I'm of a firm belief that misunderstanding the scaling of the 1-minute round has led to a ton of unfair criticisms of OD&D & AD&D. For example, the parrying rule doesn't allow for attacks. Why? Because, normal parrying is assumed as part of the normal AC (dexterity adjustment). The parrying rule is an explicit attempt to minimize hits to oneself at the expense of attacking, usually paired with a withdrawing action. Within a one-minute scrum there isn't a need to model parrying explicitly any more than there is to model the numerous offensive actions taken in that minute. The to-hit and damage rolls are statistical determination of the result of many actions. It's no accident that Gygax was an actuary. Looking at statistic results over specific timespans is the heart of that profession and it shines in AD&D. Similarly, one sees this in the unarmed combat rules of AD&D. They too are consistent with the 1-minute round. They don't model each attempt to strike, they model the state of things after one-minute of action. Once you start looking at these things, the real beauty of the original OD&D and AD&D scaling of space and time really shines in comparison to later versions. It's a thing of beauty. So, many things that seem unrealistic or contradictory or missing when shorter time-scales are considered begin to make sense under 1-minute rounds.
We homebrewed our combat rounds to be 10 seconds because we enjoyed the head fiction of fast, frenetic fighting. It suited our Pepsi-fueled, 13 year old brains. 🤯 It also made the rate of missile fire feel more "realistic". We still assumed that parrying, feinting, and similar maneuvers were happening within that 10 second span.
Unfortunately, it seems as though nobody read any of Gygax's narratives in the 1st Ed. PHB or DMG about these things. He explained his assumptions very well. And very thoroughly, too verbose to be honest. Without this knowledge, the rules do seem to be a poor design and thus were heavily modified by GMs and players over the years. And now we've got characters that have lots of swings and do handfuls of dice in damage against foes that have mountainous piles of hit points. Gygax warned of these developments in his narratives. Apparently, subsequent game developers didn't read this. Good video. Thanks.
I started playing with BECMI & AD&D 1ed. It didn't matter how long the combat was SUPPOSED to be, my fighter was still getting 1 attack just like the kobold he was fighting. I think in AD&D 1e a fighter had to be 7th level before he could attack as many enemies as he had levels, provided the enemies were humanoid of less than 1 hd. I didn't feel very heroic compared to Mages whipping out fireballs & chain lightening. When I found out about Chain Mail allowing multiple attacks per round for fighting men I though yeah, that is what I wanted!
What is also strange to me is how Holmes worded the passage about time. “Each turn is ten minutes except during combat where there are ten melee rounds per turn, each round lasting ten seconds.” So to me, this means that each combat round is 10 seconds long, but a “combat turn” is 100 seconds long (10 rounds at 10 seconds each). That’s just weird to me.
Interesting how Gygax describes hit points as endurance, right up until the last few strikes. I like that, and it’s reminiscent of endurance and piercing blows in The One Ring.
@@TheBasicExpertThe fact of ‘save or die’ poison rolls, that can kill even high level characters, shows that hit points are not extra health, but envisaged to be a marker of endurance, skill and puissance in arms.
@@elliotvernon7971 Pretty much. I mean Gary gives great reasoning in 1e about hit points and how they represent endurance, luck, favor of the gods, etc..
An issue with abstraction, in any game system, is when something very specific tries to be done. An abstracted 1 minute combat rounds needs open ended results--exploding dice, critical hits, effect as it is done in mongoose traveller. In personal combat a lot can happen in one minute as well. An example from the UFC. Pat Barry vs Cheick Congo. Barry nearly KO's Congo twice, then himself gets KOed all in the span of 30 seconds. 24 strikes and 3 discrete grappling exchanges.
I think you are thinking too much in a later years RPG sense when these rules were still written in a wargame mindset. Classic Traveller has none of those things and is the superior version of Traveller IMHO. And I say that as someone who has contributed art to mongoose 2e Traveller since 2015. I love that game.
