Ability Score Improvements

ASI with no balance issues whatsoever

It is my uncontroversial opinion that as a character gains levels, that character should improve. This is already the case in AD&D for saving throws, attack rolls, proficiencies, and spells, but it excludes Ability Scores and the values derived from them. PCs can become better combatants mechanically, but they never become stronger or more agile. They can improve in the mysteries of their religion or the finer points of etiquette, but never become wiser or more charismatic.

But, do they need to? In modern D&D, the ability score is the number from which you derive all other modifiers, so of course it must improve. This is not the case for early D&D, wherein the scores were descriptive markers, something that let you know what kind of class you should play based on the gated prime requisites. Any bonuses for high scores provided only moderate benefits, if any at all. Do characters really need to improve their base stats when increasing Dexterity from 13 to 14 does absolutely nothing?

Well, yes. I think so. Even if a game like AD&D doesn’t have a mechanical need for Ability Score Improvements, or ASI, it certainly has a psychological one. These are improvements to numbers created by the player, rather than the tabled stats that they’ve been handed, and therefore provides a stronger sense of advancement when the player gets to make ‘their’ numbers better, especially since those values are the most prominent and primary entries on their sheets. Of course, it can have mechanical impact, too. If the DM is making good use of ability checks, a single point to any score is a 5% increase toward success. If the DM has been creative with house rules and put some bite into the ability score bonuses, there’s even more of a reason to allow ASI.

However, if you’re running any version strictly by the book, then the answer is no.  As a result, searching for options to implement ASI within TSR’s published rules unearths very little. There’s the option for adjusting scores during generation found in OD&D and B/X, the age adjustment table in AD&D, wishes (with a ruleset that shows how much Gary’s players were abusing wishes), and magical items. Aside from chargen options, these are all DM-granted improvements.

The only time you see active improvements chosen by the players themselves is in Unearthed Arcana, where the Cavalier class can invest into scores in a similar manner to the Exceptional Strength feature for Warriors. Given my distaste for that edge-case percentile barnacle, I’ll reject that as an improvement mechanic and keep it far away from the other ability scores.

Get out of here, you weirdo.

 

I even went to the Player’s Option books to see what crazy ideas the TSR crew might have been cooking up in the heady days of ’95, but there are no ASI rules found there. However, they did add sub-ability scores in the effort to make the game that much more cluttered.

So we’ll have to house rule it. There are a couple of options.

You could implement structured improvements with a basic +1 bonus at specific levels, such as is done in modern D&D. Players pick two scores and bump them every four levels, or whatever schedule you think best, perhaps even based on class. This is reliable and easy, though these bumps are all but guaranteed to get dumped into prime requisites. PCs under this improvement method will suffer from a curse of sameness as they all invest into the ‘good’ abilities that their class (or your game) needs. Mythlands does a good write-up on this.

You could instead make the players roll for it. At scheduled levels, the player can roll a d20 against one or two scores in the manner of an ability check, but this time attempting to roll at or above their score. If they succeed, the score goes up by one. If you wanted to make the increase of bad scores easier and high scores more difficult, you could use 3d6 against the ability, which also has the added benefit of aligning with the dice used to originally create the score. With either option, this pulls back on the power creep and incentivizes players to improve poor scores rather than hyperfocus on minmaxing their elf.

Of the choice between static and random, I’m clearly a fan of the latter. Still, the auto-improvement (even with a chance of failure) isn’t great. PCs in AD&D should not and do not ‘ding’ upon level up. Therefore, let’s add in a feature of standard leveling: training.

 

When leveling a PC, the DM is already provided roleplay tools (mandated in 1e, optional in 2e) to ensure that both time and treasure are spent in pursuit of improvement in their class. This can be extended to ASI. If a players wants to increase their poor stats, they need to find and pay for a teacher, perform a task or quest, or generally come up with some good description for the way in which they’re investing time into that ability score. In the same way that high level characters require high level trainers, the effort to boost Charisma from good to great means that PCs will be hunting for the most charming person they can find and shelling out precious resources to do so. Another lever is thereby granted to the DM in the pursuit of keeping players engaged and PCs poor, while the players themselves are given agency in the upgrade of their characters.

