A Look at OD&D: Support and Upkeep

Player Character Support and Upkeep

“Player/Characters must pay Gold Pieces equal to 1% of their experience points for support and upkeep, until such time as they build a stronghold, which will bring in annual tax revenue. If the stronghold is in a wilderness area all support and upkeep costs then cease, but if it is in a village or town not controlled by the player/ character then support and upkeep payments must continue.”

For those of you who aren’t in the loop, a couple of us bloggers over at The Ruins of Murkhill decided to write a series of posts in January to commemorate the 45^th anniversary of the game you’re here to read about, D&D. The rule above this paragraph talks about Gygax’s upkeep rules. And I thought we’d take a look at them.

                I’m not going to assume you play the same D&D as me, I wouldn’t even pretend that’s the case, but it’s parts of the book like this that are universally applicable. If you weren’t aware, the first part of that quote speaks to a specific XP philosophy, in which you gain your XP by gathering treasure through adventurous means; effectively allowing you to gain XP by not killing the dragon, but only because you took all the treasure out from under it as it slept. It would not include, however, the money you find in the peasant’s pocket, because murder isn’t an adventure. This doesn’t mean another system couldn’t use it though. Let’s check a little something out perhaps.

I really do enjoy how 5e's (and other) systems put up a table
of how much money the players should receive. That would
seriously bog down game preparation.

                You see this nifty table here? It tells you how much money your PCs make each level. According to Gygax’s rule, 1% of this should be taxed for each level. Let’s see if we can do the maths here quick.

Level                     % Taxed

2                              9 gp

3                              27 gp

4                              54 gp

5                              90 gp

6                              130 gp

7                              190 gp

8                              270 gp

9                              360 gp

10                           490 gp

Etc.

                Now, the leveling system works in a way where that system would probably tax about 1 gp a day, though I can’t be completely sure having never played much 5e. But here’s the question. How do we trick our players into giving away their much loved money? Well, there’s a variety of ways to do just that.

Toll

A group of haggard people approach the gate, their torn and bloodied cloaks flap behind them in the wind. The guard looks at them a bit nervously, they look dangerous, and he probably shouldn’t let them in this late at night.

What? Did you think your characters looked heroic? No, they are likely a fearsome sight to behold. Why does this matter? Well, why would someone let a group of people who are probably bandits into his city, he has a duty you know.

They could just kill the guard of course.

Food and Lodging

                Many people just knock off food and lodging as an assumption, and don’t even bother to consider it, but here’s a little something to consider. Remember how the time from first to second level left only 9 gp for the 1%? Your characters probably start out too poor to afford a nifty little inn, in fact, their money is probably just enough to get them food. So where do they sleep? That’s perhaps an interesting thing to consider.

Burglary

                This one might be useful later on in the game, but you shouldn’t be throwing this one about all the time, that’s how you create murderhoboes. After all, why trust the bank when it’s always getting robbed, why trust that NPC when you keep getting mugged? But one or two times in a campaign this can be a powerful tool to get some of that money out of their fingers.

Housing

Gygax mentions the acquisition of a home-base, and that if you locate it in a city, you continue to pay upkeep, but otherwise, become exempt. This makes sense, but of course you still need food when you live in the woods, although having a dedicated hunter would make that less of a problem. But house ownership in a city is generally associated with settlement, and settlement is associated with taxes. This one would be a lot less exciting to play out, of course, though due to it’s nature, you wouldn’t necessarily have to.

They’ll probably just kill the tax collector though.

Celebrating D&D!

If you have read any of the few first posts, you would see evidence that I have my roots in pathfinder. In fact, my very first post is also my most viewed, by a margin of more than 70 views. Why did I stop? Well, the answer is just that I got writers block.

I was originally introduced to pathfinder by a friend, and my first character was a paladin named Harlan Arvel. I never even played him. I was pretty much immediately thrust the position of GM, because no one else wanted to do it.

Needless to say, the first few games were awful. I tried running a homebrew, but it just crashed and burned. After that I tried running an AP, but I didn’t even have the time to prepare it. We found it so boring, in fact, that we ended that one after the first session. I had spent hours a day poring over various materials and homebrews from the game, and it ultimately just burnt me out. Then one day, I decided to make a blog, in order to post a homebrew class I had made, the Witch-Hunter, and show it to the world. It took a few revisions to get it where it is, and still to this day it goes un-playtested. That’s because my regular games stopped around that time.

After a long break from playing, I started reading content from a few OSR blogs on the internet, it kind of pulled me in. So I tried to start a new game, and I was able to get two of the players from my old one to join. Needless to say, I had a lot longer to prepare for it, and it started out a hell of a lot better than my last one. But why am I rambling on about pathfinder when I’m supposed to be writing about D&D?

The Actual Point

Well, that would be because D&D freed me. When I first learned about OD&D, I was under the impression that it was some kind of less superior version of pathfinder because of how ‘old’ it was. I always thought that with pathfinder, you had an infinite number of choices because you could just homebrew anything you didn’t already have. And of course it had a ‘much more’ sophisticated combat system. I really thought, that rules were better than rulings, but I was wrong.

You see, with my discovery of OSR, I read through some of the original D&D books; and I was surprised. You see, I am a man who enjoys some verisimilitude, and OD&D had a lot more than I had thought. I actually found that, in my opinion, the combat rules were much more sophisticated than in pathfinder, not to mention how much more realistic they were! I mean, the fact that anyone who knows how to fight would never let an enemy get behind them of their own volition being represented in the combat rules, made a lot of sense to me. Unless someone were to sneak up behind you, you would turn your body in a way so as be facing any enemies nearby, the other way for an enemy to get behind you was for a group of them to surround you. I don’t think I can begin to provide how much this single rule meant to me, it was basically the last straw that won me over.

This month marks the 45^th year of D&D, that is something that truly deserves to be celebrated; and no matter what edition you play, even among us in the OSR community, it’s just one little child or grandchild to their shared mighty ancestor. If you still check this blog out from time to time for pathfinder, which I know happens occasionally based on traffic sources, I would encourage you to check out some of the stuff OSR presents, you may find it holds more merit than you think.

Anyway, what significance does D&D hold for you, Is it merely a hobby, or something more? Let me know in the comments below.