Last night our gaming group started a new game, dipping deep into the history of tabletop role-playing games we had decided to go for a game using the Original Dungeon & Dragons rules. The group has flirted around the edges of the ruleset with various retroclones over the years, but it has probably been a good thirty years since I've directly played the game. We had three players and the DM, and a night of adventure.
We used the PDFs that are currently available through OneBookShelf, which are the "cleaned up" versions of the books that were made for the premium OD&D boxed set that Wizards of the Coast put out a couple of years ago. You can get the core rules, and we used Greyhawk because I wanted to play a thief and one of the other players wanted to play a druid, so that brought Blackmoor into play. There are a couple of little bits and pieces in Eldritch Wizardry, but honestly I don't think that it or the OD&D version of Deities & Demigods are as important to play a game of Original D&D as the three core books, and the first two supplements.
Don't get me wrong, there are good things in Eldritch Wizardry (for the GM, at least). The monster lists were expanded by the various types of demons that have been central to the game (except for that period where the game tried to disavow demons and devils), but more importantly to the history of the game, Eldritch Wizardry features the official first appearance of the mind flayer in the game. There was a mention of the mind flayers in The Strategic Review, but this was their official appearance in the rules themselves.
As a resource for the DM, there can be an argument for the use of Eldritch Wizardry. The new monsters are an important step in the game's evolution. However, the player-facing parts of the book, the introduction of psionics into the game, are a hot mess. Although I was a fan of games like Psi-World, and television shows like The Tomorrow People, I've never really liked to include psionics in D&D games. Their overly complicated presentation in the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books (based strongly on how they appeared in Eldritch Wizardry) are probably what influenced my thoughts on psionics in the game. The payoff for using the rules in a game were minimal in light of the added complication, so a lot of people just didn't use the psionics rules. Thankfully, the rules have been developed into a better direction in successive editions of the game.
I think that it is upon the completion of these five booklets that the game recognizable to contemporary gamers as Dungeons & Dragons as they know it. You don't get the thief as a class, which I think is a key part of Dungeons & Dragons as a dungeon crawling adventure game, until Greyhawk, and with Blackmoor you get the druid and the assassin as characters. Greyhawk is also the point at which hit dice and damage dice are broken out of "D6 for everything," and we start to see the various character classes take on their own unique shapes. Using just the core rules, you could often end up with a cleric who was a better "fighter" than the fighter themselves, and the changes in Greyhawk, primarily with the increase to using a D8 for their hit dice, meant that fighters could stand out from the pack in more ways.
The flaw to using the "original" texts (while the OD&D releases from a few years ago did keep the original edition's art, they did redo the typesetting to clean things up) is that the organization of the books is haphazard. It can be difficult to find things in these books during play. During our session, each of us had a difficult time at different times finding things in the files (including the DM). In this way, 0E (as Original Dungeons & Dragons) retroclones like Chris Gonnerman's Iron Falcon rules are superior because of their better organization and presentation of the rules. Another nice thing about retroclones like Iron Falcon is that they take into consideration the rolling changes to the rules from the supplemental books, which means that the game is probably closer to what contemporary gamers think of as being Dungeons & Dragons than the core rules would do.
This cleaned up approach, with better rules presentation, is what attracts me more to retroclones instead of the original editions of the games anymore. Instead of Original Dungeons & Dragons, I would rather play Iron Falcon. Instead of B/X D&D, I would rather play Labyrinth Lord. I don't really have much in the way of nostalgia towards these games themselves, so when I play them having the cleaned up rules really helps.
The session of the game went better than we expected actually. The character creation phase of things was…interesting. Of the three characters, the "hardiest" of them had only two hit points. The other two characters had one. The DM did throw out a lot of options for what our characters might want to do going forward. If you haven't played in a sandbox type of campaign, the idea is that the game's "story" develops in an emergent style, rather than a linear style like with many published adventures. This does give more flexibility to the DM, as many adventure paths tend to not survive interaction with the player characters.
