Sing to me, O Muse, of BECMI!

[rabindranath72]

B/X Blackrazor, despite his name, has gone all-in for 1e, for the same reasons. He asserts that AD&D has the best rules for long-term play.

Personally it's not so much about "long-term play" (I had at least two BECMI campaigns go to 36th level); although I can see why a wider variety of content, be it spells, classes, monsters, races, etc. may increase long-term replayability, what I am mainly after is ready-made content I can drop into a game with the least amount of work. Just looking at the pages describing Sages in the DMG is an eye-opener: coming up with that stuff takes work, a LOT of work. When I was a teenager or in my early twenties, I had a lot more time; nowadays between wife, kids, and work, I consider myself lucky if I can put together one or two games per month. So any help, from the least amount of sources as possible, is a no-brainer.

Curiously, one way in which I have "advanced" my B/X (for when I don't care about a lot of detail, but I still want something "more"), rather than going the BECMI route, is using select bits from OD&D's Greyhawk:

• Separate (more or less) race from class, with exactly the same class and level limits in Greyhawk (including half-elves)
• Tweak the classes per Greyhawk: increased backstabs for thieves, sweeping and exceptional strength for fighters, intelligence table for magic-users, paladins
• Tweak the races per Greyhawk: elves and dwarves get some boons (elves can hide like halflings, +1 to hit with sword and bow; dwarves get AC bonus against giants, +1 to hit giant-class; all races get race-specific thief bonuses.)

All of these adaptations take just a page or so, but they make the game a lot more interesting.

 

[cavalier973]

I added a few rules from Moldvay:

1. Anyone can search for “room traps”

2. Natural healing of 1d3 HP a day (or 1d4 HP, if I go by the 1991 Black Box)

3. Crowbars

 

[rabindranath72]

I added a few rules from Moldvay:

1. Anyone can search for “room traps”

2. Natural healing of 1d3 HP a day (or 1d4 HP, if I go by the 1991 Black Box)

3. Crowbars

Yeah, those were always curious omissions. Not even the RC has rules for natural healing!

 

[CleverNickName]

Yeah, those were always curious omissions. Not even the RC has rules for natural healing!

We house-rule it as 1 HP per level if you were staying in town, and half that much if you're camping in the wilderness. Camping in a dungeon or monster lair is only 1 HP per day. This is probably more fiddly than most would like, but it works for us.

 

[cbwjm]

The RC is my very favorite D&D book. I got the pod version, and it’s very nice.

One of my favourites as well, I've got one copy from back in the 90s and recently gifted a spare copy to a friend. It's a great book.

 

[Jack Daniel]

B/X Blackrazor, despite his name, has gone all-in for 1e, for the same reasons. He asserts that AD&D has the best rules for long-term play.

I mean...he's entitled to his opinion, but I've run several years-long campaigns using the BECM rules and we've run characters past level 25 several times. A long-term campaign is more about what you and your friends enjoy playing, and less about the rules themselves. If you still look forward to playing it every week, it's the right game for you and your group.

Yeah, I can't agree with JB. BECMI holds up better than AD&D in the long-term, IMO, because it has structure that AD&D lacks. The clear procedures for dominion play in the Companion Set, planar adventuring rules that (despite their anemic presentation in the Master Set) blow the Manual of the Planes right out of the water, and everything to do with questing for immortality, to say nothing of Immortal level play… it's not a contest, unless you happen to just dislike high-level play and powerful PCs in general.

(There are, of course, many in the OSR who don't think that old-school D&D should go much above 10th level, or that the 14th level soft ceiling of the Expert Set should be a hard cap. I often find myself baffled by this tendency to lionize low-level play, the "medieval mudcore" aesthetic, and the "fantasy effing Vietnam" style of survival horror play that — no thanks to that pernicious video game designer Matt Colville — entirely too many people now think old-school D&D was all about. But I digress.)

We house-rule it as 1 HP per level if you were staying in town, and half that much if you're camping in the wilderness. Camping in a dungeon or monster lair is only 1 HP per day. This is probably more fiddly than most would like, but it works for us.

My own house rule on this (§3-2) takes a bit from the various original/basic editions and a bit from AD&D. In a safe place, characters recover 1 hp/day during the first week they rest, then 2 hp/day during the second consecutive week, 3 hp/day during the third, and so on. This setup then gives me a nice, convenient way to deal with characters resting in the wilderness: assuming a well-defended and well-supplied camp in the wilds, characters who need to rest start out recovering 0 hp/day during the first week, and then it progresses to 1 hp/day during the second consecutive week, 2 hp/day during the third, and so on. In either case, the longer you rest, the faster you heal, a bit of a callback to AD&D 1e's rather fiddlier rules from pg. 82 of the DMG.

 

[rabindranath72]

planar adventuring rules that (despite their anemic presentation in the Master Set) blow the Manual of the Planes right out of the water, and everything to do with questing for immortality, to say nothing of Immortal level play… it's not a contest, unless you happen to just dislike high-level play and powerful PCs in general.

