More IV

I still love method IV and the little webpage I mention in that other article has had some success/praise and quite a lot of usage from other people who like a bit of ivy. I thought I'd move the utility up to this site instead of running it at home. So here it is, complete with a new feature: you can ask for sets that qualify by race instead of class. Enjoy and let me know if there's any bugs

Update 2024: Geoffrey McKinney asked if I could add an option to not filter out scores which don't qualify for any class (or race if using that). So here it is. If you select "two 15s" it will still make sure the results have two 15s or better, but the character may still not qualify for anything due to a very low score or two.

Note that I still use the OD&D order for ability scores.

Qualify by:	Class Race
Two 15s:
Raw scores:

Beauty is in the Die of the Beholder

If your looks are holding you back,
Get some armour and a small
European country and you'll soon
be beating them off with a stick.
Or a death ray, as the case may be.

D&D had charisma as an "ability" from the start and from that start, the lack of appearance was noted by players, DMs, and adventure writers alike. The idea that charisma subsumed appearance never worked for a moment with anyone I knew and it's still a pretty laughable idea; just talk to a good-looking 18-year-old sometime and test it out.

So, when it was added in UA it should have been good news, surely? All those succubi could be stated out sensibly without giving them huge loyalty bonuses; and handsome rangers could set hearts aflutter across the boarder lands while good-looking rogues could wile their way into the confidences of women without being automatically regarded well by everyone around them.

Yeah, well. You know; didn't work out that way. I think like many others I rejected some aspects out of hand but a recent discussion on DF made me wonder if it was worth surveying it again with a more detached view compared to the exciting days of holding a new AD&D hardback in my hands.

Firstly, there was the name. "Comeliness" is not a neutral word, nor is it an elegant one for the concept. "Appearance" is much better and has the virtue of not abbreviating to something that starts with "Co". Just a plain stupid choice, which I suspect was driven by pride - Gygax simply couldn't admit that so many rival games which had used "Appearance" for years had been right.

Second problem, and the main thing I want to post about: comeliness grants a special power of fascination for the higher scores. Which sounds oookayish, except that "high" starts at 14 in a game which suggested that all player characters should have two scores of 15 or more. So, 14 isn't that impressive sounding to the players.

Heroes are just different.
(click to enlarge and read 2nd paragraph)

But player characters are special. For the bulk of the population, 15 is the highest score they can have and that's only as common as 18 is when rolling 3d6. Combined with a 15 charisma, for a +1 bonus, the best a normal person can hope for is a comeliness of 16. At the other end of the scale, the lowest score possible is 5 - "simply ugly".

In the context of the rules, the 1-in-46656 village heart-breaker is only able to use the fascination power on people with a wisdom score of 8 or less, which sounds fine, really, and probably more of a nuisance than a boon.

But PCs are not normal people and they can have the full range of comeliness from -2 to 21 (-5 to 23 with inter-racial modifiers) and the effects of the fascination are greater as the numbers climb, and not just in proportion.

A character with comeliness of 17 can still only fascinate creatures with wisdom of 8 and under, but with a score of 18 that jumps to 12 for the opposite sex (and starts to work on the same sex, albeit at a lower strength).

The next step up is at a score of 22, which is just about reachable for elves dealing with humans although it would be so incredibly rare as to be insignificant if scores were being generated randomly. While the wisdom score affected remains at ⅔ of comeliness (14 or under at this level), a new power has appeared which means that if such an attractive being actively attempts to seduce a character then they must have a wisdom of 18+ to resist being fascinated.

Fools in love

Strictly speaking, the maximum score is 25 like any other ability, available to a CHA-19+ with a base 18 comeliness and a couple of points inter-racial bonus. The rules however give details for scores up to 30 presumably in the expectation of them being used for an updated Deities and Demigods or something similar. I'm going to ignore this category for now.

In parallel with the fascination power, the new rules say that reaction rolls are modified. Firstly, it seems that ugly characters (scores under 10) simply get a negative reaction. Does this mean no roll is made? Who knows?

