Tag Archives: THAC0

25 Years Ago I Posted My Wish List For D&D. How’s it Going?

At Gen Con in 1999 Wizards of the Coast revealed plans for a third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, scheduled for release in 2000. The upcoming release would preserve the “essential look and feel” of D&D while introducing intuitive changes like a unified d20 mechanic where high rolls meant success. Free t-shirts teased the upcoming changes.

During that 1999 announcement, I thought back to 1989 and how AD&D’s second edition rules addressed few of the game’s weaknesses. I remembered the disappointment that I had felt. I wrote, “Second edition had some virtues: It consolidated and organized the rules; it featured leaner, more readable writing; and it dumped some of the clumsier bits like giving distances in inches and dividing rounds into segments. But mostly the second edition just repackaged the hodgepodge of rules accumulated since the first edition. Almost all the game’s inconsistencies and clunky bits remained.”

Since 1974, the roleplaying games that followed D&D featured countless innovations that improved play, so in 1989, D&D’s rules looked as dated as a Model T. The 1999 announcement previewed something different: a third edition that redesigned the game from its foundation. That promise fired my excitement. I posted a wish list of the changes to D&D that I hoped to see. Now 25 years later, how many of my wishes came true? My original post appears in italics.

1. Unify the game mechanics.

Want to find out if you hit? Roll high on a d20. Want to jump a chasm? Roll low. Want to use a skill? Roll high. Want to use a thief skill? Roll low on a percentile. Listening at a door? Who can remember? Look it up. The third edition fails if it fails to make sense of this.

Third edition delivered the mechanic where players add an ability modifier and other adjustments to a d20 roll, and then compare the result against an AC or difficulty class to determine success. This mechanic remains at the heart of the game and ranks as the single biggest refinement over the game’s 50-year history.

Wish granted.

2. Smooth the power curve for magic user advancement.

Playing a 1st-level mage means spending your adventure waiting for your big moment when you can cast your single, feeble spell. The situation improves little until level 5 or so. Some say that this balances the class against the extreme power of high-level spellcasters. I say it’s bad design. Low-level casters should have more than one spell. If this unbalances the class, then reduce the power of high-level casters.

While third edition kept low-level magic users in the game by granting them bonus spells based on intelligence, wizards still surged in power at higher levels, eventually overshadowing other characters. Fourth edition D&D solved the problem, matching the power of different classes by giving every class the same allotment of daily and encounter projects. The uniformity left some gamers unhappy, and that included the designers. “I’d never wanted to use the exact same power structure for the wizard as every other class,” said lead designer Rob Heinsoo, “But we ran out of time, and had to use smaller variations to express class differences than I had originally expected.”

Fifth edition reverted to a magic system that resembled the Vancian magic of older editions, but the game made three changes that check the power of high-level wizards and other spellcasters.

  • Many spells now require their caster to maintain concentration to keep their magic going. Critically, a spellcaster can only concentrate on one spell at a time. Now rather than layering haste, invisibility, fly, blur, resistance, and a few others, a caster must pick one.
  • Spells cast by higher-level casters no longer increase in power simply based on the caster’s level. Now, for example, to increase the damage of a fireball, a wizard needs to spend a higher-level spell slot.
  • Compared to earlier editions, spellcasters gain fewer spells per day, and much fewer high-level spells. In the third edition, a 20th-level wizard could cast four spells of every level including 8th and 9th level. In fifth edition, a 20th-level wizard gets 14 fewer spells per day, and only one 8th- and one 9th-level spell. Sure, the fifth-edition caster enjoys more flexibility, but far fewer slots.

The damaging cantrips introduced in fourth edition also let low-level wizards do something magical every turn, rather than spending most combats flinging darts like exactly zero magic users in our fantasy imagination.

Wish granted.

Related: How fifth edition keeps familiar spells and a Vancian feel without breaking D&D

3. Drop THAC0.

To the folks boasting that they have no problem with THAC0: Don’t spend too much time lauding your math skills. We all can do the addition and subtraction in our heads, but the system remains a clumsy and counter-intuitive vestige of D&D’s wargame roots.

In drafts of the original D&D game, a 1st-level fighting man could figure the lowest d20 roll needed to hit by subtracting the target’s AC from 20. New fighters needed a 20 “to hit armor class zero,” and with each level they gained, their THAC0 improved by 1. The to-hit tables that reached print lacked the same simplicity, but descending armor classes remained. So when the second edition dropped “attack matrix” tables in favor of THAC0 numbers, the game returned to its roots. Still, THAC0 used negative numbers for especially tough ACs, made mental math more difficult, and forced a counter-intuitive concept on players.

Second-edition designer Steve Winter said, “There were all kinds of changes that we would have made if we had been given a free hand to make them—an awful lot of what ultimately happened in the third edition. We heard so many times, ‘Why did you keep armor classes going down instead of going up?’ People somehow thought that that idea had never occurred to us. We had tons of ideas that we would have loved to do, but we still had a fairly narrow mandate that whatever was in print should still be largely compatible with the second edition.”

