Sunday, August 11, 2019

Why BX is the Best!

Got a copy of Moldvay's Basic D&D? Turn to page B16 and check out the Charm Person spell:

Any commands given will usually be obeyed, except that orders against its nature (alignment and habits) may be resisted, and an order to kill itself will be refused.

Emphasis added for what I hope are obvious reasons. This, I tell the young'ens, is how we differentiated between two fighters back in the day. If your character was a mercenary who'd gut his own grannie for a shaved copper, or a paragon of virtue who never raised a hand against the defenseless and the weak, mattered mechanically, and was specifically called out in the rules.

(Compare this to the rules in Gygax's AD&D Players Handbook, which do not reference habits or personality at all in resisting Charm Person or Mammal.)

5 comments:

Venger Satanis said...

You unearthed a cool little fossil there.

trollsmyth said...

Venger Satanis: Thanks! What's weird is that, until recently, I'd assumed all early versions of the spell worked like that. I was shocked to discover that the same wording didn't appear in the AD&D PHB. So yeah, accusations that I treated AD&D as mere add-ons for B/X are totally legit. ;D

Narmer said...

That is a cool little nugget!

Eric Diaz said...

Great find! Moldvay's Basic never fails to impress. It has some kind of oracular quality; it seems to contain answers to many questions that still torment D&D (and all kinds of RPGs) until today.

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