Daily travel time in AD&D 1e

The PHB states that the players can move their inches rate in miles in "a half day's travel". Would that imply that a full day's travel is double that number? One would assume that means 12 hours, but if you cross-reference those numbers with the DMG, you'll notice those numbers are still too low. But they do work out if you use 14-16 hours of travel per day.

AD&D 1e assumes 16 hours of travel per day.

It may not be the most realistic metric, but I like the idea that characters are spending the entire day sans rest time, traveling. The 12 hour travel rule otherwise gives characters 4 hours of downtime in which they are not sleeping or traveling. AD&D 2e explicitly states 10 hours of travel, allowing for 6 hours of downtime and 8 hours of sleep every day. Kind of a waste, I think, even if it is more realistic.

AD&D 1e loyalty

 BtB, henchmen have a 50% loyalty chance. This number is modified by charisma score and several properties of the individual, such as alignment, training, treatment by liege, length of service, etc.  It looks like all this stuff should be calculated ahead of time and written on the henchman's sheet somewhere, or kept in a separate log by the DM, and incrementally modified when appropriate. It's another level of bookkeeping in an already bookkeeping heavy game. 

Instead, it's possible to only calculate these numbers when necessary, and instead of summing them into a static challenge target, turn them into modifiers to the dice roll. The base score to fail a loyalty check remains 50%, but now all the modifiers are reversed and added to the d100 die roll. It's a simple algebraic equation:

    BtB: 50% + modifiers > d100 score

Just reverse it to become: 50% > d100 - modifiers

This will take longer at the table, but I am becoming much more amenable to spending time at the table, than spending time outside it to get stuff done. AD&D itself is a very cumbersome game where doing even simple things BtB can take a very long time fiddling around with dice math.

House rules for AD&D

Source books

Core Rules only. No UA, OA, Survival Guides, or other nonsense.
 

No Psionics, Bards must follow the requirements to level in Fighter and Thief first. We will be using the Weapon vs. Armor class tables, and by the book bean-counting encumbrance

- Stats are 4d6 drop lowest, arrange to taste.
   - if you don't like your stats, you must reroll a full set of 6 stats

- Worn Armor refers to armor on the body only. Gloves, Boots, Helmets and others must be worn separately.
- A shirt can only hold 100 gp weight. To carry any more you'll need to carry sacks, backpacks, belts etc.
- Riding a mount allows characters to fight as a cavalry class. Your mount does not gain secondary attacks for you.
- If you fire a ranged missile into a melee, you have an equal chance of hitting any engaged combatant
- Characters must drink an unknown potion entirely to determine its effects.

Phased Combat

I use phased combat where each side moves in order per phase. Combat rounds are 1 minute long and are broken up into 10 segments of 6-seconds each. The phases are:

Surprise

Initiative

Movement

Missile

Melee

Players have to declare their actions before initiative is rolled and combat phases are resolved.

Multiple Actions During Combat

If a player wishes to perform multiple actions, then every action is broken down into segments of 6-seconds and added up, to a total of 10.

For example, if a player wishes to move, drink a potion,sheathe one weapon and draw another, and attempt an attack, then first the segment of initiative is added to the distance moved (Movement rate x 1' foot per segment), then any number of segments for extra actions like drinking or switching weapons, then the weapon speed factor is totaled up. If the result is 10 or less, the player is successful in performing all actions. If it is less, the player cannot finish all actions.

Surprise

Every player will roll surprise for themselves.  Generally, characters will be surprised on a roll of 1 or 2 on d6. 

If there is a Ranger in the party, he will be surprised on a roll of 1, and any monster he is attempting to surprise will be surprised on 1-3 on d6.

Initiative

The party caller will roll initiative at the beginning of each round of combat, and the DM will roll for the monsters. The lowest die wins, and the die score indicates the segment of the round that the party acts on.

Movement Phase

The party that won initiative can move first, and the party that lost can follow. Movement rate x10' is the number of feet that a character can move in combat.

If a character is engaged in melee at the beginning of movement phase, they may choose to make a fighting withdrawal or a retreat. A fighting withdrawal disallows the use of an attack in that round. A retreat allows a character to flee at 10x his normal speed, but exposes them to rear attacks.