Third edition dropped THAC0 and descending armor classes in favor of a target to-hit number and to-hit bonuses players added to their roll. Suddenly, the game became more consistent and intuitive.

Wish granted.

Related: The Dungeons & Dragons Books that Secretly Previewed Each New Edition

4. Give complete rules for magic schools and specialization.

The second edition mentions magic users who specialize, but the core rules fail to give rules for magical specialists other than the example of illusionists.

Third edition included rules for wizards specializing in each school of magic. The 2014 version of fifth edition built on the idea by giving specialists abilities specific to their school.

Wish granted.

5. Give rules for different clerics for different deities.

The second edition mentions variant priests for other deities, but the core rules fail to give rules for priests other than clerics. Why shouldn’t a priest of a god of the hunt use a bow? Why shouldn’t the priest of a thunder god be able to cast a lightning bolt? Why should the rules force the DM to answer these questions?

In the third edition, clerics chose two domains such as the air and war domains suitable for a god of thunder. Domains brought extra powers and domain spells like chain lightning. By fifth edition, cleric domains turned into full subclasses with accompanying abilities. Alas, gods of the hunt still lack support.

Wish granted.

6. Make spell statistics consistent.

Playing spells in AD&D either demands that you memorize the details of each spell or that you waste game time thumbing through the PHB. Why can’t most ranged spells have consistent ranges? Why can’t most area-of-effect spells affect the same area? Similar spells should be grouped and should share similar numbers for range, duration, area of effect and so on.

The fourth edition of D&D granted this wish, but I also learned that part of D&D’s charm came from spells like polymorph, phantasmal force, and wish that no cautious game designer would pen. Unlike earlier editions, fourth edition provided spells with effects that confined their effects to grid and to a tightly defined set of conditions. Often spells no longer worked outside of combat. Even fireballs became square.

These changes simplified the dungeon master’s role by eliminating judgment calls over debates like whether a wizard could toss an earthworm above their foes, polymorph it into a whale, and squash everyone flat. The fourth-edition designers aimed to make the dungeon master’s role easy—something a computer could handle. But this approach discouraged the sort of ingenious or outrageous actions that create unforgettable moments. D&D plays best when it exploits a dungeon master’s ability to handle spells, actions, and surprises that no computer game allows.

Although fifth edition returned to spells that demand a DM’s judgment, the spells feature more careful and uniform descriptions than in the game’s early editions. Credit this improvement to a card game.

When the designers of Magic: The Gathering faced the problem of bringing order to countless cards, they used templated text: they described similar game rules with consistent wording imposed by fill-in-the-blank templates. Today, the patterns of templated text appear throughout modern D&D’s rules.

Early in the development of third-edition D&D, Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR. Skaff Elias had served as a designer on several early Magic sets and ranked as Senior Vice President of Research and Development. Skaff felt that the upcoming D&D edition could fix “sloppiness in the rules” by using templated text. Skaff and Wizard’s CEO Peter Adkison told the D&D design team to switch the spell descriptions to templated text, but the team kept resisting his directives.

Eventually, the D&D team readied the release of a playtest document that still lacked templated text. They claimed rewriting all the spell descriptions according to formula would prove impossible because hundreds of spells would need templating in 48 hours to meet their delivery deadline. Nonetheless, Adkison and Skaff took the challenge themselves, working through the night to rewrite the spells and meet the deadline. Even after that heroic effort, the rules document that reached playtesters lacked the templated descriptions from the CEO and the Design VP. The design team had simply ignored their bosses’ hard work.

The failure infuriated Adkison. He lifted Jonathan Tweet to the head of the third-edition team. Designer Monte Cook remembers Adkison’s new directive: “If Jonathan says something it’s as though I said it.” Unlike the TSR veterans on the rest of the team, Tweet had started his career by designing the indie roleplaying game Ars Magica and the experimental Over the Edge. As a member of the D&D team, he convinced the team to adopt some of the more daring changes in the new edition.

7. Make spell power consistent.

Spells of the same level suffer from wildly different power in game play. This means that each spell level includes a few powerful spells that see constant play and many weaker spells that are forgotten. Worse, spells like stoneflesh pose game balance problems.

As long as D&D adds spells, the game will fall short of making their power consistent. The 2024 version of the fifth-edition rules makes changes to nearly 200 spells from 2014. Some changes affect power levels by changing their damage or healing dice, by adding concentration, or even by substituting a different spell for an old name. The changes bring the power level of spells closer to other spells at the same level. Still, silvery barbs remains unchanged even though players widely regard it as broken. And the completely rewritten conjure minor elementals spell joins the list of broken spells often nerfed by house rules.

Related: How new changes created the 4 most annoying spells in Dungeons & Dragons and The 3 Most Annoying High-Level Spells in D&D

8. Shorten one-minute rounds.

Who besides Gary Gygax accepted minute-long rounds as plausible? I recently reread the second edition’s rationalization of why someone can accomplish so little in a minute, but found the explanation as silly as ever. While the length of time simulated by a round makes little difference on actual play, I still prefer some sense underlying the mechanics.

