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For each retweet this gets I will post one surprising thing we discovered running AD&D by the book with an all original campaign. (Note: was a die hard B/X, ACKS, Classic Traveller guy going into this.)
In first edition AD&D, orcs are not the Predator-looking monsters of those execrable fantasy movies that have now set how most people imagine them. Nope! In addition to having pig noses, real AD&D orcs are also SHORT. Human fighters cram them into lockers all the time!
Unlike illustrations of half-orcs in later editions, first edition AD&D half-orc player characters are of the "superior 10%" that "are sufficiently non-orcish to pass for human." This is among the most hilariously unintentionally funny passages in rpg history & is GREAT GAMING.
Given that green slimes can be killed by a cure disease spell, the paladin is able to INSTANTLY KILL a green slime if he still has his weekly cure disease ability available. (B/X omits both the paladin class and the disease elements of the slime creating a very different tone!
People have long sneered at AD&D for being a "ROLL playing game", but people play completely differently depending on the class. When they play as assassins, for instance, they get so taken up with playing as crazy evil they invariably do things that bring on tpk's or near tpk's.
I used to think that the core classes from Basic D&D were purer somehow, that the extra ones in AD&D were just overpowered splat. The reality is that the Paladin, Druid, Ranger, and Assassin are implemented so audaciously their presence in a party fundamentally changes the game.
People think of AD&D as being focused mostly on the combats. Yet it includes a class that has a means to IGNORE COMPLETELY all that stuff about hit points, to-hit matrices, even saving throws. The assassination rules shift the focus of the gameplay to an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FOCUS!
I grew up thinking that wilderness adventures were special, requiring both higher level characters and elite level dungeon mastering. AD&D's inclusion of the ranger and the druid means that wilderness adventure in on the table even with a level one party.
The druid spells looked like garbage to 14-year-old me, but in actual play they allow the party to parley with natural creatures, gain animal allies, and avoid unnecessary combats. If you are transporting recovered treasure back to town through jungles, this is INSANELY USEFUL!
There is about a 1-in-9 chance of a player qualifying for the paladin class. If one is in the group, there are whole categories of problems that become "easy" thanks to the "free" detect evil, cure disease, laying on hands, and protection from evil.
So the point of the "fancy" classes in AD&D is to effectively mute MAJOR aspects of play so that as party composition changes due to attrition, the game both plays differently week to week and also presents players with different opportunities with the EXACT SAME CAMPAIGN.
Magic-users and thieves are so useless in a fight, that fighters become REALLY important. A second level fighter with as many fightery henchmen as he can keep around is a FOUNDATIONAL player character. Due to morale, his charisma bonus is FAR more important than his damage bonus.
AD&D is designed around the need for players to be able to run away. This is really what makes the game work with completely random content. You don't have to design everything so that the players win with their last hit point, so scenario design is OPTIONAL and even unnecessary.
The most reliably useful first level spell in our AD&D campaign is not Sleep, Magic Missile, or Cure Light Wounds. It's Entangle. Because again, avoiding combat and escaping certain death is the soul of the game. This is contrary to EVERYONE'S expectations for fantasy rpgs.
I confess that the AD&D monk class baffled me for decades. What is this thing and why is it here?! Well, given how often an AD&D party is in hot water, the incredible Move rating of this class BY ITSELF makes the monk the most likely to survive the "fun" sessions. RUN!!!!
Encounters with groups of monsters in open spaces have a SIGNIFICANT chance of killing at least one party member. Large numbers of fighting-man henchmen dilute the losses to established player characters, yet players are willing to spend them needlessly. https://twitter.com/ashofcreativity/status/1304844292649873409
The idea of "boss monsters" is foreign to AD&D. An insanely powerful monster with no entourage can easily be eliminated and/or outmaneuvered by a low level party that is at all creative and cohesive. As @lewpuls famously noted, the game strongly encourages combined arms tactics.
The iconic percentile based monster tables of the DMG and Fiend Folio give way to a d8+d12 "artisan" approach in MM2. Each of the five middle results-- 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13-- each have a 1-in-12 chance of coming up. (The 2 and the 20 each have a 1-in-96 chance of occurring.)
If you think AD&D's lore is no good after playing a game set in fantasy city with an overlord, a weird cult, an assassin, a harlot, a courtesan, electrum pieces, an ethereal silver cord, and a couple of thieves, then you have NO IDEA who Fritz Leiber was!
https://twitter.com/Axenhammer1/status/1300998670960095232
https://twitter.com/Axenhammer1/status/1300998670960095232
It takes three hours to make a playable one page dungeon. You don't need a key. All you need is a few monsters, treasures, and really dumb ideas marked directly on the rooms. This was good enough for Dave Arneson. The original D&D game system will make this work for you as well.
