Jack Daniel
Legend
The history of D&D is more than a little convoluted, but I think most gamers are aware that there are two basic "branches" of the D&D game: OD&D and AD&D, which respectively refer to the "original" and "advanced" versions of the D&D game.
OD&D first came out in 1974, and throughout the 70s, a number of supplements were added to the game which added settings and more complex rules (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Sorcery, etc.) Then in 1977, J. Eric Holmes wrote the first D&D basic set (although it's title was still simply "Dungeons & Dragons"), which revised a few OD&D rules and included some stuff from the supplements, but which is still recognizably OD&D.
Also 1977, the Monster Manual came out. This was the first volume of Advanced D&D 1st edition, Gary Gygax's attempt to streamline and codify the rules from the original game and the supplements into something suitable for tournament play. From this point on, we can speak of AD&D as a distinct family of D&D editions, and their nomenclature has never been in dispute: 1e, 2e, 3e, and 4e belong to this group, and we can speak of two distinct eras along this branch, the TSR-produced AD&D games (1e and 2e) and the WotC-produced d20 System games (3e and 4e). Okay, fine. But AD&D is still best thought of as a derivation or branch off of the original game.
Many gamers generally recognize that the OD&D line has five distinct versions of the game, but they are almost never referred to as "editions"---and rightly so, because they don't differ all that much from one another. If we pick a benchmark to decide what an edition is (like, say, "1e and 2e are different enough to be separate editions, but 3.0e and 3.5e are not"), the best we can say about the later OD&D games is that they mark distinct revisions, but not separate editions. We can say this, because different editions tend to have different assumptions about the kinds of characters found the core rules of the game. Just look at the list of available races and classes from the four editions of AD&D: different every time.
• 1e: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, half-elf, half-orc; fighter, paladin, ranger, cleric, druid, monk, thief, assassin, bard, magic-user, illusionist.
• 2e: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, half-elf; fighter, paladin, ranger, cleric, druid, specialty priest, thief, bard, mage, specialist wizard.
• 3e: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, half-elf, half-orc; fighter, paladin, ranger, bararian, monk, cleric, druid, rouge, bard, wizard, sorcerer.
• 4e: human, elf, eladrin, dwarf, halfling, tiefling, dragonborn; fighter, warlord, paladin, ranger, cleric, wizard, warlock, rogue.
The AD&D line also assumes a 9-alignment system based on law and evil crossed with good and chaos. 4e killed that sacred cow by condensing NG, CG, LN, TN, CN, LE, and NE into Good, Unaligned, and Evil; but the assumption remains that there are extremes of Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil, with more ambiguous positions in between.
**********
So, returning to the original game, the standard practice is to speak of five separate iterations of non-advanced D&D:
• OD&D, the 1974 game that came in a white or brown box and described a complete game that could advance to an indeterminate level (just like AD&D 1e does).
• Holmes Basic, the 1977 boxed set that taught kids how to play D&D up to 3rd level
• B/X, the 1981 Basic Set by Tom Moldvay and the 1982 Expert Set by Steve Marsh and David Cook, which took the game to 14th level, but suggested that it would run to 36th.
• BECMI, the 1983 revisions of the Basic and Expert Sets by Frank Mentzer; and the 1984, 1985, and 1986 releases of the Companion, Masters, and Immortals sets by the same author. A complete system that took the game to 36th level and then immortality.
• “Classic D&D,” the rules released from 1991 onward in the form of the Black Box Basic Set, the Rules Cyclopedia, and the Wrath of the Immortals boxed set. Similar to BECMI, but the new immortals rules were heavily revised and simplified.
Okay, now here’s my problem: these games don’t have nice, pretty labels based on edition numbers. When somebody says “2e,” everybody knows that this designation means “the game that came out in 1989 and eliminated half-orc assassins, and got revised in 1995 along with a bunch of crappy splatbooks with shiny black covers that unbalanced the rules, but it didn’t matter because all the settings were awesome.” That’s 2e, and we all know it.
