I made this comment on one of my videos and got called out for it by a fan of the original edition of Dungeons and Dragons. According to him, there's a large fanbase that still plays and enjoys the original game and that I could gain more insight on it by seeing what they do. Fair enough, and I dove into looking at the original brown box set and the released supplements.
As a caveat, I haven't played a session of OD&D so I'm limited to reading the books and looking up what the fans have to say about it, but I stand by my earlier assessment. The original 3 books of Dungeons and Dragons were never meant to be a stand alone game. They're a product of the war game culture of the 1960's and 1970's, where the players took many different sources from many different systems and blended them into their own campaigns. The first 3 booklets of D&D were introduced into this culture with the expectation that they would be added as one part of the players' ongoing campaign. The books themselves explicitly assume use of the combat rules from the game Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures and the wilderness journey rules from Avalon Hill's game Outdoor Survival.
The original release of D&D is a skeleton of a game meant to be swapped into the context of a larger ongoing campaign. It provides a basis for resolving man-to-man combat and focuses on the individual character scale, where more prominent games focused on the scale of large armies. It was the first game to introduce elements of fantasy fiction such as mythical monsters and spell casting, and thus caused a revolution. As D&D became more commercially available, the gaps in the system and the need for other games' rules became more noticeable issues for players who weren't part of the Lake Geneva wargaming club, so Gygax and TSR released 3 supplemental books to fill that need. As such, to fully play D&D as its own game you need the original three books, Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, along with the supplements Greyhawk: Supplement I, Blackmoor: Supplement II, and Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry. The other two supplements, Gods, Demigods and Heroes and Swords & Spells are mostly unnecessary.
As I said earlier, D&D is a skeleton of a game and to truly play, you must flesh out the campaign yourself and add in your own game rules and campaign ideas. Fans of the system see this as its greatest strength, in that you're allowed and encouraged to let your imagination go wild and add in whatever you want. Dave Arneson, the co-creator of the game, did just such a thing with his Blackmoor campaigns, which brought in elements from Chinese wuxia films, space age science fiction weapons, nuclear power and whatever else.
But in my view that means that you're not playing D&D, you're creating and playing your own game with D&D as a guide. In effect, you're house ruling and homebrewing it all yourself. And that was the intent all along, and its greatest draw, and also how its creators actually played. Gary Gygax himself admits that he basically only uses some tables and math resolutions, and prefers to just do everything else on the fly at the table.
If I had to do that, though, why would I play D&D? Why wouldn't I just make up my own RPG system without the wild inconsistencies and issues of D&D? With Blackjack, and hookers. If I had to homebrew it all, I'd rather just homebrew a whole game myself. Which I guess is what happened after Wizards of the Coast released the Open Gaming License.
This sentiment that most players weren't playing D&D but their own game that was mechanically very dissimilar to the original was echoed by Gary Gygax in his introduction for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. There was a backlash of that from the fans, but I think there's some truth his statement.
D&D's greatest strength is that it created and
introduced the idea for Role Play gaming, and provided the beginning
framework on how to do so. I find it strange that, once this idea became
globally available, its fans started to just try and 'improve' D&D,
rather than create their own better systems wholesale. D&D isn't all that role play games could be - after all, Vampire: The Masquerade is very different from D&D and yet is a popular role playing game in its own right.
Dr. John Eric Holmes famously studied the core booklets of D&D before coming to the conclusion that the game was "impossible to play" as written, and created his own revised version of the game called Basic Dungeons & Dragons, published officially by TSR. Other players not from Lake Geneva, WI came to the same conclusion and created their own spinoffs as well, such as Tunnels & Trolls.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a much more feature complete game than D&D. It's meant to be an end to end campaign system in itself, without the need for mandatory supplements in order to be played. In a way, it's also more restrictive than the original game and is much less modular, as adding elements from other fiction or from other war games will break the already skewed balance and can actually change the nature of the game. And a phenomenon it shares with its predecessor is that AD&D also needs to be house ruled before it can effectively be played.
There exists a community of players that still enjoy Original Dungeons & Dragons, and still rank it as their favorite version of the game. I think that they do so because it was the first game that they played, and not on the intrinsic merits of the system itself. As a modern player, there's very little reason to go back to OD&D except as a historical curiosity. There are so many revisions, future editions, spinoffs and clones that fill the shortcomings of the original game that there's no real reason to play the first by itself. If players really want to homebrew their own game, the easiest method would be to use the d20 SRD and create one that way. As a lover of history and hoarder of childhood antiques, I can see the appeal of wanting to own and play original D&D, but functionally I cannot recommend it above later, successive editions of Tabletop Role Playing Games.
My current experiment is to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as written (if not as intended) and in doing so I've realized that there is a very specific style of play it encourages, and a solid vision to the game. It's not a very strict system, but changing either changes the nature of the game, and I fully encourage players to do so to find the style of game and the vision they like the best and want to play. I believe the reason that so many old school players, 'grognards', dislike the modern edition of D&D is because it really does replace both the style and vision of AD&D with something else, something a lot more forgiving, consequence free and wildly fantastical
My favorite overview of OD&D comes from this site: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2603/roleplaying-games/reactions-to-odd
High praise for the open ended, freewheeling nature of OD&D from the OG http://kaskoid.blogspot.com/2016/02/how-i-helped-to-pull-rope-that-tolled.html
and an actual mechanical comparisons of the two systems: http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2012/02/damn-you-gygax-part-1.html
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