In Appendix C of the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, there’s a bunch of tables for generating random monster encounters.
Each of the 10 “Monster level” tables has a list of monsters and the number of those monsters that appear.
The problem I’m having, here, is that the numbers are clearly designed for a party of adventurers. For example, in the Monster Level I table (the lowest level monsters, which could theoretically be encountered by a meagre 1st-level party), if you roll “orc”, you get 7-12 orcs. There is no WAY a single, solo player-character could possibly defeat 7-12 orcs. The player-character would get slaughtered.
I’d like to scale these tables down for solo play. The problem is, I don’t know how big of a party they were designed for.
Nowhere in the text of Appendix C does Gygax state how big the party exploring the dungeon is supposed to be. Is it supposed to be 4 characters? 5 characters? 6 characters? Should I divide the listed number of monsters by 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 or more?
So … does anybody know how big a party a generic dungeon encounter was SUPPOSED to be designed for, back in the days of 1st Edition AD&D?
Generally speaking, encounters weren’t actually designed based on things like balance back then. The game was still coming from its wargaming roots, and the numbers listed for how many orcs occur is really only telling you what size social groups orcs form, not how many you should actually encounter in play. There really aren’t any guidelines, and there’s no way to judge how many you should use other than experience.
Expected party size, for what it’s worth, was anywhere from 1 to about 20 characters.
The best DM I had would adjust the encounters to be half to double the level of the party. That is, if the party consisted of 6 first level characters, we could expect to encounter a combined monster level of 3-12. He wouldn’t throw one 12th level monster at the party, but he might very well throw 12 first level monsters at us, or 6 second level monsters. He’d also feel free to completely disregard the die rolls if he thought that it was too easy or too hard for us.
I THINK, but I’m not sure, that the standard adventuring group was 4-6 characters, possibly with henchmen and/or hirelings and familiars and NPCs. This also assumes that the party is fairly balanced, class-wise, that is, there’s at least one thief or thief type, at least one cleric, one tank, and one mage.
That sounds like an eminently reasonable description of the “number appearing” field in the 1st Edition Monster Manual entries. (The 1st Edition Monster Manual’s listing for “orc,” for example, stated a Number Appearing of “30-300.”)
However, the charts in Appendix C of the DMG, on the other hand, explicitly listed how many of each monster you should actually encounter in play. It even had formulas to adjust this number upward or downward depending on what Dungeon Level the party was currently on.
It was these latter charts, in Appendix C of the DMG, which stated that an individual encounter with orcs on the 1st level of a Dungeon should involve 7-12 of them.
I only became familiar with the concept of a “tank” (a.k.a. the Meat Shield) when I started playing World of Warcraft at the end of 2005.
Looking back, I now wonder exactly how it was that a “tank”-type character in early pencil-and-paper Role-Playing Games was supposed to “hold aggro” on the monsters. What did (say) an AD&D fighter do to make the monster swing at him, instead of attacking the magic-user or the thief?
4th Edition D&D solved this problem by giving tank-type characters the ability to “mark” a monster, which caused the monster to take damage automatically whenever it attacked anyone other than the tank. But earlier editions of D&D didn’t have anything like this, or anything like a World of Warcraft “taunt” for that matter.
Did you just have to role-play your way through it by having your party’s tank throw out insults to the monster’s mother? How did that work for monsters that, technically, didn’t have mothers?
The thief was usually at the front of the party when the party was just getting from Point A to Point B, in order to spot traps and such. However, once a potential enemy was sighted, the thief would usually try to fade into the shadows and get into a backstabbing position. The mage was usually in the middle of the party, so that s/he could sling spells in battle, but was assumed to take some care to not hit the tank(s) with a stray Fireball or Lightning Bolt. Basically, the characters would position themselves differently in different situations, with the tanks moving to the front of the party when they encountered hostiles, and the more physically vulnerable characters moving to the back of the party. If a fighter type is swinging that bastard sword at an orc, you can bet that the orc is gonna target the fighter who is right in front of him and very accessible and the orc will worry about the mage as soon as he can get around to it. If the orc tries to reach the mage without taking down the fighter first, then the fighter will have at least one attack of opportunity on the orc, possibly more. Just one hit from a bastard sword, if it’s in the right place, can really ruin your whole day. So the tanks would engage each other, and the spell casters and distance fighters would target their opposite numbers.
Of course when you’re knee deep in kobolds, ALL sides of the group are the front.
Please note, I haven’t ever played WoW or Everquest. They scare me. You know how you hear these stories about people who have grown into a couch or chair? I’m afraid that might happen to me.
One thing that really helps tanking in tabletop RPGs is that the monsters can’t just run through or past a big guy with a weapon - in WoW there’s no collision detection at all and in EQ1 even if it is there it doesn’t really apply to enemies much in most circumstances. Whereas in D&D, if you are in a narrow tunnel and you put your beefiest guy in plate to the front, the enemies will only reach the rest of the party over his dead body.
In larger areas and outdoors it can come down to just how much of an asshole the GM wants to be - some delight in targetting the back rows, making pin cushions out of wizards and turning the tank into just another melee dps, some are a lot more forgiving and engage the closest players first which allows tanks to tank. We have had a bit of an issue with this in our Warhammer Fantasy campaigns, which has lead to everybody wearing metal armor and having high Toughness. When I briefly played a wizard, I spent every battle invisible as much as I could.
