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They’re wokifying the Forgotten Realms, changing Waukeen into Wokeen and making her the goddess of communism.

[vixensdungeon]

That’s pretty hot, but the armour list is missing the modifiers for different weapon types (less granular but still a thing in 2nd Edition).

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a game for a specific kind of pervert. And my tastes are very… singular.

🥵🥵🥵

[vixensdungeon]

One pet peeve I have is when people call Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms too samey. They're so different!

"But Vivian, you enchanting beguiler of maidens," you might say, "they're both just medieval fantasy settings!"

Yeah, imagine that. Medieval fantasy settings in the medieval fantasy game. Shocked Pikachu face dot tiff.

They're so different! And the way you start to understand the difference is by understanding the differences between their progenitors.

Gary Gygax was a wargamer. His setting grew partly out of his wargaming club's wargaming campaign (that's what the Great Kingdom is). And that shows. A big deal is made of political borders and army compositions. Because Greyhawk is the wargame setting!

Ed Greenwood is a storyteller. The Forgotten Realms got their start from stories he'd make up as a child. It's full of weird places and weird people with weird customs, bits of local news and funny made up words. Elminster isn't a political power like Mordenkainen, he's a sage. Because Forgotten Realms is the whimsical story setting!

So if you can't see beyond the fact that there's, like, elves and knights in both? Sounds like a skill issue.

[vixensdungeon]

Alright kids, time for more science. Let's see if this shakes things up a bit more than the last one. Welcome to the 90s, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition. There are again several ways to generate your ability scores. A major difference from 1st Edition is that some of these are just obviously more powerful than others.

Method I: 3d6 straight down the line. The books devote a weird amount of page space justifying this one. Best not to go into character generation with any preconceptions about what you'll play.

Method II: A slight upgrade from Method I, you roll 3d6 twice for each ability, keeping the highest total. You're mostly still letting the dice choose your character for you.

Method III: 3d6, but now you get to arrange them! You have more control over what you'll play, but good luck getting into the "elite" ones like paladin.

Method IV: 3d6 twelve times, pick the six highest and arrange as you like. Someone else will have to do the math on how this compares to the next one.

Method V: Again we have today's standard method, 4d6 (drop lowest) arranged as you please. Will it dominate the poll again?

Method VI: Now we're getting into almost the realm of point-buy. You start each ability at 8, then roll 7d6 and assign the results to your ability scores as you choose. You can't go over 18, though! So unless you rolled two 5's or a 4 and a 6, you can't have that hallowed number.

Player's Option: Skills & Powers added a bunch of new ones later.

Method VII: Point-buy is here. You have 75 points to spread between your abilities, making sure none are below 3 or above 8, and are within the limits of whatever race and class you've picked.

Method VIII: You get 24d6 to assign among your ability scores, no less than 3d6 and no more than 6d6 to each ability. Than you roll them and keep the three highest of each roll. This allows you to go for a certain class but doesn't guarantee it.

Method IX: Point-buy but with variability. You first roll on a table to see how many points you have to spend, but also what your maximum score is. Higher point totals allow for lower maximums!

Method X: This is just Method VII but it calls the points character points and allows warriors to spend points to get exceptional Strength. I'm really not sure what the point of it is unless you're playing a warrior class, and even then I might use VII and just hope for a good roll on exceptional Strength.

[vixensdungeon]

I really should've seen the result coming. Now, y'all might think Method I is really fast, and sure you get your numbers generated quickly. But this is AD&D. Now you're stuck fitting the numbers into the various racial and class ability requirements. Don't forget there are also maximums as well as minimums! That's why I voted for Method III, it's the only one that takes the wheel from me in terms of what kind of character I'm going to get, and I find that liberating.

Next up: 2nd Edition! The ones after that pretty much gave up on quirky ability generation methods, though 3rd Edition still has some.

Let's do a poll of little consequence, I'm curious about something. In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, it was suggested that players should not roll their abilities as they used to in the original game, 3d6 in order. Instead there were several alternative methods introduced, one of which is still in wide use today.

Method I: This one's gonna be familiar. You roll 4d6 and drop the lowest die, repeated six times. Then you arrange these numbers intoy your ability scores as you wish. Became the gold standard in 3rd Edition, although has since been overshadowed by point-buy (yuck).

Method II: This one also allows you to arrange your scores as you please, but you roll 3d6 twelve times and keep the six highest scores.

