Incomplete?

[mjulius]

I’ve often heard Oe referred to as *incomplete* but it occurs to me that I don’t even know what that means. Like what is complete anyway? What doesn’t OD&D have that can’t be resolved off book with say “give me a DEX check.”?

Do you have issues with this? I had some at a game shop but none when running for some nongamers. Both of those, however, were BX.

I want to build an OD&D game but I don’t know what to anticipate as problems or buy in.

[Finarvyn]

I think that the "incomplete" notion probably stems back to the fact that OD&D mentions that you can use Chainmail to resolve certain things, or that monsters may get bonuses as given in Chainmail. Whether this is a potential issue or an actual one may depend upon your feeling that you have to play "the right way" versus your ability to "wing it" as needed. My group in the 1970's had been playing Chainmail before OD&D came out, so we didn't have this feeling that anything was missing. Other groups may have had a very different experience in the matter.

I would say that your "give me a DEX check" is a great way to play, and follows my own "just grab some dice and roll something" approach. It doesn't quite resolve the issue I mentioned above, but it's a great philosophy for any OD&D campaign. In the same vein, often I'll provide a spell list without details so that a player can use some imagination as to what he/she thinks that spell ought to do -- getting hung up in "official" rules can be a chore sometimes and I prefer to let the action and ideas flow instead of letting rules get in the way of the game. That's not to say that I don't try to stay somewhat consistent, but I don't want to have to stop play a lot to look stuff up.

My biggest frustration was always that the system isn't 100% internally consistent, which is understandable since it was evolving as we were playing. Having all d6 hit dice in M&M suddenly morph into various hit dice types in Greyhawk troubled us a little since some wanted to stay with the old way and others in our group wanted to switch over. (We had a similar issue pop up when AD&D came out, since some of the players wanted to move to the newer rules and others liked staying with the older stuff.) My solution is that I like to switch up rules from campaign to campaign, so my current group has no attachment to any one particular set of rules. (Basically, they are willing to adapt to whatever situation I throw at them and often ask "how are we doing it for this campaign?")

[Stormcrow]

The original D&D was written for experienced wargame campaigners who hadn't yet heard the Good News about focusing your campaigns on the beyond-warfare adventures of individual characters. It's a set of beginnings, designed to get you into the general idea of how a this new form of game works, where you can then do what you always do with your wargaming campaign: make everything up.

People who call the original D&D rules incomplete are those who are expecting the game to furnish you with a system or systems to resolve everything. It wasn't written to be that. Presumably, these same people would complain that the booklet that comes in the glove compartment of their new car that tells them all about the airbags and how to change the oil is incomplete because it doesn't also tell them how to replace the engine or transmission. That's not what the book is for.

So, sure, call it incomplete if you like. By your definition, it wasn't SUPPOSED to be complete.

[derv]

Jun 8, 2018 15:52:06 GMT -6 Piper said:

Missile Ranges? Not too relevant in a dungeon setting, but I looked up the range of a longbow in an encyclopedia and used that for everything.

For some reason this statement caught my eye. I guess it was the rarely expressed idea of looking something up outside of a rulebook and using it all on it's own. I'm contrasting this to statements like "make it up" or "rulings, not rules". I think a persons game should make sense to them. I'd be inclined to create a new slogan- "Find what makes sense to you and your players and apply it".

[mjulius]

These are all wonderful responses, thank you.

I think I must be getting dumber because even looking at BX anymore I find myself saying “d**n, so many rules...” The imaginative possibilities of this tiny little system is relaxing.

I’ve barely run anything these last few years (back to school, babies, and career) but as the smoke begins to clear I hope that I’ll manage to sell OD&D to a group.

[mjulius]

Jun 8, 2018 15:52:06 GMT -6 Piper said:

Missile Ranges? Not too relevant in a dungeon setting, but I looked up the range of a longbow in an encyclopedia and used that for everything.

This is the best thing I’ve read about DnD in some time. I’ve felt that the game has become too self-referential.

[delta]

I'm also glad to see folks responding positively to the "go research the real world" idea. I've looked at it like that for a long time.

Without irony almost everything I know is from researching for D&D. :-)

[asaki]

Some of the game expects you to have the Chainmail rules, so technically D&D by itself is incomplete. They also recommend having the Outdoor Survival board, and they make vague suggestions at all of the extras that they couldn't fit into those small booklets.

You can say that the supplement books help to complete the game, but I think a lot of people appreciate the "less is more" approach, and just having a solid foundation to lay your own houserules on top of. AD&D and it's derivatives certainly have a lot of feature creep going on, and it's difficult for DMs (and PCs) to "wing it" when it feels like you're stepping on the toes of all these detailed, pre-existing rules.

I haven't tried running OD&D yet (I like the organization of B/X better), but I wouldn't have a problem with it, I would probably just borrow the missing bits from the updated editions. It would be interesting to try running it with the original combat tables, at least once though.

[hamurai]

Every RPG is incomplete. It's impossible to make a rule for every occasion, although some games certainly try. Personally, I don't care for the bloated systems with a million tables to roll d1000 just to find out what kind of fish a certain lake has which the adventurers pass by.

