Since it was probably all over your feeds already (and has been mentioned on the front page here), I won’t go into a great deal of detail except to say that the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons is out in PDF on all of the OneBookshelf related-sites. A big part of the problem with having role-playing gaming conversation online (and in person as well) is that a lot of the viewpoints are based off of what people have read or heard other people say about games, rather than experience them first hand. Many times this is because the material in question is long out of print, and the people wanting to talk about couldn’t experience them first hand. As more older material comes back into print (or made available in PDF form) I would like to think that it will make having honest conversations easier. I know that is likely a naïve idea.
Original (or Old, depending on how you like to fill in the “O”) Dungeons & Dragons is the transition from earlier wargames to what would eventually become role-playing games. I like to think of this incarnation as being more like “proto” D&D, mostly because while there are a lot of the elements that gamers without familiarity with the older D&D experience would recognize as being D&D, still not all of the pieces are in place. I think the things that aren’t there will be more likely to trip people up.
Let’s talk a little about what the proto D&D isn’t, or doesn’t have, for those who haven’t experienced it. First off, everything from weapons to hit dice are on a d6 “scale.” That means that weapons tend to look pretty much alike, as do the hit points of characters. Fighters (called “Fighting-Men” at this point after Edgar Rice Burroughs references) get slightly more hit dice than Magic-Users, but Clerics are close behind. A party without a Fighter can hang on with a Cleric or two (which is how games I’ve played have worked out).
The other “missing” component is the Thief class. No Thieves ‘til Greyhawk.
Most of the other elements are in place, and “race as class” isn’t yet on the table. There is a flaw, though, in that a couple of special abilities for elves and dwarves refer to the Chainmail rules.
The issues of hit dice and a lack of Thieves are my biggest issue with the proto D&D. The Thieves are a big deal, because between Leiber and Howard, it doesn’t feel like fantasy to me without a Thief. It also seems a weird omission for dungeon-based adventuring.
In play, the sameness of hit dice and weapons damage can lead to a generic quality for things, particularly weapons. It can also create a weird quality of the characters all having roughly the same “toughness” to them, regardless of class. Randomness is a great equalizer in the proto D&D, and your first level Fighter can have fewer hit points than the Magic-User. While it might just appear happenchance on the surface, I think that the random quality is what passed for “game balance” in these earliest versions of the game.
Now, I haven’t played proto D&D directly in a couple of decades, but over the last few years our group has played a lot of Swords & Wizardry, starting out using the Whitebox rules, and then eventually adding more detail from Core and Complete as we went along in our games. Whitebox certainly was more Magic-User user friendly.
Now, Greyhawk, the first supplement to OD&D, “fixed” these “problems.” This was also the point at which Magic-Users were forever consigned to having d4 hit dice (I personally use a d6 for them in my “old school” games), which can be good or bad depending on your view of things. I get that the reasoning was probably “Hey, they get spells…let’s not go crazy with the Magic-User” but it isn’t a line of reasoning that I agree with. But the nice thing about the game is that it is flexible enough to take a few smacks from house rules, with only minimal wobbling on the part of the system.
And this boils things down as to why I like playing these older editions of the game. For some, playing OD&D or “old school” games like Swords & Wizardry get written off as being nostalgia-driven. Despite having gamed since 1979, I am one of the least nostalgic gamers that you are probably ever going to encounter. Honestly, I killed off enough brain cells in college that I couldn’t remember how I gamed as a kid if I even wanted to do so. But, and this is probably evident in my writing about games, I have reached a point in my life, and my gaming, where I want simpler approaches to things in my gaming. That’s where “old school” games come into play for me.
A couple of years ago, when a long-time friend of mine asked me to introduce her to tabletop RPGs (after years of playing WoW) via Google Hangouts, I started a search for fantasy games that would have a similar enough of an experience that she would be able to recognize it from her experience, while being a simpler experience and getting away from the grid and miniatures approach (that I am not a fan of anyway). I scoured the internet, looking for things that were free downloads (didn’t want her to buy a bunch of stuff and turn out to hate tabletop) and looked over games like Basic Fantasy and Swords & Wizardry. I don’t remember the exact reasoning, maybe because the Whitebox rules were so simple, but that was what we went with. We used a variant Thief class to round out our game.
Anyway, this is a digression but I wanted to dig in a little and show that what I am talking about is play-based. Plus, the flexibility of the game is a huge consideration. Making up new classes is pretty easy, mostly because there aren’t as many mechanics to complicate matters. Expansion for an OD&D game (without Greyhawk being out in PDF at the time of publication) is really easy with all of the resources that exist for games like Swords & Wizardry Whitebox (which, if I haven’t explained well enough is based off of just the rules from the initial OD&D three booklets) to take your OD&D games in all sorts of directions. Barrel Rider Games does a lot of material for Whitebox that can easily be slotted into OD&D as well.
Even if your plan isn’t to play OD&D as-is, there is still a great foundation onto which you can build a fun class and level based fantasy game that does better suit the needs that you might have in a game. Crafting new spells and new monsters is pretty easy. I made about five new monsters before our Tuesday game in just a couple of hours. That time was going from “I have a cool name” to “I have a fully statted out creature.” If you want to check out something that is fairly close to OD&D (but is free), there is Matt Finch’s Swords & Wizardry. It is a pretty great game in its own rights, and our group has gotten years of enjoyment out of playing the game. I really hope that new edition Swords & Wizardry Kickstarter happens.
OD&D may seem very different and not as well-organized as later RPGs, but there have been decades of refinement in between now and then. However, that refinement does not mean that the original material is not able to produce just as enjoyable game-play as the modern ones. Much like comparing early music, with its often less sophisticated instruments, with a modern classical concert; there's enjoyment to be found in both.
