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.

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.

Rations

Encumbrance values for rations in AD&D 1e are not given in the item list in the PHB, but in Appendix O of the DMG. There are no encumbrance values for rations in AD&D 2e. To me, this means that rations in 2e are weightless.

BECMI’s guidance on the difference between standard and iron rations is that standard rations spoil overnight in a dungeon. I use a different method in my games as a house rule, where standard rations spoil after a week from the date of purchase, while iron rations last forever.

I treat hunger and starvation much like HP - you’re fine until you die. I house rule that after a week without food, the character dies.

Terrain movement modifiers in AD&D 2e

 This isn’t really spelled out in the books so I’m documenting it here. 

Terrain Costs for Overland Movement are multiplied to the distance of the terrain. 

For example, travel over 5 miles of rocky Desert terrain, with a terrain cost of 2, becomes effectively 10 miles of travel.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Random encounters shouldn’t feel random

 They should feel like they’ve been there the whole time.

Final Fantasy like random encounters are annoying and boring, don’t be like Final Fantasy.

Even though you, the GM, have randomly determined an encounter, the result of that encounter is now a permanent fixture in your world. If it was a monster that your PCs have killed, it’s corpse now stays in the location where it fell, and could lead to further complications in your game world.

Don’t make monsters just jump on the players at random intervals, make it seem like the monsters were just on their way and were going to cross that area all along, and the player characters just happened to run into them.

Wilderness encounters should not be like dungeon encounters. When I make wilderness encounters, they are a full dungeon or of a scale such that they cannot be resolved with a single RP instance or combat round. You can call my wilderness encounters “wandering dungeons.” 

If you don’t want to do that, and want little wandering encounters in the wilderness, then make multiple encounters per day. The AD&D DMG has a very tight method of rolling an encounter check multiple times per day, depending on area terrain type and population density. Any other method can be used as well, for example rolling a check, selecting an encounter from a table, and then rolling another die to choose the number of encounters. Space these encounters out during the day or place them apart in distance, and then describe how the players travel into them. Your map does not need to be that precise in scale, as long as you can believably narrate your players traveling from one encounter to another until they make it out of the hex.

Healing

 Potions of healing are properly Potions of Magical Healing.

Natural healing in D&D is accomplished at the rate of 1 HP per day. Binding a wound or setting a broken bone does not have the same effect upon a character as magical healing.

The effect of a potion is identical to a spell of Cure Wounds. Cure Wounds does not cure disease, remove poisons, unclog arteries, or reverse aging. If every spell was free and every priest knew Cure Wounds, that would still not stop death from natural causes. (There are spells to reverse those other debilitating conditions, though).

A wealthy person with high level priest spells on tap could conceivably prolong his life through magical means. This happens today in the real world with people who live on life support. In the real world, some life support procedures are especially painful, and are not guaranteed to work. D&D magic is always reliable and not especially painful, so the real cost of using magic is the Vancian casting system. Magical healing in the D&D world might prolong the life of a character and improve its quality beyond what it was for actual medieval citizenry, but the high cost and low availability is the only reason it’s not available to everyone all the time. Even the highest level Patriarch cannot heal, cure, and reverse the aging of every infirm person in the city.  That service is reserved for the privileged.

New Wilderness travel rules

 You’ve all been handling wilderness travel wrong! The wilderness only exists as a means for linking dungeons together! Every encounter in the wilderness should be a mini dungeon! The wilderness should be static so the players can know where everything is and can return to it! A wilderness with random generation and small scale random encounters is indistinguishable from a dungeon and offers no unique variety, it is glorified set dressing!

 I would never force my players to travel linearly through the wilderness. They can take any route they want, the point is that the relationship between all elements in the wilderness is static. The players know exactly where they’re going and what they’ll run into on the way (except unexplored areas)

Wilderness encounters should be large enough such that they cannot be resolved in a single combat turn or RP event. Wilderness monsters should be in a monster camp or a full traveling army, not bands of 4 or 5 as in a dungeon. Getting past a wilderness encounter should be a half-day or full day event itself.

Even friendly encounters should be large in scale. Instead of meeting a peddler by the side of the road, the players should run into an entire merchant caravan on route.

Towns are just friendly dungeons. The wilderness only exists to link dungeons together (and “random” dungeons that we call wandering monsters) 

 In this method, the players can see the hexes and move hex-by-hex. When players enter a hex, I can ask them if they want to continue their journey, or spend the rest of the day exploring the hex. If they choose to explore, I reveal to them all the features of the hex (typically three). If they choose to travel, I give them a chance to accidentally find one feature of the hex, and I increase the chance of a wilderness encounter.

My wilderness travel rules

OD&D and AD&D use a default wilderness scale of 1 hex = 5 miles. B/X and BECMI use a default scale of 1 hex = 6 miles.

