Exceptional B/X Characters

Enough about average characters. We learned a bunch, but most of it was fairly obvious anyway. Let's talk briefly about exceptional characters instead. Out of a million characters rolled up, how many are exceptional? Well, what do we mean by exceptional? Maybe a good approximation would be the total sum of all ability modifiers? For simplicity let's just use the "standard" scale from -3 to +3 for all abilities. Here are a few examples for "amazing" characters as well as the chance for rolling one:

Class	S	I	W	D	C	X	Total	Chance
Cleric	15	16	18	12	16	18	+11	0.0001%
Fighter	18	11	16	17	14	18	+11	0.0002%
Magic-User	9	18	17	18	13	16	+11	0.0003%
Thief	18	10	15	18	16	13	+10	0.0016%
Dwarf	18	13	14	16	18	18	+13	0.0001%
Elf	18	18	14	14	18	15	+12	0.0001%
Halfling	18	13	17	16	18	15	+12	0.0002%

You may have guessed it, rolling up one of these monsters is basically impossible. The best result (certainly not a systemic issue, just a bunch of lucky rolls) is that 16 out of 1 million thieves are this awesome. That's not a lot, certainly not enough to ever actually see one of these characters in your games. But let's scale back a little bit: A character is pretty decent already if you get a total of +3 or more in terms of modifiers (and pretty bad if you get -3 or less) so what's the chance of rolling that? Better it turns out:

Class	Chance >= +3	Chance <= -3
Cleric	11.65%	12.79%
Fighter	11.57%	12.75%
Magic-User	11.54%	12.79%
Thief	11.60%	12.75%
Dwarf	14.59%	8.05%
Elf	15.51%	8.33%
Halfling	19.53%	4.61%

It's a little surprising (for me anyway) that human characters have a better chance of being "bad" than "good" according to my simulation. Demi-human characters, on the other hand, have a better chance of turning out "good" as it were. Halflings are especially lucky in this regard, so maybe the next time you roll up a character who actually qualifies for being a Halfling, you should really go for one of those little buggers?

(Sorry, I am sitting at my dad's weird Windoze box in Germany, so I don't have access to my usual Python toolbox of visualizations. I was going to plot the actual distributions for you, alas I'll have to add those things at a later date. I hope you still enjoyed reading what I have.)

Average B/X Characters

I've been fooling around a lot with rolling 3d6 lately. I don't roll them myself, I have a little Python script roll them, but it's a lot of fun to look at what happens. Nothing too surprising actually, but still, worth a little post I thought.

Normally you roll 3d6 in order and see what you get. Well, for this post I am turning that around a little: I'll roll 3d6 in order as long as necessary to get 1 million characters for a certain class. Of course for clerics, fighters, magic-users, and thieves there's actually no difference: None of those require minimum ability scores in B/X. But when we get to dwarves, elves, and halflings you need to keep in mind that we're not looking at 1 million totally random characters, but one million totally random dwarves, elves, and halflings. Subtle difference? I hope you're still with me in any case.

Just rolling 3d6 in order is not enough. In B/X you get to perform prime requisite adjustment: Once you pick a class, you can increase a prime requisite of the class by 1 point if you in turn lower some other ability score by 2 points. That's somewhat of a subtle process because sometimes you might choose not to add another point to your prime requisite to keep a nice modifier elsewhere. For example, you may decide to keep Strength 17 and Wisdom 13 for a fighter instead of going for Strength 18 and Wisdom 11. True, in terms of overall modifiers you'd still be at +3 but maybe you really like to get that +1 to saving throws against magic? I have not modeled such subtleties directly because they seem too specific to the whims of a particular player. What I've done instead is to order the attributes that can be lowered by what I think most players would agree is reasonable:

Class	Prime	Lowered in order	Rationale
Cleric	Wisdom	Intelligence, Strength	Preserve melee potential
Fighter	Strength	Intelligence, Wisdom	Preserve saving throws
Magic-User	Intelligence	Strength, Wisdom	Preserve saving throws
Thief	Dexterity	Intelligence, Wisdom	Preserve saving throws
Dwarf	Strength	Intelligence, Wisdom	Preserve saving throws
Elf	Strength, Intelligence	Wisdom	No other choice
Halfling	Strength, Dexterity	Intelligence, Wisdom	Preserve saving throws