For mildly attractive characters in the 14-17 range, the reaction roll is still made and increased by the comeliness score; at 18-21 this is increased to 1½ times the score and at 22 and up the modification is a whopping 2x the score. So that's at least +44%! To put that into context, that on its own is enough to leave just a 1% chance of a reaction below "neutral" and an 88% chance of a positive reaction.

"On its own". Well, is it? Because such a character almost certainly has a high charisma too, which also has a reaction bonus. Combining them simply breaks the system.

On top of that, there's the question of when do the comeliness effects actually apply? Plainly, not while in full plate armour with the visor down. What about when wearing a veil or mask? This is where comeliness gets tricky, because it's in actual play when players want to use or manipulate their comeliness that questions like this come up.

"And where do you keep
your spellbooks, Merlin?"
"Oh, come on! That's got to
be worth +4 at least!"

Leaving that aside for a moment, there is some interesting material in the explanation of the fascinate power. The first one being the saving throw against being manipulated - roll 3d6 and try to exceed the comeliness score in question. Bonuses are given for being asked to do things against one's nature (with +3 or +4 suggested for alignment-changing requests).

Any successful save against the fascination power breaks it permanently. I think this is something that's often overlooked when judging the effect of this power in the game. Until scores get really high, it is reasonably possible to break free quite quickly.

There's also a note about how shape-changing magic works and in particular a mention of polymorphing only allowing a modification of 2 from the figure's original score due to "subtle social clues", which offers a possible solution to the question of hidden faces.

Finally, the whole shebang is modified when dealing across races - and in the special case of drow, across sexes too. Essentially, all the demi-humans and humans are divided into classes and given a modifier for when dealing with others. There are some groupings within these classes whereby two races see each other without modifiers. For example, all races see the grey elves and high elves as having +2 to their comeliness but they do not get the bonus when dealing with each other.

There's an odd note about humans and halflings being paired this way, but since both have a zero modifier it makes no difference anyway.

Drow females get +1 to comeliness from other races, including drow males; drow females view drow males as having a -1 penalty. Which is quirky and quite good, or at least as close to good as anything about the done-to-death clichéd tedium that the drow represent ever gets.

Complicating this further is a note in UA for comeliness of 7-9 which implies that the modifier due to charisma is not received when dealing with other races. Perhaps this is another of those cases where subtle social clues leave the viewer none the wiser about what makes a particular dwarf or elf more beautiful or, as I believe, it's just a mistake in the text. I suspect the idea was to point out that dwarves have a maximum charisma of 16 to non-dwarves and do not get a bonus for higher charisma in those cases.

Evil is as Evil Seems
Did I say "finally"?  I lied. Most of the above is about high comeliness and there is a quirk of low comeliness which reflects some mediaeval views on the subject of beauty (which were themselves rather muddled). Ugly evil creatures are, apparently, seen as beautiful by evil characters so that a negative score in such circumstances is treated as positive.

"You can't book me for 'being funny looking'!"

This effect is mentioned only in relation to scores below -8, so it's not entirely clear whether these scores are the only ones to which it applies. Nor is it clear if anything is meant to be inferred about evil characters and positive scores. And on top of that, harsh rejection by a high comeliness character results in their score being treated as negative by the spurned would-be lover. What if both are evil? Does that mean there's no effect? I doubt it but it's another sloppy bit of thinking in a section of rules that has similar issues, I think.
Since this range of scores is impossible to generate, the questions it raises are only in relation to specifically placed encounters so I guess it's up to the DM, and the same is true of the ultra-high scores. I suppose that it makes some sort of sense in a fantasy world to have evil characters view, for example, both  Juiblex and a succubus as equally attractive.
Interestingly, comeliness is defined in the rules as being something that effects creatures of a human sort, not something only they posses, so the DM is free to apply it to anything that takes his/her fancy as being horrific or beautiful, even if not actually humanoid.
There's a subtext here that evil acts perhaps should reduce comeliness, but that perhaps would not go down well with players. Still, it's an interesting "Dorian Grey" notion that might be worth playing with.

