Welcome to Part 8 of Motivations in Roleplaying Game Economies. You can find Part 1 here. In this series we discuss how games affect the behavior of their players, using Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set (1981, Ed. Tom Moldvay) as our example text. Part 8 examines the most powerful spell in the game, Sleep.
We hope our analysis keeps you awake at night.
To Sleep, No Chance of Dreams Because The Murder Hobos Slit Your Throat
Our final analysis of the efficacy of magical methods in defeating opponents in Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set brings us to its most legendary spell: Sleep. Should an elf or magic-user begin their adventures with this spell, we believe that they possess a substantial advantage.
Sleep is similar to Turn Undead in that it affects a random number of targets, but differs from spells like Turn Undead, Light and Charm in that no roll for success is required and neither is a resistance roll allowed. Still, its name seems rather innocuous. How effective is the power to induce slumber? In fact, we imagine that it could be rather pleasant in the right circumstances. There are some limitations to the spell, like being unable to put to sleep undead, but compared to Turn Undead’s exclusive effect on undead creatures, it seems a light restriction. And unlike the effects of Light or Charm Person which, if successful, maintain their magical effect for many turns or even days of game time regardless of the victim’s efforts, Sleep’s effect may be canceled by a hard slap, which seems a reasonable limitation to us. However, the (once again suspiciously sociopathic) authors take pains to note that a “sleeping creature may be killed (regardless of its hit points) with a single blow with any edged weapon.” This gruesome detail seems to lend the spell an unprecedented amount of potency. Hit points are life! Removing them all at a single stroke without recourse to any roll or saving throw is not found elsewhere in the rules. This particular breed of murder is reserved especially for victims of the Sleep spell.1
That said, just how powerful is the effect? According to the description, 2d8 creatures may be ensorceled—2 to 16 victims! At its minimum that’s twice as effective as any fighter attack, Light-blindness trick or Charm Person spell. The closest analog is Turn Undead, but that ability affects a maximum of 12 undead creatures, four fewer than Sleep’s upper bound (and, we might add, undead creatures turned away by a cleric flee, whereas this spell puts its victims into cursed slumber at the feet of psychotic interlopers bent on ensuring they sleep forever).
We hope you agree that this preposterous spell’s powers warrant deeper investigation. Please indulge us as we compare a magic-user with the Sleep spell against the effectiveness of our beleaguered hero, X.
To set the bar, and give X his due, we calculate the fighter’s survivability in a brawl with a typical first level magic-user: 94.04%, very satisfying. Good job, X, you can handle 1-on-1 combat with a first level magic-user. And you only died another 59,642 times.
Having set that particularly low bar, let’s call our magic-user M and calculate her survivability against a typical goblin from the Caves of Chaos.
Her 32.77% survivability seems in line with our expectations regarding class specialization and efficiency. She’s the least combat capable of the trio of classes we tested, but she is a spell-caster and does not wish or need to enter combat with only her robes and dagger. What if M deploys her powerful Sleep spell instead? Our modeling here gets a little tricky, but we believe we can make some solid estimates.
Let’s examine her chances of taking down opponents based on the spell’s 2d8 range of victims. Our friends at Anydice show us that 2d8 has the following distribution:
At first glance, we note that she always rolls greater than 1 and so her chance of defeating a single goblin with Sleep stands at a stark 100%. However, that 100% does not paint a true picture of a combat simulation in Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set. To compare fighting apples to magical apples, we must place M within melee combat range of her target. Even though her spell can outrange a goblin’s javelins, M might find herself vulnerable to this type of attack because her vision is limited to a 30-foot sight range in torchlight, close enough for a goblin to ambush her or charge her.
Critical Combat Sequence
Therefore, M can only guarantee putting to sleep her victim if she wins initiative. Winning initiative in this edition of Dungeons & Dragons requires each side to roll 1d6. The higher result goes first. Essentially, it is a coin toss. However, M’s chances are bolstered by a quirk of the Combat Sequence rules.
Due to the order of operations of steps 4 and 5—magic then melee—initiative ties against hand-to-hand combat break in M’s favor. In the event of a tie, she’ll be able to cast her spell before the goblin can strike. Since she gets the benefits of ties in her favor on the 1d6 initiative roll, M receives a boost to her odds: 58.34% chance of winning initiative and laying low her enemies.2 Recall X’s B-grade 81% chance of pulling off the same feat. The fighter is actually better suited for this type of scut work.
However, M sends into the dreamlands at minimum two goblins. Her chance of affecting a pair of goblins is the same as putting to sleep a singleton. According to our Death Machine Survivability Calculator, X’s chance of defeating those same two goblins is 56.68%. Oddly similar in efficiency to M’s 58% of winning initiative and sleeping them.
As the foe’s numbers expand, M comes into her own. Against three goblins at once, X survives only 39% of the time. Whereas M’s spell has a 98.44% chance of affecting three goblins, which makes her odds of survival: 57.4%.
Against six goblins, X survives merely 15.37% of the time. Yet the powerful 2d8 sleep engine that M wields will blanket six or more goblins 84.38% of the time, giving her respectable odds of 49% of defeating them on her own. The young wizard wielding Sleep has far better odds than a fighter at defeating a crew of six.
We created these scenarios in order to compare efficiency between two disparate character classes, but we admit they are rather artificial. In more organic scenarios, ideas of party-level heuristics quickly spring to mind. One can imagine a scenario where X, T and M all work together toward their aims. X blocks the approach to T and M, protecting them from harm while they each leverage their special abilities. When they encounter a foe that X or T is unlikely to survive, M may dispatch them with but a word, and the group may retreat or continue as they see fit.
In my experience the success rate of a group that contains a character capable of casting sleep is an order of magnitude higher than a group without such capabilities. The spell allows a thoughtful L1-L2 group to overcome at least one encounter. So the crew can use the spell to modulate their threat level—going deeper with it or pulling back if things get too dangerous.
It’s useful but next week, we’ll discuss an even more powerful ability, available to all characters in Dungeons & Dragons.
Until then, we are your Ludological Alchemists.
Want more? You can also listen to our companion podcast, The Hypothesis, here.
And we confess that we do not find it reassuring that they limited murderers to slitting throats rather than caving in the skulls of their sleeping victims with a mace or warhammer…or suffocating them…or tossing them over a cliff…or binding them and throwing them into a river…or…perhaps we’ve fallen asleep and are reliving nightmares.
In a 2d6 distribution table there are 36 possibilities. In 15 of them M loses, which is 7/12. So her initiative is 50% plus 1/12 or 58.43%.
Sleep. The Fireball of early levels, only without the nasty side effect of friendly fire.