AD&D thoughts, Part Three: Sword and Sorcery vs. High Fantasy

[dorchadas]

Interest, skip, etc. This is more general thoughts rather than specifics.

Also, I edited my house rules post with some more stuff. Go see!


One of things that D&D has more and more gotten away from is its roots in old sword and sorcery stories--Howard's Conan stories, Leiber's Lankhmar, Moorcock's Elric, and so on. Those were a lot of the stories that Arneson and Gygax pulled from to create the game that became D&D.

What is sword and sorcery? Well, the wiki definition is there, but here's a few things I'd emphasize:

• Adventurers - Sword and sorcery is basically where the whole idea of the adventurer as a profession came from. The heroes go out, steal treasures, plunder ancient ruins, tangle with wizards and demons, and then head back to town spend their ill-gotten gains on hookers and blowwenches and ale, thus precipitating the need to head down into the dungeons again for the next round of debauchery.


• Humanocentric - Sword and sorcery does feature non-human races, but typically as either horrible foes (witness the ape-men or serpent men of the Conan stories) or as ancient races who rose and fell before humanity clawed its way to civilization. This gets reflected in the demihuman level limits (about which more later) or demihumans-as-classes of early D&D.


• Sword vs. Sorcery - In all these stories, linear fighter/quadratic wizard isn't a problem. The sorcery in sword and sorcery typically is curses, ritual magic or the summoning of hideous monstrosities, and its practitioners are frail and in ill-health from all that time bent over scrolls and inhaling incense. The hard part is making your way past the wizard's summoned demons and magical traps. Once you actually confront the wizard in the flesh, it's easy. There's an echo of this in the pre-3.0 casting failure rules--to wit, if someone hits you at all, your spell fails.


• Low Effect of Magic - The average person has never seen a spell, much less met a spellcaster. Wizards and priests of forgotten gods are things you hear about around the fire on winter nights, not things that live in the rich part of town.


• Black and Gray Morality - Sometimes Gray and Grey instead, but typically you root for the protagonists because they're the protagonists and the bad guys are corrupt officials or evil sorcerers, not because the good guys are shining paragons of goody goodness.

High fantasy is more common nowadays. It's your typical bildungsroman story about people pulled from poor roots who rise to greatness to save the world, etc. That's reflected in D&D as well, with the assumed Level 1 farmboy to Level 20 badass on dragonback progression, good vs. evil mindset (re: alignments) and the prevalence of threats to the ENTIRE WORLD!!!!!

D&D kinds of blends these two together. In your typical generic D&D setting, magic is easy to learn with tutoring (Wisdom or Intelligence 9 to enter the caster classes), but has little effect on the way most people live. Wizards can get quite powerful, but it's still extremely difficult to act if there's someone in their face swinging a weapon at them.

One big thing is magic items. D&D really kind of began the whole "magic items everywhere, characters dripping with magic" trend, but--at least in early editions--the amount of magic items out there made very little sense considering the rules needed to make them (in second edition, it's easier in subsequent editions).

First, a quote from the 2nd ed. Dungeon Master's Guide: "And a magic-rich world has consequences unforeseen by most DMs. If magic is common, then normal people will begin to build inventions around it. There may be djinni-powered steam engines, crystal ball telecommunications networks, and other very un-medieval results. This can be entertaining, but it does drastically change the shape of the campaign world. The charm of discovering a magical item is lost if everyone has one, but too few magical items can also ruin a game. This is especially true at higher levels where magic is also important to character survival. You don't want to kill half the party just so the survivors can be excited at discovering a sword +1." So, they did realize what the consequences were, and it's neat that they took this to its logical end and built a whole setting around it (Eberron). While magic items were not as integral to character power levels and survival as they were in 3.0, they were still pretty damn important.

Also, I think the later line "Powerful, exotic, and highly useful items (such as a sword +1)" is absolutely hilarious in light of the way D&D actually tends to be played. :p

Anyway, here's the rules for making them:

• Scrolls - You need exotic ink, an exotic quill, and paper of good quality. The example given for flesh to stone is the feather of a cockatrice. The wizard has to be seventh level at least. Also, every single scroll requires a fresh batch of ink and a new quill.


