It's been over 10 years that I've been maintaining, testing, and refining my OED House Rules for Original D&D, which you can find at OEDGames.com. Over that time, I've gotten lots of great feedback from readers & players via this blog and other sites. One of the guiding principles of that work, based on my own proclivities of course, is for it to be exceedingly minimalist -- just the barest of facts polishing up OD&D in some ways, taking up the smallest amount of page space it possibly can. Maybe sometimes it's even too minimalist.
Recently our chief aide-de-camp over at Wandering DMs, Baquies -- supporter, archivist, live-chat moderator, clip artist, etc., etc. -- created something I think is pretty amazing. For those people or places where my OED work was too sketchy or ambiguous or possibly fraught with confusion, he's written a completely expanded, "verbose" edition that lays out everything greater clarity than I had inclination to write. My few pages for Players and Judges rules have blossomed into an almost 50 page comprehensive ruleset -- complete core rules, racial and class information in table form, equipment lists, spell rosters (from the OED Book of Spells), treasure tables, encounter tables, complete monster rosters, traps lists, and so much more. He's even added a Forbidden Appendix of his personal design that includes (gasp!) an option for Clerics and other stuff.
It's clearly your one-stop shop for all things OED. At prices like this (totally free), we've got to be crazy!
Baquies & I thought it best to host this document over at Github, in a completely open format (Open Document Text), so players can download it and modify it to taste. And make public edits, too? If you have a Github account (and know how to use it), feel free to make edits & pull requests and see if they become part of our OED campaign going forward. We're excited to see what happens next!
To view the OED Expanded rules, click the following link, then OED-Expanded.odt > Download:
Thanks for the shout out.
ReplyDeleteFull credit where it is due, most of the appendix comes from OED footnotes, the blog, WanderingDMs episodes, and of course, the Discord.
..and of course, now that it is up, I see a bunch of little tweaks. ;)
Of course! I saw on academic Twitter a short while back: "Most errors in academic papers are spotted 5 minutes after you submit it". :-)
DeleteOED is the sweet spot for me for 0e interpretations.
ReplyDeleteAwesome, thanks for saying that!
DeleteWhat timing! just finished laying out my own modified copy of OED—Original Edition Reavers. Actually came across the git in a google search the other day but didn't make much of it other than thinking, huh, I don't remember Delta sharing the source doc for OED in a while. Anyway, very cool. Thanks guys.
ReplyDeleteSuper cool, we hope it helps! :-D
Delete50 pages!
ReplyDeleteRight!? Who'da thunk it? :-)
DeleteAny chance of including psionics in the appendix? I love omitting clerics to remove cheap healing options, etc., but I confess a soft spot for psionics, even the 2nd ed. Psionicist class. Maybe from teenage memories of the Deryni series.
ReplyDeleteI've got to admit, even though I have a soft spot myself or them, I haven't used them in games in a very long time. Would you consider writing something up as a proposal?
DeleteAlso, 'Grievous Wounds' doesn't have an accompanying 'Severity Row' table, that seems to be an oversight.
ReplyDeleteSo the halberd is an 'axe' with high damage, but no reach? I'd call that a bardiche or Lochaber axe, and maybe the halberd joins the generic 'polearm' category, except maybe the halberd has the name recognition. Poleaxe would be a pretty intuitive alternative, though (and that's what the original RuneQuest rules went with, BTW).
ReplyDeleteThanks for those points! Putting it on a todo list, hopefully we can address them at some point.
DeleteSomething I have been curious about OED regarding dexterity modifying armor class and the Axe and Club weapon properties (to-hit bonus vs medium/heavy armor).
ReplyDelete1. Are you allowing dexterity to modify armor class beyond 2, or only up to 2? (a character with +2 dex mod wearing plate and shield would gain no bonus from dex, the same character wearing only plate armor would gain just +1?)
2. In either case, when considering the axe/club bonus to hit, are you disregarding how dex modifies AC and only considering the armor worn? for instance a character with +2 dex mod wearing leather would then have the same AC as chain, allowing an axe to have +2 to-hit just because they are more dexterous than the next person.
+2 dex bonus isnt super common, but even if the leather armored character in my example only had +1 dex bonus, all you would have to do is throw a shield on and we are back in the same position.
Thanks!
Good question -- My assumption is that all of those aspects you mentioned stack freely. A man in plate, shield, and Dex 18 would have AC 0. An attacker gets the full axe/club bonus regardless of target Dexterity. On close inspection, I can see why one might not want to do that, but for me simplicity wins out in this case (to date).
DeleteThanks I appreciate the reply. I am toying with variations on this for my games and im having a tough time grappling with AC as type (9-2) vs further abstracted how hard is it to hit xyz (9-0). I appreciate your insights and love your blog, can't get enough!
DeleteThanks for the kind words!! :-D
DeleteThanks for this, I'm having a read through and it's great seeing everything in one place and all things you've added.
ReplyDeleteNot sure why, but the formatting doesn't seem to have remained consistent by the time it's reached my PC (it would be great to have a PDF version too), but since it's in ODT format, I might have a go at making an A4 version.
Cool! And yeah, we're debating a bit possibly making the "primary source" here a raw-text .MD file and then automatically converting to .ODT (etc.) for consistency & ease of people interfacing with it.
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