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.

cool blog posts

city stocking tables:

 https://lizardmandiaries.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-collected-infinigrad-and-guild-dogs.html

 

Historical Europe inspired campaign
https://cydonianknights.blogspot.com/2020/08/europa-fantastica-ahistorical-campaign.html

The dice are not your friend

 The dice only exist to give players a chance to fail at something. The dice do not allow you to do things, you do that yourself when you declare your action. Rolling dice only gives a chance of hindering the players, not helping.

D&D is at its core, a dice game in which you declare your action and then roll dice to see if you fail.  If you don't, then you continue onward to gain power and glory.

How to play solo D&D

The introduction of the 5th edition rules describe the basic gameplay loop of D&D:

1. The DM describes the environment.

2. The players describe what they want to do.

3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions.

We can rephrase this into technical jargon as:
1. Content generation
2. Player action
3. Action resolution

To determine how to play solo, we can examine all 3 steps individually and take into account the special considerations of each.

1. Content Generation

In a traditional live game this is the purview of the Dungeon Master, who creates the content of the campaign and expresses it to the players. Conveying the right amount of information is crucial, because if the players know too much then they will not be surprised or challenged, and if they know too little then they will be confused and unable to engage with the game properly. In a solo game, the player and the DM are the same person, so this makes separating the content of the game tricky.

The "Master of Adventures" section of the Dungeon Master's Guide is presented as a toolkit for creating adventures. Many of the options for creating an adventure are presented as tables, and those tables can be used to randomly generate content through the use of dice rolls. 

Randomly generating content through the use of dice rolls and table lookups is a natural method for OSR gamers. The AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide provides three appendices devoted to the random generation of dungeons and wilderness terrain, random determination of monster encounters, and a chapter on random determination of treasure. 

Randomly generating content provides an exciting level of the uncertainty for the solo gamer.

2. Player Action

This is where the actual fun of the game is. This is where the DM asks "What do you do?" Given the world elements, the NPCs, the environment and location your characters are in, your player characters can take their actions. Sometimes the elements of your scene are not clear, and that requires interpretation through a question and answer oracle, or through some guided inspiration like a Tarot deck, but this is where the solitaire gamer can put on their player hat and indulge in the fun.

This is the phase where you put everything together. You can now animate all that content that you previously generated by having your character(s) interact with it all. What happens when they interact with it? Why is it all there? How did it get there? Answering these questions can be useful prompts for writing your character's story.

3. Action Resolution

The 5e system provides a universal mechanic for action resolution, using a d20:

       1. Roll the die and add a modifier
       2. Apply circumstantial bonuses and penalties

       3. Compare the total to a target number

The thresholds for the target number (called Difficulty Classes or DC) are described in plain English, so this system can be used as-is for most in-game task resolution. For the solo gamer, simply determine what you think the DC of an action is, then roll the d20 and add modifiers to see if you succeed.

Most of the action resolution rules in 5e are split between player facing and DM facing rules. The chapters devoted to "Using Ability Scores", "Adventuring", and "Combat" are all technically player facing, while the DMG chapter "Running the game" is for the DM. Simple dice mechanics can be used to cover almost all types of results, and for the rest of the unknown results it is advisable to use some kind of oracle, such as the Mythic GME.

Most solo oracles are devoted to the Action Resolution stage of gameplay. The Mythic GME uses the Fate chart, while other oracles use simple yes or no resolution. A simple d20 roll can also be used as a "yes or no" oracle as well.

Once all success or failure results have been determined, the solitaire player can return to the Content Generation or Player Action stages of the game, to keep playing and continuing the loop.

These three steps cover the "how to play" section of solitaire role-playing, and to know "what to do", the player must adapt the "Three Pillars of Adventure" to solo play, which I discuss further in depth here: https://farooqsgaming.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-three-pillars-of-d-solo.html

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.

My Mystara Campaign

So I bit the bullet and created a campaign on Roll20, in the Mystara campaign setting using the BECMI rules. I've billed it as an ongoing, open world sandbox styled campaign, and that's what it would be for the first session or so, but really I want to run through the modules B11 King's Festival and B12 Queen's Harvest, leading eventually to B10 Night's Dark Terror. Those three modules all occur in the same area of Karameikos and can fit more or less seamlessly together. The first two are basically just dungeon crawls with some story dressing, so I can fit them in whenever.

That area in Karameikos specifically has a lot of pre-made content written for it. Threshold and the surrounding areas are given plenty of detail in the Expert set, which is expanded upon in the Gazetteers and several modules, so finding material to fill in a game session shouldn't be too hard.

As a VTT software platform, I find Roll20 lacking in many ways but its LFG tool is heads above any other method of finding players, so I had to succumb and put it there.  Every other VTT on the market is taking the wrong approach, I think, by trying to be free and open source and making more features for automation, but providing no new way of finding or connecting players together. Fantasy Grounds requires you to do 90's style port forwarding and direct IP connection.  Roll20 simply wins the VTT competition, and will continue to do so for some time, I think, simply due to its ease of use.

I tried to get spur-of-the-moment pick up games running, but that met with mixed success so I figure the only way to really get consistent games is to keep an ongoing campaign running with a large pool of players involved.

Ironically, when I was looking at other games I noticed that quite a few were set in Mystara, and were playing the same modules that I wanted to use.

I want to run a similar game, set in the World of Greyhawk in the AD&D 1e system. Greyhawk itself is a very empty campaign setting, and all the modules nominally set within it are disjointed from one another. The TAGDQ series is a popular adventure path to play through for Greyhawk, but I was thinking of lowering the scope, and actually introducing the namesake City.  The City and Dungeon of Greyhawk itself were never released to the public, but a faux version of them appeared for the 2e system. Which is fine by me, I wouldn't want to play in Gygax's personal campaign any more than he would want to play in mine. 

For my campaign, I was planning on starting with T1: Hommlet, touching ToEE for a bit (because it is a really involved, cumbersome dungeon that players would get bored of sooner or later) and then routing them to the City of Greyhawk and Greyhawk Ruins. It would be a smaller campaign that wouldn't get very far out of the mid levels, but in case the players get bored there is the whole World of Greyhawk to explore, which I intend to fill in with content from the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.