Another interesting historical comparison I think is looking at the 3 original books compared to Tunnels & Trolls, published first in 1975 I believe, which Ken St. Andre explicitly states was influenced by the three original books and him finding the rules very confusing so he wrote his own game. Ken at that time was not a wargamer I do not believe, but when you look at T&T he clearly “got” the idea that combat is abstracted. In T&T melee combat everyone involved fights and each combatant generates a point total called “Hits” that represent how effective their attacking and defending was in a 2-minute combat “turn.” The combatants on each side add together their Hits and the total from each side is compared to the other side, with the higher side winning. The members of the losing side each take a number of “Hits’ (which is essentially hit points in D&D) equal to the difference between the winning side’s Hits total minus the losing side’s Hits total divided by the number of combatants on the losing side. Even though Ken was not a wargamer, he clearly understood that in the original 2 D&D books, combat is abstracted and there was no counting of individual blows and such. There was no “to-hit roll” even made to see if you “hit” your opponent in T&T, you just rolled to see how effective you were in that combat turn with offense and defense all added together into the same “effectiveness” score. So even across different games, historically at this very early stage in the hobby, melee combat was a very abstracted affair, not a “fencing match” with a die roll representing an individual attack or individual defense. But if you are not a wargamer, I think this concept is sort of a tough one to wrap your head around at first.
I agree with everything you said, but to this day the one-minute round and missile fire have never really gelled in my mind. If I expect archers to keep track of their arrows (reasonable), how many should they mark off for a one-minute round? Just 1 (or 2 depending on how you see RoF)... or like 10-12?
I view missile fire as just different. That is a 1 for 1 roll. Such a character should not be in a melee exchanging blows in parrying, etc.. So to me its fine. It takes time to load a bow and aim so for me, it still works for the 1 minute round.
I don't know BE, I think he's got you there. A musket or crossbow you might be able to use just once per minute, but a bow you can use every few seconds. For me this is why they shortened the round. People with no background in wargaming were having too hard a time visualizing all that was supposed to be going on.
@@chameleondreamAnd they do to this day. Playing with one minute rounds is really hard, trying to factor in distances and multiple people. I let bows shoot twice in that time, a la chainmail, but that really makes bows very powerful compared to melee.
the power of range attacks is still a issue in wargames. That's why middle earth sbg says you can't have more then 33% bows in your warband. It's mentioned a lot in skirmish wargame design and how it is nerfed with ranges and power reduced.
This is very interesting. Great video BTW. The way I see it, Gygax and Arneson came from wargaming, Holmes - as far as I know - did not. Gygax, I've always suspected, wanted D&D to somehow circle back and reconnect with Chainmail, ultimately ending with armies and generals and fantasy wargaming. D&D was a fun way to build up the backstory of your army's general, your nation's leaders, so Gygax did what he could to keep the two compatible. From a wargaming perspective you don't want too much minutia. A 1 minute round sounds good when you have two dozen squads under your control and really only care about who in the squad stands or falls. Holmes, as far as I know, did not come to D&D from wargaming. He started out with D&D. He was also an fantasy author, and most combat in books is between two to six characters with a close focus on the detail. Holmes was about the minutia and his version of D&D is far more detailed that the booklets that came before it. For Holmes, 1 minute of combat is a long time in which a lot can happen, especially if you are intent on describing the battle blow by blow (which to me seems a bit awkward but I hear some people like to do it). Holmes is also focused on the moment and not on the future, so his version of D&D isn't interested in setting up strongholds and amassing armies. Flash forward to today and it really seems as if Holmes has won out. There have been attempts to bring the game back to wargaming - the AD&D Battlesystem, the Companion and Masters Sets, whatever garbage WoTC churned out this past week about Bastions - but that is not what people are interested in. D&D has basically become a very long and ornate origin story generator for super-heroic characters and the wargaming that it sprung from, which it was originally intended to return to, has been relegated to just a Coda tacked onto the end of the song. Just like super-heroes, everybody loves an origin story, but they're not too sure what to do with them once name level has been reached. Buy them a castle and let them retire.
As an aside to this point, I think you'd like Ben Milton's video on "D&D is not a Game." D&D (at least to my perspective) was always intended to be a collection of different games and systems, Chainmail/a miniatures wargame always having been intended to be a large part of that framework. We've lost many of the pillars of the game over the years as TSR (and then WotC) have attempted to make the system more insular and hold more of the market-share, and I think it muddies a lot of the history and intent of RPGs.