Yes, the result of this is that I err on the "dumb side" of character generation, but since there's no simple mechanical game effect of high intelligence that seemed to be the reasonable thing to do. (One could make the point that thieves should reduce wisdom first because they need to be smart cookies and taking large risks during a heist would correlate with low wisdom, but that's beyond what the rules give us.) In any case, given these "lowered in order" rules, once I have a character that qualifies for a certain class, I use prime requisite adjustment to attempt to get those abilities pumped up as far as possible: First to get the best XP adjustment, then to get the best modifier.

Alright, now that I've explained how the characters get generated, let's get to the point of this entire post: What does the average B/X character look like? It's probably not too surprising for many of you, but here we go (I abbreviate Charisma with X).

Class	S	I	W	D	C	X
Cleric	8.84	8.79	12.20	10.50	10.50	10.50
Fighter	12.19	8.78	8.84	10.50	10.50	10.50
Magic-User	8.78	12.19	8.83	10.50	10.51	10.50
Thief	10.50	8.78	8.84	12.19	10.51	10.50
Dwarf	12.19	8.79	8.83	10.50	11.81	10.50
Elf	10.85	12.31	8.78	10.50	10.49	10.50
Halfling	11.35	8.79	8.83	12.66	11.81	10.50

It is perhaps not hard to understand how these numbers come about. Take the cleric for instance. The average roll on 3d6 is 10.5 so we start out with roughly the same average everywhere. Then we try to increase Wisdom at the expense of first Intelligence and then Strength. Note how in the average character, Strength is slightly higher than Intelligence. Starting at 10.5 we have a good shot that we actually rolled an 11 in both Strength and Intelligence. That would give us 2 points to raise Wisdom by, roughly anyway, so from 10.5 Wisdom we get to 12.2 Wisdom. All makes sense, doesn't it?

For demi-humans we first have to remember that we re-rolled all characters that didn't qualify for the class. Observe, for example, that for both dwarf and halfling the Constitution is higher than the expected average of 10.5 precisely because all rolls of less than 9 were removed before we even started. For elves we have an even higher Intelligence because not only did we enforce a minimum of 9 as part of the experiment, we're then able to increase Intelligence further because it is a prime requisite. If you compare halflings and elves you notice furthermore that the average halfling is stronger than the average elf. This is because halflings can reduce Intelligence and Wisdom to increase their prime requisites, whereas elves can only reduce Wisdom.

I should mention at this point that thieves in B/X are only allowed to reduce Intelligence and Wisdom. In BECMI, however, they are also allowed to reduce Strength. That leads to a slightly different average thief:

S 8.84   I 8.79   W 8.91   D 12.98   C 10.50   X 10.49

In a strange way, thieves are therefore "better off" in BECMI when it comes to their average dexterity score (their skills are a different matter). And hey, not only do they finally beat halflings, they also become the class most likely to have a 13+ in an ability (on average).

That's it for now on "average" characters. Of course there's an equally fascinating question in the air: What about "exceptional" characters? If you roll up a million dwarfs, how likely is it that you get an amazing dwarf? Sadly, since I am about to hop on a plane to Germany, that'll have to wait for another time. Happy Holidays!

Ability Score Minimums in B/X (Part 2)

I've been looking at ability score minimums for humans in an earlier post, suggesting that we can impose them without too much trouble if we so choose. Today I want to look at the existing ability score minimums for demi-humans briefly. If you check the B/X Basic Rulebook, pages B9-B10, you'll find the following:

• Dwarves require a constitution score of 9 or higher.
• Elves require an intelligence score of 9 or higher.
• Halflings require a constitution score and a dexterity score of 9 or higher.

What's the effect of this? Well, if we roll up a million characters using 3d6 in order, we find that about 74% of those could be dwarves or elves and about 55% could be halflings. Let's not worry too much about the details here, what's important is that without futher consideration, a player is least likely to roll up a halfling.

