The Metamorphica: A Book of Random Mutation Tables

UPDATE: A new, revised version is now available.

See the new blog post HERE.

As promised, the book is finally done!

The Metamorphica is a very large system-agnostic collection of random mutation tables, for any table-top role-playing game. The digest-sized PAPERBACK VERSION is available from lulu.com for only US$6.66 plus shipping, but you can download the pdf version for free (either FROM LULU or FROM HERE for less hassle) from DriveThruRPG HERE.

How did this happen? Good question!

I was originally inspired to make this when I started using the old Realm of Chaos mutation tables while I was running old Red Box D&D. We had a lot of fun with mutagenic substances so I decided to make a much larger collection that included mutation ideas from a whole range of other role-playing games. Along the way I added a lot of new ones as well, and when it became too big to be a stapled booklet, I decided to add procedures for creating all sorts of monsters and mutants. And also to make it available as a printed book and not just a pdf.

The Metamorphica is system-agnostic, meaning there aren’t any rules in it per se: no attack bonuses, no hit points, and no task or conflict resolution systems. I intend to use this for more than just D&D, but making the book compatible with such disparate systems as Metamorphosis Alpha, Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, and Diaspora would make it way too long, and take way too much time. You can just make up rules in play if you need them, that’s what I do. It’s really not that hard.

The Metamorphica was written by Johnstone Metzger and illustrated by Andrew Gillis, Nathan Jones, Johnstone Metzger, and Nathan Orlando Wilson. If you need to get in touch with anyone about this book, Red Box Vancouver (no spaces) has a standard gmail address that will accept your inquiries.

Also? It’s free!

Yes, this is (essentially) a free book. But if you would like to not-so-subtly encourage future products of a similar nature, or just buy me and/or the artists a drink by way of thanks, feel free to donate whatever you feel is appropriate. I will also happily accept pdfs, which you can send to the above-mentioned gmail address (the name of this blog, no spaces).

Or, if you would really like to do me a favour (warning, real-life bummer stuff follows):
I find the violence surrounding coltan mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the economics of the electronics industry that encourage it, particularly concerning. Especially since this book would not have been possible without such electronics. However, I have neither the time nor the expertise to track down and properly vet charitable organizations working to solve this issue. If you know of one, and can make an adequate case as to their accountability and their work in the DRC, please let me know. If you don’t know any charities working in this area specifically, don’t worry about it, just enjoy the book. And if you are unaware of this issue, please look it up, the information is readily available. Thank you.

Under the Chimera, another home-made module

Here is another short module I made for Red Box Vancouver. We enjoyed this one for a total of four zany sessions, mostly owing to the mutagenic liquid. You can read the session summaries starting here.

This one was also created using Dave’s Mapper and the Moldvay Basic rules. There are no mutation tables provided in the adventure, but I would recommend either this or these, since the giant system-agnostic compilation of all mutation tables everywhere that I’m working on is not yet finished.

So, here it is for you. Again, the last two pages are just the map on page 2, but bigger, just in case you need it. Anything I haven’t provided, use that book you see to the right!

Under the Chimera

The Hidden Ziggurat, a home-made module

This is a short module I made for Red Box Vancouver. I ran three sessions of it, and short summaries can be found on the RBV forums, starting here.

I used Dave’s Mapper to generate a random dungeon map, and made a few slight modifications in Photoshop. I then stocked the dungeon using the rules in Moldvay’s Basic D&D, then added my own ideas so that the dungeon made sense in the end, including some nice colour text culled from a previous phase of black ziggurat enthusiasm. And with the addition of a few short wandering monster tables, I was done.

So here it is for you, if you want it. The last two pages are just the map on page 2 but bigger. If you don’t need them, don’t print them out. There are no monster stats here, because you can get those from the Moldvay Basic book.

The Hidden Ziggurat

An Alternate Reward System for Playing Your Role

For Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, “role-playing” didn’t mean funny voices or acting out your character’s unique personality. It meant playing your role, whether that was cleric, fighter, or magic-user. Role-playing awards might mean re-roll tokens, or an xp bonus, but were not given out for dramatic performances.

