The “THE GAME” section could have honestly just been lumped in with the last post I made but I didn’t for a couple reasons. The first is that it is the first listing in the table of headings, but also the theme here is more strongly connected to the next section. This is pretty much the what is an RPG section so we’ll be brief. The section stresses the importance of the Role Playing part of Role Playing Game and how everyone should work together to make a great story in the world but Mister Cavern is always right because it’s his world and he calls the shots and is the only one who can make the game really fun and I use the masculine case because that’s what the book does.
To be fair to the book, Mister Cavern does have a lot of work to do, as the book points out, and it does point out that if something your DM does seems indefensible to you, you can just leave and start your own game, though it does so in a fairly abrasive way. Sort of like it’s calling you an ungreatful prick for walking away just because the DM broke your social contract and transgressed the boundaries of your trust you douchbag. The rest is basically the MST3K mantra so that’s the section and “Creating the Player Character” is mostly waxing lyrical on the four meanings of the word level so we can jump into the actual crunch now.
Character abilities starts with an explanation of the different stats and how the characters need at least two 15s to stand a chance and we will come back to all that because what first catches your eye is the table of strength maximums and minimums that take up the top right fourth of the page and on that note. Gigax you lying sack of shit!
Count yourselves lucky School Day's wouldn't make sense in this situation.
Recall if you will the line of my previous post where I talk about there not being stat penalties based on gender? I wasn’t just pulling that out of my ass that was litterally in the preface. And I quote.
You will find no pretentious dictums herein, no baseless limitations placed on female strength or male charisma...
And yet, reading this table what do we find but pointless limitations on female strength. Admittedly there are no limitations on male charisma, but you don’t get a medal for halfway keeping your word. I wouldn’t be so worked up by this but this was literally three pages ago and I’m trying to look at this, since I’m not really familiar with the material, as someone coming to the game for the first time, and if you got roped into the game with promises that the stupid horseshit was cut out of the game and then immediately one of the specific examples of said stupid shit shows up you’d be kinda angry that you paid for the book on that claim. Whatever back to the table, it’s just a list of strength minimums and maximums and strength is... weird. But I will get back to that in strength’s actual paragraph, one thing I will point out here is that fighters actually have the lowest minimum strength of any class with a strength minimum but the highest maximum strength, in fact only fighter characters can reach the maximum strength, unless your race or gender, and god I wish there was a way to deliver my contempt through text, has a lower cap. Which is strange and seems rather counter intuitive as since as we will learn later fighters literally only have their strength going for them, well, almost only their strength, we’ll get there.
Back to the text for now, before we actually get into the section on the stats we we learn that players roll for stats, but the game’s not actually going to tell you how you do that here, because that information is in the Dungeon Master’s manual and as players you don’t need to know how to make player characters until you’re all already gathered around the table ready to play. A little research revealed that some of the methods are kind of insane. One of them is literally 3d6 in order 12 times then take the highest set. But we’re not here for the DMs guide, maybe if I can find a copy that’s not missing a bunch of pages.
Strength is supposedly a combination of strength, endurance, and stamina and if you’re first question is “aren’t stamina and endurance the same thing?” Then we are of a like mind and the answer is, more or less yes. If you look it up in the dictionary there are some minor differences, but they boil down to the same thing. The second thing that popped into my head is that endurance seems more closely linked to Constitution, but that’s just my own personal feelings. The real money here is that a fighter with 16 or more strength gain +10% XP and if a fighter character is lucky enough to get 18 in strength they get to roll a percentile die to determine extraordinary strength. Unless you are a halfling, female eld, half-elf, dwarf, or gnome, then it is impossible for you to have 18 strength, shouldn’t have decided to be such a weakling bucko. Actually, it is unclear if you have to first roll your stats and then decide your character’s race based on what is available, or choose your race and if you roll higher than the maximum for a stat your stat just drops to the max. It is also unclear what happens if your character is a fighter starts with 17 str and belongs to a +strength race or if a character progresses their strength up to 18 somehow or if they get a magic item that gives them 18 strength as long as they have it. More pertinently, it’s not at all clear if rangers and paladins, which are listed as subclasses of fighter are allowed to roll exceptional strength. They have separate minimum strength values listed, so... no? If anyone has a more definitive answer please speak up.
