2022-08-29

OED Reviewed at Papier Und Spiele

Miniature tokens on a green grid

It was recently brought to my attention that our OED Rules system was reviewed late last year by ahabicher at the delightful Papier Und Spiele blog. They write some very nice and thoughtful things, in my opinion -- they're a connoisseur of elegantrules for mass combat, so, a natural ally, I think.

From Original Edition Delta:

Original Dungeons & Dragons, or ODnD, has various clones or houseruled re-imaginings. One of those is Original Edition Delta, which has a very good reputation (at least as I could observe in several independent cases) and openly calls itself “houserules”, but, in general basis, follows the Original DnD; even the spells are hardly distinguishable from the original, just adding various spells, like Magic Missile and Shield at level 1. Re-rolling HP at 1 or 2 is usually optional, here it is the norm...

And from Book of War – Playtest:

The system fails when it handles less than 100 combatants, but with 600 or more is works very well, and it is so closely related to Old School DnD that the transition from one to the other is, while not seamless, so still easy enough … If a full battle session is fine for the players, one can only recommend the Book of War of Original Edition Delta.

I'll say that ahabicher tests Book of War in ways that I never anticipated (including mixed units, figures splitting off from units, even use of firearms!), but that's fine -- Book of War is at its root meant to be so minimalist that you can spiral off in a bunch of different ways, and honestly that's great to see it tested here. 

Recommended: reading the whole reviews at the links above. And if you want to see more of Book of War being playtested, check out our playlists on YouTube for Book of War: Season 1 and Season 2 in the last year or two. And we're planning to have more live plays coming up this fall, so watch for us on the Wandering DMs channel! Plus, more news bout OED coming next week.

2 comments:

  1. Hey delta, can you please upload the expanded edition as a normal PDF? I find it impossible to download from GitHub and I'd really like to see it!

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    1. Huh, thanks for telling me that. Does the "Download" button on the following page not work? I'll admit GitHub can be tricky to navigate sometimes. :-)

      https://github.com/danielrcollins1/OED-Expanded/blob/main/OED-Expanded.odt

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