Acquisition of Magic-User Spells

Spell acquisition by laboratory research or finding random scrolls in treasure loot is fucking boring.

what if the magic-users had to make deals with dark gods/eldritch beasts in order to gain more spells? Yes, I realize that 5e has made a whole class around this concept, but why couldn't O/AD&D magic-users learn spells from every possible source, including pacts, inborn magical ability, and/or spellbook learning?

In fact, in OD&D it's explicitly stated that tower dwelling Magic-User NPCs will send the player party out on a Quest or Geas for magic items, so why not just extend that to have beings of unfathomable power give quests to magic-users as exchange for teaching new spells? And instead of nicely writing down the spells in a book, the supernatural creatures sear the magical knowledge straight into the magic-users mind, such that they have to write it down or lose it forever, and this method causes the language to be utter gibberish to everyone except its original recipient.

This is a great concept and will be how I approach MU spells from now on.

Dungeoncrawling

 I think that pure dungeon crawling works better in a board game, where its more natural to measure distance by counting actual spaces moved by a miniature, and turns by going around the table.

  In a more free-form role playing game, exact measurements of distance and time can get fuzzy, and start to get handwaved away. They're also primarily the responsibility of the dungeon master, who bears the burden of running the whole game, so technical details like that quickly get dropped. It's why 5e has no mention of a dungeon or exploration turn, and a throwaway chart on travel pace.

  Advanced Heroquest and Warhammer Quest absolutely nail the feeling of a tight dungeon crawl to me. The actual "role playing" aspect of the game happens outside the dungeon, when players can interact with NPCs, travel to new areas, and prepare for the next dungeon. 

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. 

D&D solo as a board game?

Just play Advanced Heroquest instead. It does everything that D&D does, but in a more solid system that’s not so heavily reliant on the GM, and has better tables for generating content.

The most frustrating part of playing D&D solo is handling room descriptions.  In purely random play the rooms are either completely bare, or you have to waste time rolling on a table to stock the room with non-gameable content. When playing with a module, it really depends if the room key is split out into player only read aloud text and DM only information, and how well both are written. Sometimes the player read aloud text does not have enough information to spur meaningful choices, and sometimes through no fault of the writer it’s just easy to glance at the GM description anyway. It feels easier to just read the whole text of a room key at once, but in doing so you won’t really be playing the game.

So to solve this problem I have this idea, to tie the game more closely to the board. Almost every module comes with an empty map with numbered keys. Instead of moving my characters abstractly through the dungeon, I’ll select an actual 10’x10’ area per character, move them to that location, and see if anything is there. This necessitates moving the characters through an actual space in the dungeon. Then I’ll flip over to the room key and see what is in the space around each character. If they tripped a wire or pit trap, fell into an ambush by a monster, or discovered treasure or secret door, all would be resolved after my characters first moved into the area ‘blind’.  If I do not look into the right area, or do not do the right procedure to find the hidden element in a square, then I miss it and lose the treasure, fall victim to a trap, or lose surprise to a monster ambush.

This is contrary to the way live RPGs are played and denies me information that I should “know” before entering an area, but on the other hand it is playable and keeps the fun of discovery for myself.

AD&D has more in depth rules for dungeon crawling than any other edition. The sections on movement and searching, lockpicking, and listening at and forcing open doors are the most helpful here. These procedures are tightly coupled with the time scale, so it’s important to keep an ‘adventuring clock’ to track rounds and turns, or a sheet to check them off as they go by. Accurate tracking of time allows the player to coordinate the characters’ actions in a standard way.

For random dungeon generation, this means not stocking the dungeon until after the player characters have moved through it. This incentivizes checking squares, because to do so otherwise puts me at maximum risk for falling for a trap or a monster ambush.

In the case of traps, if I choose a PC to check a square for traps, and if he hits the chance of triggering the trap, then he detects and avoids it and I can mark it on the square for all PCs to know. If I want the PC to do something else, like check for secret doors, and I roll that he gets hit by a trap, then he falls victim to it.

The Three Pillars of Adventure solo

The gameplay elements of 5th edition D&D are broken down into the "Three Pillars of Adventure". These are:
1. Combat
2. Exploration
3. Social Interaction

To have an enjoyable solitaire gaming experience, it is important to adapt these elements into a solitaire framework

Combat

Combat is the easiest pillar to perform solo. 

