Character 4 - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition

 Welcome back to day four of our fun and exciting Character Creation Challenge! Today's character is from an old, obscure RPG from the late 1980s, TSR Inc.'s Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition. I'm sure a few of my readers have heard of this obscure little game but for those who haven't, AD&D was published in 1989 as the second edition of the Advanced line of Dungeons and Dragons games. The base game has no setting but several were published (my favorites are Spelljammer, Dark Sun and Planescape... yeah, I like the odd ducks). So since we're only using corebooks today's character will be a generic fantasy setting character. Let's get to it, shall we?

Character Creation

Step 1 - Generate Ability Scores

Characters in AD&D have 6 ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. They all do what they say on the label. Ability scores determine what classes you can play, to what levels and if you get any bonus experience in those classes. In addition there are just a ton of derived abilities for each ability score that we'll get to when we fill in our character sheet. 

Everybody knows that Method I in the PHB for generating ability scores is to roll 3d6 for each ability score, in order. There are another 5 methods for making more heroic (read: with better ability scores) characters but for our character today we'll go ahead and roll our 3d6 6 times in order and get:

Strength 7

Dexterity 15

Constitution 17

Intelligence 11

Wisdom 6

Charisma 7

So we have an incredibly tough, madly dexterous and overly intelligent person with below average strength, wisdom and charisma. Method I gives for wildly swingy ability scores as you can see. But this was the game everyone played for DECADES and this is just something you got used to.

Step 2 - Pick Your Race

AD&D had a very small number of playable races in the corebook and they were all pretty stereotypical to anyone who had read the Lord of the Rings or any fantasy derivatives thereof. The options were:

• Dwarves - dour drinkers who live underground and like to fight goblins and orcs.
• Elves - they're just better than you, ok?
• Gnomes - like elves but less up their own ass about it. Tricksters and illusionists who live in the forests.
• Half-Elves - when a human and an elf love each other very much you get a half-elf. They don't really fit in well in either world, but they do their best. They're only really here because of Aragorn and Arwen.
• Halflings - because Hobbit was trademarked back in the day and the Tolkein estate was mighty litigious.
• Humans - unlike future editions, there was no mechanical benefit whatsoever to playing a human. No ability score modifiers, no bonus feats (what're feats?). The ONLY benefit humans have over the demi-human races is that they don't have level caps on any class.

Right, so I've made a human and a dwarf already and my ability scores are pointing at "THIEF" fairly strongly so..... ok I'll make a halfling. So consulting the Racial Ability Adjustments table, it looks like Halflings get a -1 Strength and a +1 Dexterity so I'll need to adjust those on the character sheet. Thankfully I rolled a 7 strength before adjustments or I wouldn't be able to pick Halfling as my race.

There's a little section on how halflings are usually homebodies who don't like to adventure and live in plain but well appointed homes and enjoy community and family and so on and so forth. You've seen Lord of the Rings, you know from Hobbits. 

It also says that halflings can choose to be a cleric, fighter, thief or multi-class fighter/thief. Halflings can choose their initial languages from common, halfling, elf, gnome, goblin and orc. 

Halflings are magic resistant (which is why they can't be magic users, ya see) and get a +1 bonus on saving throws vs. wands, staves, rods and spells for every 3.5 points of Constitution. So at a 17 Con my halfling is gonna be at a +4 versus magic. That's nice. 

In addition, halflings are resistant to poison (presumably because of some ancient halfling snake handling religious practices. The book doesn't SAY that, but I can read between the lines...) so they get the same bonus to saves vs. poison as they do to the magic saves above.

Halflings are good with slings and thrown weapons so get a +1 bonus to attack rolls when using thrown weapons or slings.

Halflings are sneaky little sonsabitches and if they're alone or in a group of only halflings and/or elves any opponents get a -4 penalty to their surprise rolls.

