection is gravely in error, those new types of armor did not provide any reduction to the damage inflicted on their wearers. Instead, they were simply better types of plate with accordingly better AC ratings. Damage reduction/absorption is thus something new to UA (though, as always, I am happy to be corrected on this point).

Secondly, I had long understood the rating of a type of armor in AD&D (and D&D, for that matter) to represent how difficult it was to damage its wearer. Characters with lower AC ratings were not "harder to hit," but harder to damage. I know that D&D often speaks of a "to hit" roll, but I take that to be shorthand for "to hit in a way that results in damage." If so, does an additional layer of damage absorption make any sense? Does this addition to the way hits and damage work in AD&D do violence to the combat rules or only to my peculiar interpretation of what hit and damage rolls represent in AD&D?

Armor as damage reduction isn't a new idea. Many RPGs that followed in D&D's wake – RuneQuest being one of the best examples – view armor in this fashion. However, those games broadly divorce the difficulty of striking an opponent in combat from the armor that they wear. D&D has always been a bit more vague on this subject, partly in the interests of efficiency. Whatever else you might say about D&D combat, it's fast. D&D has always sacrificed "realism" for speed of play, which I think is the right call in most cases. That's why I find the damage absorption rules for field and full plate rather odd. To my mind, they don't fit with the overall philosophy of D&D combat.

Of course, re-reading this section of Unearthed Arcana also made me wonder if Gygax's thinking had changed on the matter of armor and/or combat. If so, what might we have seen in his version of Second Edition? Might we have seen a broader implementation of damage reduction in the game? It's a question with no definitive answer, but it's fun to ponder nonetheless.

Simplifying BRP Combat?

I'd like to call upon the wisdom of readers with long experience playing games derived from Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing. Lately, I've been looking with less judgmental eyes on RuneQuest and finding within it – I speak of its 1979 second edition rather than its current iteration – worthy of greater admiration, both for its setting and for its rules, both of which really were ahead of their time.

Nevertheless, one aspect of RQ continues to bedevil me, namely combat. BRP combat, particularly in its RuneQuest iteration, is much more fiddly than I'd like. The combination of strike ranks, attack rolls, defense rolls, criticals, impales, fumbles, hit locations, and armor absorption is simply too much for my feeble mind to handle. A lifetime of playing Dungeons & Dragons has, by and large, mentally conditioned me for fast and simple combats, each round of which can be resolved with only a couple of dice rolls and the most basic of math. RuneQuest is several steps more complex than I enjoy. And yet I can't deny that there can be many benefits from complexity. I sometimes mention that, a few years ago, I had the opportunity to play Rolemaster with a referee who knew its rules well and helped make the process of using them relatively painless for me. As a consequence, I re-evaluated my older assessment of them as too arcane for my tastes. Perhaps the same is true of RuneQuest's combat system? 

That's why I'd like to hear from anyone who's refereed an RQ campaign for some length. What was your experience with combat? Did you find a way to make it run more quickly and smoothly? Is there some crucial insight into its workings that might help me overcome my concern about its fiddliness? Alternately, is there some iteration of BRP that manages to streamline combat without losing too much detail? I know that OpenQuest is well regarded in some quarters, but I haven't kept up with its development since its original release. Is that still a good option or are there others I should consider? Shower me with your thoughts on this, please.

Here We Go Again

Issue #39 of Dragon (July 1980) featured an article on critical hits entitled "Good Hits and Bad Misses" by Carl Parlagreco. I've mentioned before that this article had a huge effect on me in the early days of my gaming; I carried around a photocopy of its tables in my DM binder for years. Apparently, Gary Gygax didn't think as well of it as I. He wrote a letter Dragon on the matter, which appeared in issue #41 (September 1980), in which he not only mocks the idea of critical hits and misses but also offers up his own ideas on (tongue-in-cheek?) ideas on the subject:

"Particularly Offensive to the Precepts of D&D"

After writing my post on double damage and "instant death,"  I started looking into the history of critical hits in roleplaying games. In doing so, I came across an installment of Gary Gygax's "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column in issue #16 of Dragon (July 1978). Among many other topics, Gygax touches on the topic of critical hits. This is, I believe, the first time he specifically addresses the topic in print (though I'm prepared to be corrected, if I've overlooked an earlier text on the subject).

Purely from a historical point of view, Gygax's position strikes me as odd. Firstly, there's the matter of Empire of the Petal Throne, published by TSR in 1975. EPT includes critical hits, the first published roleplaying game to do so, and yet I can find no evidence that Gygax was particularly exercised about the inclusion of this mechanical innovation. I suppose it's possible that his opinion on the matter changed. After all, the section about appeared in 1978, which is more than enough time for him to have decided, on reflection, that critical hits were a problem.