Method III: You roll 3d6 six times for Strength, picking the highest score. Repeat for the other five. Usually gives you better scores than straight 3d6 down the line but allows you to be surprised by what character you end up generating.

Method IV: This one probably takes a while. You roll 3d6 in order, old style. But you roll up twelve sets of six scores and choose one of the sets.

Unearthed Arcana later introduced one more.

Method V: Only usable for human characters. You pick your class before rolling, then roll a variable number of dice for each ability, keeping the highest three. For example, a fighter would roll 9d6 for Strength but only 3d6 for Intelligence. Rolls that are somehow below the class's minimum scores are raised to said minimum.

[vixensdungeon]

The basics of combat aren't that hard to figure out or use. You see what sort of armor your opponent is wearing to find out what your weapon's modifier against it is (this disregards magical bonuses), and then you figure that into your attack matrix compared to the opponent's actual AC to figure out what number you need to roll to hit. Then you either roll damage or don't.

What's actually sort of mystifying is initiative, which I'm still in the process of learning. Doesn't seem like combat really cares that much about there being a grand initiative order. If you're in melee with another character, you usually don't need to care about what anyone else's initiative is.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a game for a specific kind of pervert. And my tastes are very… singular.

🥵🥵🥵

[vixensdungeon]

Vivian reads The Strategic Review Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 1975)

The issue starts with an editorial by Brian J. Blume, talking about how Tactical Studies Rules may one day become a large company, but for now is very small and made up of passionate gamers.

Cavaliers and Roundheads Rules Additions: This is not super relevant to me, but it is an example of how this isn't a D&D magazine yet.

Questions Most Frequently Asked About Dungeons & Dragons Rules: This seems like it would be very useful, since the original rules were very much not clear about many things. There's an example of combat that is frankly quite wild. A lone Hero is fighting 10 orcs in a dungeon, and two of them grapple him. The Hero beats their dice roll so he tosses them aside, stunning them. As far as I can remember, none of this is mentioned in the actual rules. On the next round the Hero scores two hits against the orcs, and dice are rolled to randomly determine which ones take the damage. Also depending on the Hero's position relative to the orcs, he might not be able to use his shield to defend. What fun!

Creature Features: We see the first appearence of another classic monster: the roper! The rules for its rope attack references turns rather than rounds, which feels like an oversight because surely it can't take the roper ten minutes to drag its victim ten feet towards itself.

Rangers: Here we have one of the game's most idiosyncratic classes for the first time. Starting with two hit dice? Check. Both clerical and magic-user spells? Check. Defining giant class monsters as including kobolds? Check! It's so weird. I love it. One thing that I'm pretty sure they dropped in AD&D was that until reaching 8th level, a ranger gets 4 experience points for every 3 normally earned. Just for being awesome, I guess.

Medieval Pole Arms: You ever wanted to arm your troops with bill-guisarmes? Well now's your chance! The article details twelve different polearms for Chainmail, which of course makes the article useful for those perverts who use the system for running D&D combat.

And that's about it! There's also an article about Panzer Warfare detailing unit organizations for various countries.

[vixensdungeon]

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a game for a specific kind of pervert. And my tastes are very… singular.

🥵🥵🥵

[vixensdungeon]

Statting yourself out in dnd 5e, What are your stats?

Tool proficiencies: Computer

Sorry, I don't know how to even start giving myself ability scores and whatnot. Maybe I could figure out my Strength through carrying capacity, but I don't know how much I can bench.

[vixensdungeon]

I think we should bring back into vogue the sort of stupidly convoluted rules for determining weather that include rolling for whether a rainbow occurs.

[vixensdungeon]

Hello please reblog this if you're okay with people sending you random asks to get to know you better

[vixensdungeon]

Clerics of the olden days dominated in the field of necromancy for a simple reason: the power over life was their bread and butter and thus, reversed, was the power over death their crackers and mustard. Also, I don’t remember wizardy necromancy being very prominent in the first place before it became on of the areas of expertise for the Black Robe wizards of Dragonlance. Generic specialist wizards wouldn’t become a thing until 2nd Edition.

Hi! I'm trying to figure out what a necromancer in classic Rolemaster would/should look like. I see that there's a necromancy list for the evil cleric, but then also a necromancer profession in the second companion that doesn't include that list. But then other companions have professions that are listed as variants of the necromancer, like the macabre, but that have the evil cleric's necromancy spell list and none of the RP2 necromancer's spell lists. How should I make sense of this?