Halflings have a 15% chance of having infravision out to 60' and a 25% chance to have infravision out to 30'. Lemme check here real fast and... on a 19 I have the limited infravision. Infravision, for those too young to remember, is basically thermal vision that some AD&D races who live underground have. You can see body heat and vague outlines of rocks and caverns and such with it, but you can't read unless you light a candle.

So there's halflings, make sure you write all that down on your copy of the character sheet if you're playing along at home. Next up is...

Step 3 - Choose Your Class

So AD&D's corebook has between 9 and 16 character classes depending on how you count specialist mages (each school is TECHNICALLY its own character class, but the corebook only details Illusionist because Gnomes can be Illusionists because fuckin gnomes need SOMETHING going for 'em). So from the list we have:

• Warriors
• Fighters - when you just want to hit people with a sword and eventually lead armies.
• Paladins - when you just want to hit people with a sword because your god told you to.
• Rangers - when you want to shoot people with a bow and live in the woods like a filthy hobo
• Wizards
• Mages - Because why limit yourself? You want all the power. If you live long enough, you'll eventually get game breaking spells like Wish that let you do basically anything you can think of. As a trade off, you start with about 4 hit points and a literal house cat has a greater than even chance of killing you.
• Specialist Mages - so there's 8 schools of magic and you can pick one you want to be better at at the expense of not being able to learn any spells of it's opposite school. I never went to Magic College, but I assume they have some really deep fraternity grudges.
• Priests
• Clerics - oh thank the gods, a healer! Also, you can't use bladed weapons. I don't remember why, you just can't. Eventually this rule was found to be really stupid because like if you're a dwarf cleric of Stabby McStabberson well, why wouldn't he want you to have a sword?
• Druids - when you want to play a magical hippy who has to fight to go up a level later in the game. Seriously, there's only like 10 level 7 druids in the WHOLE WORLD and you gotta track one down and beat her ass if you want to go up to level 7.
• Rogue
• Thief - because you really enjoyed reading about Bilbo Baggins. The Thief class (which is the one I'm picking) is legit awful, you'll see.
• Bard - because you rolled really well on multiple ability scores.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. There's a whole chart of what your ability scores have to be at a minimum to be in that class. If you roll poorly enough or just well enough in the WRONG spots, you can technically have a character who can't be in any class. What do you do then? Well it's a game from the 1980s so you start over from scratch. Luckily you're only like 15 minutes into character creation at this point.

Thiefs have to have a 9 in Dexterity, no other minimum ability score requirement. Now if you want to play a Paladin you're basically gonna have to cheat because they need a 12 in Str, a 9 in Con, a 13 in Wis and a 17 in Cha. In all my years of playing AD&D I saw someone roll those scores using Method I exactly zero times.

But that's neither here nor there, I'm playing a thief whose Prime Requisite is just Dexterity. And hey, since I have a Dexterity of 16 or more (after racial adjustments) I get a 10% bonus to all XP I earn. Because I'm just. That. Dang. Good.

Thieves spend all their time practicing their thieving skills so are only able to learn how to use a few weapons: the club, dagger, dart, hand crossbow, knife, lasso, short bow, sling, broad sword, long sword, short sword and staff. Luckily I'm a halfling thief and there are a couple thrown weapons on that list AND everybody's favorite: the sling. In addition, thieves can wear leather, studded leather, padded leather or elven chain mail if you can successfully pry it off the cold dead corpse of an elf. Oh, but if you wear anything other than plain jane leather armor it has SUPER negative modifiers on all your thief skills.

Speaking of thieving skills, the one huge attraction of the class, what are they? Well I'm glad you asked! There are 8 of them and they are... handy but not really game changing.