With that in mind, here is an alternate reward system for role-playing, with roll bonuses, saving-throw re-rolls, and allows abilities to increase. It fulfills two different goals. The first is that it incentivizes certain class- or role-specific behaviours, by rewarding appropriate actions and making it easier to increase class-elated abilities. The second is that it allows for more player-determined advancement, by allowing players to choose which abilities they will try to increase.

As much as I stand behind the sentiments in the last post, I also like it when characters can improve and overcome their faults, or hone their strengths. And this is a rather simple way of allowing a player to indicate what they find interesting or important about their own character, instead of being locked into a fixed, undeviated improvement path based on class, level, and what spells are found during adventures. Players should be able to make choices about improvements before 9th level, I think.

Each character class has five experiences that help define their role. When you do one of these five actions, mark the circle next to it. Do not mark it again until after you erase it.

You may erase all your marks to get certain bonuses, at any time:
* Erase all your marks to get a bonus to a single roll equal to the number of marks you erased.
* If you have 2 or more marks, erase them all to re-roll a saving throw.
* If you have 3 or more marks, erase them all to attempt to increase one of your favoured abilities.
* If you have 4 or more marks, erase them all to attempt to increase any one ability.

When you attempt to increase an ability, erase all your marks and choose which ability you would like to increase. If you are erasing 3 marks, you may only choose one of the two abilities favoured by your class. If you are erasing 4 or more marks, you may choose any one of your six abilities. Once you have chosen an ability, roll a d20. If you roll equal to or less than the ability’s current rating, it does not increase. But if you roll higher than the ability’s current rating, it increases by 1. Favoured abilities are listed next to the class names, below.

The seven B/X Classes listed out in alphabetical order:

Clerics (Charisma and Wisdom):
○ When you defend someone weaker than yourself (fewer hit points).
○ When you heal or rescue a fallen comrade.
○ When you ignore attacks in order to heal, bless, consecrate, or turn undead.
○ When you survive a battle against the servants of enemy gods.
○ When you tithe half your wealth to your temple (minimum 100gp).

Dwarves (Constitution and Strength):
○ When you defend someone weaker than yourself (fewer hit points).
○ When you donate half your wealth to a Dwarven institution (minimum 100gp).
○ When you find a trap before it is triggered.
○ When you slay a superior foe (more hit dice).
○ When you survive a battle where your side was outnumbered.

Elves (Strength and Intelligence):
○ When you defend someone weaker than yourself (fewer hit points).
○ When you rescue a fallen or captured comrade.
○ When you recover magical items, scrolls, or spellbooks from a dungeon.
○ When you spend half your wealth on magical research (minimum 100gp).
○ When you use magic to defeat a superior foe (more hit dice).

Fighters (Dexterity and Strength):
○ When you lead retainers into battle and they all survive.
○ When you rescue a fallen or captured comrade.
○ When you slay a superior foe (more hit dice).
○ When you spend half your wealth carousing (minimum 100gp).
○ When you survive a battle where your side was outnumbered.

Halflings (Constitution and Dexterity):
○ When you ambush a superior foe (more hit dice or greater numbers).
○ When you get to the other side of a lock or blocked passageway.
○ When you slay a superior foe (more hit dice).
○ When you spend half your wealth carousing (minimum 100gp).
○ When you survive a battle without losing any hit points.

Magic-Users (Constitution and Intelligence):
○ When you cast a spell to directly aid a comrade.
○ When you recover magical items, scrolls, or spellbooks from a dungeon.
○ When you spend half your wealth on magical research (minimum 100gp).
○ When you survive a battle without losing any hit points.
○ When you use magic to defeat a superior foe (more hit dice).

Thieves (Dexterity and Intelligence):
○ When you ambush a superior foe (more hit dice or greater numbers).
○ When you find a trap before it is triggered.
○ When you get to the other side of a lock or blocked passageway.
○ When you spend half your wealth carousing (minimum 100gp).
○ When you survive a battle without losing any hit points.

Awesome Characters are Not as Awesome as They Appear

In a post on his blog, Blair made a comment about his character:
“You rolled a crap set of ability scores? So did I for my Red Box Vancouver character, and that PC is one of my favorite characters; deal with it.”
The aforementioned former Colonel Kaffshyth (now the Warlock-Axer General), has the following “crap” stats: Str 9, Int 9, Wis 14, Dex 7, Con 14, Cha 7. That’s a full 18 points lower than your average “4d6 drop the lowest” AD&D or 4e character!

