It’s Funny How AD&D Looks Broken When You Do it Wrong

Posted On February 12, 2025

This guy grapples a ghast…wrong.  People pay him money for this.

It’s cute. Every table that plays with AD&D’s unarmed combat system goes through the same process first lampooned in the early issues of Jolly Blackburn’s Hackmaster comics. You hire sumo wrestlers to grapple for you, your pro-wrestler wizard makes heavy (heh) use of the enlarge spell to great effect. Then the DM learns a few useful counters, and it fades back into the general chaos of the game.  You learn that it isn’t a cheat code to combat, but a useful weapon in the arsenal that you only bring out when the time is right.

It’s a lot of fun, but if you’re going to use these rules, you should probably use them right.

Let’s correct the record.

1. System shock is for polymorph, not enlarge.

2. Your chance to hit is not your AC x 10, but the target’s AC x 10. That guaranteed hit is your opponent’s super power. Your starting chances against a lone ghast* are only 40%.

3. His target, a ghast, paralyzes with a touch. Our guide and his table are so addled by the post-millennial concept of “touch attack” they can’t deduce from the natural order that grappling necessitates touching, nor that the paralysis is not a spell but a natural ability that arises from the horror of contacting the very essence of That Which Should Not Be.

Let’s be charitable and assume for the moment that the swoleceror in question makes his save vs paralysis roll every round. Still not a brilliant move, and probably the suicide run our host was hoping for.

And all this assumes you’re already in combat. If you charge into unarmed combat against an armed foe, your opponent has a longer weapon and gets to attack you first. If you advance into combat then your opponent gets a free whack.  Your frontline wrestle-wizard with AC 10 and 6 HP is still a glass cannon and hardly the game breaker (teehee) the video makes it out to be. And that’s not even to mention what happens when Luchadumbledore squares up against TWO foes. One extra goblin who lets his buddy take the grapple gets free shots against a now defenseless giant sized back.

Whoopsee!

The funny thing is that I’m really not the guy who should be pointing out all these problems – check the comments of this post for people sure to add a lot more detail and corrections.  My own games are riddled with errors, which may explain why my own ‘umble videos lack the smug self-assuredness of the usual YouTube D&D hosts.

It’s a little embarrassing that we still have to point these things out, but we’re talking about a video with half a million views produced several years after Macho Mandalf inspired this error-filled silliness.

But this is what happens when you let your hobby become overrun with theorists and give them the mic instead of practitioners. One of the latter has to stand athwart the hobby and yell, “WRONG!”

It’s my turn. Again.  So be it.

My channel has orders of magnitude less viewers than this, and yet they total more time at the table in a week than his do in a month. I’m talking to the doers, not the sideline scripted-game kiddies.  It’s a smaller audience, but a better one. It may not be as lucrative, but the rewards are far richer.

That’s the real reason for this post. This video is dumb, but it looks smart to dumb people. Somebody has to point out that the emperor has no idea how to play AD&D, else the misapprehensions will continue to profligate. As has been said before, few men hate AD&D – they hate what they wrongly think AD&D is. The sad fact is that for all the lolcow jokes and production values, this video is just plain wrong. It’s entertaining, but it’s a skin suit.  There’s no there there. People who don’t play the game lap it up because it feeds into the petty lies about a seriously great game, and helps them feel a lot smarter than they really are.

It’s a con.

Don’t fall for it.

* A cursory glance at the Monster Manual indicates that Ghasts are usually accompanied by multiple ghouls, but whatevs.