AD&D DMG Slush: Combat

While I have discussed the AD&D DMG in great length on this blog, my interest has largely been in interpreting the general feel of the game: I mostly unpack the implications of specific rules, worldbuilding conceits, and explicit playstyle intentions. I sometimes get into the weeds on something specific, offer a critical analysis of a subsystem, or suggest some way to utilize weird AD&D rules in your non-AD&D games, but by and large this blog is not overly concerned with 1e's mechanics.

I appreciate the authorial voice and hyper specific DM advice in the 1e DMG, but as for actual rules, I'm a 2e guy. I know the ins and outs better and I think the rules are presented in a more digestible way. When I play AD&D, I want it to feel like 1e, but the bones of the game are 2e.

All that preamble is to say that I haven't spent much time reading 1e's section on COMBAT. As far as I'm concerned, 2e's system is just fine for my purposes. I'd rather use THAC0 than attack matrices, and I'm not particularly interested in breaking my combat rounds into segments. 

I did, however, finally take the time to peruse this section of 1e's DMG. While there's a lot of stuff I'm plainly not interested in, there are some cool tidbits as well. This post has no high-minded thesis or profound takeaway. I'm just highlighting mechanics that I think are worth spending some time thinking about.

Right at the beginning of this section we get the (now fairly common) interpretation of hit points as an abstract representation of the player character's endurance, luck, and magical protections, rather than a concrete measure of actual wounds sustained:

This of course raises questions about things like the cure wounds spells (should it not instead be cure endurance, luck, and magical protections?), or why it takes several days of non-activity to recover lost hit points, but as usual this can mostly be handwaved by declaring it "abstraction".

Then follows a procedure for resolving combat and encounters (determine surprise, then distance, then initiative, then actions and resolution for the side with initiative, then for the side without) and a lengthy section on surprise. It is possible not only for one or both sides to be surprised, but also for greater or lesser degrees of surprise, which grant the surprising side greater or fewer actions before the surprised side can act (surprise can already swing an encounter heavily in one side or the other's favor, so this is a bit of fiddliness which I feel doesn't actually make the gameplay experience any better). 

Here is 1e's reaction roll mechanic, which is like, the most complicated and least useful one I've seen:

I like that it has separate categories for "Hostile" and "Violently hostile" as well as "Friendly" and "Enthusiastically friendly" (something I carry over into all my games and greatly prefer to the over-simplified negative/neutral/positive reaction roll you often see), but I don't see the need to distinguish between a neutral uncertain reaction and an uncertain reaction that leans towards either negative or positive.

There is some common sense advice as to whether monsters pursue player characters that wish to avoid them. Basically, monsters will pursue if it makes sense for them to do so (is there a barred door or flaming oil in the way? does the party have something the monsters want? is the party faster than the monsters?) or if their description says they will. Otherwise, it's a 50/50 chance.

An honorable mention to the totally nuts advice in this section on parleying:

"Player characters will usually attack first and parley afterwards. You should create encounters that penalize this behavior so as to encourage parleying. Parleying attempts, of course, will be fruitless." Huh?! Or maybe Gygax is saying that, because of the player's base (Evil) nature, attempts by the DM to encourage parleying will be fruitless? It's a weird sentence.

Missile discharge, magical device attacks, spell casting, and turning of undead all occur more or less simultaneously (this is a bit complicated by speed factor and casting time in some cases). This paragraph describes a frenetic sort of scenario where arrows are loosed at the same time as a fireball explodes, in which case the DM makes a saving throw for each of the arrows caught in the blast to see if they survive:

I kind of love this? It seems like such a pain in the ass to stop everything and adjudicate, but it is so grounded in the fiction of the moment and in common sense that I find it really satisfying. Imagine your party is about to be hit by a volley of arrows, so your wizard launches a fireball into the air to explode and incinerate a bunch of the arrows before they reach you. That's a really cool image.