"Okay, that's 700sqft of rug
and one Egyptian queen.
Cheque okay?"

Conclusions
That's the rules as written, pretty well. The problem for me is not actually the power of fascination in itself. Stories are full of examples of great characters (usually men, it has to be said) led astray by beauty and the rule reflects that but is, in my opinion slightly too hard to snap out of at higher scores (technically impossible at scores of 24+).

No, for me the problem is the blanket applicability of of the power. Beauty is not quite subjective in the sense that any particular person is as likely to be classed as ugly as they are to be judged good-looking by each other person. The standards for beauty vary over time, but there are standards and certain people clearly float more boats than others. But who floats every boat? Even Helen only managed 1000.

If I were writing a computer game, I would effectively roll 3d6 and add the charisma modifier each time characters met and record the resulting score for future reference, effectively recording how attractive character A is to character B separately from how attractive they are to character C etc. That's not possible in a pen and paper game, clearly.

What I normally do now is to record the PC's comeliness scores (with charisma mods) and keep them secret from the players. I then pick key figures that they come into contact and check only them for the fascinate effect. Players are free to think of their characters looking god or average or whatever and I'm free to track when it matters whether the rest of the world agrees or not.

I also give the targets of fascination a bonus equal to their own level and a save the first time the power is exerted, whether in  a way which is harmful or unnatural to the character in question or not.

Beyond that, I just use it as a loose guideline. But, having looked over it all again for this post I think I might go back to a more BtB system and see how it works out.

Here's my suggestions for using comeliness:

• Comeliness trumps charisma for reaction rolls where the character's face and/or body shape is visible. Ugly characters get initial negative responses no matter what their charisma score.
• If only the face is hidden (by a mask or similar) then inter-racial modifiers are based on expectation or are ignored if there is no expectation.
• Also, if the face is hidden then comeliness is modified by 2 points towards 11 (so 6 becomes 8; 18 becomes 16).
• Modifications for dubious requests should be cumulative - so if Mistertique asks the Snow Queen for two unreasonable (or just plain annoying) requests at +2 each, she will get +6 on her save for a third such abuse.
• Age-related changes in wisdom are matched by equal and opposite changes in comeliness.
• No effect on the opposite sex, in the general case.
• Only inflict the fascination power on PCs if the situation is trivial and funny or serious and key to an interesting plot line. Don't bother with every damn shop keeper.
• Only inflict PCs' fascination power on NPCs if the player specifically tries to use it, if it would be trivial and funny, or it is serious and key to an interesting plot line.
• Call it "appearance" and abbreviate it to "A".

Your Local Representative

In case of Law,
break glass

Butterfly Effects
When running a game in AD&D's default "pseudo-mediaeval" setting there is always a tension between drawing on historical information about day-to-day life (such as how drains work, social classes, the value of a good horse) and accounting for those things in the game which are not historical.

A very typical example is the presence of magical street lighting in larger cities. Continual light is not a high level spell and any reasonably successful adventuring party could pay for significant numbers of castings in a year (or cast it themselves) in order to light up some district of their home city or town. This would make a huge difference to the life of people in mediaeval times who were very limited in their outside activities in winter because of the lack of light.

Light Wand

How Many Clerics Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?

Continual light is, of course, available to magic users and clerics alike and many Good-aligned religions would seem likely to encourage this sort of communal service (for a price, of course. Specifically 9sp per person per month in "trade, taxation and tithes" [PHB p20]). So it's hard to justify the lack of such lighting if a player moots it (which generally happens early on with any given group of players), although naturally there will be people in society who oppose this sort of thing and a dispel magic isn't hard to get either.

This leads to a related question about the availability of magic in the baseline AD&D society. This is a little tricky but there is one interesting thing about the definitions of the classes in PHB: it is easier to qualify for the cleric or magic user classes than it is for the fighter class. The first two require only a single '9' score while the fighter requires both the 9 and a 7 in constitution.

How you extrapolate this to NPCs depends on how much you feel the books' rules for player characters define the workings of non-player characters but certainly there are hints in the DMG that the normal qualifications are needed. It says nothing about ability score generation methods, however.

