Buyer's Remorse

I bought AD&D intending to follow it as closely as written as possible in order to get the full vision of the creator. I felt kind of defrauded after learning that the author didn't use the rules as written himself. In Gary Gygax's case it could be excused, as D&D probably just existed in his head, and he would have no need of a graven rules reference in order to play. However the fraudulent part is with the rules that he didn't play with, didn't playtest, and only included in the AD&D core books because of a friend's insistence or because they seemed like a good idea when writing. It makes the experience of actually playing AD&D a frustrating one, as these rules create large internal conflicts that must be addressed by each GM individually.  An option would be to simply play OD&D + Greyhawk supplement, but OD&D and AD&D share the same critical flaw in not explaining themselves very well, and thus it again falls on the shoulders of the GM to make its systems work.

 I'd say for Gygax, D&D lived in his head so he really didn't need written rules, and the impression I get is that he wasn't much of a strict rulekeeper at the table either, and so expected other GMs to follow his lead.

For another perspective, I was interested in Basic D&D, primarily through the Rules Cyclopedia but in modern OSR circles the Moldvay and Cook B/X version is regarded more highly. Instead I chose the Frank Mentzer revision and bought the BEC sets (out of BECMI) because of their promise of continued explanation and tutorial of the system as opposed to dry rules. I'm quite happy with these sets as I feel that I got exactly what I wanted - a system that works on its own merits with little requirement to houserule, and clear explanations of its features. Some of the systems are a bit too streamlined however, and I feel that AD&D has some good features that don't exist in BECMI.

One bonus for me in the Mentzer sets over the B/X or Rules Cyclopedia is the art. I know a lot of people online prefer the weird and grungy Errol Otus art because "it more accurately depicts the actual experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons", but as an amateur artist myself I appreciate the technical beauty of the Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley artwork.  Since the Rules Cyclopedia tosses all that beautiful artwork out, I feel like I dodged a bullet by not buying that book.

I love reading the AD&D books, but I like playing BECMI a lot more.

My beef with high fantasy

I love history, especially of the Ancient, Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern time periods. I'm one of those nerds that's a huge stickler for "historical accuracy". Which is why the standard "high fantasy" setting triggers me, and Angry GM does a great job explaining why:

"Technologically, it’s a mess of stuff from the late Roman Empire through to the early Renaissance. Except gunpowder. Unless there’s gunpowder. Politically, religiously, and socially it’s the modern world except that the predominant governing system is hereditary monarchies or aristocracies and the predominant religion is easily ignored polytheism that is ridiculously tolerant of atheism. They have nothing to do with actual feudalism or paganism. But they claim to be feudal. In short, it’s a standard high fantasy setting."

source: Drawing an Unnecessary Map of Nothing At All

Roleplaying

I'm not a fan of the amateur improv theater that most players seem to consider role playing as being. I also don't like DMs who approach the game as a collaborative creative writing session with dice. I prefer D&D as a game, to be played like a game, which is why I like gridded battle maps, miniature figures, and overland hex crawls.

Its undeniable that pure theater of the mind speeds up play, but most people's definition of role play belongs on a therapist's couch, or in an acting class, or in the bedroom with their significant other(s).

Real world rules in (A)D&D

Gary Gygax asserts in the opening chapter of the Dungeon Masters Guide that between the approaches of the realism simulation school and the pure gamist school, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is primarily a game that does not seek to model realism or deeply simulate anything either. Originally, this statement made sense to me and instilled the notion that considerations of fun and smooth play took primacy over the necessity of laborious detailing of real world minutiae. But then, the rest of the 230 pages of the Dungeon Masters Guide are devoted to the simulation of a fantasy world, and laborious details of real world minutiae are precisely the sticking points of the text that have caused me to create this blog just to understand how they were intended to work. As with everything in the Guide, I find that the sentiment is fine but the practical implementation of the mechanic contradicts itself.