Original D&D specified that a 10-minute turn consisted of 10 combat rounds, making rounds one minute long. Nonetheless, the D&D Basic Set (1977) specified 10-second combat rounds. Editor J. Eric Holmes based the set’s shorter round on house rules like Warlock and The Perrin Conventions common among his circle of California gamers. The West Coast community tended to rely on combat experience earned in fights staged by the Society for Creative Anachronism. To them—and to most gamers—10 seconds seemed like a reasonable time for an exchange of blows. Meanwhile, Gygax stood loyal to D&D’s wargaming roots and favored the 1-minute rounds that let D&D fights mix with Chainmail miniature battles where armies of combatants needed minutes to mount attacks. In the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, Gygax spends a quarter page defending 1-minute rounds against critics who argued that in a minute real archers could fire a dozen arrows and real fencers could score several hits. The second-edition Player’s Handbook dutifully spends four paragraphs justifying the 1-minute round by explaining how a character could easily need a full minute to drink a potion. So much for drinking a potion as a bonus action! When the third edition switched to 6-second rounds, few mourned the 1-minute round.

Wish granted.

Related: How D&D Got an Initiative System Rooted in California House Rules

9. Simplify experience.

Totaling experience shouldn’t require a spreadsheet. Why bother having exacting formulas for combat experience when non-combat experience remains largely up to the DM’s judgment? Newer games use extremely abstract experience systems because calculating experience adds no fun to a game.

Unlike the original D&D and AD&D rules, second edition avoids setting a standard experience point (XP) system for the game. Instead, the Dungeon Master’s Guide reads like a draft presenting two methods: Half the text suggests that DMs improvise awards based on how well players foster fun, show ingenuity, and achieve story goals. Half suggests DMs award XP for beating monsters. The book cautions against awarding XP for treasure. “Overuse of this option can increase the tendency to give out too much treasure.” In the end, the text offers little guidance. “The DM must learn everything he knows about experience points from running game sessions.” Obviously, when I griped about point totals that required a spreadsheet as if that were the only option, I forgot the current edition’s indecisive XP rules.

In practice, the best experience system matches the style of play that gamers want.

For games centered on looting dungeons, D&D’s original XP system worked brilliantly by rewarding players for claiming treasure and escaping the dungeon with as much as they could carry.

For games focused on stories that resemble an epic fantasy tale, awarding experience for overcoming obstacles works better. This builds on the essentials of storytelling where characters face obstacles to reach their goals. Most second-edition players chose to award XP for defeating monsters. This method based XP awards on the game’s most frequent and quantifiable obstacles, namely monsters, so the method avoided relying on arbitrary decisions. However, it fails to account for games without much combat or where smart players reach goals without a fight.

Fifth edition offers an XP system based on beating monsters while suggesting awards for overcoming non-combat challenges.

As a flexible alternative to grant XP for overcoming obstacles, DMs award XP to parties when the reach their goals—the Dungeon Master’s Guide calls these goals “milestones.” Many DMs skip the point totals by simply granting levels for meeting goals.

For gamers who stick to points, the totals still add up to thousands, high enough numbers to merit a spreadsheet. Those high numbers remain as a vestige of the original D&D game where one gold piece brought one experience point.

Related: XP Versus Milestone Advancement—At Least We Can All Agree That Awarding XP Just for Combat Is Terrible

10. Publish fewer rule books.

All the optional rule books make the second edition too sprawling, too heavy, too expensive, and too intimidating. Plus, if you use all the options, then you hardly play the same game.

Ever since TSR Hobbies learned that D&D fans would buy books of campaign lore and character options, the D&D team faced a temptation to publish too many D&D books. As sales sagged in the second-edition era, TSR tried to bolster revenue with more and more books. When the third edition’s sales boomed, Wizards of the Coast tried to capitalize by publishing more books.

But even the most eager gamers can only spend or play so much, so inevitably those additional books meet indifferent players and languish on store shelves. Rows of D&D books in game stores tend to intimidate potential new players who wonder how much they need to buy to start playing and how much they need to master to join existing players. The editions of popular roleplaying games typically end with game store shelves glutted with product. By fourth edition, the D&D team knew this pattern, but they still published hardcovers almost monthly.

Fifth edition stands as the first to stick to a slower release schedule that may avoid the risk of overwhelming fans with products. Until 2018, Wizards of the Coast only published three books a year. Still, the number of D&D hardcovers released annually has climbed to four, then five. Even as a D&D enthusiast, I no longer find time to play or even read every release. Count the wish as granted, but perhaps only through 2021 when five books a year started reaching stores.

Related: How the end of lonely fun leads to today’s trickle of D&D books

11. Make healing spells consistent with the hit point concept.

I can accept the rational behind the gain in hit points a character receives with each level: A 10th-level fighter cannot actually survive 10 times more injury than he could at 1st level. Instead, his combat skills enable him minimize the damage from a stab that once would have run him through, so instead of a fatal wound, the 10th-level fighter suffers a minor cut.

Fine. But why does a cure light wounds spell have a negligible effect on the 10th-level fighter when the same spell can bring a 1st-level fighter from death’s door to perfect health?