For the other branch of the family, sure, a lot of gamers know what’s meant by B/X or whatever, but then again, many don’t. And they’re downright fugly labels. How do I pronounce “BECMI”? Do I say “bee-ee-cee-em-ay” or “beck-me?” I have to choose between an ungainly mouthful and a potential off-color joke? It gets worse: my preferred edition is the 1991 version of D&D, but since “Classic D&D” is too ambiguous, most people call it “Rules Cyclopedia D&D.” So, instead of sounding like one of the most complete and most fun versions of the game ever published, it kind of sounds like doing homework. Or rules lawyering. I want edition names are aren’t meaningless to everybody except the gamers “in the know”!
One question that stands out is, “are there really separate editions here?” They’re not labeled as such in the books, even though the designers did write, for example, that they considered the different basic sets to be the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions of Original D&D. But they’re not all that substantively different from each other. Holmes Basic may have included thieves, five alignments instead of three, and an initiative system based on Dex scores rather than dice; but it also had dwarf and halfling fighting-men, elves which could choose to act as fighting-men or magic-users, and other features which clearly mark it as little more than an introduction to the 1974 OD&D rules.
From 1981 onward, though, the character lineup fundamentally changes: in every version of the game from this point on, the game always assumes the same four human classes (fighter, magic-user, cleric, and thief) advancing to 36th level, a dwarf class that goes to 12th level (rather than 8th as a fighting-man), a halfling class that goes to 8th level (rather than 4th as a fighting-man), and an elf class that goes to 10th level and gets to be both a fighter and a magic-user at the same time. B/X, BECMI, and the 1991 game all belong to a distinct group: “Classic D&D,” or maybe “2nd edition OD&D.”
Therefore, I have to propose the following system. I doubt that it will kill off the common usage of labels like B/X and BECMI (though I wish somebody would pick a consistent abbreviation for “Expert” and stick with it). But it does, I think, make more sense to group D&D editions into four families:
• OD&D: the original D&D game, which includes the 1974 rules (D&D ’74) and the Holmes Basic Set (D&D ’77).
• AD&D: the advanced D&D game, which includes 1e and 2e.
• CD&D: the classic D&D game, a revision and simplification of the original game, which includes the 1981 (B/X), 1983 (BECMI), 1991 rules (which could be abbreviated as D&D ’81, ’83, and ’91).
• d20 D&D: the modern descendant of AD&D, which includes 3e and 4e.
Edited to fix a date.
OD&D first came out in 1974, and throughout the 70s, a number of supplements were added to the game which added settings and more complex rules (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Sorcery, etc.) Then in 1977, J. Eric Holmes wrote the first D&D basic set (although it's title was still simply "Dungeons & Dragons"), which revised a few OD&D rules and included some stuff from the supplements, but which is still recognizably OD&D.
Also 1977, the Monster Manual came out. This was the first volume of Advanced D&D 1st edition, Gary Gygax's attempt to streamline and codify the rules from the original game and the supplements into something suitable for tournament play. From this point on, we can speak of AD&D as a distinct family of D&D editions, and their nomenclature has never been in dispute: 1e, 2e, 3e, and 4e belong to this group, and we can speak of two distinct eras along this branch, the TSR-produced AD&D games (1e and 2e) and the WotC-produced d20 System games (3e and 4e). Okay, fine. But AD&D is still best thought of as a derivation or branch off of the original game.
Many gamers generally recognize that the OD&D line has five distinct versions of the game, but they are almost never referred to as "editions"---and rightly so, because they don't differ all that much from one another. If we pick a benchmark to decide what an edition is (like, say, "1e and 2e are different enough to be separate editions, but 3.0e and 3.5e are not"), the best we can say about the later OD&D games is that they mark distinct revisions, but not separate editions. We can say this, because different editions tend to have different assumptions about the kinds of characters found the core rules of the game. Just look at the list of available races and classes from the four editions of AD&D: different every time.
• 1e: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, half-elf, half-orc; fighter, paladin, ranger, cleric, druid, monk, thief, assassin, bard, magic-user, illusionist.
• 2e: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, half-elf; fighter, paladin, ranger, cleric, druid, specialty priest, thief, bard, mage, specialist wizard.
• 3e: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, half-elf, half-orc; fighter, paladin, ranger, bararian, monk, cleric, druid, rouge, bard, wizard, sorcerer.