Missile Phase

This phase encompasses the firing of missile and thrown weapons, and of magic spells and magic item discharges.

Firing a missile weapon into an existing melee will result in a chance of hitting any combatant in that melee. The long length of the combat round presupposes much movement, positioning, feinting and striking, so it is not possible to accurately aim at an opponent in an engaged melee from an advantageous "angle" for very long.

It is not possible to fire a missile weapon when an opponent engages you in melee. If a character were to try, he would be struck by a melee attack and lose his missile attacks for the round.

If a spellcaster attempts to cast in melee, the casting time of the spell will be compared to the weapon speed factor of the melee combatant to determine who strikes first. If the spellcaster is struck before completing the spell, the spell is lost.

Melee Phase

Weapon Speed Factor is only used to determine first strike on simultaneous initiative. Melee combat is always resolved at the end of a combat round.

Thoughts on grid squares

In AD&D, three characters can fit in a space 10 feet wide. Technically, this means that 9 characters could crowd together in a 10’x10’ square.

This has heavy implications in combat.

 - Crowded 3 to an area, characters would not be able to use weapons that have a space required greater than 3’.

 - Firing a missile into a crowded 10’ area could hit any target randomly, as accurate fire would be very difficult. 

 - Within that 10 ft. sq. area, characters in combat would not be statically staring at each other but constantly moving and jockeying for position.

 - A character fleeing combat from such cramped conditions would obviously be open to attack from another.

 - it forces you to look at the “space required” stat on the weapon chart and think in real world terms about the space, reach, and formation of the combatants, treating each 10’ sq as a miniature sandbox for the combatants to fight in.

I feel like this was the intent of the original rules but was never used or implemented correctly, and designers and players abandoned it going forward. Basic D&D and beyond use 5 feet squares with the assumption that characters would attack from adjacent squares. Contrary to that, I think in AD&D you must attack from within the same square as your opponent (unless your weapon has a reach of greater than 10 feet)

I’m going to rescale all my maps to 10 feet squares and tell my players that they must be within the same square as their opponent to attack. 

AD&D as a solo miniatures game

Just play Advanced Heroquest instead 

Solitaire D&D is a curious enigma. On the one hand, D&D is obviously a cooperative game for 3 or more players, one DM and at least two players. On the other hand, the early versions of D&D, and AD&D especially, were clearly tested solo. There is a wealth of content in the Dungeon Masters Guide for the solo gamer, buried deeply within its charts and tables and dice mechanics. The only thing the DMG does not provide is the story or plot of the game, but random dungeon crawling and wilderness travel does not require a story, and in fact in purist OSR circles random grid and hex encounters are considered the gold standard of play, and so is perfect for DM less play.

The first issue of The Strategic Review included a method for solitaire dungeon crawling and that method is copied and expanded in the first appendix of the DMG. Random dungeon generation, random generation of wilderness terrain and the attached random encounters and treasure rewards create all the content necessary for a game session. On top of that, the DMG has more tables for random town encounters, NPC generation, room contents, furnishing, unidentified potions and magic items, etc. All this random content may lead to weird and logically inconsistent results, and is sometimes frustrating for the solo player, but that is the result of lacking a dedicated DM.

The second best part of AD&D solitaire play is that nearly all the game systems have a dice mechanic attached. It's not the universal d20 system of 3.5 and 5e D&D, but it leads to more unique, context specific outcomes. To resolve the outcome of any action, a player simply has to pretend to be a DM for a moment and choose a proper mechanic and set of dice to roll, and let chance determine the outcome. Or not, and grant automatic success, no one will know, you're playing solo.  The amount of rules for the standard AD&D game is so vast, however, that it's possible to get through a whole game with just the given mechanics. This does restrict the kind of things you can do in the game however, and the really crazy imaginative out-of-the-box thinking that happens in regular group sessions doesn't really happen while following solo mechanics. Also in a live session the DM can determine success or failure without the need for dice, and generate content without needing tables.

