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. 

The best review of Advanced Heroquest

 https://www.alwaysboardneverboring.com/2013/09/advanced-heroquest.html

He hits the nail right on the head. AHQ feels too real and gritty. To him, this diminishes his enjoyment. It’s what attracts me to it in the first place. And anyone who plays OSR has claimed to prefer gritty, dangerous, highly lethal dungeon crawling, and AHQ delivers.

I also like how he opens the review with a discussion on the necessity of rules, especially ones that bound the realm of possibility. A major drive of RPGs is that there are no rules, only the will of the DM, and I think that’s throwing the baby out with the bath water. Certain rules are necessary to have an actual consistent game, otherwise you’re just playing make believe with your friends. You don’t need an RPG for that, and you really should be embarrassed if you’re doing that and calling it an RPG.

My OD&D campaign

 I'm using the Outdoor Survival map for my wilderness map. I was looking for a good outdoor terrain map and briefly considered using Mystara or the Wilderlands of High Fantasy since I already have them, but I figure if I'm playing OD&D it'd be really neat to go straight back to the source.

Book 3 states: "Catch basins are castles, buildings are towns, and the balance of the terrain is as indicated."

That doesn't leave a whole lot of towns.

I've recently taken a liking to isometric maps, especially for online gaming as I feel they increase immersion and player engagement, but there's not a whole lot of isometric maps out there gridded and scaled for RPG play. 4e actually has some really neat isometric maps courtesy of a blogger, and Greyhawk got one in 2e's City of Greyhawk boxed set. 

So I guess my towns are going to be a mishmash of the Nentir Vale and Greyhawk. Players can start in Fallcrest and travel to Greyhawk or Winterhaven or whatever. It actually seems pretty neat, to turn this setting into a mishmash of everything that was once D&D. Maybe Specularum could be placed innocuously in one place on the map, Threshold in another, etc...

UPDATE: On second thought, the Outdoor Survival map doesn’t give you a whole lot to work with, and the OD&D rules only “open doors without going in”, to paraphrase the Immortals box. 

The original Judge’s Guild Wilderlands of High Fantasy, though, has a ton of content, tables for generating more content, and fleshes out the skeletons of the rules that were introduced in OD&D. I think I’m going to transition my OD&D game to a hex crawl of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

I might just use Advanced Heroquest’s dungeon map generation and stocking tables for the dungeon crawl part.

 UPDATE 2: Use Monsters & Treasure Assortment for ready made dungeon encounters.

UPDATE 3: Yeah, now just going to use Nentir Vale, because a guy made isometric maps of all the Nentir Vale towns and I can use my isometric tokens.

5 room dungeons

 I mostly only play one shots anymore, so I've gotten a lot of mileage out of certain 5 room dungeons, like the one in the Red box Basic set. I've gotten pretty bored of it now though, there's only so many times you can kill Aleena and be interested in it. My last player tried to use a healing skill to bring her back to life, which I think is precluded by getting a magic missile through the chest. Still, I let him roll for it and I fudged the results anyway.

Apparently there's a case for running megadungeons for open table play, but I think a mega-dungeon is too much for a group of level 1's. A simple 5 room dungeon, the equivalent of a haunted house, should be enough for the first adventure for a group of lowbies. Once they gain wealth and power, then they can strike out into deeper and more dangerous ruins.

Why do we always start off killing rats and goblins in RPGs? Why aren't haunted mansions more of a thing? Abandoned buildings really should be more of a standard adventuring location for level 1s.

You ever notice that the monsters in the original DOOM and DOOM II are all basically mutated humanoids? The Imp, sure, is just a human with spikes, but even the pinky Demon has the limbs and torso of a man, just strangely proportioned. The Spider Mastermind is a human brain on a robot walker, not an animal brain and not a spider in any other way. Even the Cacodemon is a human eye and mouth sans the rest of the body. I like to believe there's some subconscious knowledge there that the id software team probably weren't aware of, that the demons are all twisted aspects of humanity. Also notice that they've all shed all their clothes away. The zombies retain their human clothing and weaponry, though. 

I prefer humanoid enemies in my games as well, but maybe I just lack the imagination to come up with weird eldritch lovecraftian foes.

I've been using BECMI D&D for my one shots but I've fallen out of love with the system. I briefly considered B/X, but then it dawned on me (actually my wife gave me the idea) to just use OD&D. Which is actually a really genius idea, if you think about it.  AD&D kind of sucks for one shots because character creation can take upwards of an hour, especially with players new to the system. Players used to modern D&D struggle with the concept of Race-as-class, but OD&D is simple and straightforward and hopefully fast enough that the party can get to play in a few minutes.

The problem with OD&D is that players usually have questions about basic mechanics, which are not explained in the books. Really simple stuff like how much damage does flaming oil do and how far can it be thrown? Every DM just makes a ruling on the spot but IMO an official rule does exist in every other version of D&D so why not just use that? AD&D specifically has a half page chart describing the outcome of throwing a flask of flaming oil in excruciating detail, and since it's penned by the same author as OD&D I figure its a natural fit. I figure running OD&D and filling in the rules with AD&D is probably the most natural way of running it.

