2nd Edition's 2nd edition

My booty

Today I found these in a local second-hand book shop.

I did buy the PHB and DMG for AD&D 2nd Edition when they came out in 1989, but I really can't say I was particularly impressed. The binding and paper quality wasn't nearly as good as my old 1st Edition books, and I didn't really think much of the layout aesthetic. I did import one or two 2nd Ed. things into my AD&D campaign, but we pretty much just carried on playing AD&D as we always had.

By the time this edition was published in 1995, I'd dropped AD&D entirely and was using the Hero System exclusively for all my campaigns. I didn't even really know this edition existed until just a few years ago.

Anyway, I bought these out of a sort of archaeological curiosity, just to see what TSR thought might revive their sadly sagging fortunes in the mid-'90s. As with the first version of AD&D2e I bought, they don't really excite me much. They're not terrible, but the paper feels even flimsier than the earlier version, and though there's a lot more colour scattered through the pages, the illustration seems, for the most part, a bit lacklustre. The organisation and layout is OK, I suppose. There are some semi-useful bits and pieces of reference info in there, but nothing makes me sit up and say "What a fool I've been! 2nd Edition is clearly the One True Way!"

I'm glad to have them in my collection though.

Lots of eyes, lots of muscles

Inevitably, there comes a time when, convinced that there's something there to find, the whole party all search the same place to make sure that somebody picks up something that everyone else has missed, or all try to open the same stuck door, or pick the same lock, or find the same traps, or whatever. Apart from the fact that it takes up valuable time, and thus increases the chance of being mutilated by some treasure-less wandering monster, it can certainly help swell the party's coffers.

Assuming there really is anything to be found, that is.

Of course you can always throw a die for each individual searcher (I like to use a different coloured d6 for each character so I know who has and hasn't succeeded, just in case they want to keep the news to themselves or something, the sneaky bastards).

However, if you want to skip over all that and get the show on the road, you can always convert all those individual rolls into one combined d100 roll.

The formula for finding the probability from a whole bunch of d6 (or any other die type) is this:

1 - [(chance of NOT showing the desired pips) to the power of (the total number of dice)]

Assuming that you might just want to know the numbers and not have to do a whole lot of tedious maths to find out, here are some I prepared earlier:

Number of d6	Chance of at least one 6 showing on a handful of d6: 1 - [(5/6)^N]	Chance of at least one 1 OR 2 showing on a handful of d6: 1 - [(2/3)^N]
1d6	16.7%	33.3%
2d6	30.6%	55.6%
3d6	42.1%	70.4%
4d6	51.8%	80.2%
5d6	59.8%	86.8%
6d6	66.5%	91.2%
7d6	72.1%	94.1%
8d6	76.7%	96.0%
9d6	80.6%	97.4%
10d6	83.9%	98.2%
11d6	86.5%	98.8%
12d6	88.7%	99.2%
13d6	90.6%	99.4%
14d6	92.2%	99.6%
15d6	93.5%	99.7%
16d6	94.6%	99.8%
17d6	95.4%	99.89%
18d6	96.2%	99.93%
19d6	96.9%	99.95%
20d6	97.4%	99.96%

Hydra

Apparently this mutation is more common than you'd expect.

More leeching off the creativity of others

Jim Raggi over at Lamentations of the Flame Princess has just presented an idea that I rather like for determining how much of your character's hit-points are represent the amount of actual physical damage you can sustain and how much is luck, favour of the gods, plot immunity and so forth.

To summarize, at character creation you'd roll hit-points as if you were a zero-level normal, including any CON bonus/penalty (minimum of 1), and the result is your Actual Physical Damage Hit-Points. Those points take longer to heal than normal hit-points, while normal hit-points (always lost first) recover a lot more quickly (Jim suggests 1d4+CHA or WIS modifier per day). If you go below 0 on your APDHP, you're dead.

If one wanted to make combat more deadly, then natural-20 critical hits could come directly off APDHP, by-passing normal HP entirely. Personally, I've moved away from that sort of thing, but whatever floats your boat.

I'd also like to link that result with the character's physique, so a character with few APDHP would be tiny and frail-looking, while one with many would be huge and hulking. I'd probably want to throw the character's STR into the mix there as well, to avoid those odd tiny-and-skinny-but-infeasibly-strong results.

Scenery: The End of the World

Time for another scenery post. This is Beachy Head, one of the chalk cliffs on the southern coast of England. Apparently it's a very popular suicide spot.