OD&D Rules Read Through on “The Alexandrian”

[rsdean]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMOAYhrIYW4

This may be of interest…I do wonder if he’ll make it all the way to the end.

[Deleted]

Well, it's the Alexandrian so I'm guessing he will eventually get all the way through. He did a years-long blog post series about OD&D after all.

[dicebro]

I already read it.

[rsdean]

Well, I’ve read it too. I am guessing the point is to introdcue people who haven’t, and comment on some of the rules which were not what would be expected by someone who came in later.

[dicebro]

What if half way through he stops reading and announces “Awe screw the rules! I’m just going to wing it from now on. You guys are on your own!”

[tombowings]

Apr 21, 2022 10:30:30 GMT -6 dicebro said:

What if half way through he stops reading and announces “Awe screw the rules! I’m just going to wing it from now on. You guys are on your own!”

Definitely in the spirit of OD&D.

[Deleted]

He's got part 2 up.

[dicebro]

“By the rules you can throw a coin as a ‘weapon’ and do 1d6 damage.” Um, no.

[waysoftheearth]

A referee should possess the wherewithal to identify a credible "weapon" and rule accordingly.

[dicebro]

Apr 27, 2022 18:59:25 GMT -6 waysoftheearth said:

A referee should possess the wherewithal to identify a credible "weapon" and rule accordingly.

It’s about shutting the door to common sense in the pursuit of “foolish consistency”.  Some folks strive so hard to cling to the rules, or lack thereof, that they end up with absurd rulings.  Then they blame it on the game. It’s kind of sad really.

[Deleted]

I always find it amusing that a player even has to ask what the advantage of a polearm is over a dagger, as if the mechanical damage dice are the only factor involved. If that's the limits of the human imagination for that individual, this just may not be the game for them.

[tombowings]

I think it's less the lack of imagination and more the imagination having been previously trained out of the player.

[captainjapan]

I had no idea that weapon damage was omitted from the pre-Greyhawk printing of od&d. Or was it omitted? That would seem to me a pretty important detail. Maybe, a reference to d6 damage appears on a different page of the 1st print.

I have a 5th or 6th printing on hand. That's a far cry from a 1st printing. Now, I wonder what other little omissions there were in '74, to save on space.

I've just now, through a search of the forum, come across a new(to me) castle construction pricelist missing from UW&WA. FYI, a cauldron of boiling oil will run you 50gp.

[tombowings]

Former players from Gary's group who have been members of this board (are we allowed to name banned/deleted members?) have confirmed that all weapons originally inflicted 1d6 points of damage.

[rsdean]

My 4th printing OD&D still did not have the 1-6 damage rule spelled out…as noted with some other things, you had to intuit it at that time. There are several places in the rules where exceptions are spellec out, so it is theoretically deducible.

[skars]

The holmes edition basic game also retains the d6 damage for everything. You can actually see when it became the standard for Basic D&D in the different printings of B2: Keep on the Borderlands. The reference sheets included with the module begin to include variable weapon damage in the 2nd printing included with the Moldvay basic set.

[captainjapan]

A look through Piper 's annotated od&d reveals that scrolls were disallowed to clerics in the first printing. I may have already known this at some point.

A first printing of Keep on the Borderland tops my wishlist. I have Zenopus ' monster dexterity post clipped somewhere, but I suspected there were more differences between Holmes and Moldvay versions. 

[skars]

Apr 29, 2022 19:00:39 GMT -6 captainjapan said:

A look through Piper 's annotated od&d reveals that scrolls were disallowed to clerics in the first printing. I may have already known this at some point.

A first printing of Keep on the Borderland tops my wishlist. I have Zenopus ' monster dexterity post clipped somewhere, but I suspected there were more differences between Holmes and Moldvay versions. 

Oh definitely the DX scores are a big change between printings. Thankfully goodman games put out their "into the borderlands" book that includes both printings of B1 & B2 as well as 5e updated versions.

[dicebro]

Apr 29, 2022 7:52:06 GMT -6 captainjapan said:

I had no idea that weapon damage was omitted from the pre-Greyhawk printing of od&d. Or was it omitted?

