AD&D Quick Character Generation

I hope to be able to start a new AD&D campaign soon. This would be the first time playing AD&D, for me as the referee and probably for the campaign participants as well.

To get us started as quickly as possible, I put together another character creation cheatsheet. You can find it at this link.

We start by rolling ability scores with a seemingly strange percentile dice method. Actually, this is just simulating Method III from the DMG, i.e. roll 3d6 six times, pick the highest roll, repeat for each of the six stats. The percentile method accomplishes this with only one roll for each stat, to a 0.5% accuracy.

For those who are interested in the methodology, I used the excellent AnyDice tool to calculate probabilities for each result, rounded to the nearest 1%, and mapped the final result to percentile dice. I let the results 3–9 "give" their percentage share to the result 10 since their probabilities are all below 0.5%. Thus, the possible attribute spread is 10–18. This creates almost only above-average characters!

I picked Method III because there's no choice involved and the method creates very viable characters right away. It also encourages players to try out different classes depending on what the dice gave them.

Returning to the cheat sheet, we pick our class next. As in the OD&D cheat sheet from my previous post, we're only handling Human characters. The idea is that the other playable races will become available as players "discover" them in the world. This is again a great reduction in complexity, even more so than in OD&D, but still allows us to experience the whole spectrum of classes, and nopefully will even free up enouogh mental RAM in order to try out the psionics mechanic.

Next, alignment. I think rolling for it is best: if you don't want it to matter much, then there's no harm in rolling. If you want it to matter, then this will prevent players from coordinating on which alignment they choose, making sure that no one alignment will dominate the campaign.

As for my approach, I would like to experiment with a "Werewolf-style" social deduction dynamic, where PCs don't know each other's alignment from the start, and thus don't know which "team" they belong to. In my mind, alignment won't actually matter much at first level, but will become more and more important as the characters level up. I'll let you know how this idea goes.

Anyway, we roll for alignment and adjust based on class. Then checks are made for exceptional strength and psionics as needed. We roll Hit Dice the standard way and then roll for height, weight, and secondary skill.

I only included height and weight tables for Humans. The DMG requires up to two percentile rolls per stat (if you roll average, you roll again to allow a small variation), but I reduced it to one percentile roll. The result will be the same, for example, rolling 60% followed by 30% is the same as rolling 18% with a single roll.

The rest of the cheat sheet is standard by-the-book, with weapons and armor restrictions listed for convenience. I didn't get around to making equipment packs and I don't know if I will. For one, the AD&D equipment list is much larger, and also buying equipment seems to be part of the game according to Gary – you're supposed to shop around and find suppliers, stock can run out, etc.

In practice, I think I'll prepare some pre-generated characters including equipment for the very first session, and if that goes well, handle shopping asyncronously between sessions (if the players are up to it).

A couple of bonus cheatsheets round out the pdf. The first is a very minimal character sheet! I'll use it for pre-gens and let you know how that fares in practice.

The second is a conversion guide from OD&D characters to AD&D characters assuming standard 1974 OD&D rules.

That's it! I'm quite satisfied with this material, and hope it will allow us to quickly get to playing. RPGs have to compete with videogames and other entertainment forms, and I sincerely hope that my quick character creation tool will help give everyone a great AD&D experience.

Now I'll go and study the DMG. Cheers!

First Offering

I'll start this blog by sharing a useful tool I've been using in my OD&D one-shots and few-shots, but I think it will prove useful in campaign play also.

It's a quick character generation handout. Players at all levels of experience can work through it in parallel and they'll have a playable first-level character in ten minutes, tops.

Check it out at this link.

The main idea is to let players generate only the most essential information. I simplified the process by including only Human characters, which in my mind is sufficient to play D&D.

Languages and alignment are not chosen but assigned by the referee based on the location the PC will start in. Thus the PCs could be Chaotic if they start in a Chaotic town, and maybe know the language of the goblins who live nearby.

Most importantly, I reduced equipment selection to a single dice roll, taking an idea from Necropraxis: you can see his take at this link. Three d6 are rolled and this simply determines the starting equipment for each class. The GP price of that equipment will always equal the 3d6 roll times ten.

Designing these starting equipment packs has been somewhat time-intensive because I gave myself some design goals that are quite ambitious taken together.

First, I wanted to leave no GP unused, reasoning that characters so generated will go immediately into the dungeon and will want to have as much equipment to help them as possible.

Second, I wanted to limit myself to the items listed in Vol. I, but also exhaust these items; in particular every dungeon-compatible weapon has a chance to be wielded by a fighter.

Third, I put an eye toward party composition and into maximizing the chances of a successful expedition for players, thus: lots of oil flasks, torches, and container space. Also lots of ranged weapons for fighters. I also gave everyone Iron Rations because for now I'm considering these to be a required "ticket to entry" for dungeon exploration.

This done, I calculated movement rates, AC, and encumbrance in advance. This means that the player can simply copy down that information to their blank-page character sheet, or even just circle their equipment pack directly on the cheat sheet.

I'm using here a simplified encumbrance system where 50 coins = 1 unit of weight. This is working very well so far, and is really close to by-the-book encumbrances (at most a 5 coin rounding error per item, but for most items it's exactly accurate).

One note: a backpack contains 300 coins = 6 units of weight. Since everyone has "miscellaneous equipment", I list backpacks as containing 4 units of weight and weighing 2 units themselves. This simplifies things greatly. The 20 coins error from the 80 coins encumbrance for miscellaneous equipment is justified by only counting encumbrance for picked-up coins when 25 of these are collected. The generous referee can simplify further by only counting from 50.

Spell rules are subject to interpretation in original D&D. I say that the magic-user starts with a single spell in their spell book, and rolls for this spell with a d8. For my next one-shot, I'll curate the spell list by replacing spells that I know will not be useful in the prepared adventure with more useful ones, still retaining the total of 8.

I like to use the spell complexity rules from Chainmail, so I summarized these in the magic-user section. The magic-user must roll 2d6 to see whether their spell will take effect immediately, with a delay, or not at all. A failed spell will not be lost, and the PC will have the opportunity to retry casting it the turn after.

There is also the Fighting Capability vs. Fantastic Fighting Capability to explain. The first is the Chainmail value of the figure in units. I found it useful when using Chainmail to resolve "ordinary" combat between man-like figures. This could be interpreted in a couple of ways, but I think I settled on the best way to do it which will be the subject of a future post. The statistic is also good for adjudicating unarmed combat and struggles of strength: roll as many d6 as your Fighting Capability and compare the total with your opponent's.

The Fantastic Fighting Capability stat is just THAC0, only I've reversed it to use roll-under attack rolls. Thus to hit AC 6 you add your FFC to 6, say 2+6=8, and try to roll 1–8 on a d20. I found this system lightning-fast to adjudicate, and is of course mathematically equivalent to using THAC0 or the attack matrices in Vol. I.

This post got long! I realize I've embedded a lot of assumptions about my interpretation of OD&D in this little cheat sheet. Probably each one of these interpretations deserves a separate post.

Whatever your interpretation of OD&D, I think you'll find great value in the equipment packs. Use them to start up a new player in minutes, or to quickly generate a stable of characters for solo play. Happy gaming!