Alternatively, it's possible that Gygax's condemnation of critical hits was a narrow one. He calls them "particularly offensive to the precepts of D&D," not "to the precepts of roleplaying games." He may simply have felt that Dungeons & Dragons was designed with a particular type of experience in mind and that critical hits ran counter to that design. Thus, the presence of critical hits in EPT was of no concern to him, since his opinion was solely concerned with D&D. 

However, if that's the case, we have to reckon with the existence of the sword of sharpness and vorpal blade, two magical weapons introduced in Supplement I: Greyhawk in 1975, the same year as Empire of the Petal Throne was published. These weapons include the possibility of instant death by the severing of an opponent's neck and the possibility of this happening is much greater than that of an instant death critical hit in EPT or even the more traditional "double damage on the roll of a natural 20" favored by most versions of the rule in wider circulation. No doubt Gygax would (reasonably) say that these weapons are rare and their inclusion is entirely up to the individual referee. Still, I think there's more than a little mechanical similarity between the way these weapons work and critical hits and that somewhat undercuts Gygax's stated position.

From a purely personal perspective, I can't quite recall when I first encountered the concept of critical hits, but I suspect it was quite early in my introduction to the hobby. By the early '80s, critical hits were one of those rules that everyone knew about and many used, even without being able to point to a section of D&D's actual rules that supported them. For many years, I carried around a photocopy of the critical hit tables from issue #39 (July 1980) and occasionally made use of them. I've never had any really strong feelings for or against the concept, which is why I find Gygax's vehement denunciation of them so odd. 

A Question re: Strength

If one uses, as OD&D, AD&D, and Empire of the Petal Throne do, a one-minute combat round, I think you're committing yourself to a broadly abstract approach to combat. As Gary Gygax explains in the Dungeon Masters Guide: "During a one-minute melee round many attacks are made, but some are mere feints, while some are blocked or parried." 

If one understands combat in this way, I think it makes sense to avoid talking about "to hit" rolls, since, over the course of the round, there may be many attacks, some of them even landing a blow on an opponent. Rather, the combat roll determines whether or not any of those landed blows are strong enough to overcome the opponent's armor and deal damage. Thus, the "to hit" roll is really more like a "to damage" roll.

Consider how common it once was – and perhaps still is, for all I know – to criticize the way D&D uses armor class. Why, I recall being asked, does wearing plate mail make a character harder to hit than if he were wearing chainmail or leather armor? The answer is that it doesn't. Rather, certain types of armor make a character harder to damage, which is why I recommend dropping the use of phrases like "roll to hit" and the like.

All of this brings me to my question about Strength. Prior to Supplement I, a high Strength score conferred no mechanical benefits beyond a bonus to earned experience for fighting men. With the publication of Greyhawk, this changed. Now, a high Strength granted a bonus to "hit probability" and to damage. Given the understanding of the combat roll I propose above, does it make any sense for a high Strength score to do both? 

A bonus to the chance to deal damage (called "hit probability") makes sense to me, since what that really indicates is an increase in the likelihood that a character can land a hit solid enough to harm his opponent. I find it reasonable that a high Strength might assist in this. Why, then, a bonus to damage dealt as well? Isn't that "doubling up" on the Strength's role in combat or am I overthinking this, as I often do?

I hope I've explained myself clearly enough so that my question is intelligible. If not, I'll do my best to clarify my position in the comments.

Double Damage and "Instant Death"

 Empire of the Petal Throne (1975) contains the following section:

This is the first appearance of what would later be called a "critical hit" in the history of roleplaying games. Since the start of my ongoing House of Worms campaign, I've made use of this rule without modification. According to one of the players, there have only been four such "lucky hits" (as Professor Barker called them) in the nearly seven years we've been been playing, all of which affected opponents of the characters – until our most recent session.

During Session 253, the characters were exploring a series of caverns beneath a ruined step pyramid they'd found on a coastal island. There was plenty of reason to suspect the caverns were inhabited, not least of which being that they seem to have been picked clean of anything organic. This worried Kirktá, the apprentice to Keléno, scholar priest of Sárku. For that reason, he volunteered to keep watch on the ledges of a large cave while his comrades explored nearby. His worries proved well founded, as a large insectoid creature began to crawl down one of the ledges, apparently attracted by the echoes of the characters' actions.

