Monster Troop Types in OD&D I

CHAINMAIL Troop Type/OD&D Fighting Capability

In order to use CHAINMAIL combat tables for possibly all type of combat, fighting capability and troop type need to be established for all men and monsters. For men it's very straight forward, they just fight as determined by their weapons and armor, and in case of class levels, they just fight as a number of men equal to the class fighting capability (a 3rd level Fighting-Man fights as 3 men and a Magic-User of equal level fights as 2 men). For most low level men-type creatures it's almost equally easy. 

 

OD&D offers up (M&T p5: Attack/Defense) that monsters basically fights as a number of men equal to their HD. This is very usable in many cases, but doesn't quite work with the CHAINMAIL fighting capabilities. 

 

CHAINMAIL offers some guidelines in the monsters that are clearly described, and I try to use those as reference points:

 

Top of the food chain

Dragons: Attacks and defends like 4 Heavy horse.

Giants: Attacks and defends like 12 Heavy foot.

 

Snacks

Peasants: Attacks and defends as Light foot (1)

Hypothetically, Purple Worm and Sea Monster should be up there with dragons and giants, but the rest of the OD&D monsters should be somewhere in between.

Challenges with converting OD&D monsters to CHAINMAIL troop types

Something to understand about CHAINMAIL troop types is that the difference between Light foot and Armored foot is quite big. A normal man in plate armor (Armored foot) can kill (hit in OD&D) and normal man in leather at 4:6 but in the opposite case, it takes 3 LF footmen to even have a chance of hitting a footman in plate (one of them has to roll a 6). The difference between said Light footman and  a Heavy horseman (mounted knight) is even bigger. So what troop types to assign monsters is important. 

 

Another variable is Accumulated hits or Simultaneous hits. Accumulated hits, as in the case of giants, means simple what's in D&D, each hit is subtracted from the number of HD (or men, as it may be) so when a giant has taken 12 hits, it's dead. But a dragon must take simultaneous hits to hurt it, so while 24 peasants have a good chance of score a few hits on a giant, of the 16 men needed to hit a dragon at least four sixes must be rolled for each hit. Of course, simultaneous hits could be removed but that would be a pity, because it's very cool! And it would make dragons weak.

 

Next task will be to classify all monsters not already in CHAINMAIL. Lucky for me, people have attempted this before. I'm looking at Marv Breig's (Finarvyn) lists, as well as Daniel Norton's Unchained for ideas.