2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 6
You can read more about the challenge here and here.
Hero level characters ought to have magical equipment. The question is, how to determine what items do they possess? AD&D DMG has a nice table for that, but I am limiting myself to the original Dungeons & Dragons little brown booklets.
Last Thrusday, I wrote that I plan to roll on the table from Vol III The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, p.19, once per character level:
| Class | Item | Chance |
|---|---|---|
| Fighting-Man | Sword | 50% |
| Fighting-Man | Shield | 25% |
| Fighting-Man | Armor | 25% |
| Magic-User | Wand | 60% |
| Magic-User | Ring | 30% |
| Magic-User | Miscellaneous Magic | 20% |
| Cleric | Weapon | 40% |
| Cleric | Staff | 30% |
| Cleric | Shield | 20% |
| Cleric | Armor | 10% |
Dwarves will roll with different scores, but only once, per their description in Vol II Monsters & Treasure, p. 16:
DWARVES: ... For every level of fighting ability there will be a 10% chance that the dwarf will have a magic shield, magic armor, or a magic sword (die 1–4) or hammer (die 5, 6).
Translating that into a table, the odds for Hero dwarf would be:
| Class | Item | Chance |
|---|---|---|
| Fighting-Man | Shield | 40% |
| Fighting-Man | Armor | 40% |
| Fighting-Man | Weapon (sword 1–4, hammer 5–6) | 40% |
Well, coding above tables and checking actual results revealed that might not be the best idea. So what I will do instead is roll once on the table, and then re-roll only if there were no magical items rolled whatsoever. Maximum number of re-rolls will not exceed four, i.e. the character's level.
That is a compromise I am happy with.
⁂
One last thing before I finally get back to rolling characters—unusual hirelings.
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