The first three supplements for OD&D added a plethora of optional rules that would later be elaborated into AD&D 1E. Supplement I: Greyhawk was a testing ground for Gygax's ascendant crunchiness that offered a slew of character options including the thief class, multiclassing-without-calling-it-multiclassing, and the "alternate combat system" that finally, fully divorced D&D from Chainmail rules. Perhaps more surprisingly, Supplement II: Blackmoor was the same kind of thing for Arneson, what with the assassin and monk subclasses and hit location tables. Kinda goes against the grain of Arnesonian fantasy being rules-lite, but I already harped on that a bit in my Spirits & Spookiness interlude about the edition split. Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry added an early version of psionics, but we don't talk about that.
I'm more interested in a character option that the books didn't add between then and AD&D. And if possible (but probably not practical), I want to do a little backwards-compatibility to add it in.
We're talkin' half-orcs today!
Unlike their elvish counterparts, half-orcs did not debut in the Greyhawk supplement, and would not appear until the AD&D Player's Handbook released several years later (assuming there's no half-orc in a Chainmail book I'm unaware of, anyway). But the differences between AD&D and supplemented OD&D are not so large, and with a bit of work and an eye toward the """""balance""""" struck in OD&D, I think I can port them back.
To start off, we can skip a step entirely. Since OD&D doesn't use racial ability score modifiers, we don't have to futz with that at all.
Between Greyhawk and AD&D, racial level limits for all classes other than thief (which was the first class everything could level unlimitedly in) either stayed the same or increased very slightly with the addition of exceptional ability score benefits. The average seems to be +1 across the board. As an example OD&D elves can go as high as Fighter 4/5/6 and Magic-User 8/9, plus NPC-only Clerics 6; AD&D elves can rise to Fighter 5/6/7, Magic-User 9/10/11, and Cleric 7.
Working backwards from the AD&D half-orc with a -1 across the board, we would arrive at racial limits of Fighter 9, a truly abysmal Cleric 3, and Thief 6/7/8. I'll be ignoring the thief level limit in favor of making it unlimited like everyone else gets, since half-orcs lose out on their unlimited assassin progression thanks to that subclass being human-only in OD&D. Optionally, you could let half-orcs progress as assassins up to 6/7/8, or take the limits off it too. Or do something else entirely! Multiclass combinations from AD&D can stay pretty much unchanged, although I pity anyone trying to squeeze value out of that cleric level.
Next we look at racial abilities, where we have to get creative.
OD&D half-elves inherit their elven parent's ability to spot secret and hidden doors, but they don't gain the elf's combat abilities or infravision. This tells me that we can directly transfer some of the AD&D orc's traits onto the half-orc, but not all of them.
Well, I say "traits" but it's really only one notable thing from their Monster Manual entry: a 35% chance to notice construction underground and 25% chance to notice sloping passages, on account of old orcs being proficient miners before Gruumsh went the way of the Chaotic Evil berserker. We can slap those numbers onto the half-orc and round them off as a 2-in-6 and 1-in-4 chance, respectively. Orcs have infravision, but if we're being sticklers then half-orcs can't have any of that, since for some reason half-elves didn't receive it from their elven parents in OD&D, and in all likelihood the Great Value brand Peredhil would complain about unfair treatment if any other hybrids were so lucky.
Optionally, just go ahead and give half-orcs and half-elves infravision like their nonhuman parents. Or if that seems too strong, cut the values in half for 30' each.
Languages are super simple to deal with by comparison. Common, alignment (as much as those annoy me) and orcish for the defaults, plus goblin, hobgoblin, and ogre.
Finally, we turn to thief skill bonuses.
In OD&D and AD&D thieves get bonuses to certain skills depending on their species in the form of percentile increments of 5. Every thief in OD&D has 30 percentage points divided up among the various skills, except for halflings who receive a whopping 40 on top of a +1 to Hear Noises rolls. I'm unsure how to quantify the bonus to Hear Noises in terms of percentage points since I'm not sure if it means +1 to the skill's progression, I.E. you count as a thief 1 level higher than normal, or +1 is added to your current range of hearing, so 1-3 at 1st level and the skill is maxed out a few levels early at 1-6 at 11th level. I accept the former explanation that it's just a +1 to effective hearing level and so it would be equivalent to +5% on another skill, but that is my interpretation of ambiguous text- as so very much of early D&D is.
Halflings aside, we can take that standard 30 and use it as a budget for the most appropriate half-orc thief bonuses we want to cherry-pick from AD&D. The full list is as follows: Pick Pockets -5%, Open Locks +5%, Find/Remove Traps +5%, Move Silently 0%, Hide in Shadows 0%, Hear Noise +5%, Climb Walls +5%, Read Languages -10%.
We can ignore Climb Walls and Read Languages since the former scales (heh) with level, while the latter is just a flat 80% chance for all thieves regardless of background. I feel like we can also drop the -5% to Pick Pockets because no other thieves in OD&D get a penalty from species. That leaves us with Locks, Traps, and Hearing for a total of 15%, with 15% left to spend.
To figure out where to put those last few points I look at the distributions of the other species' bonuses:
Here we can see that there are no +10% values for Remove Traps, so I think it's a fine niche to fill by bumping the half-orc's bonus up by 5 points. Similarly, I will add +5% to both Move Silently and Hide in Shadows because there are literally no thieves with less than that, including half-
... Wait a second. Where are half-elves on this table? As a matter of fact, where're the humans for that line of "-"s across the board so we remember everything is being compared to a human baseline?
No, this isn't a bit, I actually did not realize that half-elves and humans were omitted until I was uploading a screenshot.
I guess that prompts an entirely different interpretation: half-elves share their human parents' versatile unremarkability in thievery when it comes to OD&D. And following the logic like I've been trying to do all post, that means half-orcs should do the same and have +0% to everything.
Well shoot. That's a slightly underwhelming conclusion to come to. Oh well. I'll still keep all the above in. Gotta show my work.
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To condense everything down into a single block of text that probably could've been a tweet instead:
Half-Orcs: Can advance to Fighter 9, Cleric 3, Thief U, Assassin 6/7/8 or U (optional); multiclass any 2. Detects underground construction 2-in-6, sloping passages 1-in-4. Infravision 30' (optional). Languages: Common, orcish, goblin, hobgoblin, ogre, alignment tongue.
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| And while we're here, I can't not share the OD&D orc art. How'd we get pigmen from a frumpy dude with a cutlass? |
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