When I want a town or village I generally run a computer program that rolls up everyone in the place using 3dA (averaging dice) in order with a 1% chance of a particular person being "special" and such characters get 3d6 in order instead and may have a class, with the program then deciding what class, if any, they pick out of the options their scores give them.

For this general pool of NPCs, then, there is a 0.63% chance of qualifying for the Cleric class (and an equal chance of qualifying for the magic user or thief classes). So, in a population of 1000 we would expect to see 6 people capable of casting clerical spells and 6 capable of casting magical spells (there may be overlap between these groups and I'm talkig about adults here, of course).

So, if an NPC qualifies for either magic user or cleric, which isn't too unlikely, which would they go for? Simple answer: cleric. Everyone wants to be a cleric.

Back to Reality
In the real world, "the church" was immensely powerful in most nations and especially so in the West where the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim churches had their centres. The reason for this is simple: people don't want to die and those religions offered a very clear message of "you won't really die".

Quite simply, people could and did give up everything they had in order to ensure that they would qualify for the promise of eternal life even though they had, for the most part, almost no evidence that the claims were true. They didn't need evidence; they needed hope because they had plenty of evidence of the inevitability of death and any chance of escaping that would naturally be leapt on, and was.

Now look at our fantasy world. Here, there is the same message of living on but there is loads of evidence, including people raised from the dead not in some distant Rapture but right here and now and often in front of many witnesses. If you have the cash you can actually speak with the dead (only a 3rd level cleric spell) and get very specific information like "where did you bury the treasure?" instead of vague statements about how much the departed loved Uncle Harry (or was it Uncle Billy? how about Aunt Jane? Some sort of relative, or maybe a friend who was like a member of the family? A favourite car, perhaps? The veil's getting thick; put some more money in the meter).

As if that wasn't enough, look at the cure and heal spells. 6 clerics, even Acolytes, would transform the lifestyle of any mediaeval town, particularly in war time.

The First Dalek Pope
So, if you think the mediaeval churches were powerful, think about what they would be like if they literally could return kings from the dead or cure the myriad of diseases which routinely ran through whole countries.

Imagine, also, the effect of excommunication in such a world? The withdrawl of all healing spells in itself is a major threat to anyone who crosses the church. If the church says "smite this person or we will withdraw our protections from you" then that person had better be fleet of foot because pretty well the whole of society will turn on them rather than face such a loss.

At this point, our pseudo-mediaeval setting isn't looking very mediaeval any more, really, is it? There's little reason to have monarchs and those that do exist will be puppets (not radically different, I know), the populace will have decent health and be safe from the fear of disease and injury while going about their business in the brightly-lit towns with their 24hr lifestyles organized around religious duties. Almost every country will be a de facto theocracy.

Populations will be much more urban, too, as the numbers of clerics suggested are probably still too low to take these benefits out into a scattered rural hinterland, so town life will be more attractive because that's where you're most likely to have clerics on hand. Agricultural output will probably be higher for several reasons (health of farmers and the availability of long-term weather forecasting via divination spells, as well as some perhaps non-adventuring spells for blessing crops which are not listed in PHB) so the lower farming population level will not be a problem.

Good, Innit?

The Duke of Slyonnia

Of course, this all assumes that the dominant religion is basically Good aligned and wants to spread the benefits of clerical magic throughout society. But that's actually a pretty safe bet because those are the sorts of religions that will prosper. If Slyonnia's clergy offer nothing to the peasants and support only the rich elite, while neighbouring Bennifica's clergy support everyone, then Bennifica's population (and therefore its army) will be stronger and healthier and the border regions will see a continual flow of deserters from Slyonnia to Bennifica. With a certain degree of irony, Darwin will ensure that Evil religions will struggle to become dominant in the face of Good.

Evil cults will tend to attract the powerful excommunicated characters from other religions, as they will offer them the healing and so forth that they have lost. The weak can go jump, of course, because Evil despises weakness by definition (AD&D definition). So such cults will be small but with a disproportionate number of high level characters. Zero-level types will still exist because every Evil religion needs its cannon-fodder.

