Last night, in memory of Gary Gygax, some friends and I got together and played an impromptu game of Classic D&D (or BECMI, if you prefer; the red box/blue box/cyan box/black box game where only the thief knows how to walk quietly and "elf" and "dwarf" are classes).
And I have to say that I was amazed.
A bit of background: I cut my gaming teeth on BECMI back when dinosaurs ruled the earth--okay, twenty years ago--but fairly soon made the jump to AD&D and 2nd Edition. As far as I know, I was the only member of the group who had ever played it. Of the others, I believe two had learned on 2E and three on 3E. I myself was very rusty on the mechanics, so there was a definite learning curve for everybody. ("Wait... so which is good in this edition, high numbers or low numbers?" "Depends on what you're rolling!")
Nevertheless, they all rolled up characters in the 8th- to 9th-level range (I handed out 200K experience, modified by prime requisite), and I ran them through a hastily thrown-together dungeon. And it was a blast. The energy was incredible throughout, the action was fast and furious, and everybody was clearly having a great time. By the end of the game, the entire party had been wiped out except for the magic-user, who used magic jar to take over the body of a fire giant and eked out a victory in the final boss fight by the skin of his teeth... but I didn't hear anyone complaining.
Afterward, I took a while to think about what had made the game so exciting. While there was certainly some nostalgia value for me, the same was not true for anybody else. Yet everyone seemed to be as much into it as I was; indeed, one of the players who had come to D&D by way of 3.5E said he liked Classic better.
Here are some of the things that struck me about playing Classic:
#1: Virtually no arithmetic. The only addition involved was in damage rolls, and not a lot even there. Everything else was just "roll the die and compare to a number." Saving throws, attack rolls (consulting a chart), the thief's special abilities--all just number comparison. You wouldn't think it would make that much of a difference, but it does. Even the most basic math requires pulling your attention off the game for a second or two, and those seconds add up to a substantial energy drain.
#2: Ruleset limited in scope, but within that scope, very decisive. There's no waffling in Classic. Either the rules say what happens in a given situation, or they don't. If they do, they're up-front about it, without a lot of obscure corner cases tucked away in weird places. If they don't, the DM wings it; and since the system makes no bones about requiring the DM to wing it, there's no flipping through the book trying to figure out if the rules cover this or not. Just make a decision on the fly and keep right on going.
#3: Related to #2, character actions less restricted by rules. This is more a psychological issue than a mechanical one, but... in 3.5E, the rules try to cover every eventuality. As a result, people get used to operating within the framework of what the rules allow, and they tend to think about their actions in mechanical terms rather than in game-world terms. In Classic, that's not the case--there's so much stuff the rules just don't cover that you have to go beyond them, and that gets players thinking more about what's actually going on.
#4: Lack of finicky restrictions. This was particularly noticeable with the magic-user, whose spells were mind-blowingly free of limitations by 3.5E standards. Obviously, this had its down side--the M-U totally dominated the session, racking up a spectacular kill count against a horde of troglodytes, then winning the final fight thanks to his possessed body's innate fire immunity. But I was struck by the... well, for lack of a better word, the "gung-ho-ness" of the spell list. The designers were obviously looking to make the spells do Cool Stuff, to be exciting and fun to use. By comparison, 3.5E spells feel like they were written by accountants and tax lawyers.
#5: No maps, no minis, no battlemat. Our group has gotten into the habit of using minis and battlemats for 3.5E, but we played Classic without, and it really punched up the energy level. There wasn't any mapping either.
#6: No iterative attacks. 'Nuff said.
#7: Overall speed. Thanks to all of the above, we blew through an astonishing number of combats at a very rapid clip. The dungeon involved the following:
Three ogre sentries at the entrance, with a bell to summon reinforcements if they didn't get taken out fast.
A collapsing ledge and a souped-up crab spider that ambushed the fighter immediately afterward.
Half a dozen troglodytes.
Fifty regular troglodytes, a trog priest, a trog war-leader, and their bone golem god.
Another ogre sentry.
A barracks with a dozen sleeping ogres in it.
A fire giant.
A red dragon.
And we played out every one of those battles in the span of about three hours. (Admittedly, the fire giant fight ended very quickly when the M-U cast magic jar and the giant failed his save.) A similar 3.5E adventure would have taken twice as long.
So, how does all this relate to 4E? Well, obviously 4E gets rid of iterative attacks, and combat is by all accounts quicker. It also looks like there's a shift toward removing finicky restrictions from spells and special powers--albeit balancing them better--and if arithmetic isn't being removed, it is at least being stripped down and simplified. And it seems the scope of the ruleset is being reduced somewhat. So in a lot of ways, we appear to be moving back toward Classic.
On the other hand, 4E does not appear to be moving away from the use of minis, rather the reverse. I'm hoping the system will allow for some flexibility in this area. There's a wargamey fun to battlemat combat, but last night convinced me that it's a mistake to break out the minis for every fight. I'd like to be able to play out the lesser battles in "story-space" and only switch to minis for the big boss fights.
I'm also thinking about the Digital Initiative. There seems to be a built-in dice roller. If the interface is clean and quick enough, it might be worth sacrificing the feel of physical dice, in order to let the digital roller handle the number-crunching. Even stripped-down number-crunching is still number-crunching, after all; it still forces the player to take his/her mind off the game and do math, simple as that math may be.
For everyone who has or can get hold of a copy of the Classic rules, I really encourage you to give them a whirl, if only for old time's sake. It offers a different perspective on the game, one that's easy to lose in the minutiae of 3.5E and the anticipation of 4E. Classic has its flaws, to be sure--a lot of them--but it has its strong points too.
