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.

 OD&D, by the book, is an inferior game to Advanced Heroquest. My primary sources of complaint are:

• Encumbrance
• The primary modifiers of encumbrance in OD&D are your armor and weapon, and everything else is assumed to weigh 80 gold piece equivalent. The rest of your weight limit is determined entirely by how many gold coins you carry.
• In Heroquest your move speed is modified by armor, and everything else only adds up to your weight limit, until you cannot carry anymore. Again, you are mostly only concerned about how much gold you can carry.
• Gold for XP
• In OD&D, Gold and Monsters both grant XP. In Supplement I: Greyhawk and later, monster XP is trivially small, to the point of not being worth the fight
  
• In AHQ, the only way to level is to pay for training with gold. Monsters also drop gold when they die, such that it can be considered equivalent to an "XP value", however gold has more uses than just as a means to level 
• The Gold feedback loop
• Taken as a whole, the above two points illustrate that both games stress the need to dungeon crawl for gold, but the gold economy and feedback loop is stronger in AHQ 

Further complaints

•  Time tracking by steps-per-turn
• This is much easier to track on a board game with an actual grids or a ruler, than it is to convey and track abstractly in theater of the mind 

• Exploration
• AHQ still allows players the thrill of exploring the unknown
• The method for finding secret doors (actually, generating secret doors) puts more control in the hands of the players while counterbalancing that with a DM's wandering monster check 
• Traps
• AHQ d12 spot and disarm chances make finding several common traps much simpler than OD&D.
•  I like it more than a 2-in-6 for every trap. I also see this as a framework, I can imagine any new trap and give players an X-in-12 chance for finding it. This is assuming that they haven't sussed out the "secret method" planned by the GM of finding and disarming it.
  
  This also straight replaces the Search/Spot/Perception rolls of the d20 system. In fact I think that roll is a flat answer to the problem of finding traps that OD&D has. Importantly, I like the d12 chance because it sets the chance of finding on a per trap basis, and not per character ability score. This is more logical to me and cuts out the need to put a modifier on the perception roll to detect trap.

• Spells
• OD&D Magic-Users know every spell in a spellbook of appropriate level, and can create new spells at the cost of 1,000 gold and a week of research. However, they can only use a limited number per day, and must rest before casting another
• AHQ Wizards also know every spell, however they must roll at the beginning of each round to see if they have enough spell points to cast. This keeps their gameplay dynamic and allows them to be useful more frequently than the OD&D magic-user
• NPCs
• The given NPC Hazard encounters in AHQ are a lot of fun
• Henchmen are easier and less punitive to recruit
• OD&D's morale and loyalty system is better, however
  

For a straight dungeon crawl, AHQ is better than OD&D. What OD&D offers above AHQ is the chance to do more, to journey in the overland and  engage with NPCs. Also maybe build a stronghold and go flying or sailing, but nobody really does that. OD&D shines when you lean into its role as a free-form RPG.

I really do like OD&D and I've run several games with the system, but I've always found it lacking in some pretty big ways and have ended up needing to create many more rulings per session. For a strict dungeon crawl, the more solid rules of AHQ are better for a more enjoyable evening of play.

BONUS:

• No f@#$ing DM 
• AHQ can be played out of the box without a DM, while in OD&D the notion ranges from absurd to plausible with extra procedures and oracles
  

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.

Cracking the solo code

 Turns out that I’ve been playing solo wrong. Apparently it’s better to first decide what your character wants to do and then generate the world in response, than it is to generate the world first and then try to move your character through it like an automaton. With the latter method, I found most GM Emulators to fail in usefulness since I would be doing all the GM roles anyway, and I found them to be better used as “Player Emulators” where their oracles and tables were better suited to controlling the PCs.

DM Yourself is a great new product that puts the focus back on the solo player acting only as a PC and not as a GM, to drive the story forward. 

 Every procedure in D&D is longer and slower than doing that same action in real life 

cRPGs

 I liked Pathfinder: Kingmaker better once I created a character not as a "protagonist", but as a fit to the party. That game is more about managing a 6 person party than it is about playing a single individual main character.

Most of the guides online say that your choice between focusing on magic or melee doesn't matter in Divinity: Original Sin 2. This is false, magic has significantly deeper gameplay and most of the combat is built around the interactions between different magical effects. Physical combat and damage doesn't have nearly the variety, unless you play as a polymorph. I didn't enjoy D:OS2 until I had a full magic caster party.

Pillars of Eternity has the best controls for console. The 2D backgrounds are also better than every other game that use 3D backgrounds. The isometric perspective on a fully 3D modeled game gives me motion sickness.

Baldur's Gate sucks. Baldur's Gate II sucks more. I never felt like I was playing AD&D while playing those games, instead I felt like I was playing any generic BioWare game.