Digressive Musings on Old-School D&D

Tag: B/X D&D

Foraging, Hunting, & Wilderness Survival in B/X D&D

FORAGING: Characters travelling in the wilderness may attempt to search or hunt for food, either to extend their normal supplies or prevent starvation. Searching for food may be done while travelling. If 1 is rolled on a d6, the party will have found enough to feed 1-6 men for one day. This food will consist of nuts, berries and possibly small game. To hunt, characters must spend a day without moving. There is a 1 in 6 chance of having an encounter from the Animal Subtable on the Wilderness Wandering Monster Tables. This encounter is in addition to any normal encounter rolls for the day. Days spent resting cannot be used for hunting.

Cook, ed. Dungeons & Dragons Expert Rulebook, 1981, p. X51

I love the simplicity of this mechanic, and in my experience resolving attempts to forage or hunt during play is super quick and non-intrusive. Although the rule as described above allows for an actual encounter when hunting, I usually handle hunting just as abstractly as foraging to keep the game moving. With that said, I would certainly play out a hunting encounter depending on the context and feel of the gaming session. The AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide which came out in 1986 provided four pages on how to handle foraging, hunting, and fishing. Sure, that’s great for times when you need a bit more complexity and detail; however, I’ll take a solid one paragraph mechanic over four pages of unnecessary complexity for my games.

Discerning & Conceptualizing Wisdom in D&D

Wisdom rating will act much as does that for intelligence.

D&D Vol. I: Men & Magic, 1974

Helpful quote, I know. Besides acknowledging that wisdom is the prime requisite for clerics, along with some guidelines on how a wisdom score can be adjusted to affect a character’s overall experience point bonus, the above sentence is all the original three Dungeons and Dragons booklets ever said about wisdom. Despite my love for OD&D, that’s a pretty half-baked conceptualization for one of the three primary abilities. At least it was half-baked in its originally published form. It seems Gary Gygax just needed a mechanical parallel to the strength and intelligence prime requisites for fighting-men and magic-users, respectively. What wisdom actually measured had to either be deduced by the dictionary meaning of the word or ascertained in actual play with other players.

From Titles to Epithets: New Flair for Old-School Dungeons & Dragons

In early editions of D&D, level titles were used as descriptors for each character class at each level of advancement. A first-level cleric, for example, was known as an Acolyte, while a second-level cleric was called an Adept. Encountering three Mediums was synonymous with encountering three first-level magic-users. This system of level titles held true until the publication of AD&D 2nd edition in 1989 which dropped the practice. At the time, I can’t recall anybody I gamed with ever really noticing the change since most of us had already begun to ignore the titles in actual game play.

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