One thing I found fascinating was Delta's D&D's assertion that following the real world provided him with an elegant solution to most of the gaps with the OD&D system, explained in his post Realism in Game Design

Angry GM also makes an assertion that all rules firstly model the real world, then are modified and replaced by rules that seek to provide a more streamlined game experience, in this post Why Rules Exist , in which he also explicitly calls out Gary Gygax's assertions.

One of the things that drove me away from D&D 5th Edition was the lack of depth in the game system. I couldn't really articulate why I felt this way, because as much as anyone I dislike numerous and cumbersome rules, but I now take to the understanding that 5th Edition throw out many rules necessary for a comprehensive system, and its thin real world simulation is actually a design flaw.

Depth in gaming is a big, pervasive theme in this blog, whether I'm talking about tabletop RPGs or video games. Some of the deepest first person shooters have absolutely nothing to do with reality, such as Quake 3 Arena, but their simulation is so comprehensive that it stands by itself. On the other hand, 'realistic' shooters have gained unbelievable popularity in recent years and have almost completely supplanted pure game shooters, and that trend doesn't seem to ever be going away.

I feel that AD&D leans much harder into the real world simulation camp than Gygax would have you believe, probably as a result of general trends in wargaming from the 70's, and definitely more than modern editions of D&D.

Bounded accuracy

This feature alone makes 5e a better system than 4e, which had level dependent scaling defenses and accuracy

More AD&D movement issues, this time for outdoor movement and encumbrance

The PHB states that under normal encumbrance condition, a PC can move '12" ', whatever that means. Whether its measured by a ruler on a tabletop, scaled to the miniature figure used in actual play, or scaled to the table map used in actual play is a huge problem. Still, the guide in AD&D is that 12" equals 120 feet in-game. 

The DMG states that under normal encumbrance, a PC can move 30 miles per day.
If calculated from the PHB, where it states "Each 1" of movement equals the number of miles...in one-half day's trekking" (p.102), it would seem that the actual number for an unencumbered character would be 24 miles per day, so of course the two measurements are incongruous.

I, personally, would rather choose the explicitly stated rule in the DMG over the calculated measurement.

And a final note, "normal" encumbrance means up to 35 lbs.(PHB p 101)  or 350 gold coin weight  (PHB p.102) without strength bonuses.

p.27 of the DMG lists armor weight in pounds, which needs to be multiplied by 10 to get gold coin weight, in order to determine the total weight carried by a character, which can be used to determine accurate encumbrance.

And finally, the actual gold piece weight values of regular items is in an Appendix in the back of the DMG (p. 225) instead of in the inventory lists of either the PHB or DMG!

Putting together these rules piecemeal is a real pain

For exploration, the PHB states that movement is 1/10 the rate given in the combat movement table, which means that for 12" a character could only move at 12 feet per minute, much less than the actual human walking speed of 276 ft/min. I don't buy the in game explanation that mapping and being cautious reduces speed to this number, so this is a total house rule I use to make regular movement through a dungeon room or through a city to take 1 turn total, whether the distance is 12 feet (normally a round in exploration), 120 feet (normally a turn) or 1200 (beyond a turn).


yay someone collected the encumbrance rules into a "Master Encumbrance Table":
 https://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=FT&fileid=175&watchfile=0

Delta's got a great breakdown of the issues with Movement and Encumbrance:
http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/p/primary-house-rules.html 

Prehistoric setting in AD&D

Before I rediscovered D&D, I was on a huge "Barbarian fantasy" kick, styled after such video games as the Golden Axe series and the Gauntlet games, as well as movies like Conan the Barbarian and Fire and Ice, and books such as A Princess of Mars. This was fueled by a concurrent interest in primitive cultures and Stone Age technology, and I was fascinated at the probable structure of such a society, such as their day to day lives and hardships they would have faced.