In my personal game, I don't let my players see the hexes. Instead I let them choose a compass direction and a length (distance or time) in which they want to travel, and I then describe what they see and experience on the way. This roots them firmly in the perspective of their own character, instead of breaking immersion into a top-down map view, and they never see the changes in scale. Ideally, the experience for the players would be identical whether they are traveling across the overworld or through a dungeon.

On the DM side, I use hexes as handy boundaries for a collection of stuff. As the players' party enters a hex, I'll describe the features within the hex that they can see. This is similar to a videogame like Skyrim or GTA where, as the player avatar nears a location, the compass fills with icons of interesting things to do. In practice, this means telling the players something like "You see a stone tower off in the distance" or "You can see smoke rising from a firepit between a camp of tents", or "you can see a band of goblins down the path".

I never force my players to stick within the bounds of the hex. The PC party travels according to their own judgement and I simply describe what's nearby, even though they would actually be "between" two hexes.

A wilderness travel scale in terms of hours is useful for certain situations and types of terrain, but sometimes days is a more wieldly scale.

I haven't yet tested the mapping procedure for cities by individual streets that I described in this post, but I intend to subject some poor party to it anyway.

% in lair

What does this mean? Does it give a chance for the wilderness encounter monster to be in its lair? Does it mean that if I find a lair, a monster may have a chance of being in it, or leave it empty? Does it mean that, should I encounter a monster in the wilderness, a certain percentage of them would be in a lair and the rest without? If I do find monsters in the lair, do I have to construct an entire dungeon, populated with the number of monsters rolled? The wording is unclear and no explanation is given.

I'm reminded of the chapter in The Hobbit where the dwarves ambush/are ambushed by some Trolls, and upon surviving the encounter find the trolls' lair and their booty of magic swords. The trolls' lair was actually just a cave with a simple bag buried under the dirt, not an elaborate dungeon.

I think it's easy to convert that into AD&D terms, if we treat the wilderness as the dungeon. As players encounter monsters, the % in lair could mean that the monsters are within the lair, that they have a lair, that a lair exists without monsters, that a certain percentage of the monsters are in the lair and the rest wandering around, or all of the above. The "lair" can be a simple abode - a tent camp for semi-civilized races or bandits, small caves or holes in the ground for creatures that naturally live in the wild, or whatever.

The purpose of a lair is to hold treasure - the only relation it has to the rest of the game, and the only gain of passing the percent check, is that it allows you to roll on the "lair treasure" table for the monster. In short, its more rewarding to find the monster's lair as it will have more treasure. Turning the lair into a dungeon just adds too many steps to finding the treasure. A simple lair, populated by a band of monsters, that the players can clear out and spend a day searching to recover the treasure, is probably the most expedient way of handling it.

Creating simple wilderness lairs is also much easier and much more natural than dotting the landscape with dungeons. Unless a major part of the fiction of the game is that dungeons simply exist all over the world for no reason, much like an Elder Scrolls game.

Wilderness as a dungeon

Here's a thought: Treat city streets as corridors of a dungeon that players must move through and map. Of course, since they're outdoors they move at a faster rate - 10 yards per turn of mapping, or 100 yards per turn not mapping.  They can accurately map out a city, and the DM can explain it, by walking down the streets and noting intersections and important buildings along the sides. Of course no one does it this way, because it's too cumbersome.

Traps in the wilderness are way more natural to my imagination. Snare traps hidden under a pile of leaves, pits dug into the ground and covered with moss, spikes dug into the ground, nets in tree canopies, razor wire across barks, bear traps in the ground. These are all great traps that have actually been used in the real world. It's gruesome but the fighting in Vietnam and WW2 in the Pacific have many examples that can be used for inspiration.

Wandering monsters actually have a reason to wander in the wilderness. In a dungeon, it's assumed that they're aimlessly walking about, or occasionally stalking the players. In the wilderness, they could just be going somewhere. In the case of orcs and goblins, they can actually be an organized band on patrol. Maybe they're actually a unit marching to a destination and run into the players by accident. Maybe they're camping and taking a rest. Maybe they found the players' tracks, and are actively following the players. Maybe the players accidentally walked into the territory of a large predator. All of these create encounters with a purpose.

Wilderness travel, for small scale exploration or town activities, should be measured in terms of hours. The conversion is simple, 60 yards for every hour of travel in an unknown wilderness, if mapping carefully, so a character with 12" movement can cover 720 yards per hour.
Without mapping, that's 7200 yards per hour, or roughly 4.09 miles per hour, which is about average human walking speed IRL.

Also, moving over the hex map - Give the players a large radius of sight, but don't reveal the whole map. Have the players move with natural directions - orienting towards a landmark, or a compass direction, and setting a distance. Reveal hexes according to the players' sight radius, or multiple hexes at once. Obviously this technique is meant more for VTT that handles line of sight for you.

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 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.

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.

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.