Agreed. This change from a 1-minute to a 10-second combat round really highlights to me the difficulty with non-wargamers trying to understand the three original books. Holmes was not a wargamer to my understanding so when G&A use language like a “to hit roll”, which in wargaming is abstracted across large units of men fighting other large units of men, and not individuals fighting individuals, it is easy to see how a non-wargamer is going to interprete phrases like this outside of the context of classic wargaming to mean something completely different than G&A intended. The ironic thing to me is that the way combat is described in the original three books really only makes sense in a wargaming context, and yet, the game caught on with non-wargamers. I remember as a 10 year old in 1975 trying to play and understand those three original books and not being a wargamer at the time, the game made very little sense especially combat wise UNTIL we started to use the “alternative combat” mechanics and charts because they make it sound more like a “to-hit roll” is a single attack, which we could wrap our brains around. And yet, by doing so and bring into our understanding of the game a non-wargaming mentality, we were not really understanding the game at all the way that G&A intended. I think this changes quite a bit when you get to AD&D and Gary really starts to muddle things up, for example sticking with the 1-minute combat round, hit points, lots of failed attacks and feints and blocks during that 1-minute, etc., and then laying on top of this very detailed “skirmish” rules like shields only being effective against blows coming from certain directions, how many opponents can attack another opponent based on size, etc. Mixing an abstracted larger-scale wargame set of combat resolution rules with small-scale skirmish rules was a very “interesting” choice that just IMHO added fuel to the fire of confusion of what the combat rules were trying to accomplish with abstraction.
@@matthewkirkhart2401 Well, I'm impressed a 10 year old could fathom those three original books. I'm in my 50's and they make my eyes boggle out of my head :-)
@@chameleondream Oh we failed miserably. For example, we thought “hit points” coming from the “hit dice” were how many dice you rolled in combat when you hit someone, so this was how much damage we were doing to the monsters. Lol. And that’s just one of our “interesting” interpretations. I also played with some kids who were more like 13 and 14 but still, they didn’t really understand the rules either. We just had such a love of the idea of fantasy gaming, dungeon crawling, and being able to be in a story similar to those that we were starting to read that we didn’t really care that much about the rules. I sometimes think I should listen more to my 10-year-old self more. 🙂
i think it has to do with how combat was resolved, If i remember correctly 0d&d and holmes used combat phases, ad&d used combat segments. I don't know about B/X itself but many of the clones just give you a action&move on your turn
@@TheBasicExpert take what i have to say with a grain of salt, my original books wondered off many years ago so im going off of memory and afew clones i have on my shelf. In Od&d you could act in multiple phases(missle, move, melee, etc... ) so everyone would move before melee where as in holmes (atleast in blueholmes) you were only allowed to act in one phase so you couldn't move and attack in the same round. there's a decent wright up comparing different ways of running combat in the optional combat rules section of sword & wizardry.
@@jw66667 0e is pretty basic in it's alternative method. If that was how your group played then, you were probably drawing from chainmail, which would be my recommended way as well as it has a breakdown of phases as you state (which probably led to later editions variants on it).
Oh you are spot on with the heroic general idea. Arneson actually started people at Hero Type level to keep it heroic and people alive. The troops also add additional longevity to the HQs/Leaders. This is wargaming folks.
10 rounds of combat per turn are segments from 1e. Take a look at Griffs notes from Tonisborg rules. He has combat segments in the combat flow just worded somewhat differently. He has additional notes from the original group as well so probably worth paying attention to what he is doing here in the near future.
The only thing I disagree with so far is that you are calling level 1 pcs normal men. This is definition but a person casting magic is not normal, neither is a +1 fighter or someone who can turn undead. The fighter obviously has ability of a non normal man at level 1 but the other two classes are elevated above normal by their abilities. Sorry to nit pick but it at the table it starts get a little confusing calling PCs normal types when you are building dice pools and reading charts.
Mudcore sounds like a heavy metal sub genre.
Now, it begs the question: were you to make an rpg with the title Mudcore, what kind of game would it be?
