Swords & Wizardry: Designer Notes

I love this game.

Swords & Wizardry Revised stands out with its unique 'designer notes' boxes scattered throughout the book. These notes delve into various house rules, options, unclear parts of the original game rules, and other hacking information, providing a deeper understanding of the game's mechanics.

One notable aspect of Swords & Wizardry Revised is the absence of 'thieves' tools' in the equipment list, a feature also present in the original game. This absence significantly empowers thieves, making them more dangerous and tricky. They can now pick a lock with whatever they have at hand, like a chicken bone found on the floor of a cell. A thief always has a lockpick hidden somewhere or can quickly fabricate one, and they don't need to haul around a toolbox filled with picks, hammers, spikes, and a pry bar.

Part of the game introduced later institutionalized tropes we live with today, and those were not always part of the original design, ever considered, or seen as a "must-have" for play. Are you telling me to use a class feature, and I need to buy and possess gear? Can it be taken away from me?

Again, just like giving only fighters a STR damage bonus to attacks, removing thieves' tools from the equipment list improved the thief class. Sometimes, what you remove from a game makes it superior, and these sacred cows must be done away with.

Also, the game talks about crits and how automatically assuming "double damage" is far too powerful and suggests a +1 damage instead. The game's hit point scale is far lower than modern games, and doubling damage on crits would make fights into "spamming attacks for crits." The only class that has a doubling damage mechanic is the thief on a backstab, and that is it. Do you want to double your damage rolls? Play a thief.

Even Shadowdark removes the CON bonus to hit points after level one because hit-point inflation is real. That game realizes "what you take away" makes the game better.

At some point in D&D's history, they became too generous and started handing out the same bonuses and class features to everybody. This was likely when the D&D game was being marketed for children, so they started standardizing every bonus, and similar house rules made it into the game, where "everybody got everything." Suddenly, mages were rolling a 20 and doing double damage with a quarter-staff hit. They got a STR bonus for that damage, too.

Nobody asked why.

Nobody thought this pushed up hit points and made the dice less meaningful.

After a while, a goblin in D&D 4E had 30 hit points, whereas in B/X, they had about 3, and in 5E, they had 7. A dragon in the game's first version averaged 30-50 hit points; in 5E, they have 200-600; in 4E, dragon hit points went into the thousands.

Daggers in all these games still do 1d4 damage.

Newer versions of D&D use multi-attacks, huge modifiers, and doubling and tripling mechanics to mitigate the scaling through class features. All they do is write more and more rules to solve the problem they introduced into the game when they put this artificial scaling in the first place, all the way back in D&D 3.0. The game takes longer to play, requires more reference, classes are orders of magnitude more complicated, and the game is this artificial slog to play when it does not have to be.

Factor out damage scaling, and all those rules will go away. But they won't have anything to sell you.

I would prefer to use that dagger in Swords & Wizardry than in any modern implementation of D&D made by Wizards.