• Potions - You need a complete alchemical lab (unless you're a priest, then you just need an altar to your deity), rare and bizarre ingredients, and 200 to 1000 gold pieces worth of mundane ingredients per potion.


• Everything Else - Costs at least 1000g and sometimes up to 10,000g, two weeks to a month of preparation of the object to be enchanted, requires a Permanency spell (which permanently lowers Constitution by 1) and after all that, only has (60% + caster's level - 1% per spell or exotic ingredient needed) chance of success.

Who were all these wizards willing to spend all that money and time and sacrifice a part of their life force permanently to make a generic Sword +1? No wonder all those ancient empires fell--their wizards over-extended themselves and died of pneumonia. :p

Forgotten Realms gets even more ludicrous at times. Elven High Magic can make magic items too, but you need multiple super-powerful elf wizards (at least 900+ years old and level 20+), who can make one item a week. And then they talk about some army of 300 people where every single weapon and armor they have is +5. So...one ranged and one melee weapon, shields, armor...adds up to 32 years to make all of that, during which time those elf wizards couldn't use any other magic at all, ever. 32 years isn't that long when you're 900 years old, but it's still a bit (read: a lot) silly.

(the truly hilarious thing is that, under the rules as written, High Magic has a backlash per spell, the lowest of which is aging 1d10 years and it goes up to "permanently disintegrated with no chance of resurrection" or "reduced to a drooling idiot with Intelligence 3" or "Gate to Hell opens and sucks you in" and then goes on to list a High Magic ritual for creating magical windows that you can make solid or not at will. Wat.)

As I mentioned in my last post, Netheril gets around this with devices called Mythallars, which basically are like broadcast power stations for magic items. You can make items simply and cheaply and link them to the Mythallar, in which case they only work if they're within a mile of it, or do it the long way above to have them work anywhere. This is part of why Netheril, despite being full of superpowerful archwizards, doesn't have that much foreign influence--99% of the archwizards' badass trinkets and protective items stop working if they leave their floating cities. It's also while the Earthbound Netherese get such a raw deal. I mean, the archwizards theoretically could set up a Mythallar for an Earthbound settlement, but then they need to stick around and maintain it, and when it's that or go all over in your very own flying city...not much of a choice, really.

But, magic items are important for character survival, as it says, especially as you get higher in level and start encountering creatures who require magic items to even be hurt. So, what to do?

• Smaug Shots - Allow critical hits, or hits of sufficiently high margin, to hit anything even through its tough hide because you hit the weak point for massive damage or whatever. I'll probably use this regardless of what I decide to do.


• Weapons of the Legendary Hero - There was a copy of Dragon Magazine that had rules for items becoming magical spontaneously based on the deeds of their wielders--a sword used by a hero who sacrificed himself to hold off an orc horde in a narrow pass might end up a Sword +3 Orcslaying, for example. I can't remember the rules, but this wouldn't be too hard to adjudicate. It also allows for people to use the sword of their forefathers without feeling like they're falling behind the power curve.

I'm still not entirely sure what to do about this, or exactly what I want the balance to be. Netheril isn't so bad (because of the range limitations), but the elf counterbalances mostly rely on elves being of the "we sit in our forests and do nothing lest the balance of the world be affected" mindset that PC elves are highly unlikely to be by virtue of them being RPG PCs played by humans.


Anyone else run into this problem? Was it a problem for you? How did you deal with it?

Next post (on this theme)--a bit more on demihumans and humans and mood.

Comments

[deathfromafar.livejournal.com]

I really like the Weapons of the Legendary Hero. I might have to use that in a future game of my own. It would really make sense for a hero's weapon to do such things as that (though it sounds much like goblin-made items in the Harry Potter universe, i.e. the Sword of Gryffindor). It would also really make sense for found items which have their own odd bonuses.

[dorchadas]

If you can get a hold of it somewhere, the entire way magic items work in Earthdawn is built around the same premise, to the extent that the way you identify what an ancient artifact can do is by learning about the life of the last person who used it. Mechanically, it starts off with no powers, and as you go along and learn more you unlock its various abilities until it's fully powered up.