I'm of a firm belief that misunderstanding the scaling of the 1-minute round has led to a ton of unfair criticisms of OD&D & AD&D. For example, the parrying rule doesn't allow for attacks. Why? Because, normal parrying is assumed as part of the normal AC (dexterity adjustment). The parrying rule is an explicit attempt to minimize hits to oneself at the expense of attacking, usually paired with a withdrawing action. Within a one-minute scrum there isn't a need to model parrying explicitly any more than there is to model the numerous offensive actions taken in that minute. The to-hit and damage rolls are statistical determination of the result of many actions. It's no accident that Gygax was an actuary. Looking at statistic results over specific timespans is the heart of that profession and it shines in AD&D.
Similarly, one sees this in the unarmed combat rules of AD&D. They too are consistent with the 1-minute round. They don't model each attempt to strike, they model the state of things after one-minute of action. Once you start looking at these things, the real beauty of the original OD&D and AD&D scaling of space and time really shines in comparison to later versions. It's a thing of beauty. So, many things that seem unrealistic or contradictory or missing when shorter time-scales are considered begin to make sense under 1-minute rounds.
We homebrewed our combat rounds to be 10 seconds because we enjoyed the head fiction of fast, frenetic fighting. It suited our Pepsi-fueled, 13 year old brains. 🤯 It also made the rate of missile fire feel more "realistic". We still assumed that parrying, feinting, and similar maneuvers were happening within that 10 second span.
Unfortunately, it seems as though nobody read any of Gygax's narratives in the 1st Ed. PHB or DMG about these things. He explained his assumptions very well. And very thoroughly, too verbose to be honest. Without this knowledge, the rules do seem to be a poor design and thus were heavily modified by GMs and players over the years. And now we've got characters that have lots of swings and do handfuls of dice in damage against foes that have mountainous piles of hit points. Gygax warned of these developments in his narratives. Apparently, subsequent game developers didn't read this.
Good video. Thanks.
I started playing with BECMI & AD&D 1ed. It didn't matter how long the combat was SUPPOSED to be, my fighter was still getting 1 attack just like the kobold he was fighting. I think in AD&D 1e a fighter had to be 7th level before he could attack as many enemies as he had levels, provided the enemies were humanoid of less than 1 hd. I didn't feel very heroic compared to Mages whipping out fireballs & chain lightening.
When I found out about Chain Mail allowing multiple attacks per round for fighting men I though yeah, that is what I wanted!
What is also strange to me is how Holmes worded the passage about time. “Each turn is ten minutes except during combat where there are ten melee rounds per turn, each round lasting ten seconds.” So to me, this means that each combat round is 10 seconds long, but a “combat turn” is 100 seconds long (10 rounds at 10 seconds each). That’s just weird to me.
Yeah it's worded very strangely, I agree.
Interesting how Gygax describes hit points as endurance, right up until the last few strikes. I like that, and it’s reminiscent of endurance and piercing blows in The One Ring.
I'm probably going to do a topic about hit points in the near future.
@@TheBasicExpertThe fact of ‘save or die’ poison rolls, that can kill even high level characters, shows that hit points are not extra health, but envisaged to be a marker of endurance, skill and puissance in arms.
@@elliotvernon7971 Pretty much. I mean Gary gives great reasoning in 1e about hit points and how they represent endurance, luck, favor of the gods, etc..
An issue with abstraction, in any game system, is when something very specific tries to be done. An abstracted 1 minute combat rounds needs open ended results--exploding dice, critical hits, effect as it is done in mongoose traveller. In personal combat a lot can happen in one minute as well. An example from the UFC. Pat Barry vs Cheick Congo. Barry nearly KO's Congo twice, then himself gets KOed all in the span of 30 seconds. 24 strikes and 3 discrete grappling exchanges.
I think you are thinking too much in a later years RPG sense when these rules were still written in a wargame mindset.
Classic Traveller has none of those things and is the superior version of Traveller IMHO. And I say that as someone who has contributed art to mongoose 2e Traveller since 2015. I love that game.
@@TheBasicExpert I'm more of a fan of the 1st edition of mongoose traveller. Not without its issues.
Another interesting historical comparison I think is looking at the 3 original books compared to Tunnels & Trolls, published first in 1975 I believe, which Ken St. Andre explicitly states was influenced by the three original books and him finding the rules very confusing so he wrote his own game. Ken at that time was not a wargamer I do not believe, but when you look at T&T he clearly “got” the idea that combat is abstracted.