The Evil perspective on all of this is that they are marginalized because the sheep have banded together to thwart the "natural" order where the weak perish and the strong rule and prosper (see previous note about Darwin and irony).

In-Joke for Smalltalkers

The Ivory Tower
I said that everyone who can be either a magic user or a cleric will want to be a cleric. Why? Why are the magic users not ruling the world from their collages of magic instead of the clerics ruling from their churches?

The simplest answer is that first level magic users are rubbish. They certainly offer society at large very little that would work as a seed of a power-base, unless it is a society of insomniacs. Compared to an 18-Wis 1st level cleric with his/her 3 cure spells per day, the 18-Int magic user with one sleep spell is on a hiding to nothing in the popularity stakes.

Cultural values will naturally see the cleric as more useful, and therefor more valuable than magic users and there's an obvious snowballing effect here as the clerics are more respected and therefore have more secular power so more people want to be clerics and the church grows in power and gains respect, gaining more applicants etc.

Meanwhile, people may hear tales of world-shattering arch-mages and army-destroying wizards but the path to that level of power is "back loaded" in terms of reward.

So, while it's certainly possible to imagine isolated cities or maybe nations that are dominated by cadres of magic users, the implication of the rules is, to me, clearly in favour of magic users being loners looking, if at all, for that rare dedicated apprentice who is willing to trudge through the grind of the low levels for the big payoff. A payoff that itself has implications for the numbers of magic users compared to clerics.

When Two Tribes Relax Go To War
The relationship between magic users and clerics also has a bearing on why I weigh NPC generation towards clerics. Basically, I see AD&D as having a built in rivalry between the two classes. There is an inherent challenge to the gods in the way in which the magic user class works.

Clerics get their power from their deities; they may even have to take different spells from the ones they want if the deity disagrees with their choices.

Magic users take what they want, when they want it. Of course, they have to find it first but that's a minor detail. There's a clear statement here that the magic user doesn't need gods.

Clerics, druids, and illusionists get 7 levels of spells; magic users get 9. As I've mentioned before, this is not an accident nor is it some odd design error in AD&D - it's quite intentional. A power word kill is two full levels above a Holy Word in power. This has implications for daemon magic resistance but also various magicks which block spells and effects based on level. In any case it is also an implication that magic users ultimately gain knowledge witch is either denied by the gods or unavailable to them. Neither is something that a cleric would, I think, find a comfortable inference.

So, there is an implied rivalry between the two classes and even mages and clerics of the same alignment must to some degree regard the other as "doing it wrong". And if clerics are in the ascendancy in society then the implication of this is that magic users will find life a bit easier outside the areas where clerics operate. So, it's off to the lonely tower in the middle of nowhere to get on with unpicking the secrets of the universe without some priest constantly saying to leave the universe alone, thank you.

All this stuff flows more or less naturally from material contained in PHB and as such the DM is likely to face questions about it from players in a long-term campaign.

The Big Picture
As I see it, the implied reality of the PHB and DMG is one where magic is both common enough to have an effect across the whole of society (it doesn't take many raise deads to transform people's attitudes) and mostly clerical in nature.

The Friendly Face
of unspeakable
knowledge

Magic users are likely to be viewed with suspicion by normal people who see clerical magic as something that offers them day to day aid and the possibility of long term salvation from personal death while the wizard has no heal spells and no cure spells, but does have animate dead, disintegrate, and fireball. They may well be of great value when danger threatens, but perhaps with something of the air of nuclear weapons about them - "wouldn't it be better if we got rid of all of them?" may well be a sentiment that gets bandied about from time to time.

The dominant church in an area will generally be Good aligned, but in isolated nations where it is harder for people to simply vote with their feet, a Dr Doom or Dracula might be able to keep people under their control with a religion based on doling out favours to those who tow the line. Such nations, of course, make excellent places to set adventures in.

Similarly, magic users will dominate only where the churches are weak, and that probably means out of the way places which have managed to develop more or less independently of the mainstream cultures.

