The 50th Anniversary of OD&D in 2024. I've only see it mentioned a couple of places and then on a forum, they talked about blogging once a month for the year leading up to it. So I said sure I can do that. So one post a month for all of 2023, just to remind people of the this amazing milestone. I will try to come with a more informative post for February, but this month, just dipping my toes in the water.
A couple of questions though, have you ever played OD&D? Have you had the chance to play OD&D? What have you heard about OD&D? Have the things you have heard, made you want to play OD&D? Why or why not?
Unfortunately, there hasn't been a lot of talk about the 50th anniversary as of yet. Interesting questions. Here's some answers.
ReplyDelete1. I have never played OD&D by the rules of the original boxed set or the supplements. I do own the pdfs and I will have them printed out in the near future. I did receive a Holmes box and some AD&D manuals from my uncle in the summer of 1980. I did play a ton of Holmes so technically I have played a version of OD&D.
2. I've never had the chance to play OD&D.
3. I've repeatedly heard the mantra of "less is more" and judging from messing around with Delving Deeper and seeing how easy it is to create in those rules compared to modern systems I would say that is definitely correct.
4. Yes, I would like to play OD&D because even though Delving Deeper gives me a good idea of how OD&D plays, I would like to experience the officially published rules.
(1) Yes, that was the edition I started with back in 1977. And I continued playing it even when AD&D came out, although we tended to use the AD&D classes and spells and magic items, but still essentially used the OD&D rules for actual play. Heavily house-ruled, but that was the case with everyone playing OD&D. [We shifted to 4d6/best 3 for characteristics due to Gygax's methods setting class attributes higher than for OD&D.]
ReplyDeleteThere really were no actual games of OD&D back in the day though. Every groups campaign, game, and play style varied from the base that was presented. part of playing with a new group meant finding out how things varied. It was expected. If you want to see how far it could vary in some cases take a look at Powers & perils which was what Richard Snider's OD&D game developed into. The California players, gathered around DunDraCon played quite differently from the MidWest wargamers that started things off. They were more into character and roleplaying than solving a tactical problem (and Gygax even mentioned in an APAzine that they "were playing the game wrong"). Not wrong - just differently from what he was used to.
This was one of the great things about OD&D - the diaspora of creativity and ideas. [One of the stated reasons for the creation of AD&D was to attempt to stop this diaspora by producing an official set of rules - before TSR totally lost control of the game.]
(2) I heard that it leads to Satan worship. Repeatedly, thanks to Jack Chick.
(3) I think the edition wars are stupid and artificial (and generally driven by nostalgia). It's all D&D (even 4E is D&D under the trunk). That said the recent utterances of the new management at WoTC have been somewhat of a concern as they are very rule focused and focused on "the right way to play", but that is understandable, since the rules are the only thing they really have to sell.
Hack the rules make them your own. One nice place to start is the Monster Manual. Give the creatures in there a completely different twist and see what happens. You'll be playing D&D, but it won't be the standard D&D setting any more and there will be a whole new game to explore and develop.
The advantage of OD&D - and why my game is still pretty much based on it ... and not - is simplicity. It allows me to run a sandbox based on encounter tables (as I have since 1978 when I got my hands on some decent encounter tables). Once you know level/class and/or hit die you have most of what you need to define the mechanics and nature of what you have encountered. More complicated games (such as Runequest, for example), generally need pre-generated creatures to be used in this sort of manner.
And it eliminates the expectation that creeped into the game post-3.0E that the gamemaster should provide a "balanced" encounter because of all the preparation they needed to do to set up a battlefield. Too easy and it's wasted effort for a small time at play. Too hard and sensible players avoid the encounter as too dangerous and the effort is wasted again. [Or the players go in expecting to win and then complain about getting killed because they had the 5E expectation that the party should survive. There is actually an extensive section on "running away" in the OD&D rules and how ditching food and/or treasure may distract your pursuers.]