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I'm looking to start an AD&D 2e game in a month or two with a group of friends, all of whom have played AD&D before. Now, what I'd like to know is how one makes a properly balanced AD&D encounter. It's far less clear than later editions with their whole ECL thing. I've run a couple AD&D games before but winged it, which generally left them either without much challenge or a near TPK. Any advice on this? How about setting an XP value to an NPC? The guide listed in the Monstrous Manual is not very helpful for that.
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Jul 31, 2015 06:43
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ScaryJen posted:AD&D is pretty swingy, so balance can be a bit tricky. I usually try to match monster Hit Dice to the average party level for wandering/non-boss encounters and bump it up by 2-3 for bosses. More than Hit Dice that makes encounters deadly is the weird poo poo some monsters can do, like stat damage and level drain, so I count anything like that as a HD for my formula. I also treat each die past the first for "number appearing" as a HD as well, and sometimes adjust those dice if I want more or less of a specific monster appearing. Yeah the real trick with AD&D monsters is the wide variance in their unique little powers. One might have a form of grapple that lets them do automatic damage until removed, one might have a unique poison that paralyzes the target if they fail their save vs poison, but it paralyzes for 1 TURN which is brutal. All those things mean the XP value doesn't mean as much as it should, and makes me wonder how the hell they determined poo poo back in the day. I suspect it was entirely guesswork. So a level 2 mage would give 2500 xp split through the party? That doesn't seem right, as a level 2 mage MIGHT get a spell off before dying, but probably would just die in 1 hit. A level 2 ANYTHING isn't worth the amount of XP it took to get to that level. I used the rolling method used in Red Death, all stats are 8 and you roll 7d6 which you can add in whatever combination you want as long as it doesn't end up breaking racial maximum. Works pretty well for allowing you to be whatever you want as long as you don't roll completely trash
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Jul 31, 2015 07:48
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ScaryJen posted:Yeah, looking back on it, my remembered math about killing classed NPCs may be off. They usually didn't come up in my games unless they were a boss type character with at least a bit of backstory and some magic gear. I may have done it more as a "level up" button for completing story arcs, it's been awhile. Red Death has some neat ideas but holy poo poo is magic garbage there. If you've ever played Ravenloft you know about Dark Powers checks: Imagine normal dark powers rules but also ANY spell causes one AND each spell takes 10x as long to cast AND you have to make an ability check at the end to actually cast the spell. Needless to say, just being a dude with a gun is WAY more valuable to the party, since a spellcaster is pretty well guarenteed to start failing powers checks at some point. Where in the AD&D 2e DMG is this table? I'd love to use it, it would be very helpful for stuff I'm doing. Gotta stat out important NPCs! Presumably you could use it to slap class levels onto monsters as well, which is something that AD&D didn't do all that often. drrockso20 posted:I kinda want to see someone do a 2E clone that integrates a lot of the weird optional stuff, and puts a lot of focus on things like Specialist Mages and Specialist Priests among other things All Wild Mages all the time, baby! No non-wild mages allowed. Specialist priests are kinda ehh, though. Their difference has to do with a custom built faith which is generally either hilariously OP or garbage. What I'd like to see more of is a resurgence in the old campaign settings. More Planescape, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, or Spelljammer would be just great. While I love AD&D, it's so much easier to get a party for 5e, but homebrewing isn't to my taste for something as big as trying to recapture the feel of one of those campaign settings.
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Jul 31, 2015 08:54
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Angrymog posted:Does anyone know if the Sigil guidebook has a poster map? I'm rebuilding my planescape collection, and it's one of the ones I'm missing, and now that I have the main four boxes, I'm not super precious about getting the original versions of other things, unless they had maps in them, which I know the POD process mangles by printing them as a bunch of pages. Not that I know of, not in that particular style. I've found a number of pretty good ones online, however. The very first image has a solid, wrapping map with labeled streets, major buildings of note, and even where the various businesses and buildings may be found in other books.
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May 6, 2018 07:59
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