ASIs are not a slippery slope to overpowered or boring PCs. They’re an improvement path that can reward roleplay while giving players a chance to build up their most personal scores. As evidenced by Gary’s very reactionary rules regarding the use of wishes to increase ability scores, it’s clear that players have wanted to increase these scores since the earliest days of the game. I’m with them on this one.

Ability Scores and Checks – Part 2

I3-5: Desert of Desolation, 1987

In Part 1, I did my best to explain why the ‘push-button’ argument is crap, but it’s not the only concern people have with the Ability Check mechanic. Three other objections were mentioned.

1. Characters with very high scores reap all the benefits, while mid-tier scores see increased failures.

Yes, that’s the design. A higher ability score means a higher chance for success. If the PC has a 10 in any ability score, then they fall in the middle of the range, equivalent to a normal person. They should only have a 50/50 shot at difficult tasks that require that ability. If the task isn’t something a normal person could fail at half the time, then the check needs modifiers, the ability score target needs adjustment, or the roll doesn’t need to occur.

By providing a -5 to +5 modifier to the roll, you can swing that chance by 25%. As stated previously, this provides a chance to ask the player how their character is accomplishing the task, and to then reward that. It grants a lever to increase intelligent play. If you really need to ramp up the difficulty, you can halve or quarter the score. This drops the chance precipitously, but still recognizes the impact of the PC’s score on the task at hand. And you can still modify the roll! With these adjustments, you can reach a wide range of chance, and the character’s score serves as the primary source of that final value.

Once you’re in need of chances between 95% and 100%, it’s time to just let the PC have the win; their score itself serves as the evidence of their success. If you’re looking for chances below 5%, you’re again being too granular, and are best served by granting the character a minimum floor of their 1 in 20 chance. It’s simple and allows the surprising to happen more regularly, which is always a good time. After all, you asked for the roll, so there’s a chance, right?

Your players when you tell them how the modifiers affect the roll.

 

Speaking of that.

2. A score of 3-18 only spans 16 values on a d20, PCs always have a 15% chance of success, while a PC with a score of 18 always has a 10% chance of failure.

I think we have the solution in the text above. Modifiers and score target adjustments allow us to circumvent these minor caps. Still, if you’re calling for a check, it implies a chance of failure; a 1 in 10 chance of failure at the peak of one’s ability would appear to me appropriate when fully testing that ability. I see it as a feature rather than a bug.

Mentzer suggests an alternative approach, Basic 1983

 

So I’m not swayed by the prior points, but the last one has teeth:

3. Ability scores never improve, which locks in those mid-tier failures for the life of the PC.

Yeah, this is absolutely fair. In AD&D, the PC’s ability to hit and their saving throw values increase as they level up based on their class. Their core ability scores, on the other hand, are permanent outside of a magical item or a wish. As a result, the scores never provide a sense of progress in the same way that other rollable stats do.

A common solution is to just use saving throws instead of ability checks. I see the cleanliness of using a pre-existing mechanic to solve the issue, but I think it’s a poor substitute. First, that’s not what saving throws are for. Saving throws are meant to be reactionary. Using them proactively to succeed goes against their design of avoiding disaster, which can work but muddies the waters. Secondly, they often don’t match to the desired action. If our chandelier-swinging thief uses a saving throw to determine whether they look awesome or fall hysterically, what’s the check? Death magic? Breath weapon? Petrification? It’s not intuitive.

We’ll look at solutions in the next post, and figure out if we even need one.

Ability Scores and Checks - Part 1

AD&D 2e Glossary

The ability scores of D&D have remained consistent from ’74 onward, albeit the final reordering only occurred in 2e. How one uses these scores for adjudication has evolved with every iteration, and I won’t waste time relating a history that has already been well researched by others.

