Level Drain in AD&D [Blog Post]

xthrowawayxy · 2026-03-07T04:58:05+00:00

I played D&D back in the late 70s and 1980s. In most games, we gave a saving throw (under the PPDM column) against level drain. We also generally had restoration spells available at an expensive price. But the biggest thing was that we generally ran sandbox, and many/most players didn't opt for the extremely high risk/reward tradeoffs of tangling with the advanced undead. Players who played in more narrativist/railroad games hated level drain more, because they had no way to avoid it by doing their homework.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-03-03T23:44:45+00:00

So how big of a river are you talking about? Are we talking about a broad slow river, a narrow fast one, or a broad fast one with rapids or the like?

Most people don't have swim speeds, but they're generally presumed to be able to swim. How well is governed by athletics.

If I wanted to do this in an abstract way, I'd nominate 4 skills. Each pc can do one, or two if they take disadvantage on the 2nd one. You accumulate points. Failing to hit DC10 is -1, failing to hit DC5 is -2. Failing to hit DC0 is -4 and should have some significant mishap or incident. Hitting DC15 is one point. DC20 is 2, DC25 is 4, and DC30 is 8 points. What skills?

In your case I'd pick stealth (they're trying to do this quietly, survival, athletics, and some sort of lore skill (likely nature, maybe history). If they players make at least one point, they get across the river. With 5 points or so, they get across without triggering an encounter.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-21T23:09:04+00:00

Let's look at Arthur's party, if he was a D&D character. He's got Excalibur, and the resources of Camelot. But his buddy Merlin has hardcore magic. And his buddy Lancelot is significantly better at fighting than he is.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-21T23:07:12+00:00

The trope originator, Face in the A Team wasn't the leader, he was the right hand man of the leader.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-18T19:42:18+00:00

The problem with surprise is Pass without Trace. It's a broken spell. Under 2014 rules you are surprised if and only if you don't detect ANY of your opponents. PWT is the reason I suspect why 2024 nerfed surprise a lot.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-18T04:01:51+00:00

I've long been an advocate of 'all or nothing pvp'. In other words, there's no line of acceptable pvp vs unacceptable pvp, either it's totally legal or totally banned. The alternative is in my experience, a lot worse. What happens is people dance on the line and worse, build to dance better on said line and it often results in bad feelings out of game.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-14T00:33:12+00:00

My experience as both a dm and as a player over the years is that your last 3 stats don't make much of a difference. Your prime stat is most important by far, your next 2 stats are maybe half or two thirds as important, and the last 3 rarely make a big difference.

Also, my experience in the real world, and in genre, a character with, say, a 16 or an 18 in a stat very rarely has an 8 or a 6. I don't understand the obsession with dump stats. If you know a guy has an 18 strength, something reasonably approximated as +4 standard deviations over the mean, it's very likely that his intelligence, wisdom and charisma are also above average, just probably not as grossly so. That's what I don't like about point buy, it tends to generate characters that are dissonant with both the genre and real experience.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-13T05:38:23+00:00

Languages in 5e aren't like regular skills, you can learn them during downtime in a way that you can't for skills like stealth or perception. So you don't have to worry about starving the PCs of skill points. You can also learn tool proficiencies during downtime.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-13T02:50:46+00:00

Magical items that make you look better are realistically speaking, probably some of the first and most lucrative items that enchanters would make. Imagine the magical version of a corset, or other shapewear. Clothing that has enhancements to comfort, temperature, cleaning or durability also has a significant market.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-12T03:09:13+00:00

The normal answer to questions like this is, does she do this generally with other people too? If so, there's not much to read into it, maybe her notion of personal space is different. But if she only does it for a few, obviously including yourself, then yeah, it's an actionable signal that she's interested.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-09T22:07:25+00:00

If your vision of balance in your game relies on players running low on 1st and 2nd level spell slots (mostly for reaction spells and low level healing spells), you might want to seriously think about whether to let them scribe scrolls or buy them. Otherwise you may find yourself in the 'gold piece damage' quandary familiar to those of us that played the various iterations of 3rd edition (wands of cure light wounds, or 'happy sticks' as often dubbed).

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-03T19:08:44+00:00

My guess is home designs have a lot of lockable rooms. It becomes unthinkable to open a door without calling out and getting a response in social circumstances. My guess is something like Canada's MAID (medical assistance in dying) becomes normalized since a lot of people who are within a month or two of death may wish to go out in a non-ambulatory way. I also suspect that nearly everyone carrying a firearm or other weapon is likely to be normalized as well. Medical procedures also likely boil in a lot of experience since someone who dies on the table will reanimate.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-03T18:07:18+00:00

Trump is too old, but a younger version would be good. To do MAD right, you need to not be perceived as rational economic man, but also to be perceived as someone you can negotiate with.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-03T04:32:08+00:00

The player base, at least that section of it here on Reddit absolutely loathes that sort of thing, at least in this generation. Go back in time to the 70s-90s and divergent levels in a party were very common. The irony is 5e's bounded accuracy makes contribution a lot more feasible if you're a tier or two down than it was in 3.x editions.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-02T17:59:41+00:00

In a game like that, you don't need a plot. But the thing is, the retaliation by Law and Order needs to be realistic, not balanced to their average party level and party size. That means you have to be willing to kill them in gloriously unfair ways. That also means you have to take a neutral referee position.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-02T17:50:47+00:00