The first time I played AD&D solo, I tried to stay close to "theater of the mind" style gameplay. Armed with nothing but character sheets, a notebook, graph paper, the rulebooks and some dice, I sat down to play the game, using the notebook as a journal and log. I did not really enjoy the experience, and it felt more like sitting down to do my taxes or take study notes rather than playing a game. Using miniatures and a battle map, however, greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the experience.  I now keep a large dry erase gridded battlemap as a general play space. On this map I keep small notes in the corner pertaining to the scenario I'm doing, and make ticks to mark off turns and rounds as an adventure clock. I keep miniatures in the marching formation and when it comes to the dungeon I only draw the rooms on the battle map in the event of an encounter or other situation that requires precise movement. Otherwise I draw the map of the dungeon on graph paper (the way a mapper in a live party should do), and only transfer the layout to my battle map in the event of an encounter. I then run the encounter as a tactical skirmish wargame, noting reaction checks and morale where appropriate, and then move on.

I like miniatures, I like visual maps, I like tactical wargaming, and I like writing quick notes on the board and erasing them rather than scratching everything out on notepaper. It made the game more visual and tactile for me, but it did result in more sprawl of game components. My character sheets, adventure clock, battlemap, miniatures, DM screen, notes and dice took up almost all of the dining room table to play. As a result, set up and teardown takes some time, and the components are not easily portable. And as I have young children, they cannot be left out for long. But these are the price to pay to play D&D on a personal, intermittent schedule.

While solitaire D&D play will never be as free wheeling and imaginative as a group session, it can approximate the fun and provide a unique experience in its own right, and the AD&D system provides a lot of content and mechanics to be used in service of this goal.

My personal O/AD&D shitbrew

After delving into old school TSR-era D&D rule systems and dealing with some frustrations while playing sessions "by the book", I've come to realize that I prefer a synthesis of OD&D and AD&D for my games. By far the best supplement for OD&D is the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, which drowns the reader in rules that expand on and explain the ones introduced in the OD&D LBBs. The Players Handbook, on the other hand, basically replaces material from Men&Magic, by expanding class and race options and increasing the numerical inflation of all ability scores. It is specifically the numerical inflation of character abilities in the PHB that is my issue with the system, so instead of that book I will be relying on Men & Magic.

My personal canon of books would be the OD&D 3 books and Supplement I: Greyhawk, using all the options from all 4 books. That includes the Thief and the Paladin, Demihuman multiclass options, percentile strength charts, Magic-User chance to know spells, variable weapon damage, variable hit die, and monster XP determination. The Monster and Dungeon levels tables from Monsters & Treasure and Greyhawk will be used (really who needs more than 6 dungeon levels?), but just for kicks I might incorporate material from the Monster Manual because all of that content is directly compatible and was basically written for OD&D anyway.

Combat is probably the thorniest issue of Original and Advanced D&D. OD&D actually doesn't have a combat system, just a chart describing the use of a d20 to replace Chainmail's hit determination matrix, and for everything else it refers the reader back to Chainmail. Since the d20 has become the standard for D&D combat, I'm more inclined to use that system, and the one time I played with Chainmail's combat as written our group quickly abandoned it for being too complicated. I am a fan of the 2d6 system though, it seems more similar to hex-and-chit board wargames, so depending on what dice I have at hand I might use Chainmail's system. The default combat system in my games, however, will be AD&D's combat sequence with the to-hit matrices and weapon damage charts from OD&D. I have found a use for the weapon vs armor charts and plan to use them, but only if player characters start becoming unreasonably hard to hit, and only the weapon vs. armor from OD&D. There is no reason for the ridiculous list of polearms from AD&D or the negative Armor Classes.

So where at all possible, material from OD&D will be used, including the additions and changes included in Greyhawk, and the AD&D DMG and Monster Manual will be used to fill in options and provide extra material when necessary. This keeps the simple and easy to use systems from OD&D, except in the cases where they're not straightforward and easy to use, and then material from AD&D will be used to supplement it. I figure this creates a complete ecosystem in which to play which shores up the flaws that both games would have separately, and yet retains the spirit of something that is recognizably D&D. 

AD&D weapon vs armor considerations

AD&D characters have 3 armor classes. Armor class of base armor, armor class with dexterity bonus, and armor class with shield and dexterity bonus. Different types of attacks hit different armor classes. Frontal attacks strike against the maximum AC provided by worn armor, shield and dexterity bonus. Flank attacks negate the shield. Rear attacks negate the shield and dexterity bonus. Only the official AD&D sheets have separate entries for the different armor types, all the online player created sheets I've seen ignore this completely.

