Takeaways from BROSR

 I read some of their blogs and I still don't really get how patron play works, but what really stuck with me was their description of how a campaign was run. Every patron is essentially the leader of a faction, and their intrigues against one another drive the quests that regular PCs go on.
 Now I don't really know how the BROSR run their games, but the idea that the campaign world essentially moves from a Grand Strategy level with different factions in a constant state of flux, as determined by the actions of the players, is very appealing. I'm very fond of Grand Strategy games and populating a world of medieval nations at war is very natural to me. This is what I'm implementing in my current campaign, where every adventure that the PCs go on has some direct political or strategic consequence in the greater campaign world. As the fortunes of various factions shift, new adventure hooks naturally open up.  That's also why I'm using AD&D 2e, the non-OSR edition, as its a much better fit for this kind of campaign. It beats going into another undeground cave and getting stuck in a squabble between bugbears and hobgoblins, at least.

No more kitchen sinks!

 I'm running a campaign set in a mythic fantasy version of the British Isles, circa 860 AD. Due to the nature of the setting, there's many monsters and magic items that are restricted from use, and I absolutely love the effect that has in game. Given that I'm using a twist on a real world setting, the players immediately relate to it and have ideas of what can and should be done in the adventure, and by limiting monsters and items, I'm able to reinforce their suspension of disbelief.
  I think that adding too many elements from outside influences such as Tolkein's works, Conan and pulp adventure stories, etc., tends to shatter disbelief and revert players into a headspace where they know that they're just playing a game. Actually one of the issues running B2: Keep on the Borderlands is the baggage that creatures like Orcs and goblins bring, because they've been done so many times in so many other kinds of games.
  In fact one of my drives to play systems like Original D&D was its restrictions on player classes and races, and a lot of my advice for running spellcasters is to limit the specific spells that they have access to. I just didn't realize that it's better to limit all of these from a setting perspective and not a system one. That might explain the popularity of settings like Dark Sun and Ravenloft, which specialize D&D in their own ways.
  Rather than running a generic fantasy kitchen sink, I think its better to see the monster manual and spell lists as options that you must remove pieces of in order to fit your campaign. Most tables that I've seen just assume that everything that exists in the rule books also exists somewhere in the campaign world, but by creating a campaign world where some things cannot exist has conversely freed me up to run a more satisfying game.

Also as a side effect, using a map of historical Britain and Scandinavia has absolutely crashed my interest in fantasy maps. Fantasy maps are usually just pastiches of real world places anyway, with odd geography. I think it would be fun to run a campaign in Central or Eastern Europe as well, which would give access to most kinds of biomes.

Thoughts on Man-to-Man in D&D

Dragons fight as "4 heavy horse", which is simple on the mass Combat table, but unclear on Man to Man.
But wait, "Barding" is an armor option on the M2M table.
Dragon armor rating can simply be equal to Barding, with the appropriate number of Hit Die as referenced in D&D Book 2.
Then they also have that Achilles Heel of being shot out of the sky by a Hero on a roll of 12

I'm not a fan of multiple attack rolls. One "chance to hit" per attack is enough.
Hit Points should (and do) replace simultaneous hits with cumulative hits. There's no need to model extra attacks or anything on top of that.

Light, Heavy and Armored Foot troop types can map directly onto the Leather, Chain, and Plate armor types.
Light,  Medium, Heavy and Draft Horses are purchasable mounts in D&D, and with the addition of Barding can be armored.

In Chainmail, while flanking, the defender is hit as if he was one lower troop type. This correlates to a 2 step drop in armor type on M2M, with consideration given for a shield. It's also probably the origin of the "+2 to hit" rule in AD&D. In both AD&D and Supplement 1, the right flank gets no protection from a shield.

Digging into the Chainmail M2M rules has given me a new appreciation of Supplement I: Greyhawk as merely an attempt to translate Chainmail rules into the D&D chassis. The implementation is a bit tortured and some of the math is wrong, but its what we've come to expect from Gygax. I feel like a fuller explanation of the imported systems would have benefited the supplement, and apparently Gygax did too, as that's what he wrote in AD&D (and had issues describing it there as well)

House rules for D&D + Chainmail

The races: Human, Elf, Dwarf and Hobbit

The classes: Fighting-Man, Magic-User, Cleric

No multi classing, elves must choose a single class

Stats are rolled 3d6 arrange as desired, starting gold is 3d6x10 for personal equipment 

There are no hit points. A single hit is death for Man- type characters. It takes 4 concurrent successes on d6 for a Man to hit a Hero.

