Recently I've been playing the old Baldur's Gate D&D game, which while not first edition has got me reflecting back on the old first edition rules, as well as the hardass no-forgiveness old SSI 2nd edition games where the dice fell as they would and by golly if you party was in the wrong place at the wrong time it was curtains for your first level party.

Back when you used to do first edition, or if you were to run a first or second edition game today, what would you do if a levelled-up player character was destroyed? Would you have the player roll up and use a first level character, on the grounds that that character would level up very quickly in a high level party? (He threw a rock at the Beholder and then hid behind a pillar while the level 10 guys went to work, therefore he participated and gets some of the EXP.) Or would you let the player create a new character at average party level?

Reflecting back on the old game there are a few aspects that I like about it which I feel like we really lost in recent RPGs. I liked the Hobbseian mortality of that game. It was very grim and hyper-masculine. You had stacks of hitpoints but if you so much failed a saving throw you were toast, or else you'd be in a position where you'd be toast if someone was able to attack you. Stinking Cloud was the bomb diggity.

In the old game some of the dice tables were truly hardcore. There was a literal small random chance every time you picked up a NPC employee at a tavern that he'd be a sociopath. Likewise a chance your character would get a disease. Whereas a D&D character usually has access to Cure Disease there were actual rules for the progression of the disease and for how it killed you if for some reason you couldn't get Cure Disease.

Personally I never felt too good about the rules for raising dead, as I felt that detracted from the gravitas of a very unforgiving setting. I understand it, definitely, considering how long it took to level up a character and how statistically likely it would be for you to die from time to time. But in the interests of gravitas, Viking fatalism, and Conan head-lopping if I were the GM I'd rather have a campaign where there's no raise dead, but if your character dies you can introduce a new one, complete with backstory explaining how you got into the storyline. Playing one character all the way through to level 36 would probably get boring after a while anyway.

It just depends on what everyone wants, really.

Everybody wants that sort of bootstrap beginnings, just left the farm experience? Let's start at first!

Everybody wants to start with a few cool things they can do, but don't risk dying at the hands of a lone kobold? Let's start at 3-5.

As far as mortality, we always knew Raise Dead was technically an option, but we were usually way too poor to afford it. We usually treated it as a reason to make a new character.

I never played 1e D&D, but I have just started my first campaign as DM and if one of my PCs were to die, I'd let the player make a new character at party level. While the quick level-up argument certainly holds water, I generally find that it is counter-fun for any player to feel like a fifth wheel for any amount of time.

I played 1st for quite a while, and had a great time with it. It was the only system we'd had TPKs with. Good times. When a character dropped, you started again at first level. Sounds kinda funny saying it, but it added "realism" in a sense. Not all characters are created equal. Kind of like Aragorn, well into his career, meeting up with a bunch of 1st lv hobbits.

The monk with d4 HP was awesome. Our DM was generous enough to let us switch two attributes. Everything else was dice where they lay, and you built a character around what you got. No one was ever killed by kobolds, but we did get some deaths from some beastly goblins. Fastest TPK was when someone pissed on an altar of Lolth and she sensed it, filling the room with monstrous spiders.

The highest level character anyone had in our group was 16th, with me having a 12th lv cleric. I do like that Exp progression better than say 3rd edt, where I've seen a number of characters reach into the 20s. It seems to me that level should be truly exceptional, not inevitable if you play long enough.

I did find one adventure for 3rd edt that lived up to it's advertisement as having the "1st edition feel" : Rappan Athuk. Bad ass dungeon.

It's only realistic if you assume that the only people a party of adventurers ever meet are level 1. Are the PCs the only adventurers in the entire world? Are they the only experienced adventurers in the entire world? I think it's both unreasonable and unrealistic to make either assumption. If a character dies, how difficult is it really to figure out a plausible way for them to meet another character of similar level?

It's an interesting thought. The way I see it it could also add realism in the sense that every monster the party ever encountered wouldn't be at exactly the level that the party could handle. You could have "realistic" dice-fall-where-they-may random wilderness encounters where the encounters could either be extremely easy or extremely difficult. It wouldn't feel like the whole entire game world was upgrading along with the player characters all the time.

Likwise the town guard wouldn't all suddenly be level 10 fighers because the party was level 10. Instead the town guard might be levels 1-3 because the party contained one guy at level 10, three guys at level 5, and one guy at level 1.

Interesting thought.

Of course when you got to actual "plot points" or major dungeons it would have to be difficult enough to challenge the party so the monsters would have to be very tough. But you could have it so that there were a lot of puzzle aspects and complicated traps and the dungeon was as much intelligence and abstract thinking as statistical power. Especially in old D&D where the old Save vs. Death Ray could make hitpoints and armor class irrelevant.