To be honest, I didn't expect that my one hit point character would survive the evening, to the extent that I didn't even bother to name my character calling him thief. When pressed in game, I had my character explain to a sheriff that the reason why he was named "Thief" was similar to those cultures where children are named after diseases, or calamities, as a way to keep those things from happening to them. The sheriff was skeptical about my character's explanation.
Our characters spent a lot of time in the local inn scavenging for rumors and things to do. There were cool sounding rumors, like a necromancer being in the vicinity, but ultimately it seemed too dangerous to our overly fragile characters. We ended up deciding upon a raiding party to raise some money via the sheriff's bounty on goblins. We found an enclave of goblins, and through a combination of luck and planning, we managed to survive the encounter. Knowing that my character would likely die in any sort of close combat, I instead picked the short bow as his weapon. A couple of lucky hits, combined with the bonus for a thief's surprise attack ability, allowed my character to pick off a couple of the goblins, while the fighter and druid dispatched the remainder.
The fighting was nerve-wracking for us, because we all knew that if the rolls were reversed, that our characters would be the ones who would be dead on the forest floor. This demonstrates how you have to approach combat differently in OD&D than you do in other editions. One complaint about Original Dungeons & Dragons is that player skill is more important than the capabilities of the characters. I think that this can definitely be true, particularly in the case of low level OD&D characters. You cannot approach a fight in OD&D in the same way that you might in more recent editions of Dungeons & Dragons. You can't just keep throwing a character against a conflict until something breaks in Original D&D like you can in more recent editions of the game. Trying that approach will just lead to dead characters. There are enough dead characters littering our previous campaigns to demonstrate this point. The DM does have to work a little bit harder in OD&D to keep player knowledge from having a dramatic impact on the game, since it is a part of the game. If you're used to playing more recent games you might not be used to having that line between good and bad character knowledge, and if it is something that you're not used to having to deal with as a GM it can cause headaches as everyone gets used to the differences in the styles of play.
Ultimately it was a good night. Everyone had fun, and the characters managed to survive their encounter with the fictional game world. Will they survive the next session? Who knows. Like I said earlier, none of us expected to have our characters survive this first session. But we played the game hard, and we played it in what we thought was a smart way, and that helped us, and our characters.
We used the PDFs that are currently available through OneBookShelf, which are the "cleaned up" versions of the books that were made for the premium OD&D boxed set that Wizards of the Coast put out a couple of years ago. You can get the core rules, and we used Greyhawk because I wanted to play a thief and one of the other players wanted to play a druid, so that brought Blackmoor into play. There are a couple of little bits and pieces in Eldritch Wizardry, but honestly I don't think that it or the OD&D version of Deities & Demigods are as important to play a game of Original D&D as the three core books, and the first two supplements.
Don't get me wrong, there are good things in Eldritch Wizardry (for the GM, at least). The monster lists were expanded by the various types of demons that have been central to the game (except for that period where the game tried to disavow demons and devils), but more importantly to the history of the game, Eldritch Wizardry features the official first appearance of the mind flayer in the game. There was a mention of the mind flayers in The Strategic Review, but this was their official appearance in the rules themselves.
As a resource for the DM, there can be an argument for the use of Eldritch Wizardry. The new monsters are an important step in the game's evolution. However, the player-facing parts of the book, the introduction of psionics into the game, are a hot mess. Although I was a fan of games like Psi-World, and television shows like The Tomorrow People, I've never really liked to include psionics in D&D games. Their overly complicated presentation in the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books (based strongly on how they appeared in Eldritch Wizardry) are probably what influenced my thoughts on psionics in the game. The payoff for using the rules in a game were minimal in light of the added complication, so a lot of people just didn't use the psionics rules. Thankfully, the rules have been developed into a better direction in successive editions of the game.