Ability Checks, wherein you attempt to roll under your ability score with a d20, were still considered nonstandard by 1989. 2e shoved them into the glossary and begrudgingly noted that you can use them as saves. Yet, the Nonweapon Proficiency system of 2e uses ability checks as the base for that mechanic; when you’re rolling a Navigation check, you’re just rolling an Intelligence ability check with a -2 penalty to the ability score. It’s as messy as its ludicrous name suggests.

Chatter on the old forums makes it clear that ability checks were common at many tables due to its utility and simplicity: roll equal to or less than the number on your sheet, and we’re done here. No math on the player side beyond a bonus or penalty given by the DM (or for particularly difficult tasks, halving the ability score). Both players and the DM can immediately calculate their chances of success; the DC is right there. It’s easy to call for when needed and easy to categorize most actions into one of the six abilities.

That same chatter evidences that others most certainly did not use this semi-rule. They note that it is overly beneficial to high stat characters (giving an 80% chance of success to a stat with 16), while being functionally useless to anyone with an average score (50% chance for a stat of 10, aka: a coin flip). Conversely, it creates a ceiling of a 90% chance, where even a PC with a max score of 18 will fail 1 out of 10 times.  Since ability scores do not increase with level, there’s no improving this percentage, leaving a level 14 character exactly as good or bad at any given ability as they were at level 1.

These objections are worth discussing, so we’ll come back to them later.

The main objection of the grognards, as with any skill-like system introduced to ‘old-school’ play, is that it replaces descriptive problem-solving in favor of push-button solutions. Why attempt to offer any details on how the PC talks to the guard or searches for the hidden clues when players can just ask to make a check? Why think about solutions when you have a big button that solves any problem with a 75% or whatever chance of success? This mechanic will be the death of thoughtful and creative play!

Pictured here: Moldvay ruining D&D as early as the '81 Basic Set

 

I find this last argument to be nonsense for a few reasons.

First, push-button solutions are everywhere in AD&D. Need to lift this portcullis? Bend bars/lift gates. Open a stuck door? Open door. Oh, hey look, they’re just modified Strength checks. Then there are thieving skills which are explicitly push-button; for the thief, they’ve got a Hide In Shadows hammer and everything looks like a percentile nail. If we dig into the spells, aren’t they a bit push-button? After all, you don’t have the wizard describe the intricate details of Magic Missile; it’s fire and forget, literally. Hell, attack rolls fit this definition.

Second, what’s the alternative mechanic for determining success for an activity that has some chance of failure? A common answer suggests eyeballing the chance of success, then calling for a roll with a d6 (à la secret doors, and don’t get me started on that vestigial search mechanic) or using a percentile roll. Okay, what are you basing that chance on? If the fighter is attempting to push a boulder, you would take the PC’s Strength into account. If the thief is attempting to swing off the chandelier, you’d consider their Dexterity. If you’re making a call on their chances without considering the ability score, that’s just arbitrary and it invalidates a core part of what makes that PC who they are. If you’re making that call with the ability score in mind, why not just use the damn score and apply a modifier? It’s right there.

Third, if exploration and social interactions are spoiled because players are using ability checks like they’re Hit X to Skip, that isn’t their fault; it’s a DM issue. This is AD&D we’re talking about, right? It’s the DM’s game. As DM, you choose the mechanics of how your players interact with the world. You’re the one calling for the checks! There is nothing stopping you from using ability checks to reinforce world-building and emergent play. Ask the player how the character searches/talks/whatever, then let them know how their decisions impacted the modifier you give to the ability check. If they’re asking for the check themselves, judo them into explaining how they want to use it, and reward clever responses with good bonuses. If the PC has a good enough stat that modifiers obviate the chance of failure, then don’t call for the roll; instead, congratulate them on their ingenuity and let them do the thing they were trying to do.

Sure, but how do you pay respects?

