Monday, April 1, 2013

I'd Play or Run B/X D&D

"Quiet Fools! The Dungeon Master has arrived!" - Tom Servo

No, this isn't an April Fool's joke, despite the date. I'm just looking back at Basic/Expert set D&D and why I'd actually jump in on a game of it. Assuming I had free time for another game, which is a joke. Springtime is busy time for me.

Jeffro's brief discussions of running X1 prompted me to pull out (one of*) my copies of X1 and re-read it. Then I started in on Expert Set.

One thing I like about B/X, and about the Expert Set in particular, is how clean and simple the rules presentation is. There aren't a lot of special cases. The explanations are clear, the layout makes it easy to find things, and there isn't a whole lot of extraneous discussion, High Gygaxian waxing about The Game or The Mighty Master. It's purely how-to-do-it, with quick asides where the DM's decision needs to cover a situation.

The stat rules are simple, too - +1 to +3, not a lot of cases where one class benefits from one thing but not another, or people will eleventeen languages, or percentile strength to make the gap between 18 and 19 a huge one. Not only that but everything 13 and up gives a bonus, so you don't need ultra-high stats like in AD&D to matter (ST 15 on 3d6? Wow! Worth close to nothing in AD&D, sorry, next time roll better.)

Not only that, but the assumptions are spelled out well - everyone can climb, Thieves can climb sheer walls. Everyone can swim unless you rule otherwise. Everyone can build a stronghold at the same level. Alignment is simple and oriented on broad strokes of action (group oriented vs. selfish vs. actively destructive). And so on. There are plenty of figured examples, too, for folks who just want buy a freaking castle and not design every 10' square of it by hand, or who aren't sure what a good campaign area should look like.

In a way, it reminds me of GURPS - the rules complexity is a bit lower than GURPS, but it really sounds like "take these and go do stuff with it" rather than "take these and do them in a particular way." It's not a prescription to play but a solid set of baseline rules that cover 90% of what you need and has enough to let the GM know how to consistently make up the other 10%. I feel like I know what was intended by the rules and how to just go with it without violating that intention.

It doesn't need a lot of house rules, either, not obviously so. Maybe just a few - I think the Thief really needs d6 hit points to survive. I'd consider using the Advanced Edition Companion's rules for race split from class if people bothered me enough about it. And I'd dump the Tarantella spider (the joke wore thin by the time I was 10, nevermind now). Maybe another to deal with weapon choice and two weapon use.**

But otherwise it's clearly a pretty good rules set. Too bad they marketed it so heavily as the kiddie intro to D&D.

Now I'm not saying I'm going to stop playing GURPS, or that I'm planning on running a B/X game. I think I'd quickly get to the point where I wanted a lot of what GURPS offers in my game. But as long as both the players and I were willing to take it all lightly, play it as written to see what happens, and just go with it, I think it would be fun. That really goes for all games, but it's a case of not wanting to play B/X with people who want it to be GURPS or AD&D or white-box D&D or anything else. Just, let's play this thing as see how it goes. I'd certainly play in it (as a fighter, I'm not a fan of not-fighters when I play games.) It still has a lot of the pull that D&D did back in the day when I first read it.

Good stuff. And much respect to the retro-clones, but man, the original B/X is just cooler to me. I'm glad it's back in print and people like Jeffro are out there running it.



* I didn't throw out my D&D stuff, and I inherited a couple collections. So I have 2-3 copies of X1, Basic, Expert, and other adventures. Some are in terrible condition, some aren't, but I've got them. Don't hate on me for not having a family that chucked my stuff, okay?

** One rule I thought of while reading the Holmes translation notes:
Two-Handed Weapons give +1 to AC, but you strike last in the round (and then in initiative order, if there are multiple wielders). Dual weapon attacks are fine - anyone can do them, and you get to attack normally with both weapons on the same target (fighters can split targets). Shields give +1 to AC as well (and magical ones would give more.) You'd get a nice spread this way - two-handed weapons give some protection and high damage, but act last. Shields let you act quickly but give you a defensive bonus. And two-weapon attacks give you more damage, potentially, but you're losing a lot of AC. On the face of it, it seems like it gives you a lot of real choices - a mix of offense and defense, a mix of offense and defense that trades off speed for damage, and pure offense.

Obviously this would go with the rules for differentiated damage by weapon type.

20 comments:

  1. Advanced Edition Companion? The Labyrinth Lord one, right?

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    1. Yes, that one. It would work well as a "But I want this one rule from AD&D in my B/X!" guidebook.

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  2. (I actually did get rid of my D&D stuff at one point. "Eh, I'll *never* play this again.")

    Both B/X D&D and GURPS are "anything you want" type systems. They just have differing means to that end.

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    1. Yeah, I can see that. B/X is just firmly bolted onto a game world assumption. But I think the combo works - and I like how much the writers trust the GM and the players to just go an do that if it's explained well.

