OSR Why B/X?

[Mannahnin]

And this is simultaneously a strawman and a shift of goalposts. oD&D, B/X, and 1e were written to be dungeon exploration games where you gained XP by obtaining loot. This is how Gygax played the game, how Gygax wrote the game, and Gygax taught the game - but Gygax's writing was not always clear. You could play them as adventure path games. Meanwhile 2e is written to be an adventure path or worldbuilding game that you could play as a mercenary dungeon adventure game.

It's always frustrating when someone comes into an existing discussion, doesn't read the prior posts, and contradicts a claim that literally no one in the thread is making.

 

[overgeeked]

I get that it's a ridiculous claim to you. You apparently don't remember the widespread rejection of 2E in the 80s by 1E players uninterested in switching/updating. You were evidently part of the percentage which liked 2E and carried over your older-school sensibilities to the newer edition while just using the cleaner mechanics. I expect that you disregarded the changes to the XP system.

As someone who stuck with AD&D through 2E, 3E, and 3.5 I can attest to this being a very real thing. There are a lot of grogs who held onto their AD&D and ignored 2E.

AD&D is the 2nd or 3rd most popular edition of D&D. After 5E and maybe 3X.

 

[Parmandur]

Which makes it an even stranger assertion that 2E was just 1E compiled and cleaned up. I maintain that the only way to assert that is to have ignored the shift in style and play focus that occurred during the 2E era, either because one had already made that shift (the Hickman Revolution did not come out of nowhere) or because one simply ignored the particulars and used 2E to continue to play in the old school style.

I mean, he was st Ground Zero.

 

[Reynard]

I mean, he was st Ground Zero.

Which means he had a different set of experiences and a perspective colored by the experiences. That doesn't make him objectively "right" about the statement that 2E is just a cleaned up 1E when it clearly is not, and intentionally so.

 

[Voadam]

2e mechanically was mostly a 1e cleaned up and continued. There were small things like the changes in xp and initiative and some class stuff and other little bits but really a lot mechanically the same.

2e in its core books was fairly different in how it told you to play the game, so while 1e had dungeon crawling mercenary gold seekers ranging from good paladins and rangers to evil assassins carefully facing danger as its model, 2e presented their model as more a heroic questing band like in Dragonlance.

I could not say if there was a similar shift in B/X to BECMI to RC, I am mostly familiar with B/X as base rulebooks. B/X was fairly in the 1e mold of gold seeking dungeon crawlers.

 

[Mannahnin]

2e mechanically was mostly a 1e cleaned up and continued. There were small things like the changes in xp and initiative and some class stuff and other little bits but really a lot mechanically the same.

2e in its core books was fairly different in how it told you to play the game, so while 1e had dungeon crawling mercenary gold seekers ranging from good paladins and rangers to evil assassins carefully facing danger as its model, 2e presented their model as more a heroic questing band like in Dragonlance.

Mechanically it had a lot of compatibility. As has already been acknowledged in the thread by people talking about it, including the people saying it's at or over the borderline of new school.

Because while the changes to XP were emblematic, they were a fairly small piece of mechanical representation of how TSR gradually shifted over time from promoting a mostly-Gygaxian style of play to primarily promoting an Epic Fantasy/Dragonlance style of play. There was for more than a decade a tension between D&D's xp system and those gamers who preferred Epic Quests and altruistic heroes. Many of them changed it for themselves. 2nd edition is the watershed moment when TSR stamped that approach the Official Preferred Way.

I could not say if there was a similar shift in B/X to BECMI to RC, I am mostly familiar with B/X as base rulebooks. B/X was fairly in the 1e mold of gold seeking dungeon crawlers.

There was, to a lesser extent, yes.

 

[Parmandur]

Which means he had a different set of experiences and a perspective colored by the experiences. That doesn't make him objectively "right" about the statement that 2E is just a cleaned up 1E when it clearly is not, and intentionally so.

It makes him knowledgeable about how OD&D, the Old School, was being played by it's creators. Thwt doesn't make him "objectively" right, but it is a pretty good measure for Okd School.

 

[Reynard]

It makes him knowledgeable about how OD&D, the Old School, was being played by it's creators. Thwt doesn't make him "objectively" right, but it is a pretty good measure for Okd School.

There's a whole book dedicated to how differently people played the game at its inception, including the people that invented it. I am not suggesting his experience is invalid, just that it is a recollection of a singular experience. But more to the point, I am not saying anything about what happened at any particular table. I am pointing to the 1E core books with one hand and the 2E core books with the other and saying "These games are intended to be played differently."

 

[Parmandur]

There's a whole book dedicated to how differently people played the game at its inception, including the people that invented it. I am not suggesting his experience is invalid, just that it is a recollection of a singular experience. But more to the point, I am not saying anything about what happened at any particular table. I am pointing to the 1E core books with one hand and the 2E core books with the other and saying "These games are intended to be played differently."

But maybe they weren't, and the 2E books just communicate the same point more efficiently...?

 

[Mannahnin]

It makes him knowledgeable about how OD&D, the Old School, was being played by it's creators. Thwt doesn't make him "objectively" right, but it is a pretty good measure for Okd School.

As Reynard referenced with his allusion to The Elusive Shift, I think everyone here is aware that there were multiple strains of play in the old days. There were differences between how Gary ran things vs how Dave ran things, but more prominently, there was the difference between the Gygaxian approach to play as primarily a game, appealing to wargamers heavily, and the approach to play it as a way to enact and create a story, more embodied by, say, Lee Gold's crew on the West coast. Non-wargamer SF fans. The arguments over gold for XP and how unrealistic it was (for the Trad and pre-Trad players) were a perennial refrain running from roughly 1975-1989.

But maybe they weren't, and the 2E books just communicate the same point more efficiently...?

I've spent way too many hours with those texts. While the 2E books are certainly clearer, no, they're definitely written in support of a contrasting play mode. 1E is Gygax. You CAN play Big Damn Heroes but the core expectation is that being a Lawful Goody-Goody is a limitation, often a drawback, and likely liability in your primary job of Getting That Bag. 2E is post-Gygax, post-Angry Mothers From Heck, written in a kind of wishy-washy manner trying to support Gygaxian play AND story-first play. And the mechanics largely hew close to 1E due to the editorial mandate to maintain a high degree of reverse compatibility, but the expectation is definitely that you're probably Heroes doing Good Deeds, and the XP system was revised to support that expectation.