D&D General Veteran fans - did you think of Basic D&D and AD&D as completely different games?

[Paul Farquhar]

I played them both the same way, including using modules interchangeably. But I soon found Basic too limited for my taste and focused on AD&D.

 

[delericho]

Presumably this was the official TSR line (though I'd be interested to hear if there were contradictory statements). But is this what veteran players really assumed back in the day? A wall between Basic D&D and AD&D, with nothing meant to be used interchangeably?

TSR had to maintain that line, for legal reasons (it was to do with the Gygax/Arneson fallout, and the legal rights each had). They had to maintain both lines in print and rigorously push the line that they were entirely separate games. It wasn't until either the very last days of TSR's demise, or possibly early in WotC's tenure, that someone reached out to Arneson and the rifts were healed.

As for whether we considered them separate at our table: sort of. We never really mixed editions (even 3.0 and 3.5e mixing was very limited), so never used BECMI materials once we 'graduated' to 2nd Ed. But there are sufficient similarities between every TSR version of the game that you could mix-and-match with reasonable success.

 

[Lyxen]

In the end, especially for the early days, I think it mostly depended which options you were using for AD&D. There are many things in there, for example Weapon type vs AC which were (from experience) used a very few tables. But if you used the "core" AD&D of simple rules, they were very similar to Basic, and even the classes were not that different. Yes, basic dwarves had to be be fighters, but frankly, AD&D only had some other options in terms of classes/races combination, that does not make for a different game.

 

[Lanefan]

Modules and magic items were completely interchangable IME, with only minimal if any tweaking required.

Never tried porting a character over as we never played B/X or BECMI or any other variant, just 1e.

Some of the modifications we made to 1e probably pushed our games closer to B/X or similar while others would have pushed them farther away.

 

[Shiroiken]

They were different games in the same way that 1E and 2E were different games. They had similarities, and some material could be used in the other, but they had a different feel. A lot of people adapted a game that was a combination of both.

 

[Cadence]

Northern IL (Rockford) around 1982, the DM and a few players were much older and had been active in the IL/WI con scene since before Chainmail. I'm not sure what rules the DM was using, but the players used OD&D, B/X, or AD&D based on what they had. We had all switched to AD&D a year or two later - but still used modules from whatever.

 

[Alzrius]

I first remembered coming across this idea, that D&D and AD&D were different games, when I came across the conversion rules for the two in the back of the Rules Cyclopedia. It was enough for me to decide that they were different games (albeit ones with a lot of similar ideas and basic foundations), particularly since I was an absolute stickler about rules back then.

 

[Alzrius]

TSR had to maintain that line, for legal reasons (it was to do with the Gygax/Arneson fallout, and the legal rights each had). They had to maintain both lines in print and rigorously push the line that they were entirely separate games. It wasn't until either the very last days of TSR's demise, or possibly early in WotC's tenure, that someone reached out to Arneson and the rifts were healed.

That was Peter Adkison (he talks about it in 30 Years of Adventure). WotC wanted to do away with the D&D/AD&D division, and knew they had to resolve things with Arneson, so Adkison talked to him and they agreed to cut Arneson a check in exchange for his releasing his rights to residuals over D&D products.

 

[aco175]

Completely different games- no, I would think 80-90% similar. Kind of like how Toyota uses the Corolla chassis for the Prius and Rav4, lots of same but feels slightly different in riding.

 

[Helldritch]

Both games were really close to each others but different enough so that modifications to use the modules from one with the other might require a bit of work.

Basic modules were very easy to port to AD&D as long as you kept to the B/X ones. Using C and M adventures was a lot more work as some monsters were way more different than their counter parts in AD&D.

On the other hand, using AD&D modules with basic rules was a lot of work. Adventures for 1st to 3rd levels were still manageable but as soon as you got to the higher levels, it became a chore, especially with NPCs if you wanted to keep their classes flavour. How do you translate a druid level 7 in basic? Druids are neutral clerics that reached 9th level in D&D and the chose nature. So a 7th level druid in basic is really 16th... So the flavor of some NPCs was automatically lost.

AD&D could use most of BECMI, but the reverse was not true.