CHARACTERS:
There are three main classes of characters: Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, Clerics.
Fighting-Men includes the characters of elves and dwarves and even halflings.
Magic-Users includes only men and elves.
Clerics are limited to men only. All non-human players are restricted in some aspects and gifted in others. This will be dealt with in the paragraphs pertaining to each non-human type.
Fighting-Men: All magical weaponry is usable by fighters, and this in itself is a big advantage. In addition, they gain the advantage of more "hit dice" (the score of which determines how many points of damage can be taken before a character is killed). They can use only a very limited number of magical items of the non-weaponry variety, however, and they can use no spells. Top-level fighters (Lords and above) who build castles are considered "Barons," and as such they may invest in their holdings in order to increase their income (see the INVESTMENTS section of Vol. III). Base income for a Baron is a tax rate of 10 Gold Pieces/inhabitant of the barony/game year.
Setting aside the sexism of the time, though it took this crew less time than most of the world to accept that in a non-real setting that women can be fighters too, or that humans can be distinguished without calling them "men." Venture back into my early teenage years, though, there it is, in your face, in a way that's much more real that the nonsense I see being called out on youtube. It's a little like a woman saying, "They used to be sexist back in the day" and my thinking, "Sister, you have no idea how sexist it was in the day." Not that I blame the complainer. They've got every right.
Look at the priorities of the fighter: magic items, limited; whack-an-enemy; advance to baron. Not a word about protecting the mage or the cleric, not the tiniest sentiment about the fighter being there to support or sustain the party. Like I said, all this has the absence of that ideology. We aren't here to tell you about what a fighter fights for, or what responsibility is owed, or that a fighter is "more than whacking." There's no "role-playing" here so none of that enters the picture. It's refreshing.
Nor is the Baron a "hero." No, it's spoken of strictly in monetary terms, your chance to exploit some peasants for capital. There so social expectation, no requirements to save cats from trees, no reason to think first and sword later. You're a fighter. Swing away. Later generations, yes, will shove messaging into all this, believing they're creating motivation when in fact they're imposing dogma, but at the outset D&D refused to pretend that a character sheet needed a conscience.
Magic-Users: Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long, hard road to the top, and to begin with they are weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magical types until they have worked up. The whole plethora of enchanted items lies at the magic-user's beck and call, save the arms and armor of the fighters (see, however, Elves); MagicUsers may arm themselves with daggers only. Wizards and above may manufacture for their own use (or for sale) such items as potions, scrolls, and just about anything else magical. Costs are commensurate with the value of the item, as is the amount of game time required to enchant it.
I'll comment just for a moment, for my sanity, about the creative grammar of these passages. That run-on sentence at the top of this is a beaut. Why bother using periods at all? And the imposition of capitals for every noun that has the vaguest importance, only to abandon that use of capitals three paragraphs later... you just don't see writing like this outside an elementary school. It's really a thing to admire.
Again, the assumption is plainly that the magic-user (not yet listed as a "mage" or "caster," words I find vastly preferential) is going to do some fighting. There is an inclusion here about fighters protecting the low-level mages (yes, dammit, I'm using the word), but it's clearly framed as optional ("unless" implies there's an alternative). There's also an assumption that when mages reach a certain level, they're expected to look after themselves. I don't fault a mage hiding behind a fighter; it makes good sense. So does hiding behind a tree. But too often this got translated into an expectation that the fighters are "there to protect the mages," which, really, is just nonsense. A fighter is not a lackey.
Intuitively, since the mage is made intentionally fragile at the campaign's beginning, there's an expectation that a lot of them are going to die. That's the message here. Not "you're going to be weak until you're stronger," but, "because you're weak, you'll count yourself lucky IF you get stronger). The expectation of perfect survival in later games obliterates this game balance, which is demonstrably there from the start. If every mage survives until it gets powerful, then logically, let them start powerful, or make them wait until the inevitable day arrives. Game value added? Zero.
The idea is that, when your fighter dies, you say, "I think I'll gamble on being a mage," expecting that you probably won't make it. But it's fun to try, to see if you wind up being the statistical anomaly at the top of a wide-based pyramid with a lot of dead mages under you. Chances are, you'll die, shrug your shoulders and say, "I gave it a shot. I think I'll try a fighter again." It's a different mindset, made possible by an easy character generation. But more about that later.
Note again that the end game for the mage is also exploitive. Make magic, make money. It's almost like the American Dream was influencing some of the thought process here, eh?
It would have been nice if just one of the group had known an artist, or had the wherewithal to approach such a person, because honestly, they're everywhere, even in 1973. What really makes it for me, if you'll allow, is the little circle over the "i." We can almost imagine a whole library of spritish literature so ordered, with neat little circles over the "i"s and "j"s, and the periods too, and little bubble exclamation points, ellipses drifting like pollen grains... it's how you'd instantly recognise a book was sprite-written. Then the local sage could show it to the players and say, "Ah yes, early-era sprite script — note the dotted curls and the parentheses shaped like leaves. This was written before the brief period when stars replaced periods, during the reign of Pimwynn the Pontificator."