Here is the rule for missile discharge into an ongoing melee:

While this can be a bit tedious in the event of an especially large melee with lots of combatants, I've always loved this rule. Missile weapons have always been powerful in D&D, especially in AD&D, in which a stationary archer can fire two arrows from their bow every round. Giving missile weapons a percentage chance to hit the attacker's allies when fired into a melee certainly won't make the player feel like Legolas, but it is a reasonable drawback to impose in these situations.

Some rules for grenade-like missiles:

It's worth drawing attention to how short the range of container missiles is. You can't easily and accurately toss these clear across dungeon corridors. If you are close enough to accurately throw a container of burning oil, you are also close enough for the target to easily get into melee range with you. 

Item saving throws come up again here. When you hurl that pot of flaming oil, the DM is supposed to check if it actually breaks!

I like this bit about throwing ingestible poisons into the gullets of monsters:

Here is a handy rule for when your players want to roll a boulder off of a ledge onto a monster's head:

14 pounds is, of course, equal to the "stone" unit of weight measurement used in the UK and Ireland. Fun!

Item saving throws rear their head once more when a creature attempts to leap over flaming oil:

Make sure to ask your players whether their characters are wearing long, dangly cloaks!

Likewise, make sure your Evil clerics are carrying unholy water to throw in your player character paladin's face:

Continuing on the subject of clerics, they can turn undead on multiple rounds in a single encounter so long as their attempts continue to be successful:

If lesser undead are being controlled by more powerful undead, the greater undead may need to be turned in order to turn the lesser.

Evil clerics are sick. Instead of turning undead, they compel them into service. This can be for as little as 4 hours (in the case of a 1st level Evil cleric compelling a wight, which requires a roll of 20), a full 24 hours (for any undead up to and including spectres, plus paladins of up to 4th level), or even 6 whole days (for any undead up to and including wraiths).

Love the idea of the Evil cleric running with an absolute squad of divinely compelled undead minions (plus any created by various spells). The possibility that the party's paladin is compelled to serve the Evil cleric NPC is also pretty neat.

Of course, this has its drawbacks, as if the Evil cleric is knocked unconscious or killed, the undead are freed from control and may attack the group, which could be very bad indeed:

Then there's this bit about opposed clerics having turn undead battles:

Simply put more Evil clerics in your games!

There's a long bit about closing into melee and charging:

• You cannot make a melee attack on the same round that you close into melee unless you charge.
• You can only charge if you're not encumbered, and you get a movement bonus (+33.3% outdoors, +50% for quadrupeds, and +100% indoors). 
• Charging creatures suffer an AC penalty (no Dexterity bonus allowed, or a flat penalty of 1 if the creature doesn't have a Dexterity bonus). 
• At the end of the charge, longer weapons strike first, regardless of initiative.
• A creature who is being charged (or leapt, pounced, or fallen upon) can brace a piercing weapon against the charge, dealing double damage on a hit. Braced weapons such as these always strike first.
• If the charging creature survives, it gets +2 to hit.
• Only 1 charge can be made each turn (10 rounds).

Weapon speed factor comes up next. If initiative rolls tie, the weapon with the lower speed factor strikes first (simple, but I like 2e's use of speed factor as a modifier for individual initiative a bit better - generally, I prefer individual initiative as it makes combat less like rocket tag). There's also this totally bonkers rule:

I like the idea that faster weapons might enable multiple attacks against a wielder of a slower weapon, but this feels way too fiddly for me. There's another bit about how weapon speed determines whether a weapon can strike before a spell is cast, but it's similarly too complicated to warrant using. Again, I'd rather just use individual initiative with a modifier from speed factor/casting time to determine whether the weapon user or the spellcaster goes first.

I really like this bit of nuance to the morale mechanic, where the degree to which the morale check fails determines how the morale failure manifests itself in the creature's behavior:

I'll be honest that I don't understand what the difference is, mechanically speaking, between "fall back, fighting" and "disengage-retreat". There's a later section on breaking off from melee (attacks of opportunity are a thing!), but it only covers turning one's back to the opponent and fleeing at full speed (which I would interpret as "flee in panic").