If we go a little further and for each of our one million characters pick an actual class uniformly at random (out of all the classes a character qualifies for), we find (approximately) the following:

• 17% Clerics
• 17% Fighters
• 17% Magic-Users
• 17% Thieves
• 12% Dwarves
• 12% Elves
• 8% Halflings

I don't know about you, but this doesn't sit right with me when it comes to the demographics implied by B/X. I always thought that elves should be rarer than dwarves which in turn should be rarer than halflings. The only thing that does work out as expected is that humans are the most populous: we get about 68% humans and 32% demi-humans.

Curious side note: Before I ever ran these simulations, I came up with a house rule to randomly determine race. I did this because I got tired of parties that were mostly demi-human. (I am with Gary that demi-humans should be exotic, not commonplace.) The rule I "guesstimated" was this:

d20	Race
1-14	Human
15-17	Halfling
18-19	Dwarf
20	Elf

In other words, 70% humans and 30% demi-humans seemed mostly reasonable to me. Now I'd be hard-pressed to say why exactly. I seem to recall fiddling with the d20 numbers for a while and this seemed to be the simplest way to make sure that elves are rarest, followed by dwarves, followed by halflings. So it may just have been an accident. (End of curious side note.)

If we wanted to tweak the resulting population by only modifying the required minimums, where should we start? If we added strength as a minimum to dwarves and elves all we'd achieve would be that each of those populations will be about the same as the halflings. Here's the (approximate) breakdown:

• 18% Clerics
• 18% Fighters
• 18% Magic-Users
• 18% Thieves
• 9% Dwarves
• 9% Elves
• 9% Halflings

Not really what we'd want. But how about now tweaking the actual numbers? Let's leave halflings at strength and dexterity 9+ but move dwarves to strength 9+ and constitution 12+ and elves to strength 9+ and intelligence 14+. What do we get (approximately)?

• 21% Clerics
• 21% Fighters
• 21% Magic-Users
• 21% Thieves
• 10% Halflings
• 5% Dwarves
• 2% Elves

That's more like it, at least it's closer to what I would expect. So if you feel like I do about what the population mix should be like, I'd suggest going to these stricter requirements for dwarves and elves. (Or you could do intelligence 13+ for elves, then you'd get slightly more of them, roughly 3%, but still not too many.)

Keep in mind that we've dealt only with minimum requirements here. It turns out that B/X has many more mechanics (prime requisite adjustment, XP adjustment, etc.) that impact the actual demographics implied by the rules. But that's for another post...

Ability Score Minimums in B/X (Part 1)

At the end of my post on strict spell books I complained that B/X allows magic-users that cannot read. To quote:

I noticed that B/X interprets low intelligence scores as a limited ability to speak/read/write. However, magic-users are not required to have a minimum intelligence score. This either implies magic-users who can be almost braindead yet cast Fireball or a missing minimum requirement. I am about to house-rule that magic-users need a minimum intelligence of 9 just like elves.

Now I've finally had time to think through what such a minimum requirement would mean. And I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised when I found out that it means almost nothing.

Let's assume that the B/X world is populated with "3d6 in order" humans only. What's the chance of rolling a 9 or greater on 3d6? Answer: 74.07% So almost three quarters of all attributes will be 9 or greater.

Now if I wanted to add a minimum intelligence requirement for magic-users, I should probably add one for clerics, fighters, and thieves as well, right? So let's say that all four human classes have such a minimum requirement. What's the chance that out of the four rolls determining strength, intelligence, wisdom, and dexterity not a single one would be 9 or greater?

Let me not bore you with the math, it turns out to be 0.45%. So out of a million humans, roughly 4,500 would no longer be able to qualify for any class. Yes, it's tough, those 4,500 would have to remain "normal humans" for the rest of their lifes.