• 4e: human, elf, eladrin, dwarf, halfling, tiefling, dragonborn; fighter, warlord, paladin, ranger, cleric, wizard, warlock, rogue.
The AD&D line also assumes a 9-alignment system based on law and evil crossed with good and chaos. 4e killed that sacred cow by condensing NG, CG, LN, TN, CN, LE, and NE into Good, Unaligned, and Evil; but the assumption remains that there are extremes of Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil, with more ambiguous positions in between.
**********
So, returning to the original game, the standard practice is to speak of five separate iterations of non-advanced D&D:
• OD&D, the 1974 game that came in a white or brown box and described a complete game that could advance to an indeterminate level (just like AD&D 1e does).
• Holmes Basic, the 1977 boxed set that taught kids how to play D&D up to 3rd level
• B/X, the 1981 Basic Set by Tom Moldvay and the 1982 Expert Set by Steve Marsh and David Cook, which took the game to 14th level, but suggested that it would run to 36th.
• BECMI, the 1983 revisions of the Basic and Expert Sets by Frank Mentzer; and the 1984, 1985, and 1986 releases of the Companion, Masters, and Immortals sets by the same author. A complete system that took the game to 36th level and then immortality.
• “Classic D&D,” the rules released from 1991 onward in the form of the Black Box Basic Set, the Rules Cyclopedia, and the Wrath of the Immortals boxed set. Similar to BECMI, but the new immortals rules were heavily revised and simplified.
Okay, now here’s my problem: these games don’t have nice, pretty labels based on edition numbers. When somebody says “2e,” everybody knows that this designation means “the game that came out in 1989 and eliminated half-orc assassins, and got revised in 1995 along with a bunch of crappy splatbooks with shiny black covers that unbalanced the rules, but it didn’t matter because all the settings were awesome.” That’s 2e, and we all know it.
For the other branch of the family, sure, a lot of gamers know what’s meant by B/X or whatever, but then again, many don’t. And they’re downright fugly labels. How do I pronounce “BECMI”? Do I say “bee-ee-cee-em-ay” or “beck-me?” I have to choose between an ungainly mouthful and a potential off-color joke? It gets worse: my preferred edition is the 1991 version of D&D, but since “Classic D&D” is too ambiguous, most people call it “Rules Cyclopedia D&D.” So, instead of sounding like one of the most complete and most fun versions of the game ever published, it kind of sounds like doing homework. Or rules lawyering. I want edition names are aren’t meaningless to everybody except the gamers “in the know”!
One question that stands out is, “are there really separate editions here?” They’re not labeled as such in the books, even though the designers did write, for example, that they considered the different basic sets to be the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions of Original D&D. But they’re not all that substantively different from each other. Holmes Basic may have included thieves, five alignments instead of three, and an initiative system based on Dex scores rather than dice; but it also had dwarf and halfling fighting-men, elves which could choose to act as fighting-men or magic-users, and other features which clearly mark it as little more than an introduction to the 1974 OD&D rules.
From 1981 onward, though, the character lineup fundamentally changes: in every version of the game from this point on, the game always assumes the same four human classes (fighter, magic-user, cleric, and thief) advancing to 36th level, a dwarf class that goes to 12th level (rather than 8th as a fighting-man), a halfling class that goes to 8th level (rather than 4th as a fighting-man), and an elf class that goes to 10th level and gets to be both a fighter and a magic-user at the same time. B/X, BECMI, and the 1991 game all belong to a distinct group: “Classic D&D,” or maybe “2nd edition OD&D.”
Therefore, I have to propose the following system. I doubt that it will kill off the common usage of labels like B/X and BECMI (though I wish somebody would pick a consistent abbreviation for “Expert” and stick with it). But it does, I think, make more sense to group D&D editions into four families:
• OD&D: the original D&D game, which includes the 1974 rules (D&D ’74) and the Holmes Basic Set (D&D ’77).
• AD&D: the advanced D&D game, which includes 1e and 2e.
• CD&D: the classic D&D game, a revision and simplification of the original game, which includes the 1981 (B/X), 1983 (BECMI), 1991 rules (which could be abbreviated as D&D ’81, ’83, and ’91).
• d20 D&D: the modern descendant of AD&D, which includes 3e and 4e.
Edited to fix a date.
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