Thoughts on Man-to-Man in D&D

Dragons fight as "4 heavy horse", which is simple on the mass Combat table, but unclear on Man to Man.
But wait, "Barding" is an armor option on the M2M table.
Dragon armor rating can simply be equal to Barding, with the appropriate number of Hit Die as referenced in D&D Book 2.
Then they also have that Achilles Heel of being shot out of the sky by a Hero on a roll of 12

I'm not a fan of multiple attack rolls. One "chance to hit" per attack is enough.
Hit Points should (and do) replace simultaneous hits with cumulative hits. There's no need to model extra attacks or anything on top of that.

Light, Heavy and Armored Foot troop types can map directly onto the Leather, Chain, and Plate armor types.
Light,  Medium, Heavy and Draft Horses are purchasable mounts in D&D, and with the addition of Barding can be armored.

In Chainmail, while flanking, the defender is hit as if he was one lower troop type. This correlates to a 2 step drop in armor type on M2M, with consideration given for a shield. It's also probably the origin of the "+2 to hit" rule in AD&D. In both AD&D and Supplement 1, the right flank gets no protection from a shield.

Digging into the Chainmail M2M rules has given me a new appreciation of Supplement I: Greyhawk as merely an attempt to translate Chainmail rules into the D&D chassis. The implementation is a bit tortured and some of the math is wrong, but its what we've come to expect from Gygax. I feel like a fuller explanation of the imported systems would have benefited the supplement, and apparently Gygax did too, as that's what he wrote in AD&D (and had issues describing it there as well)

House rules for D&D + Chainmail

The races: Human, Elf, Dwarf and Hobbit

The classes: Fighting-Man, Magic-User, Cleric

No multi classing, elves must choose a single class

Stats are rolled 3d6 arrange as desired, starting gold is 3d6x10 for personal equipment 

There are no hit points. A single hit is death for Man- type characters. It takes 4 concurrent successes on d6 for a Man to hit a Hero.

In almost all cases the Mass Combat Table will be used for combat resolution, the Man-to-Man Melee table will only be used for individual combat between Hero types and those rare cases when it applies against Monsters

Super Heroes may roll twice on the Man-to-Man Melee table to attempt to hit a Hero. Hero and Super Hero will use the Mass Combat table against Man characters.

The Man-to-Man Combat Table and D&D

I don't think the Man-to-Man table was ever intended to be used with D&D. The Mass Combat rules dovetail so nicely with both the Fighting Capability column and Monster HD that it does feel like the game was developed out of those rules, while the M2M table and D&D's level progression seem at odds with each other. Generally, every attempt to reconcile them has some struggles - the very first can be seen by Gygax himself in Supplement 1: Greyhawk.

I've seen some implementations that try to use the M2M table as the universal melee resolution mechanic for D&D, but I think that only works when two combatants are of the same type. For example, if two men are fighting or two heroes. In the case of Man vs. Hero or Superhero, it makes more sense to me to revert to the Mass Combat rules. I prefer squad combat and simultaneous hits over individual combat and tracking hitpoints over multiple rounds. Actually I don't even use hitpoints in the PbP game that I'm running, just the appropriate number of successes on d6 for a hit.

If you select the M2M table for use only against opponents of the same category, then you can still involve the "Fighting Capability" column of D&D for bonuses. For example, a "Man + 1" would roll 2d6+1 for his chance to hit another Man

OD&D + Chainmail

 I love this so much. It really makes OD&D so much more playable when you just use it as a campaign system for Chainmail. So while all battles would be fought with Chainmail, OD&D would be used to calculate overland campaign movement rates, fleeing success, terrain types, random encounters, treasure, and allow a method whereby your troops get stronger and become hero types.

I've seen a lot of attempts to meld the d20 combat system with Chainmail's Man-to-Man combat table. The two earliest attempts were from Gary Gygax himself, first in Supplement 1: Greyhawk and again in AD&D 1e. I like the 1e table and I use it when I play AD&D, but for OD&D I think it's better to ditch the d20 system completely and only use Chainmail's d6 dice pools and 2d6 system.

I only use the Man-to-Man table in the case of Hero vs Hero combat or in the rare instances where it applies to Hero vs Monster combat. For everything else I use the Mass Combat system detailed earlier in Chainmail, where it takes a minimum of 4 light footmen to damage 1 heavy horseman. That means that if the player only has 3 light footmen, the heavy horseman is functionally invincible against them and can damage them with impunity. This is the expected result when strong monsters, such as dragons, attack regular troops.