I considered my fascination with primitive cultures and my interest with D&D to be compatible, but unrelated. The then current editions of D&D were the 4th and 5th edition by Wizards of the Coast, and they tended toward an implied high fantasy, high medieval setting. Even though the Barbarian existed as a class name, it did not make much sense thematically or historically, as I detailed in an earlier post.

I was actually surprised to find out that the 1e AD&D sourcebooks actually have explicit mention of primitive and tribal peoples, and actually have native support for a prehistoric styled world. The Man enemies of the Monster Manual strictly mention Cavemen and Tribesmen, and I could argue that Berserkers fit the bill as well, and with only minor changes so could Bandits. The only human enemy types I would consider unable to fit would be the Buccaneer and Dervish, as those imply a certain reliance on 16th century technology. And the Nomad, as they're basically stand in for Arabian tribesmen and raiders, and while its easy to argue that Arabian nomads lived in the Stone Age until about 1918, I don't really see them and the European concept of Barbarians actually freely mixing.

Aside from "Men" type, many, many of the entries in the Monster Manual depict primitive or brutish type enemies. Ogres, Hill Giants, Minotaurs, even Devils and Demons and more are depicted wearing only loincloths made from animal fur, brandishing crudely made spears, slings, clubs or simple bows, and little else. Most of the enemies are straight animalistic monsters, but even the humanoid ones are sometimes depicted completely naked, not just the infamous Succubus but male monsters as well like the Imp and Minotaur, and powerful ones like Orcus, Balor and the Pit Fiend.  Ironically the humble Goblin, Orc and Kobolds are better dressed and equipped with more technologically advanced weaponry than world threatening monsters such as Orcus. And then there are the pages devoted to the many different type of Dinosaurs, and many entries of Pleistocene animals.

Not just in the Monster Manual, but Tribal Shamans, Witch-Doctors and other primitive spellcasters are directly mentioned in the Dungeon Master's Guide as well. All this points to native support for a primitive styled campaign in the AD&D system. Such a campaign would actually be enhanced by the onerous resource management and harsh penalties in the system, as primitive peoples were not expected to survive for very long, and neither are low level AD&D characters.

It seems obvious in hindsight, and other blogs such as Grognardia have taken deep analyses into the "pulp fantasy" influences within D&D, which are the sources of the barbarian hero and of which Gary Gygax was a big fan.

The newer editions basically throw all of this out. All the monsters and all the heroes are wearing properly tailored and modest clothing in the 4e and 5e source books, and most of the brutish enemies have been thrown out. The Cavemen and Tribesmen do not return, and neither is there mention of Tribal Spellcasters, its just assumed that monster magic users operate the same way as player ones. The dinosaurs make their return in 5th edition, because dinosaurs are cool, but the Pleistocene animals don't, mostly because the designers probably never expected players to play in that era.

Only a few supplements in the modern editions support a barbarian styled campaign. The Dark Sun setting for 4e (as early as 2e I guess) is set with such, but Dark Sun is more post apocalyptic in the style of Mad Max, except no one has firearms or diesel fuel.  Storm King's Thunder is a 5e adventure module that promised a romp through savage barbarian territory, but in practice all the encountered NPCs, towns, and dungeons were very civilized and technologically advanced.

It's a shame that no official adventure module took place in an early prehistoric world. The closest to come was "X1: The Isle of Dread" and its callback in 5e's "Tomb of Annihilation", but in those instances players from the 'modern' world traveled to a secluded area where dinosaurs never went extinct. The Hollow World campaign setting for Mystara was similar where man and dinosaur live together in the core of the planet, untouched by the passage of time on the surface.

I feel that a straight adaptation of a late Stone Age, or Ice Age campaign could be a lot more intriguing and would contain a lot of unique and novel game play opportunities that none of the other settings have had.

I'd play "X1: The Isle of Dread", but I have no interest in a quick trip to The Land that Time Forgot, to meet the People that Time Forgot in the Savage Land, or sail 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth where At the Earth's Core the people live like its One Million Years B.C. at the time When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Jurassic Park.