Simple and Precise

War I love the concept of wargaming. When I was a kid I used to think I'd go to West Point. Kids sure are crazy. Of all strange things to be interested in, military strategy has always been one of mine. I used to read military strategy books, military history, play Total War, Europa Universalis IV, and the like. So when I started to get deep into the TTRPG hobby, war games such a Chainmail obviously sounded appealing. Upon trying them, however, I found them tedious, boring, slow, and not even very representative of real combat for all the work it involved. Maybe a day will come where I come around (I still haven't tried Warhammer), but until then I've looked for alternative ways to scratch that itch. I've come to realize that, in a TTRPG context, I actually enjoy the consequences and big-picture of army versus army more than the minutia of playing out every single order. Enter BECMI's War Machine! I read these rules a...

  Back again with some simple and precise AD&D 1e content. There are a lot of DM screens and reference sheets out there. Here's one I made for my game. I also made a handwritten, one-page version of this which unfortunately wouldn't upload well as a resource to others.  I usually hew close to by-the-book... unless I don't. I'm not trying to be as dogmatic as people like Anthony Huso (which is totally fine for him, by the way; trying to express yourself with a common language of rules is exactly why rule books are made to begin with!). The changes are very minor and usually made to facilitate faster play at the table. I only made changes when they personally slowed the game down too much for me. One notable exception for me is the reaction roll. Personally, I prefer the B/X 2d6 reaction roll; it's much more decisive and makes interpretation in the moment much clearer than d100... but isn't a big enough hill for me to die on to change ...

I'm back again with some more AD&D 1e resources. This time, I present to you a (BtB!) equipment list derived from the values listed in both the PHB and DMG. You can find the spreadsheet  here . Not everything has an encumbrance value given in 1e; unless I found it absolutely necessary to give an approximate value based on other entries, I left that entry blank. For those interested in the equipment list I plan to use for my upcoming game, you can find that here . This is using my modified encumbrance system, weapons table, and armour table. Let me know if you catch any errors, and happy gaming!

This is a follow-up to my previous post . Ok... so I couldn't stay away. It warmed my heart to see people find the other character sheet so useful, enough so that they plan to use it! But not everyone wants my opinionated houserules messing with their game. I went ahead and made a by-the-book version of the character sheet. You can find it  here . To be specific on the changes made from last version: Switched to BtB weight-based encumbrance (modified by Str). Armour selection also automatically adjusts movement based on "bulk". BtB weapons and armour tables. I kept weapon versus AC values as a toggle option and updated the values. The character sheet is now printer friendly! Here is a downloadable pdf version of it. Let me know if you catch any errors, and happy gaming!

I've been preparing for an upcoming AD&D 1E campaign. One of the things I learned from Anthony Huso's  wonderful blog is that in order to run such a campaign (and with such scope and scale), you need really good  resources. To that end, I put together an AD&D 1e character sheet here  (using Google Sheets) that is quite powerful. I've done everything I can to automate the complex bits of AD&D that slow the game down. That's a recurring theme for all my prep: find ways to facilitate fast gameplay. I also made an equipment list, a character creation guide, and some player and DM reference sheets, but those are posts for another time. You'll notice there are a few template options: the first is a general use character sheet; the second has a thief skills table; the third has a turn undead table. There's also a Data sheet, which is used for the automation. I committed some sins in making this sheet -- deviations from the holy doctrine of the MM, PHB, and...