In a real campaign, the players can go anywhere and reject all of your adventure locations for ANY reason. You will need a lot of them in order to be ready. And you will have be prepared to see things you develop go unused. Quantity is FAR more important than quality!
The most daunting thing about running a campaign with all original material is having to watch the players have WAY MORE FUN with stuff you made up on the spot than the stuff you spent hours developing for them. You are learning what actually matters in a real D&D campaign, tho!
If fourteen-year-old you tried making dungeons with the random tables in the back of your D&D book and you despaired because they just seemed so awful to you, then know this. Your biggest problem was that you didn't keep playing in your horrible original dungeon.
The most significant thing about AD&D that nobody seems to have noticed is that AD&D is not predicated on the 15 minute work day, but rather a ONE WEEK work day! This is such a foundational component of running a campaign that Gygax dedicates two entire pages to describing this.
For a lot of dumb reasons, most people play D&D as one very long adventure with the same set players getting together week after week where time freezes at the end of each session with the players still in the dungeon. This is NOTHING LIKE the game described in the AD&D DMG.
Adventure modules obviate the advice and direction of the AD&D DMG and insinuate that SOME OTHER GAME should be played at with the AD&D system. This causes people to be unable to comprehend the game put together by Gygax. At all. It's brain damage, y'all!
With all of developments in the rpg scene going on in 1979, it still seemed natural to Gygax that elite hobbyists would still want to run the game more or less the way he and Arneson ran it in the early seventies!
I've been playing that the players must be second level to get henchmen and that rates for men-at-arm are for non-adventure work only. But the first level parties will have have men-at-arms beefing up their ranks on the lowest levels of the dungeon.
In AD&D, every player regardless of player skill and character ability gets to...
A) Contribute to the party's scheming and planning
B) Describe their individual action before initiative is rolled
C) Decide how they want to spend their six days of down time between sessions
A) Contribute to the party's scheming and planning
B) Describe their individual action before initiative is rolled
C) Decide how they want to spend their six days of down time between sessions
The uniqueness of real AD&D campaigns and the extent to which the PLAYERS drive the fleshing out of its milieux is astonishing. You can't purchase something that is as well suited to your group as the world that they'll help you create. And it's something that is uniquely THEIRS.
Seeing the results of an original AD&D campaign consistently outperform in actual play the countless products purchased over the years to do the same job, I'm persuaded that the rpg innovation since 1980 mostly just serves to persuade you (wrongly) that you can't pull this off.
Real AD&D campaigns are filled with things you'd never have thought to make but which your players forced you put in there either directly or indirectly. They are engines of culture creation-- specific, tailored culture that's just for your friends. https://twitter.com/JohnsonJeffro/status/1263265774858354691
When I started running AD&D, I tried 2 do anything that Gygax said in the text regardless of how strange it seemed. Most people asking about this wondered about things like weapon speed and armor class adjustments. As if the game was just Basic but with Advanced combat. It's not.
The act of playing AD&D correctly will make you feel like you are constantly "majoring on minors." The more you lean on the text of the DMG, the more you will find yourself taking the time to do things that seem extraneous or irrelevant to most role-players today.
Similarly, most people tuning into the DMG today are going to be shocked by the audacity of a Gygax speaking emphatically and with authority about how to run a D&D campaign. Taken piecemeal and out of context, his pronouncements sound crazy, unhinged, weird. Bizarre!
Because of this, it is very VERY surprising when you finally take the time to sit down with the DMG and discover that there is actually a very well thought out game in there, that the text really is far more cogent than it is given credit for being.
In May 1979 when Mike Carr wrote the foreward to the DMG, dungeon mastering was synonymous with running a UNIQUE and ORIGINAL campaign. The DMG is a TOOLKIT for making YOUR OWN milieu. If you do not do this, you are not playing the game described within its covers!
Writing in the preface, Gygax says, "only you can construct a masterpiece from [the DMG], your personal campaign which will bring hundreds of hours of fun and excitement to many eager players." It's hard to believe, but everything you need REALLY IS within the pages of that book!
![Writing in the preface, Gygax says, "only you can construct a masterpiece from [the DMG], your personal campaign which will bring hundreds of hours of fun and excitement to many eager players." It's hard to believe, but everything you need REALLY IS within the pages of that book!](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eh138y9XkAAwssX.png "Writing in the preface, Gygax says, \"only you can construct a masterpiece from [the DMG], your personal campaign which will bring hundreds of hours of fun and excitement to many eager players.\" It's hard to believe, but everything you need REALLY IS within the pages of that book!")