I admit this issue is more of a peeve than a serious problem with the system, but a bit of consistency would make the rationale for hit point advancement much easier to accept.

Fourth edition granted this wish. In the fourth edition, rested characters gained a limited number of healing surges, and then healing magic let characters trade surges for healing. Because the number of points healed by a surge grew with a character’s hit point total, magic like healing potions cured wounds in the same proportion at every level. Fourth edition’s treatment of hit points and healing ranks as one of the edition’s best innovations, but it needed the edition’s hit point math to work, so fifth edition returned a scheme where a 1st-level cure light spell offers minimal healing to a high-level character.

Related: D&D’s Designers Can’t Decide Whether Characters Must Rest for Hit Points and Healing, but You Can Choose

Secret D&D Games, Sharpshooters, Baby Orcs, and More From the DM David’s Comment Section

Time for another visit to the comment section. At the end, one reader tells a true story of how the Satanic panic drove a group’s Dungeons & Dragons games into secret, and what happened when concerned citizens learned of the underground game.

Strong Moral Dilemmas in D&D and the Unwanted Kind that Keeps Appearing

In Strong Moral Dilemmas in D&D and the Unwanted Kind that Keeps Appearing, I contrasted the moral dilemmas that reveal D&D characters against the baby-orc dilemma that dungeon masters should avoid.

Dan wrote, “The thing with the baby monsters from Keep on the Borderlands is that Gary Gygax never intended for the to be a moral dilemma. He assumed that all party members would be agreed on cleaning the place out, paladins included. When asked about it on the Internet in later years, he was somewhat incredulous that it even came up, stating that a properly-played paladin should view justice from a medieval perspective and would take the stance that ‘nits beget lice.’

Unlike Gary Gygax, today’s players often see humanoids as reflections of humanity. So tarring entire races of humanoids as irredeemably corrupt and worthy of extermination draws troubling parallels to the real treatment of real human groups.

Rasmusnord01 wrote, “I think of three things that can help avoid making the ‘baby-orc issue’ into a problem. (1) Have a leader of the group. In the hands of the right player, a designated leader can help resolve situations and keep the discussion from taking too long. (2) Avoid allowing mercy to come back to bite the players. (3) Make ‘evil’ humanoids more nuanced.

Teos “alphastream” Abadia wrote, “A friend of mine who used to write for Living Greyhawk said to me once that a great adventure teaches you something about your character. Over the years, that advice has stood the test of time for me. Great adventures help me better see my character’s personality and where they stand, and touch me emotionally or at a visceral level in some way.

Since that time, I’ve tried to write adventures where decisions (often but not always moral dilemmas) help you understand your character better. Maybe you swap bodies with someone else, so you see yourself from the outside and separate your personality from your frame. Who are you? Maybe you bring a spirit into yourself. What part of that personality do you accept or reject, and what is it displacing? Maybe you face a tough choice. Do you bring a child into battle if that child is an artifact? Do you sacrifice a few to save many? Maybe you have to choose between a sure thing that isn’t so sweet, and worse odds for a chance at something better?

Three Reasons the Ecology of Monsters Can Make Creatures Worse

In Three Reasons the Ecology of Monsters Can Make Creatures Worse, I suggested that framing monsters as natural creatures sometimes stifled the imagination. Lots of readers agreed but reminded me that developing monsters as creatures in nature can also fire the imagination.

It’s utterly absurd to suggest that natural creatures can’t inspire stories, because they have,” wrote greatwyrmgold. “And only slightly less silly to suggest that magical creatures can be more evocative than natural ones.

This article presents a false dichotomy between the fantastic and the naturalistic, between the magical and the dull. Creatures can be magical and dull when they pull from the same library of stock monster attributes as every half-arsed fantasy story in the past 60 years, but they can be fantastic and naturalistic with a bit of effort by the author.

Why Dungeon & Dragons Dropped Assassins and Renamed Thieves

An avalanche of comments to Why Dungeon & Dragons Dropped Assassins and Renamed Thieves noted that Assassins shouldn’t be killing for free and certainly not targeting their allies.

For instance, Carl Torvik wrote, “Assassins may the ONLY evil character you should allow in your campaign. They kill only when hired to kill. They have no reason to attack their party. They come with ready-made attachments to the NPCs and the world (guilds, contacts, associates of former targets, etc.) And they have a reason to want a gang of people around to protect them and occasionally even help them on a difficult hit.

Alphastream told how, in the 80s, friction between thieves and other evil characters broke up his game.

In my very first campaigns we had two players where one would play a thief. Before long, he would start stealing from us. The other would then back him up and threaten. It was a source of friction in our Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, but when we played Barrier Peaks, it escalated. Three of us tried to stop it and three wanted the freedom to do whatever they pleased. We separated, adventuring separately. That killed the game.

I can now look back on those events and understand what this was truly about. D&D was for me, as with many players, an escape from the social challenges of my normal life. When evil characters began to push their agenda, our D&D game ceased to become a collaborative escape from the everyday and became again a social challenge to which we had to respond. Bullying was again in my life, as were systems (here, the DM) that failed to make life better.