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  3. I have to look back with nostalgia. I've gained a real aversion to abstraction in my gaming as I've aged, and I'm sure things like classes, races (as classes!), AC and ever-escalating HP would bother me just as much in B/X as it does in Pathfinder.

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    1. It's just enough system to provide structure for improvisation. The simplicity of combat (with morale rules) means you can play out several in a session. But the focus on the game is really up one level from there: resource management and going and doing as you please. The most important things that occur in a session are not governed by any rules at all-- it's just people imagining doing things and describing their actions and the DM making rulings out of nothing.

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    2. I do recall play being very quick when I was a boy (using the Basic Set, 1977) so that's definitely a selling point for some. I'm just one of those weirdos that actually likes "a rule for everything" instead of vague, catch-all rules about how the DM decides. Really curtails my own enjoyment of gaming, by limiting my scope.

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    3. I like having rules around for everything, but I end up making a lot rulings on the fly anyway.

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    4. You know, Peter, I do as well - but I sure like the nice warm feeling of knowing that there are probably rules out there for it, if I need them. :)

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  4. I think my biggest frustration with B/X would be the multiple fiddly die types and dice rules, though I don't think B/X has nearly as many of the weird "roll 1d100 under, roll 1d20 over" as AD&D.

    A retro-clone/clean-up of B/X, in the same vein that D&D3.0 was mostly intended to be a clean-up and mechanical unification of AD&D, would be great. Make it a minimalist clean-up that focuses on getting all skill checks, attack rolls, and saving throws on 1d20 roll over and don't add the weirdness of feats or monster attributes or any of that. It'd be fun to play for the types of games that B/X supported.

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    1. Personally, I don't think the gains in cogency and elegance would make up for the loss of charm. But there are so many versions and clones at this point, I guess everybody could find something to suit them by now....

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    2. I wouldn't want to create a new version of B/X, or clean it up. I'd either want to run it or play it straight (or at least 95%+ straight) or just go play GURPS.

      Which is why I'd likely turn down an offer to play B/X if it was heavily modified. It's the stuff in the books that I want to play again sometime.

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    3. Mark, I'm curious, and I've never managed to pin someone down for long enough to understand this. Can you explain why having a variety of die types is a bad thing for you? Is this separate from having a bunch of different mechanics (e.g. AD&D's "to bend bars, roll this; to force open doors, roll that" as opposed to a single integrated BRP-style strength-vs-resistance mechanic)?

      In other words, would you be happy with having lots of different mechanics as long as they all used the same dice (maybe d100-roll-low)? What is it about different dice that's a problem?

      I ask (a) because I genuinely don't understand this, and (b) because I like the haptic qualities of having a bunch of different dice on the table to fiddle with.

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    4. I'm curious about this as well, as I'm a huge fan of GURPS, but think that limiting things to d6 quantities inserts scaling issues that are entirely artificial and nothing more than an artifact of the dice being used and the means by which they are used.

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  5. I just recently started a pseudo-retro campaign starting with a bit of a mixture between X1 and N4 (Treasure Hunt) -- Isle of Dread, but starting with a "0 level" setup -- which really makes dinosaurs terrible, even the smaller ones (and don't get me started about "there are 22 tribal warriors").

    To get into the mindset, I, too, started perusing my old Expert Set (I'm using HERO for the campaign, with an abysmally low point value but steady increases). And I have to say that while I like some things, it just doesn't hit a sweet spot for me. There's a streamlined game in there somehow, which I might be willing to use (Searchers of the Unknown? All fighters + Cyclopedia weapon specialization?), but most editions of D&D always mix in too many edges and corner cases. And that doesn't seem to trigger nostalgia for me. (I still say "wasted youth" RPG -- Germany's DSA, 1st ed. -- has a better foundation)

    X1 is awesome, especially if you take a bit of time to tie all the weird races together in a semi-coherent setup. And I'm apprently not the only one with that opinion, as it was a big part of the Savage Tides adventure path (turning everything into one big Demogorgon-ish place) and the D&D 5E playtest has a conversion of it -- the description pretty much unchanged, and the maps just copied out of the orange revised edition.

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    1. I've noticed the Savaged Tides thing from reading Mark's blog.

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  6. Speaking of two-weapon fighting, ACKS (a B/X derivative) handles it so:
    Shield + weapon: +1 AC, 1d6 damage
    One-handed weapon used in two hands: 1d8 damage
    Two-handed weapon: 1d10 damage, -1 init
    Two-weapon fighting: +1 to-hit, 1d6 damage (the assumption being that the off-hand weapon is used to feint or parry open gaps in the enemy's defense)
    It creates a nice, clear set of tradeoffs between styles, and we've been pretty happy with it so far.

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    1. Nice. I see my idea isn't too far afield then.

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  7. Now it's time for you to come out and say that it actually was an April fool's joke.

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