Two days ago I was treated to Logan. The movie is the latest in a long line of X-Men movies and, after the abomination that was X-Men: Apocalypse it was a welcome addition to the genre. That being said, Hugh Jackman never disappoints, and once again he brought the iconic character of Wolverine to life on the Silver Screen in a strong and robust way.

Of course, as a Comic Book Nerd as well as a Gaming Geek, I have often wondered why the two don’t cross over more often. Yes, there are a few Batman games, and a few Marvel games; however, generally speaking, they can be counted on one hand. Yes, there is Legendary, Crisis, Marvel Munchkin, Dice Masters – but they all seem to be card (or dice) games. Where is the X-Men minis game (there is a little known Batman one) or Superhero RPG?

One of the potential reasons could be because the characters are so difficult to do justice to in a game. They may be too large for life, and thus hard to portray. Alternatively, maybe the licenses are too expensive, who knows?

Well, off the back of watching Logan, I’ve decided to try and do something I haven’t done since a Space Opera campaign when I was a kid. I’ve decided to recreate one of the X-Men in a game.

For this, my Dad (who participates quite a lot in RPG based blogs) and I have stepped back in time to look at Advanced D&D. We wanted to look at Versions 3.5 and 5, but we thought why not look back to the beginning, how we used to try and recreate characters as a kid?

Wolverine a la Post-It Note

What Would Wolverine Look Like as an Advanced D&D Character?

Please excuse the basic table but:

Naturally the above doesn’t go into any additional magic as he wouldn’t have any (he is a basic Fighter, as Barbarians didn’t exist in AD&D). It also doesn’t go into any specific items as those will vary on how you want to play the character.

Let’s look at what it does go into though –

Basic Details, Level, and Alignment

We had to do some research to understand how tall and heavy Wolverine is meant to be. He is, and this is quoting the Google Rich Snippets here, 5’3 (one foot shorter than Hugh Jackman is) and meant to weigh 200 lbs without his skeleton. This, once you add on his skeleton becomes 300 lbs. Name-wise, it felt more D&D-esque to go with his original name of James Howlett. It would seem a bit strange going up and down the Sword Coast as The Wolverine.

Level-wise, AD&D characters start getting really awesome at Level 10 so, naturally, Wolverine should be Level 20. This may be overkill, but he is an elite soldier. This couples hand-in-hand with an alignment of Chaotic Good. We had some debate as to whether he should be Chaotic Good or Chaotic Neutral, and Good came out on top. Namely, he never does anything evil and it never even crosses his mind. Okay, so he kills a shed load of people – but all in the name of Good, so that’s what counts.

We debated a bit as to whether Wolverine would be a Monk or a Fighter. In the end, we went with Fighter as Monks denote a certain level of self-control that we are not sure Logan has. From a philosophical perspective, he feels like a Fighter more than the zen demeanour of a Monk.

Statistics

Wolverine is strong, fast and difficult to kill. For a character such as Logan the Constitution goes off the charts – so 19 felt natural. It felt like the right kind of thing to do. As well as that his Strength is always pushed to the absolute maximum, so 18 there. Dexterity, on the other hand, well it actually occurred to us that Wolverine heals at a rapid pace, and we know that because he gets hit – a lot. He kind of sucks at getting out of the way of things. Thus his Dexterity is fast, but not abnormally so.

Looking at his other three statistics, however, he is not a people person and so this results in a low Charisma. Wolverine is also not known for his Wisdom or Intelligence, I mean, let’s just look at a few quotes:

“If you want to shoot me, then shoot me!”

“You’re a dick.”

“I’m going to cut your god-damn head off. See if that works.”

“Holy shit.”

“Go f**k yourself.”

Those are all taken from the X-Men movies, to be fair he does have a few more profound moments in the books; however, it is hard to argue that they denote high Intelligence or Wisdom. That being said, he is a strategic genius, so although I’ve noted a lower Intelligence and Wisdom, they are not “break-the-game” low.

Regenerative Powers

This is where it gets interesting. Without just “having mutants in the D&D world” how do we use the rules as they were written to create the Wolverine?

The thought process initially went “can we make him part Troll to get the rejuvenation?” to which the answer was a resounding “no”. There were no rules in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons to have a Half-Troll character. Even if we could, it would affect height and weight so much it wouldn’t really be Wolverine.

So after more discussion, we decided to go with a Ring of Rejuvenation. Yes, it is kind of cheating, but it also works at around 5 hit points per round. This makes him as good as a troll without actually being one.

Claws

The above suggestion (in the statistics) is using the AD&D claw rules (which are meant for animal claws but use your imagination), and assuming each claw is the same as three daggers. This gives our D&D Wolverine an attack of 3D4+2 (with the strength modifier) each turn. This seems fair, and also pretty lethal. It also means that our Wolverine cannot be disarmed, as his weapons are claws, nor does he get any negatives for hitting with his off-hand. AD&D was great for claws because they didn’t define how big they should be, yet still included rules, allowing us to define their size.

There is one final perk these claws have. Against zero level characters, a Fighter can have as many hits as his level per weapon. Our Wolverine is level 20. That means he can have a whopping 40 attacks per turn. Before you disagree or think this is overkill – just watch this video.

So What Do You Think?

There are plenty of other ways of doing Wolverine in later versions, so this is just a question to the AD&D players – but what do you think? Have we missed something? How would you do it? Let us know in the comments below.

SIMILAR ARTICLE: Is it Possible to Have A Completely Non-Violent RPG?

Published by Luke

Board game nerd, comic book geek, Rubik's Cube solver, Splendor player, and Blogger. View all posts by Luke