However, in an earlier post, Blair also crowed that while DMing he managed to “Totally beat the living shit out of badass dwarf Gamgar,” who is my character. During that adventure, Gamgar had the following stats: Str 9, Int 6, Wis 10, Dex 10, Con 14, Cha 8. Since then, he has lost an arm and a leg, and now has Dex 6 and Con 12. He is but a third-level dwarf with worse stats than Kaffshyth, and his only magical weapons are a shield that weighs nothing and a sword +1, +3 vs. undead (which proves mostly useless whenever he has to fight ghouls).

People have a tendency to think of characters who do exceptional things as having exceptional abilities. Witness Gygax’s ridiculous interpretation of Conan’s stats. Or the urge to interpret Charisma as physical attractiveness and thus the pervasive presence of females with a score of 18, from the ancient Bone Hill module to the first four issues of the more recent Fight On! magazine. And certainly the urge to play heroic fantasy heroes has created numerous techniques for generating characters with higher stats, and little or nothing in the way of flaws. Stats are a way to communicate information, so naturally, the easiest way to show how exceptional and special a character is, is to give him or her exceptionally high stats. Which neither Gamgar nor Colonel Kaffshyth have.

So why is Gamgar considered a badass? Because of what I tell people, mostly. Gamgar managed to survive his first few adventures by scamming gullible goblins, through a lucky series of reaction rolls, in spite of his low Charisma. As a Dwarf, his saving throw vs. death is a little better than 50%, which came in handy when he fell in a river wearing plate mail, and again when he released a poison cloud of gas from a jewelled skull he attempted to loot. For someone who usually only takes a single retainer into the dungeon with him, if that, he’s been pretty lucky in that department too, even if most of them have died fairly quickly—they at least kept Gamgar from dying! And yet, for all his bad-assery, he hasn’t seen much profit. In a game that says “If no one has reached the 2nd level of experience in three or four adventures, the DM should consider giving more treasure,” Gamgar has managed to survive twenty adventures, but is still only 3rd level. Partly, that’s because, although he doesn’t like to leave his companions behind, he’s not afraid to run away when he has to.

Nor is Gamgar the only bad-ass 3rd level Dwarf in the Black Peaks. Graham’s character Connor had the head of a polar bear and wielded a flaming sword, until his body was stolen by the wizard Zamzomarr. What were his stats? Str 5, Int 13, Wis 4, Dex 4, Con 13, Cha 10. The only bad-ass stat Connor had was his prodigious 22 hit points. Meanwhile, Graham managed to roll two 18s in a row for his latest character (in Dex and Con no less!), whose lowest stat is a 10. Having moved on from the worst stats in RBV history to the best, Graham’s new guy still managed to lose an eye in his first adventure, and almost died of blood loss in his second.

Meanwhile, Dalamyr the Cleric of Wisdom is the most famous character in our campaign. He’s a 5th level Cleric with the following stats: Str 12, Int 9, Wis 14, Dex 9, Con 9, Cha 8. He’s completely average (for 3d6-in-order), only 1 point better than Kaffshyth in total, and yet he’s been on hand for some of the most earth-shattering quests and witnessed some of the strangest events in the Black Peaks. Everybody talks about him and his Doomriders, despite his low Charisma.

As for Blair’s crap-statted Kaffshyth, he’s called the “Warlock-Axer” because he managed to kill a high-level wizard one-on-one. How did he do that? This warlock, suffering from a Light spell cast on his eyes and some hit point damage already, had Charmed Kaffshyth and the two were escaping from the other PCs. After seeing the warlock use Fireball on his companions, Kaffshyth managed to make a (difficult) saving throw, and shook off the Charm. The warlock had the bad luck to run away in the wrong direction, making it easy for Kaffshyth to dispatch him.

The point is, these characters are bad-ass because of the things they have done, a good deal of which have come down to sheer luck. They are not bad-ass because of their stats, and their stats do not reflect their experiences, their successes, or even necessarily the way their players have role-played them. For the most part, stats in Red Box Vancouver have been an obstacle to overcome, not a source of strength. We’ve all had characters with crap stats, and we’ve all dealt with it.

