"Pure fantasy, self-referential, gamist nonsense."

A quote taken from here in reference to the disease system in 3rd Edition.

Perfectly encapsulates why I disliked 3rd Edition and why it turned me off from D&D as a whole for a very long time.

Hirelings, and the limitations of AD&D

There’s many sections in the AD&D rules that I’ve read dozens of times but still can’t make any sense of. One of those sections is the rules for dealing with hirelings. The Player’s Handbook hints at them, and while the Dungeon Masters Guide goes into great detail about the different types of hirelings, their professional skills, cost of hire, upkeep, where to find them, etc., no explanation is given on how to use them. The actual method of play is left up for the reader to invent for himself. I can only guess why, but it seems that Gary Gygax assumed that the players would learn to play from joining someone else’s game, who had learned it in turn from another game.

This is frustrating as many passages and rulings in AD&D are presented in this manner. Some subjects are laden with an unnecessary amount of detail, while others that desperately need explanation are missing them.

The BECMI Basic set, though, has been really helpful in this regard. Even though it is a much smaller volume and most rule descriptions are much shorter, they are clear, concise, and actionable enough to be used for play. The AD&D DMG spends a full page column and a half describing timekeeping, along with a play example, the Basic DM Rulebook writes it out in a few short paragraphs.

Hirelings in the Basic DM Rulebook are clearly described, as are the mechanics around them and why the players would want them. Also a short table that displays their loyalty and reactions is given, as well as directions to the DM and players on how to play with them. It’s a clearly superior set of rules than what’s presented in AD&D.

I think that the best way to play is to do what players did in the 80’s - play Basic and AD&D, taking what you want from either system, and blend them together as necessary.

Personally, I’m still committed to playing AD&D strictly as written, but this is seeming more and more like a personal crusade now than a casual hobby. And, without the benefit of a live GM with experience in AD&D, the guidance in the Basic rulebooks will have to suffice.

T1: The Village of Hommlet solo

Reading through a premade module is so boring! And T1 is set up like a pure sandbox, so there is no apparent story beyond what you can glean from minor details and what naturally occurs during play.  It feels like it was designed for an experienced DM.

Reading through dry paragraphs of world details and short descriptions of NPCs and locations makes my eyes glaze over. I guess the only way to figure out what this module is about is to play it solo.

As soon as my four AD&D characters make it out of their first dungeon

Starting T1 solo with a party of 4 level 1 adventurers -
 - they begin by arriving at the town with their previous equipment
 - movement in town is the same as combat in a dungeon, so they are about to move 120 feet in a 1 minute round
 - they see houses and head to the Inn of the Welcome Wench 

An Actual Review of B/X and BECMI D&D

They're the same. The BE of BECMI is identical to B/X, intentionally so, as some passages are lifted word-for-word. There are a few minor changes - BECMI smoothens out the Cleric and Magic-Users' spell progressions, and stretches out the Thieves' Skill progression over 36 levels. The Thief skill progression is the only flaw, as it lowers the class's chance of success per level, but there are many solutions to this problem online, not the least of which is simply to go back to the old progression system.

 Mentzer Basic and Expert were also written as tutorials for absolute novices who may have never even heard of role playing games before. This was intentional, as the BECMI sets were TSR's forays into the international market. As such, Mentzer Basic includes a solo tutorial adventure and a group tutorial dungeon spread out over two books, instead of Moldvay Basic which only has a sample dungeon and a short example of play. For modern, experienced gamers, the tutorials are considered unnecessary. 

 The 1981 Basic set came with both Moldvay's Basic rulebook and an adventure, B2 Keep on the Borderlands. This clear separation of rules and adventure made referencing the rules much easier. The 1983 set came with a Player's Book and DM book, both which had tutorials and rules split between them, which made them more difficult to reference.

The BECMI Expert book contains additional content over B/X Expert in the section for Dungeon Masters. B/X presents a map of Karameikos and the Known World as a sample wilderness, BECMI presents a sample town called "Threshold" with a light amount of detail, and some quest hooks around it.

What BECMI adds over B/X is extra content for higher levels, the CMI books. The Companion book, in particular, adds rules for stronghold construction, management, and mass warfare; making it unique. To get a similar situation in OD&D you would have to incorporate the Chainmail Mass Combat rules, which were originally meant as a tabletop miniatures wargame anyway, or AD&D 2e's Battlesystem, which is an awful approximation of it. The Companion set's stronghold rules also let you play out a small Sims-like domain management game, if you'd like.