The weapon vs armor tables are used against worn armor and shields only. This is due to an obfuscation of the Man-to-Man combat table from Chainmail, which explicitly gave certain weapons bonuses against certain armors. A shield's bonus is only applicable to armor class depending on its size. Small shields only provide a bonus against 1 attack a round, Large shields provide a bonus against 3 attacks per round.

The only reason to use the weapon vs. armor charts is to limit the power of swords. The base stats of swords do more damage and have more favorable reach and speed factors than all other weapons. However, swords only get a "to hit" bonus against the lightest types of armor, and do poorly against heavy armors (except the two handed sword). There are less than a handful of weapons that can harm the heavy armors - maces, morning stars, the heavy cavalry lance, flails, picks and halberds. Basically, clerics and paladins present the greatest danger to heavily armored foes.

The weapon vs armor table basically makes armors that were hard to hit, even harder to hit and armors that are easy to hit, even easier. Most monsters in AD&D do not carry the weapons required to hit heavily armored characters, so in order to provide a challenge the DM has to specifically equip monsters with the higher bonus providing weapons.

The Sword, Two-Handed is far and away the best weapon in any consideration. It has a bonus to hit every class and does the most damage of any weapon. It has a favorable length and space required to swing. It's only drawbacks are its high weapon speed factor, which means it will lose initiative against ties, and in the case of a tie the opponent may make multiple attacks against the two-hander, and it will basically be unable to interrupt a magic user from casting a spell. In my games, I allow players to walk through 10' corridors at a formation of 3 characters abreast, but restrict them to using only weapons that have less than 3' space required. The "standard" D&D grid uses 5' squares, and most player characters choose to march two abreast down a corridor. The two handed sword requires 6' space to use, so I'm going to have to come down hard on that requirement to restrict players from using a two-handed sword in situations where they would hit an ally.

Most polearms have long reaches and have small space required to use. This makes them really advantageous in tight formations and to fight over the space of another character. Attacking from the second rank is the greatest advantage of polearms and is the justification for their use. Once the polearm bearer is engaged directly, he should abandon his polearm for a more favorable personal weapon.

Frank Mentzer considers AD&D to be more of a wargame than the looser, more open OD&D strain. I agree, and prefer to lean heavier on the wargame aspects of AD&D than the magic. I try to treat the dungeon as a long field expedition.

All this was prompted by a game of AD&D in B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, in which I had two Paladin player characters, who started with average armor and then quickly bought plate armor and shields and became nigh invincible to monster attacks and weapon damage. The only way to harm those characters was to equip monsters specifically designed to harm them, and to play them to the hilt using ambush and flanking tactics. It really drove home to me that the real difference between AD&D and any other strain of D&D is the combat aspect of it, and if you're not using all of AD&D's combat rules then you might as well play any other edition.

Things I legitimately don't like about AD&D

The number inflation

Armor Class in Basic and OD&D goes from 9 to 2, and fits in neatly with the math from a d20 roll. The only way to gain armor was to buy and equip your character from a small selection of armors and shields.  In AD&D, armor class goes from 10 to -10, and your character's dexterity bonus is added to your it, and certain classes like the Paladin get special boosts to armor class. The THAC0 of monsters and PCs rises quickly as well, while AC itself doesn't change from its initial value. This means that, to keep up the player's protection from damage, by the high levels they need armors +3 and shields +2, and other such nonsense.

This sort of AC number inflation, and the irregular way in which it rises, eventually led to the 3e notion of constantly increasing stat bonuses and 4e's level scaled AC. In AD&D's AC system, I see the beginnings of the trend that eventually led D&D to the numbers game that it now is.

I understand that, at the time, AC and to-hit inflation seemed like a good idea, or maybe it was an unintended consequence of how early D&D was played, once the PCs started getting their hands on magic swords and armor. IMO, Chainmail had the best system for magic weapons - a magicked weapon granted at most a +1 bonus to a roll of 2d6. "Double magic" weapons and "Triple magic" were almost unheard of.

In modern D&D, if players don't have +5 weapons by the time they're out of the early levels, they scream blood. To me, this cheapens the nature of magic weapons, and turns them into simple stat bonuses. Its the same silliness that video games have, when by the time your character hits lvl 100 he's carrying a rare legendary masterwork sword of vampiric fire +10.