No one person is in control of what happens in an AD&D game.
The Dungeon master can build out locations in the world, but the players decide where they go..
Meanwhile player in an adventure are limited by what they can persuade each other to do. https://twitter.com/Geocon19/status/1305342645976346626
The Dungeon master can build out locations in the world, but the players decide where they go..
Meanwhile player in an adventure are limited by what they can persuade each other to do. https://twitter.com/Geocon19/status/1305342645976346626
People whose formative years happened after 1e AD&D tend to a hard time even IMAGINING an rpg that is consistent with what Gygax describes in the DMG. Everything about it is an affront to their assumptions about how rpgs can even work. https://twitter.com/nicklongshankz/status/1305512377870430208
70s rpg culture embraces randomness and the occult in a matter of fact way. Phillip K. Dick's application of the I-Ching is indicative of the times. The old school's "oracular powers of the dice" is essentially magic. In contrast, 80s rpg culture is overwhelmingly modernist.
The are three things required in order to make a dungeon environment come alive. Empty rooms with many passages connecting them, wandering monster tables, and time.
The incorporation of a time element into D&D games is so obscure, players reflexively treat the game world as if it is completely static. They may come up with solid combat tactics and wild plans, but they rarely note when their strategies entail significant opportunity costs.
A typical AD&D adventure consists of
1) Players coming to agreement on where to go and what to do
2) Some travel/exploration
3) Turning around and going home the moment they find significant treasure and/or use up too many spells and hit points.
1) Players coming to agreement on where to go and what to do
2) Some travel/exploration
3) Turning around and going home the moment they find significant treasure and/or use up too many spells and hit points.
AD&D sessions do not need to be planned. They cannot be planned. Less ambitious games allow players to choose between a few adventuring options. The actual play of an AD&D campaign will quickly get to the point were there are a dozen possibilities or more at any given time.
This encounter from Keep on the Borderlands can easily B stretched into 3 hours of gameplay. At my table it turned into a reenactment of the attack on the bandit camp from Seven Samurai. This quality of D&D means you can run entire sessions just from the random tables of the DMG.
I made countless mistakes trying to learn the game as I went. I felt bad about this and would apologize for it as I gradually nailed things down. But the thing is, the players don't care about your rules. Your campaign benefits from that. But that is not your players' concern!
This is not to give you license to play the game wrongly. The point is YOU HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THIS WHILE YOU ALSO STEADILY LEARN HOW TO CREATE A CAMPAIGN MILIEU ON THE FLY. The players somehow manage to have fun through it all.
I look back at my terrible notes from when the AD&D game was just beginning. The city we played in didn't even have a name. We started with nothing! But somehow, everything we needed would emerge spontaneously, mostly in the heat of play. It really is magical.
The simple "there and back again" structure of an AD&D session allows people to sit in as they please-- just like playing jazz. When you complicate things with elaborate story arcs, you sacrifice your ability to improvise well with anyone who shows up. https://twitter.com/sebastiangood/status/1306067111442370560
Once you have a suitably large play area roughed out, you can stay FAR ahead of the players by just adding a new one page dungeon each week. Given that this takes less than 3 hours, an AD&D campaign with total player autonomy is AMAZINGLY SUSTAINABLE. https://twitter.com/JohnsonJeffro/status/1306726457067085825
There is nothing wrong with your first dozen one page dungeons that cannot be fixed with the next dozen one page dungeons.
AD&D campaigns are additive, eventually containing everything the players could conceivably want 2 do. The more you play, the better feel you will have for what you need to add. The campaign will necessarily trend towards the best solution for YOUR GROUP'S collective preferences.
When you sit down to make twelve+ one page dungeons, you really have NO IDEA which one will stick, which one will become the focus of the action. No matter how well you think you know your players, they will still continually surprise you.
The sprawling, massive underworld that Gygax architects in the appendices of the DMG is a direct consequence of the requirements of actual play. Unpredictable players with total autonomy require LARGE PLAY AREAS THAT CAN BE STOCKED QUICKLY.
Nothing that you create can be so elaborate that you or the players can't simply walk away from it. Modules are of course antithetical to this. People that learn to play D&D via modules are thus primed to distrust the deceptively simple dungeons suggested by the DMG.
When you're running the game, you second guess yourself wondering if you're doing the right thing. But when the players double down and triple one on 1 course of action out of DOZENS of choices, you just have to accept that the players are playing the game that they want.
