Following Phenster’s first house-rules article “Pandemonium Society House Rules,” two letters in L’avant garde #33 (September 1980) show a mixed reception.
Giving his home address, Keith Menard of Garden City, KS, admonishes, “Munchkins should not play with rules. They might hurt themselves.” Menard then offers to send his old copy of Greyhawk to the Pandemonium Society, “as I don’t use it since I started playing Advanced.”
Middleton reader Todd F. G. Nils writes that he introduced the concept of “first-and-last-attacking weapons” into his AD&D game. “It’s more intuitive than speed factor, but it doesn’t account for multiple attacks per round for faster weapons.” To rectify the deficiency, Nils adds an additional rule:
I use the idea of heavier and lighter weapons to give weapons two classes lighter (which is like faster) 2 attacks per round, and weapons three classes lighter get 3 attacks.
Phenster makes no reference to either critique in his next contribution, printed in L’avant garde #35 (December 1980).
Rules the Pandemonium Society Doesn't Use
Some rules we don't like, so we don't use them. Like the rule that says you can't move while you're in melee. After a while, combat got kind of boring. It seemed like we all just took turns hacking at a thing until we killed it or it killed us, if we didn't run away first. We want to be able to maneuver while we fight, like Sinbad. Whenever Sinbad was fighting a monster, he was always moving around a lot, jumping up on things and pushing things over and falling back before the monster's onslaught. It's more exciting that way.
So, in our game, even when you're fighting hand-to-hand, you can still move, just not very far. And you can't turn your back on the monster, or it can attack you and you don't get to fight back. It's still hard to get out of combat, because the monster can move same as you, so it'll just follow you unless someone else is fighting it too.
We don't use the drop-your-weapon rule either. You never see Sinbad drop his weapon just because he got surprised because a monster showed up. One kid dropped what he was carrying so much, we made him carry the 10' pole. When we saw a monster, he had to drop the pole anyway. We started calling him Jinx, and we didn't let him hold the lantern either.
There's another rule that says you have to roll to see who goes first when your dex score is close to the monster's. We do simultaneous combat instead. Whenever your dexterity is the same, you both go at the same time. That way, you might kill the monster, but it could kill you too.
A thing we allow that isn't in the rules is that you can wait to take your turn until someone does something or something else happens. Like when you know the evil wizard will probably throw a spell, instead of shooting him right away, you can wait till he starts moving his hands and chanting, then shoot. If you hit him right then, the spell fails. You can also wait for someone if you want to do something together. Whenever you wait like that, your initiative count changes for the rest of the combat. One time, we were fighting a mummy, and I had a torch, and Jinx was going to throw a flask of oil at it. But Jinx had a lower dex than me, so I had to wait for him to go. He missed, of course. I threw the torch anyway and set the oil on fire behind the mummy. Beowulf had to charge with his shield to push it into the fire, and then we all threw oil at it until it stopped chasing us through the dungeon!
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