D&D 1E Common House Rules for AD&D?

We ignored Weapon Speed Factor and added Critical Hits fir a natural 20.

Not just 2x (yawn), but homemade critical hit tables were common.

My table rolled a d20, and if you got a second natch 20, roll again. In high school, my friend Nirmal rolled 4 in a row, for 8x damage on an arrow shot!
 

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TerraDave

5ever, or until 2024
So many house rules here and there.

One from 2e that has not been mentioned, and was an "official" option. Demihumans did not have level limits, but needed ~double XP. In practice this put them about 1 level behind humans.

More specific to our table: more generous thief skills--they needed all the help they could get. Reserve spells for wizards, that could take longer to refresh then daily. And there were many others, depending.
 

Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
We ignored Weapon Speed Factor and added Critical Hits fir a natural 20.

Not just 2x (yawn), but homemade critical hit tables were common.
Speaking of crit (and fumble) tables, I think the classic Good Hits & Bad Misses tables from Dragon 39 hold up pretty well and add some excitement and the occasional instant-kill to the game. They do require tracking whether characters are wearing helmets, as well as wielding shields.

I recommend ditching the awkward and slow percentage chance of getting one, from the article, though, and replacing it with simple Crit on a natural 20, but then allow the victim to Save vs. Death to avoid it. This means high level characters and high HD monsters are better at defending themselves from such terrible strikes.

I got this one from Delta.

 

billd91

Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️
We used a parry house rule. Characters could, when declaring their actions (this was 2e* with declarations made before the individual initiative was determined), hold one of their attacks to use reactively as a parry until their next turn came around. Then, if they were hit by an attack, they had the option to parry it by making an attack roll. Whomever hit the higher AC was who won - either a successful hit by the enemy, or a successful parry by the PC.
It led to a lot of "Parry the bite!" shouts in the middle of combat encounters with things with sharp, pointy teeth.

*Any 1e game that used individual initiative would work fine for this too.
 

Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
We used a parry house rule. Characters could, when declaring their actions (this was 2e* with declarations made before the individual initiative was determined), hold one of their attacks to use reactively as a parry until their next turn came around. Then, if they were hit by an attack, they had the option to parry it by making an attack roll. Whomever hit the higher AC was who won - either a successful hit by the enemy, or a successful parry by the PC.
It led to a lot of "Parry the bite!" shouts in the middle of combat encounters with things with sharp, pointy teeth.

*Any 1e game that used individual initiative would work fine for this too.
Ooh, we did almost exactly this (as far as I can remember) for a while too.
 

billd91

Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️
Ooh, we did almost exactly this (as far as I can remember) for a while too.
It's really interesting how some ideas propagated in the days before the internet was ubiquitous. Some appeared in Dragon, some propagated through players who played in various home groups and then moved around, others via convention games.
 

Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
It's really interesting how some ideas propagated in the days before the internet was ubiquitous. Some appeared in Dragon, some propagated through players who played in various home groups and then moved around, others via convention games.
I agree. Hence the "ooh". :LOL: I always enjoy encountering this stuff. Or thinking about how some common house rules became official rules in time.
 

Initiative in 1E is kind of a white whale for me. The system as explained is incoherent, incomplete, and over-complex, but what I can see of it has lots of good bits in it. I've been tinkering off and on with simplifying it/cleaning it up, because I think there's potential in it for the best D&D initiative system yet.
My own 20/20 hindsight kind of view of it is that it NEVER was a system that Gygax himself used or even wanted. From what I understand it was one of a number of things put into 1E because other people asked for it. Again IIUC, he personally always used something far simpler, and maybe even half governed by DM fiat. The point being that FROM THE BEGINNING he never had any stake in that part of it - he didn't CARE if it worked, much less worked well. He didn't need to care because it's not as if it was stopping anybody from buying the game, and he had no motivation or personal desire to fix it for everyone. When anyone ever asked him 1E initiative-related questions in later years he was mostly polite, but I always got the impression he was on some level disappointed that people didn't just fix it for themselves, but instead kept flogging a clearly dead horse.

Of course he eventually got forced out of TSR prior to 2E even being a thing. Any opportunity for him to then officially address issues raised about 1E initiative were lost, and in 3 years TSR had created 2E (probably just so they could stop printing everything for 1E and not have to pay Gygax royalties for selling anything with his name on it).

Myself, I cut WSF in half, and have them apply to the roll every round (rather than only 1 round in 6 when initiative is tied); spell casting time is then also directly applied to the initiative roll each round, and other actions (including missile fire based on ROF) are assigned flat initiative roll modifiers. In essence it doesn't really drastically re-write the BTB system, but it works SO much more simply, and in a way far easier understood by anybody, and in a FRACTION of the written space.
 

Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Myself, I cut WSF in half, and have them apply to the roll every round (rather than only 1 round in 6 when initiative is tied); spell casting time is then also directly applied to the initiative roll each round, and other actions (including missile fire based on ROF) are assigned flat initiative roll modifiers. In essence it doesn't really drastically re-write the BTB system, but it works SO much more simply, and in a way far easier understood by anybody, and in a FRACTION of the written space.
Sounds good. How do you handle multiple attacks? Is weapon reach a benefit at all, or is it just longer weapons are always slower, even when closing to melee? Do you do any kind of delayed onset for potions, or ditch that entirely?
 


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