I agree with Fin, the Chainmail references can make seem OD&D incomplete. They could have re-printed the referenced rules.

Missing ranges for missile weapons, for example, are of course a lot easier to research today than 30 years ago. In the end, though, the exact range doesn't matter anyway. It's an abstraction and doesn't take into account many factors that archers would have to think about, like wind. So it's probably no issue if you don't research and just make an educated guess. That's what we did when we started playing all those years ago. We still had a great game, even if our arrows might have been flying too far or not far enough. That's not what I remember about those games.

Some people are just not comfortable with making their own stuff up and feel like everything needs to be in the written rules. We have a DM like that and I've often argued he should just get rid of the rules he doesn't like and make some house rules with us, his game group, but that leaves him saying "And where do we stop? We'll be house-ruling so much over time, we won't even be playing D&D any more." Which always makes me laugh and say "So be it, as long as it's as we want to play!"

[smubee]

D&D initially started as “Here’s how we do it.. how do YOU want to do it?”

In my opinion, OD&D was never designed as a coherent set of “rules” to rigorously encompass every possible scenario like a board game, but rather it serves as a source of inspiration for how someone could play a different type of war game.

In that sense I suppose it could be perceived as “Incomplete”, but I feel that it definitely inspires more creativity that way.

Sure, subsequent editions definitely espouse creative play, but if you change up 5e too much, you start to lose what makes it 5e. Whereas the intentional emissions of certain elements of OD&D don’t change what you’re playing.

We all might do things completely differently, but because there are hardly any “set in stone” rules, you can look at most of our tables and definitively say “Yep. That’s OD&D.”

[Finarvyn]

Jun 10, 2018 1:59:15 GMT -6 hamurai said:

I agree with Fin, the Chainmail references can make seem OD&D incomplete. They could have re-printed the referenced rules.

Perhaps change "could" to "should."

Especially for the premium edition rules, which I assume were often bought by folks who don't have resources such as this board where someone can help to explain the game philosophy. I imagine a lot of newer gamers buying the thing and thinking "wait, so they are now referencing a booklet not in this box?" and if they happen to find a copy of CHAINMAIL it might be the 2002 "Chainmail Miniatures" thing based on d20. (In full disclosure, I have never read or played the 2002 "Chainmail Miniatures" game, so I really don't know if it is at all like the Gygax/Perren CHAINMAIL booklet from the 1970's. I am guessing that it is not, and that an "OD&D Premium" purchaser who also bought "Chainmail Miniatures" might not get any of his questions answered by that product.)

What I wish they had done for the "premium" product is to either (1) leave the booklets alone and reprint them exactly as they were done originally, or (2) put them together in some way so that a reader wouldn't have to flip around so much to find anything; essentially make a clone the "right way" with legal use of the original text and explanation inserted as needed and clear note that this is commentary and not original text. Sorry … bit of a rant there.

[Finarvyn]

Jun 29, 2018 11:10:05 GMT -6 smubee said:

D&D initially started as “Here’s how we do it.. how do YOU want to do it?”

In my opinion, OD&D was never designed as a coherent set of “rules” to rigorously encompass every possible scenario like a board game, but rather it serves as a source of inspiration for how someone could play a different type of war game.

Very much so! I think that the revolution here was really the idea that one could make up a world and make up some characters and have them interact using some form of semi-standardized guidelines. That's why it's so hard to determine if the Braunstein games and early Arneson Napoleonic scenarios were "D&D" or not, since they used this revolutionary new idea and people clearly played a role of sorts in the campaign. The difference is (to me) that they weren't published as a new game, so they weren't really out in the public eye.

Nowadays, players are so used to having every option and situation spelled out in the rules so that there are (hopefully) no places for interpretation or mis-interpretation of the rules. That's the genesis of rules bloat, and I agree with you that D&D was never intended to do this in the early days. My personal belief is that AD&D is the thing to blame for this notion of total standardization, at least it was in my own gaming group back in the day. With OD&D it was always assumed that the DM would adjudicate things but once AD&D came out there was this feeling of there being a "correct" way to play. Caused quite the philosophical rift for my group at the time.

[muddy]

This seems correct to me as well - the great fun seemed to be, for the DM, the creation of the dungeon and/or world and for the players the exploration and interaction with that environment, and the rules certainly weren't intended to cover every possible situation - that would be impossible, especially because the dungeon or world was idiosyncratic to each group. A standardized D&D world seemed against the spirit of the game and would rob the DM of some of the fun. Good sessions depended a lot on the DM's ability, creativity, flexibility, and general attitude - fair, and not in any competition with the players. Whether the game was close to reality/common sense (no, you can't swing from the rope to escape the giant while casting fireball) or a completely gonzo adventure depended on the tone the DM set. And it was all good so long as everyone was having fun. I don't remember any rules lawyering - and we transitioned to AD&D pretty easily, probably because we had a tight group who had been playing for years and the "rulings, not rules" idea was pretty firmly established. Its pretty easy to see why that was so - the DM might always have info the players didn't - the goblin has a +3 shiled or whatever.