"Natural 20" & "Double Damage"

   You haven’t really played Dungeons & Dragons until your very first roll of 20 on a d20. It really is the hallmark moment of the game, and one of the greatest thrills in all of role-playing games.

   But where does the expression “natural 20” comes from? Why was it coined in the first place? And why don’t we ever mention natural 12s, natural 17s, or natural 1s?

   It comes from the Attack Matrices in First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Each character class had its own Attack Matrix, and there was one for the monsters, too. This one here is for the fighter types. Look at how the To Hit requirements progress on the table: 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 20, 20...

   The number 20 is repeated 6 times. It is the same on all Attack Matrices.

   The first “20” there is a normal die roll, which can include all the usual bonuses. Your fighter has a +2 To Hit bonus because of her strength, and she wields a +2 magical longsword; she rolls a 16, add her bonuses, and the final result is 20. It’s a hit.

   The 5 subsequent 20s are a different kind of beast. Regardless of your character’s bonuses and magic items and spell effects, she’ll need to roll a 20 if she wants to hit that opponent. So, you get 5 rows of Armor Classes that are not exactly hit proof, but... your character is gonna have to roll heroically. Who rolls multiple 20s in the same fight, right?

   In the AD&D heyday, we only ever used this expression when someone or something attacked someone else or something else whose AC put them right into those five “perfect hit” rows for that class.

   “You’ll need a natural 20 to hit that will-o’-wisp.”

   “But I have my +6 flaming vorpal holy avenger two-handed relic blade thing!”

   “Won’t do you any good this time.”

   Here’s what Gary Gygax wrote in his 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide:

   “Consider the repeated 20 as a perfectly-aimed attack which does not gain any benefit from strength or magical properties of any sort – spell, missile, or weapon. That is, the 20 must be attained by a roll of natural 20. All bonuses accrue only up to and including a total of 20, so that even if a character attacked with a bonus for strength of +3 and a +3 magic sword he or she would have to roll a natural 20 in order to score a hit on any creature normally hit by the second or successive repetitions of 20, i.e. the bonus (+3 for example) could not exceed a total score of 20 unless an actual 20 is rolled.”

   Regular readers know that I have been running a First Edition AD&D campaign since 2014, and yet I never had to tell a player he needed a natural 20 to hit an opponent. The party never faced anything so strong that their Armor Class placed them within those five dreaded rows of the Attack Matrix.

   That gives you an idea of how rare an occurrence this is: it wasn’t put to use at my table in over 20 game sessions.

   It is a level 1 fighter trying to smite Demogorgon. Literally.

   In 5e, rolling a 20 doesn’t entail anything special besides giving you your highest possible To Hit score. If all your bonuses amount to +8, then you can hit Armor Class 28, and that is quite impressive, since Demogorgon in 5e has an AC of 22.

   Chris Perkins still uses the expression whenever he rolls a 20, but it is just an old habit and nothing more. 5e Dungeon Masters never ask players to roll natural 20s – it is simply not part of the game mechanics anymore.

   In 2018, my players were fighting a giant troll in a giant swamp. The ranger rolled a 20 on his To Hit and instinctively yelled, “Natural 20!”

   He remembered that those words had some special meaning; but in this case, it wasn’t relevant, since the ranger needed 17 to hit the troll. Anyway, all the other players latched onto that like it was the Second Coming of Christ or something. Now they say “natural” ALL the time.

   Player: “Natural 11.”

   Me: “But what’s your total – with bonuses?”

   Player: “Natural 15.”

   Me: “There you go. It’s a hit!”

*

   I only ran Empire of the Petal Throne once, and it was a rather short campaign. The City Half As Old As The World proved deadlier than Lankhmar, and the party never even made it out of the Underworld. Plus, the guys (it was an all-boys school) were obsessed with Middle-earth, and few were interested in Tékumel. So Greyhawk was a good compromise, with all the usual Middle-earthy kingdoms, and some nice, exotic realms to the south and west. Ekbir, Zeif, Tusmit and Ull certainly had some EPT undertones – and you could still get your hands on puzzling technology à la Tékumel if you ventured to that mountain range called the Barrier Peaks, or to the “City of the Gods.” But I digress.

   At school, in the days of the D&D club, I introduced my players to the mechanics of Empire of the Petal Throne. In that game, an attack dealt double damage whenever you rolled a 20. Plus, you could get an instakill if you were lucky enough to roll a second consecutive natural 20 or a 19.

   So, you had one table playing regular D&D, and another table playing EPT. Once in a while, someone at the EPT table screamed, “20! Double Damage!”

   Some of the players sitting at the other table naturally assumed that double-damage-on-a-nat-20 also applied to D&D, but it didn’t. I saw several DMs hopelessly scour their books to find the elusive rule – to no avail.

