Surprises from Second Edition

So my Church of Al-Qadim (i.e. SundAD&D) game is up and running, and four brave souls are letting me run my dream Al-Qadim game (with a few modifications to fit their points of view). Its been a bit rough so far, because I forget how much work it can be to run a game, in this case stitching a number of Al-Qadim and non-AQ adventures together into a nice sandbox. So I haven't even given out all the background info I was hoping to, and might need to recommend a couple changes to characters still, but things are coming along fairly well I think.

However. I had a few surprises with the second edition rules.

First off: random wilderness encounters. I mucked it up a bit and ran the dungeon rules for the wilderness, but I'm not sure it affected all that much there. But afterwards when I sat down to really read through the random encounters rules I see this:

Unlike the dungeon tables, those used for the wilderness are not so neatly organized according to deadliness or power. One principle of wilderness adventuring (which makes it more dangerous for low-level characters) is that virtually any creature can be met—and often in sizeable numbers. This is a risk the players should be aware of before they take their characters out into the untracked forest.

This really hit home after killing one PC and rolling for a 10-hit die giant snapping turtle (6d4 damage with a successful bite means it would be virtually guaranteed to kill any of the PCs with one hit).

Second off: Death's door. After killing a PC, I used the obvious Hovering at Death's Door optional rule. I shocked myself a little, as PCs can't recover more than 1 hitpoint for a full day (and are basically useless that whole day). This is definitely a lot gritter than the rules in modern D&D where there are cantrips to stabilize people and warlords can yell people back on their feet. I definitely like it, but I wonder if there's a role for letting high-constitution characters get off a little easier. Though maybe it could just be you're officially dead when your negative HP hit your constitution score, rather than -10 for everyone. This rule also makes me feel a little justified with my proposed 5e house rule of assigning a level of exhaustion if you get to negative HP.  Second edition also made it a bit easier than first edition, where it can take a whole week of rest before the injured character can adventure again. I suspect we'll find the pace of healing a lot slower too unless the priestess uses all her spells for healing constantly. Makes me think a little about whether I want those second level healing spells in the game or not: priests can't heal as much if there are no healing spells at a particular level.

Third off: Crazy spells! The save for Charm Person might only be made in spans of weeks, not days or hours. I kind of knew this but didn't actually read it before we played. Animal Friendship is basically indefinite (though there's a limit to how many you can have at any given time), which we discovered right before we started. These are all basically hidden class features (much like Eldritch Blast & Hex or Hunter's Mark or Find Steed in 5e).

Fourth off: Ability scores! I didn't know dexterity didn't modify initiative (probably cause it was hard on group initiative which was the early standard). Instead it modifies your likelihood of being surprised (you might not surprise everyone in a group). Likewise both dexterity and wisdom have broad impacts on classes of saving throws (dodge-able and mind-affecting spells) and everyone gets a constitution bonus to saves versus poison (though dwarves and halflings get a bigger bonus for their race). I like some of this and you can see how it prefigures the fortitude, reflex, and will saves/defences of later editions.

Overall, I'm liking it. It definitely seems to be working for a gritter game, is easy-ish to modify some aspects, and it would be a bit harder to get 5e to do some of this as well as second edition seems to be (not to mention I have all this second edition stuff, I doubt they'll ever actually convert Al-Qadim to 5e).

Days and time in RPGs

There's a lot of hullabaloo going around these days about daily powers in RPGs. Now, of course, this is focused on D&D Next, but it really has a broader impact than that. Its hard to say if the hatred for daily powers is even a matter of play style or simulation versus narration, because what does a daily power represent? This is the whole five minute work day issue, but also ties into the quadratic wizards, linear fighters issue. I'll try to focus here on the five-minute workday though. I think the issue is slightly odd day-based game-design in a game where days aren't the right time frame. I've talked about this before, but mostly in the context of healing. I want to focus on daily powers here.

First, Daily powers have a long history in D&D. The magic system, of course, has daily re-charges. But the paladin, monk, and many classes from Oriental Adventures all use the game day as a unit of rest. Daily power refreshing is a stable of D&D, but does it have to be? Does a daily refresh lead to a five-minute workday?

Even in the early days of D&D, spells weren't quite "daily". There was an extensive spell memorization requirement. It took 15 minutes per spell level to memorize a spell. So a low level magic user might study her spell book for an hour or two, but a high level magic user might literally take days to memorize her full allotment of spells. To be precise, that's six hours for a seventh level magic user to memorize all her spells, sixteen and a half hours for a 12th level magic user, and almost 35 hours of study for a 20th level magic user. Surely if you followed these rules in first edition, a party can't just "go nova", rest for a day, and then return to cast its way through the next level of the dungeon. Five minute work day? Not exactly.

Overcoming the D&D 15-minute workday

The Heroes of the Lance didn't have a 15-minute workday.

One of the often cited problems of the magic system in D&D (along with many class powers) is that it suggests that adventurers should use all their powers to solve their problems, wait a day to regain them, and do it again. In my experience with D&D, we rarely had this sort of problem, though occasionally there were discussions about waiting another day to regain spells and such. This is generally a problem of thinking about the resources over the story, but I can see how it could really be a major problem for certain players.

A further complication with this problem is that it means some types of adventures (i.e. journeys) might be played completely differently than short delves or investigations. Part of this, in 3.5 and 4e where map-and-mini combats are the norm, means that DMs are less inclined to have many encounters a day during wilderness treks (or just star-wipe to the dungeon's entrance and skip the journey altogether) because of the set-up involved. But adventures based on longer units of time will have this issue.

I think there are a few ways to alleviate this problem, but not all of them are equally good: