[OD&D] Halenar Frosthelm: House Rules 39 years and counting

[ThePerilousDreamer]

In this thread I will be posting all of the house rules that I have thought about and/or tried and/or used. Not everything in this thread will be things that I have tried, some I have only thought about, some were only used once and some are used all the time.

I will also be posting ideas with a question, such as the following example:

How do you define each of these by size in your campaign? Also do you have better names for some of these?

I sort of do it as follows:

Farmstead = 1 or 2 extended families
Hamlets = 3 or more Farmsteads up to 150 people.
Small Villages (walled) = 151-400 people
Villages (walled) = 401-1000 people and may have a few shops & other amenities
Small Towns (walled) = 1001-2000 people
Towns (walled) = 2001-5000 people
Large Towns (walled) = 5001-10,000 people
Small Cities (walled) = 10,001-20,000 people
Cities (walled) = 20,001 - 100,000 people
Large Cities (walled) = 100,001-1,000,000 or more people

And much, much more: especially the questions!


Disclaimer: Please note that anything I post in any thread I create here in the Workshop is solely intended to illuminate what I do IMCs and, where applicable, the reasoning behind it. Anything I post here in the Workshop, is not intended to comment in anyway on anything you do in your campaign or on any opinion or belief that you may or may not hold in regard to anything, but to solely and exclusively be my opinion as it relates to my campaigns and game worlds alone.

[ThePerilousDreamer]

Of all the house rules I have had over the years the oldest one concerns natural 20's. In OD&D bitd a natural 20 always hits and double natural 20's, i.e. two natural 20's rolled back to back was always and auto kill. My friend who brought the game to us in college in the fall of '75 told me that when they first started playing in the spring of '74 that it was the first house rule they put in the game for OD&D.

Over the years there were many variations, such as a natural 20 followed by a 17 or 18 was double damage or followed by a 19 was triple damage and followed by a second 20 was an auto kill. One variation was that you had to be 4 levels higher than your opponent for any of these options to kick in.

Currently, I run it that a natural 20 followed by a 19 is double damage and a natural 20 followed by a second 20 is an auto kill.

[ThePerilousDreamer]

What are the death rules in your campaign? Are you happy with way you run it? And are your players happy with the way you run it? Are you more lenient that you would otherwise be to make everyone happy?

Bitd we played it that at 0 HPs you were dead as dead could be, end of the story until you got a cleric to a high enough level to change the playing field. Now, as I mentioned elsewhere, we currently play it as follows: when a PC gets to 0 HPs (actually 0 to -10HP) we rule that you are unconscious and bleeding, the Ref rolls a d12 and whatever the result is the other PCs have that many melee rounds to start administering at least first aid or the PC is dead. However, if the roll on the d12 is a 1, then the PC is dead because there is not enough time (6 sec melee rounds) to start first aid.

My preference would be to run it the same as we did bitd, but I don’t have strong feelings about it, since one: it makes all the players happy and two: they gain no advantage since they take more risks and as a result die just as much and as often as if we did it the old way.

How do you run it in your campaign?

Tim Kask wrote:

In the true sense of the original game, 0 HP meant you had failed to avoid a mortal blow. You were dead. How long you had before the stiff got ripe was up to each DM and the ambient temperature of the adventure.

This is how we played it bitd and not one player ever questioned or complained about it back then. Currently I implemented my house rule as detailed above simply because it does not really help them at all, but it gives them the illusion that they have been helped and it completely eliminates questions or complaints, but I would prefer the original way. At least it does not really make them die less often, because players always use every bit of rope that you give them. I implemented this house rule because not everyone comes from an old school background and even those that do have largely been corrupted (no offense intended) on this issue over the years.

[Scott Anderson]

1. I like your size categories. Along with the idea of "hides" of land, you can get a good feel for how many of each kind to put into a hex, and then how many people live in one.

2. For demi-men, dead is -1 HP. Men live to -5. Elves can't be brought back from the dead. We use 1 minute combat rounds and anyone checking on someone at 0 or lower stabilizes them.

People who die but are basically intact can also throw on a table of permanent disfigurement instead of handing in their sheet. Peg legs, missing an eye, lose both hands, that stuff.

We don't use regular crits when playing 0e or B/X. In 3.X, the weapons have defined crits. Fighters do cleave, and in 0e, anyone making their attack throw by 4 or more can roll an extra die. We play a version of 0e that only uses six-siders, and attacks are resolved on two dice. It's much less common than "make it by 4" sounds to d20 players. This is called over-damage.

Fighters, with cleave and a better chance at over-damage, can make short work of lesser foes; but you don't get the same swingy combat as you do with crits.

[ThePerilousDreamer]

I like the concept of a "hide" of land and the fact that it was not a specific measure of the area of a plot of ground, but that it varied in size.

Here are some other terms that I would like to work into one version of my rules, of course I would have more incentive to do it if I had players who were interested in the original end game.

List of medieval land terms
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The feudal system, in which the land was owned by a monarch, who in exchange for homage and military service granted its use to tenants-in-chief, who in their turn granted its use to sub-tenants in return for further services, gave rise to several terms, particular to Britain, for subdivisions of land which are no longer in wide use. These medieval land terms include the following:

a burgage, a plot of land rented from a lord or king
a hide: the hide originally referred to the land-holding that supported a family in the early medieval period, sharing its roots with words used to describe related issues, such as the family deriving directly from the sexual relationship between a man and a woman. The hide was later used to define areas of land, which could vary from 60 to 120 old acres (approximately 30 modern acres (120,000 m2)) depending somewhat on the quality of the land. The hide was not ubiquitous in Anglo-Saxon England, with, for example, land in Kent being assessed in sulungs (approximately twice the size of the average hide).
a Knight's fee: is the amount of land for which the services of a knight (for 40 days) were due to the Crown. It was determined by land value, and the number of hides in a Knight's Fee varied.
a hundred: a division of an English shire consisting of 100 hides. The hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham in Buckinghamshire are known as the Chiltern Hundreds.
a franconian Lan used in Poland since the 13th century, consisted of 43.2 morgs = 23 to 28 hectares. The term Lan was also used to indicate a full-sized farm, as opposed to one split up into a number of smaller sections.
a wapentake: a subdivision of a county used in Yorkshire and other areas of strong Danish influence. It is similar to hundred or a ward. It was used in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland.
a shire was originally a type of a subdivision of a county; some shires evolved into administrative areas equivalent to a county; a shire was headed by a Shire Reeve (becoming Sheriff, in Saskatchewan the Mayor of a Rural Municipality is a Reeve); shires were most commonly subdivided into hundreds, but other types of subdivisions were also made
a rape: Sussex was divided into six rapes, which were intermediate divisions between the county and the hundred. A rape was to have its own river, forest and castle.
a lathe: Kent was divided into five lathes, from the Old English laeth, meaning district.
a riding: was a division of land in Yorkshire equivalent to a third of the shire. The name is derived from the Old Norse thriding, meaning "one-third".
a ward: a ward is a subdivision of a shire, equivalent to a wapentake or a hundred. It was used in Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, and Durham.

From sizes.com

In England, 5th or 6th – 16th century, an Anglo-Saxon unit of land area, conceptually the amount of land needed to support a peasant family, “acres sufficient for one plow for a year1.” Much of the 19th-century controversy concerning the size of the early hide arose from thinking of it as an areal unit, when in fact it was one by which taxes were assessed. In this role it was ultimately replaced by the knights fee. In later times the hide = 120 acres, often naively assumed to be = 100 acres, but in the original sources describing the hide as a hundred acres, it is the long, or great, hundred, 120, that is meant.

hide

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