Hard to argue! The MotP is a really subpar product. D&DG does a much better job in its Appendix 1 at providing simple, gameable information for planar travel and adventuring. The book even provides an outline of the quest for immortality, which is remarkably similar to the overall Master set/Immortal set framework (Frank must have been inspired by it.)

 

[cavalier973]

I’ve been running my six year old through the Red Box solo adventure. She chased off the goblin, killed the snake, and just met Aleena. I’m making her write everything down on a piece of paper (ability scores, hit points, and equipment).

She asked why the pictures show her as being a man, rather than a woman. I pointed out to her that the text explicitly says that the character can be either male or female, and that the pictures are there just because.

I will have her play through the next dungeon, too, and have have her draw the map.

Then, I hope to get the rest of the family to play Castle Mistamere.

As an aside, I think Castle Mistamere would make a good intro dungeon for B2: Keep on the Borderlands. Treat it like a Monty Haul game, and they pull out enough treasure for everyone to level twice—but, then have the party attacked by bandits, who escape eastward with all that treasure. Hopefully, the party follows, intent on reclaiming their treasure and getting revenge. They discover Castellan Keep, and start searching the area for the bandit camp. When they finally find it, they realized it was attacked and ransacked. I would drop clues that whoever attacked the bandits went even further east.

I would also put a small dragon in the caves of chaos, which is behind everything bad going on. Because, you know, “Dungeons and DRAGONS”.

Also, a couple of good adventures to squeeze into B2: “A Hole in the Oak” could go somewhere near the river. “Winter’s Daughter” could be placed near where the Mad Hermit lurks.

 

[cavalier973]

Another thing I just discovered is that the RC doesn’t have information about encumbrance reduction for magical armor. In the Red Box, magic leather armor weighs 10 lbs (100 coins) less than non-magical armor, magic chain mail weighs 25 lbs less, and magic plate mail weighs 30 lbs less.

B11, King’s Festival,says that magic armor incurs no encumbrance, which seems a bit overpowered, to me. (p. 31).

Page 55 of the Companion rules DM book has a chart for encumbrance of the different types of armor, including what the weight is based on size (halfling, elf, human, etc.)

 

[Gus L]

Yeah, I can't agree with JB. BECMI holds up better than AD&D in the long-term, IMO, because it has structure that AD&D lacks. The clear procedures for dominion play in the Companion Set, planar adventuring rules that (despite their anemic presentation in the Master Set) blow the Manual of the Planes right out of the water, and everything to do with questing for immortality, to say nothing of Immortal level play… it's not a contest, unless you happen to just dislike high-level play and powerful PCs in general.

Perhaps this is a hot take ... but ...

I also disagree with JB - largely because I don't think any of the early D&D games "hold up" well past about 6 or 7th level, and I find AD&D - at least the original versions of its rules that I've read a jumbled mess (an inspirational one but...) I personally believe that every early D&D system requires and will naturally undergo large amounts of change through house rules as any campaign progresses or as the referee builds a more unique setting. For example I play my own version of pre-Greyhawk OD&D that's been evolving since 2014 or so. I think good AD&D referees/designers like Bluebard/Huso (and I am sure B/X Blackrazor) are doing pretty much the same thing with AD&D, and that's cool. These systems all need to adapt to fit one's table, refereeing style, and campaign goals.

My overall impression though is that the overall current focus on AD&D among certain circles in the Post-OSR has more to do with nostalgia for the early forum days of OSRIC and scene drama/posturing rather then any particular system benefits. It shouldn't be read too seriously unless one wants to engage in psycho-sociological scene archeology of the OSR (2005-2020). Back to this thread's topic...

BECMI is an interesting project! Long ago I played a level 1 - 30ish campaign of BECMI largely using published adventures. It was an experience, but I can't say our youthful selves were especially rigorous about interrogating (or even applying) its many subsystems. Last adventure we started was I think was Twilight Calling, but we didn't finish it and instead went off to stew in various teenage demimondes.

To me BECMI represents a fascinating attempt to create (for a large audience) these exact sorts of house rules and directs the early D&D rules (which are sufficiently the same from OD&D through 3E to be more or less interchangeable) specifically towards domain play with a final ascension to godhood. One can compare this with AD&D, which is less coherent or focused, but seems (perhaps as part of its efforts to create a 'tournament ruleset') to channel high-level play into extraplanar adventure. That is to say that AD&D struggles with the difficulties of high-level D&D as a game of individual adventurers while BECMI seems to move more deliberately back towards the wargame roots that Gygax and Arneson likely originally envisioned. Now, despite this I don't especially love how BECMI tries to do this -- it's burdened by retaining the mechanics of older editions while placing a stronger focus on "trad" style directed narrative adventure.

As an example of how this causes issues - take a look at the way the creatures in BECMI adventures (specifically the sample ones in "B") tend to "attack until killed" vs. the greater emphasis on reaction and morale mechanics in B/X or AD&D. Given that BECMI's lethality isn't any less then B/X's this makes combat far more dangerous and also far more common, which encourages players to race up the power curve and focus on combat viability rather than exploration or other types of play.