This property of real D&D is the reason why AD&D explicitly repudiates rule zero. It's counter-intuitive, but only by elevating the campaign to a level of supremacy FAR above the players can you ever succeed in giving them what they actually want. https://twitter.com/JohnsonJeffro/status/1306791326051184642
Playing AD&D by the rules does not put a LIMIT on your creativity. Far from it! Follow the instructions within the DMG and you will discover an ingenious framework that will SUPPORT you as you DEVELOP your creativity far beyond what you think you can do. https://twitter.com/Grand_DM/status/1306921329283694592
Is making your own megadungeon DIFFICULT? Only if you change the definition of it to be something different from what Gygax outlined in the DMG! ANYBODY can build, maintain, and develop an AUTHENTIC AD&D megadungeon if they commit to just 3 hours of mapping and stocking a week.
The AD&D DMG is not a framework for running other peoples modules in somebody else's campaign setting. The entirety of the text TAKES FOR GRANTED that you will construct your own original campaign milieu and gives you precise instructions on how to do it. https://twitter.com/meffridus/status/1307138498013663234
One reason the default AD&D DMG megadungeon fails to make sense is because people have embraced the tenets of modernism and rejected the premise of a mythic underworld, sure. But the real reason it doesn't make sense is that THEY HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY TRIED IT.
The campaign style presented in the AD&D DMG is so dynamic, so coherent IT PRACTICALLY RUNS ITSELF. You can try to inject module-style situations into it, but the effects of time, responsive monsters, and sheer player brutality rapidly turns them into a mass of jibbering chaos.
More than anything else, players love to pool their talents and cunning in order to completely annihilate anything that smells like a prepared adventure situation. The entirety of D&D culture after the AD&D DMG is engineered to DENY players this elemental pleasure. They hate it.
Point four there by Mike Carr in the foreword to the Players Handbook indicates that players could have their characters participate even if they weren't present for the game. This is expected practice today by contrary to my reading of the AD&D DMG.
I am a little nuts for insisting on multiple characters per player, 1 game day = 1 real day, not ever pausing game time and so on, but even the introduction of the Players Handbook describes just that sort of game. AD&D assumes a massively open table with overlapping play types.
Per the Players Handbook, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a world. The DM *must* use the system to devise an individual and unique world. This ambitious game is FUNDMENTALLY DIFFERENT from "telling a story" or running an "adventure path"-- completely different mindset!
Most people get to this table and want to roll chance to know for every single first level magic-user spell in the Players Handbook. THIS IS DEAD WRONG. The world implied by the AD&D rules simply doesn't work that way. There is no "complete book of spells" for player chartacters!
AD&D magic-users get 3 random spells at the start of the game in addition to Read Magic. Unlike B/X magic-users, they do not get Sleep or Charm Person for free. Like fighters that haven't earned their plate-mail yet, they must be creative with what they happen to have available!
Magic-users in AD&D adventure in the hopes of finding spell scrolls with spells that they can add to their spell books. If they manage this, they get ALL of the XP value of these items. Because of this, multi-classed mages will advance faster as mages than as their other roles!
Just as in OD&D, AD&D magic-users can begin researching original spells EVEN AT FIRST LEVEL. Random starting spells and spells recovered from dungeons already make every magic-user unique. This rule allows players to create variant mage types IN THE COURSE OF ACTUAL PLAY!
Again, the rules outlined in the DMG supersede the Holmes style application of the chance to know percentages. AD&D emphasizes a post-apocalyptic Dying Earth style world of LOST MAGIC. You can't roll for chance to know on a spell you don't even know you don't know!
Random starting spells mean they start out much more quixotic that their counterparts in other editions. Leveling does not guarantee access to new spells. Players have a huge incentive to research new spells that solve campaign-specific problems. GAMING GOLD!
AD&D produces a world where magic is FAR MORE like that of Vance's Dying Earth than any other edition of D&D. Magic-users are offbeat, highly individual, greedy, cerebral. The rules drive play + cause each player character to rapidly diverge from stock D&D archetypes. IT'S WILD!
The specialist mages of later editions solve a problem that REAL AD&D does not have! It systematizes something that should not be formalized. Turns something fraught with weirdness and wonder into a problem space to be hacked into by boring min/maxer types.
AD&D's magic system was not designed. It GREW out of actual play through the efforts of creative player character magic-users. If you play the game AS IT WAS INTENDED TO BE PLAYED, your players will do likewise. They have a mechanism to alter an extend THE RULES through PLAY!
The AD&D spell-using classes provide enough uniformity that it is easy to manage them in the campaign. With the addition of even 1 original spell, low level player characters of this type can be transformed into JUST ABOUT ANYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE-- without splat or rules bloat!