Not trusting my math I hacked a quick Python script to roll up characters and evaluate them, so we can actually look at a sample of these poor sods:

{'C': 6, 'D': 4, 'I': 8, 'S': 8, 'W': 8, 'X': 11}
{'C': 12, 'D': 7, 'I': 8, 'S': 8, 'W': 7, 'X': 11}
{'C': 17, 'D': 8, 'I': 8, 'S': 7, 'W': 7, 'X': 13}
{'C': 7, 'D': 5, 'I': 6, 'S': 7, 'W': 6, 'X': 10}
{'C': 9, 'D': 8, 'I': 8, 'S': 4, 'W': 8, 'X': 12}
{'C': 8, 'D': 6, 'I': 8, 'S': 8, 'W': 8, 'X': 17}

Some have "redeeming" features, take the one with a constitution of 17 and a charisma of 13 for example. Presumably there is a player somewhere who'd have fun playing this character: A healthy and charismatic (leader-type?) magic-user who has a hard time writing down notes. But let's be honest, just how many players are we talking about here?

So here's my verdict: Adding a minimum requirement of 9 for the prime requisite of a class is totally fine. True, if we look at individual cases, there may be some characters that we could still find a player for. Overall, however, I don't see how 0.45% of rolled up characters contributing to nothing but entropy are a problem. I'd much rather be sure that magic-users can actually speak/read/write, that fighters can actually carry their armor and weapons into battle, etc.

Appendix: Once I had the Python script, I couldn't resist running it a few more times. Say we wanted to make sure that characters are actually good in their chosen class by requiring a 13, what would that mean? How about requiring 16? Here are the results for each 9, 13, and 16 when generating a million characters:

Minimum  Prime Requisite	Classed Humans	Normal Humans
9	995,372	4,628
13	699,147	300,853
16	173,279	826,721

Obviously the higher minima have a huge impact on who can join a class and who has to remain a "normal human" as it were. Those higher minimums are certainly not recommended for standard B/X, although I have a feeling they'll help me in my house rules regarding multi-classed characters.

Demi-Human Abilities in B/X

Neat ideas always hit me when I should really be grading. No matter, let's write it up. Quickly! If you check pages B9-10 in your B/X Basic Rulebook, you'll learn that dwarves, elves, and halflings can do some very special things:

• Dwarves have a 2-in-6 chance to find slanting passages, traps, shifting walls, and new construction.
• Elves have a 2-in-6 chance to find secret doors.
• Halflings have a 2-in-6 chance to hide in shadows. (Let's ignore the wilderness version.)

That's awesome stuff of course. The only problem is that it stays that way forever. You can scan the B/X Expert Rulebook all you want, those special abilities don't improve! Doesn't matter that your dwarf is level 12, your elf is level 10, and your halfling is level 8: 2-in-6, 2-in-6, and (cynical drumroll!) 2-in-6. Depressing. Possibly one of the worst oversights in all of B/X?

Luckily it's easy to fix: Just tie those chances to the demi-human's level and you're done! There's already one (and only one!) 2-in-6 ability in B/X that improves with level: the "hear noise" ability for thieves. It goes to 3-in-6 at level 3, 4-in-6 at level 7, and 5-in-6 at level 11. So just declare that demi-human abilities also improve at those levels and you're done! You now have a better, more demi-human-friendly B/X to please your players with. Yay!

Of course using "hear noise" has the strange consequence that elves and halflings don't get to "max out" their special ability. I can live with that, but just in case you can't let's try to find another way to read B/X that might make you happier. One idea could be to look at XP instead of levels. Thieves reach level 3 at 2,400 XP, level 7 at 40,000 XP, and level 11 at 400,000 XP respectively. What do those numbers mean in terms of demi-human levels?

XP	Dwarf	Elf	Halfling
2,400	2	1	2
40,000	6	5	6
400,000	10	9	n/a

Alright, so halflings still get the shaft and never reach 5-in-6 for hiding. Worse than that, elves now start with 3-in-6 for finding secret doors. I don't actually like this better than the first approach, but hey, maybe you do?

In my house rules levels 4, 8, and 12 are "special" because they coincide with the level limits and level progressions used. So there I reuse those numbers to determine when demi-human special abilities get upgraded.

Of course the important point for me is not which progression to use, it's much more about adding another small way in which characters improve over time. Take it from someone playing a level 12 dwarven fighter in AD&D every week: Nothing is more boring than (apparent) lack of progress!

PS: I don't think that any of the other "general" d6 skills should improve with level. But for demi-human special abilities, I find the idea rather appropriate (and indeed appealing).