Maybe a good rule of thumb is "fall back, fighting" allows the creature to fall back at a third of their normal rate while still attacking, "disengage-retreat" allows half movement and doesn't provoke additional attacks, but doesn't allow the retreating creature to attack either (similar to 5e's disengagement rule), and "flee in panic" allows the full movement rate, provided the creature survives any provoked attacks (at +4 to hit)?

2e uses a 2d10 roll under morale mechanic (unlike AD&D's d100 mechanic), so the conversion would be something like:

• Fails by 3 or less: Fall back, fighting
• Fails by 4 to 6: Disengage-retreat
• Fails by 7 to 9: Flee in panic
• Fails by 10 or more: Surrender

There is a lengthy section on pursuit and evasion, which for some reason offers largely different guidance for determining whether monsters chase the player characters:

This is a mix of common sense and fiddly number stuff, but I like it well enough.

There is then a breakdown of what conditions must be met for pursuit to end, and the specifics depend upon which of the groups is faster. Basically, monsters will break off pursuit if the party is far enough away (with the distance needed being less if the party has broken line of sight), if a certain amount of time has passed without the pursuers gaining ground on the party, or if the pursuers become physically exhausted.

Pursuers can also be slowed by barriers and distractions, or confounded by intersections in the dungeon, provided they can't see the party's light source, hear them, or smell them - some nice rules of thumb re: how far light sources can be spotted once the party has rounded a corner and how far away characters can be heard when wearing different types of armor:

I also like this specific guidance for using food and treasure to distract monsters:

A very good reason to keep a pouch full of copper coins! If you're being pursued by monsters of low intelligence, simply scatter 90 coins behind you and you can guarantee they'll stop chasing you. That's not even one gold piece! During a pursuit, one round allows you to move three times, so unencumbered humans can get 360 feet away before the monsters pick up the chase again.

Pursuit outdoors is handled differently, and is determined by the speed of each group, the predominant terrain, the size of the groups, and available light (checked every hour):

This is solid stuff, and you can use it with basically any elfgame. 

Something worth mentioning which is not made explicit in the text is that each hour of pursuit is an hour "wasted" by the party - it is (presumably) one less hour that they can spend traveling that day, one hour that they are chased off course from their destination (and must make back once pursuit is over), and it could even result in an encounter check being made. Imagine evading pursuit from a band of orcs for four hours, only to run into a dragon immediately after. Conversely, you could lead the orcs back to inhabited lands and hope to run into a patrol from the nearby town to take care of the orcs for you.

Some guidance about how many creatures can attack a single creature simultaneously in melee:

This is one of those cases where I would probably just use 5e's rule of thumb (sizes T, S, and M occupy more or less one square each, size L occupies four, size H occupies nine, and size G occupies 16, and however many creatures of whatever size can fit in the surrounding squares is how many can attack at once). 1e's rules are not super thorough (they don't include size T, H, or G at all), but we could probably extrapolate from the information provided:

• Size T: 6 size T, 4 size S, 2 size M, or 1 size L, H, or G figure can attack simultanouesly
• Size S: 8 size T, 6 size S, 4 size M, 2 size L, or 1 size H or G figure can attack simultaneously
• Size M: 10 size T, 8 size S, 6 size M, 4 size L, 2 size H, or 1 size G figure can attack simultaneously
• Size L: 16 size T, 12 size S, 8 size M, 6 size L, 4 size H, or 2 size G figures can attack simultaneously
• Size H: 20 size T, 16 size S, 12 size M, 8 size L, 6 size H, or 4 size G figures can attack simultaneously
• Size G: 24 size T, 20 size S, 16 size M, 12 size L, 8 size H, or 6 size G figures can attack simultaneously

Or maybe extrapolation is the wrong way to go, as this section suggests that the shape or larger creatures will in part determine how many attackers can engage with it at once:

Like, giants are Huge because they're tall. How much wider are they than an ogre? That is, can twelve people really surround it and attack it all at once? Would you need to cover more of its vertical surface area to field that many attackers simultaneously, or would doing so simply allow additional attackers? It's really hard to say, but I do like that this is in part another concession to good old common sense.