This system works best with large troop numbers, so it isn't well suited to underground dungeon crawls with a small group of characters. Which is fine, as it works really well for overland campaigning with large armies and mass combat. Raising and maintaining an army is a huge money sink in this game and justifies a constant need for treasure. In fact I find it interesting if the players immediately jump into overland campaigning on day 2 of their adventure, after having gotten just enough gold to raise their first contingent of soldiers.

OD&D + Greyhawk

 “If you’re going to play with Greyhawk, why not just play AD&D?”

Well, now I have an answer. Players don’t want to play AD&D, because of the stigma. But they’ll play a game that’s mechanically identical to AD&D, so long as it’s still OD&D.

To be fair, there’s a lot I don’t like about AD&D, which I’ve expounded about on my blog. So I guess now I’ll be playing OD&D + Greyhawk, which gives me everything I like about playing AD&D, and none of the stuff I don’t.

I love being an OD&D Dungeon Master.

This is my 200th post!

OD&D's Wilderness Rules

OD&D's wilderness game is much smaller than people think it is. The rules that exist only cover movement, setting up encounters, and evasion. The encounter charts have a large number of monsters, too large to actually fight using the Alternate Combat System from Book 1. When encountering monsters in the Wilderness of OD&D, it seems expected that the players would switch over to a set-piece battle using the Chainmail rules.  OD&D's wilderness adventuring can basically be seen as a sketch of rules for using a hex map and random monster battles with the Chainmail miniatures game.

Encumbrance in OD&D

 Encumbrance in OD&D is very simple to calculate. You add the weight (in gold coins) of your armor, weapons and shield together to find your base encumbrance. This value will mostly determine your movement rate. All the other small inventory items you might have, such as 50' of rope, iron spikes, torches etc., are all combined together to a flat value of 80 gold piece weight, or 8 pounds total.

  A standard man in OD&D can carry a maximum of 3000 gold piece equivalent weight. Your equipment and inventory is a fraction of that, generally less than half if not less than a third of the total. That means that most of your free carrying capacity will be taken up by the actual gold pieces you are carrying.

  The whole point of OD&D is to carry as many gold pieces as possible out of the dungeon. Every mechanic in the game is either in service to this goal, or is directly affected by it. It is largely the weight of gold coins that will increasingly slow you down as you travel.

  I found this gameplay loop to be quite satisfying. As a result, though, the silver standard is a bad fit for OD&D, and this simplified encumbrance system is a bad fit for AD&D. The reward feedback of AD&D is different, the primary motivator of that game is to level up XP. AD&D has a stricter, more granular encumbrance system, that is more in service to the simulationist nature of that game.

  Honestly, I found that OD&D encumbrance is easier on the DM, but players who are used to later editions of D&D take a while to adapt to it. Its also not as immersive as AD&D's encumbrance system, and it leads to players not really caring what's in their inventory. Which is fine, for a one shot. The sores of AD&D's math heavy encumbrance system are well known, but it forces players to engage more with the game.

Things I like about OD&D

 The simplicity of the numbers. 100 xp per hit die, d6 hp per hit die, all weapons do d6 damage.

Armor Class is entirely dependent on worn armor, except in the case of high dexterity which gives a benefit of at most +1.  This is only an issue with rising THAC0, but for PCs THAC0 rises slowly. Monster THAC0 rises by hit die, so it can be turned into a simple formula - monster THAC0 = 19 - hit die. As PCs gain levels, they gain more hp, so that their greater vulnerability to getting hit is commensurate with their greater ability to take damage.

All of this might seem too simple, but it exists within an elegant ecosystem where one mechanic flows into another. AD&D dissociated all these mechanics from each other, breaking them in the process. Variable hit die and variable weapon damage, new xp determination formulae, THAC0 and AC are no longer symmetric, and on. Maybe there was a wisdom in doing so that was born from actual play, that is otherwise not readily apparent.