 D&D combat contains little to no hidden surprises and the dice system introduces a high degree of randomness, making this a perfect system to perform solo. The player only has to play both sides intelligently, and let the dice fall where they may (or not, you're playing solo, nobody cares if you fudge results). Any "surprise" variables such as monster special attacks or reinforcements can just be introduced through dice mechanics. 

 But D&D is more than just a skirmish level wargame, and if the game was only combat then it would get boring very quickly. To contextualize the combat there is dungeons and exploration.

Exploration

Exploration is possible to play solo with random generation of layouts and terrain and random encounter creation. A simple table of encounters and any number of procedural generators can be used to accomplish this task. But there are hidden elements in dungeon and wilderness exploration that need special consideration to not ruin the fun of surprise.

 Trap placements, secret doors and hidden treasures all exist as knowledge meant only for the DM, to be revealed to the players only through clever play and after taking the proper precautions. It is possible to emulate these elements through solo play, and with a little work it can feel almost as natural as learning about them from a DM.

The AD&D DMG has a great list of traps in Appendix A Table VII that are eminently usable solo, and OD&D Supplement I: Greyhawk devotes an entire chapter to them. The D&D board games use face-down trap tokens as hazards to PCs. Their placement is known but the effect is not, and generally they are placed at the edge of a tile, halting player progress. The player is then faced with a single chance to disarm them, or otherwise pass over them and suffer the damage.  Random event and encounter cards can also simulate the unpredictability of a dungeon crawl. Similar random events and hidden hazards can be adapted for wilderness play, making overland exploration a fun part of solo play as well.

Pregenerated dungeons can be used to play solo effectively, with a bit of work. For this method its ideal to have a Player's version of the dungeon map that only shows the basic layout, and a DM version that has all the traps and secret doors and treasures listed. It really depends on how well the dungeon keys are written, the kind that are best for solo play keep the player information in the top two paragraphs and the DM only or secret information below them. Modules that use a lot of boxed text are great for this method. To play through this method, first move through a dungeon room and make a note of everything you would do as a player - where you check for traps or treasure, what you decide to look for, how you decide to exit the room or listen for monsters. After making all your player decisions, then read the DM information in the room key and flip over to the DM map and note if any characters triggered a trap or found secret objects, and adjudicate victory or loss appropriately. 

Social Interaction

Social interaction is the pillar least adaptable to solitaire play. NPCs generally only do a few player-facing tasks: provide an opportunity for shopping, combat, help or hinder PCs, become followers, and provide rumors or push the story forward.

You can approximate NPC interactions by using reaction rolls and morale checks, but an important part of social interaction is learning rumors, finding out new information and hearing the story of the characters and the game world. All this information is meant to be the sole purview of the DM and can't easily be randomly generated.

  The Mythic Game Master Emulator uses event focus and event meaning tables to generate story content, and a worksheet of scenes and NPCs to determine the outcome of a story. Rory's Story Cubes or other methods of creative writing also fulfill this experience. The 5e DMG devotes an entire chapter to creating story quests and progressing through NPC motivations and plot twists, and fills it with tables for the explicit purpose of random generation. 

 Personally, I don't write out huge dialogue exchanges between PCs and NPCs. I generally determine the disposition of the NPCs, any applicable persuasion attempts by the PCs, and the results. If the PCs fail, then no new rumors are gained or resolved. But if you want to flex your creative writing muscles, this is the place to fill in the dialogue.

Using a premade adventure module can help fill out the story aspect of the game, but adventure modules are written entirely for a DM and generally don't separate the player facing information from DM-only information. Going across the wilderness travel or dungeon exploration part of an adventure module is definitely doable using the above mentioned procedures, but when it comes to the actual story you basically have to read it beforehand and are "on rails" throughout the entire experience. Personally, I find reading an adventure module to be catatonically dull, and I use solitaire procedures to work my way through a module in order to prep it for a live game.

Ironically, the more experience you have playing D&D with a live group, the better your solo play experience will be. D&D, the nerdiest game ever made, requires you to socialize.

