OD&D Edition Experience: Did/Do You Play Basic D&D? How Was/Is it?

[commandercrud]

Holmes edition. Yep. It's great. But BECMI is best.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Played it when I was 12, loved it. Have no interest in playing it again.

Didn't realise you were referring to the 1977 Holmes edition.

 

[HarbingerX]

We played this, but it had a blue box iirc.
It was good, but then MM and then PHB AD&D came out, and we never went back to playing this. I wouldn't want to play it now. If I recall, you were limited to 4th or 5th level? That was a deal killer for us.

The rulebook is a blue version of the box cover. You're probably remembering that. It did indeed stop at 3rd and players were encourage to switch to AD&D after that. The weird thing is that the monsters included some that were way above the ability of 3rd level characters.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

When I was learning D&D when I was 10-11 back in the early 80s, I used a mismatched set. My Basic was from BECMI, and my Expert was from B/X. Little kid me never realized they were two different editions.
Since the question is about Basic, I marked "Never played, but would like to."

edit: Ah! nvm, this is the pre-B/X Basic. Wow, still confusing to me, heh. My answer in the poll stands, though.

 

[Yardiff]

When my brothers and I and our best friend got into D&D we didn't have anyone to teach us. So we gathered the blue box, 1e MM, 1e PHB, and some Arduin Grimoire dungeons and played with those not really knowing they were different things.

 

[CleverNickName]

Played it when I was 12, loved it. Have no interest in playing it again.

Didn't realise you were referring to the 1977 Holmes edition.

edit: Ah! nvm, this is the pre-B/X Basic. Wow, still confusing to me, heh. My answer in the poll stands, though.

When my brothers and I and our best friend got into D&D we didn't have anyone to teach us. So we gathered the blue box, 1e MM, 1e PHB, and some Arduin Grimoire dungeons and played with those not really knowing they were different things.

Yeah, things got really complicated in the early days. It's hard to keep all of these different editions straight, even with dates and pictures of the cover. Lots of folks remember these editions under different names, or with incorrect names, or in piecemeal with other versions.

The first D&D edition war probably started when someone tried to use a Moldvay rule in a Holmes game, and an argument erupted over which version was the "one true Basic" version of D&D.

 

[teitan]

So I tried it in the mid 90s with the Rules Cyclopedia. I didn't like that it was overly simple at the time but I was starting to turn from AD&D to games like Shadowrun and Vampire so I was moving into a whole new paradigm of RPGs that D&D was not very emblematic of. I tried again in 98 but it just wasn't for me. I did play a game in 2007 that was a lot of fun though and enjoyed the rules for their simplicity in comparison to 3e.

 

[GreyLord]

Holmes is one that is a great mystery to me. It's not that I didn't play it, but the set I played it I could swear the elves were handled differently than most remember it. I remembered my set had it that elves were Fighters and Magic-Users but had to choose each adventure which one they were going to be and advance in.

People have told me that this was only in pre-production sets and not in productions sets, but I could swear the copy I had first had this rule in it (the sets I have now which I got later do not seem to have this).

I enjoyed it for what it was. It was more an introduction to OD&D or AD&D (your preference I guess) but somewhat different from either one in many ways.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I first played Basic after playing AD&D, and felt it was a vastly more limited and inferior game.

 

[Shiroiken]

Originally voted that I'd played this version, but didn't realize you meant the Holmes version. We had a copy of it, but used the B/X version instead.