Challenging the Players

I went into AD&D with the notion that if the players accurately described what they were doing, I would allow them success or failure on their task depending on their description. I thought this would be a refreshing change from modern D&D, where everything is resolved with a skill check and a die roll.

Unfortunately, this did not work in practice. My players simply described what they were doing and blazed through most challenges with nary an effort. How would you adjudicate climbing a tree in AD&D, without the Thief's climb skill? Surely you don't need to specialize as a thief to climb a tree. 5e's athletics or acrobatics skill would be an easy fit, but if I use AD&D's climbing speed rules and give my player an instant success on the climb attempt, the loss of a few segments of time is hardly worth tracking and what should have been a mobility challenge just became a few seconds of wasted time IRL.

 This is especially true for the most common dungeon challenges - locks and traps. By letting players describe 'alternate' methods of cracking them open and disabling them, I merely taxed them by only 1 turn of action, and so they moved past the challenge virtually unhindered. The occasional wandering monster did little to impede them. On the other hand, D&D 5e would approach these challenges with a die roll that has to meet a target Difficulty Class number. Failing die rolls is often frustrating, but the hidden upside is that it causes a natural deterrent to player behavior. If they fail a die roll multiple times, in the AD&D system, that means that they're losing multiple turns. Which means that other players are doing other things, and there are more frequent wandering monster encounters.

Sadly, it seems like I'll have to implement more dice rolls in my game. A 1-in-6 chance or % out of 100 seem like the best fit for AD&D. The Difficulty Class system is a better fit for BECMI, since it uses attribute stat bonuses anyway.

Hirelings

AD&D combat works best as a tactical skirmish game. This is hard to execute when every player only controls one character, so for this reason I think the early editions of D&D implemented retainers or henchmen and hirelings. However, I never understood henchmen as written. It seemed needlessly complicated to acquire and employ them, ordering them around added extra steps to every action, and in the strictest case the DM is supposed to run them, making it extra work on top of everything else. In the sense of using them as replacement characters for the players, I never understood why you couldn't just reroll a new character when your main one died, and a level 1 PC who would ostensibly need henchmen as backup is not allowed to recruit them as written, as they do not have enough fame to attract any followers. So its safe to say that I never used henchmen as written in AD&D.

Instead I use the hirelings list and allow players to employ mercenary soldiers as level 0 or level 1 fighters. They come with their own arms and equipment, and require the monthly cost as well as a split of treasure, and generally I let the players run the hirelings unless they wanted to do something exceptionally dangerous, which is when I call for a morale roll. The OD&D rules for retainers is much more usable, and much less complicated for handling their loyalty, morale, and general use.  I still cap the number of hirelings in the dungeon to the PC's charisma score - otherwise players will march whole armies down into the dungeon for a clean sweep.

Using this method transforms AD&D into a more tactical game, and away from the traditional RPG. Its advantage is that it makes combat more interesting and less instantly lethal, and it forces players to care about characters beyond their own, but the downside is that it takes away from the pure roleplaying experience and many players do not want to run multiple characters at once in this fashion.

One thing I had noticed, though, is that players love subjugating and turning enemy NPCs into their service. Goblins, especially, are prey to players who like to threaten them within an inch of their life and then force them to become minions. Honestly, I love it. I'd prefer it if players kept turning enemy NPCs into their henchmen. The caveat, of course, is that when the PC dies, the monster henchmen all desert.

Random dungeon generation for solo play

Is almost exactly like homework. In fact, using dice for all content generation and action resolution requires you to write notes in a log to keep track of it all, an exercise that’s mechanically indistinguishable from doing actual paperwork. Playing D&D solo leans heavily on the “theater of the mind” play style, which necessitates the need to record everything. As a solo RPG player, you take on the role of the DM, player, and as many PCs and NPCs as exist in the game, and managing all that with pen and paper is tedious.  The bookkeeping killed solo RPG for me.

So I looked to board games, miniatures, map tiles, and any other tactile player aids I could use to eliminate the massive overhead of solo play, and more accurately emulate a live session of D&D, where nobody records anything but everyone is following along.