Religion in early D&D

Dungeon Modules B1 In Search of the Unknown, B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, and T1 The Village of Hommlet do not reference the pantheon of deities that were introduced in "Gods, Demigods and Heroes" or in "Deities and Demigods". Instead, there is an oblique reference to a Church and a singular religious figure, St. Cuthbert.

In B1 the only references are in the names of the pregenerated Cleric characters, one of them is a devotee of the "Great Church", another of the "Secret Church", and one of "St. Cuthbert". In B2 there is a chapel inside the Keep, the Curate who maintains it, a duplicitous priest who lives in his own house, and the Temple of Chaos, but there is no mention of which deities any of them serve. In T1, the Church of St. Cuthbert has a strong presence in town and causes tension with devotees of the town's Old Faith.

These modules give us a fragment of a glimmer to how D&D was played in its early days, and to me it seems that instead of using a strict pantheon of gods, early campaigns relied on a loose interpretation of Christianity and pagan faiths from British medieval history. I think the addition of a strict pantheon of gods to the worlds of Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms, or any other, is a mistake and actually divorces the game from its inspiration and restricts the kind of stories you could tell. I find a looser interpretation of religion more to my taste, as something that's closer to historical reality than the mess of fictitious deities that everyone plays with. And, I think a proper implementation of religion into D&D can help explain some of the more incongruous aspects with the game, such as the cleric and paladin classes or the effect of resurrection on elves, and the lack of demihuman PC clerics.

Here's how I would remix it:
There is a Great Church in the land and its patron saint is Saint Cuthbert. (From the modules above, there is no indication that St. Cuthbert is a deity, rather than just a venerated saint.) The Church represents the totality of organized religion, and all human settlements have at least a chapel or some place of worship around which the village has grown. The Church is humanocentric, and only admits humans into its highest ranks.

The Great Church allows members of its clergy to wander the world as missionaries and enforce their mission by force of arms. These Clerics still follow precepts of the Church such as the restriction against shedding blood, and through prayer and knowledge of scripture they are able to perform miraculous works such as healing others and stopping harm to the body through disease or poison. Clerics can travel the world dressed and armed as Fighting Men, but choose to carry blunt weapons because they are trying not to kill their opponents.

The Paladins are an Order of Fighting Men who swear loyalty to the Great Church, and through their faith can perform some miracles. These men are not part of the Church hierarchy but can also heal, cure disease and are protected from evil. (Interestingly, OD&D Paladins cannot cast Cleric spells). Any deviation from their code of ethics results in an immediate loss of their powers, and they must atone and perform penance under the guidance of a Church hierarch to get it back. Only human fighting men, so devoted and charismatic, are admitted into the Order.

The language of the sacred texts of the Great Church is considered the Lawful alignment language, and it has become the de facto language for legal documents and academic documents in Universities of higher learning.

Outside of the monolithic human church, the spirits of nature and natural phenomena are worshiped by the intelligent races such as Elves and Hobbits, and even some humans are devoted to this worship they call the "Old Faith". Like everything humans do, they've created a high structure of wise men called Druids, who worship Nature and strive to keep a neutral balance among all things. Elves and Hobbits generally stay away from the circles of the druids, though some individuals may join. The language used to commune with Nature is considered the Neutral alignment language.

Hiding from open engagement with the other two is the Secret Church. This is made up of people who use the sacred texts and teachings of the Great Church and reverse its meaning. Those who speak the reversed language can cause the opposite effect of miracles to take place, such as harming instead of healing, cursing instead of blessing, and damning instead of saving. Wandering militant devotees of this Secret Church are evil Clerics, well versed in the teachings of the Great Church who must also follow its stricture of behavior, such as the ban on shedding blood, otherwise they do not have access to the miracles they wish to misuse. The reversed language is called Chaotic, and speaking it attracts demons, devils, and other fiends from the lower planes, and also grants command of evil spirits and the undead.

Apart from the main religions there are many discrete Cults and Temples, all devoted to their own deities and beliefs, who may or may not be a real creature from a higher or lower plane.