Gygax does not assume a campaign is tailored to a specific group of player characters. Bad play will kill off bad character concepts. Untenable characters will be transitioned to npc status. Great players develop their characters into an interesting campaign element over time.
AD&D's training costs are BRUTAL. We frequently have characters with enough XP to level, but they are FROZEN at their previous level until they can get enough of a treasure haul to pay for training. You can't just scrape along and keep leveling. You must do AWESOME THINGS!
The AD&D training costs have a tremendous influence on play. The players are always broke. They think about how they are going to get tens of thousands of gold ALL THE TIME. This keeps each session focused on the sort of gameplay that the game best supports.
AD&D training costs defined our campaign the moment I began asking players to DESCRIBE their training. This grounded play in the broader society, set up systems of patronage and obligation, made background elements relevant, and created an entire economy around self-improvement.
Kicked out of the thieves guild, our Elven thief "Chaz" had to pay DOUBLE training costs due to self-training penalties. Demi-human player characters would later on get their through Chaz-- gradually building up a modest rival to their Lankhmar style thieves guild of their city!
Meanwhile, the half-orc fighter Fàgor used his training money to put out a hit on himself: 10 gold to anyone that successfully punched him in the face. In game, he searched for the legendary six-armed skeleton fighting master Trobelor in hopes of getting his tutelage.
Clerics who accepted their proper role as Catholic-style avatars of holiness and purity got the benefit of low cost training and patronage from an established religious order. Human thieves similarly advanced quickly due to the benefits of working for a proper guild.
Players with stupid deity concepts were relegated to The Street of the Gods where they attempted to slowly build up their own religious cult. Double training costs! I allowed spell research costs to count for this-- with newly minted spells slowly replacing the bible themed ones.
AD&D training costs are frequently dispensed with and often derided by connoisseurs of gaming, but for us... they were a means of fleshing out the broader campaign world and integrating each player character's place in it from session to session. Underrated!
Thanks to the training costs, players got rated at the end of each session-- always hilarious! Note that magic-users are penalized for engaging in melee. Thieves are punished for engaging in frontal attacks. THERE ARE RIGHT AND WRONG WAYS TO PLAY YOUR ROLE IN AD&D!!!
Poor play not only multiplies the exorbitant cost of training your AD&D character. It also increases the length of time your PC will be out of play. Thanks to this rule, the group can get a break from annoying and overbearing character concepts that end up dominating gameplay.
AD&D is notoriously hard to master. It has no rules that I ever implemented correctly on the first try. Every time you reread a passage you find something you never saw before. People naturally speculate that the text of the rules is somehow weirdly Vancian in its own right.
Why is AD&D hard to master? Gygax had a fundamentally different concept of fantasy from most of us, sure. He was also steeped in the hard core do-it-yourself world of historical miniatures gaming. He is culturally remote-- but also has a crazily different concept of D&D to boot!
AD&D was developed by accretion, a compounding of ad hoc ruling on top of ad hoc ruling. People delve into it hoping to pull out some sort of system that would be recognizable to gamers steeped in later game design efforts. The fact is, it's just not there. And not needed.
The curious thing about AD&D is that it works so well when it violates every principle of design that we take for granted. No systemization. Twice as difficult to level as in Basic D&D. Obscure and tedious rules elements. The active repudiation of both session zero and rule zero.
In contrast to its competitors, AD&D is designed to produce "a campaign which offers the most interesting play possibilities to the greatest number of participants for the longest period of time possible." It is engineered to help you recreate the SUCCESS of Gygax's campaign.
AD&D takes for granted that your campaign will run forever. It assumes your players will just keep on coming back. It is set up to accommodate dozens of concurrent "campaigns" with a dizzying range of playstyles. No other game is this encompassing, this ambitious. But it works!
AD&D players don't burn out the way that DM's are wont to do. The people that get hooked have their eyes on the game's nearly impossible campaign goals. And they just don't want to stop. The difficulty and scope are a tremendous lure.
On the other side of the screen, AD&D is an elaborate machine-- the never-ending basement game of the lost miniatures gamer cult. It's built from the ground up to help you fake a coherent campaign for a veritable hoard of gamers. This is why the DMG equips you as well as it does!
The dirty secret of rpg's is that designers don't playtest them and purchasers mostly just put them on their game shelfs. AD&D is as far from this culture on nonplay as it gets. Every weird looking rule within its covers is put there with your long term actual play needs in mind.
In the preface to the PHB, Gygaxs proclaims that there
s "no ponderous combat systems for greater 'realism'" and no "hint of a spell point system." D&D is a campaign superstructure. Bloating out the tactical element like that completely displaces the game's expansive focus.
s "no ponderous combat systems for greater 'realism'" and no "hint of a spell point system." D&D is a campaign superstructure. Bloating out the tactical element like that completely displaces the game's expansive focus.