 

The argument that ability checks (and skill checks) make players dumber does not fly with me. Players aren’t pushing a “solve problem for me” button, they’re pushing a “have my character interact with the world” button. They’re directly interfacing with the game through the lens of the PC they’ve created, and using the ability score – the first thing they generate when making a character – to do so. Honestly, what else are ability scores for? They should have more meaning than just providing two dozen small modifiers to varied subsystems.

You don’t have to pick between smart play and simple, sheet-based mechanics. You can have both. Anyway, it lets the players roll the dice more and they like that.

We’ll look at the other problems in Part 2.

To Hit Descending AC

In the last entry, I discussed why I like descending AC and some of its advantages. I left the disadvantages for later, and so we have arrived.

My argument is simple: the bad parts of descending AC are the complicated ways used to determine how one beats the numbers, and ascending AC is therefore identified as the superior method only because it resolves the annoying math. However, I do not believe that one necessarily follows from the other; you can have descending AC without the complications. Before we get to that, let’s run through some of these methods and see where they cause friction, starting with the two methods that were used during AD&D’s run: To-Hit tables and THAC0. 

To-Hit tables were there from the start; the linked blogs concerning its genesis (found in the last post) are a recommended source to understand why the tables were built this way. The use is straightforward: find the monster’s AC and the PC’s level in the table headers, then cross-index to get the required value to hit. The 5th level Fighter is attacking an enemy with AC 5? Look at table I.B. on page 74 of the DMG and find that an 11 is needed to hit. The player rolls, adds any bonuses, and says, “I rolled a 12.” The DM says, “You hit.”

This is dead easy for the player, but compared to modern approaches it’s work for the DM. Instead of having to keep just a single number (AC) in their head and compare it against the player’s results, the DM has to reference a page of tables (or jot down the required values, for each level and class in the party, prior to play). Whichever way you look at it, having to reference a table each time a player smacks a goblin isn’t what I would call an elegant solution, though it was a very familiar state of play for early designers and DMs.

The state of play in the early '70s (Chainmail)

 

THAC0, or To-Hit Armor Class Zero, is a house-rule and cheat for resolving this lookup issue, made official in 2nd Edition. Since the original tables don’t change, their math can be worked backwards to give players a single number with which they can determine hits. Take the THAC0, subtract the AC of the monster, and ostensibly you’ve got your To-Hit number without any table lookups or fuss.

But of course, there is fuss. First, who does the math? If it’s the DM, then we’re just substituting one table for another, now with subtraction! If it’s the players, then are we giving out the monster’s AC? Online discussion suggests that it was common practice for players to subtract their attack roll from their THAC0 and announce which AC had been hit, though the original books don’t provide this particular formula. Even this is a kludge: you’re now asking players to roll high, add modifiers, and subtract two-digit numbers (which are easy to accidentally transpose) to reach a low target. Regardless of how much you can get used to it, this is why people talk about using THAC0 in the same way you’d describe using a slide rule.

Well, this is from 1e, but you get the idea.

 

Okay, those are the official ways to hit descending AC. What has the OSR developed? As noted in the prior post, most of them ditch it entirely, but for the few that keep the numbers heading toward zero, there’s little change. Games which hold to the original definition of OSR (i.e., cloning and cleaning up old-school D&D and AD&D) still stick to the tables or THAC0, while the “do whatever feels old-school, man” side of the OSR isn’t participating.

Descending Armor Class

I hail from the era of the post-3e consensus, where it is a given that descending armor class is unintuitive and dumb, while ascending armor class is simple and pristine. The orthodoxy on this is rather ubiquitous. I’ve been hard pressed to find any modern TTRPG that embraces the concept, and even the OSR gang tends to toss the idea overboard when designing their fantasy heartbreakers.

The origins of descending armor class are murky, though it’s been well explored in blogs that actually know what they’re talking about. The apocrypha suggests that it was built from Arneson’s experience with naval wargaming, where a ship with 1st class armor would be harder to sink than 2nd class armor. While that is likely the origin of why we call it “Armor Class,” the choice to descend appears to be based more on Gary’s opinion on the elegance of the math involved.