Justifying Exploration Movement

I seem to spend a lot of my idle cycles (too many maybe?) thinking about D&D, and one topic I keep coming back to with some regularity is movement rates. I started this post with the goal of doing something about the atrociously slow pace of D&D character in those dark and deadly dungeons we all love. Of course it turned into something a bit more involved: A historical survey (at least for the versions of D&D I care about) of the player-facing differences regarding movement. I focused on movement in the dungeon, and I ignored whatever differences there are between player characters and monsters. (My friend Delta has written a wonderful post about wilderness movement in AD&D/OD&D that you'll want to check out as well.) So without further ado:

• OD&D gives movement rates primarily in inches which makes sense considering its wargaming roots. In the section on encumbrance (volume 1, page 15) we find that player characters move 12", 9", or 6" depending on how much they carry. Somewhat confusingly the same page also gives an example of a fully armored character moving at 6"/turn. Why is that confusing? In the section on underworld exploration (volume 3, page 8) we first learn that 1" equals 10' in a dungeon. But then we find that there are actually two moves in one turn of approximately 10 minutes. The fully armored character from the previous example is therefore given a rate of 120'/turn, not 60'/turn. The rules note further that movement is doubled for flight/pursuit so the same character can "run" 240'/turn. By the same rationale an unarmored character should be able to explore 240'/turn and "run" 480'/turn.
• Holmes Basic gives movement rates primarily in feet which makes sense because it's more accessible and we're dealing only with dungeons anyway. On page 9 of the rules we find the same 120'/turn for the fully armored character and the same 240'/turn for an unarmored character. The good doctor characterizes this as a "cautious walk" and agrees with OD&D that it's the appropriate movement rate for "exploring/mapping." However, he then introduces "normal movement" as well, at twice that speed. This notion is never explicitly explained, but it's presumably there to cover movement through areas that have already been explored/mapped. The obvious "problem" here is that OD&D uses this "normal movement" speed for "flight/pursuit" which implies "running" and not just a regular walk. Holmes then introduces an explicit "running" movement rate at three times the exploration rate. So a fully armored character can now "move cautiously" at 120'/turn, "move normally" at 240'/turn, or "run" at 360'/turn.
• AD&D gives movement rates in inches again, presumably because Gygax just cannot stop himself. Page 101 of the Player's Handbook lists out the basic 12", 9", 6", and 3" movement rates for various levels of encumbrance. On page 102 we find the same 1" = 10' dungeon scale as in OD&D, however gone are the two moves per 10-minute turn. So now our fully armored character can only move 60'/turn while exploring/mapping a dungeon! But of course it doesn't stop there: What Holmes called "normal movement" now seems to happen at five times the "exploration/mapping" rate so 300'/turn for our fully armored character whereas "flight" or "running" happens at ten times that rate, so 600'/turn.
• B/X D&D gives movement rates in feet again, doh. On page B20 of the Basic Rulebook we find that characters move at 120'/turn, 90'/turn, 60'/turn, or 30'/turn depending on encumbrance. The fully armored character now moves at the AD&D rate of 60'/turn. On page B19 we are told that this "assumes that the players [sic] are mapping carefully, searching, and trying to be quiet" so this is once again the "exploring/mapping" speed. There are no concrete guidelines for "moving normally" through already explored territory. Running speed is given as the same number of feet per round. Turns out that B/X keeps the 10-second rounds Holmes introduced, however those are now given an explicit relation to the 10-minute turn: there are 60 rounds per turn. So the running speed for a fully armored character would be 60*60'/turn = 3600'/turn! (Page B24 comes to the rescue by stating that running speed can only be maintained for 30 rounds before requiring a rest of 3 turns, but that doesn't change the fact that B/X characters run a lot faster than characters in any other version of D&D considered here.)