Red Box to d20: Thief

Before we get too far into the Thief let’s talk about Skills, since he’s the only Red Box class that has what is a “modern” conception of skills. Whereas the other classes’ attempts to do things are governed by a variety of rules: the surprise rules covers hiding and sneaking, door opening is covered by the open doors rules, finding pit traps can be covered by the “trap goes off on a 1-2” rule, and of course there’s Moldvay’s offhand remark about rolling under a stat.

For our d20 conversion, I’m going to use stat checks in lieu of skills, modified by various situational bonuses (ie Elves get a bonus when searching for secret doors, but not when searching for treasure in a pile of garbage).  Thieves are going to work the same way, which means that stats are going to be even more important for Thieves than for any other class. And it also means, given the difficulty of rolling decent stats using Red Box’s 3d6 in order method, that Thieves get completely screwed by this system.

Both seem faithful to the original text. 🙂

So here are the Thief’s saves, with the Fighter in parentheses:

Death Ray or Poison (Fort) 13 (12)
Magic Wands (Will) 14 (13)
Paralysis or Turn to Stone (Fort) 13 (14)
Dragon Breath (Ref) 16 (15)
Rods, Staves or Spells (Will) 15 (16)

Virtually identical. Fort 13, Ref 16, Will 14.5.

BAB HD  Fort Ref Will
+1  1d8 +2   +0  +0
+1  2d8 +2   +0  +0
+1  3d8 +2   +0  +0

It’s weird to think of the Thief as bad at Ref saves. I’m actually starting to wonder if Dragon Breath maps well to a Reflex save, considering that the Fighter is better at it than a Thief. It makes you wonder: how did the designers imagine the Fighter surviving a blast of fire from a Dragon? Hunkering down behind a shield and gritting his teeth, or diving out of the way? Likely neither–it was a simple calculation of: Fighters are tougher than thieves.

Next let’s have a look at the Thief skills:

Level  Open Locks  F/R Traps  PP   MS   Climb  HS   Hear Noise
1      15%         10%        20%  20%  87%    10%  32%
2      20          15         25   25   88     15   32
3      25          20         30   30   89     20   50

Man, this is a weird class. Thieves are actually not the stealthy, skilled burglars they’re cracked up to be. If anything, they are amazingly nimble climbers and desperate pickpockets who likely live short, brutish lives. I wouldn’t hire these guys for anything except climbing impassable walls and other underground barriers in order to place ropes for the rest of the party.

I’ll give Thieves the following bonuses:

Level  Open Locks  F/R Traps  PP   MS   Climb  HS   Hear Noise
1      +3          +2         +4   +4   +16    +4   +1
2      +4          +3         +5   +5   +17    +5   +3
3      +5          +4         +6   +6   +18    +6   +5

It’s a little weird, I’ll admit it. I’ve made him a worse climber at 1st level, in order that he can get a small bump at 2nd & 3rd. I’m comfortable giving him the same percentages in d20 for Open Lock, because even the simplest lock is a DC 20 in the d20 system. Ditto for Finding and Disabling Traps, which although they are separate skills in d20, don’t need to be here.  Same with Pickpocket (Sleight of Hand in d20).

The Listen skill specifically says a 1st level Rogue using MS to sneak past you is DC 15. The +4 seems reasonable enough. Climbing a typical dungeon wall is DC20, so our +16 is actually a bit low to map to the Basic numbers, but the d20 system isn’t granular enough to do 1% bumps, so I’m going to keep it, if only so we can end up with a number near 89% at 3rd level.

Hide is tricky, so I’m going to use the same reasoning that I used for Move Silently and move on (silently). Hear Noise jumps from 32% to 50% at 3rd level, so I’m going to do what I did with Climb and back into the higher number, giving Thieves a nice +2 bump per level.

So not terribly faithful, but approximate.

This exercise in converting the Red Box classes to some sort of d20 approximation has been interesting. I never realized how underpowered they are compared to their d20 counterparts, never mind the stat bonuses.

I also never realized how concepts like niche protection and class balance were really just hand-waved until 3e D&D. Regardless of how you feel about 3e and later versions, you can’t make the argument that they didn’t at least consider how the classes stacked up with each other. Seeing these classes translated into the d20 “lingua franca”, I really understand why only a masochist would play a Thief. I also see that the Fighter, long held to be the workhorse of the Red Box, is actually really a tough row to hoe.

