Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Beginnings of an AD&D Campaign

Most of the players were on board to switching to the AD&D campaign. One just isn’t into d20 games and no problems there I will just have to see him on-line and play some City of Heroes. We’ll kill some clipart.

Like I said in my previous post we will be playing AD&D, warts and all, but there will be a few homebrewed rules thrown in.

Character Creation: 
  • Roll 4d6 throw out the lowest six times then place them in the attribute of your choosing.
  • All races in the PHB are fair game.
  • All classes in the PHB are fair game.
  • Roll starting money as per class.
  • Choose weapon proficiencies.
  • Choose a non-weapon proficiency. (I need to find the short entry in the DMG about them)
  • Magic-User classes start with 3 spells, each additional spell will cost them 50gp.
  • Languages need to be chosen.
  • I’m even playing with alignments. How can you have a true AD&D game without them.
  • And I am using the money system, including the dreaded electrum piece.  

Homebrewed Stuff: 
  • I will switch the money system from a gold to a silver standard. I just like it better overall.
  • I am not at home and I don’t have my books in front of me, but I don’t remember if this was a rule or not, but I plan on giving a +1 to AC for helmets and +2 to AC for great helms (but it carries a -1 ‘to hit’ penalty).
  • No going to worry about encumbrance for the most part. Unless they find a 500 pound gold statue.
  • Initiative will be a d10 instead of a d6. It makes sense to me since there are 10 segments in a combat round. What you roll is what segment you attack on. Dex bonuses will apply. If a player gets an AC bonus the same number will apply to the initiative.
  • I retain the right to change or ingnore everything I have just said. 
When I get my books in front of me and hash out the rules I'll post more.  The setting I have pretty well outlined in my mind.  At least the beginning.  It is something I came up with when our group was planning on doing a cooperative Points of Light type suppliment for old school systems. 

My plan is to hash out rule details.  Then give the players the background and starting situation.  Each will get there own custom knowledge sheet and so on.  I plan on posting a lot of the details here.  Use this as one of those wikis I don't totally understand.

7 comments:

  1. Sounds very exciting.
    I'm feeling dense - what do you mean by 'If a player gets an AC bonus the same number will apply to the initiative.'

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  2. Hey JP, not dense I just did a lousy job explaining.

    When players have a 15 dex they get -1 from AC, 16 -2 and so on. So when they roll initiative they would subtract that number from their roll. So if they have a 15 dex and rolled a 4 on the d10 they would get to attack on segment 3.

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  3. Are you using AD&D Surprise? :)

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  4. Your idea of using d10 for initiative instead of a d6 is really cool. I've never heard of that before, but like you say, it makes a lot of sense.

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  5. Yeah, it seems to me that my old gaming group moved to D10 eventually (this was back in 1986 you understand, so my memory's a little hazy). I know that the segments made more sense in light of weapon speed factor and spell-casting and the D10 seemed a no-brainer.

    Side note: What is in the water that I keep seeing these OSR bloggers starting up AD&D campaigns? I keep reading, "while I LOVE B/X I'm going to start up a 1e game." Did I miss a memo somewhere or something?

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  6. Crazy. I just DMed the first short session of a new 1e AD&D campaign last night. We're using the 3 core books only and going as BTB as we dare.

    JB: No idea. It just clicked in my head almost two weeks ago that a return to AD&D using original books (not clones) was the way to go for us. Maybe it's the end of the world approaching.

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