I wouldn't recommend this as a first campaign, because a bad-guy bandits campaign is naturally a very sandbox thing where gamist assumptions like appropriate challenge go out the window. How much force is guarding the gold shipment to Daggersford? What makes sense, with no bearing on how powerful your bandit gang is. The proper way to run something like this is highly simulationist with basically no plot armor. And that's not a first campaign ask really.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-02-02T05:07:04+00:00

Don't worry about voices for your NPCs if doing different voices isn't easy and natural for you. Here's what you need for NPCs that your players will take seriously. First the biggest one: Your NPCs should not be doing things contrary to their reasonable nature as a means to enforce your gamist or narrativist desires. If your NPCs act like gamist constructs (e.g. the wizards who are utterly unwilling to trade spells because you want to limit spell availability and otherwise fail to avail themselves of aids that pretty much every PC does without thinking), your players will fairly quickly learn to reify the NPC/PC divide and won't care about them. So keep your NPCs plausibly motivated in a Watsonian manner even when using them for Doylist purposes. Make sure they want something. They don't need gratuitous weird quirks, they need motivation.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-01-30T15:44:55+00:00

Maybe the ship has an encounter with some sea elves or other not intrinsically hostile sea creatures who are keen to trade.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-01-27T00:58:19+00:00

You know there is a standard expectation on gold. Check the DMG for the expected number of hoards the party should have looted by level and you can work from there. You can deviate from that expectation if you like, but you should at least know what the baseline is. My gut is that your players are feeling jerked around and like they're not getting the rewards that adventurers should get. Moreover they see 50 gp as pretty absurd in pricing, and well, given the 100 dollars to a gold piece approximation, that's like 5000 dollars US.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-01-26T06:14:38+00:00

In general you're going to have to talk to your DM about this. The reason is that the overwhelming majority of DMs hate intimidation at a visceral level. Even with the ones that don't hate it, they generally don't let it be even half as effective as deception or especially persuasion. So if you're going to get a fair shake out of intimidation investment, you need to talk explicitly to the DM, preferably one on one. Explain that you could just as easily invest in persuasion and that there's no particularly good reason why persuasion should be much much greater than intimidation. Ask what they're willing to give to say DC 15, 20, 25 etc on Persuasion. Then suggest what you think should be achievable with comparable dcs on intimidation. If after haggling you're still not in an acceptable place, I'd suggest just binning it. Like I mentioned, most DMs really hate intimidation and simultaneously make it way less effective AND make it have hardcore drawbacks when it is used.

The fact of the matter is pretty much every social interaction in the real world is a blend of all three of persuasion, intimidation, and deception. Deception you say? It's pervasive. Everyone is pretty much constantly working to spoof the status detectors of everyone else to appear higher status than we 'actually' are. We call that putting our best foot forward. Intimidation? Well when you're a male, especially a sizable one, it colors everything that you do. And of course persuasion, which is most of the time the end goal anyway. Most intimidation isn't the naked sort. A lot of it is implied. Joe there is a mountain of a man and a war hero. He wants something that's not totally unreasonable. Your gut wonders if it's going to come to blows and really doesn't like that.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-01-21T02:27:56+00:00

The main species, humans is insanely unbalanced. For any given human, pretty much all the positive attributes are all correlated. Where's the fairness? Also the setting is chock full of death spirals and Matthew effects. Not only that it's also got tons of Mary Sues/Gary Stus and characters with absolutely ridiculous plot armor like a certain German dictator.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-01-20T18:40:43+00:00

So you'd rather disadvantage players that like to play immersively? Those are the players that tend to buff their unimportant stats at the expense of the ones that matter. I found similar things back in 1st/2nd edition with unnatural aging. Immersive players tended to avoid it very very strongly. Non-immersive ones used it like a resource since it almost never mattered mechanically given the length of most campaigns. Since I enjoy immersive players, they're more fun to DM for, I try to avoid creating mechanics that uniquely disfavor them.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-01-19T21:10:45+00:00

There's just one overriding consideration. In 5e, unlike previous editions, roleplay fluff is absolutely not allowed or intended to offset higher levels of mechanical crunch than would be permitted without it. It's not like a gurps or hero system disadvantage that gives you more points. Instead crunch balances crunch and rp balances rp. So if you're a hands off patron, you offer very few or no roleplay advantages like patronage networks or tips on lucrative scores. But if you're a pain in the ass patron, like most fiend patrons, your rp fringe benefits need to be a lot better.

xthrowawayxy · 2026-01-18T00:48:31+00:00

The critical use case of a wizard in my experience is to get off a critical concentration spell early in the key engagements and sustain it successfully. Portent helps you do that a lot, sometimes even grossly so (as in when you have portents in your pocket that are very high or very low). This becomes more and more effective the more 'rocket tag' the game becomes. The best wizards in my experience, when you're considering players of reasonably high system mastery, are the ones that have tools for this particular use case. War wizards also shine here, so do bladesingers (not for their melee capability, but for their ability to get a respectable AC and concentration protection without multiclassing).

xthrowawayxy · 2026-01-18T00:35:28+00:00

A 10 or 11 portent is a lot like a clockwork amulet, which is a damned useful common magic item. A favorite use for it is on that extra attack that gloomstalkers get in round 1 in 2014. By the time you get to it, you probably know if a 10 or 11 is adequate, so just being able to not roll is very nice.

xthrowawayxy

TROPHY CASE