The other thing this has shown to me is that a d20 conversion would be a lot more faithful if, rather than trying to port Red Box classes over, I’d worked on some brand new, 3 level d20 classes.

I’m not going to continue with the experiment any further, but hopefully someone (other than me) found it interesting.

Red Box to d20: Halfling

I haven’t got much enthusiasm for the last two classes, but it feels like we’re on the home stretch, so let’s just power through the Halfling and then take a bit longer with the Thief, because he’s the only class is Basic that has Skills.

The Halfling’s saves are identical to the Dwarf, something I never noticed before–that’s how popular the Halfling is at RBV. One thing I did notice is that the Dwarf/Halfling saves are different in Basic and Expert D&D, which is just strange. I’ve been referring to the expanded charts in Expert so I can see where the first improvement is for a class (ie 4th level for Fighters), and the Dwarf/Halfling saves are significantly better. Here they are side-by-side (Basic/Expert):

Death Ray or Poison 10/8
Magic Wands 11/9
Paralysis or Turn to Stone 12/10
Dragon Breath 13/13
Rods, Staves or Spells 12/14

I’d love to know what the story was here. Did they decide that Dwarves needed more advantages? Is one a misprint? It’s weird. Anyway, I’ve been using the Expert saves until now, so I’ll keep ’em. The Halfling:

BAB HD Fort Ref Will
+1  1d6 +6  +2  +4
+2  2d6 +6  +2  +4
+3  3d6 +6  +2  +4

This guy has the same xp as a Fighter: 2,000. He can’t use long bows or two-handed swords, so he’s no different than a Dwarf (although the wording is different, talking about weapons that are “cut down” to size). He can’t see in the dark, nor does he have d8 hit dice. But his saves are very good. Seems reasonable so far. What else?

He’s accurate with missile weapons, getting +1 to hit at all times. Call it Point Blank Shot, even though it’s quite a bit better than d20 with the lack of a range restriction. He gets +2 to AC against larger creatures, but I’m not going to mess around with size categories right now, so let’s call it a +2 Dodge bonus.

He gets a 16% bonus to initiative. Call it Improved Initiative, to make up for PBS. Their hiding ability is fearsome. Outdoors, it’s 90% and indoors it’s 33%.

Calculating a hide bonus is a little complicated, because the average adventurer has a 16% chance of hiding–never stated explicitly, but in general that’s the rule of thumb for Basic: when in doubt, roll a 1 on a d6. I’m going to keep DC 15 as the baseline, even though Goblins and Orcs have +2 and +1 to Spot, respectively. Why? I don’t know exactly. It seems like a reasonable compromise to handle the range of DCs the Halfling is likely to face from level 1-3. Adding to the trickiness is that the average d20 PC has a 30% chance of hiding with an unmodified d20 roll vs DC 15.

Probabilities are not my strong suit, so I asked some smarter nerds to weigh in. Here’s what one of them said:

A 15% chance of success corresponds to the smaller part of the area under the normal distribution curve about one standard deviation from mean. A 90% chance of success corresponds to the larger part of the area about 1.3 sd from mean. A 30% chance of success is about 0.5 sd, so I’d just up the halfling to 1.8, which yields a ~96% chance of success when hiding outdoors, and a 50% chance (0 sd) to hide in other conditions.

That’s assuming that skills follow some kind of normal distribution, and that returns on ‘investment’ in the skill tapers off, which is exactly how it doesn’t work in d20.

A 15% chance of success corresponds to the smaller part of the area under the normal distribution curve about one standard deviation from mean. A 90% chance of success corresponds to the larger part of the area about 1.3 sd from mean. A 30% chance of success is about 0.5 sd, so I’d just up the halfling to 1.8, which yields a ~96% chance of success when hiding outdoors, and a 50% chance (0 sd) to hide in other conditions.

That’s assuming that skills follow some kind of normal distribution, and that returns on ‘investment’ in the skill tapers off, which is exactly how it doesn’t work in d20.

The consensus was that +4 to hide indoors and +9 outdoors was a reasonable compromise, given the complexities in translating Basic’s percentile system to the d20 DC system.