But most people who run OD&D use it as a license to run wild with their imagination, which was kind of the original point of the system and kind of also what killed it and prompted the publication of AD&D.

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.

Subtle worldbuilding

 Players who read the rule books, campaign setting books, and lore, generally want to bring elements of that into the game. Especially those players that have purchased and read splat books that include new races, subclasses, spells and abilities. In a game like 5e, the DM has no tools for managing how the players use this new material. If a player brings in a build or character idea, the DM can only sit back and watch them play it out by succeeding on dice rolls, or ban it outright out of game. Personally, I think banning concepts from the game is kind of a dick thing to do, as it breaks the implicit agreement between players and DM, but there's no other way in 5e.

AD&D, by contrast, has a lot of subtle mechanics that let the DM maintain the integrity and versimilitude of the game while allowing the player to include what he likes. The training requirement, for example, is much lambasted by the community but what it does is force player characters to seek out NPCs in the world to continue their own growth. NPCs ground the players. Gaining magical spells is not automatic in TSR D&D, in fact there are no rules at all for how magic users gain spells. Only AD&D 1e has a list of admonishments to the DM to not give out magical spells too freely, but no guide on how to give them out at all, except as random treasure spell scrolls. This means that a magic-users spellbook is firmly in the hands of the DM. If the DM does not want to give out Wish spells, Fireball, or even Protection from Good/Evil, the magic-user will never see those spells. This actually solves the "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" problem before it ever even occurs. 

On top of the mechanical controls, it allows the DM to manage the fiction of the world. Say if the DM does not want Orcs as a race, but the player brings in a Half-Orc character. The DM can allow the player to his character while simply having no other orcs or half-orcs show up in the world.  Half-orc adventurers in AD&D can "generally pass as human", and beyond mechanical bonuses don't add anything more to the setting. The NPCs don't even have to mention the different facial features of the half-orc character, and there can be no temples to Gruumsh, no shrines, no mention of Orcs in the hills, nothing. Orcs don't have to exist in the DMs world.

Then there's ways to manage the physical features of the character. "Half-orc", in an orc-less world, could just mean an ugly person. Maybe he had an ugly dad, or his parents come from a separate tribe that the civilized folk consider "orcish". And if the player is insistent on being part of a distinct demi-human race, the NPCs can all just treat that as the rantings of a deranged lunatic.  The player can play his character, and the DM can maintain her world, and the friction between the two is lessened.

  But in 5e, there is a huge interconnectivity between a PCs race, the subclass options he chooses, the background of the character (including ideals, bonds and flaws), and the player's backstory. All of this adds elements to the DMs world that she may not be comfortable with, and the only way to manage it is to talk out of character about it and waste precious game time. Instead of subtle controls, everything becomes an open debate.

Heroquest rankings

 Advanced Heroquest > Warhammer Quest > Heroquest

Advanced Heroquest actually adds a whole lot of cool new rules that add depth to the combat, loot and trap content of the game. Advanced Heroquest also has rules for generating content procedurally, ensuring that the game remains dynamic for repeated play. Compared to Advanced Heroquest, the base game is a little too simple and lacking depth. Regular Heroquest also requires a dungeon master to play and every scenario is pre-programmed, so there's no system for creating your own adventures beyond the GM's discretion. It also doesn't have as much content. Warhammer Quest is like a streamlined version of Advanced Heroquest. It removes certain complexities of Advanced Heroquest rules and simplifies some of the dice rolls. The Roleplay book adds expansive content, and this adds breadth to the game.  However, Advanced Heroquest has the deepest rules for dungeon crawling of the three.

Perusing these boardgame rulebooks really highlights that D&D has pretty bad rules for handling traps and loot. There's a couple of random tables, but for placing and showing them to players the rules basically state "it's up to the DM". As such, when it comes to traps and treasure the only information is about what types are available, not how to use them. The nature of a board game like Heroquest allows for more solid rules on placing and using traps and finding treasure.

Advanced Heroquest actually has a great system for handling traps. Trap Counters must be pulled in random events and then played by certain triggers. Each trap has a spot chance that allows the player to roll a die to see if the trap is spotted or avoided, otherwise the trap causes a unique affect or damage to the character. This is such a simple and elegant system for handling traps that I wonder why D&D doesn’t have any mechanics for dealing with traps. DMs in D&D just have to imagine triggers and the players have to imagine ways to avoid them. The Advanced Heroquest system is so good that I feel like stealing it for every other game.

In Warhammer Quest, all dungeons are randomly generated and the objective room is somewhere buried in the stack of dungeon cards. The role play book introduces the role of the GM who can make dungeons that are not random. In Heroquest, all dungeon layouts are pregenerated, so require a DM to keep that knowledge hidden from players. Advanced Heroquest presents both options, it has a few pregenerated dungeon layouts that are combined into one overarching quest, and then the default mode of play to generate them randomly. Advanced Heroquest is dice driven, as opposed to the other two games which are card driven.