Aíthfo and Grujúng rushed to meet the creature, attacking it as it slowly descended the wall of the ledge. They soon realize that its carapace protected it well and that, owing to its size, it would take a great deal of effort to slay it. Initially, the fight went well, with the creature failing to land a blow on any of the characters. However, on the third round of the fight, I rolled for a 20 and then a 19 against Aíthfo, resulting in his instant death. I decided that the creature's mandibles sliced through the unlucky Aíthfo's neck, severing his head from his body. 

Needless to say, this shocked everyone. No character had ever suffered an instant death due to the critical hit rule before. Ironically, Aíthfo had failed a saving throw some years ago that had resulted in his death, but he was eventually restored to life by Naqsái magic (which led to some long-ranging consequences). Now, though, the characters were quite far from any means of revivifying Aíthfo and worried that this might indeed be his end. Znayáshu, however, had an idea. After sewing his decapitated head back onto his body – Znayáshu is an accomplished embalmer – he made use of his excellent ruby eye on Aíthfo's remains. This device of the Ancients freezes its target in a moment in time. In this way, the body would be immune to decay or corruption until Znayáshu used the eye on it again. The body was then submerged in the water of an underground river to keep it safe.

The characters continue to explore the caverns. Once done, they plan to seek out some means of revivifying Aíthfo and will return to the caverns to do so. How or when this will occur is still unknown. Given the way this campaign unfolds, it could well be many, many more sessions before it comes to pass, assuming it ever does. But that's the nature of this campaign: it's unpredictable. In the meantime, Aíthfo's player has taken up the role of Lára hiKhánuma, a sorceress of Ksárul and a relative of Aíthfo's new wife (or should I say widow?). It will be fascinating to see what happens next.

Aíthfo in happier times

Retrospective: Snapshot

I've never made any secret of the fact that Traveller is without question my favorite roleplaying game. In large part, that's due to my lifelong love of science fiction – some of my earliest memories are watching Star Trek reruns with my aunt in the early 1970s – but I firmly believe that my affection is also due to the elegance of the game's design. Traveller's rules are straightforward, wide-ranging, and expandable. Time and again, GDW showed how relatively easy it was to add to, subtract from, and modify Traveller for various purposes.

A good example of what I'm talking about is evident in the various boardgames derived from Traveller that GDW published, such as  Snapshot. Snapshot first appeared in 1979 in a black and green box of similar size to the 1977 Traveller set. A second edition released in 1983 came in a larger, 8½" × 11" box. I owned the second version and, like so many RPG products of that era, I played it until the box literally fell apart. 

Snapshot is an adaptation of Traveller's combat rules for the purposes of simulating, as its subtitle proclaims, "close combat aboard starships in the far future." Inside the box is a 28-page rulebook, a collection of counters, and a sheet featuring the deckplans of a Type-S scout vessel and a Type-A free trader (scaled for use with either the included counters or 15mm miniatures). If you're already familiar with Traveller's combat system, Snapshot is easy to understand. Newcomers might find it takes a little effort to comprehend, but not much. Compared to most miniatures wargaming rules, Snapshot is refreshingly simple.

Make no mistake: that's what Snapshot is – a set of science fiction miniatures wargaming rules. Like other wargames of this kind, it's played in conjunction with scenarios, several samples of which are included in the rulebook. For example, one scenario deals with alien animals destined for an imperial zoological park that get loose while in transit; another deals with an attempted hijacking of a starship. All of the scenarios include victory conditions for one side or the other, as well as options for altering their basic parameters. Of course, referees and players of Traveller would likely have no trouble coming up with scenarios of their own.

Snapshot would seem to have had two audiences in mind. The first is people just looking to play a quick miniatures game and who might, through playing the game, become interested in Traveller. The second is people like myself, who already played Traveller and were keen to get our hands on counters and appropriately scaled maps for use with our RPG adventures and campaigns. It was in that capacity that my boxed set fell apart. Over the course of several years, I made regular use of Snapshot to adjudicate hijackings, boarding actions, and many other combats in and around starships. I can't begin to tell you how many hours my friends and I spent doing this, but it was a lot. I suppose any kid who thrilled upon seeing the opening scene of Star Wars would have a natural affinity for this kind of thing.

A few years ago, when I was refereeing my Riphaeus Sector Traveller campaign, I regretted that we were playing online, because I was keen to pull out my old Snapshot maps and counters whenever the characters became involved in combat aboard a starship. We made do with virtual tools that allowed us to do the same thing, more or less, but I can't deny it didn't quite feel the same to me. They say nostalgia is a hell of a drug and perhaps that's so. On the other hand, the fact that a little box containing cardboard squares and a fold-out map still exercise a hold over my imagination decades later has got to be worth something too.

"We're Doing Something Wrong."