I think I can leave it at that, neither BECMI nor the Rules Cyclopedia do anything different from B/X regarding basic movement. (Well, the encumbrance tables are slightly different, but hey.) We should probably conclude with a table summarizing all of the above? I want to keep things simple, so I'll use an unencumbered character for this:

	OD&D	Holmes	AD&D	B/X
Exploring	240'	240'	120'	120'
Walking	-	480'	600'	-
Running	480'	720'	1200'	7200'

This level of variation is moderately scary. Not that it matters in practice: You always just play one system after all. But it's still a little bizarre that closely related versions of D&D come down that far apart on this simple question. So what's the basis in "reality" if there is such a thing?

The average human walking speed seems to be around 3 miles/hour. There are 5,280 feet in a mile, so that's 15,840 feet/hour. There are 60 minutes in an hour, so that's 2,640 feet/turn. Wow, even those versions of D&D that have a notion of "moving normally" are really far off from that.

Jogging seems to happen at about 6 miles/hour, maybe a little less. If we assume that D&D characters are not highly-trained sprinters, only joggers, that still leaves us with a "running speed" of 5,280 feet/turn and only one out of four versions of D&D is even in the right ballpark.

Or look at it the other way: Those 120'/turn (from AD&D or B/X) for an unencumbered character exploring/mapping translate to 720'/hour or 12'/minute or 2'/round (in B/X terms). Two feet in ten seconds? Two feet is less than a single step for an adult!

I can already hear half the OSR shouting "It's a game, just play it!" in my direction. Sorry, not good enough, things are simply too far off to sweep under the rug. So let me propose a strawman that I'll shoot down again in a few paragraphs.

Start with that average walking speed of 2,640 feet/turn. Round off to get a nicer number, let's say 2,400 feet/turn. Set that as the movement rate for an unencumbered player character walking normally, for example down one of the few paved city streets in your favorite fantasy metropolis.

Now let's "weigh them down" with encumbrance. In the versions of D&D that deal with encumbrance at all, movement rate goes down by about one-fourth per encumbrance category. Alright, so we'll get 2,400 feet/turn, 1,800 feet/turn, 1,200 feet/turn, and 600 feet/turn. For running we'll double those (but we'll assume a pretty short duration for runs just like B/X does). For exploring on the other hand we'll divide by two for each complication we can think of. Let's see, there's mapping (its own reward), searching (presumably for treasure), being quiet (presumably to avoid random encounters), being cautious (presumably to avoid traps), and that's about it. So we'll divide by 16!

That leaves us with 150 feet/turn, 112.5 feet/turn, 75 feet/turn, and 37.5 feet/turn for four levels of encumbrance. Pretty close to the (slightly slower) 120 feet/turn, 90 feet/turn, 60 feet/turn, and 30 feet/turn in the existing rules! In fact, it's close enough to simply round off again and use the existing movement rates. (Maybe it would be slightly better to use 150 feet/turn, 120 feet/turn, 90 feet/turn, and 60 feet/turn instead? See below for reasons not to.) However, let's remember how we got here: We took a realistic version of "normal walking speed" and divided by 16. That's a huge decrease and probably overestimates things quite a bit. But to keep things simple, let's forget about the 16 and just say that from the usual movement rates we get back to "normal walking" if we multiply by 10: So 1,200 feet/turn, 900 feet/turn, 600 feet/turn, and 300 feet/turn. Seems reasonable enough, what's not to like?

I shall tell you what's not to like. Suddenly armored parties move 60 squares per turn in my dungeons instead of 6 or 12 squares. Among other things that destroys a lot of the fun that can be had when parties desperately try to escape from a dungeon after an encounter that left them almost dead. I either have to make all my dungeons a lot bigger, or I have to turn up the frequency of wandering monster checks. It requires that I rework lots and lots of stuff, especially monsters who (presumably) are familiar with the dungeon and move at "normal walking" speed instead of "exploration speed" now. Overall, I'd much rather find a fix that let's me keep things as they are numerically, but that offers a better deal to the players nevertheless.

So here is my actual proposal (remember the above was a strawman): If the ridiculously slow movement is in fact because the party is ridiculously cautious, careful, quiet, etc. then the reward should be that they have a chance (only a chance!) to notice interesting things without having to explicitly ask for them:

• When they approach a trap, they automatically have the usual 1 in 6 chance to spot it.
• When they pass a secret door, they automatically have the usual 1 in 6 chance to spot it.
• Before they open a door, they automatically have the usual 1 in 6 chance to hear some interesting noise.