I accomplished this by limiting the scope of the game. Instead of the freewheeling open nature of a full RPG, I restricted it down to just dungeon crawling and hex crawling. The AD&D 1e rules are very comprehensive on the topic of dungeon crawling, and while its wilderness travel rules aren’t the best, they are extensively detailed. These rules can be supplemented and in cases replaced by the more elegant, streamlined rules from the BECMI sets.

Randomly generating an endless dungeon or wilderness becomes boring in short order, but the BECMI books have a crucial bit of advice that’s completely absent from the AD&D text, which is to first create a goal for players entering the dungeon. This is also an idea lifted from the D&D adventure system games - create a goal room, and add it to the random generator table. The point of the game then becomes to adventure until the goal room is reached.

The Basic rule book admonishes to choose a scenario first when creating a dungeon, but the 5e DMG has the most comprehensive list of options, and even tables for story content and plot twists that can occur during the game. These story game charts can add an extra dimension to the otherwise staid dungeon crawling.

And the easiest way to replace dice rolling on a table is to transfer the entries onto cards, then after drawing a card, replace it into the deck and reshuffle it.

A brief of different editions of D&D for solo

AD&D 1e is the best edition for solitaire play. It not only comes with a section on "Random dungeon generation for solo play", but with the Random Wilderness Generation table, it can also be used for solo wilderness exploration, and the many, many other charts can easily be adapted into random generators as well. This means you can randomly create whole towns, npcs in detail, encounters, and even new monsters and magic items. Using all this content generation with the random encounter chances, and the solo player can readily simulate the procedural creation and exploration of a roguelike videogame, such as the Diablo series.

AD&D 1e is a very rules-heavy game, and has many subsystems governing player actions, and many rules for resolving those actions. This makes adjudicating certain situations just a matter of following the guidance in the book, and whole games could be played without any external resources. Although, AD&D does place a lot of importance on the role of the Dungeon Master, but those situations that the book does not cover can be filled in with a GM emulator, such as the Mythic GME.  This, however, means that playing AD&D solo is excruciatingly slow, and requires a lot of bookkeeping.

D&D BECMI is very similar to AD&D but is much simplified. In fact, many of the rules and systems described in BECMI have a direct counterpart in AD&D, but with simpler mechanics.  What the BECMI rulebooks are missing, though, is a random method for creating a map or a dungeon, but they do suggest a procedural method for creating one, and then randomly stocking them with monsters, treasures and traps in the case of dungeons, or with random encounters in the wilderness. The Expert book also comes with maps of Threshold, Karameikos and the Known World, so maybe creating a custom map is unnecessary when the player can follow the adventuring rules to gallivant across the prebuilt setting.  The looser nature of the D&D rules means that the player is freer to pursue any imagined course of action, without consulting the rules, and without needing a die roll for everything.

5th Edition D&D is built upon the chassis of the d20 system, and as such has a universal system of conflict resolution, which the AD&D and OD&D systems lack. 5e's basic method for handling any situation is to assign it a "Challenge Rating", and then resolve success based on the roll of a d20, modified by ability and skill scores.  This makes the base system much easier to learn and run, and provides an elegant solution to any unknown situation. The 5e DMG also took cues from the 1e AD&D DMG, and contains charts and tables for random generation and stocking of content. The dungeon generation chart in particular is more balanced than its 1e counterpart. 5e is more story oriented than 1e, though, and as a result has a section devoted to generation of quests, NPC motivations, and plot twists. This could theoretically elevate the nature of the game from the procedural dungeon crawling focus of the earlier games to one more goal oriented, but I haven't actually tested it out.

5e is also an evolution upon 3e D&D, but is a lot lighter on the rules. An explicit design choice in 3e was to reduce the role of the DM from the adjudicator of all scenarios to a referee of the rules, and there were rules for many, many scenarios. The rules heavy nature of 3e makes it more workable to facilitate a game solo as there are a lot less unknowns. 3.5e and Pathfinder are still popular choices when it comes to tabletop roleplaying, but I've never played them.