AD&D adds a lot of cruft that I'm not a fan of. The Half-Elf and Half-Orc races, the special powers given to Paladin and Ranger classes, the Monk class, numerical modifiers and bonuses to everything.. The Psionic appendix and chapters might as well not exist to me. Yes technically all of this came from OD&D supplements, but they are mercifully not part of the core game. There is an assumption in AD&D that everything must have a mechanic attached and if that mechanic does not confer a numerical bonus, then it is not worth using. That may not be what the designers intended but a lot of groups played it that way, and I can see where they're coming from. This is a criticism usually leveled at 3e or beyond, but in AD&D 1e I see the genesis of all the sins of 2e, 3e, 4e and 5e. It's really hard to enjoy the game knowing that a few simple spells or magic items could completely break the game, or a player who decided to make a certain build could do it at will.   It is the least balanced edition of D&D, and that's saying something. There is a necessity for even low-to-mid level PCs of requiring +stat bonus magic items just to stay alive.

 I originally looked at BECMI to alleviate my issues with AD&D, but there I ran into a new problem - no one wanted to play. The general atmosphere is that "Basic" D&D is not interesting, and even OSR players prefer newer OSR games that are more horror or gonzo fantasy inspired. I assumed that with the current popularity of OSE that I would get more people to play BECMI D&D, but that hasn't been the case.  BECMI also has more haters, where B/X does not, and that I don’t understand.

 A lot of people who play OD&D like to use it as a springboard to wild and weird stories, the gonzo fantasy that the OSR scene is enamored with. I don't play that way. I am a very minimalist gamer and I enjoy low magic, low fantasy worlds with a simple collection of items and classes. Even my monsters are more naturalistic than supernatural. 

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. 

Issues with OD&D

So I sat down to play this game, and its amazing the issues that come up during play that you would not notice by simply reading the rules.

To start off, OD&D seems like a very simple game - There are three classes and four races. Every character gains 1d6 for health per level, every weapon does 1d6 for damage, and every monster gives 100xp per hit die when they die. But this simple system gets confounded by a lot of inconsistent rules.

First are the ability scores. They don't seem to do anything, except when they do. Constitution adds bonuses to health, and Dexterity increases the chance to hit of missile fire. Strength and Wisdom confer no bonuses, and Intelligence is only used to determine how many languages the character can speak. Until you crack open Supplement I: Greyhawk, and include the charts for Strength bonuses and Intelligence bonuses.  Charisma seems to be the most important stat, and is given the longest explanation with a chart to explain its use in governing hirelings, but the actual use of hirelings is never explained.

Encumbrance and weight are mentioned as an important element of the game, but the details are sketchy. A list of items is provided to use, but only a few items have any weight attached. Whether the other items are weightless or if their weight is to be determined by the referee is not mentioned. Moldvay Basic attempted to address this issue by giving all "miscellaneous items" a combined weight of 80 coins regardless of actual amount carried, and Mentzer Basic includes a "simple encumbrance" system where only coins affect weight carried. As is evident, even the smallest difference in rules can affect how differently the game is played between tables.

Supplement I: Greyhawk really does try to flesh out the rules and complete some of the gaps, as well as providing more content to play with. It does this by throwing a bunch of charts and dice probabilities at everything. It does standardize the game a bit, which may turn off the people who don't like being bound by rules, but results in D&D somewhat approaching the standard of a game that can be played.

To the people who think D&D doesn't need to be constrained by rules: Do you really need D&D to roleplay? Thanks to the internet, there are countless RP and fanfiction servers where they play without any set of rules.

Supplement I: Greyhawk -review

I finally sat down and read this book. I've previously discussed OD&D, but I've restricted myself to just the 3 LBBs. I liked the material contained within them but I found it limiting, both in terms of the expansiveness of the game and in terms of prepackaged content. Greyhawk adds more content and tries to add more concrete rules to the game and smooth over some incongruities.  This is really the supplement that adds more 'crunch' to the game.

  Within this supplement, the game begins to take on the shape that is recognizable as AD&D and the Basic boxed set line - variable HD for classes, variable weapon damage, all stats now give conditional bonuses for high scores, etc. The infamous strength table and the percentile strength makes its appearance here, though the bonuses it grants are much less than what makes it into AD&D.

 The Thief and Paladin classes are also introduced, but again much weaker than what they will eventually become. The Thief exists as a set of useful dungeoneering skills, and allows Dwarves and Hobbits a second class they can opt for. Multiclassing is also introduced for demihumans, thus cementing the separation of race and class  in the D&D game. The Paladin, as presented in Greyhawk, is just a lawful good fighter that has a limited ability to heal or cure disease, and at higher levels gains extra powers with his holy sword and steed. This version of the Paladin is much less powerful than his AD&D counterpart, who can also cast spells and has a constant aura of protection from evil.