   Here’s what Professor M. A. R. Barker wrote in his 1975 Empire of the Petal Throne:

   “A 9^th Level warrior who hits a 1^st Level opponent (i.e. an opponent with one hit die) does FOUR 6-sided dice of damage – almost certainly killing him! This becomes important, of course, in melee conditions where one advanced-level person fights more than one low-level opponent. [...]

   If a player hits with a 20-sided die score of 20, he does DOUBLE hit dice damage.”

   That’s how it happened for me, in ’84. And it must have happened to countless other gaming groups all over the world. Even today, players I didn’t know back then can roll natural 20s and shriek, “Double Damage!”

   Most of the time they have never heard of Empire of the Petal Throne.

   The double damage feature is the one thing most AD&D players know about EPT, without knowing that it comes from EPT.

   Dungeon Masters are welcome to use it, though. If you want to implement that rule in your campaign, why not?

   Personally, I prefer the “full damage” rule. Indeed, what’s the use of dealing double damage if you roll poorly on your damage dice and do just 10 points? You’ll never deal just 10 damage with the full damage rule, unless you play a magic-user with a non-magical dagger.

   This concludes our little piece about the origins of the natural 20, as well as another year of blogging.

   Adios, 2020.

40Kriegsspiele

   In ’87 or ’88, one of my AD&D players told me, “There is a new game with no role-play, only miniatures, and the entire table is a battlefield!”

   I was curious.

   Of course, there really wasn’t anything “new” about miniatures wargaming. They’ve been around since the early 1800s under the common name Kriegsspiele.

   From the get-go, I knew it would be an expensive hobby. The price tag for a standard army today is around $600. With magnetization, add another Benjamin or two for those tiny magnets and a half-decent drill. And that cost may have been higher in the eighties, because the figures were all metal. I couldn’t afford any of it.

   The setting didn’t appeal to me all that much, either. Empires and eagles and ginormous plasma guns. It was just too aggressive. I remember walking into the local game store one day and coming face-to-face with this issue of White Dwarf:

   I was rattled. What with all the live, obnoxious skinheads that prowled our streets in friggin’ 1989. Games Workshop didn’t see any problem whatsoever with putting up that kind of artwork on the cover of their magazine? Really?

   Many people have discussed Warhammer’s problematic imagery over the years, and I won’t get into that here. I just want to address the seriousness of it all. For me at least, it all boils down to one simple thing: do I wish I’d be right there in that room with those guys? If the answer is no, well, I won’t play that game.

   I remember seeing pictures of a 40K convention in Greece. It was a huge room full of bald guys dressed in black, with tattoos. I did not want to be there. I don’t have the required clothes, anyway. Wearing all black all the time, for fear of passing for – what? Not serious enough? A noob? Are we still this insecure?

   When I catch an episode of Acquisitions Incorporated, I always want to be sitting at that table with that bunch of lunatics. Every. Single. Time. That’s it. That’s the magic recipe.

   The seriousness I’m talking about stems from competing. 40K ain’t casual: there is a winner, and there is a loser. Even Magic: The Gathering isn’t casual, because there’s a winner. D&D can be taken very seriously, too; but it is – mostly – casual. There are no winners or losers in role-playing games. It makes a big difference.

   I’ll buy one Space Marine and put it in my D&D campaign. He’ll be stranded there in the world of Greyhawk. His powered armor ran out of energy months ago, but he keeps wearing it. And he had to learn how to use a crossbow. It’ll be funny. Especially when he crosses paths with a cowboy from Boot Hill and a Chaotic Good, “Drizztian” renegade Mind Flayer!

*

   Obviously, avid gamers are gonna get curious from time to time – about other styles of play, alternative mechanics, different settings, and so forth. A year ago, Sly Flourish was pondering “lightweight” game mechanics based “on 2d6.” Well, that is Dave Arneson’s original Blackmoor – the First Fantasy Campaign. They didn’t have funny dice back in 1971, so everything was rolled on 2d6. A 12 was a crit, and a 2 was a fumble. Every once in a while, curious gamers feel the need to return to that. Back to their roots. Curiosity is a good thing. It’s a sign of intelligence.

   Every once in a while, some tabletop gamers, not all of them, but some of them, will want to go back to the basics that is miniatures wargaming. It’s okay. Just know that 40K isn’t the only option.

   Why not go rogue and create your own system? One of my friends did it a few years ago, and I actually blogged about it on here. If you want to read that post, go to the Archives and click on 2015-11-25. Basically, he printed a (very) large color map of a besieged city in his campaign world, created cardstock counters and tokens, and then our regular characters each had to lead a squad of militia and battle the invaders block by block, sometimes house by house. With a DM, the whole thing is less competitive, and much more enjoyable. I recommend it.