Combat must remain simple enough that it can scale up to handle the titanic battles that Gygax took for granted as being your birthright. "Realistic" combat systems and spell point systems drive the scope down to just a few figures per side. That's why initiative is by side!
I'll tell you an secret. AD&D's combat system is not so granular that it can break the combat round down in the 6 second "segments" the way that a surface reading of the rules would lead you 2 believe. Segments don't come into play the way that Car Wars phases or SFB impulses do.
Note this off the wall rule here. The number of segments it takes 2 cast a spell is compared to a d6 initiative roll to determine if a melee attack has spoiled it. This is a quick ad hoc ruling on top of a simple system. It's just not an elaborate and #SuperAdvanced monster game.
If someone is casting a spell in melee, then segments briefly matter in this incredibly abstract way. All of the elaborations of the AD&D combat rules are like this. Fast, simple rules with hyperspecific cases that have enough detail to quell the objections of a barracks lawyer.
AD&D combat is so abstract, you don't get to decide which figure your character is attacking. The players describe their actions BEFORE initiative is rolled. After that the DM has a LOT of latitude to describe how things actually play out. This requires imagination, not minis.
The unrealistic hit point system of D&D is there so that you can break off of battle when things turn against you. However, if you want to break off from melee you are liable to take some damage. This rule lets player wipe out fleeing monsters. But it can also result in TPKs.
If you tell people that you are running AD&D, they will typically ask if you are using weapon speed and armor class adjustments because it's the only thing they know about the game from the PHB charts. These #SuperAdvanced game elements actually don't come up that often.
AD&D determines spell spoilage in melee randomly because without individual initiative and individual movement and attack actions, there really is no other way to determine what precisely is happening during a melee round and when it actually transpires. https://twitter.com/JohnsonJeffro/status/1326681135917756417
People that play house-ruled D&D variants typically go around the table during combat with each player deciding what their character will do on their turn. There is always some guy that has no idea what is happening that slows the game down. REAL AD&D IS NOT AT ALL LIKE THAT!
Note Gygax's use of segments here. The player DESCRIBES HIS ACTIONS before the round while the DM translates it into something that can fit into the chaotic melee. The player is not moving a pawn on a grid. He is participating in something that exists only in the imagination.
Miniatures gamers of the time were the sort 2 whip up entire Napoleonic armies from molten lead. Dungeon Masters were expected to craft a completely original campaign milieu. But wow, not using Official AD&D Miniatures is beyond the capacity of the intended audience of this book!
People that think early D&D was not played theater of the mind style lamely point to these diagrams from the 1979 DMG for evidence, but minis change the abstractness of the combat system not one whit beyond limiting the number of opponents that can attack a single figure. Sad!
AD&D takes for granted that you are fluent in medieval miniatures gaming. It uses a miniatures rule set as its chassis, it assumes that medieval battles are an intrinsic part of that game's backdrop, and that the campaign will eventually incorporate miniatures battles into play.
If AD&D combat is played with miniatures, it isn't played on a grid but rather with rulers. Further, player characters do not move independently but instead behave as is they are all operating on the same base. This is the only interpretation of the game consistent with the rules
AD&D combat is resolved as if a base with 30 goblin figures on it is right up against another base with the players' party on it. That is the level of granularity it assumes. (Your 20 men-at-arms get their own base. Your spell-casters and thieves are also put on their own base.)
Gygax assumes that your dungeon expeditions are going to be brief "there and back again" type affairs. If you think you are inclined to spend days or weeks inside of a dungeon, you have departed from the premise of the AD&D game.
The no. appearing for many entries in the Monster Manual are baffling to contemporary gamers. The numbers are a poor fit for typical adventure situations. But they just so happen to translate perfectly to a single infantry unit in Chainmail.
We know from Three Hearts and Three Lions and also the Elric stories that alignments are not just characterizations of personal philosophy, but rather they correspond to powers and principalities on a cosmological level. Bipolar law vs. chaos is insufficient for real D&D's needs.
The foundations for alignment in AD&D derive from the need to establish opposing sides in fairly larger miniatures battles-- each with units consisting of hundreds of men or monsters. But what happens when you are running a campaign with many players running multiple characters?
The switch to the weirdly baroque 9-point alignment system gives you an objective means of determining how well not only NPC henchmen but also ENTIRE ARMIES are going to cooperate-- providing referee and player guidance at both the adventure and the strategic level of the game.
AD&D accomplishes PRECISELY what the game's original subtitle claimed: provide "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames - Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures." The purpose of the rules is to provide a framework for generating large miniatures battles.