"Facing" is, of course, important in AD&D:

No, your shield does not give you a ubiquitous AC bonus regardless of which direction you're being attacked from, stupid! Personally, I like the fiddliness of "No, the AC bonus from your shield doesn't benefit you against this attack. Neither does your Dexterity bonus." Fictional positioning!

Some other special considerations:

I like that magically sleeping and held opponents are automatically struck for maximum damage, and especially that they can be so struck at twice the normal rate! This is only when a melee is ongoing. Otherwise, they can be automatically slain or bound at a rate of one per round, which makes sense.

Interesting that two-weapon fighting must employ either a dagger or hand axe in the off-hand:

I prefer the 2e rule, which is simply that the off-hand weapon must be smaller than the main hand weapon (so if your main hand weapon is a long sword, the off-hand weapon can be a dagger, hand crossbow, scourge, sickle, or short sword, though bafflingly the hand axe is size M in 2e so it cannot be used this way). I think the 5e rule is even more elegant, though - just give certain weapons a property or tag that lets them be used in two-weapon fighting.

Here is 1e's rule for attacks of opportunity, which I alluded to earlier:

As I mentioned, there is no distinction between a creature that is fleeing in panic versus making a fighting retreat or tactically disengaging.

This bit is hilarious:

As the note at the bottom indicates, unless a special adjustment is made, a monk can never stun or kill a hill giant with a single blow (they're ten and a half feet tall). A 16th level monk could stun or kill an ogre (9' tall). Of course, the Monster Manual pretty much never lists the weight of any monster, so I can't imagine how you would actually adjudicate this. I would probably never use it, but it's very funny and very AD&D.

Continuing on the topic of monks' unarmed attacks:

I take this to mean that a monk attacking a lich would be subject to the lich's paralyzing touch attack, which is pretty brutal. Don't monks have it hard enough? Also kind of perplexed as to why dopplegangers are unaffected. Does this imply that they are not living things? Or perhaps that their physiology is far too mutable to be manipulated by the monk in this way?

Next is an explanation of what player characters might accomplish in a single melee round:

The DM might require players to write their actions on paper (like an IRL game of Diplomacy). The DM should "of course" regard all discussion about strategy between players as if their characters are talking aloud. If the players take too long to decide what to do, assume their characters are simply standing around debating their course of action. 

For my money, this is all pretty bad advice, but it is amusing. I do somewhat like the idea that combat should involve more talking. Flip this around and imagine that the goblins are also talking amongst themselves, declaring their actions aloud (in their own language, obviously)!

The example describing what can be done in a single round is somewhat interesting. It's pretty much all left to the DM's judgment. While I don't love breaking rounds up into segments, the idea that a character can hurl a flask of oil, drink a potion, and move, and that it actually takes a certain amount of time to retrieve an item from a backpack is interesting. Way too complicated for me, I think.

Following that is an example of melee, which is lengthy and complex, and which I won't detail fully here. Some highlights:

First, I have to give a shoutout to Gutboy Barrelhouse, which is maybe the best NPC name I've encountered in all of my analysis of TSR-era D&D. It is also worth pointing out that these parties are both very mixed in terms of character levels.

Next, we see the effect of surprise:

Because if you are surprised, the number you rolled is the number of segments for which you are surprised, rolling high is actually worse (that is, if you are surprised on a roll of 1 or 2, you would prefer to roll a 1 over a 2). Dexterity adjustments modify the number of segments that an individual is surprised, so while the whole party is surprised for 2 segments, one member of the party is surprised for only 1 segment because of their Dexterity adjustment (weird and fiddly - I don't love it).

The whole example is a bit complicated, but the advice at the end is solid:

There is a lengthy, complicated section on non-lethal and weaponless combat (pummeling, grappling, and overbearing). I can't imagine ever using this, but maybe? My eyes just kind of glaze over looking at it.