The Master and Immortal sets add in high level artifacts, weapon specializations, the quests for Immortality, and the whole new Immortals system of combat and magic. Most players and groups are obsessed with dungeon crawling and fighting larger enemies, and throw out the late game content of BECMI, and I think that's a shame, because the value I see in the Master and Immortal sets is that they provide new and unique gameplay additions that keep the game from going stale. Modern D&D has no such content, and simply adds more powers and more class features for players to attain as they gain increasing numbers of levels, and I really think that limits the scope of the game.

B/X is generally praised for the conciseness of its text and its ability to convey all the information of the game with the brevity of its language. BECMI uses longer form explanations and more advice and guidance on how to play the game. For this reason there is an impression that the Mentzer books talk down to the reader, while the Moldvay, Cook and Marsh books use more adult language. Personally, I've never had an issue with it. I'm still struggling to figure out what the hell Gary Gygax is trying to convey in the OD&D and AD&D books.

A complaint I've seen online is that it is hard to find rules in Mentzer BE due to its tutorial nature. While the rules of the game are introduced slowly in the tutorial, they are all collected and presented as a reference at the end of the book. The organization and wording is identical to Moldvay Basic, as I've mentioned before, so I don't understand this complaint. The Marsh and Cook Expert book, in particular, has terrible organization and the Mentzer Expert book doesn't change any of it, but just uses more words in the descriptions.

The appeal of B/X is in the brevity of the text and the limited scope of the gameplay that covers only what OD&D did, with its focus on Underworld and Wilderness Adventures. With the OS Essentials book out, which takes the content of the B/X levels and reorganizes them into something better referenced for play, its become the dominant game books for OSR type D&D.

The BECMI books go far beyond, delivering on the promises of OD&D by including domain level play, more integration with the Known World campaign setting, and rules for deity-tier Immortals play that doesn't devolve into killing Odin for his magic spear.

As an aside, some people prefer the amateurish art of the B/X books, as they feel it more accurately represents the gritty, high risk dungeon crawling style of early D&D play, and dislike the more professional, high fantasy art of the BECMI sets.

In the end it comes down to personal preference. Some players prefer to reference B/X as a slim set of volumes to keep on hand for game sessions, while others prefer the longer form tutorials and explanations of BECMI as a way to learn the game. Mechanically, there is no real difference, in fact you can see BECMI as merely as an incorporation of errata and an update to the B/X rules.

A point worth mentioning, and something really negative about BECMI was the politics surrounding its creation. As part of the ongoing lawsuit between Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, TSR attempted to remove everything copyrightable from D&D and keep it in AD&D, which is why a lot of the special races like Drow don't appear, and the names of magic spells such as "Tenser's Floating Disk" were renamed to just "Floating Disk".  Frank Mentzer seems like he didn't want to be caught in the middle, and credited both the creators of D&D in his publications. The BECMI sets were also created to be TSR's international products, which explains the shift in tone and language of the rulebooks.

B/X and BECMI are so similar, and they're in continuity with Original D&D "0 edition" in a way that the two editions of AD&D are not, that the choice of which to play and purchase really is a matter of personal preference. Most old school fans of D&D tend to stick with whichever they got first.

OD&D is not a complete game

I made this comment on one of my videos and got called out for it by a fan of the original edition of Dungeons and Dragons. According to him, there's a large fanbase that still plays and enjoys the original game and that I could gain more insight on it by seeing what they do. Fair enough, and I dove into looking at the original brown box set and the released supplements.

As a caveat, I haven't played a session of OD&D so I'm limited to reading the books and looking up what the fans have to say about it, but I stand by my earlier assessment. The original 3 books of Dungeons and Dragons were never meant to be a stand alone game. They're a product of the war game culture of the 1960's and 1970's, where the players took many different sources from many different systems and blended them into their own campaigns. The first 3 booklets of D&D were introduced into this culture with the expectation that they would be added as one part of the players' ongoing campaign. The books themselves explicitly assume use of the combat rules from the game Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures and the wilderness journey rules from Avalon Hill's game Outdoor Survival.

The original release of D&D is a skeleton of a game meant to be swapped into the context of a larger ongoing campaign. It provides a basis for resolving man-to-man combat and focuses on the individual character scale, where more prominent games focused on the scale of large armies. It was the first game to introduce elements of fantasy fiction such as mythical monsters and spell casting, and thus caused a revolution. As D&D became more commercially available, the gaps in the system and the need for other games' rules became more noticeable issues for players who weren't part of the Lake Geneva wargaming club, so Gygax and TSR released 3 supplemental books to fill that need. As such, to fully play D&D as its own game you need the original three books, Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, along with the supplements Greyhawk: Supplement I, Blackmoor: Supplement II, and Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry.  The other two supplements, Gods, Demigods and Heroes and Swords & Spells are mostly unnecessary.