• Pick Pockets - you can steal small objects from targets without them noticing. At level 1 you have a 15% chance of doing this before adjusting for race, dexterity, armor and points spent.
• Open Locks - very handy skill to have in a dark, dirty dungeon full of locked doors and chests. At level 1 a thief's base score is 10%.
• Find/Remove Traps - technically anyone can FIND a trap, but a thief can do it without setting it off...approximately 5% of the time at first level.
• Move Silently - so you can assassin some creeds, bro! 10% of the time.
• Hide in Shadows - sister skill to moving silently but only half as good. 5% base score on this one.
• Detect Noise - shh! Do you smell that? Maybe 15% of the time you do.
• Climb Walls - Spider-Thief, Spider-Thief, fails to pick your pocket and runs away. This one you're actually GOOD at starting out, 60% base score.
• Read Languages - Sure. Yanno, when you're living in the gutter stealing bread to survive maybe you pick up a couple lines of Ancient High Elven Text. Why not. Oh, because it starts at 0%, that's why not.

Now like I said, all of these get modified by your race and your dexterity and you get 60 points to distribute amongst them, with the caveat of no more than 30 points to a single skill. So even if I split my 60 points among four of the thieving abilities, most of them top out at around 40%. That's a 40% chance to pick a pocket or pick a lock. A 25% chance to find or remove a trap or move silently. Thieves get all these abilities but they almost never work at lower levels. Only the lucky thieves survive to higher levels.

In addition to that thieves can backstab which means if you sneak up on an opponent and attack them unawares you get a damage multiplier of x2 for the first 4 levels, x3 for the next 4 and so on to a max of x5. Oh and they can all speak Thieves' Cant because Fritz Lieber said they could or something. It's a kind of slang that only thieves can recognize.

Step 4 - Fill In The Blanks

So that's baaaaaaaaasically all there is to making an AD&D character. You have to roll for your hit points, based on your class. Pick an alignment from the 9 that everyone on the internet knows (you're gonna pick Chaotic Good unless you're a ranger, paladin or druid) and fill in the rest of your sheet. Yeah, there's Non-Weapon Proficiencies and buying gear and the like but all of that is either optional or boring so I won't be covering it here. Except for gear. I'm gonna let you, dear reader, in on Chigg's Essential Adventuring Gear.

Chigg's Essential Adventuring Gear

Right, so every character needs their weapons and their armor and a holy symbol if they're a cleric or a set of lockpicks if they're a thief. But beyond that, does it matter what you bring down into the dungeon with you? Yes. Yes it does. There is a Right And Correct list of equipment found in the AD&D Player's Handbook that you need to bring with you or else You Will Be Boned:

1. Backpack, Belt pouch (small), Sack Large. For the holding of your equipment and, later, any treasure you wish to take out of the dungeon. If you wind up with too much treasure to haul out, bring the expensive stuff back to town and hire some locals to haul the rest up.
2. Candles. Bring 3 to 5 candles with you. Sure, Infravision is nice but sometimes you need to see the writing on the wall or scroll or what have you. Candles are great for this.
3. Chalk. Bring a few pieces of chalk with you to mark which doors you've been in. Saves time in map making though smart dungeon dwellers might wash your marks off their walls or worse, change them.
4. Flint and steel. Because everyone likes to have a fire to cook over.
5. Lantern. Because sometimes you want to see more than a candle can illuminate. Be sure to stock up on oil while you're at it. Worst case scenario, your lantern oil can become Molotov Cocktails.
6. Map or scroll case. Ok, so you didn't come into the dungeon with a map but hey, maybe you find one while you're down there. Or some magical scrolls. Even if you can't use 'em, you can sell 'em!
7. Rope. Spring for the silk stuff, it's more expensive but it's lighter and you want to be able to carry as much loot out as possible.
8. Torches. If everyone brings 2 or 3 then you should be fine.
9. Winter blanket, bedroll. Tie 'em under your backpack at the start of the day and be cozy and warm when you're not on guard duty at night.

Bring all this with you to every dungeon crawl and you're set for success! 

In Conclusion

Right, so like I said there's not a lot to AD&D characters so my Halfling Thief, Topper Bottoms is done. You can find his character sheet right here if you'd like to give it a look. I'll see you all tomorrow for... uh... whatever book is next on the shelf. Bye!