Several pages of attack matrices follow, which aren't of interest to me. There is a table with guidelines for how powerful a monster must be to affect another monster which is vulnerable only to magic weapon attacks:

So an ogre (4+1 HD) can hit a shadow (+1 or better to hit), a catoblepas (6+2 HD) can hit Demogorgon, Prince of Demons (+2 or better to hit - also, what a funny sentence), a vampire (8+3 HD) can hit Orcus, Prince of the Undead (+3 or better to hit), and 25% of frost giants (10 + 1d4 HD) can hit...well, there isn't anything in the Monster Manual that requires +4 or better to hit, so I guess, like, a god. Giants being able to kill gods seems pretty apt.

There's also more information on turning undead. Typically, 1d12 undead are affected. In the case of powerful clerics versus lesser undead, it's 1d6+6. 1-2 minor demons, lesser devils, mezzodaemons, and night hags can be turned by clerics of 8th level or higher (as "Special" undead). Good clerics turn undead (or "Special" fiends) for 3d4 rounds, and those creatures must flee at full speed for the duration if possible.

Lots of information about psionic combat. I love psionics but would never use this stuff. More likely I would just give the psionic creature a handful of psychic-flavored spells and adjudicate them with that in mind (i.e., no components required, and the psionic powers aren't treated mechanically as "magic"). There's even a handy list of which spells could be used as psionic powers:

Extremely useful in my opinion!

And you can even use these guidelines to modify the saving throw against these "psionic" spells:

Magic-users, clerics, elves, dwarves, and halflings are resistant to psionics, as are those under the effects of a mind blank spell. A helm of telepathy worn by the defender stuns the attacker if the defender's saving throw is successful. Seems much easier than using a whole other combat subsystem.

I also like this bit about psionic combat occurring very quickly, so the DM should just stop everything and resolve it before doing anything else:

There's also this handy table for using a monster's Intelligence to determine its Wisdom score:

If you're not running psionic combat, you'll probably never need this, but I found it interesting.

Next is saving throws. A roll of 1 is always a failure! Item saving throws! Magical items get bonuses, and all items get +5 against attack forms "in their own mode" (feels like that phrase is doing a lot of work here):

A lengthy diatribe on the very meaning of saving throws follows. I love this section:

(A)D&D is a game about personae interacting with the milieu. Okay! This results in adventure. Great! The resulting fantasy is dramatic and comic, foolish and brave, exciting and boring. Awesome. I love that D&D is explicitly allowed to be comic, foolish, and boring! Characters are linked by blood and purpose. There are frustrations, setbacks, and tragedies. The player characters are creating their own Conan-esque legends. Why is such a succinct explanation of D&D's very ethos buried in a subsection of the section on combat?

The player character is all-important. Interesting! Not very OSR. They must always have a chance to survive. If they do, they become the stuff of legends.

Love this example of a character chained to a rock escaping a red dragon's breath. Great advice for adjudicating these situations and describing them in the fiction. This whole section is great:

Flavorful description of how magic-users learn to bend magic to their will and how saving throws manifest in different character archetypes! The final example is the cherry on top. All that waxing poetic about the importance of the player character and the legends they live, how their fame and infamy enriches the campaign, how they must always have some chance to narrowly avert certain death...and the guy tripped over a rock and got fried by a blue dragon. Love it!

I like this bit about circumstantially modifying the saving throw:

Once again, good old common sense and deference to the fiction trumps hard-coded rules.

Just as a natural 1 is always indicative of a failed saving throw, this suggests that a natural 20 could always be a success:

Remember how much saving throws suck in 5e (at least in the 2014 version, maybe they fixed it in 2024)? We figured this out in 1979!

Here's an interesting bit about poison:

Swine and wearboars are immune to insinuative poisons. Large monsters are unaffected by smaller monsters' poisons. Again, common sense stuff, but I like seeing it spelled out.

Similarly, magic armor gives a bonus to the saving throw when it makes sense:

It does not affect saving throws against anything inhaled, ingested, injected, or things that affect the mind or otherwise bypass the armor like shapechanging magic. Metallic armor doesn't help saving throws against electrical attacks.