So, the Necromancer in Rolemaster Companion II has its own spell lists that allow it to fulfill the role of a classic necromancer. I think the best way to contextualize it is that while you can play an Evil Cleric as a Necromancer a Necromancer (a hybrid Channeling/Essence user) will be a more "classic" flavor of Necromancer while also being more versatile.

Why are Evil Clerics better at Necromancy than, say, Evil Magicians? Because Rolemaster was very much in conversation with early D&D and in early D&D (and in fact all the way up to D&D 3e) Clerics made better necromancers than Magic-Users/Wizards for some reason.

(Worth mentioning: in Rolemaster Unified Evil Magicians do get access to a bunch of Necromantic spell lists, so this isn't even consistent within Rolemaster.)

[vixensdungeon]

Their barbarous horny bard seducing the dragon

Our blessed attacking the darkness

[vixensdungeon]

Gonna start a new blog series with its own tag and everything. I'll try to at least sort of read every issue of the Dragon Magazine, and go through what's in them! Mostly this is just for me to check out what's in them, because that can sometimes be a bit tricky to look up. So let's get started! (the tag is going to be #vivianreadsdragon)

Vivian Reads The Strategic Review Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1975)

Yeah I know it's not Dragon, but it's close enough. Hush.

So back before Dragon, TSR had this newsletter called The Strategic Review. It was mostly about their own games, but not all the time! A big difference to the solely D&D-focused magazine of the future.

There's not really a cover to this one.

Creature Features: The first real content after an introduction and some TSR news is the first appearence of the mind flayer, "a super-intelligent, man-shaped creature with four tentacles by its mouth which it uses to strike its prey." If it strikes a foe with its tentacle, 1-4 turns later it'll kill the foe by sucking out its brain. This is honestly not perhaps as perilous as it seems because one turn equals ten rounds of combat. But if it manages to stun you with its mind blast, it can probably schlorp out your brain at its leisure.

After this there's some talk about new zines and upcoming conventions, as well as some errata for Tractics, TSR's WWII wargaming rules.

Castle & Crusade: This seems like a regular column by Gary Gygax. This time he talks about spears in man-to-man combat in Chainmail.

Solo Dungeon Adventures: Again by Gygax, this one presents a system for going on solo dungeon adventures in D&D. Solo wilderness adventures had already been possible if one owned the Outdoor Survival board game as the D&D rules suggested. What's presented is a series of tables for generating the shape of the dungeon as well as the contents of its rooms, to be rolled as the dungeon is explored by the solo player. Could also be used by the Referee to generate random dungeons when out of ideas!

And that's pretty much it. There's some stuff at the end about the future of the newsletter, as well as instructions for ordering games from TSR. The whole thing is only six pages so only so much content can be expected.

[vixensdungeon]

There are two wolves inside me. One wants to craft my own world, weave my own tapestry. The other wants to use a pre-existing setting because it appreciates the amount of craft and dedication that went into it.

"Why not do both?" This is D&D, both are a major time investment.

"Then why not play a lighter game meant for shorter campaigns?" Because that would defeat the purpose of making/using a stupidly intricate campaign world.

Now the wolves are making out sloppy style which isn't helping matters any.

[vixensdungeon]

Several children, some local, some from the refugee camp, went missing while playing together. The alderman is doing his best to keep the peace. Tensions rise…

A murder of crows circles the council tree. Grim tidings from the west…

[vixensdungeon]

Most tabletop roleplaying games at least to some extent try to create a certain type of story, one you can descibe them through other forms of media. For example, World Wide Wrestling is about doing a professional wrestling show. Monster of the Week is about doing a monster-of-the-week TV show. Another might be going for an epic fantasy novel, or a Ghibli movie, or superhero comics, or The Lost Boys, whatever.

But D&D at its genesis wasn't. Sure it was inspired by other media like swords & sorcery novels. But it wasn't trying to be those things in any real way. It was a wargame about plundering dungeons and exploring the wilderness, eventually getting into politics and warfare. And the only non-game media kinda like that is… inspired by D&D, at least to some extent. The first time the game really tried to be some other thing was, I think, Dragonlance, where it was doing a high fantasy epic.

Just a thought I had.