There are merchants in every town, but magical items are rarely available for sale. These must usually be found on your various quests. Basic items, like weapons, armor, food, backpacks, horses, blankets, matches, oil, rope, shovels, hammers, nails, etc. will be available in stores. Henchmen can also usually be found in town… especially the day laborer type for special projects. Taverns are good places to find available hire-ons. Some of them might even be able to swing a sword and serve as protection.
Beyond these tangible rewards for adventuring, characters also receive “Experience Points” (or XP) at the end of each session. These are based on how well you did overcoming challenges… slaying monsters, working cooperatively, how much “roleplaying” you did, solving puzzles, etc. When you accumulate enough “Experience Points” you go up a class level. You go from being a 1st level Ranger to a 2nd level ranger after you gain a couple thousand experience points.
Going up a level is about the best thing in the world. You become stronger, learn new skills (or spells if you’re a caster) and get better at just about everything you do in the world.
There are also 3 other statistics that we’ll use often. The first is “Hit Points”. (Also called HP) This is how much damage you can absorb before you die. Damage is always expressed in terms of how many Hit Points you lose… e.g. being hit with an arrow typically does 1-6 points of damage. If your character has 7 Hit Points, a single arrow cannot slay her. The most it would do is 6 points of damage, reducing your character’s health from 7 to 1. Characters are considered fully functional until they reach 0 hit points. Then they fall unconscious. They will lose blood and die if no one heals them within 10 minutes. If they sustain massive damage (let’s say a building collapses on top of your character and he takes 30 points of damage when he only had 12 Hit Points to being with) he dies instantly.
Your maximum (fully healed) number of Hit Points is determined by your class and level. Fighters get the most (1-10 per level.) Wizards get very few (1-4 per level.) Clerics and Thieves are somewhere in the middle. A high constitution score will also help you gain more Hit Points. Each time you go up a level, you roll the appropriate die and add this number of Hit Points to your maximum.
You can heal yourself in various ways after sustaining damage. You can rest. You can be healed by a cleric spell, or a potion or scroll with magical healing effects. You can be treated by a trained healer (who can accelerate your resting healing rate from 1HP per day to 3HP per day.) By third level, a fighter with a strong constitution may have over 30 HPs, while a 3rd level Wizard may have only 10. It’s very important to KEEP YOUR WIZARDS AND THIEVES AWAY FROM THE FRONT LINE. They die quickly and aren’t very good with a sword anyways.
Next is Armor Class. This is a number that reflects how difficult to hit you are. It incorporates your size, how dexterous you are, what kind of armor you are wearing, and is often bolstered by magical items. This number starts at 10 and goes down. Wearing chainmail drops you to an AC of 6. Wearing platemail will drop you to an AC of 3. Carrying a shield will help your AC, but prevents you from using 2 handed weapons like bows and large swords/axes/hammers. (2-handed weapons often do the most potential damage in D&D.) Some magical items will allow you to have an AC of less than zero… in that case you just keep going with negative numbers. Some powerful creatures, like red dragons, have a natural AC of -2.
The last number in this post is THAC0. It stands for “to hit armor class zero”. Your THAC0 will be handy way for us to know what number you need to roll on the 20 sided die to hit someone with an armor class of zero. For a 3rd level fighter, the number is around 14. For a 3rd level wizard, the number is more like 18. If you’re attacking a creature with an AC of zero, your wizard will have to roll an 18 in order to “hit” (or damage) the creature. That’s a very low 15% chance. The fighter, on the other hand, has a 35% chance. Probably better for the fighter to swing a sword and the wizard to cast a spell (most spells do NOT require a “to hit” roll!)
Obviously, not every enemy will have an AC of zero. Mostly, they’ll have armor classes from 3 to 8, just like you will (until you get bad ass magic armor!) To adjust for this, you simply subtract the AC of your target from your THAC0. So if your THAC0 # is 15, and you’re attacking a centaur with an AC of 6, you only need to roll a (15-6 = 9) 9 to hit. You have a better than 50% chance of hitting! Once you score a “hit” then you roll for damage. Once you’ve reduced your enemy to zero hit points, you’ve slain the monster. When you slay the monster you collect experience points, and you get to loot the corpse for treasure.
See how it’s all perfectly related?!
BTW, our current cast is: Walaka the Dwarven Bard, Soapy the Elven Wizard, Nedrita the Human Ranger, and Otis the Half-Elven Priestess. Melvin is questionable... working hard on PhD stuff... not sure if we should invite Calvin, or stick with this 4 person party. I think you guys are probably good to go at this point.
Also: we've ruled out Tues, Wed, and Thur for various reasons. So Friday through the weekend til Monday night are all still open. How soon would you guys like to come over, roll up the basic character attributes and borrow some reading material? That way you can familiarize yourself with the rules more, and develop a greater sense of story about who your character is. Then when you come over next we can begin the actual game.
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