And so on, and so forth. Yes, in a very roundabout way I am arguing for "passive perception" as I believe 5th edition calls it. Seems like a very fair deal to me: If the explanation for why the player characters crawl like snails is their meticulous dungeon delving expertise, why the heck would players have to poke the DM about those things?

Of course this might not feel like D&D to you anymore, but it still feels like D&D to me. And since it's just a chance, I really don't think I am giving too much away. In fact, I am probably adding a 1 in 6 chance for magic-users to spot magic as well as a 1 in 6 chance for clerics to spot evil. And you know? I'd much rather make a few more rolls for them than have my players miss fun things in my dungeons just because they never asked.

Update 2015/11/11: Turns out I got my initial math wrong, sorry. Thanks to Todd Haynes for spotting it! I fixed the numbers and things are less extreme now in the strawman proposal. (Sadly I had to cut my Traveller/Star Frontiers quip as well.) I stand by my actual proposal in any case: A reduction by a factor of 16 should have more benefits for the players than what is given by the rules as written.

The Other Missing B/X Spell

Most B/X fans know that there's no spell description for Detect Invisible in either of the 1981 rulebooks. While this makes for a great pun (maybe it even was intentional on Tom Moldvay's part?) the "completionist" in me had to import the spell description from Frank Mentzer's 1983 basic set to be satisfied. (Turns out that I could have imported the spell description from the original 1977 Eric Holmes basic set as well, but I only realized that recently.)

Well, today I noticed that there's another spell "missing" from B/X. It's a tad bit more debateable I guess, but here we go anyway. If you turn to page X49, you'll find the Staff of Power which (among other things) can be used to cast Cone Of Cold. And sure enough, there's no spell with that name in B/X. From the way the spell is characterized in the magic item description it seems to fit right in with Fire Ball and Lightning Bolt, the other two attack spells a Staff of Power can create: A d6 of damage for each level of the caster.

Of course that's not a complete spell description, but luckily we find the Wand of Cold further down on page X49 which states that the cone is 60' long and 30' wide at the far end. Now we're almost done with reconstructing the spell, but we should still double-check the details with other sources. So let's look at OD&D and AD&D. We're in for a surprise because OD&D doesn't have Cone Of Cold either! It does have both the Staff of Power and the Wand of Cold but not the spell, just like B/X. AD&D of course has the spell, but it's a tad bit different than what you'd expect from the B/X items:

• The AD&D spell is level 5 and not level 3 as would fit with Fire Ball and Lightning Bolt. That's presumably justified by Cone of Cold having fewer complications regarding area of effect or rebounding?
• The AD&D spell description doesn't give the exact dimensions of the cone, however it does explicitly state that the cone starts from the caster's hands (so the range is 0).
• The AD&D spell does d4+1 damage per level of the caster which guarantees a higher minimum damage but falls short of the possible maximum damage a d6 would provide.

So we'll have to "pick up the pieces" a bit. Personally I find level 5 to be too high, after all that's the same level as Cloudkill which potentially insta-kills creatures of less than 5 hit dice. So let's say it's level 4 instead. Also let's adopt the clear dimensions given for the Wand of Cold and let's make it d6 per level as implied by both B/X magic items. We arrive at the following:

Cone of Cold
Range: 0
Duration: instantaneous

This spell creates a cone 60' long and 30' wide at the far end that originates from the magic-user's hands. It does 1-6 (1d6) points of cold damage per level of the caster to all creatures within the cone. A saving throw versus spells will reduce damage by half if successful.

Sounds like a decent B/X spell to me? Also by adding a cold attack spell to the list we can get a little more mileage out of the cleric's Resist Cold, a neat side-effect.

I am sure there will be those who'd argue that the spell is not in fact "missing" at all, it's just that in the B/X world cold attacks only come from White Dragons or magic items. I don't know, I think there should be a spell because wizards have to create those magic items based on something, right?

And if you feel like adding this spell is a bad idea without taking something else away, may I suggest removing Growth of Plants from the magic-user's spell list and giving it to the cleric instead? Seems sensible anyway...