OSR Why B/X?

[Willie the Duck]

Someone hates one of the greatest DnD books of all time? I seriously love the RC, I started playing with it and return to read it from time to time. I ended up using its mass battle rules as the basis for mass battles in a 5e game. I loved that it is a complete system in a single book (minus levelling as immortals, but I don't feel like that's a requirement for most games).

I would call RC the greatest DnD reference book of all time -- wonderful for someone who has already learned how to play, less so for someone coming in cold. At least compared to the elegance of B/X (despite having important concepts split between B and X products), I feel like it reads like a phone book. It has the advantage of being an entire game contained in a single volume, but they did have to sacrifice some clarity to do so.

 

[Mannahnin]

I would call RC the greatest DnD reference book of all time -- wonderful for someone who has already learned how to play, less so for someone coming in cold. At least compared to the elegance of B/X (despite having important concepts split between B and X products), I feel like it reads like a phone book. It has the advantage of being an entire game contained in a single volume, but they did have to sacrifice some clarity to do so.

And YMMV, but for me, the art was and has remained a giant roadblock to enjoying the RC.

 

[CleverNickName]

Just out of curiosity, why is B/X the (current) focus of the OSR community? Why not AD&D or 2E or BECMI? What makes B/X (and by extension OSE) the primary tool for folks dipping into Old School D&D?

For me, it's mostly about nostalgia. It's the first D&D rules set that I ever played, and I have a lot of fond memories associated with it.

 

[cbwjm]

I would call RC the greatest DnD reference book of all time -- wonderful for someone who has already learned how to play, less so for someone coming in cold. At least compared to the elegance of B/X (despite having important concepts split between B and X products), I feel like it reads like a phone book. It has the advantage of being an entire game contained in a single volume, but they did have to sacrifice some clarity to do so.

People always talk about it being bad for someone learning to play, but that book was my introduction to dnd and my cousin and I had no issues with learning to play using it. We were making PCs and running adventures in no time.

 

[cbwjm]

And YMMV, but for me, the art was and has remained a giant roadblock to enjoying the RC.

I actually quite like the art, some of it is still my favourite: I really like the art for the magic-user, elf, and thief and there is an image of a beholder stopping a magic-user's spell that I quite like. Also the actaeon.

 

[Malmuria]

I actually quite like the art, some of it is still my favourite: I really like the art for the magic-user, elf, and thief and there is an image of a beholder stopping a magic-user's spell that I quite like. Also the actaeon.

I agree! This wouldn't have occurred to me at the time, but I think the magic user made me feel seen as a POC. Maybe that's why they were my favorite class!

https://www.enworld.org/threads/one-piece-of-art-what-d-d-art-inspired-you-to-love-a-class.690436/post-8717912

 

[Mannahnin]

I agree! This wouldn't have occurred to me at the time, but I think the magic user made me feel seen as a POC. Maybe that's why they were my favorite class!

https://www.enworld.org/threads/one-piece-of-art-what-d-d-art-inspired-you-to-love-a-class.690436/post-8717912

That's definitely one of the nicer pieces.

It may just be that I started with Mentzer Basic and Cook Expert, so Larry Elmore and Erol Otus were the first D&D artists to really fire my imagination. The nostalgia runs deep. Even just a few years later when I saw the RC the art just didn't work for me, for the most part.

 

[Kai Lord]

But yeah, even those of us who played 1E back in the day ignored at least half of it. Truthfully, we were really playing B/X with 1E classes, races and monsters on both B/X and 1E adventures, which are essentially interchangeable, then and now.

This is so freaking true. Me and my friends all claimed to play AD&D since we bought all the books and had Rangers, Paladins, Barbarians and the like but really all we were playing was B/X with those races, classes, and monsters (plus a few other things like Exceptional Strength for Fighter-types) thrown in. We didn't even bother with spell components. We never realized until many years later that by cherry picking our favorite elements out of both B/X and AD&D that we essentially ended up with OD&D, lol.

It really shined a new light on the entirety of Holmes, B/X, AD&D and BECMI as just a twisting of the game that everyone was really playing due to the Gygax/Arneson split and feud over royalties.

 

[Kai Lord]

And YMMV, but for me, the art was and has remained a giant roadblock to enjoying the RC.

Yep. Fantastic cover but it was painful flipping through the pages and comparing the new art to the likes of Otus, Dee, Willingham, Elmore and Easley. That made it very hard for me to accept the RC as a true continuation/reiteration of those prior releases.

 

[cbwjm]

Just goes to show how subjective art is, I always thought the 1e stuff was terrible, especially the stuff in the MM.