I recently acquired One-Hour Skirmish Wargames by John Lambshead on the recommendation of a friend. It's a very interesting book from a number of perspectives and I might later do a full review of it. For the moment, though, I want only to draw your attention to a couple of paragraphs from the general introduction of the book, because I think they have a certain applicability to RPG design. 

There is a school of thought that persists to this day that because skirmish wargaming involves few models that each model must have concomitantly special rules. Often the player has been required to micromanage actions. For example a gunman model might not just shoot, but (i) locate the target, (ii) draw his pistol, (iii) cock his pistol, (iv) aim his pistol, (v) pull the trigger. The player might even be called upon to write out orders in advance detailing all these actions. This approach has meant that skirmish games have had a tendency to become complicated models of real life.

I well recall playing a game of Cold War fighter combat (air games are often a sub-branch of skirmish games) in the early 80s where a single pass by two Tornados at an element of MIG 25s that might have taken ten to thirty seconds of real time actually required all afternoon to play. If game-time is longer than real-time then we're doing something wrong. (Italics mine)

Random Roll: DMG, p. 61

Page 61 of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide features a lengthy section entitled "Encounters, Combat, and Initiative." The section is so long and so full of fascinating asides that I'm going to focus only on those paragraphs that address the sometimes contentious topic of the one-minute combat round. Before starting, it's important to remember that, while the one-minute round is most well known is AD&D, it's not unique to it. Both OD&D and Empire of the Petal Throne, two games with which I am quite familiar, also make use of it. However, other versions of D&D, most famously Tom Moldvay's 1981 revision, do not, preferring shorter lengths of time. I'm genuinely agnostic on the matter myself, not seeing it as a hill to die on one way or the other. For this post, my interest is solely on Gygax's reasoning behind one-minute combat rounds.

He begins:

Combat is divided into 1 minute period melee rounds, or simply rounds, in order to have reasonably manageable combat. "Manageable" applies both to the actions of the combatants and the actual refereeing of such melees.

Right off the bat, Gygax suggests that one-minute rounds exist primarily for practical reasons. He continues:

It would be no great task to devise an elaborate set of rules for highly complex individual combats with rounds of but a few seconds. It is not in the best interests of an adventure game, however, to delve too deeply into cut and thrust, parry and riposte. The location of a hit or wound, the sort of damage done, sprains, breaks, and dislocations are not the stuff of heroic fantasy. The reasons for this are manifold.

In typical Gygaxian fashion, these sentences are at once commonsensical and querulous. I think his general point that "highly complex" rules for combat get in the way of the running of "an adventure game" (a term he uses often in the DMG – but that's a possible topic for another post). My own decades-long experience is that, with a few exceptions, I personally prefer simple, straightforward, and easy to adjudicate combat systems over those with more detail. That said, I can't wholly sign on with Gygax's contention that more complex systems "are not the stuff of heroic fantasy," which almost seems like a calculated slight against other RPGs with different priorities than AD&D.

In any case, Gygax uses this as an opportunity to talk about hit points and how AD&D's conception of them ties into the one-minute round. 

As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the types of damage caused are not germane to them. 

Again, perhaps I am an outlier, but this makes perfect sense to me, especially in light of the one-minute combat round. If an attack roll does not represent a single cut or thrust but rather an abstraction of many such actions over the course of a minute, I think it quite reasonable that hit points should be similarly abstracted. Oddly, he immediately follows up with this: "this is not true with respect to most monsters, it is neither necessary nor particularly useful." I'm not sure how to read this. Is Gygax suggesting that, for most monsters, hit points are a measure of physical damage or is it that the location of hits and types of damage caused would be germane to them? 

In any case, he quickly gives us more to unpack.

Lest the purist immediately object, consider the many charts and tables necessary to handle this sort of detail, and then think about how area effect spells would work. In like manner, consider all of the nasty things which face adventurers as the rules stand. Are crippling disabilities and yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic game where participants seeks to identify with lovingly detailed player-character personae? Not likely! Certain death is as undesirable as a give-away campaign. 

I think Gygax starts off with an excellent point about charts and tables. If one prioritizes speed in handling combat, too much detail can be a serious impediment. D&D in all its forms has always tended toward the fast and abstract. That's either a bane or a boon, depending on one's own interests, but I don't think it's a "flaw" in the game's design. I've played – and enjoyed – RPGs with more complex combat systems and would happily do so again. There are many unique pleasures in that style of play, just as there are in D&D's. I take no issue with anyone who prefers one over the other, so long as we all recognize the subjectivity of such a preference.

