Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Rathje 11-30-05, 01:44 AM	Yeah, I know the primary focus here is on 3.0/3.5, but I've a 2nd Ed. question and I have no idea where to look. My girlfriend received about $1000 worth of AD&D 2nd Ed. merchandise from her godfather, since he's stopped gaming. We're looking into a 2nd Ed. campaign. Since I always DM, I'm doing just that. Everything is looking all fine and dandy, except for the Monster Manual. I'm not sure what's an appropriate encounter for a party of any level. I can look at hit dice, but that's not always the most accurate solution. After all, an Illithid has 8+4 hit dice and is worth 9000 XP, but a 10 hit die Manscorpion Swarm Leader is worth 6000 XP. I don't know where to begin. If I just "guess and test," I run the risk of continually killing PC's, which could discourage them into giving up on 2nd Ed. I'd like to be able to play both 2nd Ed. and 3.5. More variety. Any advice on 2nd. Edition encounters? Is there something I'm missing?
Cantankerous 11-30-05, 02:13 AM	A good rule of thumb, although there is a section in the 2E DMG on balancing your encounters, is to take the AVERAGE number of exp the party needs to get to next level, divide that by the number of people in the party and divide that by how many encounters you want to have staged between each level and viola; you have a basis. It works like this: Let's say the group consists of a 4 characters with 10,500 exp each presently, so we might have a Fighter, an Illusionist and a Druid, all of 4th level and a 5th level Rogue. For this bunch a total of 26,500 exp are needed to get everyone to their next level (9500 each for the Illusionist and the Rogue, 5500 for the fighter and 2000 for the Druid) divided by 4 to get an average is 6625. Now, if you want there to be eight encounters between now and the next major downtime, you'll want threats worth that amount as a good working total, (plus about 10% for safety). So, an encounter with 5 Bugbears (worth 600 exp base) with a Bugbear Shamman (worth an additional 175 exp) thrown in, a decently tough encounter in the critters are played to their abilities and the PCs are twinked out, works out about right. Remember that 2E is big on "individual experience point bonus awards" on top of everything else, so the above encounter will rpoduce more than the 775 it seems to. Isshia
StormCrow42 11-30-05, 07:24 AM	You might also want to check out the Out of Print forum (http://boards1.wizards.com/forumdisplay.php?f=54), where I'm sure more people who have still played 2nd edition recently enough to remember such things hang out.
Varia 11-30-05, 09:46 AM	Erm, that doesnt make sense, Cantank. Your maths is correct, but its totally unconnected to what he's asking. He wants to know how to figure out how to decide what to use in an encounter, what is balanced etc, what will challenge a party, and not TPK them, NOT how much an encounter needs to be worth to keep the group on some arbitrary levelling curve. Frankly, the answer isnt easy to formulate, and relies a great deal on knowledge and experience with the game. However, I'll try to give you some basic rules of thumb. A party has a certain number of hit dice, equal to the sum of the levels of the characters, with multiclass characters counting as their highest level plus 1 per extra class. ( eg- an elf who is a 4rd lvl fighter and 5 lvl magic-user would count as a 6th level character) A given party can, very approximately, handle somewhere between 4 and 8 encounters against critters whose EFFECTIVE hit-dice total is approximately equal to their own. Precisely how many such encounters they can weather depends greatly on the makeup of the party both in general and compared to the specific critters involved (magic resistant critters hurt more if the party is heavy on spellcasters than if theyre melee-heavy, forinstance) , and your DM'ing personality. Note that it is the effective total of the critters hit-dice, not their actual total, that is important. In the left column on page 47 of the DMG it has a table for the hit dice of critters and the exp for them, with a list of hit-dice value modifiers in the center column. Use these modifiers on the actual hit-dice of the critters to get a decent feel for their effective hit-dice, to compare to the party, remembering that each +1 on a monsters hd counts as an additional 1/3 of a hit-dice (so forinstance 3 critters with 3+1 hd would total 9+3 hd (9 hd and 3 hit points) for a total of 10 effective hit-dice). Remember