What exceptional strength actually does is provide very minor bonuses to attack, damage, damage, how much you can carry in gold pieces, not gold value, the actually weight of a gold peice, your chances to force open a door*, and to bend bard or lift gates which leads us to this little tidbit.
Strength Table II Adendum wrote:The number in parentheses is the numer of chances out of six for the fighter to be able to force open an locked, barred, magically held, or wizard locked door, but only one attempt ever (per door) may be made, and if it fails no further attempts can succeed.
I genuinely never thought I would ever have cause to use this image unironically.
So let’s just get this fucking straight, you get one, unt exactly one! chance so break a door down and then, what? The door becomes invulnerable to your attempts like it’s fucking Doomsday? Your fighter hurts his shoulder and just gives up? Just- why? I don’t even care about your stupid rule, but why does this happen? What is the explanation in universe? This is like a joke Team Four Star would use in DBZ abridged, in fact it literally is. Not even the facetious interpretation of literally that idiots don’t think count this is a thing that actually happened. I have a friend who finds systems to be chafing and limiting to role playing in general and while I think systems can usually be worked within to come up with the desired result, this- this I think fits the bill. And it’s not just stupid it’s internally incoherent because in the section below explaining how forcing doors work the books says you’re allowed as many attempts as you like with no penalty, so it’s only if you have really high strength (since only 18/91-99 or 18/00 get that)? Or no, I’m being an idiot, that section specifically states it relates to stuck or heavy doors so if the door is actually locked you only get one chance at really low odds which is still fucking stupid but at least it’s consistent. The same one time rule applies to bending bars or lifting a gate and while the example puts the character under time pressure there’s nothing in the rule relating to that so I’m not sure why you can’t just keep trying if time allows, a wizard, sorry MAGIC-USER, did it I guess.
I’m not sure if the other bonuses from strength are any good there’s seriously a +6 difference in to hit between the lowest possible strength and the highest possible strength and a +7 difference in damage, but I’d need to look at the monster manual to see if that’s any good and I don’t have the monster manual. So again if wiser heads than I have the information by all means enlighten me.
Intelligence is much shorter it’s got the racial minimums and maximums but this time most of the races are left out, in fact the only playable race that has a max intelligence is the half-orc at 17. Intelligence works similarly to how it does in 3.5 you get languages and more spells for high int and you need a minimum score for spells of each level above 4th. Unlike later games though you don’t just get two spells per level plus whatever you can find instead every time you go up a spell level or your int goes up or down relatively permanently you roll a percentile dice for every wiz- Spell-Caster spell of that level or just all the spells of every level available to you. This is limited by your maximum spells known which could very well be every spell ever if you have 19 or more int and at 19 you have to roll 95 or lower on your percentile dice to learn a spell so the odds of you having a majority of the spells possible is pretty good. Also if you find a spell book or scroll with a spell you don’t know in it you can learn that way. The game dosen’t say if magic items that buff int are intended to count as sufficiently permanent to warrant rerolling spells, but if so it’d be fairly easy to abuse and that would also imply that that was also the intent for strength.
Wisdom is much the same song and dance except that insead of languages you get a bonus to magical attacks and instead of chance to learn a spell you get a really weak sauce spell failure mechanic. The minimum wisdom for a cleric is 9 and that gives a 20% chance of spell failure but that drops to 5% by 12 and to 0 at 13 so it’s not something a cleric even really cares about. Also, apparently you can only be a thief if you’re wisdom is 5 or lower and the very next section tells us that you can only be a cleric if your dexterity is 5 or lower. So... Gigax really wanted to enforce the clueless thief and clumsy doctor tropes I was not aware existed? Okay this was also a thing with the fighter and wizard in the strength and intelligence tables, but there at least it made a little sense given the genre conventions, and lack of barbarian, even if it felt weird that you couldn’t have a physically weak but mentally strong cleric and stuff. But this feels like it’s there just because the previous tables did.