The worst problem with evil PCs or thieves stealing from fellow party members isn’t the lost items or even a death. It’s the impact it has on us as individuals, and how it upsets the very reason we came together to play and tell stories. We can introduce aspects that allow for party conflict, but when doing so we should look to find ways to mitigate that at the player level, or the game will suffer.

Quiiliitiila wrote, “Players who choose to create characters and then play them disruptively are to blame, not the classes. Any player who hides behind the class as a defense for their toxic actions is wrong and probably not suited to play in depth characters in the first place.

In the end, D&D and AD&D may have started as a simple hack and slash board game, but it evolved into a truly unique role-playing game where you get to experience adventure as a wizard or a cleric or even a blackguard! How you choose to play those characters is up to you, it has never been dictated by the rulebooks or class descriptions.

Alphastream agreed, but wrote, “As a designer I can choose to write mechanics that either bring people together for collaborative play or cause them to fight each other and disrupt party unity. I know which one I would rather see RPG companies design.

David’s article is examining how important names and other design elements are for play. They are extremely important. Often more important than we may realize. Any individual player or DM may or may not react to the design, but on the whole we are creating incentives for certain types of play. Assassins might be terrible at one table and not a problem at another, but what is more important is how they play overall. Overall, they caused problems.

When I design professionally, I’m often doing so for organized play, where I get to see how the design impacts hundreds to thousands of players. I can often see the impacts at a large convention and gain a really fascinating view into how the design works. Incentives that seem unimportant can end up being very important at that macro level. It’s good to go back and examine whether the design is encouraging heroic play, camaraderie, positive escapism, and other elements that routinely are cited by players as reasons to play D&D. Any individual group can always choose otherwise, but the overall design of D&D should point its incentives in that direction, because that’s what D&D is about.

Alert reader Dan realized that much of this post revisited a five-year-old topic. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense to link back to your previous post on the topic instead of copying the first half nearly verbatim, picture included?

Perhaps, but only about 1% of readers will follow a link to an earlier post. Reviving older posts sometimes helps me offer something every week. Many more folks read this blog now than did five years ago. Since few new readers browse my older posts, an old topic can still find interest.

I want to thank Dan and other dedicated readers who show enough interest in my posts to notice 5-year-old material. Your enthusiasm keeps me writing.

Sarah and Kaitlin Howard pictured with Lolth

Sarah M Howard wrote in to identify herself in the post’s photograph. “The drow priestesses in the picture are Sarah and Kaitlin Howard.” Thanks Sarah. Your costumes and the life-sized Lolth combine for an unforgettable photo.

Why Gary Gygax Added Unrealistic Hit Points, Funny Dice, and Descending AC to D&D

The post Why Gary Gygax Added Unrealistic Hit Points, Funny Dice, and Descending AC to D&D brought up THAC0, which led Erïch Jacoby-Hawkins to offer a bit of history.
Although THAC0 officially became a part of AD&D with the 2nd edition rule books, it was already being incorporated in some of the pre-2nd Edition modules in the mid to late 1980s, for example, modules I9 Day of Al’Akbar and I11 Needle from 1986 & 1987, respectively. I think THAC0 may have appeared in Dragon and Dungeon magazines around that time. The mechanic worked equally well in 1st as 2nd edition, as the AC system didn’t change, and the principle of the to-hit tables remained the same.

Perhaps I should have included Day of Al’Akbar in The Dungeons & Dragons Books that Secretly Previewed Each New Edition. Can anyone identify the first appearance of the term THAC0?

Why Did So Many Classic Adventures Come From 7 Years of D&D’s 45-Year History

The post Why Did So Many Classic Adventures Come From 7 Years of D&D’s 45-Year History told how the outsized attention and influence of D&D’s earliest adventures elevated their reputation.

Bryce Lynch parsed a word choice in Dungeon magazine’s list of 30 greatest adventures. “I note that the use of the word ‘greatest’ avoids the implication that they are actually good.” Bryce pens a series of entertainingly cranky reviews where he holds adventures to impossibly high standards. His consistently looks for three qualities: “Usability at the table. Interactivity. Evocative.

The lack of accolades given to more recent adventures led to my list of the 10 greatest adventures since 1985.

The 10 Greatest D&D Adventures Since 1985

The author of number 10, The Gates of Firestorm Peak (1996), offered more on his classic adventure. Bruce Cordell wrote, “Thanks for the review! Much appreciated. If you’re interested, I wrote about designing the Gates of Firestorm Peak a few months ago, and the associated creation of The Far Realm (which certainly got its name in Gates, but which I further highlighted in later adventures to strengthen its importance).” See http://brucecordell.blogspot.com/2019/03/origin-of-far-realm-in-d.html.

Teos “alphastream” Abadia praised number 6, Madness at Gardmore Abbey (2011) and recommended a follow up. “I love this adventure, especially in how it showcased how varied 4E adventures could be. I would also mention the prequel, Siege of Gardmore Abbey by Steve Townshend. Here, Steve takes us back in time to when the abbey first fell. It has a strong innovative take on a prequel with a variety of fun encounters built for a convention one-shot. It also has some super-fun pregens, some of which have great conflicts that are revealed during play. It’s amazing design. Siege can be found in Dungeon 210.