In Defense of AD&D

Most modern gamers, myself included, have faulted AD&D as being a grab bag of contradictory mechanics, some poorly developed, that may or may not have been tested and that the author himself may not even have used. However, a way of excusing the material incorporated into AD&D is to not see it as a single, coherent system, but rather as the amalgamation of everything that had been published under the D&D name since the release of the original booklets, including articles from The Strategic Review, fan submitted works, and answers to frequently asked questions. In that way, AD&D can be seen as a culmination of all things D&D up to that point, whether or not Gygax himself personally used it or even thought it was a good idea. With that view, the books seem more like a gift to the budding RPG community, rather than the adversarial dictation many view it as.

The Turn Sequence

I've been thinking a lot about this, how to incorporate by-the-book time tracking into my AD&D sessions.  Time is a very important element in the AD&D game, with almost every subsystem requiring or mentioning the passage of time as a factor in resolving an outcome, yet in actual play this element is almost completely ignored. Most parties either abandon it totally or consider the recording of time only randomly when it feels appropriate. The only situation where it gets any focus is during combat and initiative. The DMG itself admonishes, in all caps, to keep strict time records and I feel that a significant portion of the game's balance is bonded to the time system.

For this reason I have an experimental idea - to record the passage of turns first, and then adjudicate which actions can occur within it.

For example, within 1 turn a PC can either move up to his movement speed x10ft while exploring and mapping a dungeon, or search a 20ft by 20ft area for secret doors, or listen behind a door, or disarm a trap, etc.  If a PC wanted to do some of these things in combination, for example, moving up to half his total distance, approaching a door and listening for sounds behind it, then only his movement action can resolve on the first turn and he must wait in position before attempting to listen at the door on the next turn.

In a party situation, this would allow PCs to take separate individual actions and resolve their successes at the same time, at the end of the turn. For example one PC could check for traps, another might search a section of wall for a hidden door, another might try to force open a closed gate, etc.  Combat is always rounded up to the next full turn.

This feels more like a tactical game to me, where characters move into and hold a position before continuing on to the next turn.  A lot of concepts from tactical games have started to appeal to me as a method of playing D&D, such as moving and fighting in formation rather than as individuals.

The DMG has a guideline for searching a room, where if there is nothing in a room a single round check will make that obvious to the PCs, but otherwise a 20' by 20' area can be searched in one turn. With a little bit of math, we can extend this to a room of any size, and simply divide to find out how many turns are required, rounding up to the nearest full turn.

Obviously the main drive for this type of strict timekeeping is in running my solo games, but I feel that this could be used in live play as well. For a live situation, the DM can call out the turn and ask what the PCs decide to do during it.  I have no idea if players will take to such a procedure or if it will be quickly abandoned.

For live play, I like to hide dungeon areas that are outside the PCs line of sight. To incorporate this turn system, I would simply let my PCs walk into any area, revealing what they can see as they go, until they reach the limit of their movement distance per turn.  Of course in such a situation, ambushing the PCs with monsters becomes much easier.

There are tools to aid DMs in tracking time, such as the OSRIC turn tracker, but I assume that this method would make those tools mostly superfluous, except as reminders for torch burning times and monster checks.

Playing aids for AD&D

I started this journey to actually play AD&D by the book a few months ago now, and I'm still not at the point where I'm prepared enough to run a campaign, as in DM it myself and play with a character.

I've found the extra playing aids put out by TSR to be almost essential when running the game. I cannot imagine the arduousness of having to play straight out of the book.  I will link the playing aids I found to be the most helpful, and where possible I will link official or open license versions that are as close to the TSR originals as possible.

First off is Mad Irishman's AD&D Player Character Record replicas: http://www.mad-irishman.net/pub_dnd_1e.html#1e_adnd2   I found these to be invaluable in recording my players' accumulated information, as the days when all a PC's information could fit on an index card a la OD&D are over.  AD&D has too many conditional adjustments and statistic modifiers to keep track of.

Unfortunately Mad Irishman's PDFs only reproduce the actual sheet, and not the instructions. There is a lot of useful information in the instructions that would help fill in these sheets, information that should be in the PHB but isn't, and the only way to get it is to track down a copy of the original product.

Secondly the adventure record sheet, linked on the same page, which reproduces a lot of the information on the character sheet, but has a useful section on tracking turns or days.