A final note about Clerics and Paladins - In AD&D certain demihumans can multiclass as fighter/clerics, such as the Half-Elf and Half-Orc from the PHB, and an expanded list including Dwarves and Elves in Unearthed Arcana, which gives them all the weapon, armor and health bonuses of the Fighter class and the spellcasting ability and saving throws of the Cleric class, thus creating a very potent combination at the cost of a halved rate of level advancement. Humans gain no such multiclass ability, and so the Paladin is the only way Humans can gain such bonuses. The Paladin generally speaking has better abilities than the Fighter/Cleric but his spellcasting is weaker, and must maintain a very high charisma and a strict adherence to Lawful Good, or lose all his abilities and be demoted to the level of a standard fighter. In this way the Fighter/Cleric has it easier, but a Paladin played well is much stronger.

Ranting against “A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming”

    I do not like this PDF (I’m not going to link it because you require an account or some junk to download it, and I don’t recommend it anyway). It intends to show the difference in gameplay styles between old D&D and modern, but it does so terribly, by creating a straw man DM as an example of modern gaming versus an example of a “true” old school DM. And in the end, the old school DM and the modern DM end up doing the exact same thing.

    In one of his examples, the PCs come to a room trap. The modern DM has them roll an ability skill check, while the old school DM has them talk out the solution (“roleplaying”). This is the crux of the difference, according to the Primer - player skill over character skill, rulings over rules. But nothing, literally nothing is stopping the modern example PCs from just talking out the solution, and their DM going with it. This is a bad example, and unfortunately every example is like this.

    And in the end, the result is the same, a minor trap, which players overcome with some natural ability.  The modern DM actually has more options in that example than the old school DM, as he could encourage role play and sprinkle in some skill checks as desired.

    Full disclosure, I do not use skill checks in my games, but I’m consciously reacting away from modern D&D design which is heavily reliant on them.

    While I like the sound of “Player skill over character skill”, I think that example misses the point. Instead, what I would highlight is that players cannot use die rolls and skill checks circumvent or get out of difficult situations in the game! A natural 20 means nothing in old school D&D and that’s something I generally have to train modern players out of expecting. Old school D&D is meant to be a simulation of a living world, not a balanced set of mechanics. When players encounter a hazard, or trap, or unknowable situation, they must engage with the simulation and attempt to deconstruct it and overcome it. That’s what the Primer narrowly defines as “player skill”.  Instead of “Player skill over character skill”, I would substitute “Simulation over mechanics”.

    The second issue I have with this PDF is the notion of “Rulings over rules”. Because the original D&D rules were very sparse, and more like a collection of Dave Arneson’s and Gary Gygax’s notes, all other groups had to invent circumstantial rules in actual play. The PDF codifies this style of off-the-cuff rulings as a hallmark of old school gaming. I disagree. One only has to look to AD&D to see that codifying the rules of the game was a very early impulse, once the folks at TSR saw how the game began to be played “out in the wild”.

    In fact, I believe that in either OD&D or AD&D, it is specifically mentioned that the referee should keep a notebook of all such off the cuff rulings made during the game session, and refer back to them for consistency. In effect, every GM would be codifying his or her own rules. Players like consistency, and a GM who makes two different rulings on similar situations would quickly be called out on it.  Instead of “Rulings over rules”, I would once again substitute “Simulation over rules”.

    And that’s actually what I like about old school D&D, in that it is about crafting a consistent, logical, and believable world that the players have to engage with directly and use their imagination to navigate, rather than with their character sheet and using dice to “win”.

    And the real difference I believe between old school and modern D&D is this: In early D&D, the DM was the driving force behind the game, who set up the verisimilitude of the world and arbitrated the player’s actions within it. In modern D&D, the players are the drivers of the game, using their ability scores and dice rolls to overcome numerical challenges that the DM can only set the difficulty threshold to.  From 3e onward, limiting the DM’s influence over the players was a stated design goal. And that, more than anything, changed the nature of the game.

Frank Mentzer on religion in BECMI, from a facebook post

Frank Mentzer J Conrad, I think a more detailed answer is appropriate.

To address your point -- Belief Systems, aka Religions.
I very specifically avoided all mention of any major real-world faiths in the entire BECMI line.
I avoided derivatives of their beliefs, too. (Compare to extensive Christian influence on Gary's works; he was a Jehovah's Witness, and I'm agnostic.)
I also avoided lesser-known Beliefs as much as I could. Frex, some people still believe in Astrology or Phrenology, so I didn't go there.
I toyed with a religious setup that was 100% fictional, but it turned out indistinguishable from Parody, so I stopped.
You want details of the religion in your game? Fine, please make your own. But don't mock others.