Teos also commented on number 5, Dead Gods (1997). “It’s also worth comparing it to other adventures of it’s time. It’s incredible how often adventures that should be amazing/fantastic (such as nearly every Planescape adventure) manage to be mundane. ‘Sure, you are in Sigil, now here is a guard duty assignment.’ More adventures need to really deliver on high fantasy.

I liked Vecna Lives for toying with some of those concepts (the opening scene is insane, the advice on running horror is incredible), but it stops short of attaining what it could. Same with Ruins of Castle Greyhawk. In 5E, Dungeon of the Mad Mage has some very strong parts, especially given the source material.

I admire that even the first-level adventures for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG include big, fantastic elements. Those adventures avoid caravan duty and rats in the cellar.

Responding to my list of The 10 Greatest Dungeons & Dragons Adventures Since 1985, Andrew wrote, “A key to the (good) 5e adventures is the Internet communities and third-party add-ons. By the book Tomb of Annihilation is good but falls apart here and there, but thanks to Facebook groups, Reddit and the great companion PDFs sold you can customize it with great ideas and fix weak bits really easily. Doing that back in the 1e days was quite daunting. Even a great module like Barrier Peaks was nearly impossible for me to run as a kid without any help.

Wraithmagus challenged my list’s methodology. “I am bewildered why you would create a list like this based on POPULARITY of all things, which is by far the least useful metric. If such a list is going to be useful, surely, they should be overlooked adventures, so that readers can have their attentions drawn to buried gems. Saying ‘Let me tell you about crap you already know about just so everyone can argue about how overrated it is is as unhelpful as it comes.

Although I did weigh each adventure’s reputation in my ratings, I consider that different from rating popularity. In the end, I cast my own judgement. My ratings won’t match anyone else’s, but a list like this needs to track the opinions of D&D fans closely enough to seem authoritative. As for finding buried gems, many readers had never heard of classics like Dead Gods and Night’s Dark Terror.

In Making the List of 10 Greatest D&D Adventures After 1985, I considered future lists of great adventures for high levels, from Dungeon magazine, and branded for a campaign setting.

Alphastream suggested some candidates. “The greatest high-level adventures from any era: I have to go with Throne of Bloodstone. While the design in many places is not exceptional, for a 1988 adventure it does a great job of showcasing how a truly awesome high-level plane-spanning adventure can work. It was very enjoyable as the end of my college campaign and took us to level 32-36 in AD&D play!

The greatest adventures branded for a campaign setting: For Dark Sun, Freedom does one of the best jobs at capturing a setting and introduces player well to the momentous events in the boxed set with the fall of Kalak. The same is true of the adventure included in the boxed set, which captures outdoor survival very well. Play those two and you get what Dark Sun is. Compare this to Dragonlance (or later Dark Sun adventures), where you feel like you get a bad version of the novels while the real stars are off doing the cool work.

Queen of the Demonweb Pits Opened Dungeons & Dragons to the Planes

The post Queen of the Demonweb Pits Opened Dungeons & Dragons to the Planes led Thomas Christy to write, “Great article! Check out these amazing maps by Jon Pintar! If I get to run this in the future, they will be great!

Alphastream recalled playing Q1 in high school. “The dungeon was very so-so. It did feel like a boring zoo or even a boring dungeon until the final level. It was then fantastic. The final battle was brutal. The party had a character with psionics… and Lolth does too. The old psionic combat rules had never been used until then. We looked them up, and basically everything happens in the first segment (part of a round). Party walks into Lolth’s room, psionic character drops dead as Lolth handily wins, and regular combat ensues! That was exciting!

Sharpshooters Are the Worst Thing in D&D, But That Speaks Well of Fifth Edition

A few readers responded to Sharpshooters Are the Worst Thing in D&D by describing the historical superiority of archers.

Todd Ellner wrote, “Think about it in the real world. The horse nomads of Central Asia from the Scythians to the Mongols pretty much swept all before them and replaced the style of warfare wherever they went. The life of the samurai wasn’t ‘The Way of the Sword.’ It was ‘The way of the Horse and Bow.’ Missile weapons are that much of a game-changer.

Although I like the historical perspective, D&D isn’t history, but a game where characters do fantastic deeds for the fun of players. A focus on fun leads designers like Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax to favor unrealistic, but fun things like hit points over realistic, not-fun things like sepsis and sucking chest wounds. Fifth edition pairs the intrinsic advantages of ranged attacks with the game’s two most overpowered feats to encourage situations where the sharpshooter player has fun and everyone else wonders why they showed up.

Some commenters raised the canard that archers tend to be “squishy,” lightly armored and vulnerable to attack. In this edition, fully-armored fighters also make the most efficient sharpshooters.

Some compared the damage dealing of sharpshooters to spellcasters. Certainly, spellcasters can shine for their ability to clear hordes of foes and for their utility. But most spellcasters really are squishy, and their spell slots force players to watch their resources.