I was going to make a joke about how sometimes consitency is bad, but I couldn’t find any pictures of people trapped in a non-Newtonian fluid.
Dexterity is noteble for being the only stat other than strength to have a second table. Also Illusionists MUST have 16 dexterity which seems oddly prohibitive. Anyway at first glance It looks like you get an attack bonus and defense penalty for high dex but then I remembered this is AD&D and defense is backwards for no reason. In case your wondering, no the text does nothing to make the table clearer. You add your defense adjustment as a positive modifier to saves if it’s high, but subtract it from your armor and having a three gives you higher armor but that’s bad? Well I know it’s bad but nothing in the text explains this you have to go to the equipment section or combat? Fuck! it’s not even clear where to find the actual rule and they expect you to keep track of your facing in relation to each enemy if you have a shield but we still have constitution, charisma, the races, and the classes to get through before we get to the clusterfuck that is the equipment section and armor rules.
The second Dexterity table gives the bonuses thieves get for high dex they have very small. A thief with 18 dex only gets +10% on everything but trap finding and opening locks and that’s 5% and 15% respectively and you get no bonus for climb, hear noise, or read language. By the way, only thieves can hear noises but we’ll cover why every party must have a thief in every game when we get to classes.
Constitution is basically the same as in later games but with some stupid stuff that has since been removed, much like one would cut out a cancer. Ther’s bonus hit points and save stuff. But only fighters can ever gain more than 2 HP per hit dice from high Con and you have to save not only against effects that are trying to kill you like flesh to stone but also against any spell that changes your body like polymorph. You can get 99% resistance to this, if you have 18 con. Also, your original con is the number of times you can be resurrected you lose 1 con each time and even if your Con gets restored you still don’t get any more resurrections. Also if someone is trying to resurrect you you have to roll a percentile dice and if you roll too high you’re dead forever because fuck you for wanting to continue playing the game you loser. Having 18 con gives you a 100% chance to get revived though, and at 10 you’ve got a 70% chance so the odds of just dying are at least kind of low.
Charisma gives you the number of henchmen you can have, a modifier on your follower’s loyalty, and how people react to you. Dwarves and Half-Orcs have a maximum charisma but it’s a soft charisma maximum. They can have higher Cha but when dealing with any other race their charisma is considered to be the lower number because fuck you for wanting to assimilate into our culture you freaks. Honestly though this doesn’t make sense to me. In all the genre fiction I’ve read Dwarves seem like pretty cool people. Sure they’re gruff and sometimes harsh but I’d much rather be friends with someone from a race that will go to the ends of the earth to help their friends, instead of say, the elves, who will go to the ends of the forest to avoid your problems because you are of a lower race and therefore unworthy. Half-Orcs I guess I get but it seems kind of pointless. Also Paladins need to have 17 cha so good luck ever getting the stats to play one.
And that’s the section. Like I said before I’m going to be fixing this book soon, so it’ll need to be kept bound closed to apply the pressure to let the glue dry properly. So it might take a bit longer to get the Character races done.
I decided to name that gargoyle darkness for a stupid joke based on a sketch I did in drama.
Opening the book up the first point of note is that pages 3-38 have formed an independent state and broken off from the country of spinesia not entirely unexpected given the book’s age, and fixed easily enough with a bit of binder’s glue and some time. But enough quibbling let’s jump into the forward. 
Like that yeah.
No, no, no.
Yeah, that looks about right.
The preface then ends with a very special thanks to everyone who contributed to the making of AD&D and I’m going to say perhaps MORE than 60%. Just a guess. Then the book jumps into the introduction and I cannot be fucked because the first half is about AD&D is different from OD&D and about the mechanical differences from OD&D and how the classes have been rebalanced and I’m just going to use my powers of clairvoyance and say that the “magic-user” class wins everything forever and the second is about how D&D is a WORLD man! and you have to EXPERIENCE it man! 