We get more language about what hit points (and moreover, the Constitution score) represent:

There's a lengthy musing about what percentage of a character's hit points represent "physical ability to withstand punishment" and which represent "metaphysical" ability ("skill, luck, and sixth sense"), but none of this seems to impact mechanics at all, as all hit points are recovered the same way (magical healing or the passage of time):

Characters with poor Constitution heal more slowly (if they have a penalty, they must rest that number of days before any hit points are recovered), while characters with high Constitution heal more quickly (only after the first two full weeks of rest). Regardless, player characters always regain full hit points after four continuous weeks of rest.

I really like the rule that (except in cases of low Constitution) characters regain one hit point per full day of rest (i.e., no adventuring activity - one could argue that this rule still allows traveling overland and even dungeon delving, so long as no combat or spell use occurs, but I choose not to interpret it that way). If a goblin cuts you and does three damage, you feel it. That's three days of rest! This does exacerbate the issue of clerics, paladins, and the like serving as healbots, but it also greatly boosts the value of those characters, so I'm okay with it. It also encourages players to spend more time in settlements, which costs some money and incentivizes them to get mixed up in politics and intrigue.

Did you know that, rules as written, AD&D characters die at -10 hit points? I didn't!

This was a common house rule in our 2e games growing up, but I assumed it was just that - a house rule to make the game less lethal. I hadn't guessed that it had this sort of precedent!

I'm a bit mixed on this. I do like the level of lethality posed by death at 0 hit points. On the other hand, being brought to 0 hit points is still brutal, even if death does not occur. The character is helpless until they rest for a full week unless a 6th level heal spell is used. The rest of the party basically has to drop everything to get them to a safe location, effectively ending whatever expedition they were on.

I also like that at -6 the character gets some sort of lingering injury based on whatever brought them to 0. It's cool to have a hard-coded point at which your character gets a scar - a putrefying giant tick bite, a lingering head injury from a goblin's mace, or a gnarly scar from an owlbear's beak. I'm tempted to use this in my ongoing B1 game, but it might be unfair to all those characters who have died along the way already.

We get rules for intoxication:

Love this. Not sure why we need both modifiers to bravery and morale (or what the difference is even supposed to be, mechanically speaking), but otherwise this is great stuff. Obviously you can use this table for when the player characters are intoxicated, but I like using it for NPCs as well. A greatly intoxicated orc that can barely hit you but refuses to stop fighting and is harder to kill is more fun than just a regular old orc. 

The penalty to attack dice also acts as a bonus to opponents' saving throws, so a drunk magic-user's spells are easier to resist than a sober one's:

It takes time to sober up, but the application of stimulants can shorten the time required:

The chance that using strong stimulants will lower a character's Constitution permanently is also funny. Great excuse to introduce amphetamines to your D&D game!

Finally, the combat section concludes with a list of types of real-world "insanity", described in clinical and mechanical terms. Insanity can be caused by a variety of factors, including cursed magic items, backfiring spells, mental anguish in a character afflicted with lycanthropy, psionic attack, attacks from Demon Lords like Demogorgon, or whatever. It's fine. Better minds than I have written about the issues surrounding the use of real-world mental illness in roleplaying games, so I won't dwell on it here.

So that's AD&D combat as presented by the DMG. There's some neat stuff in there and some stuff to throw away. The big highlight is the lengthy blurb about saving throws that for some reason distills the essence of D&D itself into a sort of impromptu mission statement. The bit about hit points representing both physical endurance as well as metaphysical skill and luck is also quite interesting. 

Mechanically speaking, I really like the more nuanced "degrees of failure" approach to morale, the rules for evasion and pursuit, the list of "psionic" spells, the common sense approach to saving throw modifiers, the rules for lingering injuries, and the rules for intoxication. The example describing what actions can be performed in a round and the example of melee (while not represented in full in this post) are also illustrative and worth checking out.

I'm going to keep running 2e, but as usual, 1e has given me some things to keep in mind when running my version of the game. I imagine a lot of this stuff found its way into the 2e DMG as well, but honestly, I don't see much reason to use the 2e DMG at all when the 1e version exists.