So here’s how the abilities shake out:

Weapon Proficiencies: All (except long bows and two-handed swords)
Armor Proficiencies: All
Hide bonus: +4 (+9 outdoors)
Point Blank Shot, Improved Initiative, Dodge (+2 vs Larger than man-sized)

And that’s the Halfling. Next up is the weakest class in Basic, the poor, pitiful Thief.

Red Box to d20: Cleric

Next up is the Cleric, a class that I consider to be the best overall class in Basic D&D, despite what I said earlier about the Elf. The Cleric is nearly as good a fighter as the Fighter–he does slightly less damage and his ranged weapons suck–and he’s got the same hit points as an Elf. But instead of 4,000xp, he needs even less than the Fighter: only 1,500. And he can turn undead as well as cast cure light wounds once he makes 2nd level. Even though Elf is the most popular class at Red Box Vancouver, it’s no coincidence that of the three highest level PCs, two are Clerics.

In other words, the next time someone complains about the CoDzilla in 3.5e, tell them it’s part of a long tradition of divine ass-kicking. 

So the Cleric. Here are the saves, with the Fighter and M-U for comparison:
Death Ray or Poison (Fort) 11 (12, 13)
Magic Wands (Will) 12 (13, 14)
Paralysis or Turn to Stone (Fort) 14 (14, 13)
Dragon Breath (Ref) 16 (15, 16)
Rods, Staves or Spells (Will) 15 (16, 15)

These are surprising. Looks like the Cleric has one of the better Fort-type saves in the game ~12.5. Ref is not great, but no worse than the M-U, at 16. And versus magic, the Cleric is decent, ~13.5. Using DC 15 as our baseline:

BAB HD Fort Ref Will Spells
+1 1d6 +2 -1 +1 none
+1 2d6 +2 -1 +1 1 1st
+1 3d6 +2 -1 +1 2 1st

Clerics don’t get spells until they’ve “proven themselves” to their god by leveling.  We can revisit that when we look at spells. They can use all armor and all non-edged weapons (swords and arrows are specifically called out in the text as examples). And they can turn undead.

Armor Proficiency: All
Weapon Proficiency: Simple, Martial (non-edged).
Eschew Materials: Basic has no material components or focuses.

I gave the Cleric Martial weapons because the warhammer, a highly iconic cleric weapon after the mace, is a Martial weapon. That’s something I might change when I give the equipment list the d20 treatment.

As far as turning undead goes, I don’t see any reason why we can’t use the d20 version. It’s close enough to the Basic one, although because Charisma isn’t a prerequisite for the Basic cleric, we’ll use Wisdom as the operative stat.

Saves are still a little weird to me. Being no good at Ref works with the whole “heavily armored priest” archetype, but being better at Will saves than an M-U is strange to me. I think it’s the M-U that is weird, though. There’s an analysis of the Basic classes that shows that they’re all about as powerful as their relative xp costs… except for the M-U which has a very high xp cost to the amount of powers it has. Maybe the M-U saves were nerfed at some point for the same reason?

Next I guess I’ll tackle my two least favorite classes, the barely used Halfling and the nearly useless Thief.

Red Box to d20: Elf

Elf. The best class in Basic D&D. You can fight. You can cast Sleep. You can wear Plate Mail and use a Sword. D&D sure did love Elves back in the day. Admittedly, they need twice as many xp as a Fighter to level, but given that they combine the Fighter class with the M-U class, plus the Elvish abilities, the price tag seems actually pretty cheap (Fighter + M-U == 4,500).

So here we go. Everyone fights like our poor Fighter, so let’s jump right to saves. Fighter’s and M-U’s saves are in parenthesis for comparison:
Death Ray or Poison (Fort) 12 (12, 13)
Magic Wands (Will) 13 (13, 14)
Paralysis or Turn to Stone (Fort) 13 (14, 13)
Dragon Breath (Ref) 15 (15, 16)
Rods, Staves or Spells (Will) 15 (16, 15)

It looks an awful lot like the designers just took the better of the two classes’ saves and gave them to the Elf. Boy they had a hard-on for Elves. So let’s do the same thing. And we’ll split the difference with HD, just like Basic:

BAB HD Fort Ref Will Spells
+1 1d6 +2 +0 +0 1 1st
+1 2d6 +2 +0 +0 2 1st
+1 3d6 +2 +0 +0 2 1st, 1 2nd

Weapon Proficiency: Simple, Martial
Armor Proficiency: All
Eschew Materials (as M-U)
Darkvision (as Dwarf)
Search bonus: +3
Immunity: Ghoul Paralysis.