Some cited certain melee fighting styles that can approach the damage output of sharpshooters. But melee types foster interesting fights because they stand in harm’s way and must move to attack. Meanwhile, monsters can surround their boss with enough protection for the mastermind to act before the barbarian can cut a path. Sharpshooters just turn potentially interesting encounters into point, shoot, and now it’s over.

Readers who see the trouble with sharpshooters offered advice to managing the archetype.

LordJasper wrote, “Start enforcing ammunition tracking. A lot of DMs let players get away with ‘forgetting’ to track their arrows and crossbow bolts. Make archers keep track of every bolt they fire.” The limit comes when archers capable of emptying a quiver in just a few rounds need to carry every missile.

Unfortunately, a 1 gp quiver of 20 arrows only weighs a pound, so players will argue they can easily carry 20 quivers totaling 400 arrows. Dungeon masters who rule otherwise will UNFAIRLY DESTROY an entire character concept—or so players will say.

This is where game mechanics poorly reflects reality,” Jason Oldham wrote. “Drawing on personal experience, an average quiver MIGHT hold 20 arrows. They are bulky and need to be packaged with at least some consideration for the delicate bits. Bolts are slightly more accommodating but only slightly. I personally enforce some rather strict house rules as far as how much a player can pack around and how readily accessible equipment may be. But that’s just me, I like to make my players suffer just a little bit.

Some readers suggested spells that hinder archers.

Oniguma wrote, “I’ve found one little, often overlooked spell that does wonders to diminish the potential of ranged attackers: Slow.

Sapphire Crook elaborated. “Slow is a rare spell that doesn’t require sight. You just pick six targets in a pretty large cube, and they have to pick a god and pray. Fireball can kill, but Slow can save lives.

Eric Bohm suggested Wind Wall. “‘Arrows, bolts, and other ordinary projectiles launched at targets behind the wall automatically miss.’ I don’t like using it because it is such a hard shut down, but it is useful for letting the rest of the party contribute.

The prospect of using Wind Wall against a party dominated by archers excites me. Still, many commenters blamed any trouble with sharpshooters on DMs who fail to prepare custom encounters to thwart the archetype. I prefer to avoid D&D games where the players bring scissors, and then the DM always prepares rocks. That approach creates an adversarial dynamic and robs the game of variety. DMs who run Adventurers League can add total cover, monsters, and hit points as I suggested in the post, but we can’t remake adventures to vex archers.

Number Monsters to Stop Wasting Time Finding Them on the Battle Map

In response to my advice that DMs number monsters to stop wasting time finding them on the battle map, Scott suggested using a 3D printer to make numbered bases that cup miniature figures.

The Two D&D Feats Everyone Loves (For Someone Else’s Character)

My post on The Two D&D Feats Everyone Loves (For Someone Else’s Character) ranked the popularity of D&D’s feats.

The relatively low popularity of Resilience surprised some commenters. For spellcasters who try to stay clear of attack, Resilience (Constitution) beats the most popular feat, War Caster. By the way, according to the letter of D&D rules, if you take Resilience for one stat, you can’t take it again for a second, different ability.

The popularity rankings of feats invited comparisons to each feat’s actual power. Thinkdm wrote, “Here’s some poll results I ran to break them down into tiers. You see the ‘broken’ feats aren’t even the most popular. Likely because they are suited to specific play styles. But, it’s still interesting.

Little-known D&D classics: Fez

In reply to Little-known D&D classics: Fez, Matt wrote, “I’ve never been to Gen Con, and in fact only came to AD&D when I was in middle school in the early 1990s. I found the Fez adventures about ten years ago when I was combing Amazon for out-of-print, non-Wizards of the Coast, and pre-d20 game materials.

They immediately changed my world.

I would spend the next decade reading, absorbing, and preparing to run Fez with my own group of gamers whose frame of reference for D&D only begins around the year 2000 or so. I’m happy to report that we finished the first Fez adventure back in May, and I’m preparing to go into Fez II, which is really the best in the series, in defiance of the law of sequels.

When I ran Fez I, I modified the game to accommodate some of their expectations: The players saw their characters’ stats, but they began as amnesiacs. Still, even with that change, the Fez formula engaged them immediately.

Fez has become one of our most memorable adventures. I highly recommend that anyone out there with a gaming group pick up these gaming classics and run them.

The True Story of the Cthulhu and Elric Sections Removed from Deities & Demigods

The True Story of the Cthulhu and Elric Sections Removed from Deities & Demigods prompted a funny exchange.

Joel Orsatti: “Any idea why the Finnish mythos was dropped?

Brent Butler: “They may have simply run out of K’s.

More likely, TSR dropped the mythos to fit the abbreviated book within a smaller number of signatures—groups of pages printed together.

The Media Furor that Introduced the “Bizarre Intellectual Game” of Dungeons & Dragons to America

In The Media Furor that Introduced the “Bizarre Intellectual Game” of Dungeons & Dragons to America, I explained why Gen Con in the 80s came to ban live-action games, and the change in attitude since. Spoiler: Today, some folks accept that playing D&D can prove beneficial.

