The Zen of Old-School D&D
Quendalon 1215446674|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
I found this nifty guide to the Old School D&D mindset. I really like the "try anything" vibe that it emphasizes.
The Zen of Old-School D&D
summary:
Meditate on this, Grasshopper!
Quendalon 1215446674|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Re: The Zen of Old-School D&D
James_Nostack 1215469544|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
If OD&D weren't unplayable, I'd probably be running a campaign of that instead. But…
Re: The Zen of Old-School D&D
littleidiot 1215475221|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Erm… Why is it unplayable? I'm curious.
Re: The Zen of Old-School D&D
James_Nostack 1215486404|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Doug, I guess it isn't literally unplayable, because a lot of people play it quite happily, but I find that OD&D runs into a paradox.
The chief attraction of playing OD&D seems to be that it's unfinished; large parts of the rules are ambiguous, contradictory, and require extensive harmonization with Chainmail or later supplements, which are themselves ambiguous and contradictory.
Whether this is a feature or a bug is debatable. The argument for it being a bug is that char-gen is difficult, the rules for combat are incomprehensible, and all the other procedures of play (movement, wandering monsters, traps) are almost non-existent. The argument for this being a feature is that, golly gee, it's a puzzle that doesn't make sense, and we have to do archaeological research, and review secondary-source material, and make policy-based arguments about what the rule should be. (Alternately: yay the rules are gibberish and we have free reign to make stuff up, regardless of its compatibility with the design goals.)
For me, I can see how the latter would be fun, but (a) it seems like this would be a heck of a lot of work for very little return over what the Moldvay set delivers, and (b) the true "advantage," at least to me, would be having an extremely malleable ruleset that does almost nothing to constrain GM fiat. Personally, though, I much prefer having a fairly light but comprehensive ruleset, rather than making things up on the fly, but that's a personal choice I guess.
Re: The Zen of Old-School D&D
TavisAllison 1215741534|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
I just wrote a long description of my experience playing OD&D (once) and what I've been learning about how it differs from Red Box. Then I hit "alt" instead of "shift" and navigated away from the page, alas. Suffice it to say that:
- OD&D is awesome to read - in particular the way it handles wilderness wandering monsters (1d6 for type, 1d6 for subtype) is super easy to roll your own (thinking of a d6's worth of humanoids, and their relationship to one another & the locale, is a snap, and the players will run into each type often enough to start developing a relationship to them; neither is true of a single-roll table, especially an AD&D d100 one!).
- Red Box is largely the same info, just much better presented. Some of what's new is also awesome to read. I really like a 2-12 chart for monster reactions. If I roll that in the open, the players won't feel (as I think they do in most of my games) that "if the monsters are talking to us, the DM must be using them as a mouthpiece for something we're supposed to find out" - and having the gnomes they'd hoped to ally with roll badly, scream, and charge would totally amp up the roleplaying in that encounter!
- Red Box is much better to actually crack open and play - when I ran it for my son, his 6- and 8- year old friends, and their dad, I did change some stuff that I prefer OD&D's take on (no thief so everyone has to think their way past traps; scaled-back ability bonuses so the difference between rolling an 18 Strength and an 8 is more roleplaying than mechanics), but at least Moldvay makes it clear what the pieces that you might change even are. There are plenty of discussions on the OD&D board you linked above about how "initiative", or what kind of dice hit dice are, aren't even mentioned in the OD&D "little brown books". That can be fun to read if you have a rabbinical turn of mind, but when I played using the White Box I think it broke the mood a little every time I couldn't resist saying "Wow, this is fascinatingly wack!"
Re: The Zen of Old-School D&D
James_Nostack 1215782593|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Tavis, that's pretty much my reaction too, though I haven't had the pleasure of trying to figure out OD&D in play.
The reaction table is great. One quirk: not only might "ought-to-be allies" get ticked off at you, but also, certain other creatures are likely to be your friends unexpectedly: giant spiders, gnolls, zombies, etc (whether this is the right way to play is debatable, but there's nothing against it in the text). One of the things that boggles me is that you've got this great little tool to create role-playing scenes, and yet in nearly every early "adventure module," the monsters immediately leap to attack. Sigh…
(Of course, in Eric's "Ghost Tower Game," as soon as we saw some Goblins we tried to massacre them…)
Re: The Zen of Old-School D&D
littleidiot 1215957664|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Of course, in Eric's "Ghost Tower Game," as soon as we saw some Goblins we tried to massacre them…
Not guilty!
Re: The Zen of Old-School D&D
James_Nostack 1215972203|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Yeah, I blame Adrian for that. But after hearing the survivor whine and cry a long time, I was ready to kill him too.
Re: The Zen of Old-School D&D
Invincible Overlord 1215977553|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
See, I KNEW that's what they would all do. At least I tried to teach him goblin.
I started playing right as the first basic set (blue book), the white box OD&D with Greyhawk and Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry, and the AD&D MM ONLY were out. It was a very special time of DIY as we randomly mooshed things together. We were kids, but I can't imagine anyone seriously taking a stand for Rules As Written at the time. I guess that's why I'm extremely skeptical of RAW to this day.
Re: The Zen of Old-School D&D
Quendalon 1215985725|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Speaking of reaction rolls and the goblins, I'd spent some time planning out their reactions based on each possible reaction roll. The roll came up negative/suspicious; some chatting got you guys a reroll with a better result, but by that time you'd already started moving in for the kill. :-)
Are reaction rolls actually supposed to be rolled out in the open? For that matter, I'm wondering as to the upsides and downsides of having the DM roll everything out in the open…
Re: The Zen of Old-School D&D
James_Nostack 1215989074|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
I guess that's why I'm extremely skeptical of RAW to this day.
For most "traditional" RPG's I feel the same way. It's only after playing a bunch of these new-fangled Forge style RPG's that made me appreciate literalism as a design principle. Personally I think this particular edition of Basic D&D is very well suited to a rules-as-written approach, but this hasn't stopped me from wanting to tinker around the edges.
Are reaction rolls actually supposed to be rolled out in the open?
Text doesn't say. During the Lost Mine adventures, I pre-rolled for the initial attitudes, figuring that these were largely (I think entirely?) independent if player input. Since I knew their overall mood, this allowed me to plan a little bit for how they'd react to possible player gambits. So I found that helpful, personally. But on the other hand, it takes up very little time at the table, and I can certainly see how improvising would be fun.
With regard to that particular encounter with the Crying Goblin, I was prepared to talk to him up to a point, but after 5-10 minutes of table time and he was still whining and screeching, I started to wish Adrian had been a little quicker on the draw…