As I said earlier, D&D is a skeleton of a game and to truly play, you must flesh out the campaign yourself and add in your own game rules and campaign ideas. Fans of the system see this as its greatest strength, in that you're allowed and encouraged to let your imagination go wild and add in whatever you want. Dave Arneson, the co-creator of the game, did just such a thing with his Blackmoor campaigns, which brought in elements from Chinese wuxia films, space age science fiction weapons, nuclear power and whatever else.

But in my view that means that you're not playing D&D, you're creating and playing your own game with D&D as a guide. In effect, you're house ruling and homebrewing it all yourself. And that was the intent all along, and its greatest draw, and also how its creators actually played. Gary Gygax himself admits that he basically only uses some tables and math resolutions, and prefers to just do everything else on the fly at the table.

If I had to do that, though, why would I play D&D? Why wouldn't I just make up my own RPG system without the wild inconsistencies and issues of D&D? With Blackjack, and hookers. If I had to homebrew it all, I'd rather just homebrew a whole game myself. Which I guess is what happened after Wizards of the Coast released the Open Gaming License.

This sentiment that most players weren't playing D&D but their own game that was mechanically very dissimilar to the original was echoed by Gary Gygax in his introduction for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. There was a backlash of that from the fans, but I think there's some truth his statement.

D&D's greatest strength is that it created and introduced the idea for Role Play gaming, and provided the beginning framework on how to do so. I find it strange that, once this idea became globally available, its fans started to just try and 'improve' D&D, rather than create their own better systems wholesale. D&D isn't all that role play games could be - after all, Vampire: The Masquerade is very different from D&D and yet is a popular role playing game in its own right.

Dr. John Eric Holmes famously studied the core booklets of D&D before coming to the conclusion that the game was "impossible to play" as written, and created his own revised version of the game called Basic Dungeons & Dragons, published officially by TSR. Other players not from Lake Geneva, WI came to the same conclusion and created their own spinoffs as well, such as Tunnels & Trolls.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a much more feature complete game than D&D. It's meant to be an end to end campaign system in itself, without the need for mandatory supplements in order to be played. In a way, it's also more restrictive than the original game and is much less modular, as adding elements from other fiction or from other war games will break the already skewed balance and can actually change the nature of the game. And a phenomenon it shares with its predecessor is that AD&D also needs to be house ruled before it can effectively be played.

There exists a community of players that still enjoy Original Dungeons & Dragons, and still rank it as their favorite version of the game. I think that they do so because it was the first game that they played, and not on the intrinsic merits of the system itself. As a modern player, there's very little reason to go back to OD&D except as a historical curiosity. There are so many revisions, future editions, spinoffs and clones that fill the shortcomings of the original game that there's no real reason to play the first by itself. If players really want to homebrew their own game, the easiest method would be to use the d20 SRD and create one that way.  As a lover of history and hoarder of childhood antiques, I can see the appeal of wanting to own and play original D&D, but functionally I cannot recommend it above later, successive editions of Tabletop Role Playing Games.

My current experiment is to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as written (if not as intended) and in doing so I've realized that there is a very specific style of play it encourages, and a solid vision to the game. It's not a very strict system, but changing either changes the nature of the game, and I fully encourage players to do so to find the style of game and the vision they like the best and want to play.  I believe the reason that so many old school players, 'grognards', dislike the modern edition of D&D is because it really does replace both the style and vision of AD&D with something else, something a lot more forgiving, consequence free and wildly fantastical

My favorite overview of OD&D comes from this site: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2603/roleplaying-games/reactions-to-odd

High praise for the open ended, freewheeling nature of OD&D from the OG http://kaskoid.blogspot.com/2016/02/how-i-helped-to-pull-rope-that-tolled.html

and an actual mechanical comparisons of the two systems: http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2012/02/damn-you-gygax-part-1.html

Procedure for solo dungeon adventuring with AD&D

1. Random dungeon generation (Appendix in the Dungeon Masters Guide)

• Generate rooms from Table V 
• Generate room features
• Generate monsters, traps
• Determine treasure in room 
• Generate doors and exits
• Use graph paper for dungeon layout, and a dry erase battle map for miniatures combat 

2.  Player Characters begin exploring

• Record the beginning of each turn

3. Engage monsters

• Determine surprise (p. 61 COMBAT)
• Determine encounter distance (p.62 )
• Consider avoiding or parleying with monsters (p. 63)
• Consider pursuit and evasion of pursuit if detected (p. 67)
• Roll Initiative and begin combat procedures
•       Procedures from  Here
• Tally the total rounds of combat to determine time spent, rounding up to next whole turn