Elves can see in the dark like Dwarves, have a bonus when searching for secret doors similar to the Dwarves searching for traps, etc. They’re also immune to the paralysis of ghouls, which doesn’t have a d20 equivalent that I’m aware, but we’ll just make it a special feature.

And that’s the Elf. This is getting easier now that we have our base classes to work from. Next I’ll do the Cleric, which is easily the best class in D&D (some things never change, huh?) and I guess I’ll do the Halfling and Thief, which have to be the two worst classes in Basic D&D.

Red Box to d20: Magic-User

On to the Magic User. I’m a little anxious about this one, because I never play M-Us, so let me know if I miss anything.

The amazing thing about M-Us in Basic is that they fight as well as a Fighter from levels 1-3. Fighters really get a raw deal in Basic.

Their saves are:
DR/Poison (Fort) 13
M Wands (Will) 14
Para/Stone (Fort) 13
Dragon (Ref) 16
R, S, Spells (Will) 15

So Fort is 13, Ref 16 and Will 14.5. This surprised me. Magic Users are a little worse than fighters at dealing with Death Rays or Poison, but significantly better at resisting Paralysis and being Turned to Stone. That is just plain odd. They’re not as good at getting out of the way of Dragon Breath, which makes sense, and they’re good at resisting Spells… but no where near as good as a Dwarf. And only a little better (10%) than a Fighter. All in all, a real dog’s breakfast for Saves, and they don’t map very well to what you’d expect: sucks at Fort/Ref, good at Will.

Then again, M-Us have some serious disadvantages in Basic, so I won’t mess with saves just yet, but make a mental note to revisit this class again. So here’s the M-U:

BAB HD Fort Ref Will Spells
+1 1d4 +2 -1 +0 1 1st
+1 2d4 +2 -1 +0 2 1st
+1 2d4 +2 -1 +0 2 1st, 1 2nd

This class doesn’t feel right. +0 for Will saves just looks weird. And it has the same Fort save as our Fighter? Something ain’t right here. I’m wondering if I need to look more closely at my Magic == Will and Dragon Breath == Ref approximation. Come to think of it, I have no idea if a DC 15 Ref save is even remotely approximate to dragon breath in 3.5e. So before we go any further, let’s examine that.

A Basic Red Dragon is a 10 HD monster with average hit points of 45, which is also how much its breath weapon does. That puts it roughly equivalent to a Wyrmling or Very Young 3.5e Red Dragon. The DC for those categories: 15 and 18.

The DC 15 Ref save seems okay to me, as does the Dragon Breath to Ref save conversion. The Fort and Will values we ended up with are strange, but I’ll have to come back to that, when I do the Spell and Poison conversions.

M-Us can’t wear any armor or shields, and they can only fight with daggers. A lot of DMs allow them to use quarterstaffs or other small weapons, but by-the-book, they’re guys in a robe with a knife and a book.

Armor Proficiency: none.
Weapon proficiency: dagger.
Eschew Materials.

Basic (and I believe Expert) have no material components for spells. Basic has no rules for writing scrolls, copying spells into spellbooks, or making magic items. Expert D&D notes that M-Us can make scrolls and magic items when they hit “name” level, but that’s out of our scope. I’ll keep the Basic spell progression until I convert spells. I think we’re done.

A couple things I’ve noticed while doing this: the first is that the mere act of going through the Basic game makes me want to house rule it to make it more like the D&D I want to play. For example, I’d give the M-U proficiency with swords. Why? Because Gandalf, Elric and probably a bunch of other cool wizards had magic swords they liked to swing around. And it doesn’t really matter, because if you’re a Basic M-U in melee, you’re not going to be proficient with that sword for very long. 😛

The other thing I notice is how much 3.5e captures D&D for me, at it’s core. The classes, the class features, the race features, the strengths and weaknesses: they feel right to me. All the supplemental material, feats, etc didn’t always feel like D&D, but the core game hits the sweet spot for me. A great example are those M-U saves up there. They look bizarre! M-Us should be good at dealing with spells (ie Will saves) and crap at everything else!

Booyah. Next up, the Elf. I’m feeling pretty good about him.