OD&D Recap

Now that I've spent some significant time thinking about the OD&D rules (and writing up my house rules, below), I do think that OD&D provides perhaps the best basis for a hobbyist to use as a platform for their own, personalized version of the game. However, if you approach the "little white box" for the first time you may be surprised by a few things -- here are the most significant things I felt compelled to "fix" in my Original Edition Delta:

1. Abilities do not modify actions. Generally speaking, while OD&D has the classic 6 abilities, in the main the idea that they should be used to modify actions in the game had not yet been invented. The first 3 (Str, Int, Wis) do nothing except modify XP awards (respectively for the initial 3 classes: Ftr, M-U, Clr). The latter 3 (Con, Dex, Cha) give at most a +/-1 modifier to certain rolls (Con: hit points; Dex: missile fire; Cha: hireling loyalty).

This was rapidly changed by EGG in Supplement I: Greyhawk, where all of the abilities received some sort of action modifiers (identical to what we know from AD&D). However, it's a fair claim that EGG went off the deep end here, with extensive tablature lacking any core system for the DM to remember mentally. Every system since that time has responded by seeking to standardize the various ability modifiers (Moldvay Basic, 3E D&D, Castles & Crusades, my own OED, etc.)

2. Racial benefits are rather scattershot. The benefits accrued to different races (dwarf, elf, halfling) are a somewhat complicated melange of abilities in the OD&D player's book, references back to Chainmail, and variations on abilities indicated in the OD&D monster booklet. You have to hunt a pick and do some interpolation (as from Chainmail) to figure out exactly how these abilities should fit into your D&D game. Dwarf trap-finding, elven combat advantages, and halfling missile fire are not given any numbers in the OD&D books themselves. Furthermore, I feel that the lack of a core system created a proliferation of later add-on abilities, which became highly burdensome to track in AD&D or 3E D&D. The same can be said for the elven multi-class ability.

Again, Supplement I: Greyhawk felt compelled to quickly address these issues. Multi-classing was expanded and formalized (as seen in AD&D), not with complete success. Racial abilities were given additional detail (some in errata), again in ways that were not totally balanced. This is one of the things I massaged in OED; selecting from a limited number useful, relevant, and memorable racial abilities.

3. Weapon effects are not distinguished. In the classic OD&D system, no weapon is different from any other weapon; they all strike at the same rate, with the same to-hit chances, for the same 1d6 damage. If you want different weapon effects (first-strike, chance-to-hit), then you have to make use of the earlier Chainmail system (which was apparently the default assumption for OD&D).

At the risk of sounding repetitive, Supplement I: Greyhawk again saw this as a need clearly requiring redress, and provided a variant system giving different damage, to-hit chances, required space limits, and other details to the different weapon types. Personally, I judge this as a well-meaning project but with limited success; similar to the Greyhawk ability modifiers, this material was perhaps too cumbersome for convenient use (what with separate damage rates for small-versus-large targets, difficult-to-adjudicate space requirements, and an enormous table of weapon-vs-armor adjustment minutiae). With Supplement II this project further expanded into a complete hit-locations system which pretty much collapsed under its own weight. Almost all versions of D&D since have felt compelled to pare down these rules (no size differentiation; no weapon-vs-AC matrix, etc.) In OED I took the Greyhawk project as inspiration and again trimmed it down to its usable kernel.

4. Table-based functions are the rule. Now we get to points that EGG never distanced himself from. All forms of classic D&D (OD&D, AD&D, Holmes/Moldvay Basic, etc.) are largely table-based in adjudicating combat, saves, class hit dice, thief skills, etc. This creates a bit of a slow-down in play as the DM has to look up each of these cross-referenced items. It's additionally odd because in most cases there's a simple one-line formula that could be used to replace the entire table (for combat, it's d20 + fighter level/Hit Dice + AC >= 20, etc.)

Various camps did finally see this simpler formulation, and included things like THACO in the AD&D DMG, or the d20 core mechanic in 3E (albeit at the expense of every target of any action in the world requiring a DC listing). I am greatly in favor of the speed-up gained from a simple formulation, so of course that's what I use in all my games, including the OED.

5. Encumbrance is at the wrong granularity. I've railed about this for a long time, and it's a fundamental error that no version of D&D has ever corrected to date. In OD&D, EGG specified weights in coins (1/10 of a pound), so to find encumbrance you have to add up numbers in the hundreds and thousands of units -- ultimately it requires a calculator in hand, and it's highly cumbersome. 3E uses pounds, and it's little different (still adding scores or hundreds of units). Legions of us have simply ignored encumbrance for decades because of this aggravation.

What you really need is a system whose scale requires adding numbers up to, say, 10 or 20 at most, which we can all do immediately in our heads without a calculating device (on the same scale as the D&D system for class levels, ability scores, hit dice, damage, to-hit scores, saves, and so forth). Basically any granularity on the order of about 10-pound units would suffice. Most fortuitously, there is a real-life Imperial unit of the "stone" (14 pounds) which both satisfies this requirement perfectly, and at the same time provides additional in-world color. All you need is for the core rules to specify weights in "stone" and the whole encumbrance system becomes trivially easy to sum and adjudicate. (See previously here.)

6. Combat scale and sequence are unclear. Perhaps the most troubling oversight in OD&D, the exact relation of distance, time, and actions in a round lives in a hazy gray zone somewhere between Chainmail, OD&D, and AD&D. The OD&D distance scale is specified as 10 feet (a briefly-considered switch from Chainmail's 10 yards), which fails to physically fit miniature figures in the assessed space (resulting in the tortured explanation early in the AD&D DMG). The OD&D time scale is described as "fast and furious" at 1 round per minute, which is not really "fast and furious" at all (and again results in a labored and unconvincing justification at the start of the combat chapter in the AD&D DMG).

Here, the 3E D&D game finally made the required fix, clearly setting the distance scale at 1" = 5' (basically the same as miniature figure scale), and round length at a fraction of a minute each (6 seconds, whereas I prefer 10 seconds after some analysis of real-life archery speeds and the like). Now we finally have "fast and furious" combat, which was an admirable goal from the start. This I've carried into OED, along with additional clarifications gleaned from how the Chainmail and Swords & Spells combat sequences were intended to function.