EDIT: It also raises the question as more of a real issue of when your favorite character is going to retire. You could keep risking, levelling up, becoming more famous, and accruing more treasure, but chances are sooner or later your luck will run out and you will die horribly to some undead monster that basically rapes your soul. It's kind of like playing Sid Meier's Pirates where you have the tension between whether to take more risks, or whether to quit while you're ahead. It could also produce some badass moments where the kingdom is being threatened and some legendary hero comes out of retirement.



That's unspeakably hardcore for someone to do in a dice-fall-as-they-may campaign where you start over at level 1.



I agree. Reaching Name Level and becoming a Baron after having been a commoner most of your life isn't the same thing as transitioning from a minimum wage McDonalds job to a middle management job later in life.



I'll have to check it out.

I'm running a 3rd edition game now and we had to address that question. I ran one before where a character died and lost only a single level (as per the rules) - the result was, for the rest of the game, he simply wasn't very effective in combat. He was a rogue, so he really needed that base attack bonus, small as it was and, over the life of the game, he was always the guy who missed or failed his saves or whatever. So ultimately, the idea of starting characters over from level 1, seems like a good way to eliminate all enjoyment from the game. Who wants to play a game where every battle is 9 levels ahead of you? You have a base attack bonus of +1, and you have to beat an armor class of 25? And the worst part is, it's feeds itself. If you make it to level 2, but your party is all level 11, guess who is going to die when hit by a 6th level fireball spell? And now you're back to level 1, with everyone else a little closer to level 12. I can't imagine enjoying that sort of a game. Shadowrun does it right, when you're dead, you're dead, make a new character who is similar in level to the party.

I can imagine, if you have a game with a very high mortality rate, this could work, since every few games EVERYONE is dead and that inequality is eliminated. But at that point, it basically eliminates any character-driven plot. I know WR may enjoy those, but I know I wouldn't.

Right now what I'm doing with my game is saying *IF* they can find someone to raise dead, the character comes back with XP equal to the lowest member of the party. If a person retires a character, their new character enjoys the average XP level of the party. I'm not completely happy with it, because it eliminates the fear of death, but with the party at level 3 (and therefore raise dead spells are basically unavailable to them) it's working for the time being. I'm definitely open to other suggestions (but considering going with the SR way of doing things and saying dead is dead for PCs).

Well if you use the Challenge Rating system for advancement, that first level guy is going to be involved in a fight with his tenth level party, against CR8-10. He gets a chunk of that exp and will catch up pretty quick.

After 1st edt though, I prefered the system for Darksun. It's one of the 2nd edt settings for AD&D, 'case the name's new to you. The game is set out with the expectation that you'll at least die a couple of times, and healing magics, especially Raise Dead and the like, are extremely rare. Mostly only the bad guys have it (Templars). So you don't roll up one character, you roll up four , a character tree. When the character you are playing gains a level, you can put a level onto one of the other characters. Andthey all start at 3rd lv, again because of the assumption that they'll die otherwise. That way, if/when you do lose a character, you've already got another one ready to go, with at least a few levels under their belts.

He will never catch up (by the 3/3.5 rules in the book). It follows like this:
1) Calculate the level of the GROUP (not each character)
2) Determine the EL/CR
3) Compare the EL/CR to the group level to determine the group XP
4) Divide by the number of participants.

Now your level 1 character will get levels more frequently than the other characters, because 1,000 XP gets more low levels than it does high levels, but as that level 1 character approaches 5 or 6, those levels come less frequently and the rest of the party will always have a 45,000 XP lead (so when our revived character reaches level 10, the rest of the party will be 13).

That's going under the assumption that they always do everything as a group, never individually. That also leaves out individual experience awards for things like RPing, and other less tangible aspects. I'm only demonstrating that the 3rd edt experience setup tends to drop a bit more experience towards the lower level guy, as opposed to 1st/2nd edt where it's a flat amount across the board, regardless of levels. I'm not suggesting one is better than the other mind you, just different.

That is true, although I think any character is going to make up 45,000 XP by any reasonable amount of role-playing. I'm not trying to figure out which is better (actually, yes I am), just how it could possibly work. Seems like the "I'm level 2 and the rest of the party is level 12" is sort of a permanent SUCK on any future gaming with that character/group.

Which is why I love the character tree. Although one of our favorite characters was originally a lv O herdsman who got saved by the rest of the party, and became a serious bad ass. *shrug*

Now that is some distilled hardcorerery right there. I think the element of personal development and progression is what makes a lot of people tick.

One fun thing about the most hardcore first edition adventures, particularly AD&D adventure Tomb of Horrors, is that there were plenty of things that were instant-death, some of them without saving throws. But such deadly traps worked both ways. A level 1 character could insta-kill an arch-lich if he were smart about it.