Fighters will be outnumbered by clerics and thieves, but will probably outnumber magic users by a fair margin in most places. The fighter class will tend to be represented more by the lone hero rather than by a ruling warrior caste.

End of Part One
All this is very simulationist, of course. But role playing is by its nature simulationist in that we're trying to simulate a character in a story which emerges from group play (aren't we?)

The DM can certainly fix anything with the above picture that they don't like by fiat but there are alternatives. But this post is long enough and I'll come back to this next week.

In Praise of IV

Roman Numeral Failure

Back in the day, we always used Method I from the DMG to generate our characters. It allowed some  choice of class and the "4d6, drop lowest" mechanism meant that stinkers were fairly rare. But not very rare, and there was a subtle issue with the act of re-arranging the stats.

Because the player re-arranged the ability scores they tended to start of with an idea of the class they wanted to play and the rolled scores became a sort of puzzle to be solved: how to arrange these and combine them with age and racial abilities to make a <your class here>. I'm a believer in embracing the random and using it as a springboard to ideas one may not have had otherwise and this didn't have that feel at all.

But it was quick. And for the DM rolling up NPCs that's a useful thing, to say nothing of the time that could be spent when a new party is rolled up. Method II didn't actually produce very good characters and required twice as much rolling; Method III required six times as much rolling, and Method IV twelve times! These were not going to be used at any "live" table I've ever been at.

The world moving on,
and around and up and down.

But the world moves on.

I've had a little webpage up for a while which generates character lists for method IV and I've found it inspirational as a DM. When generating NPCs, I use three levels of detail: plebs, henchmen, and established characters, more or less by the book.

Plebs use 3 averaging dice in order so their basic scores run from 6 to 15; henchmen now use Method IV unmodified and so have the full 3-18 range but have no guarantee of two 15s; established characters are generally level 4+ and are generated by Method IV with the requirement of two 15+ scores.

Method IV uses an underlying 3d6 roll rather than the 4d6 roll of Method I and this means that you get a wider range of scores in each character - 5's and under do actually turn up. For instance, here's a set I've just generated with the "established" system:

	Str	Int	Wis	Con	Dex	Cha	Com	Classes
Set 1	11	14	8	7	15	15	13	F M T
Set 2	15	15	7	8	8	15	13	F M
Set 3	11	8	12	15	15	8	4	C F T
Set 4	10	15	11	9	17	11	10	C F M I T
Set 5	12	16	12	15	8	9	8	C F M
Set 6	9	4	10	12	18	15	15	F
Set 7	14	15	15	11	12	14	13	C F M T A
Set 8	15	9	10	13	17	16	8	C F M T
Set 9	11	17	15	13	15	15	16	C D F M T
Set 10	16	10	14	17	4	11	14	C
Set 11	15	10	16	8	14	8	9	C F M T
Set 12	16	11	11	8	6	17	14	C F M

If I'm looking for a fighter I have quite a few choices here but #6 jumps out as a potentially interesting one. His (or her, of course) Int is what's making him a fighter. He's nothing much to look at physically; a little bit weedy in fact, and he's not clever but he's fast as lightning, good-looking and charismatic in some way. Here's what that gives me:

Gerald the Slow (4th level fighter, NE)

Gerald is an anti-hero. Slow of wit but quick of limb, he takes what he wants often in outbursts of violence that take others by surprise. Good looking and arrogant he is rarely without a doxie on one arm and a toady on the other. Any attempt to engage him in mocking word-play is an invitation to a slit throat. Gerald hangs around in seedy inns and is occasionally encountered  along with his gang of misfits by battered parties returning from some underworld setting. Gerald's MO is to follow such a party when it emerges from some underground entrance in an attempt to gage its strength. A weak party will be attacked without parley by missile fire and poison with the intent of wiping it out completely; a strong party will never know Gerald and co. were there. His wisdom, however, is such that he has had a few close calls over the years. But as yet his luck has held.

And into the stack of NPC index cards goes Gerald the Slow.

