An Old Character Sheet

So, looking through my file of the original version I played, the one current in Fayetteville Arkansas in 1980-81, I found a bunch of character sheets. Characters tended to die very quickly in this game: no one ever advanced beyond third level because that'd make the DM have to go to a different random encounter chart, so he just killed anybody who was near leveling up (it's pretty obvious when all the monsters bypass the front-line fighters and unerringly focus all their attacks on that one character among the dozen or so in the group).

Two important stats were Reaction Time and Death Level:

--to determine Reaction Time, divided Dexterityby 3, with the result subtracted from 8

--to determine Death Level, multiply Constitution by .03 and add 1, then multiply the result by your hits (=hit points).  That this is such a needlessly complicated process says a lot about this iteration of the game in a nutshell -- but I did take away from it a strong belief in some sort of negative hit points system so that there was a brief window during which characters who'd fallen to zero hp or below cd still be brought back.

I'm off tomorrow for Kalamazoo but will try to post some of the character generation material when I get back.

For now, dere's the character sheet:






--JDR