Underlying: Think about it. In this fantasy world, high-level clerics know what comes after death. Some of them chat with gods/immortals on a regular basis. They also control health care, and probably education. So why don't they take over? The Only Possible Answer: the gods/immortals rule that off-limits; if you covet mortal power, leave the faith and start a Dominion (and forget about cleric spells). It's a matter of multiversal balance, preventing excessive power from congealing in one place (clerics) and ruining the balance of Everything... thus upsetting the Prime Plane in general, and thus decreasing the likelihood of getting more Immortals thru ascension.
So for the gods/immortals, it's just a matter of self-interest. It's about getting more Immortals.:)

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.

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.

Rolling for initiative

I don't like the convention of having the players roll for initiative at the start of combat. It's an invention brought in by the 3rd edition of D&D and maintained all the way up to the present day. The problems are manifold and have been belabored to death elsewhere, so I'll just point out my solution. AD&D and BECMI don't work like this. In both systems, players must make an intention of action BEFORE the initiative die are rolled. This sounds like a wargaming practice, but it also works great in narrative combat.

Focusing on D&D narratively, as if we were playing purely in 'theater of the mind', the players would be doing whatever they want, until one of them comes into a situation and will say "I attack".  At that point, their attack should automatically succeed, unless it is opposed by an enemy or monster, who decides to fight back. The monster should also announce its action, such as "I breathe fire." Only then are initiative die rolled, simply to determine which action goes first. After that single round of combat, narrative play would resume, unless the two combatants opt to continue a series of attacks (or opposed actions)

This is a subtle genius woven into the original D&D framework that is not effectively communicated in either the rulebooks, or from most groups online. I've been part of AD&D and Original D&D groups where the DM used 3e style individual initiative, simply because it seemed to be more fair in giving all players a turn. For that matter, I found the O/AD&D  turn sequence to be much more fair, as every player has his or her own say every turn if they have to describe their actions to a caller, who would then relay those actions to the DM. I personally don't use the caller, or rather as a DM I also act as the caller, and ask my players to describe all their actions per turn to me first before I resolve their actions all at the same time. I describe my method more in depth here

I read a blogpost on AngryGM where he disparages the initiative roll as the "whoosh" of loading the combat screen from a videogame rpg, and I agree. But using O/AD&D style encounter rules, and rolling the initiative die only IF two sides decide to take opposing actions, and only AFTER they've made their declaration, allows you to weave combat into narrative gameplay without breaking the flow of the narration, and still allows players who do not wish to be in combat to go about and do their own thing. The only thing to remember, to keep everything balanced, is that 10 rounds of combat equal 1 turn, so you can pace the players' actions accordingly.

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.

Magic-User houserules

Magic-Users have a few well known problems when played in AD&D. Since I play a lot of one shots, I've added a few house rules in order to allow players to have fun with Magic-Users while trying not to unbalance the class in relation to the other classes.

Hit Die, level progression, spell progression, spells per day, weapon restrictions, armor restrictions, weapon proficiencies, spells per day remain the same. A magic-user must purchase any spell components necessary for spells he or she may want to cast.

I'm not a fan of Vancian magic but I understand the need in gamist terms, so here's where my house rules come into play. A magic users "spells per day" ability now refers to spells "memorized" per day. They now recover their spells at a rate much faster than in the book, where recovering a single spell of 1st level will require 1 full day of rest.  Instead, for every 1 hour (6 turns), the magic-user will recover a 1st level spell. For every 2 hours, they will recover a 2nd level spell, and so on..  To change the specific spells they have memorized for the day, the magic-user must take a day's rest.

Scrolls and even the spellbook can now function differently.  Scrolls can be seen as a physical analogue to spell memorization.  Creating a spell scroll inscribes the magic words onto a physical form in the same way that memorizing a spell creates the magic in the magic-users' mind. A magic-user can then read any spell inscribed on a scroll, but in doing so the magic words are burned off the scroll and it is lost. Rules for creating scrolls are in the DMG, and remain unchanged.  The spellbook, now, can be in a pinch used as a list of scrolls. If the magic-user does not have a certain spell prepared, he or she can read it straight out of the spellbook, but doing so burns the spell out of the book and it is lost. Procedures for copying spells into the spellbook remain unchanged.