to only give the critter the modifiers for extra abilities when determining encounter balance if it can reasonably be expected to get to use those abilities in the fight. Forinstance, dont give the orcs bonuses for their missile weapons if they will be encountered at melee range, even if theyre loaded with missiles. (You may wish to give them missiles even though they likely wont get to use them for purposes of window-dressing, or extra stuff for the party to loot, or to encourage the party to stay at melee range etc) Personal experience tends to suggest ignoring 1 critter bow for every bow the party has that isnt in the hands of its 2 main tanks, when determining effective hit-dice. If the critters individual effective hit-dice is 1 higher than the party average then I suggest counting it as 25% more than its actual value, if 2 higher than the part average then count it as 50% more, and if 3 higher then count it as double. So for a party of 8 lvl 1 characters, a typical, approximately equal fight might be 10 goblins (1-1 hd each), or 8 orcs (1 hd each), or 3 gnolls (2 hd each), or 2 bugbears (3 hd each), or a single ogre (4 hd). An average party can handle somewhere between 4 and 8 such combats before they have to rest and recover. Any fight against critters with effective hit-dice higher than the suggested totals/averages is potentially very dangerous for the players, and will certainly use up a significantly greater portion of their resources than usual as the players unload in order to stay alive, so use such combats sparingly and carefully. Conversely remember too that encounters that are weaker than the party will tend to use fewer resources and thus extend the number of encounters the party can handle before resting. Its much, much easier to kill 10 solo goblins one at a time in 10 seperate fights than to kill all 10 at once in a single fight. For the specific critters you mentioned, the manscorpion leader and the illithid, the illithid does have fewer hit-dice, but it has lots of special abilities to make it effectively stronger, while the leader has only a few, hence the illithid is actually stronger than the leader and thus is worth more. Once you have possible encounters decided, especially hard ones, I recommend you play them out alone ahead of time to see how they turn out. That will help you fine tune them for the desired difficulty and make sure you dont set up an unintended TPK. Keep doing that till your feel for the balance is good enough to not need to. Hope that helps a bit. *Hugs* Varia
Araes 11-30-05, 02:10 PM	Actually, Cantankerous has a reason for where he's coming from. In general, XP in 2nd. Ed. was supposed to be reflective of how difficult a monster was. Admittedly, in several cases, and for those monsters which had a host of special abilities, it was way off. However, for normal monsters and characters, the XP rating of a foe should give the GM an idea of how hard it should be to take down. Honestly, this is exactly how 3rd Ed. is set up, they just obscure it behind the CR mechanic, which makes it a lot easier to figure out. CR is set up so that the total experience from 13.33 encounters of challenges at a parties CR should allow them to level. (Behind the Curtain, DMG 41) All experience in 3rd is then calculated from this basis. In the case of Cantankerous he's just suggested that you start with the experience itself and then formulate yourself how many fights you'd like it to take before the next average level (somewhat difficult due to the wide disparity in XP rates for classes in 2nd Ed.) In his particular example, he suggested that the number of encounters be 8, rather than the 13 suggested by 3.0. In my experience of 2nd. Ed., this is likely to get you killed, as 2nd. Ed. encounters were even more "swingy" than 3.0 ones. However, its a perfectly viable example. Oh, and I'd be horribly jealous Rathje if I hadn't done the exact same thing as a gift to a friend when I moved to France. Loved the feel of 2nd. Ed. Its crazy, highly unbalanced at points, and has a serious one-up manship thing going on with a number of the books, but it had much more of the "fantasy" flavor for me personally. Problem is, nobody wants to play it. (something about AC being crazy...honestly, how hard is THAC0 really)
Rathje 11-30-05, 08:45 PM	Thanks a lot, everyone. It's making more sense now. Bookmarked, too, for future reference in case I get lost again. I agree, Araes,THAC0 isn't that hard. High AC is just a bad thing instead of a good thing.