The next absolutely essential aid is the DM screen, reproduced on Dragonsfoot: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/cs/index.shtml#22 .  After reading through the DMG I came to the conclusion that there was no way I was going to remember all those rules and exceptional cases myself, and I was ruminating on creating a "cheat sheet" for reference, but then I found half the work was done for me with the DM screen. While it is little more than just a collection of tables, some of them apply directly to the Character sheets with information that's not obvious from the book.

And Finally, the Dungeon Masters Adventure Log, for which I could not find a free legal copy online. Not the log itself, but the instructions to the log is what's valuable, as it collects a bunch of adventuring rules that were scattered throughout the DMG in a concise and readable layout.


The most valuable aids for me are ones that provide quick references to the rules and charts from the DMG and PHB. Using these aids has taken a lot of strain of preparing and organizing a play session of off the DM and make it possible to play without constantly flipping through the source books. These aids also provide an organized and structured way of describing the events and results of a session without defaulting to haphazard and unreliable loose paper notes.  Surprisingly, some of the information recorded on these sheets is not mentioned in the core books themselves, meaning there are some essential rules missing from the books.  I found that these aids greatly enhanced my experience in AD&D and I consider them to be as essential to game play as the source books.

Was OD&D Gygax's preferred system?

The closest I can get to a source is from this quote:

"I run three-booklet OD&D now and again myself, adding some house rules to make 1st level PCs a bit more viable and allowing Clerics a spell at 1st level if their Wis is 15 or higher." 

src: http://cyclopeatron.blogspot.com/2010/03/gary-gygaxs-whitebox-od-house-rules.html

There's other posts by Gygax on the ENWorld and Dragonsfoot forums where he states that he preferred rules-light systems in his later years over the rules-heavy approach of something like AD&D.


Also a good quote here:

AD&D is an interesting beast ... Gygax was distilling all the work done on D&D into one coherent system ... To my mind, his biggest problems come when he invents new material (such as the initiative system) rather than adapting the old.

src: https://merricb.com/2014/06/08/a-look-at-armour-class-in-original-dd-and-first-edition-add/

To me, this tracks with my current impressions of AD&D:

The best things about AD&D are the portions adapted from OD&D, tournaments, and Gygax's own home games.  Meaning, they were at least playtested.

The worst things about AD&D are the parts he invented for the book, because they seemed like a good idea at the time.

More AD&D movement issues, this time for outdoor movement and encumbrance

The PHB states that under normal encumbrance condition, a PC can move '12" ', whatever that means. Whether its measured by a ruler on a tabletop, scaled to the miniature figure used in actual play, or scaled to the table map used in actual play is a huge problem. Still, the guide in AD&D is that 12" equals 120 feet in-game. 

The DMG states that under normal encumbrance, a PC can move 30 miles per day.
If calculated from the PHB, where it states "Each 1" of movement equals the number of miles...in one-half day's trekking" (p.102), it would seem that the actual number for an unencumbered character would be 24 miles per day, so of course the two measurements are incongruous.

I, personally, would rather choose the explicitly stated rule in the DMG over the calculated measurement.

And a final note, "normal" encumbrance means up to 35 lbs.(PHB p 101)  or 350 gold coin weight  (PHB p.102) without strength bonuses.

p.27 of the DMG lists armor weight in pounds, which needs to be multiplied by 10 to get gold coin weight, in order to determine the total weight carried by a character, which can be used to determine accurate encumbrance.

And finally, the actual gold piece weight values of regular items is in an Appendix in the back of the DMG (p. 225) instead of in the inventory lists of either the PHB or DMG!

Putting together these rules piecemeal is a real pain

For exploration, the PHB states that movement is 1/10 the rate given in the combat movement table, which means that for 12" a character could only move at 12 feet per minute, much less than the actual human walking speed of 276 ft/min. I don't buy the in game explanation that mapping and being cautious reduces speed to this number, so this is a total house rule I use to make regular movement through a dungeon room or through a city to take 1 turn total, whether the distance is 12 feet (normally a round in exploration), 120 feet (normally a turn) or 1200 (beyond a turn).


yay someone collected the encumbrance rules into a "Master Encumbrance Table":
 https://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=FT&fileid=175&watchfile=0

Delta's got a great breakdown of the issues with Movement and Encumbrance:
http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/p/primary-house-rules.html 

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 

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.