The weapon vs armor to-hit bonus chart appears in Greyhawk, but it has a lot less entries than the one in AD&D. It is clearly a holdover from Chainmail, but given how many publications it has appeared in, I strongly suspect that circa 1977 Gygax used weapon vs armor bonuses in his game. There is more discussion of using the alternate combat system to play D&D, further reducing the need to have a copy of Chainmail to play.

Like every one of Gygax's rulebooks this is poorly laid out and poorly worded, but personally I've spent enough time reading old school D&D rules to be able to pick out the important highlights. Adding the 3 LBBs and Greyhawk together gives a game very similar to AD&D but much more restrained in power and scope. The bonuses for PCs and monsters are smaller, and all classes don't get the fantastic tools that they would get in AD&D. Personally, I would prefer to play this game over AD&D, as I feel that the number crunch of AD&D is much worse, while everything else is otherwise the same.

Wilderness travel as outdoor survival

I don't like the traditional D&D hex crawl. I think my problem stems from the fact that I started with AD&D, and to this day I don't understand the point of AD&D's wilderness rules. D&D Vol III: Underworld and Wilderness Adventures has a simpler system, but makes a lot more sense. Dan from Delta's D&D has a great series of posts looking at Outdoor Survival, the game OD&D tells you to play instead when you're wilderness traveling: http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2016/09/rules-of-outdoor-survival-part-1.html

I'm experimenting with the idea to make Wilderness hex crawls more interesting by making them survival simulators. Instead of just wandering monsters, I could make chance of getting lost, diseased, or dying of starvation into possible factors. Starvation is a big point, players usually ask "What if I don't buy rations?" in D&D, and 5e solves this by adding an "exhaustion" mechanic, but I don't want to add even more rules to the game.

In previous games, I simply told players that nothing happens until they go 7 days without food or 3 days without water, and then their character dies. That seemed to be enough for players, and surprisingly they've all eaten every day instead of waiting for 6 days between meals. So far, nobody's abusing the system so I won't enforce a change, but in case someone decides to, I'll add an optional rule, that days without food increase your encumbrance value. I figure that mimics the "Life needs" system of Outdoor Survival close enough, without needing to hand out survival cards to every player.

The wilderness travel rules in AD&D and B/X/BECMI both abstract travel into periods of days. This is actually frustrating when playing B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, since it gives you a map divided into 100 yard squares. B2 gives movement rates in terms of squares per hour, and I'm not really sure that lines up with the daily movement rates or even the individual encumbrance movement rates. The "squares per hour" movement system also echoes back to Outdoor Survival's grid based play. Yet even for all that, I found B2's Adventures Outside the Keep to be pretty boring, taking place on a mostly empty map with only a handful of encounters, requiring the DM to invent material to keep it from being boring. And every time I've played B2, I've had to invent a ton of material to fill out the map.

That's the puzzle I'm trying to solve, and I think it will be an even bigger issue with a larger scale map. Maybe threatening players with starvation, disease, and unintended movement simply for journeying in the world might add an interesting minigame, or maybe it would bog them down in tedium.

Original D&D (Single Volume Edition) by Greyharp Review

The DM of a group I was playing in wanted to switch over to Original Dungeons and Dragons, and shared this PDF of the 3LBBs compiled into one volume. This volume is mostly just a reorganization and mild editing of the original 3 volumes, but the results are astounding. Presented in this manner, the OD&D rules are clear, concise, and as simple and complete as E. Gary Gygax always claimed they were. In fact I'd go so far as to say that this version of the rules is flatly superior to AD&D.

The opening foreward of the book is written by the compiler, and he addresses the criticisms that I have had about OD&D: That they are incomplete, poorly presented, and more of a toolkit for the referee to flesh out than a full game in themselves. He disagrees strongly, and to prove his point presents the rules in a manner that does make them a complete game. I've read the original 3 LBBs deeply and can find no great inconsistencies with this volume, so I would have to say that he has succeeded by far.

Here's the thing, though. To understand OD&D you need a strong foundation in some other edition of TSR D&D - whether its AD&D, B/X, BECMI, or the Holmes Basic book. This PDF is written with such an audience in mind, one that is very familiar with classic D&D and has been playing it for some time.  OD&D is not a game for beginners or newbies to tabletop role playing games.

While actually playing the game, however, I found it mechanically indistinguishable from the BECMI games I'm fond of. In fact, while playing, I was missing some of the options from a fully featured BECMI game. It felt like I was playing the same exact game, just with less stuff.