Rathje 12-01-05, 02:57 AM	Alright, I was flipping through the DMG and Monster Manual II and something came up. First of all, from MMII: LEVEL and EXPERIENCE POINT VALUE are determined by the method indicated in THE DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE. If a type of monster has varying hit dice and/or experience levels, values for each of them are shown. (I also get to see how much I've learned so far) Let's take a simple Worker Honeybee. 3+1, so a base of 120 XP. Damage includes Poison, a +2, so we've got 270 XP. The MMII says XP is 150 + 4/hp. First of all, the 150 doesn't match up to any of the values on Table 31 on page 69 of the DMG. Second, the quote says that it uses the method in the DMG, but neither the DMG or MMII mention the "+4/hp." Is that +4 XP for every hit point the Bee has? I found an average of 14.5 HP, which gives an extra 58 XP. That's 208 XP total, on average, which is basically directly between the 175 of 4+1 to 5 and the 270 of 5+1 to 6 1) Why doesn't it fall under the experience point values in the DMG? 2) Just to be safe, how if the +x/hp done? Why do some monsters have +1/hp, while others have +10/hp? 3) Am I just screwing up?
weasel fierce 12-01-05, 03:10 AM	the +x/HP is an AD&D 1st edition rule. It doesnt exist in AD&D2nd edition, and the DMG for 2nd edition doesnt have it. AD&D2nd edition, like D20, ignores the hit point totals, and just works off of hit dice. Anything that gives cool powers to the critter, simply counts as more hit dice. Use overall XP values to give a very very rough guideline, but the real trick is experience. No system can account for the exact mix of your characters, their gear, the conditions of a battle, circumstances, tactics, preparedness of both sides, surprise and a million other factors. 3.x pretends to do so, with the overly simple and abstract CR system, but thats another thread, I suppose. So just assign what seems fair, and be prepared to wing it. After a game or two, it'll be second nature. If in doubt, aim a little lower, and just be stingy on treasure... or aim high, and see if the players are smart enough to withdraw and regroup :)
Cantankerous 12-01-05, 09:58 AM	Actually, Cantankerous has a reason for where he's coming from. In general, XP in 2nd. Ed. was supposed to be reflective of how difficult a monster was. Admittedly, in several cases, and for those monsters which had a host of special abilities, it was way off. However, for normal monsters and characters, the XP rating of a foe should give the GM an idea of how hard it should be to take down. Honestly, this is exactly how 3rd Ed. is set up, they just obscure it behind the CR mechanic, which makes it a lot easier to figure out. CR is set up so that the total experience from 13.33 encounters of challenges at a parties CR should allow them to level. (Behind the Curtain, DMG 41) All experience in 3rd is then calculated from this basis. In the case of Cantankerous he's just suggested that you start with the experience itself and then formulate yourself how many fights you'd like it to take before the next average level (somewhat difficult due to the wide disparity in XP rates for classes in 2nd Ed.) In his particular example, he suggested that the number of encounters be 8, rather than the 13 suggested by 3.0. In my experience of 2nd. Ed., this is likely to get you killed, as 2nd. Ed. encounters were even more "swingy" than 3.0 ones. However, its a perfectly viable example. *snip* Exactly correct Araes. I haven't had the oppurtunity to get back on since yesterday early, but you nailed the whole thing precisely. I had the CR mechanic in this manner about four years before 3E came out and it worked ok. I had to re-write the XP valus of alot of the critters in the differing MMs, but doing iot from this basis is almost just a reverse engineering of the CR system. Isshia
Rathje 12-01-05, 09:26 PM	Oh...I see. Yeah, I messed up. She inherited a 1st Edition Monster Manual II, not 2nd Edition. I'll need to find one of those, then. Dang. Is it close enough that I can still use it? I heard that 1st Edition and 2nd Edition were pretty similar.
weasel fierce 12-02-05, 12:32 AM	They will work fine. I have used my AD&D2 monstrous manual for 1st edition games. Generally, monsters give slightly less XP, and some (notably dragons) are less powerfull.
Cantankerous 12-02-05, 02:30 AM	Less powerful under 1st edition rules that is. It was probably clear enough, but just in case... Dragons took a HUGE upgrade in 3.x edition (thank god) but they took quite a leap upwards between 1st and 2nd editions as well. Isshia
weasel fierce 12-02-05, 03:50 AM	yeah, one thing that will become very apparent is that a dragon will be hacked apart, in a plain knock down / drag out fight in AD&D1. Now, with a few spells, and breath attacks first, its another matter entirely *GM laugh*