D&D - The Cartoon (Part 3: Old School Combat)

I'm going to give myself about 45 minutes to blog. We'll see how much I get through.

Close to four years back (!!) I started a series of blog posts (or, rather, intended to start a series) about the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. For various reasons and distractions, not the least of which being my life in Paraguay, this trailed off rather abruptly (you can see my prior posts here and here). Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the series again, mainly due to my daughter's love and fascination with the show (my son...eh, not so much). Enough so that I thought I'd get back to it.

Why not?

My first thought, interestingly enough, is how well I think the show actually models the game. All right, all right (I hear your snorts of derision)...NOT with regard to theme (the "quest for home" isn't anything like the standard quest for treasure and prestige), but in modeling game play. Much more so than what I used to think; however, you have to read between some of the lines with regard to censorship of a children's Saturday Morning Cartoon.

For example, no one was ever going to show characters (even adult ones) butchering orcs and spilling the blood of bullywugs on screen. That kind of animated violence (even in decades past) was reserved for the cinema, if at all. The original Johnny Quest (created in the 1960s) featured a lot of shooting, explosions, and killing of "bad guys" but no blood was ever shown (certainly no results of bloody hand-to-hand fighting) and, besides, JQ was created for an older audience and originally broadcast in a Prime Time time slot. So no "D&D show" made for kids was ever going to feature a dude disemboweling some opponent with a battle-axe.

Even so, remember the abstract nature of D&D combat. PC makes an attack roll. If successful, make a damage roll. Deduct damage from "hit points." If HPs reach 0, opponent is defeated.

All of these things are open for interpretation. What a successful attack looks like...and what a defeated opponents looks like...doesn't have to be gore-splashed bloodletting affairs. We might like them to be (I know I do), but recognize that the narrative color applied to the role-playing is almost entirely an arbitrary choice, and generally of the DM. I can be lazy and say, "You swing and hit the guy; he looks badly hurt." I can instead say, "Your feint leaves him wide open allowing you to bash his blade towards the ground and drive the point of your sword into his thigh; blood gushes from the wound as it appears you've nicked an artery."

But I could also say, "Your magic club strikes the ground in front of your opponent, throwing up rocks and dirt as he's knocked to the ground. He looks at you with fear...looks like he's had it."

Recognize that...in the television show...defeated creatures (driven away, sealed in caves by rockfalls, or whatever) almost never return to trouble the protagonists. No, there are no corpses left strewn about the scenery, but they're as good as dead for all the trouble they cause later.

"But the cavalier doesn't even use a weapon!" Look, here's the thing I've come to think (as I re-watch these old shows): the Dungeons & Dragon cartoon is based on the oldest editions of D&D (even if it is pulling a lot of creatures from the then-newly-released Fiend Folio), if not B/X. Regardless of the character's "titles" (which, as far as I can tell is nothing but the name a player might scribble at the top of their character sheet), here's how I'd break down their classes:

Hank (plays "Ranger"): Fighter
Bobby (plays "Barbarian"): Fighter
Eric (plays "Cavalier"): Fighter
Sheila (plays "Thief"): Thief
Diana (plays "Acrobat"): Fighter
Presto (plays "Magician"): Magic-User (we'll get to him in a separate post)

In both OD&D and B/X, the default damage for any type of attack is D6...doesn't matter if you're using a two-handed sword or a dagger. Or a magic quarterstaff or "lightning bow" or bashing with a shield. Now, I do tend to look at the game through an OD&D (0E) lens because of the fighters multiple attacks against creatures of 1 hit die or fewer (Hank, Bobby, and Diana tend to do this a lot), but I can easily see this as a house rule 'ported into a B/X game, along with the various AD&D monsters. The B/X morale and reaction rules would seem a large part of the show.

All right, that's all my time at the moment. Perhaps more later.

We all do D6 damage.