(...in progress...)

OD&D

Even with a copy of Chainmail, it will take some guessing or borrowing from later editions to figure out how to play this game. That’s part of its charm, though.

Gygax says that he always used the “alternate combat system” rather than Chainmail. See Gygax OD&D 2005 for notes on how Gygax ran a OD&D campaign in 2005.

OD&D+

Once you cherry pick some additions from the supplements, The Strategic Review, & The Dragon. You get a game that is starting to look like AD&D but with the looser attitude of the original game.

The nigh universal difficulty, though, is that this game is spread over a bunch of booklets. & a lot of this is having to look up an original rule in one place & then look up modifications to it in one or more other places.

Holmes

B/X

RC/BECMI

(Herein I speak mainly of the RC, since I have only it instead of the individual BECMI sets & the gazzeteers.)

Once AD&D was born, everyone at TSR was playing it rather than D&D. (According to the TSR employees I've asked about it.) Despite some innovations, the 1981 edition was firmly built on the tested foundation of OD&D+. With three more box sets & then the gazetteers & then the creature crucibles...the D&D line expanded into lots of new territory. Although I’m told everything was playtested, the TSR employees played AD&D in their own campaigns. The TSR employees wrote material for AD&D, & the D&D line became increasingly written by freelancers.

While there were a lot of good ideas, much of this material doesn’t feel well playtested to me. Also, I’ll be very happy if I ever have a campaign that can really use any of the beyond-Expert material, but it hasn’t happened yet.

OAD&D

OAD&D+

AD&D2e

The custom cleric idea seemed good. The problem is that it meant creating a custom class, which is not easy to do well. The rule changes to support custom clerics didn’t really do anything to make this much easier than it would’ve been under 1e.

Specialist wizards were a good idea too, but it was too small a change to really make them worthwhile.

AD&D2e+

I wasn’t playing AD&D during this period.

Hackmaster

(Which, to be fair, I haven't actually played...) OAD&D + AD&D2e + lots of other cruft + parody. The other cruft & parody just don’t add any value to me. (Combines the worst aspects of OAD&D & d20 D&D...?)

For parody, I think I’d prefer Munchkin d20. For AD&D, I’d just buy the books second-hand if I didn’t still have mine (both 1e & 2e). They’re easy enough to find.

The modules, however, might be worthwhile. They seem to have just enough changes to make them fresh again. The cruft & parody should be easy enough to ignore.

C&C

My first complaint with C&C is that the 200+ page PHB could have had everything I would consider essential, but it doesn’t.

My second complaint is that the SEIGE system is too generic & simplistic to be made so pervasive.

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Old school

I didn't know where else to put this, but I wanted to capture it.

On ENWorld, haakon1, writing about why he considers a certain recent module "old school", wrote:

It's understandable to someone who isn't a D&D fanatic. It's not just a bunch of D&D stats, but stuff that makes sense independently of D&D. It's main monsters are a ghost, a type of undead warlord, some guardians for him, some furry clawed forest creatures, and some people. It's not about half-dragon prestige class yadda yadda.

"Old school" adventures should have that "makes sense even if you don't memorize all the bizarre rules" aspect to them

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Classic D&D

last updated 2 years ago #