More remarkable, I think, is Gygax's description of D&D as an "open-ended, episodic" game. I don't find that description at all controversial, but I still take note of Gygax's use of it nonetheless, just as I do of his claim that it's a game "where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed player-character personae." This certainly seems at odds with the popular belief that, for Gygax, player characters were little more than "pieces on a board" to be discarded and replaced with ease. In like fashion, the implication that instant death was not desirable is further evidence that he was no "killer DM" of the sort players have been whining about for as long as I've been involved in the hobby.

With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents. (Such rules as double damage and critical hits must cur both ways – in which case the life expectancy of player characters will be shortened considerably – or the monsters are being grossly misrepresented and unfairly treated by the system. I am certain you can think of many other such rules.) 

Again, I think this comes down to taste. In my House of Worms campaign, I've made use of EPT's critical hit rules since I begin it more than six years ago and I've used it equally against PCs, NPCs, and monstrous enemies. My experience is that it's occasionally proved decisive in a combat but that, by and large, it's not upended things to such an extent that I'd caution against using it. No PC has died due to a critical hit in this campaign (though a couple did in my Dust of Gold campaign set in Mu'ugalavyá). On balance then, I don't share Gygax's concerns about critical hits.

One-minute rounds are devised to offer the maximum of choice with a minimum of complication. This allows the DM and the players the best of both worlds. The system assumes much activity during the course of each round. Envision, if you will, a fencing, boxing, or karate match. During the course of one minute of such competition, there are numerous attacks, which are unsuccessful, feints, maneuvering, and so forth. During a one-minute melee round many attacks are made, but some are mere feints, while some are blocked or parried. One, or possibly several, have the chance to actually score damage. For such chances, the dice are rolled and if the "to hit" number is equalled or exceeded, the attack was successful, but otherwise it too was avoided, blocked, parried, or whatever.

This is a very helpful section, because it makes more clear what Gygax saw as happening during the course of a single one-minute round. He elaborates on this later, explaining that "a round of combat is not a continuous series of attacks," nor is it "just a single blow and counter-blow affair." That has long been how I conceptualize a round; it's also why, when refereeing a combat, I generally don't describe it in any detail, preferring instead to speak of it in very broad terms. 

I should end here, but Gygax makes one brief aside that I think worthy of attention. He talks about monsters and their hit points. 

With respect to monsters such damage is, in fact, more physically substantial, although as with many adjustments in armor class rating for speed and agility, there are also similar additions in hit points.

For some reason, this doesn't sit well with me, perhaps because Gygax had just previously indicted critical hit systems for treating characters and monsters unequally. Now, he is admitting that he does the same with hit points. Is this an unforgiveable or game-breaking design choice? Hardly. Yet, it does make much more explicit the extent to which all combat systems need to make concessions of one sort or another in order to make them playable and fun. The question is simply what aspects of combat one wishes to emphasize and where one draws the line between "simple" and "complex."

Random Roll: DMG, p. 74

Page 74 of the Advanced D&D Dungeon Masters Guide features four attack matrices to aid the DM in adjudicating combat. They're all quite interesting in their way, but Matrix I.B, which concerns fighters and related classes, is especially so.

Let's start at the top. This matrix covers attacks by fighters and its two sub-classes paladins and rangers. Bards also make use of this table, though only at the highest level of fighter they have attained. That's interesting, because, if I'm understanding the rule correctly, it means that bards never increase in their combat effectiveness. Also interesting is that non-player half-orcs use the monster attack matrix rather than this one, unlike NPCs of all other playable demihuman races (are half-orcs even considered demihumans?).

It's difficult to compare AD&D's matrices with those in OD&D, since there is a wider range of armor classes in AD&D available. Nevertheless, it's notable that a 1st-level fighter in AD&D needs 11 to land a hit on AC 9, while an OD&D fighter of the same level needs only 10. On the other hand, AD&D fighters advance in steps of two levels rather than in steps of three in OD&D. (AD&D clerics, meanwhile, are more effective than their OD&D counterparts, since they advance in steps of three rather than four.)  The "special note" below the matrix offers the suggestion that fighters could advance in steps of one level, with each level granting a +1 bonus rather than the +2 bonus provided by the standard approach. I've never known anyone who used this optional rule, though I recall an article in the pages of Dragon that advocated strongly in favor of it.

A final observation concerns the notorious repeating 20s on the matrix. For reasons I don't quite understand – readers can enlighten me in the comments below – the matrix includes a series of six 20s before the advancing again beyond 20. I've always played Dungeons & Dragons with the "rule" that a roll of 1 is always a failure and a roll of 20 is always a success. I don't know where I picked this up, but it's now so ingrained in my mind that I instinctively use it. Given that, I don't find the repeating 20s odd at all; what seems strange to me is that there are target numbers higher than 20. What does that represent? How are we supposed to interpret it? I welcome any insights people better versed in the intricacies of AD&D can offer.