And I have to say that I was amazed.
A bit of background: I cut my gaming teeth on BECMI back when dinosaurs ruled the earth--okay, twenty years ago--but fairly soon made the jump to AD&D and 2nd Edition. As far as I know, I was the only member of the group who had ever played it. Of the others, I believe two had learned on 2E and three on 3E. I myself was very rusty on the mechanics, so there was a definite learning curve for everybody. ("Wait... so which is good in this edition, high numbers or low numbers?" "Depends on what you're rolling!")
Nevertheless, they all rolled up characters in the 8th- to 9th-level range (I handed out 200K experience, modified by prime requisite), and I ran them through a hastily thrown-together dungeon. And it was a blast. The energy was incredible throughout, the action was fast and furious, and everybody was clearly having a great time. By the end of the game, the entire party had been wiped out except for the magic-user, who used magic jar to take over the body of a fire giant and eked out a victory in the final boss fight by the skin of his teeth... but I didn't hear anyone complaining.
Afterward, I took a while to think about what had made the game so exciting. While there was certainly some nostalgia value for me, the same was not true for anybody else. Yet everyone seemed to be as much into it as I was; indeed, one of the players who had come to D&D by way of 3.5E said he liked Classic better.
Here are some of the things that struck me about playing Classic:
#1: Virtually no arithmetic. The only addition involved was in damage rolls, and not a lot even there. Everything else was just "roll the die and compare to a number." Saving throws, attack rolls (consulting a chart), the thief's special abilities--all just number comparison. You wouldn't think it would make that much of a difference, but it does. Even the most basic math requires pulling your attention off the game for a second or two, and those seconds add up to a substantial energy drain.
#2: Ruleset limited in scope, but within that scope, very decisive. There's no waffling in Classic. Either the rules say what happens in a given situation, or they don't. If they do, they're up-front about it, without a lot of obscure corner cases tucked away in weird places. If they don't, the DM wings it; and since the system makes no bones about requiring the DM to wing it, there's no flipping through the book trying to figure out if the rules cover this or not. Just make a decision on the fly and keep right on going.
#3: Related to #2, character actions less restricted by rules. This is more a psychological issue than a mechanical one, but... in 3.5E, the rules try to cover every eventuality. As a result, people get used to operating within the framework of what the rules allow, and they tend to think about their actions in mechanical terms rather than in game-world terms. In Classic, that's not the case--there's so much stuff the rules just don't cover that you have to go beyond them, and that gets players thinking more about what's actually going on.
#4: Lack of finicky restrictions. This was particularly noticeable with the magic-user, whose spells were mind-blowingly free of limitations by 3.5E standards. Obviously, this had its down side--the M-U totally dominated the session, racking up a spectacular kill count against a horde of troglodytes, then winning the final fight thanks to his possessed body's innate fire immunity. But I was struck by the... well, for lack of a better word, the "gung-ho-ness" of the spell list. The designers were obviously looking to make the spells do Cool Stuff, to be exciting and fun to use. By comparison, 3.5E spells feel like they were written by accountants and tax lawyers.
#5: No maps, no minis, no battlemat. Our group has gotten into the habit of using minis and battlemats for 3.5E, but we played Classic without, and it really punched up the energy level. There wasn't any mapping either.
#6: No iterative attacks. 'Nuff said.
#7: Overall speed. Thanks to all of the above, we blew through an astonishing number of combats at a very rapid clip. The dungeon involved the following:
Three ogre sentries at the entrance, with a bell to summon reinforcements if they didn't get taken out fast.
A collapsing ledge and a souped-up crab spider that ambushed the fighter immediately afterward.
Half a dozen troglodytes.
Fifty regular troglodytes, a trog priest, a trog war-leader, and their bone golem god.
Another ogre sentry.
A barracks with a dozen sleeping ogres in it.
A fire giant.
A red dragon.
And we played out every one of those battles in the span of about three hours. (Admittedly, the fire giant fight ended very quickly when the M-U cast magic jar and the giant failed his save.) A similar 3.5E adventure would have taken twice as long.
So, how does all this relate to 4E? Well, obviously 4E gets rid of iterative attacks, and combat is by all accounts quicker. It also looks like there's a shift toward removing finicky restrictions from spells and special powers--albeit balancing them better--and if arithmetic isn't being removed, it is at least being stripped down and simplified. And it seems the scope of the ruleset is being reduced somewhat. So in a lot of ways, we appear to be moving back toward Classic.
On the other hand, 4E does not appear to be moving away from the use of minis, rather the reverse. I'm hoping the system will allow for some flexibility in this area. There's a wargamey fun to battlemat combat, but last night convinced me that it's a mistake to break out the minis for every fight. I'd like to be able to play out the lesser battles in "story-space" and only switch to minis for the big boss fights.
I'm also thinking about the Digital Initiative. There seems to be a built-in dice roller. If the interface is clean and quick enough, it might be worth sacrificing the feel of physical dice, in order to let the digital roller handle the number-crunching. Even stripped-down number-crunching is still number-crunching, after all; it still forces the player to take his/her mind off the game and do math, simple as that math may be.
For everyone who has or can get hold of a copy of the Classic rules, I really encourage you to give them a whirl, if only for old time's sake. It offers a different perspective on the game, one that's easy to lose in the minutiae of 3.5E and the anticipation of 4E. Classic has its flaws, to be sure--a lot of them--but it has its strong points too.
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