4. After encounter has been resolved or avoided, PCs explore room

• Use Movement and Searching procedures (p. 96)
• Roll checks to determine if PCs are aware of traps, hidden objects, items and secret doors
• Distribute treasure(s)
• Tally the total time spent in room search procedures

5. Move to next room

• Attempt listen at doors, lockpicking, door bashing
• Organize PCs in movement formation
• Move  through current room (all intra room movement is assumed to happen in one turn)*
• Exit room and go to new room

6. Repeat steps 1 - 5 for successive areas in the dungeon, until the party decides to escape or rest


*I've come to the determination that movement speed per room is largely irrelevant. The large distances a PC can cover in one turn (whether encumbered or not) makes it more convenient to assume that the PC is doing all sorts of little wandering around the room throughout the whole turn, and even moving from one end of the room to the other can all be managed within one turn. Only separate actions, such as detection of hidden features or picking locks, add extra time to what is spent in a room.

This is a house rule, but I consider it a 'soft' house rule since it doesn't contradict or override any existing rule, and preserves the structure of the original rules.  Also, AD&D is a game where the judgement of the DM is absolutely required in order to make the game run at all.

AD&D 1e Solo - Character Creation

So its been a while since I last broached the subject of solo play. In that time I've been rereading the AD&D Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, I must have read them dozens if not a hundred times already, in order to get a grip on the rules. AD&D is a very complex game and it expects you to have a solid knowledge of the rules before you even begin to set down and play. I don't know how teenagers in the 1980's did it, I assume they took whatever rules they remembered at the moment and decided to wing it for the rest. Nevertheless the goal of this exercise was to play AD&D as close to the book as possible, so it was important to have a very firm understanding of the game's rules before I ever put any characters through a dungeon.

There's a lot of elements in First Edition that I found more useful or better than modern editions. Firstly, that the Dungeon Master's Guide is presented as the 'core' rulebook while the Player's Handbook only really describes a character and the character's options. I found this very useful in actually playing the game as I only needed the DMG as a reference. In modern editions of D&D the core rules are presented in the PHB and the DMG is presented as 'extra' rules for setting up environments, adventures, dungeons and campaign elements. I found this to be more frustrating as I had to go back and forth between both PHB and DMG during the course of play to reference all the rules.

I also liked the First Edition's Character Sheets, though I was initially overwhelmed by the level of detail presented on them. Without them, and coming from a background in modern D&D, I would have otherwise only copied the base statistics of my character, items and equipment, and probably a couple of other optional details. This means that I would have spent a large amount of game time flipping back and forth between various tables to get the data I needed, so having entries for all of them on the character sheet itself was a welcome addition. Although when I started to create a standard Human Fighter, I noticed that a lot of those entries were being left blank, so its when I switched to a Dwarf character and started incorporating more complicated elements such as age, race and equipment adjustments such as shields and helms that I noticed my character sheet becoming more filled out.  I figure that to get the most use out of the sheet, you'd have to create an Unearthed Arcana version Paladin-Cavalier.

So the first character I decided to focus on was a Dwarf Fighter. In First Edition it seems that most players avoided playing as demi-human races in order to remain unrestricted by a level cap. I don't plan on my characters making it much farther than level one anyway, and as I mentioned earlier the more complicated character build ended up being the more interesting one as well. Otherwise, it seems like the best way to play a demi-human is to multiclass with them, but that would also slow their level advancement to a crawl by splitting experience gained in half between both classes. Perhaps it doesn't have as much of an effect in practice, but before I playtest it I couldn't really say.

And then there are the issues I have with First Edition AD&D, which I find is common among the internet where fans speak praise of the system and complain about it in equal measure. It's most evident in the writing style. I actually enjoy reading the published sourcebooks, they read more like books on philosophy or long winded erudite discussions of the system itself than a manual for play. Many passages are evocative of the style of play and truly immerse you in this new type of game that Gygax had created, but as actual, technical instruction it is an obscure, confusing mess.

AD&D Time and movement rules make no sense

and create wildly inconsistent timing issues while recording the adventure. Nevertheless, I think the best approach would be to not think about it to much, and just run the system as it is laid out, and see if it causes any tangible issues during a live session.

If anything it would probably mean that time spent traversing the dungeon would be trivially quick, while time spent in combat and traveling outdoors would be greatly magnified.

And apparently, this is why they make no sense: http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2015/02/when-inch-is-not-inch-in-ad.html