Jack Daniel
dice-universe.blogspot.com
Not long ago, I had to put the kibosh on the campaign I was running, mostly due to a lack of free time on my part. I was running what could best be described in today's old-school vernacular as a mashup of the Original and Classic editions — mostly BECMI as the foundation, but with elements drawn from the LBBs or Holmes Basic as needed. Very little (except for the training rules) from AD&D. And it only occurred to me after this campaign had ended, and I was pondering the usual postmortem issues, that I somewhat regretted not using more AD&D in the mix. It wasn't that I missed the nitty-gritty of the AD&D mechanics per se; whenever I go back and play 1e or 2e, I find myself very quickly wanting to revert to Basic-style initiative, surprise, morale, reactions, etc. Rather, the AD&D classes (even the four base classes) just have an entirely different vibe from the way they work in BECMI. Something about the different power-scale, and the slow crawl to reach the highest experience levels… it had me wondering if I could perhaps port that into a Basic/Expert style game, and maybe even kick it up a notch. (Because why do anything if you're not going to crank the amp up to eleven?)
When I was a kid, we never frankensteined together D&D and AD&D. The books said that they were separate games, and so we treated them as separate games. Mixing and matching and mashing up OD&D and AD&D may be old hat to a lot of you who started playing back in the 70s or the 80s, but it's something that I've legitimately never done! And doing it requires making a series of choices — deciding how things are going to work in my game, drawn from the smorgasbord of (surprisingly compatible) options laid out in the white box, red box, 1e, and 2e. One of the first choices to make, before I can even decide how (or whether) I'm going to implement things like demihumans, dual- or multiclassing, sub-classes, and so forth, is how I want the basic character classes to advance. I've written in the past that original D&D basically gives two advancement schemes, a slow pace of advancement used by fighters and mages, and a rapid one used by clerics and thieves; and that AD&D reconciled this by making all the classes advance slowly (the XP tables go linear after about 9th level), while Classic D&D opted instead to make all classes advance rapidly (the tables mostly go linear after 8th). There's also the matter of ultimate scale: AD&D goes up to 30th level maximum, and D&D to 36th.
In my experience, I've rarely gotten a lot of use out of the game's highest levels (be they dubbed Master or Epic); this isn't an uncommon story. There's even been a rumor floating around the old-school blogs and forums lately that Frank Mentzer ultimately regretted following the note in the '82 Cook/Marsh Expert Set that said the D&D game would go up to 36th level, and that he would have preferred limiting things to 20th himself. (I have no source on this rumor, nor do I have any inkling of its validity.) Looking at the tables from the various editions, and considering how I'd like to "mash" them together, I'm thinking I'd like to do something a little bit cheeky and make the following alterations: (1) the XP tables will go linear in AD&D fashion after 9th level, but only until 11th level, after which the XPs required to advance will slowly ramp up even more (×1.5 from levels 12th to 14th, ×2 from levels 15th to 17th, and ×2.5 at 18th), and (2) the maximum level for all the classes will become 18th level, which is close to 20th (but not such a neat, round number — eighteen has character) and also exactly one-half of 36th. (I'm sure at least some people out there will mutter something about the Expert Set and 14th level, but, no. Fourteen levels aren't sufficient. As mentioned earlier, "B/X" was never intended to cap out at 14th level in the first place. It doesn't feel right to treat 14th as the apogee of human PC advancement, forever cutting off the highest spell-levels from play.)
So, without further comment — except to say that while I haven't quite settled on how I want to treat demihumans and subclasses yet, I'm leaning toward an expanded system of race-as-class with slightly raised level-caps (perhaps in the vicinity of 10th for hobbits, 12th for elves, 15th for dwarves) and the option for human characters to change classes (fighter to paladin, cleric to druid, etc.) if they meet certain requirements and reach a minimum level (around 2nd to 4th) first — here are the revised base classes (fighter, thief, cleric, and mage) that I hope to test-run soon, should that welcome day ever come that I can find the time to play again!
(If there's any interest in seeing more, I'll update this thread from time to time with additional content as I hash it out.)
<<Links were here but now they're deprecated (9/27/22)>>
When I was a kid, we never frankensteined together D&D and AD&D. The books said that they were separate games, and so we treated them as separate games. Mixing and matching and mashing up OD&D and AD&D may be old hat to a lot of you who started playing back in the 70s or the 80s, but it's something that I've legitimately never done! And doing it requires making a series of choices — deciding how things are going to work in my game, drawn from the smorgasbord of (surprisingly compatible) options laid out in the white box, red box, 1e, and 2e. One of the first choices to make, before I can even decide how (or whether) I'm going to implement things like demihumans, dual- or multiclassing, sub-classes, and so forth, is how I want the basic character classes to advance. I've written in the past that original D&D basically gives two advancement schemes, a slow pace of advancement used by fighters and mages, and a rapid one used by clerics and thieves; and that AD&D reconciled this by making all the classes advance slowly (the XP tables go linear after about 9th level), while Classic D&D opted instead to make all classes advance rapidly (the tables mostly go linear after 8th). There's also the matter of ultimate scale: AD&D goes up to 30th level maximum, and D&D to 36th.
In my experience, I've rarely gotten a lot of use out of the game's highest levels (be they dubbed Master or Epic); this isn't an uncommon story. There's even been a rumor floating around the old-school blogs and forums lately that Frank Mentzer ultimately regretted following the note in the '82 Cook/Marsh Expert Set that said the D&D game would go up to 36th level, and that he would have preferred limiting things to 20th himself. (I have no source on this rumor, nor do I have any inkling of its validity.) Looking at the tables from the various editions, and considering how I'd like to "mash" them together, I'm thinking I'd like to do something a little bit cheeky and make the following alterations: (1) the XP tables will go linear in AD&D fashion after 9th level, but only until 11th level, after which the XPs required to advance will slowly ramp up even more (×1.5 from levels 12th to 14th, ×2 from levels 15th to 17th, and ×2.5 at 18th), and (2) the maximum level for all the classes will become 18th level, which is close to 20th (but not such a neat, round number — eighteen has character) and also exactly one-half of 36th. (I'm sure at least some people out there will mutter something about the Expert Set and 14th level, but, no. Fourteen levels aren't sufficient. As mentioned earlier, "B/X" was never intended to cap out at 14th level in the first place. It doesn't feel right to treat 14th as the apogee of human PC advancement, forever cutting off the highest spell-levels from play.)
So, without further comment — except to say that while I haven't quite settled on how I want to treat demihumans and subclasses yet, I'm leaning toward an expanded system of race-as-class with slightly raised level-caps (perhaps in the vicinity of 10th for hobbits, 12th for elves, 15th for dwarves) and the option for human characters to change classes (fighter to paladin, cleric to druid, etc.) if they meet certain requirements and reach a minimum level (around 2nd to 4th) first — here are the revised base classes (fighter, thief, cleric, and mage) that I hope to test-run soon, should that welcome day ever come that I can find the time to play again!
(If there's any interest in seeing more, I'll update this thread from time to time with additional content as I hash it out.)
<<Links were here but now they're deprecated (9/27/22)>>
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I think I liked it better the first time, when it was called the Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition Companion. 