Obviously, not all NPCs can be quite as quirky as a STR 9 fighter but Method IV certainly means that penalties for low scores are something to be considered whereas in Method I we always have the phenomenon of the "dump stat" where a poor score can be shoved away so that it has minimal effect.

For example, #10 above is a good cleric stat block - high hit point bonus, a damage bonus, and two bonus spells but a hefty 3 point penalty to AC. The presence of #11 probably means that a player looking for a cleric would take that instead despite the lack of hit point bonus but I think the choices this method gives are more interesting. Additionally, a player with no idea, or no strong idea, of what to play can scan down the list for inspiration in a way that Method I is not conducive to (and still less the various point-buy systems).

Perhaps Gerald the Slow is something a player might like to have a go at when they see it presented on a sheet when they would never have thought of playing an 18 Dex, 9 STR fighter, or the strong, smart but implusive, charismatic magic user on line #2.

Now that computers can generate lists of stats in an instant there's really no need to avoid Methods II to IV, so why not give them a try?

AD&D Races: Elves

Wood Elf?

Races are one of the big tone-setters in any fantasy game. A game with only humans is going to have a different feel than one where there are only demi-humans and AD&D's assumption that players can play any one of several races certainly puts a distinctive stamp on the default gameworld.

Elves are particularly interesting because of what they are not. What the word means to a person probably reflects that person's reading or movie-watching more than any other race. While AD&D's dwarves, half-orcs, and hobbits/halflings are inextricably linked to Tolkien's versions, the elf as described in first edition retains its own identity to a much greater extent.

High Elf?
Art: Wendy Pini

"Elves" can be, of course, Tolkien's superhuman serial-incarnating immortals from the dawn of time, or they can be the fairies of Rackham and Shakespeare, the wood/nature spirits of English folklore, Wendi Pini's shipwrecked star-voyagers, or the elemental magic-wielders of Scandinavian and Celtic myth. But Monster Manual elves are basically the English type.

Over time they changed, but from the start Gygax demonstrated a knowledge and interest in the beings found in the folklore of the British Isles, and not just English stories. The MM, MMII, and even the Fiend Folio have many examples which are straight adaptations by Gygax from English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh tales and myths into AD&D stats. Probably only Greek mythology rivals Britain for direct inspirations for AD&D monsters.

The elves fit into this "ecology" and are in fact a very poor fit for either Middle Earth or Vanaheim, while the more whimsical of Britain's "fairies" are given their own entries as brownies, pixies, sprites, booka/pookas, and so on, leaving the elves themselves as one of the main demi-human options for player characters.

Which is not to say that Gygax didn't try to ride more than one horse. Even in 1977, AD&D elves came in a wide variety of types: Grey (specifically given the alternative name of "faerie"), half-elves, wood-elves (AKA sylvan elves), aquatic elves, the default high-elves, and the rumoured drow or "black elves".

Although the tallest male elves can reach 5' 6" in height, according to the DMG, the average is 5'; not "little people" exactly but far from the imposing forms of Tolkien and many older tales of elves.

Elven Queen?

In (particularly Scots) folklore, the elves and the other fairy races are divided into two camps, the seelie and the unseelie courts, where "seelie" means "blessed" and court is used in the sense of a royal court, with a king and queen at its head - Oberon and Titania being the most famous examples of elven rulers due to their appearance in A Midsummer's Night Dream, although the "Queen of Fair Elfland" encountered by True Thomas is still also widely sung about anywhere where two or more beards and a guitar doth gather together. Presumably, the unseelie court likewise has its rulers, although I don't know of any specific examples off the top of my head (and I can tell you that Google is no help at all in this area!)

The influence of these stories is so strong, in fact, that they manage to impinge on one of the most clear of all the lifts from Tolkien - the ranger class. Despite its unarguable origins in Tolkien, in that class the list of "giant class" opponents is really a thinly disguised list of the Unseelie Court of British folklore.

Elven Royalty?