In fact I had done an experiment myself a while back, where I considered just throwing out all later rulesets and running a game of OD&D by itself. To that end I printed out the reference tables, and was in the process of putting together a game session. What I noticed was that all the material on the OD&D tables was identical to BECMI, there was just less content - less monsters, less magic items, and an entire class was missing.

However, this compilation of OD&D has also changed how I view the B/X and BECMI rules. Instead of a separate game, I now see the BECMI boxes as intro sets to OD&D, the first literally being the beginner's set from levels 1-3. 

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.

Even Tim Kask agreed

He decided to buy the original rule book and a set of dice.  However, he said he couldn’t just take the game straight to an SGS meeting — he could hardly figure out what the rules meant.

 Kask was a veteran war games player and a pretty smart guy, but he said he couldn’t make heads or tails of “these horribly written rules.”

“These things suck,” he remembered thinking. He all but told Gygax as much, too.

  https://thesouthern.com/news/local/an-siu-gaming-club-played-an-integral-part-in-the/article_a2c8bcd5-0d4c-5df3-a4cf-1f3a4225286d.html

OD&D vs B/X and BECMI

Again, what’s striking to me is how much is the same. I was initially under the impression that AD&D was a compilation of everything OD&D, while the “Basic” strain of D&D was a restructuring by different authors using the same underlying principles. But after cross referencing the source rule books a few times, I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s not the case at all. The rules and information in the Moldvay and Mentzer sets are very similar as what’s given in the three original D&D booklets, just vastly improved in clarity, organization and explanation.

Like the Moldvay set, OD&D basically runs on a d6 system, not just for weapon damage but for resolving success of most situations, such as finding hidden doors and avoiding traps. The d20 is only used for combat resolution on the alternate combat table. OD&D is notorious for how much of its game system is actually not detailed in its core books, and those gaps are filled in by the Basic and Expert sets.

It actually gives me more confidence in considering the whole line of "Classic" D&D rules to be one continuous strain beginning with OD&D and re-edited right up to its last revision with the Rules Cyclopedia.

The modern OSR attitude seems to be that OD&D and B/X/BECMI are two different strains of the game, but I believe that part of that might be driven by an urge for purism in rulesets and a highly elitist attitude among OSR gamers. During the '80s and '90s when these books were in print, there was no distinction between the flavors of Classic D&D since they were all branded as the same, and I think the OSR attitude is an overreaction to that which focuses on the most minor differences in wording and table values.  And this is understandable, since most OSR games owe their very existence to minor differences in wording and table values, and legally could not exist without them.

Coming back to D&D, the high degree of compatibility between the successive versions makes it much more useful to cross reference between them, and to use the information in one book to fill in the gaps of the other.

Underworld and Wilderness Adventures

The actual method of how to play D&D is contained in this volume. Men and Magic and Monsters and Treasure describe the things in D&D and how to use them, but the actual explanation of what to do in the game is written in Underworld & Wilderness Adventures.

And there's not a lot in there. The first section describes dungeons and how to build one followed by a brief discussion on how to explore it, with a couple of short asides on how to actually use some of the items detailed in the equipment list.* This is followed by a discussion of combat procedures in the dungeon, which explicitly directs readers to Chainmail for an in depth explanation, or they can use the very sparse charts from the alternate combat system in volume I.

The next section is Wilderness and it basically directs the reader to Outdoor Survival for the actual exploration rules and a map on which to play. A short discussion on converting the Outdoor Survival map for D&D play follows, and the rest of the book is taken up by combat procedures on land, aerial and naval.

What's striking is what's missing. There is no discussion of roleplaying, no mention of town adventures, of chats with NPCs, no instructions for the creation of a campaign or set up for heroic quests. D&D is primarily and explicitly only about combat, on a 1:1 figure scale in a fantasy setting either in the underworld or overworld, with monsters and heroes.  What people actually consider an RPG to be is completely absent.

Maybe all of that is contained in the supplements and Strategic Review magazine, but then that would mean that to canonically play D&D as an RPG requires a whole host of sources beyond the basic 3 booklet set.  Everything I've mentioned that was missing is actually in AD&D and the later Basic sets.

*which I found way more helpful than most other D&D source books since this information is not restated anywhere else until the Mentzer red book.

The only OD&D revision that I like

http://mahney.blogspot.com/2009/03/ultimate-sandbox.html

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.