Elegance

Putting aside the math for a later date, one may ask if there are any advantages to descending armor class, at least in the context of designing new or derivative rules for TTRPG combat.

I can see three.

First, it’s compatible with TSR-era modules. When 25 years of D&D material uses descending AC, using that expected number keeps DMs from having to do quick conversion or scribble in the margins. There’s value in being able to run the old stuff right off the page without much adjustment, even if the math gets a bit off between the early editions.

Second, it evokes an old-school feel. This is admittedly trivial, but it’s not to be discounted. Much of a game’s tone and style is brought forth from the decisions a designer makes in crafting its ruleset. There’s nothing that says ‘old game’ like holding onto an antique like descending AC. It’s like putting a spittoon in your bar or using neon pink in your cyberpunk art; the aesthetic is in service to the ideal.

Or like putting this style of art in your AD&D clone.

Third, a bounded range that terminates at zero provides a floor. AC 0 stands as a solid barrier between a character that is just well protected or quick and one that is armored by magic or by other extraordinary means. When crossing that threshold of zero into the negative, PCs find themselves fighting something otherworldly. Those monsters are a mathematical indication that you have entered the Upside Down. This is compared to something like 5e, where the barrier of 20 is rather soft; the difference between an enemy with AC 19 and AC 21 is just a small bump in difficulty, but the difference between AC 1 and AC -1 is a line between the mundane and the mythical. This Mythlands post does a great job of digging into the idea. 

These advantages suggest to me that descending AC should hold at least some esteem in modern old-school creations, but it’s generally rejected unless the work is trying to ensure compatibility. The reason for this has nothing to do with AC moving south, but instead is due to the mechanism for how you hit it. Tables and wonky formulas are what get brought up when descending AC is derided. We'll look at that problem next time.

Planescape: Setting and System

Planescape is, by far, the most interesting fantasy world I’ve ever stumbled across. The later editions of D&D offered only the barest glimpse of this setting, with descriptions of Sigil, the City of Doors, the otherworldly Outer Planes, and the city’s enigmatic ruler The Lady of Pain.

When I finally dug deep enough into the historical strata to hit the rich vein of the mid-90s, I found a treasure trove of lore within the Planescape campaign books and accessories. TSR had invested much into their creation, detailing everything from apothecaries to crime kingpins, all wrapped in a bizarre shell of an impossible dystopian magicpunk setting. It had a feel and tone that I had only seen in novels like Perdido Street Station and Neverwhere, with a clash of cockney slang, philosophical war, and easy death. To sweeten the pot, a great deal of that lore and tone was injected into the only video game based on the setting: Planescape: Torment.

The best book I've ever played

By the time I’d decided to run the setting, the 5th edition of D&D was in full swing. The setting was all I cared about, so the system got the boot. I ran that world with 5e and had a blast doing so, but found that I wasn’t getting the tone that I had expected. Everything was combat and frantic challenges. By scraping the system it was built for, I had changed the nature of the setting.

5e’s triumph is that it makes every character feel like a unique set of skills and abilities. That character never feels like anything other than the main character, even when you’ve got another four main characters wandering about with you. The world is your playground, and the setting is the backdrop to your character’s superheroic feats and inevitable victory.

That is not Planescape’s vibe. Planescape is about fantastic places and people, but it shows those places through the lens of the ordinary. It’s where an angel and demon may share a beer, but they do so in a dive bar after having completed whatever humdrum tasks make up their daily life. Much of that life is cheap, with a major part of Sigil being depressing slums where surviving another day is the only achievable goal. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, made for a TTRPG ruleset where not getting eaten was a major accomplishment; 5e just did not translate well to that ethos.