Alphastream (again. Thanks, Teos!) wrote, “I wish I had a screen shot of an old post on the Wizards of the Coast forums by Mike Mearls during the 4E era. 4E era, mind you! That’s long after this event. In it, he briefly mentioned that when WotC was looking at the design for 4E organized play, there was a push to eliminate LARP and town-fair style play. It was due to the effect it has on the perception of the game.

I mention this not because I think WotC was necessarily wrong. (Okay, they were, but they were trying to gain acceptance for the game.) I mention it because LARPing was still seen as problematic as recently as 4E. And, because it is ironic that what has helped RPGs become mainstream during the 5E period is acting, both on livestreams and in media (Stranger Things, etc.). It is now very welcome to have people in costume, and WotC staff get in costume for livestreams and big events such as the Descent marketing event. It’s a remarkable change that has come only very recently.

Timothy Park shared his positive tale of clear-headed parents, pastors, and teachers seeing the game’s value and encouraging play.

There were a great many people using their intelligence and common sense and noticing and saying good things about D&D. They and their reasonable perspective won out. If it hadn’t, well, would you have this blog?

That story, the positive side, needs more press than the sensational bits.

As for the sensational bits, I finish this post by relaying the account from chacochicken.

My hometown was a regular hotbed of D&D and Satanic panic. In fact, the dangers of D&D was still a contentious point there until not that long ago.

I come from a small town in rural West Virginia. Evangelicalism had completely overtaken the town in the 50’s and 60’s. My grandparents moved there in 1952 and were not church going types. Strike one. My mom was an unwed mother. Strike two. My uncle got the Holmes basic set while he was in the navy and introduced my friends and I to the game. Strike two and half. It was an open secret that my navy vet uncle was gay. Strike Five.

To set the scene, it was summer 1986 and my friends and I (fortunately most kids don’t care much about the above nonsense) played a ton of D&D, but we had to keep it a complete secret from basically everyone. Our town was small enough that everyone mostly knew everyone’s business. A ring of people were in charge. The bank manager was the pastor. The pastor’s brother was the county sheriff and the high school baseball coach. Nepotism all the way down. Well these folks decided that they were going to control the behavior of the whole town more or less.

So we played that summer. A few other kids knew but none of our parents at that point. We were known to have played before, see above uncle, so everyone was wary of us. My friend Dustin, yes his name was Dustin, his parents ransacked his room and found his character sheets, dice, and some D&D ads torn our from his comic books. I’m not exaggerating, they burned all of his toys, all of them, on the front yard as he basically had a nervous breakdown. He was not allowed to speak to us again and they couldn’t risk us meeting at school so the next year he was home-schooled.

We were torn as to whether to play anymore or not because we were afraid of the possibility of punishment. Our defiance won out and we kept playing in the loft of an old barn next to my uncle’s house. He vouched for us playing regular old board games, fishing, and running around in the woods.

Then terror struck. A dog went missing somewhere close. Then a second. Then an older man “disappeared.” People went crazy. “It was Satanists!” The Panic hit full bore. The school confiscated anything to do with heavy metal music. Prayers before baseball games asking for protection against the devil worshippers that invaded our town. D&D was the primary suspect.

To be fair, as kids, we were scared too. We just knew D&D didn’t have anything to do with it. My uncle reassured us that most of the town were a bunch of crazy backwards hillbillies. He wasn’t wrong. He made a critical mistake however. I’ll never forget what happened on August 2nd 1986, a Saturday. My uncle threw a big BBQ for some of his navy buddies. We were invited to so we got some food and headed over to our barn for D&D by lantern light. My drunk uncle let slip to a friend’s wife that we were playing the devil’s game and she called her father, the aforementioned county sheriff.

We were right in the middle of the game when the sheriff and four deputies arrested us at gun point. They pointed guns at 5 kids playing a game. They were sure we were a Satanic cult cell. They put three of us in one car and two in the other. The entire drive they kept asking us about Satanism and if we killed the dogs. They didn’t take us to our parents or the police station, they took us to the church so the sheriff’s brother could rebuke us while we were in handcuffs. It was completely insane. There were 5 of us and we were all terrified except for my friend Nathan, who thought this was hilarious. His laughing and mocking the pastor helped a ton actually. We got our wits back and demanded to see our parents and told them they had just kidnapped us and we were going to call the FBI.

The sheriff took us home after that with a stern warning and a veiled threat asking me and my friends if my uncle had ever touched any of us. The next day my mom filed a formal complaint and my friend Matt’s father challenged the sheriff to a fist fight. He did not accept. The old man that “disappeared” wasn’t dead. He was on vacation in Maine or some such that summer. One or both dogs were found. We took a break from D&D for a while, but picked it back up when the Forgotten Realms grey box came out the next year. The pastor finally died in 2012 and the newer younger pastor now let’s kids play D&D other TTRPGs and board games in the church annex on Thursday nights.

So that’s the story of how D&D destroyed the brains of the people of my town for two decades because of the the media furor.