In T&T melee combat everyone involved fights and each combatant generates a point total called “Hits” that represent how effective their attacking and defending was in a 2-minute combat “turn.” The combatants on each side add together their Hits and the total from each side is compared to the other side, with the higher side winning. The members of the losing side each take a number of “Hits’ (which is essentially hit points in D&D) equal to the difference between the winning side’s Hits total minus the losing side’s Hits total divided by the number of combatants on the losing side. Even though Ken was not a wargamer, he clearly understood that in the original 2 D&D books, combat is abstracted and there was no counting of individual blows and such. There was no “to-hit roll” even made to see if you “hit” your opponent in T&T, you just rolled to see how effective you were in that combat turn with offense and defense all added together into the same “effectiveness” score.
So even across different games, historically at this very early stage in the hobby, melee combat was a very abstracted affair, not a “fencing match” with a die roll representing an individual attack or individual defense. But if you are not a wargamer, I think this concept is sort of a tough one to wrap your head around at first.
I agree with everything you said, but to this day the one-minute round and missile fire have never really gelled in my mind. If I expect archers to keep track of their arrows (reasonable), how many should they mark off for a one-minute round? Just 1 (or 2 depending on how you see RoF)... or like 10-12?
I view missile fire as just different. That is a 1 for 1 roll. Such a character should not be in a melee exchanging blows in parrying, etc.. So to me its fine. It takes time to load a bow and aim so for me, it still works for the 1 minute round.
I don't know BE, I think he's got you there. A musket or crossbow you might be able to use just once per minute, but a bow you can use every few seconds.
For me this is why they shortened the round. People with no background in wargaming were having too hard a time visualizing all that was supposed to be going on.
@@chameleondreamAnd they do to this day. Playing with one minute rounds is really hard, trying to factor in distances and multiple people.
I let bows shoot twice in that time, a la chainmail, but that really makes bows very powerful compared to melee.
the power of range attacks is still a issue in wargames. That's why middle earth sbg says you can't have more then 33% bows in your warband. It's mentioned a lot in skirmish wargame design and how it is nerfed with ranges and power reduced.
This is very interesting.
Great video BTW.
The way I see it, Gygax and Arneson came from wargaming, Holmes - as far as I know - did not.
Gygax, I've always suspected, wanted D&D to somehow circle back and reconnect with Chainmail, ultimately ending with armies and generals and fantasy wargaming. D&D was a fun way to build up the backstory of your army's general, your nation's leaders, so Gygax did what he could to keep the two compatible. From a wargaming perspective you don't want too much minutia. A 1 minute round sounds good when you have two dozen squads under your control and really only care about who in the squad stands or falls.
Holmes, as far as I know, did not come to D&D from wargaming. He started out with D&D. He was also an fantasy author, and most combat in books is between two to six characters with a close focus on the detail. Holmes was about the minutia and his version of D&D is far more detailed that the booklets that came before it. For Holmes, 1 minute of combat is a long time in which a lot can happen, especially if you are intent on describing the battle blow by blow (which to me seems a bit awkward but I hear some people like to do it). Holmes is also focused on the moment and not on the future, so his version of D&D isn't interested in setting up strongholds and amassing armies.
Flash forward to today and it really seems as if Holmes has won out. There have been attempts to bring the game back to wargaming - the AD&D Battlesystem, the Companion and Masters Sets, whatever garbage WoTC churned out this past week about Bastions - but that is not what people are interested in.
D&D has basically become a very long and ornate origin story generator for super-heroic characters and the wargaming that it sprung from, which it was originally intended to return to, has been relegated to just a Coda tacked onto the end of the song.
Just like super-heroes, everybody loves an origin story, but they're not too sure what to do with them once name level has been reached. Buy them a castle and let them retire.
As an aside to this point, I think you'd like Ben Milton's video on "D&D is not a Game." D&D (at least to my perspective) was always intended to be a collection of different games and systems, Chainmail/a miniatures wargame always having been intended to be a large part of that framework. We've lost many of the pillars of the game over the years as TSR (and then WotC) have attempted to make the system more insular and hold more of the market-share, and I think it muddies a lot of the history and intent of RPGs.