  While this will instantly make a magic-user far more powerful for one combat every six turns, I think they make up for it with their fragility and lack of options outside of magic. It's not quite the cantrip solution that is presented in Unearthed Arcana, bu neither does it replace the base AD&D system with something completely different like At-Will, Encounter, and Daily powers. And, hopefully, this will also put an end to the 5 minute work day.

 The Quarterstaff is the most overlooked AD&D weapon. Magic-Users can wield it, and its free. They don't have to be dagger slaves.

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.

Moldvay vs Mentzer

What's striking to me is how much is the same between both. Even short, throwaway rule guidelines from the Moldvay book are carried faithfully forward by Mentzer into his revision. It's clear to me that Mentzer did not intend to change the rules much at all, merely re-edit and present them in a more expansive, instructional format. The few changes he did make are mostly to be more generous to players, for example encumbrance limits are raised. The big exception are the Thief skills, which were a casualty of marketing - they had to be stretched out to 36 levels, so their actual gain per level is slower, which makes the Thief more useless for longer.  The actual mechanics, however, such as movement, speed, combat, item prices, etc. are exactly the same.

Neither Basic set contains a method for random dungeon generation. Instead they contain guidelines on building a dungeon and how to stock it, but the actual layout and method is left up to the DM.  The Mentzer Basic book is actually the same as the earlier revision's, just expanded. This makes the AD&D random dungeon generation table (copied from an article from TSR magazine) unique.

The big pillars of the OSR community are the Moldvay, Cook and Marsh B/X sets, and Allston's Rule Cyclopedia. The BECMI sets sort of get lost between them, since they're assumed to be superseded by the Rules Cyclopedia. The value of B/X and Rule Cyclopedia is that they're both written as reference works, and thus much easier to look up during actual play, while the big flaw of the BECMI sets is that the rules are divided between Players' books and DM's books, and the rules, items, and magic lists are scattered between the 5 sets, making them tedious to look through during a campaign.

Fans of B/X prefer its "simplicity". Restricting itself to 14 levels (though it Cook's Expert hints at 36), the Basic and Expert sets cover dungeon crawling and overland adventures, which is the same focus as D&D's original Underworld and Wilderness Adventures, and to it's proponents that's all you need. It's hard to argue otherwise, since modern D&D doesn't do anything different.

The Rules Cyclopedia, on the other hand, combines everything from the development of the Basic/Classic line into one book. This means it pulls in optional material such as skills and demihuman classes from the Gazetteer books, the large scale combat and dominion rules from the Companion set, and the weapon mastery and immortal paths from the Master sets, and even some hints from AD&D 2e. It takes an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to the rules and those who have it give it nothing but praise for combining everything about D&D you would ever need into one volume.

However, people who quibble about the rules differences between the editions are barking up the wrong tree.  The Rules Cyclopedia replaces some of the edits put in by Mentzer by carrying forward the original rules written by Moldvay, but then in other places uses the same text as Mentzer's BECMI set. The Classic D&D line does not have the major differences between editions that AD&D 1e and 2e, or D&D 3, 4, and 5e have had.

Difficulty Checks

UPDATE: I no longer like Difficulty Checks at all, and I never use them.

I like the 5th edition skill check system, despite the fact that it is the most hated feature of modern D&D to OSR circles. I liked them even back in 4th Edition, when they were part of the Skill Challenge encounter system, and in my 5e games I run skill challenges all the time.

Frankly, I find the d20 + ability modifier + proficiency bonus (optional) mechanic to be simple, elegant, and nearly universal for resolving undefined actions. It's a much better system than 2e's Non-weapon proficiency and 3e's skills. The 2e and 3e systems were actually very restrictive on characters who didn't choose the skill, as it meant that the player could not even attempt an action that they didn't have the skill for. The 5e system is very different, choosing a skill only applies an optional ability bonus, and anything else can be attempted simply by rolling a d20 and applying an appropriate attribute modifier. This actually frees player characters to attempt anything, and their chance of success is modified by their personal attributes.

