Very interesting.
I have a very high opinion of Moldvay Basic, and hadn't realised how different the two versions are.
@
Iosue had a good thread on Moldvay Basic pretty recently; I wonder if he (?) has a view on the Holmes edition?
Indeed a he! (Iosue is Latin for Joshua.)
I think Moldvay is an amazing piece of work. When I first used it to enter the world of D&D, I didn't think anything of it. It was so straightforward, and elegantly laid out. Here's how you make and advance characters. Here's how exploration works. Here's how combat works. Here are the monsters for the DM to use. Here are the treasures the monsters will have. Here's a section helping the DM build dungeons, and some excellent DM advice. All in 64 pages. The rules are light enough to provide a framework to build on, and yet if you play it purely by the book you have a robust game of suspenseful exploration.
Moldvay improves on Holmes in all respects, and I think even Holmes conceded that in his
review. But I think to appreciate Holmes, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the players back then. The thing is, D&D was as a concept, just so
big. The original books were not what we would consider a tightly focused design, but a primer on a whole new way to approach gaming. Arneson's home game was quite different from Gygax's, which was again different from Holmes'. I think a common approach to RPGs now, perhaps since the publication of AD&D 1e and Moldvay, is "the rules are the mechanics through which the players engage with the game". Whereas at the time I think it was more "rules are just some advice for the DM to adjudicate common situations", and the players didn't have to really worry about them. And so when it came time to choose your weapons, ostensibly you didn't go "I'm picking the weapon that gives me the most damage," you picked the weapon that fit your image of the character. And if the designers at the time thought getting in close and going stabbity-stabbity with a knife while the guy with the battle-axe was taking big slow swings, well that's a feasible set of assumptions to go by. Another consideration is that Holmes probably expected folks moving on to AD&D would be playing with slightly more complicated combat rules for speed and weapon damage.
What I marvel at with Holmes is the size of the job he had: he had the original three books, plus the three supplements. He wasn't really a game designer -- just a player who made a successful freelance pitch. There were huge gaps -- how is initiative decided? How long is a turn, exactly? How long is a round? Every table played their own version of D&D, and to Holmes this was a good thing. He was trying to distill a gaming movement into a 45-page booklet, and provide guidance while still retaining that wild "take this basic structure and make it your own" spirit. It was a different path from Moldvay. Moldvay took that big movement and pared it down to the essentials, and further, he had a mandate to ignore what was going on with AD&D, so he could rebuild D&D on some sound mechanical and mathematical principles. Holmes was trying to retain as much of the original as possible, filling in the gaps while retaining the wide open possibilities, and put it into a manageable shape for a non-wargamer.
Another thing to consider was that Holmes is listed as the sole editor on the project, and this was before TSR had a huge staff. I suspect that in as much as fresh eyes saw it, they corrected only obvious typos, and didn't address much in the way of design. Moldvay, meanwhile, had Harold Johnson and Frank Mentzer doing production/layout, and the credits for Editing/Continuity list Lawrence Schick, Allen Hammack, David Cook, Kevin Hendryx, Jon Pickens, Patrick Price, Paul Reiche III, Evan Robinson, Ed Sollers, Don Snow, and Steve Sullivan. It is hardly a surprise that Holmes contains errors and inconsistencies, while Moldvay is a far more polished design, in both game and presentation.
And while Moldvay noted in his
article on the new Basic set was based on the original White Box rules, there is much that he took from Holmes. For example, in the original booklets, the turn is quite convoluted. It's basically 10 minutes, but is made up of "two moves". So you take your character's movement and
double it to find out far you move in a turn. Rounds are not given a time frame, except that there are 10 in a turn. (Hence, in AD&D 1 round = 1 minute.) Holmes simply gives everyone a base movement score based on encumbrance, and says that a round is 10 seconds. Moldvay retains this take on movement (although he slows down the pace), and uses 10 seconds per round. Moldvay also retains Holmes' 5-level monster reaction table, rather than the 3-level table of the original game. Holmes slightly changes the XP value table found in the Greyhawk supplement, and Moldvay retains this.
So, my view is that, yes, it is flawed, and Moldvay is a much superior product. OTOH, Holmes had a hell of a job to do, and judging by the response, I certainly can't say it wasn't successful. He provided a base for others to build on. The gamer in me prefers Moldvay and Cook to Holmes or even AD&D. But the amateur D&D historian in me respects the hell out of it.