Agreed. This change from a 1-minute to a 10-second combat round really highlights to me the difficulty with non-wargamers trying to understand the three original books. Holmes was not a wargamer to my understanding so when G&A use language like a “to hit roll”, which in wargaming is abstracted across large units of men fighting other large units of men, and not individuals fighting individuals, it is easy to see how a non-wargamer is going to interprete phrases like this outside of the context of classic wargaming to mean something completely different than G&A intended. The ironic thing to me is that the way combat is described in the original three books really only makes sense in a wargaming context, and yet, the game caught on with non-wargamers. I remember as a 10 year old in 1975 trying to play and understand those three original books and not being a wargamer at the time, the game made very little sense especially combat wise UNTIL we started to use the “alternative combat” mechanics and charts because they make it sound more like a “to-hit roll” is a single attack, which we could wrap our brains around. And yet, by doing so and bring into our understanding of the game a non-wargaming mentality, we were not really understanding the game at all the way that G&A intended. I think this changes quite a bit when you get to AD&D and Gary really starts to muddle things up, for example sticking with the 1-minute combat round, hit points, lots of failed attacks and feints and blocks during that 1-minute, etc., and then laying on top of this very detailed “skirmish” rules like shields only being effective against blows coming from certain directions, how many opponents can attack another opponent based on size, etc. Mixing an abstracted larger-scale wargame set of combat resolution rules with small-scale skirmish rules was a very “interesting” choice that just IMHO added fuel to the fire of confusion of what the combat rules were trying to accomplish with abstraction.
@@matthewkirkhart2401 Very good insight! I always love to hear the perspective and personal insight of people who were there from the beginning.
@@matthewkirkhart2401 Well, I'm impressed a 10 year old could fathom those three original books. I'm in my 50's and they make my eyes boggle out of my head :-)
@@chameleondream Oh we failed miserably. For example, we thought “hit points” coming from the “hit dice” were how many dice you rolled in combat when you hit someone, so this was how much damage we were doing to the monsters. Lol. And that’s just one of our “interesting” interpretations. I also played with some kids who were more like 13 and 14 but still, they didn’t really understand the rules either. We just had such a love of the idea of fantasy gaming, dungeon crawling, and being able to be in a story similar to those that we were starting to read that we didn’t really care that much about the rules. I sometimes think I should listen more to my 10-year-old self more. 🙂
I wonder how much Moldvay BX or Basic Fantasy would change if combat rounds were one minute instead of 6 or 10 seconds...
i think it has to do with how combat was resolved, If i remember correctly 0d&d and holmes used combat phases, ad&d used combat segments. I don't know about B/X itself but many of the clones just give you a action&move on your turn
Holmes uses ten second rounds rather than 1 minute like 0e and AD&D.
@@TheBasicExpert take what i have to say with a grain of salt, my original books wondered off many years ago so im going off of memory and afew clones i have on my shelf.
In Od&d you could act in multiple phases(missle, move, melee, etc... )
so everyone would move before melee
where as in holmes (atleast in blueholmes) you were only allowed to act in one phase so you couldn't move and attack in the same round.
there's a decent wright up comparing different ways of running combat in the optional combat rules section of sword & wizardry.
@@jw66667 0e is pretty basic in it's alternative method. If that was how your group played then, you were probably drawing from chainmail, which would be my recommended way as well as it has a breakdown of phases as you state (which probably led to later editions variants on it).
Oh you are spot on with the heroic general idea. Arneson actually started people at Hero Type level to keep it heroic and people alive. The troops also add additional longevity to the HQs/Leaders. This is wargaming folks.
10 rounds of combat per turn are segments from 1e. Take a look at Griffs notes from Tonisborg rules. He has combat segments in the combat flow just worded somewhat differently. He has additional notes from the original group as well so probably worth paying attention to what he is doing here in the near future.
The only thing I disagree with so far is that you are calling level 1 pcs normal men. This is definition but a person casting magic is not normal, neither is a +1 fighter or someone who can turn undead. The fighter obviously has ability of a non normal man at level 1 but the other two classes are elevated above normal by their abilities. Sorry to nit pick but it at the table it starts get a little confusing calling PCs normal types when you are building dice pools and reading charts.