I like this system so much I'm back porting it into my 1e game. This solves a lot of issues I have when resolving the outcome of player actions. Otherwise, I either have to give players a 100% chance of success solely dependent on their ability to convince me that their plan would work, or invent some contrived system involving percentile dice, or a chance out of 6, or something else complicated and obtuse. That sort of refereeing led to all the exceptional cases and disassociated mechanics that plague the 1e DMG.

The 5e difficulty check is the best iteration of the mechanic. The result of the modified roll is compared against a difficulty class table that is universal for player characters of all levels, and the referee only has to choose whether the difficulty of success is easy, moderate, hard, or nearly impossible. This is quick, simple, and usually able to reach the consensus of the players without argument.

But importantly, this is invaluable in solo play when there is no mechanic for solving a problem. The OSR technique for overcoming an unknown obstacle is to convince the dungeon master of your action's attempt, but this cannot be done solo. You either give yourself a 100% chance of success, or avoid the attempt entirely. A difficulty check now allows you to play solo and attempt anything, with the vague notion that your success or failure is fairly adjudicated by the dice and the makeup of your player character. That might be too modern of an attitude for OSR D&D, but it works too well to be dismissed out of hand.

And this whole thing was inspired by me asking the question "how do you open a lock without a thief in the party?"

and here's some answers I like: https://followmeanddie.com/2015/02/21/locks/
http://initiativeone.blogspot.com/2013/07/has-osr-mostly-embraced-thieves.html
https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2008/06/rules-cyclopedia-hacks-and-house-rules.html

The Cleric Problem

The Cleric class started life as a pastiche of Peter Cushing's portrayal of Abraham Van Helsing in Hammer Horror's Dracula movie.  I love that movie.  Dave Arneson was very liberal in using '70s pop culture in his early roleplaying sessions, and in one game he had been playing with two teams against each other where one of the players created an evil vampire named Sir Fang who had become too powerful to stop, so the proto-cleric class was created as a counter.  When Gary Gygax included the class in the original Men & Magic booklet, he retrofitted them to reflect the Crusaders of Militant Religious Orders and tasked them with the power of turning undead and casting miracles.  Mechanically, they were the midway point between the Fighting-Man and Magic-User classes with a unique spell list which included 3 healing spells and the ability to resurrect allies from the dead, which lead to the unintended consequence of their role being reduced to healing bots.

The problem came when Gygax's players asked the natural question "Where do the Clerics' powers come from?"  Gary Gygax's flippant answer was originally "the gods" but as his players pressed the issue, he created two fictional dieties, St. Cuthburt and Pholtus, and then eventually antagonistic dieties, and then it spiraled out of control into a whole pantheon and cosmology based around alignment charts and planar existence and spheres of power, and other assorted overly complicated junk.

Every OSR blogger trying to make a retro clone or attempting to streamline their own game has tackled this problem one way or another.  Some throw out the Cleric class altogether, others change their nature into being some kind of atheist heal bot, and yet others go down the 5e path of giving each Cleric a unique spell list dependent on the individual god they serve.  To me, these are all bad solutions as they solve a problem by creating even more problems, are based on an erroneous understanding of mythology, and tend to dilute the essence of the class.  And it all comes back to Gygax's misstep in mentioning that a Cleric's powers came from "the gods".

Now, Gary Gygax has stated that he felt that including real world references to God and Satan were inappropriate for a role playing game. I read an anecdote of a group where the DM stipulated that Cleric players had to pray to the actual God for their abilities, and it caused an uneasy awkwardness at the table. So I totally agree with that sentiment and even revised my own homebrew setting to throw out references to real world churches and religious organizations, but a really elegant solution was hiding under our collective noses the whole time.

According to some Christian traditions, Saints who are thought to be in Heaven can intercede on the behalf of parishioners and are prayed to themselves. Though there was a real, historical St. Cuthbert, the one invented by Gygax bears no relation to him and can easily be a purely fictitious patron for Clerics and other religiously motivated characters. And for antagonists, the Monster Manual is full of lists of Devil Princes and demons for evil clerics to beg for favor.

Personally I cannot conceive of a world set in the Middle Ages that doesn't have a strong Christian influence in everything from deed, to dress, to song, to architecture.  Every fantasy world tries to handwave that away, and I feel that it cheapens the setting a bit. Settings that rely on a pantheon of gods would better reflect the Roman world of Classical Antiquity than the Medieval Era.