It was perfectly rules legal to use such tactics and any player adept in such tactics could guide a low level character through high level encounters.

Hmm, I wonder if anyone had their first level character instalevel to, like, level 5 or something by snuffing a huge bad guy that way.

No, but since xp was party specific, not character specific (that came later), a first level character would quickly gain the levels needed. Often if a character died anyways we would be on level 6 or so. Mostly remembering my ill-gotten childhood, drawing maps in the sandbox and fighting dragons on the imaginary seashore.

That depends on how many other party members were left alive, doesn't it. Tomb of Horrors, the specific adventure I cited, was designed to slaughter high level parties played by Gary Gygax's friends and relatives. If the low level character hangs back and lets the other party members take lead, he'll likely be the only one alive by the time he reaches the demi-lich, at which point he has a couple of rounds to insta-kill the thing with the crown and scepter trap ( which likely killed one of his friends) before the monster steals his soul (no saving throw).

Most D&D games I was in, if a character got killed, the new character would be something like one level below the party average, or something similar, and have little or no magic items. They would be less powerful than the rest of the party members, but they wouldn't be a fifth wheel, either. It might be giving them a bit of a break, but that actually seems less cheesy than having their first-level wimp mooch off the rest of the group's EXP.

While I have fond memories of D&D, and don't feel the disdain for it that some other posters seem to, the level progression system was my least favorite part of the game. You started out puny and weak at the beginning, but became too ridiculously powerful at the upper levels.

I like Shadowrun because it seems like you start out at the equivalent of 5th level or so, and get up to about 12th level or so - no cowering from kobolds, but no wading through hordes of hundreds, either. It's easier to introduce a new player, too, because a 400 BP character can jump right in with some characters who have some Karma under their belts, and still contribute.

Wait, is he a lich, or a demilich?

EDIT: Just read through the updated edition. LOL, there's a gender bender trap. That's hilarious.

EDIT 2: I don't think the treasure you get if you survive the final boss fight is worth the risk and destroyed characters it took to get that treasure.

I actually had a character become the victim of a Girdle of Femininity/Masculinity once. He got knocked out in a fight, and the 'girdle' was part of the 'treasure'. The other PCs decided it'd be a good idea to 'test' the item on him since no one could identiy it, but they knew it was magic. Bastards.

Most of the games I played in were dice-as-they-fall, roll-up-a-starting-character kind of games... but we had fun with it. It made getting past level 5 something to truly brag about.

I really remember that unless you were in a straight slug-fest with someone, your actual level didn't matter so much as your ability to think outside the box. Sure, the extra spells and crap helped, but they weren't deal-breakers like they were in 3/3.5/4E. Old-School D&D was all about preparedness, tactics, and schizophrenic paranoia rather than teh l337 pwnz0rzs powers (no, I'm not really a fan of 4E, if you couldn't guess)...

It was like, "Holy moley, Batman! I can play a paladin! Sweet!" and finding a +1 longsword was a BIG DEAL, rather than just another piece of garbage.

One of the characters in a group I run (shush, I'm doing it for the wife) just ran into the girdle. Since we're running 3.5, only one person had heard of it before. The characters were digging through the gear of a strange gypsy ally and the six-foot-something evil cleric with white-blond hair suddenly turned into a DD platinum blond bombshell.

I'll also say, I'm getting more and more interested in D&D 1 or 2. It sounds like a lot of the problems I have with 3 don't apply to the earlier editions.

D&D and AD&D are not all that different, AD&D and 3/3.5 are about as different as 3.5 is from 4E (perhaps slightly less so).

Don't think that they don't have their own problems either though. Clerics have a strange gap in sells for example. IIRC, 11th lv, you got 6th lv spells, 16th lv, you got their last level of spells, 7th , which is where Resurrection was.

All races except humans had level limits. A dwarf couldn't og abouve 12th lv fighter. Of course, reaching twelth level was a big deal all in it's own. Dragon's breath weapons were nasty. Green Dragon Breath -> 66 points of damage. Flat out. No dice. Stuff like that.

Then there's some unbalanced things, like the spell fire shield. Deals back 2 times the damage the spell caster takes. I had a 10th lv Wizard that wiped out a 5th lv fighter thanks to that one spell and a wand of lightning bolts.

1st edition definitely had some weirdness to it. But it was still awesome. It's kinda like playing an 8 bit game. You know there's stuff out there that's supposedly better, definitely faster, works better with less kinks, but there's just that something about it. Anyone that played Contra on NES should know what I mean.