Professor Barker's Solution

 As everyone reading this no doubt knows, Empire of the Petal Throne is one of the oldest roleplaying games in existence, appearing about a year and half after the publication of OD&D in 1974. Perhaps unsurprisingly, EPT draws heavily on the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, to the point where one might not unreasonably call it a variant. There are differences, however, some of which bear further examination, particularly in light of OD&D's perceived mechanical shortcomings.

A good case in point is EPT's treatment of the warrior class, which is obviously modeled on OD&D's fighting man. As yesterday's post makes clear, there's long been the sense that the fighting man (and his descendants) is underpowered when it comes to damage dealing. Various solutions have been proposed over the years, from AD&D's extra attacks against opponents of less than one hit die to 3e's combat feats, and all have merit. In Empire of the Petal Throne, Professor Barker offers his own solution, one that seems to draw, at least in part, from the OD&D FAQ printed in the Summer 1975 issue of The Strategic Review (itself a worthy topic for discussion).

In section 730 of EPT, this appears:

As you can see, as warriors progress in level, they deal greater damage against opponents of lower hit dice than themselves. This begins at Level IV, when warriors rolls twice damage dice against opponents of one hit die. As the warriors gains additional levels, these bonus damage dice not only increase but expand to include ever more powerful opponents. Thus, a Level VI warrior – of which there is one in my ongoing House of Worms campaign – deals three damage dice against one hit die opponents, as well as two dice against 1+1, 2, and 3 hit dice opponents. From experience, I can tell you that's not insignificant and has played a key role in many combats. 

However, Professor Barker doesn't end there. He also includes a "cleave" rule (or perhaps it's an evolution of Dave Arneson's famous "chop 'til you drop" rule), in which damage above that which successfully killed an opponent "spills over" to other opponents of similar sort in range. Again, I've used this rule in play over the course of the last five and a half years and it's been, if not exactly a game changer, a welcome boost to the warrior's effectiveness. Mind you, the lower overall hit point totals of Empire of the Petal Throne – in keeping with pre-Supplement I OD&D – play a role too, making the warrior significantly more durable than either the priest or the magic-user.

Section 730 includes another wrinkle, however, namely:

Thus, both priests and magic-users benefit from the additional damage dice, just not at the same rate as warriors. Given that those two classes also have poorer combat probabilities – identical to their counterparts in OD&D – their likelihood of landing any blow is less than that of a warrior. Even so, they do deal greater damage in combat as they gain levels, just as a warrior does, which somewhat undermines the warrior's battle prowess. I have been tempted to remove this rule in my own campaign, but it's come up so rarely that it hasn't been an issue (the priest and magic-user characters rarely participate in melee, preferring to hang back and employ spells or magic items safely from a distance instead).

Notice, too, that monsters use the bonus damage dice and do so as if they were warriors. This had a greater impact in the early days of the campaign, when the characters were much more likely to encounter creatures of much higher hit dice than themselves (such as the Nshé the ran into while in Salarvyá). Now, with most of the characters fifth or sixth level, it's a rarer occurrence, though still possible, as Tékumel is home to a great many nasty, high hit dice creatures, some of which can be found on the Achgé Peninsula they currently call home. 

My Kingdom for a Horse

I've always been fond of the illustration above; it's by Bill Willingham and appears in the Cook/Marsh D&D Expert Rulebook. Aside from its esthetic virtues – seeing two fully armored combatants, complete with helms has always been appealing to me – what I liked most about it was the suggestion that fighting from horseback conveyed advantages against an enemy on foot. The problem, unfortunately, is that, aside from a few sentences about lance combat, which requires charging from 20 or more yards away, there's no mention of mounted combat in the Expert Rulebook whatsoever. More is said about aerial combat than is said about mounted combat (though, again, it's not a great deal). 

Sadly, AD&D isn't much better on this matter. I don't believe it was until the publication of Unearthed Arcana in 1985 that we even get suggestions of rules for mounted combat and, even then, the rules offered would seem to apply exclusively to the cavalier class. According to UA, cavaliers are treated as one level higher for combat purposes while mounted. There is also some discussion regarding the characteristics of warhorses too, but it has very little in the way of rules and mostly focuses on the sizes of the various breeds. I find this disappointing, since the image of knights fighting from horseback is deeply ingrained in my imagination and I've long wanted to see mounted combat given its due.