This method of using St. Cuthburt as a stand-in for a religion that mimics, but isn't explicitly Christian, creates an elegant context for the Cleric's spell list and abilities, and a justification for the existence of the class.  Having religious characters as a player class adds an element of immersion to the game, beyond just having holy men and priests as background NPCs.

So, in my setting, there exists only one deity, however nobody prays to that deity directly.  Instead the Patron Saint of the land is St. Cuthburt, and all faithful direct their worship to him as an intercessor on their behalf, and the devoted seek to gain his blessings and favor.  Those blasphemous that seek unholy power would be fallen Clerics that have studied the teachings of St. Cuthburt, but seek to corrupt and reverse them for selfish means.  The knowledge such used could be used to summon demons and devils from the lower planes.  Druids and Rangers, who take neither side in the battle between good and evil, instead call upon the animistic spirits of Nature.

This resolves neatly with the alignment chart, as St. Cuthburt would dominate the Good alignment and Nature worshippers would have to remain Neutral, and followers of other beings would fall into the Evil categories. It also fixes Alignment Language into something understandable - the language of Law and Good would be the language used by the Church in formal discourse, as a stand in for Latin, the language of Neutrality would be the words spoken to commune with Nature, and the language of Evil would be reversed and corrupted forms of the language of Good. This would also explain why evil clerics are subject to the same weapon restrictions as their good counterparts, because to do so otherwise would rob them of their power.

tl;dr to fix Clerics, use a monotheistic campaign setting.  All worship is based on the Good/Evil alignment axis. The patron for Good is St. Cuthbert, for evil Asmodeus or any other devil prince, for Neutrality is Nature animism. The class breakdown follows:
Clerics and Paladins: St. Cuthburt, and Paladins can only be Lawful Good.
Druids and Rangers: Nature worship
Evil Clerics: Corrupted teachings of St. Cuthburt.

links:
http://blackmoormystara.blogspot.com/2011/01/bishop-carr-first-d-cleric.html

Race As Class

I like Race as class. I think AD&D’s system of racial class restrictions is not very different from B/X’s, and effectively only gives slightly more race-class options. Modern D&D pigeon holes certain races into certain class archetypes anyway, thus granting one only the illusion of choice.

Real world rules in (A)D&D

Gary Gygax asserts in the opening chapter of the Dungeon Masters Guide that between the approaches of the realism simulation school and the pure gamist school, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is primarily a game that does not seek to model realism or deeply simulate anything either. Originally, this statement made sense to me and instilled the notion that considerations of fun and smooth play took primacy over the necessity of laborious detailing of real world minutiae. But then, the rest of the 230 pages of the Dungeon Masters Guide are devoted to the simulation of a fantasy world, and laborious details of real world minutiae are precisely the sticking points of the text that have caused me to create this blog just to understand how they were intended to work. As with everything in the Guide, I find that the sentiment is fine but the practical implementation of the mechanic contradicts itself.

One thing I found fascinating was Delta's D&D's assertion that following the real world provided him with an elegant solution to most of the gaps with the OD&D system, explained in his post Realism in Game Design

Angry GM also makes an assertion that all rules firstly model the real world, then are modified and replaced by rules that seek to provide a more streamlined game experience, in this post Why Rules Exist , in which he also explicitly calls out Gary Gygax's assertions.

One of the things that drove me away from D&D 5th Edition was the lack of depth in the game system. I couldn't really articulate why I felt this way, because as much as anyone I dislike numerous and cumbersome rules, but I now take to the understanding that 5th Edition throw out many rules necessary for a comprehensive system, and its thin real world simulation is actually a design flaw.

Depth in gaming is a big, pervasive theme in this blog, whether I'm talking about tabletop RPGs or video games. Some of the deepest first person shooters have absolutely nothing to do with reality, such as Quake 3 Arena, but their simulation is so comprehensive that it stands by itself. On the other hand, 'realistic' shooters have gained unbelievable popularity in recent years and have almost completely supplanted pure game shooters, and that trend doesn't seem to ever be going away.

I feel that AD&D leans much harder into the real world simulation camp than Gygax would have you believe, probably as a result of general trends in wargaming from the 70's, and definitely more than modern editions of D&D.