Increasing Appreciation for Old-School Essentials

 Laat night I managed to get our Friday group to start a classic B/X D&D campaign using a blend of the Erol Otus edition Basic and Expert rulebooks, with a few extra resources, including the BX Blackrazor Companion and Adventurer books, and some material (the skill sytem) from the D&D Cyclopedia. It was fun! I think we'll be playing this game for at least the length of the adventure I have set up, which has enough content for several sessions.

We did run into some interesting hiccups, though. I learned, for example, that the Basic and Expert books are awfully vague about things like: fighting in darkness, what blindness means mechanically, how darkness the spell works when used to cause blindness, and what those penalties look like. In looking through later editions (Mentzer era books, the D&D Cyclopedia, and then the OSE rules) it became clear that a creature with the blindness condition can't attack at all. If you're in the darkness area, does that mean you are considered blind? Also, if you are shooting into the darkness, what sort of cover penalty is that?

Little questions like this....as well as movement rules during combat, are a little difficult to parse out in the older B/X books. The clarifications get better in the later versions of the ruleset, and then the complexity magically starts to ramp up in the D&D Cyclopedia, which I noticed manages to take an inherently straight forward ruleset and make it more complex (but hey, that is supposed to be the definitive edition of the BECMI rules so that is to be expected). 

Where I found the best clarity, and developed a strong appreciation for what it is doing, is in the Old-School Essential rules. The deliberate clarity that the OSE rules focus on is excellent, and I suspect that the ease with which I could find answers to these questions (or at least guidance) is probably because the author's goal was to address exactly these issues of needed clarity. And the OSE rules succeed to great effect in this manner.

Moreover, it's been long enough since I last messed around with B/X D&D that reading through and running it again, then reading through OSE for comparison has really hammered home to me that the OSE rules are a shockingly exact translation of the classic rules in almost every possible way. There are little oddities; I notice an absence of electrum pieces, for example; and devil swine are recategorized as proper lycanthropes with associated traits in OSE, while their original counterparts were more like "lycanthrope adjacent," as examples. I am looking only at tbe B/X component of OSE, too; I am much more familiar with AD&D and so realize that the Advanced elements introduced in OSE are a bit more fluid in their reinterpretations of those rules elements, more a blend of B/X with AD&D elements wedded to them....which honestly is a bit closer to how I ran the game in the early eighties. 

Anway.... I let the group know that going forward I will be keeping the OSE rules handy for quick reference as they are just so much easier to find clarity in, and that PCs can be built from original rules or OSE rules and both are accepted in the game. 

EDIT: As an afterthought, I realize that had this rule been presented in a more, shall we say, "mechanics and ruleplay vs. reality-based rules and roleplay," then I would probably just accept it. So, for example, game systems like D&D and Pathfinder often have rules that have no functional basis in reality, but are grounded in the mechanical contrivances of the game system. It is possible this Mythras rule is intended to dissuade players from just trying over and over on a task....a rule attached to a stick with a soft, suishy rationale for the GM to lean on when the player argues with them over it. But that's technically not how its presented...it is trying to make the case that trying a task twice in a row increases the odds of failure, but that just doesn't mesh well with real life, which is what systems like Mythras are trying harder to emulate. So....yeah. Hmmm.

The B/X D&D Tipping Point

 I spent a fair amount of time accruing both Old-School Essentials books and Shadowdark books over the last couple years, and vascillating between which system I generally preferred. OSE because it is more of an emulator? Shadowdark because it is more of a focused modern experienced in retro sheep's clothing? OSE because it's got a blend of B/X D&D and AD&D mechanical elements, or Shadowdark which is brutally honest in its desire to focus on dungeon crawling and loot acquisition? OSE for its quaint retro-graphical aesthetic that suggests artists influenced by Erol Otus, or Shadowdark with its stark black.white/silver design ethos that reminds me of those full-page black and white splash images in the AD&D manuals?

Of course, in the midst of this I managed to almost completely rekindle my AD&D 1E collection, thanks to a lucky find at a game store out in Roswell. That alone was enough to get me mulling over pulling off a classic AD&D style campgin, but also somehow not quite as motivating as I might have imagined. There was a piece of the puzzle missing for me....and last month Wizard of the Coast finally completed that puzzle with a print on demand edition of the Basic D&D book, with the Erol Otus cover. They Expert set was already available, but hard to use that without the Basic set, you know? And finding halfway decent copies of either book for less than an arm and a leg on Ebay is hard to do these days.

So now I have the proper B/X D&D set, and this is what I was missing. While I did favor AD&D 1E back in the day for the more flexible character options, I actually consulted with the B/X rulesets, a lot....like, all the time, because when the DMG or PHB was proving to be inscrutible to my young gamer mind (this is specifically the time when I was around 10 years old to about 14) the B/X rules allowed for simple clarity. My favorite recollection on this was combat, starting with initiative and surprise. Clearly and simply explained in B/X, a sharp contrast from the nightmare exposition that Gygax laid like a trap for the unwary in the DMG. 

Sure, we noticed all the differences in the two systems, but back then chalked that up to being "here's the basic/expert version of the rules....there's the advanced version of the rules....mix and match until you get something that works and everyone understands." One thing I did not do back then was run either B/X or AD&D in pure form, at least not until I was high school age (around 15 and up) when I by that time was familiar with more complex systems, and began to study AD&D and B/X for what they were as unique games rather than complimentary sets. By that time I was playing Palladium Fantasy, Runequest, Tunnels & Trolls and even eventually GURPS 1E with more regularity. In my fanzine publishing days I had a spurt of interest in treating B/X D&D similarly to T&T, concocting material for the game as written, including solo adventures. It was a fun exercise in working within the boundaries of a system rather than finding ways to break it. During this time and right up through my college years I continued to buy B/X (and later bECMI) sourcebooks and modules, even if I mostly used them with AD&D 2E by then.

Anyway, fast forward 35 or so years to the present, and my interest in B/X D&D is rekindled with the new print on demand edition. It's a compelling third contender in the arena where the young whippersnappers OSE and Shadowdark have been duking it out. For one thing, a lot of the material I have on my shelves aimed at either OSE, Labyrinth Lord or other B/X retroclones is pretty compatible with original B/X. For another thing, a shocking amount of classic B/X material has made its way back into POD, meaning I have also managed to begin restoring my collection of modules, including many I never managed to snag back in the day.

This is not an unusual thing for me; I have a habit of "rediscovering" B/X every few years and looking at it on its own merits, a sort of "what could have been" had I not dived into AD&D instead of B/X early on. My entire Pergerron, the River Kingdoms of Anansis campaign setting actually started as a creative exercise in desiging a campaign which assumed only the character options, magic and monsters of B/X and source books were available for the world design.* Now I am feeling that creative urge to do something new within the boundaries of B/X again....but this time I am older, have less time, and am growing more fussy with overly rules-laden systems which is leading me to appreciate the more streamlined qualities of B/X even more. We shall see! I have ideas.....I will likely post them as they come here. This new venture may or may not cannibalize from OSE and Shadowdark. 

*Technically the first shot of Pergerron started in Magic World, but then became the basis for the B/X iteration. Now Pergerron is a weird D&D 5E/Cthulhu hybrid mashup, so is distinctly its own thing.