The vibe

 

Planescape was built for 2nd Edition AD&D, with all of its quirks and assumptions about the type of characters you would have. Those characters would start off relatively powerless and certainly poor. They had to scrabble for every opportunity, and they had to be played cautiously and wisely to make it out of 1st level. A 2e character has a weapon, maybe armor, maybe a spell or two, a few hit points, and (if your DM decided to include them) a set of skills. They didn’t parade around Sigil as lords of their domain; they survived Sigil by being just a bit quicker, smarter, stronger, or luckier than the berk next to them.

This is perhaps too many words to say that I like squishy and desperate characters in my dystopian settings, but hopefully provides context for why I started my latest Planescape campaign in 2e.

Why AD&D 2e?

Is that zero in the word "OPP0NENT?" 

In short, I wanted to run Planescape. That’s a stupid reason to learn and run a 35 year old TTRPG from a defunct publisher, but it was the inciting incident. That initial interest in 2e was spurred on by growing dissatisfaction with WotC over the past few years, the underwhelming 5e version of Planescape, and seeing what the OSR community had to offer. The road toward cracking open the 2nd Edition AD&D core books had been laid.

Some context: I missed all of AD&D and 3rd Edition. TTRPGs weren’t in my wheelhouse during those years, and aside from having used those systems in the CRPGs from the era, they were opaque to me. I started in 2008 with 4th Edition, mostly due to the excellent podcasts WotC was putting out with the Penny-Arcade crew (they’re still online and worth a listen). Saying that you started out in this hobby with 4e is a bit like telling someone that you got into Star Wars by watching the Holiday Special, but it is what it is. We ran that edition happily for four years until going all in on the D&D Next playtest material, then lived in 5e for a solid decade. That’s all to say, I don’t have the old-school chops of the venerable grognards; I came to AD&D with a very different mindset.

My mindset

 

I suppose it should be little surprise that someone raised in the offal of 4e would gravitate to the other ‘bad’ version of the game. 2e is generally viewed as the corporate version of AD&D, the one without Gary Gygax, made to cut the old man out of the story, remove the stuff that angered the fundies, and shore up dwindling book sales. I did investigate 1e AD&D, OD&D, B/X, and their various retroclones. The internet made no qualms about their superiority, and they have a great argument there. For what these earlier editions do, they’re brilliant. They create a foundation upon which a very particular gameplay loop can be structured, with the dungeon as its crown jewel. The challenge was, I wasn’t looking to send my players into caverns deep and dark; I wanted a system that would blend the old-school, dungeon-delving rulesets of those editions with the modern focus on character-centric, story-based roleplaying. I also wanted better formatting. I was in luck, as they released that game in 1989.

And in 1995 with worse art! And in 2013 with a fancy cover!

 

 

2nd Edition AD&D is something of a beautiful hodgepodge. It’s designers were extremely knowledgeable about what had come before and loved it. Its lead and technically only credited designer, Zeb Cook, literally wrote the X in B/X. They were also given a mandate by their corporate overlords to keep the thing compatible with 1e, so in essence it is the ‘same game’ with the same spirit, and as a result it carries over many of the frustrating idiosyncrasies which later editions would expunge and OSR successors would smooth out.

Yet, it’s also modern in many of its assumptions. By 1989, the module-as-a-story concept was established, while the multi-level dungeons and deadly funhouses of earlier works were no longer the main point. This edition’s focus on completion of the adventure and good roleplay to earn XP, its ability-check-by-another-name skill system, and its completely modular design were built for the types of adventures that TSR wanted to produce, where hard-bitten mercs could rob the temple or intrepid heroes could save the kingdom within the same ruleset.

If you’re reading this and are well versed in the OSR community, you may be shaking your head, making tsk tsk and tut tut noises, and saying “If you wanted that you should have just picked up [insert OSR product]!” Yes, I’m positive that something like Dungeon Crawl Classics or OSE would have scratched the itch without all the pain of learning this crumbling and forgotten fossil. But then I couldn’t have run the original Planescape material straight from the books, and that was a major selling point. Also, I found that I really like descending AC, and if you can point me to an OSR game that retains it without matrices, I’ll thank you.