In the Players Handbook the "giant class" covers bugbears, ettins, giants, gnolls, goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds, ogres, ogre magi, orcs, and trolls. Of these only orcs and ogre magi are not found in British folklore. The UA version of the list added some monsters from other sources (gibberlings, flinds, norkers etc.) but at the same time MMII had added many more examples of British monsters and intelligent races.

In the end, "seelie court" of AD&D consisted of the Booka, Brownie, Buckawn, Dryad, Dwarf, Elf, Gnomes, Grig, Killmoulis, Leprechaun, Nixie (Anglo-Saxon), Pech, Pixie, Pseudo-dragon, Selkie, Some Dragons, Sprite, Swanmay, and Sylph from the lists of intelligent creatures, although some of these races would be neutral to humans. These, plus their opposite numbers in the ranger's list plus the hags and many more non- or semi-intelligent British monsters - from cooshee to yeth hounds - constitute the "natural" associations of the AD&D elf much more than balrogs and wraiths.

Elf and Sylph?

For me, and many people I knew, these were the sorts of things we associated with elves, and in Irish Studies in school we were taught about some of them as well as hearing stories from our parents and grandparents long before we ever read Lord of the Rings. So I never had that urge that so many seem to have had to make elves into a super-human race, and similarly level limits never bothered me or seemed unreasonable. Many of the stories Gygax drew on told of the decline of the elves and their associated races and creatures - even Chaucer's Wife of Bath mentions it (as does, of course, Tolkien although for subtly different reasons). The "fact" is well established in myth that elves retreated in the face of the rise of humans and the game builds that fact into its default make up.

If elves in AD&D don't seem very elvish to the modern player used to later depictions both in film and in other game systems, it may help to consider why elves are the way they are in the game and what the source material is for that particular design and build some scenarios that emphasise those origins. There are a lot of meanings to the word, and it probably helps to know which one is being used.

Who Are These Guys?

Continuing this series of posts about getting started with AD&D, let's look at the basics of character generation.

As with so many things, this breaks down into a nice linear process:

1. Roll ability scores: strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, charisma. I have to admit here that I still use this order of stats, which was the OD&D method. AD&D normally lists them with constitution and dexterity swapped.
2. Pick your race. You may pick any race that your ability scores will qualify you for including the racial bonuses and penalties for that race. So, for example, a set of scores which include 11 constitution will allow a character to be a dwarf as the +1 constitution of that race will bump the score to the minimum required.
3. Pick your class or (if non-human) classes, possibly restricted by race (PHB p14 and pp16-17).
4. Pick your alignment, possibly restricted by class.
5. Find the character's age (DMG p12).
6. Adjust the character's ability scores to reflect their age (DMG p13). You can't now go back and pick a different class!
7. Roll hit points! Now your character can fight!
8. Roll up secondary skills (DMG, p12) if applicable.
9. Roll up starting cash. Multi-class use the best row of the table on PHB p35.
10. Spend it.
11. Spell-casters (clerics, druids, magic-users,  illusionists) pick their spells (magic users and illusionists use the rules on DMG p39).
12. Adventure!

Easy. Apart from some minor points.

Firstly, #1 - roll ability scores. The DMG presents four methods (I-IV). Back in ye olden days, method I was probably the most popular. It's quick and reasonably good at generating decent score sets.

Nowadays, however, with computers and laptops and smartphones and all those sorts of things, the other systems can be utilized with no real time penalty. Given this, I prefer now to use Method IV.

Secondly, the Players Handbook has a note to the effect that characters should have two scores of 15+. I don't entirely agree with this, but again it can be factored into a computer program so that it only offers scores which fit this criterion. In fact, I have done such a thing and you can access it here, at least when my dreadful Internet connection is working (avoid TalkTalk, folks). Ironically, I think this suggestion is of less use to beginners than to experienced players who know what to do with higher stats. Anyway, it's up to the DM to decide.

Thirdly, there's a misprint in some early editions of the PHB which put the half-orc's maximum dexterity at 14. It should be 17. There's a full PHB errata list over at the Acaeum website, as well as one for the DMG, the MM and the notoriously extensive one for Unearth Arcana, should you decide to use UA in your games.

Alignment next time, I think.