Examples of costs are:
Item: Cost
Scroll of Spells: 100 Gold Pieces/Spell/Spell Level/Week (a 5th-level spell would require 500 GP and 5 weeks)
Potion of Healing: 250 Gold Pieces + 1 week
Potion of Giant Strength: 1,000 Gold Pieces + 4 weeks
Enchanting 20 Arrows: 1,000 Gold Pieces + 4 weeks
Enchanting Armor to +1: 2,000 Gold Pieces + 2 months
Wand of Cold: 10,000 Gold Pieces + 6 months
X-Ray Vision Ring: 50,000 Gold Pieces 1 year
Research by magical types can be done at any level of experience, but the level of magic involved dictates the possibility of success, as well as the amount of money necessary to invest. Assume that a Magic-User can use a 4th-level spell (explained later), therefore he could develop a new spell provided it was equal to or less than 4th level. All this will be explained fully in the section dealing with SPELLS.
This is an aspect of ephemera that is difficult to defend. If the picture above conjures a dialogue where one of the game designers is saying, "Hey, my cousin doodles; I'll give him a call and see if he's interested..." then this insertion of detail here, and not in the logical place where the last line of it says it should be, I envision a screaming match in which Gygax bullied the others until he got his way. I say Gygax because this was a pet project of his, this insistence that magic item research should work like a plant producing refridgerators... only to approach it so lazily that it never was useful for anyone. The White Box provides 11 swords that aren't just +1 (how much does a cursed sword cost), 4 miscellaneous weapons with special abilities, 24 potions that aren't giant control or healing, 18 rings that aren't X-Ray, 11 wands that aren't of cold, 7 staves that aren't wands and 29 miscellanous magic, not one of which appears in the list above. Gygax then goes on to make the exact same side-step in the AD&D DMG, basically using a lot of words to say, "My idea, your problem." At best, this gives the idea that magic can be made at a certain cost... which can't really be applied to magic not listed here, since how do you compare a mirror of life trapping to an X-ray vision ring?
What it reveals is a dangerous precedent that would essentially reveal the soft clay under the layer of topsoil that was the game. The actual concreteness needed in these rules to consistently run a game just isn't here. I don't want to fault these guys. They got a tiger by the tail, they undoubtedly saw the problem, and the solution was no doubt, "If you really care, you'll make up your own table like this one that includes everything." That's certainly the guantlet I picked up as an early DM. I saw the shortcoming, counted the number of magic items not specified and thought, "Hey, that can be solved." Then I solved it. Only to later abandon the concept because the structure of buying magic items is, in my opinion, a shortcoming. BUT, regardless of that, any DM with a backbone didn't need the handholding to dig up the soft loam and make a foundation with concrete that would support the weight of the vision being offered here.
But it's "dangerous" for two reasons. By the time AD&D comes around, and me, there are so many cases like the above insertion in existence that it requires 40 years of sustained work to address no more than a portion of the half-baked ideas that need shoring up. The experience table was a disaster from the start and it took me 30 years to solve it, without ever finding any help from anyone. The combat system was stale, still is, and though I solved that in just 5 years, what I resolved remains ignored by haters of the stale system who nevertheless won't surrender it. I still haven't yet solved Gygax's siege point damage system. I don't think there is a solution, though I've run sieges and pretty must just had to bullshit my way through the problem. So its the amount of work that's asked for, and the technical problem solving that it demands, but is largely insolvable even if you try.
So, by 1979, the designers have built a massive engineering project of half systems that don't work as is and are really beyond most people to solve. Which, in turn, is the second danger. I'm a weirdo. I looked at it and said, "Yeah, okay, I'll solve it or die trying." Others look at it and think, "Yeah, fuck that noise. Either I'll ignore it, gloss over it, arbitrate it or pretend the system works. Whatever."
Commence post books, four disastrous editions, an internet of ignoring the problem, an effective Rorschach test for what anything in the rules actually means... and a project that, even if you want to, remains insolvable.
Up until this passage, on page 7, the introduction to the game has been largely rational. Here's what this is, here's what this means. And then bam, this table. "No, we're going to shove it in your face; no, we're not going to do it well. We haven't the space. Deal with it."
And unfortunately, the main problem that arises for the engineer willing to undertake the project is being actually aware of what's a garbage half-system and what isn't. This table? Which I spent, oh too many hours with, or rather with it's AD&D stepchild, was garbage. Which I didn't know at 16. Because during our first ten years association with this game, we're not yet familiar enough with the concept to be able to decide where to put our time. Which means a lot of those first ten years are spent failing at projects that never should have been started, which discourages succeeding at projects that are worth getting right. It's all a terrible mess... and the fellows who wrote this book, who certainly had less than 10 years experience when they wrote it, weren't themselves familiar enough with the concept to grasp any of this.
Later, when they did grasp it, and tried to solve it, they failed. Or they just didn't try. That's what the Unearthed Arcana was, and the Oriental Adventures, and the Wilderness Guide. they’re all symptoms of awareness without comprehension. You can feel, reading them, that the writers know something’s wrong in the skeleton of the game. They know it can’t stand as written. But they don’t know where the structural weakness lives. So instead of surgery, they just keep adding limbs — more classes, more modifiers, more environmental rules, more dice, more "flavour." The cure becomes metastasis.
They're testaments to the "experts" in the business crashing and burning... and then deciding on option two. Fuck it. Arbitrate it out of existence. And what we have left is a permanent epistomological fog that will never lift.
That's enough.
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