My recent experience with historical wargaming has probably played a part in reviving my interest in the topic. Horses were used in warfare for more than three thousand years, right up until World War I more or less made them obsolete. Is it any surprise then that I'd start to think more about this subject? The difficulty, as is so often the case, is that, when all is said and done, I'm not entirely what I want out of "proper" mounted combat rules or indeed whether I'd even make regular use of them. My experience to date has been that most RPG session, to the extent that mounts come up at all, think of horses more as vehicles for getting from place to place than as engines of war. That's completely understandable, especially in games that involve subterranean exploration and similar activities where horses would prove unwieldy. Still, I don't think it's unreasonable to give this matter some thought.

If you have experience of such, what RPGs have good rules for mounted combat? I know, for example, that the most recent edition of Chaosium's RuneQuest includes rules for both ranged and melee combat from horseback, as well as using polearms against charging cavalry. Free League's Forbidden Lands contains some very brief rules but the focus in that game, as in so many, is on mounts as a means of traveling from place to place rather than their potential use in combat. I find myself wondering if mounted combat is one of those things that, while important historically, was left behind as roleplaying games became less indebted to their wargames roots.

Conquer, Withdraw, Surrender, or Die!

For all my cavils and criticisms of Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (especially the final film), I have a great fondness for its depiction of the Ride of the Rohirrim. One of the main reasons is the moment that begins around 3:38 in the above video (in case I screwed up the formatting of the timestamp) when the morale of the orcs visibly breaks before the charging cavalry of Rohan. It's not only a thrilling moment of drama, it's also a great depiction of something that ought to happen more often in fantasy RPG combat than I suspect it does.

Morale is one of my hobby horses – despite the fact that I am as guilty as anyone of ignoring it in play. That's really the problem: it's too easy to ignore, even though I have long believed that it's one of the keys to understanding how combat is supposed to operate in Dungeons & Dragons and related games. Part of the problem, of course, is that D&D has never really had good morale rules. OD&D doesn't really have rules outside of handling hireling loyalty – hence the reason Charisma is an ability score in the first place – and Holmes, from which I took the title of this post, has none at all. AD&D's rules, as presented in the Dungeon Masters Guide, are too complex; they practically beg to be ignored.

Now, Moldvay's 1981 Basic Rules include morale rules that are simple and fairly easy to use, in large part because he was clever enough to give each monster a morale rating in its entry. The second edition of Gamma World did something similar, although it allows for a little more variability by providing a range of ratings for each entry rather than a single number. Other RPGs with which I have a lot of experience, such as Empire of the Petal Throne, have their own simple morale systems.

From experience, I can attest to the fact that Moldvay's rules work and are unobtrusive in play. Nevertheless, I keep forgetting them, except in cases where the logic of what's happening in play makes me remember. Perhaps that's enough, I don't know. Somehow, though, it doesn't feel sufficient to me, at least when I take the time to think about it, as I am right now. Is the fault with the rules or with me? I'm naturally inclined to assume the latter, except there are plenty of easily forgotten rules that I don't forget, so why do I have such a hard time remembering to check morale? It's baffling to me, all the more so because, intellectually, I know this is something I should care more about.

Consequently, I continue to cast about for a good set of morale rules – something that's easy to use and, just as importantly, easy to remember. As I said, Moldvay's rules are actually quite decent, particularly with regards to ease of use. Maybe I just need to recommit myself to using them until doing so is as habitual as checking for wandering monsters (another vital rule that's easily forgotten). Alternately, maybe there is a set of morale rules out there that are as good as Moldvay's but easier to keep in mind. If anyone has any suggestions on that score, I'd love to hear them.

Dynamic Initiative

Last month, I talked about my recent experiences playing wargames online with friends via VASSAL. Our most recent game is Liberty or Death, which concerns the American War of Independence (or the American Insurrection, as the game calls it). I've been enjoying it, though I'm finding it a much more complex game than Falling Sky. Partly, I think it's a function of the time period and scope of the game and partly it's because I'm playing a more significant faction. In Falling Sky, I played the Belgae, who are a minor faction; in Liberty or Death, I'm playing the Patriots, who are, obviously, one of the two primary antagonists. Even so, most of the things I learned playing Falling Sky carried over into Liberty or Death, which only makes sense, given that they both use the same underlying mechanics.

One of those mechanics is its unique approach to turn order. Each turn, an event card is drawn. At the top of each card is a series of symbols, all of which is associated with a faction. For example, in the image above, the card "Benjamin Franklin Travels to France" shows the so-called Betsy Ross flag of 1777 first, followed by the flag of the Kingdom of France, the Union Jack, and lastly an arrowhead representing British allied Indian forces. The order of the symbols indicates the action priority of the factions in a turn. 