It lets you start with the ancient magical weapon of your house and gradually become worthy to wield its true power through the course of your adventurers, which is pretty awesome. I never did like the idea of characters just throwing away their old weapons when new ones came along, "This is my trusty sword, handed down from my father, or at least it was until I found that Sword +2 Flameblade in that ancient ruin"-style.

[q99.livejournal.com]

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Who were all these wizards willing to spend all that money and time and sacrifice a part of their life force permanently to make a generic Sword +1? No wonder all those ancient empires fell--their wizards over-extended themselves and died of pneumonia. :p-

Maybe they're around because the D&D world is so old? So many lost empires. Sure, you may have a kingdom where each generation makes maybe 10 magic items from all of it's best magic smiths, but throw in a few dozen millenia of that with few being destruction, and also stuff like gods, demons, and so on making their own (Hm, most magic being of planar/magic being origin in a younger world, perhaps?), and they build up.

-As I mentioned in my last post, Netheril gets around this with devices called Mythallars, which basically are like broadcast power stations for magic items. You can make items simply and cheaply and link them to the Mythallar, in which case they only work if they're within a mile of it, or do it the long way above to have them work anywhere. This is part of why Netheril, despite being full of superpowerful archwizards, doesn't have that much foreign influence--99% of the archwizards' badass trinkets and protective items stop working if they leave their floating cities.-

That's a cool idea.

Reminds me a bit of Dragaera in Steven Brust's books. All magic from the most common magic (there's a few types- witchcraft, Necromancy, sorcery, but aside from sorcery the rest are rare or weak) involves drawing power from *one* artifact. It cut out once and floating castles starting falling from the sky. But it lacks the range limit like Mythallar, which adds a really cool wrinkle.

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Weapons of the Legendary Hero - There was a copy of Dragon Magazine that had rules for items becoming magical spontaneously based on the deeds of their wielders--a sword used by a hero who sacrificed himself to hold off an orc horde in a narrow pass might end up a Sword +3 Orcslaying, for example. I can't remember the rules, but this wouldn't be too hard to adjudicate. It also allows for people to use the sword of their forefathers without feeling like they're falling behind the power curve.
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Oh, I remember that one! Cool idea.

[dorchadas]

Maybe they're around because the D&D world is so old? So many lost empires. Sure, you may have a kingdom where each generation makes maybe 10 magic items from all of it's best magic smiths, but throw in a few dozen millenia of that with few being destruction, and also stuff like gods, demons, and so on making their own (Hm, most magic being of planar/magic being origin in a younger world, perhaps?), and they build up.

That's true. It's also possible that any pre-human races had/have cheaty ways of getting around it like the elves do. Their High Magic used to come without any downsides other than the "1 per week, no other spells at all" thing.

One thing I notice is that in D&D computer games, I get way more potions, scrolls, wands, etc. than I ever remember getting in tabletop. Maybe it's just that we always refused to use them because of the megalixir problem.

("You're fighting a red dragon inside an active volcano and you don't want to drink your potion of fire resistance?!"

"What if we have to fight two red dragons later!?! What will we do then?")

Reminds me a bit of Dragaera in Steven Brust's books. All magic from the most common magic (there's a few types- witchcraft, Necromancy, sorcery, but aside from sorcery the rest are rare or weak) involves drawing power from *one* artifact. It cut out once and floating castles starting falling from the sky. But it lacks the range limit like Mythallar, which adds a really cool wrinkle.

Oh, I remember that! It was in that 3 Musketeers homage, right? The Phoenix Guard? Or the one after it?

[q99.livejournal.com]

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One thing I notice is that in D&D computer games, I get way more potions, scrolls, wands, etc. than I ever remember getting in tabletop. Maybe it's just that we always refused to use them because of the megalixir problem.-

They also tend to throw in rather large amounts of random encounters, and like to give a lot of small loot from that, or looking around, or so on. Hence, scrolls and potions :)

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Oh, I remember that! It was in that 3 Musketeers homage, right? The Phoenix Guard? Or the one after it? -

The one after :) With some other books going to the consequences.