AD&D has this baffling rule that gives a side a free round of melee attacks to their opponents' flank when they break off melee. This rule can TPK groups that aren't expecting it. Why is this in AD&D? Because in Chainmail, an about face maneuver takes an ENTIRE MOVE.
How soon can you begin miniatures battles in AD&D? Well, a 4th level fighter is a Chainmail unit by himself-- a "hero". At fifth level he becomes a de facto centurion. At 1:20 scale that is five figures. (And five figures of horsemen is nothing to sneeze at.)
But wait, there's more! Your fighter has some fightery henchmen, right? Well they can each command 10 men for each level they have obtained. So a fifth level captain with four 2nd level henchmen can command 180 men, or nine figures at 1:20 scale. Not bad!
Even a first level fighter can lead a significant number of men. Ten men-at-arms is pretty reasonable. Just don't forget that they won't go past the third level in a dungeon. Also, they have to make morale checks if stuff gets crazy!
The main reason a real D&D campaign can last years or decades is because they can accommodate countless play groups in the same campaign and countless varieties of play within them: lairs, mega-dungeons, wilderness travel, massive medieval miniatures battles. Variety = longevity!
The other BIG reason why an AD&D campaign can last years or even decades is that once you know how to use all the random tables in the DMG, you can build everything from sprawling wilderness areas to insanely complex mega-dungeons in the course of play WITH NO PREP WHATSOEVER!
Sometimes the players are stupid. Sometimes the players are outrageously stupid. This is a gift that takes a huge burden off of the DM-- you don't have to be some kind of rocket surgeon in order to keep the campaign going!
If your concept of D&D is that of an ongoing story with a sort of spotlight on one set of PC's, then alignment is reduced being a personality test. If you play with domains and miniatures battles, it's a tool for managing conflict at all levels of the game and between players.
AD&D is not meant to be played "Mech Pilot" fashion. Players are not limited by what is on their sheets, after all. And Gygax never intended that they be privy to what is in the DMG. Heck, they probably don't deserve to even know how many hit points they have! (via @RationalMale)
There were a lot of people in the eighties that sneered at AD&D for its supposed childlike simplicity. But characters and worlds don't become compelling for being well thought out. Actual play for many sessions imbues even the dumbest ideas with a multifaceted charm.
Chainmail devotes one sentence to describing what a medieval campaign would look like. The fact that D&D takes for granted that you will do something like this becomes evident when you observe the extent to which games like Tunnels & Trolls and The Fantasy Trip assume you won't!
OD&D was intended to support campaigns for 4 to 50 players, frequent sessions, multiple PC groups, tremendous battles. The elaborations in AD&D teach you in how to do that. Competing rpgs lower the bar on "campaign" to suddenly mean "supports more than just a one shot." Sad!
AD&D is equally an expression of pulp fantasy and historical miniatures culture. Its assumptions, esoterica, and rules dominated gaming throughout the 80s and well into the 90s even as culturally denuded non-gamers struggled with their reduced pidgin variants of it.
Raise dead is not available until a 9th level cleric enters play, it doesn't work with half-orcs or elves, your initial CON limits the # of times you can be raised, you must roll your resurrection survival %, *AND* raise dead reduces your CON by one. This is of utmost importance!
Multi-classing in AD&D becomes MORE FLAVORFUL when combined with training costs. They gain XP in each class at the same rate as henchmen, so they likely won't have to wait for gold when they get that 1st new level. They are liable to focus on improving one class over the others.
Multi-class characters will be rarer in the opening phases of the campaign when the players are struggling to get those 1st few characters leveled. They become more viable when some higher level characters can give them a hand up as parties @ levels 2-4 will progress MUCH faster.
Demi-humans are mostly locked out of the over-powered classes (Druid, Paladin, Ranger) and are also locked out of the most advanced spells. Demi-humans are limited in the domain game and are more likely to form a criminal underclass to polite society. Huge implications here!
Note how punishing this is: "Elven fighters with less than 17 strength are limited to 5th level; those with 17 strength are limited to 6th level." An elf fighter must have strength 18 to establish a domain. At best they will tend to lead a small elf unit in battle. Weak!
To clarify, your Fighter/Magic-user/Thief pays for training costs to be a 2nd level thief and 2nd level magic-user. He is then maxed out on XP as a first level fighter for a long time due to lack of funds. When he finally gets some gold, he might pay to advance as magic-user.
The AD&D demi-human level limits produce a fantasy setting where non-humans provide a little spice to a predominantly medieval human foundation. It's very Third Age Middle Earth-- the big armies are Rohan, Gondor, Uruk-hai, and Orc... with elves and dwarves mostly staying home.