   If and when I decide to do something similar, I’m gonna go full H. G. Wells and download Little Wars. Imagine the thrill of playing with wargaming rules that were written in 1913!

   We’re gonna push lead around a table the old-fashioned way.

*

   Saying that “Warhammer is for everyone” is like saying that model trains are for everyone – and, evidently, they are not. Those miniature railroad sets are costly, and it’s a time-consuming hobby. Sure, Games Workshop has hired a media relations manager, and they have to say that. And then, of course, 40K YouTubers will disagree for all the wrong reasons, simply because they don’t want change. It’s the battles you choose to pick that ultimately reveal your true colors.

   Here’s a bit of sage advice that is found in AD&D’s Battlesystem (1985).

“Because of the profusion of strange monsters, magic spells, and magical items in both the AD&D and D&D games (and the likelihood of much more to come!), and because of the different playing styles that each player can adopt, it is inappropriate of us to tell you what is the only ‘correct’ way to play.

However, we can tell you that the use of common sense will greatly improve your enjoyment. [...] Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from putting together an arbitrary and silly battle for an evening’s pleasure.”

   I think that it validates my whole point, which is: go ahead and play any kind of miniatures wargame, any way you want to play it.

   Teenagers living in war-torn countries can still whip up a game of D&D once in a while, theater of the mind; but they certainly can’t build an entire village with a miniature railroad looping through it. Some hobbies are “for everyone,” and some are for restricted segments of the population. It’s just the way it is. Soccer: accessible. Golf: privileged.

   Kids in Africa desperately want to play soccer, even though they can’t afford a ball, and sometimes, not even shoes. Still, they find something round, locate an area which is relatively flat, and play soccer barefoot. The goaaaaaal here is to play the game, right? Why nobody plays MTG with photocopied cards is beyond me. Maybe the collecting really is more important than the playing itself.

   In D&D, if you want an evening of over the top powergaming, it’s easy enough to set up. Roll a couple level 25 characters, equip them with ultra-powerful magic items, print out Orcus’ stat block and a few hundred zombies, draw a battle map – and go for it.

   In MTG, you can’t.

   In 40K, you can’t.

   You’re a kid in Africa who wants to play soccer, but it’s impossible. “Let’s put together a ridiculous battle just for tonight: my Space Wolves against a humongous, 6,000-point Necron army! Let’s see how fast my guys are wiped out!”

   But you can’t do it. Your pal Josh only owns a standard Necron army. You would have to find two other guys with similar armies who are willing and able to partake in such madness.

   It’s terrible when games are restrictive like that. Video games, I get it. Tournament games, I understand. But when you’re at home with your friends, what gives? I paid good money for this game; can I please fight Orcus tonight?

   Warhammer, The 9^th Age, Frostgrave and other miniatures games are somewhere between D&D and model trains. You can’t just whip up a game for someone’s birthday, and yet it requires less hardware than model trains. It’s not for everyone – but more people can access this hobby than the model train thing. The makers of The 9^th Age actually insist that you play with any kind of gaming aid: paper standees, Lego characters, homemade tokens, anything you want. This is definitely cool.

   The 9^th Age is a game, not a mammoth line of paint / models / terrain. That is the major difference. As I said, just getting started in 40K will set you back $600 at the very least. One 24ml pot of Nuln Oil is $10. Games Workshop makes most of its money with the hardware that goes in and around the game – not the game itself. In that regard, GW may have more in common with Lego than Chaosium.

   “Hardware” and “game” should be independent from one another, but they should be compatible as well, across the board. I’m pretty sure you can somehow take the hobby of model trains and turn it into something gameable. Make two trains run side by side, crisscrossing the entire basement, add some Car Wars rules and weaponry, and fire away. It could very well be the craziest, whackiest, most memorable wargame ever.

   The opposite is also possible. Take an entirely gameable thing like 40K, add a global pandemic, and it reverts to being just the simple hobby of collecting and painting models in your room, all by yourself.

   It is possible to play miniatures without Warhammer, and it should also be possible to play Warhammer without miniatures. And it is. They call it “Paperhammer,” and it’s great.

*

   So, there you have it. Different people are certainly curious about different things in 40K. The setting. The crafting. The collecting. The competing. The community. It’s all good. If you attend or want to attend tournaments, keep at it, the Emperor needs you. If you want to start collecting, go for it, and make sure to check out Corvus Belli’s store. But if you’re just “40Kurious,” then why not go completely off the rails and create your own fucked-up pharaoh motorcycle Barsoom crossover wargame? You know, like Dave Wesely and M. A. R. Barker – and Gygax – used to do on a weekly basis? There are no rules. The gaming fun ain’t tied up with any specific system or brand. It never was.

   Miniatures wargaming is the mother of tabletop role-playing games, and Warhammer 40,000 is just another iteration of it.