OD&D Is OD&D playable RAW?

[Zardnaar]

I have had the remake of OD&D for a while now but have never gotten around to playing it.

Reading the original 3 books it's missing a lot of stuff.

Lots of references to chainmail which I assume you need to play the damn thing.

The box has 7 books in it but there's a lot missing from the original 3 books.

1 to 50 players with around 20 being ideal lol.

Referee no DM, Chainmail recommend.

 

[darjr]

I don’t think it was written to be played raw.

for instance that 1-50 players were not meant to each play in every session. Unwritten because it was common for war games to have campaigns like that. I think there is much to od&d that is like that.
Things left out because people already understood, or it didn’t get mentioned because it was taken for granted it was understood.
I’d very much like a lot of those things documented somehow.

 

[the Jester]

Is @diaglo still hanging around here? Here's your man for od&d.

 

[Zardnaar]

There's no ability score tables in Men and Magic. There is for charisma.

They turn up book 4 which is them sane book for weapon damage.

 

[imredave]

It would be hard to run RAW as the only combat tables in the books are marked as an alternate. However, since the game is from an era of rulings-not-rules why would you bother to run it RAW anyways? Certainly not just the first three books. Greyhawk smooths out many of the rough spots of the first three books as so after it came out nobody I knew used just the first three books. Of course nobody I knew tried to run OD&D without adding numerous house rules anyways (I believe this is recommended somewhere in the first three books as well, so one could technically claim "house ruling" as RAW).

 

[Tony Vargas]

Prior to 3.0/d20, I don't think any version of D&D even had a definitive RaW.

Part of the brilliance of 5e is returning to that.

 

[Zardnaar]

Prior to 3.0/d20, I don't think any version of D&D even had a definitive RaW.

Part of the brilliance of 5e is returning to that.

OD&D is missing a lot of rules by modern standards.

 

[Tony Vargas]

OD&D is missing a lot of rules by modern standards.

Well, yeah, '74.

It was supposedly meant to integrate with two other games: Chainmail and Wilderness Survival.

 

[darjr]

Everything does a d6 damage. And the alternate combat system is there so I can be playable without chainmail.
Wilderness adventures were also an option.

sure it’s got its issues but it is playable raw.

but I must admit that probably no one played it raw.

 

[Shiroiken]

It depends on how you define playable. By modern standards, I'd say no, because it assumed the DM knew what they were doing (from previous wargaming experience or as a player). It was playable at the time, but many games played very differently from each other, since other than combat (which primarily used Chainmail rules), everything was judged by DM fiat.