Demi-humans in classic D&D are safe, legal, and rare. When domain and miniatures battles are removed, the reason for level limits evaporates. Gameplay then trends towards the Fellowship of the Freaks mode. With no way to impact the world, growth is displaced to character powers.
Expert D&D *DOES* allow Cure Disease to kill Green Slime. This is not in the monster description in Moldvay Basic. This will not be part of the game until a cleric reaches 6th level. The overpowered AD&D paladin meanwhile gets this awesome ability at 1st level. h/t @bxblackrazor
Due to the AD&D morale rules being so different, for a while I thought that skeletons could end up fleeing combat. Very different behavior from the Morale 12 rating in Moldvay Basic.! The truth was buried in the Monster Manual entry which I failed to pick up on in during play.
When learning a piece of music, it works well to master the ending first and then work backwards. Playing D&D without grasping Chainmail means you tinker with the opening phrases of a campaign while having no confidence for allowing it to culminate into what it is working to.
The idea of creating on original AD&D milieu and then stocking it with countless module-like situations is uninspiring. You simply don't need a sprawling continent to support that type of play. Thinking in terms of Chainmail armies changes everything, however.
Stocking your campaign map with a range of Chainmail units of all alignments and then imagining what alliances and battles might emerge is a powerful tool for creating a broader fantasy backdrop to support your players activities. Even better, it's easy to do!
The AD&D Monster Manual takes for granted that you will be using these creatures to create massive miniatures armies. The breakdown of weapon types given for many entries are of marginal value in a dungeon, but are TREMENDOUSLY USEFUL in working out armies for Chainmail.
Here is the magic. A Chainmail unit of 200 hobgoblins or whatever is THE EXACT SAME conceptual unit as a single D&D character. If you are tracking time and are comfortable with wilderness treks and can run ANY sort of D&D combat, congrats. YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW TO RUN A CAMPAIGN!!
The reason it was a mistake for D&D to transition to individual initiative and feats on a grid map is that it formally repudiates the massive miniatures campaign that the game was intended to support. This type of play DOES NOT SCALE.
Classic D&D's combat system was lifted from a medieval miniatures rule set and changed very little in the process. It is NOT optimized for small man-to-man battles. But playing it LITERALLY TRAINS YOU TO HANDLE INCREDIBLE FANTASTIC MEGA-BATTLES WITH EASE!
So when BRILLIANT GAME DESIGNERS (and DMs) fix AD&D's obvious deficiencies as a man-to-man combat game, they end up sacrificing the very game elements that allow it to EFFORTLESSLY SCALE UP to handle truly titanic campaign-worthy conflicts. This is rpg history's greatest tragedy!
AD&D does not give a morale rating to each monster the way B/X does. They get a base % rating as a function of hit dice. This system is derived from the one in Chainmail where the difference in casualties is a major factor. THESE MODIFIERS PRODUCE HIGHLY REALISTIC RESULTS.
The reason that "story games" fail as rpgs is that they introduce rules into the one part of D&D that does not have them at all. While rules provide you with the structure to allow you to run a lengthy campaign, it's the part WITHOUT rules that produces engagement and excitement.
OD&D tended 2 emphasize the sprawling megadungeon over everything else. But the moment you give players total freedom of movement, the WORLD takes center stage. No dungeon environment can long command the players' attention when things are happening in the wide world around them!
To place a lair within a dungeon, you need to determine its proper level. For example, roll 10d10 for number of troglodytes. There can be 2d4 on level 2, 4d4 on 3, 6d4 on 4th, and so on. After rolling a bunch of d4's, you can place the troglodyte lair on level 9 with CONFIDENCE.
Once that lair is placed on level 9, you can see that a Trog encounter on level 8 would include most all of the lair's population. Not realistic! A trog encounter on level 2 would be 2d4 scouts. Trogs from that lair on level 5 would be a solid group of 8d4 warriors on a mission.
Most "old school" dungeon designers compose levels with a set of two or three factions in mind. Gygax's AD&D random dungeon doesn't work that way. The tables imply a lot activity up and down through the levels. Stop assuming static rooms. Start thinking vertically!
Using the Dungeon Random Monster Determination Matrix, you can see it's possible for a level 2 monster like the Troglodytes to show up on like level 16-- with 30d4 warriors! A very big lair, but still within the ranges from the Monster Manual.
When designing a dungeon, identify where the lairs are, determining their depths as I've described. Then place outposts and wandering monster groups above them. Think vertically FIRST and imagine the resulting activity. Then design your levels around this dynamism.