In almost all cases the Mass Combat Table will be used for combat resolution, the Man-to-Man Melee table will only be used for individual combat between Hero types and those rare cases when it applies against Monsters

Super Heroes may roll twice on the Man-to-Man Melee table to attempt to hit a Hero. Hero and Super Hero will use the Mass Combat table against Man characters.

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.

 I play online with strangers a lot, and I’ve found it necessary to have a ruleset with as little ambiguity as possible. OD&D is fraught with ambiguity and this makes it frustrating to run online, as the two solutions are to either create a house rule document that no one will read, or waste most of the first session just resolving issues in the base ruleset.

On the other hand, playing OD&D this way really shows how other people perceive the rules, and highlights its unique positives and negatives.

 I’m soloing my way through Mage Knight. I like how there’s a lot more going on than “move here, kill monster”. I especially like the mechanic of gaining fame to attract followers, who you need in order to siege towns and fight bigger threats. I think D&D would really be enhanced by this level of strategic gameplay. Domain play becomes more natural when you’re already traveling with a large camp of followers. 

Also, resource management in Mage Knight is more about gaining resources by building them in the world, rather than just buying everything in town then slowly losing them in the game, which is an added level of incentive, I think.

Re: 2e and OSR

If we define OSR as a style of gameplay that focuses on dungeon crawling, resource tracking, combat as war, killing monsters and taking their stuff, 2e does that fantastically. Because the mechanics of 2e *are* the mechanics of 1e, it is literally built for that style of game.

2e has a lot more rules though. That's because AD&D started to position itself as a major roleplaying campaign system starting with 1e. In truth the seeds of it were there in OD&D, it was just never fleshed out. AD&D 1e really expands the fantasy medieval campaigning, but it is frustratingly incomplete. Part of it is due to Gygax's haphazard writing, part of it is the practical constraints of how much content can actually fit in the book. 2e takes that and builds on it, but instead of concentrating on fantasy medieval wargames campaigns, it turns into a sandbox world simulator.

Most of AD&D 1e was written in the editors room between Gygax and Kask, and it shows. Many ideas that seem good on paper turn unworkable on the table (re: polearms). By 1989, AD&D had been out in the wild for 10~12 years, and the staff at TSR had a long time to play and understand its shortcomings. It was with the benefit of this experience that Zeb Cook revised and modified the rules of AD&D for 2nd edition. Though the suits at TSR get a lot of hate, one thing they did right was stress that 2e remain completely compatible with 1e modules and splat, which reigned in any of the more extreme changes that Zeb Cook might have made. I feel that if Gary Gygax had released his version of 2e, it would be something very different from what we now call OSR.

By 1995, the bottom was falling out from under TSR. Splatbook bloat and competing product lines, inventory mismanagement and vanity investments by Lorraine Williams to fill her own coffers had caused TSR to slash most of its product lines out of panic. Ironically, this led to some of their best products in decades. The "Introduction to Advanced D&D" set is a fantastic intro not just to AD&D but the whole roleplaying hobby. And it focuses on town and dungeon crawls just like those OSR purists claim "real" D&D is like. If you need proof that 2e is a fantastic game for OSR style play, just read and play that set. It includes a subset of the full 2e rules, so you don't have to go through the whole core books.

I'm not saying 2e is perfect though. It still contains a lot of jank and clunky mechanics. like any RPG, it needs to be tailored and customized to the table in which it is played. And it has that splatbook problem: some are great, some are terrible, some in between. When I run 2e, my focus is on using it to create "realistic"/believable worlds to play in, and populating it with adventures and danger. (side note: I think my danger quotient might be too high) It is unlike 5e, which fundamentally fights against the OSR style of play by reducing challenge or outright removing it, ignoring resource tracking and focusing on "balanced" narrative encounters.

But if we define OSR as "a secret club that exists in the minds of grognards and wannabe LARPers that begins and ends at arbitrary points in time", then 2e is not and cannot ever be OSR, nor do I see why that should be anything to aspire to.

On a personal note; I do not care whether 2e is considered OSR or not. I enjoy the game because it does what I want out of fantasy adventure gaming. It is clearly old school, compatible with Original D&D (the white box) and AD&D 1st edition, and not part of the 3e and above line of game design.

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.