I think that it is upon the completion of these five booklets that the game recognizable to contemporary gamers as Dungeons & Dragons as they know it. You don't get the thief as a class, which I think is a key part of Dungeons & Dragons as a dungeon crawling adventure game, until Greyhawk, and with Blackmoor you get the druid and the assassin as characters. Greyhawk is also the point at which hit dice and damage dice are broken out of "D6 for everything," and we start to see the various character classes take on their own unique shapes. Using just the core rules, you could often end up with a cleric who was a better "fighter" than the fighter themselves, and the changes in Greyhawk, primarily with the increase to using a D8 for their hit dice, meant that fighters could stand out from the pack in more ways.
The flaw to using the "original" texts (while the OD&D releases from a few years ago did keep the original edition's art, they did redo the typesetting to clean things up) is that the organization of the books is haphazard. It can be difficult to find things in these books during play. During our session, each of us had a difficult time at different times finding things in the files (including the DM). In this way, 0E (as Original Dungeons & Dragons) retroclones like Chris Gonnerman's Iron Falcon rules are superior because of their better organization and presentation of the rules. Another nice thing about retroclones like Iron Falcon is that they take into consideration the rolling changes to the rules from the supplemental books, which means that the game is probably closer to what contemporary gamers think of as being Dungeons & Dragons than the core rules would do.
This cleaned up approach, with better rules presentation, is what attracts me more to retroclones instead of the original editions of the games anymore. Instead of Original Dungeons & Dragons, I would rather play Iron Falcon. Instead of B/X D&D, I would rather play Labyrinth Lord. I don't really have much in the way of nostalgia towards these games themselves, so when I play them having the cleaned up rules really helps.
The session of the game went better than we expected actually. The character creation phase of things was…interesting. Of the three characters, the "hardiest" of them had only two hit points. The other two characters had one. The DM did throw out a lot of options for what our characters might want to do going forward. If you haven't played in a sandbox type of campaign, the idea is that the game's "story" develops in an emergent style, rather than a linear style like with many published adventures. This does give more flexibility to the DM, as many adventure paths tend to not survive interaction with the player characters.
To be honest, I didn't expect that my one hit point character would survive the evening, to the extent that I didn't even bother to name my character calling him thief. When pressed in game, I had my character explain to a sheriff that the reason why he was named "Thief" was similar to those cultures where children are named after diseases, or calamities, as a way to keep those things from happening to them. The sheriff was skeptical about my character's explanation.
Our characters spent a lot of time in the local inn scavenging for rumors and things to do. There were cool sounding rumors, like a necromancer being in the vicinity, but ultimately it seemed too dangerous to our overly fragile characters. We ended up deciding upon a raiding party to raise some money via the sheriff's bounty on goblins. We found an enclave of goblins, and through a combination of luck and planning, we managed to survive the encounter. Knowing that my character would likely die in any sort of close combat, I instead picked the short bow as his weapon. A couple of lucky hits, combined with the bonus for a thief's surprise attack ability, allowed my character to pick off a couple of the goblins, while the fighter and druid dispatched the remainder.
The fighting was nerve-wracking for us, because we all knew that if the rolls were reversed, that our characters would be the ones who would be dead on the forest floor. This demonstrates how you have to approach combat differently in OD&D than you do in other editions. One complaint about Original Dungeons & Dragons is that player skill is more important than the capabilities of the characters. I think that this can definitely be true, particularly in the case of low level OD&D characters. You cannot approach a fight in OD&D in the same way that you might in more recent editions of Dungeons & Dragons. You can't just keep throwing a character against a conflict until something breaks in Original D&D like you can in more recent editions of the game. Trying that approach will just lead to dead characters. There are enough dead characters littering our previous campaigns to demonstrate this point. The DM does have to work a little bit harder in OD&D to keep player knowledge from having a dramatic impact on the game, since it is a part of the game. If you're used to playing more recent games you might not be used to having that line between good and bad character knowledge, and if it is something that you're not used to having to deal with as a GM it can cause headaches as everyone gets used to the differences in the styles of play.
Ultimately it was a good night. Everyone had fun, and the characters managed to survive their encounter with the fictional game world. Will they survive the next session? Who knows. Like I said earlier, none of us expected to have our characters survive this first session. But we played the game hard, and we played it in what we thought was a smart way, and that helped us, and our characters.