Most published adventures assumed a party of 6-8 PC’s, though larger ones certainly existed. I think that if you assumed “6 PC’s” you would get a pretty good result. The monster tables in the 1E books (and group sizes in the MM) were based much more on the idea of “what makes sense” in a fantasy world standpoint as opposed to “what will lead to a balanced encounter”. Design thinking just hadn’t really gotten that far yet, and it was also assumed that PC’s would need to guage threats and run for their lives more than in subsequent editions.
I’m throwing up a bit in my mouth when reading your description. While it’s true that 1st and 2nd didn’t really have a mechanism for this, it didn’t need to, since it didn’t even try for balance and if you had a good DM he wouldn’t concentrate on just the magic user all the time unless you were up against an intelligent monster. And given the choice between these two extremes of 1st and 4th, I’d take the former because it’s more realistic than a fighter able to somehow alter other’s minds.
But 3rd Edition did have a way around this in their zone of control. If you moved out of someone’s zone of control they got an Attack of Opportunity against you, so if your tanks blocked the passageway then they would get free shots and anyone trying to move past. Of course if you had two tanks blocking the path in a 10 foot hallway no one could get past but then they were in the way of the guys in the back. Which is as it should be. [del]Aggro[/del]
The thief who’s snuck up behind the monster and Backstabs it, though, would be in big trouble, wouldn’t he? As soon as that monster feels a dagger sticking between its baby-back ribs, it’s probably gonna whirl around and Hulk-Smash the poor little leather-wearing d6s-for-hit-points thief.
Was the strategy to have the thieves stay in the back of the party and shoot arrows, or to have the thieves wait until they were sure a Backstab would do enough damage to kill the monster?
Yes. I don’t see any reason for this not to be so, as there isn’t even any fictional sources of characters who can distract someone from attacking someone who’s backstabbing them. Although 3rd did have some skills toward that end. They were just roleplaying based (like taunting or distracting) and not the uber-mind-warping effects that are totally unique to MMOs and have no basis in reality nor literary tradition.
A bit of both. But what you really didn’t want to do in a meta gaming aspect though was sneak around alone as a thief even if that was the only way to stealthily do something. Because DMs are often loath to kill off an entire party, but killing off one or two characters they will do sometimes. And it’s hard to kill off one PC in a melee without realistically avoiding a Total Party Kill. But if a thief sneaks off alone and vulnerable, well, that makes the game a bit more dramatic now doesn’t it? :smack:
He wasn’t expected to hold aggro back then. The tank (more typically known as the brick) was just a dude who could dish out some damage and take some damage in return.
The concept of tanking as we understand it today was nonexistent. Smart creatures would and did bypass the Fighter in order to attack the Magic-User. Not necessarily at lower levels simply because the Fighter was more of a threat than a Magic-User at that point. At higher levels, certainly.
In this (interesting) ENWorld thread, the original poster suggests that a party of 6 PCs is about right for a home game, and that large parties like 10 or 20 PCs were mostly found at tournaments or at Gary Gygax’s home game.
Sometimes, but there was also the fact that turning to attack the thief was often as dangerous as leaving him alone, because it meant turning your back on the beefy fighter with the broadsword. Attacking from behind negated shield and Dex bonuses to armor (if any) and gave the attacker +2 to hit, so turning your back on a heavy hitter was risky. Technically, backstabbing was a one-shot thing; once the target was aware of the thief (which he certainly would be after taking a knife to the kidney), the thief didn’t get to backstab him again unless and until circumstances changed.
Hit and run tactics were popular with thieves in my circle. Backstab once, then run. If the target turned to come after you, someone else got a shot at his back. Once you’re clear, you circle around, looking for another back to plant something pointy in.
Minor nitpick: The game mechanic known as “Attack of Opportunity” did not exist in AD&D, as far as I can recall.
Combat rounds started with initiative rolls, with casting time added in for spell casters.
There was a list of actions given that would limit just how much a character (or Orc) could do in one round, but usually a standard move and one “action” may be taken. (I think actions could be delayed, with contingencies stated, such as “I’ll stand here and swing at the first Orc that comes in range.”.)
If there was a path around the Fighter that the Orc could take to get to a squishy, there wasn’t much a Fighter could do about it if the Orc moves past him.
3rd Edition really made the combat more “tactical” and structured. Before then, players and DM had to try to make do with more vague rules. It was understood, after all, that the game was just a story telling device after all.
In 1E AD&D, there was the idea that if you were engaged in melee and you moved away, then your opponent got a free attack. That’s like a proto-Attack of Opportunity.
Then in the 2E book Player’s Option: Combat and Tactics, they fleshed out an optional system that was more like 3E’s idea of Attacks of Opportunity.
You know what else has no basis in either reality or literary tradition?
Combat healers.
Gah, I hate that notion, and it’s EXPECTED in every single MMO out there. Your tank/brick character is expected to take several lives’ worth of damage over the course of a single boss fight, and then be ready for more. How are these guys not one giant heap of scar tissue by level 6?
