B/X: Racial Ability Bonuses
Labyrinth Lord is my main conduit to B/X gaming, so many of the assumptions I make about First Edition Dungeons & Dragons are derived from my experience with Labyrinth Lord. The accuracy of my initial assumptions isn’t really so much the point as whatever is eventually gained through the process of inference.
That might sound backward, but it works. I make an observation, establish a hypothesis, test it, observe the results, then refine my hypothesis. The initial assumption becomes irrelevant after a few iterations.
Anyway, that was a roundabout method of saying I observed that Labyrinth Lord “races” don’t have racial ability modifiers and it got me thinking about what that could mean — ability scores plug into combat modifiers, and as we’re all probably aware, combat is what makes Dungeons & Dragons go ’round.
While discussing character creation in 1e and 4e, my brother and I concluded some races are simply more effective choices for certain 4e classes than others. We observed dwarves were generally the best choice for Divine classes, given their racial bonuses to Wisdom and Constitution.
We found the “solution” to the “problem” of creating a character through the combination of races and classes that applied to more than one class, but to an entire category of classes — it extends to the majority of Primal classes as well.
What I would find myself proposing — strange though it may seem to players raised on 3e and 4e like myself — is to eliminate racial ability score bonuses entirely in an effort to make races and classes get along better. Other bonuses can be as good, and races don’t require ability bonuses to be worth using.
Update: Dang, you know what? I think I ninja’d myself here. I’m pretty sure I’ve suggested eliminating racial ability score bonuses somewhere on this very blog and am only coming around to it again.
Either way, the basic idea remains the same — to enable greater diversity in race-class combinations (in 4e, for example), remove the incentive to create a specific kind of numerical advantage. You don’t get that ability bonus which means you can choose freely, or make your decision on another, less-crucial advantage.
Because when the best decision is to go with a bonus to attacks and damage, there’s a problem with the system — the problem being that it can be “solved.”
Are you using race-as-class? If not, one solution could be to mix and match the character’s advancement, such as allowing a dwarf to be a magic user, using magic user hit dice and to hit while keeping the dwarf saving throw progression (the main factor that distinguishes a dwarf from a human fighter).
We used race-as-class when we rolled characters.
During our discussion, my brother and I shared our perceptions toward the characters we made when we had fewer bonuses to consider during creation.
The restrictions were different — being mostly limited to our dice results — and could be boiled down to as a compromise between what we wanted to play and what we felt was mechanically feasible. :)
The B/X rules for character creation are probably the most ignored rule in the history of rpg gaming. “Wanna play an elf? Well good luck! Hope you roll good enough for one!”
Lol, that’s too bad. My brother and I really enjoyed trying to make a character out of what we rolled. We’re both Magic players and we both enjoyed the ‘sealed’ format — which is the card game equivalent of “see what you can do with these random ability scores.” xD
One of my regrets is that I never played any sealed formats back in my MTG days. I mostly played type 1. Got my ass kicked a lot, because everyone else’s banned cards were better than my banned cards.
Yeah, sealed goes a long way to leveling the playing field. We especially like the pre-release tournaments because most of the players are only seeing the cards for the first time — and with the whole “learn through doing” thing most players require to play at 100%, it means that a lot of strategies are only just discovered over the course of the tournament.
Oh, and we always go to the midnight tournament, where everyone is over-caffeinated and/or exhausted from the work week … oddly enough the atmosphere is usually pretty congenial. ;)
I feel like if I ever tried to get back into it I’d feel like a crotchety old man. “Back in my day, we had spells faster than instants! And where did banding go? What do you mean Dark Ritual is banned?!”
I played from Fallen Empires through Mirage, got back into it for a couple years when Urza Saga came out (and was all “motherfucker what?!” over shadows), stopped again when Masks came out until the the weird ninja sets (but didn’t collect). I’m feel like I’d have to learn from the ground up. Besides, I already sold my collection years ago to a guy who looked like a fat(ter) Penn Jillette.
I got in around Ice Age, played and collected sporadically up to Tempest (my favorite set to that point), dropped in on the Onslaught block, dropped out again until Zendikar when I collected sporadically again (lots of cards I could obtain cheaply online). I started going to prereleases with my brother-in-law with M12 and Innistrad, and it’s the most fun I think I’ve had with Magic.
Ice Age was a fun block. Tempest block grew on me, after my initial outrage over some of the new mechanics. The first two sets of the Urza block, though, were some of my all time favorites.
One of the things that strikes me, though, is how expensive booster packs have gotten. I remember when you could scrounge for those last handful of Alliances, and those cost an arm and a leg at $4.50, but $2.50 was always the average, with the near infinite supply of Fallen Empires at the cheap end for years and years after it went out of print.