One warning about first edition: the Unearthed Arcana book was the ultimate powergamer's book. So many things - drow, duergar, deep gnomes, barbarians, cavaliers, hierophant druids, thief-acrobats, and a new method for generating ability scores, for humans only, that was far more generous than any of the previous methods. Seriously. It was nuts. It had lots of cool stuff, but it drastically changed the power level of the game.

I think you're right about that. For anyone who has played the old by-the-book SSI D&D games you'll notice that guys with hitpoints and magic weapons are kind of like blockers, in that they can stop the monsters from meleeing the spellcasters, but that in a sense the hitpoints can be made irrelevant since if you're incapacitated by Sleep or Stinking Cloud or paralysis you can be coup-de-graced by any dumb monster. To do well you really needed to quickly incapacitate the enemy and protect the spellcasters.

Taken from that perspective, and considering a game with people on a table top can have special traps and riddles that effectively bypass stats and hitpoints, I can definitely see a game more about being clever and prepared than about standing in a line and trading blows.

On the other hand, all it took to kill a monster was a well-placed sleep spell and a failed save. Man, even when we got up into the really high levels, our wizard cast "sleep" more than any other spell.

Totally agreed about Sleep.

Heh, "sleep" in 1st ed D&D...

Some players in France used to play with the English version of the game (before it was translated) and used the english name for spells (I do the same with some of Shadowrun's gear or powers since most of the time I buy the English PDF before the French book comes out).
And in French, "cast" as in "cast a spell" is "lancer" which means "throwing" and "sleep" is pronounced the same way as "slip" which means "underpants".

So there are a lot of stories about a group of 1st level adventurer meeting the boss at the end of the adventure and the wizard shouting: "Je lance mon Sleep !" which could be understood as "I throw my underpants!". Hilarity ensued.

J'ai etudie le francais au lycee. C'etait un suject tres amusant. J'ai gange des bons notes en francais, autrefois. J'aimerais, un jour, jouer le D&D en francais.

I don't know... throwing your underpants might be valid if you are using that one "Erotic" book that got published.

I guess it depends which bard is playing. Is Elminster a proper target?

I flipped through that in a bookstore once. I noticed that everyone in photos in that book looked like slightly overweight Renfaire people instead of dirty, desperate, skinny medieval folk.

Yeah... I try to pretend that it never got published. One more reason to play AD&D: better quality control of what got put out.

... and THAC0, because it rocks... and people who can't do simple math suck.


I want them to make a D&D movie about the original party going through the Tomb of Horrors... and we need Patrick Stewart as Mordikinen.

If raise dead was not an option for whatever reason. The player could make a new character with 1/2 the XP of his old character

Why not all the XP of his old character? I reiterate: it is both unreasonable and unrealistic to assume that the PCs are the only adventurers in the world, or that the PCs are the only adventurers of a given experience level. Why in great Cthulhu's unholy name would you force someone to be the party gimp rather than just saying, "At the next tavern, the survivors meet another adventurer?" Character death is already a punishment; piling more punishment on top of that is anti-fun, IMO, and therefore contraindicated.

You forgot the best part of Unearthed Arcana... the polearms!!! All of a sudden you had more funky pointy bits on sticks than anyone could possibly need. Unearthed Arcana was my absolutely favorite AD&D source book. Not so much for the munchkin races, alt character generation and the like than for clerical spells like "Ceremony". Hey, look, a cleric that actually has a "ritual spell" to marry people, sanctify ground for churches and such. Definitely not overpowered, but really added to the richness of the world.

/Paul

Actually Dungeons and Dragons II was much closer to D&D and a much better film than the highly advertised yet sucky relatively recent Dungeons and Dragons movie. I'd recommend seeking it out.

The D&D Rules Cyclopedia said that a "marshall" was a retired experienced soldier that a PC baron might use to train his troops, and that this NPC would typically be 5th level. I took that to mean that "most" NPCs would be 5th level or lower.

I'm not sure how that relates. So what if most NPCs are 5th level or below? I'm not talking about taking an NPC character sheet, handing it to the player whose character died, and saying, "Here you go, this is your new character." I'm talking about letting that player generate a new character at the same level of the old one, in order to avoid making that player feel useless because his character is drastically underpowered compared to the rest of the party.

Granted, at lower levels this is much less of an issue. If the other characters are only level 2, then you might be able to rationalize having the new character be level 1. But if the party is level 10, making the new guy only level 5 basically renders him useless, and that is un-fun for the player.

At half XP he'd be closer to 7 (but still, your point holds).

Because your character died and thats the penalty for having a character who dies... We never gave out even XP either so the party was usually a range of levels.

Aha, if there's *range* of levels, then the person at the bottom isn't as penalized as if everyone is the same level except for that one person.

Circular argument FTW? You're not really answering the question: why is it necessary to penalize the player whose character died over and above the fact of the character's death, which is itself already a penalty?