The authors recognized that lots of things were omitted.  Therefore anything that was “glossed over” was left to the referee’s imagination. See Vol.3 Afterword, p.36.  The authors also anticipated that Referees would make additions to the rules; and players were advised note the changes “in pencil”.  See Vol.1 Introduction, p.4.   

[captainjapan]

Aha! I see that the elves entry and the magic arrows entry in Monsters & Treasure can be construed to reveal the 1d6 weapon damage, but I must admit that having to reverse engineer the 2-7 points of +1 magical weapon damage explanation from M&T seems like a consequence of some pretty dismal editing on Gygax' part. It's good that he put out that FAQ, even if players had moved on to variable damage by the time of it's release.

[Deleted]

Alexander does admit that it's a trick of history that some of the directions introduced in Greyhawk and later became D&D canon and other directions or variations fell by the wayside. He also spoke about that in his various blog posts on the subject years back, and of course it's nothing new to us on forums like this as we discuss it endlessly. I think some of the conclusions he comes to are a bit questionable but his overall appreciation and discussion of trying to decipher OD&D as it was written in '74 is an admirable project that helps keep the conversation going.

[Starbeard]

The most surprising thing for me is that Alexander looks and sounds absolutely nothing at all like I imagined.

The revisionism that goes into the DNA of OD&D is a good point, though. Every few months there's a thread over on Dragonsfoot that turns into a mild debate over whether B/X and OD&D are the same game, but really, that debate exists because we look at "Classic" D&D to define what OD&D is: clearly, the core nature of OD&D is all of the 3LBBs (except for a number of stuff), and a select few bits from Greyhawk (but not the rest of it), because that's what looks closest to Moldvay & Cook's Basic/Expert Sets.

Personally, I have little doubt that if there ever had been a Moldvay-Cook Companion Set, it would have gone in directions, informed by both OD&D and AD&D, that today's B/X purists would find distastefully un-B/Xish — except not of course, because in that reality we'd have very different definitions of what exactly B/X is and of what rules make up the emergent core of OD&D.

[ThrorII]

May 22, 2022 22:13:49 GMT -6 Starbeard said:

The most surprising thing for me is that Alexander looks and sounds absolutely nothing at all like I imagined.

The revisionism that goes into the DNA of OD&D is a good point, though. Every few months there's a thread over on Dragonsfoot that turns into a mild debate over whether B/X and OD&D are the same game, but really, that debate exists because we look at "Classic" D&D to define what OD&D is: clearly, the core nature of OD&D is all of the 3LBBs (except for a number of stuff), and a select few bits from Greyhawk (but not the rest of it), because that's what looks closest to Moldvay & Cook's Basic/Expert Sets.

Personally, I have little doubt that if there ever had been a Moldvay-Cook Companion Set, it would have gone in directions, informed by both OD&D and AD&D, that today's B/X purists would find distastefully un-B/Xish — except not of course, because in that reality we'd have very different definitions of what exactly B/X is and of what rules make up the emergent core of OD&D.

OD&D and B/X are a lot closer than some people give them credit. While B/X opted for Race-as-Class, and tweaked some of the class charts, the character creation parts are the most different. The Underworld and Wilderness Exploration rules are near-identical, the combat is near identical to Greyhawk, the spells and monsters are only changed sparingly, treasure charts and treasures are almost verbatim, etc.

I think it is fair to say that B/X is a specific, codified, version of OD&D. A version that you could come to by reading the OD&D +Greyhawk rules, especially if you are trying to simplify some if it.

[skars]

Apr 29, 2022 11:36:43 GMT -6 rsdean said:

My 4th printing OD&D still did not have the 1-6 damage rule spelled out…as noted with some other things, you had to intuit it at that time. There are several places in the rules where exceptions are spellec out, so it is theoretically deducible.

It's spelled out on page 19 of Book 1 in subsequent printings, "All attacks which score hits do 1–6 points damage unless otherwise noted."

[Malchor]

Apr 29, 2022 11:36:43 GMT -6 rsdean said:

My 4th printing OD&D still did not have the 1-6 damage rule spelled out…as noted with some other things, you had to intuit it at that time. There are several places in the rules where exceptions are spellec out, so it is theoretically deducible.

Oh wow. So printing 1-4 are identical? For some reason I thought they stripped in the corrections.

Is this covered in the errata sheet?