However, there's an added complication. If you look to the bottom left, there's an area entitled "Sequence of Play." In that area are two boxes called "Eligible Factions" and "Ineligible Factions." After the very first turn of the game, in which all factions are eligible, whether or not a given faction can act is determined by what happened the previous turn. If a faction acts in one turn, it is generally ineligible to act the next turn. Thus, only a faction that didn't act the previous turn can make use of an event card in the present turn – and which one of them gets the option to do so first is randomly determined based on which event card appears and which symbol is listed first.

There are a couple of additional wrinkles to the turn order. The player of a faction may forego his action on a turn in order to sit out the turn and gain resources. In doing so, he keeps his faction eligible for the next turn, which may be a wise move, since players can see the next upcoming event card. Further, by passing on an action in this way, a player changes the order of initiative for future turns. All factions also have a "brilliant stroke" card, which enables eligible factions to act of sequence once per game. Though rarer, this can nevertheless shake up the game's turn order.

In play, this system is dynamic and enjoyable. It keeps the sequence of play from stagnating into an "I go, you go" sort of affair. Having seen it in action during the course of two different wargames, I found myself wondering about how to do something similar in RPG combat. Plenty of roleplaying games have had dynamic initiative systems before, but they tend to rely on rolling dice every round or some kind of action point economy. Both approaches are fine, though action points require bookkeeping, which, in my experience at least, tends to lead to their being ignored. Rolling dice every round is better, but it can slow things down. What I like about the system in Liberty or Death or indeed any of the COIN series of games is that it requires only the turning of a single card, which provides all the information needed to adjudicate turn order.

I have no idea how this would work yet, or whether it's possible at all. A few years ago, I toyed with a chit-based initiative system – I really wanted to find a way to incorporate Holmesian chits into contemporary RPGs – but I was not satisfied with the results. I will have to keep thinking about this.

The Articles of Dragon: "How to Finish Fights Faster"

Along with falling damage, psionics, and alignment, articles about unarmed combat were a commonplace in the pages of Dragon during the years when I subscribed to that venerable gaming magazine. There's probably a reason for that: unarmed combat in AD&D was, in my experience, pretty much universally admitted to be unusable as written, a fact even Gary Gygax acknowledged on more than one occasion. Despite that, no single alternative system ever really took root, with most referees employing a welter of different approaches, some based on the official system, some based on earlier articles from Dragon, and some created whole cloth. That's what playing D&D was like during my formative years in the hobby -- a crazy mix of stuff all drawing inspiration from the same base and then running off in whatever direction one deemed most fun. Consequently, I can't help but chuckle at all the folks decrying the existence of "so many retro-clones," since, to my way of thinking, what we have now is pretty much what we've always had. The only difference is that, nowadays, it's easy to print up, prettify, and sell your interpretation of D&D to others, whereas, in the past, each referee had a photocopies and stapled collection of house rules he shared with anyone willing to listen.

Perhaps because no single alternative to AD&D's execrable rules emerged, it was inevitable that the redoubtable Roger E. Moore would eventually offer his own unarmed combat system. His article, "How to Finish Fights Faster," appeared in issue #83 (March 1984) and takes up only four pages, one of them being a humorous illustration of four rotund halflings attempting to bring down an eyepatch-wearing humanoid, who looks more annoyed than inconvenienced by his diminutive opponents. Moore divides unarmed combat up into three modes: pummeling, kicking, and grappling. Pummeling is straight up fisticuffs, with or without the use of aids, like dagger pommels or metal gauntlets. Kicking is, well, kicking and grappling is attacking to subdue. All three modes are fairly simple to use, working more or less like the normal AD&D combat system but with certain modifiers and special cases unique to them. This is particularly true of grappling, which has a number of different moves detailed, each of which has further modifiers and effects.

I never used Moore's system, so I can't comment on how well it plays in practice. I suspect it probably works better than AD&D's official system, but not as well as others. I say that, because it includes a lot of specificity in certain areas (grappling, for example) that necessitates either a good memory or referring to the article to adjudicate. That's not a bad thing in itself; there are lots of rules in D&D that require reference to a rulebook to handle. However, I'll admit that I find it baffling that unarmed combat rules so often wind up being much more complicated than armed combat. Why is it that we can accept that all it takes to adjudicate an armored fighting man's attack against an opponent is a 1D20 roll compared to a chart, followed by a damage roll if successful but we demand saving throws and percentage chances and so forth if he wants to throw a punch or wrestle someone to the ground?