On Original D&D

I’m starting up my blog again for a few key reasons:
• To get back into the habit of writing regularly and redevelop atrophied writing skills.
• To articulate a philosophy of tabletop adventure gaming as a distinct subgenre of fantasy roleplaying.
• To get back down to the brass tacks of creating gameable content, both for my home campaign and for sharing with the community.

The first order of business, I think, is to establish why tabletop adventure games (TTAGs) and the original D&D game in particular will take center stage on this blog. Why do I play OD&D? And why am I writing about OD&D? What do I even mean by the term "OD&D"?

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Let us set the stage by tackling that last question first. What is "OD&D"? The acronym stands for "original Dungeons & Dragons". This refers to the very first version of the D&D game released by TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) in 1974, some years prior even to the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (which began to appear starting in 1977). 

OD&D includes the original 1974 "white box" edition of the game's core rules, various supplements and expansions, and also a number of revisions to those core rules that appeared throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Essentially, every product published by TSR between 1974 and 1996 that bears the label Dungeons & Dragons (not Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) falls under the umbrella of OD&D. This is up to and including the 1996 release of The Classic Dungeons & Dragons Game (TSR 1106), but it excludes the 1999 Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Game released under the auspices of a WotC-owned TSR (as that set is actually an AD&D product). 

While OD&D is a single game that mostly maintained a consistent spirit, ethos, and identity throughout its impressive 22-year first-party publication lifetime, there were nevertheless changes to the rules and to the game's overall philosophy with each successive revision. Most old-school D&D players tend to think of the game in terms of individual core rules releases, which, depending on how you count, means that there are anywhere from four to seven distinct versions of the OD&D game. I find it more helpful to think of OD&D in terms of two broad eras, the early OD&D game of the seventies and the classic OD&D game of the eighties and nineties. 

(If one wishes to find cover art for the various versions of the game that I'm about to describe below, The Acaeum is a helpful resource, but the TSR Archive is even better.)

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Early (seventies, white box/blue box) OD&D

The 1970s OD&D game consists of:

• The original 1974 "white box" or "3LBB" ("three little brown booklets") version of the core rules. In a woodgrain or white box bearing the title "Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures" by Gygax & Arneson can be found three booklets (Men & Magic: Volume 1; Monsters & Treasure: Volume 2; and The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures: Volume 3) as well as a few sheets of quick-reference tables copied from the booklets. 

Emphatically, the wargame Chainmail and the board game Outdoor Survival are not technically part of white box OD&D. While the rules text does call them out as "required" components, it's more the case that they're optional add-ons. Few to none of Outdoor Survival's actual rules are pointed to by Volume 3, the booklet that explains wilderness survival and exploration; instead, the Avalon Hill game's hex-gridded board is supposed to be coöpted for use as a campaign's overworld hex map. And Chainmail, while it can be used in place of OD&D's native d20-based combat system for man-to-man skirmishes and heroic "fantasy combat," is nevertheless only required for large-scale mass battles, and only then until its replacement by Swords & Spells. I have more to say on this subject, but in the interest of limiting this post to a mere survey of the OD&D landscape, I shall save it for later.

• The supplements to the OD&D game (1975–6), which are five more little brown staple-bound booklets: Supplement I: Greyhawk; Supplement II: Blackmoor; Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry; Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes; and the unnumbered Swords & Spells: Fantastic Miniatures Rules on a 1:10/1:1 Scale. The material found in these booklets (and also in the seven issues of The Strategic Review newsletter) expanded the scope of D&D, filled in gaps in the rules, and fleshed out the system. Not everything in the supplements and the newsletters made it into later revisions of OD&D, but much of it became core to the Advanced D&D game.

• The "blue box" D&D Basic Set (1977) by J. Eric Holmes. Many gamers regard this boxed set as its own distinct version of the D&D game, both because of the idiosyncrasies in its rules and because of the several passages in the text directing the player to Advanced D&D after having exhausted the possibilities offered by blue box Basic. But it's now well known that all of the references to AD&D and also the blue box's worst rules oddity (daggers attack twice per round, two-handed swords attack every other round) were added to Holmes's manuscript by later editors prior to publication. Moreover, one of the other unique quirks of this set, basing initiative off of each character's Dexterity score instead of a die-roll, is Holmes's own perfectly reasonable interpretation of a note given under the Dexterity ability score in D&D Volume 1 (as the white box makes no other mention of initiative; one must either use Chainmail or find the rule in The Strategic Review if not willing to take up Holmes's interpretation). 

I am of the opinion that the 1977 blue box Basic Set occupies the same position with respect to the white box that the later Basic Sets hold with respect to the Expert Sets or the Rules Cyclopedia. That is to say, it is an introductory set that lays out the basics of the game, explains how dungeon adventures work, and describes character advancement up to the 3rd level of experience; thereafter, one must either look forward to an Expert Set or back to the white box to play at higher levels. And prior to the 1982 release of the first Expert Set, the white box was the only place to turn if you wished to continue playing OD&D (rather than switching to AD&D). In short, the 1977 Basic Set completes the early OD&D game system by providing it with a starting point and some much-needed rules explanations and patches. And the rules found therein are indeed much closer to and more compatible with the white box than AD&D.

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Classic (eighties–nineties, red box/black box) OD&D

The classic D&D game is usually divided into three editions (B/X, BECMI, and RC), sometimes collapsing BECMI and RC into one, sometimes dividing RC into "1070" and "1106". The major differences between early and classic OD&D are the codification of demihuman character classes ("race-as-class") in the core rules; the disappearance of any vestigially Chainmail-based combat mechanics; and the eventual expansion of the character progression system out to a full thirty-six experience levels. 

• Classic OD&D begins with the 1981 "magenta box" Basic Set by Tom Moldvay and the 1982 "cyan box" Expert Set by Zeb Cook and Steve Marsh, both with cover art by Eorl Otus. The Basic Set describes dungeon adventuring and provides rules for advancing any of seven classes of player character—fighters, magic-users, clerics, thieves, elves, dwarves, and halflings—up to the 3rd level of experience. The Expert Set expands the game to include wilderness adventures ("hex-crawling") and character advancement up to the 14th experience level; it also mentions a future D&D Companion that will describe character advancement up to the maximum 36th level. Many gamers, especially those active in the Old-School Renaissance movement, refer to these two booklets by the moniker "B/X" and take them in isolation to be the perfect expression of the D&D game. For my part, I am skeptical of "B/Xceptionalism," and I do not regard the Moldvay/Cook edition as in any way separate or distinct from earlier and later releases of OD&D's core rules. It's merely another link in the chain—and frankly, one of the shortest-lived in its day.

• 1983 saw the release of a revised "red box" Basic Set and "blue box" Expert Set, both by Frank Mentzer and with cover art by Larry Elmore. The 1983 Expert Set is interesting, because while it makes some obvious changes to some of the tables in the game (such as the cleric's spell progression and the player character attack tables), many more changes (such as the saving throw tables and the infamous thief skill progressions) wouldn't actually come about until the following year, when 1984 saw yet another blue-cover Expert Set, revised a second time to conform with the "green box" Companion Set. In 1985 and 1986, the core system was completed with the releases of the "black box" Master Set and the "gold box" Immortals Set—hence the acronym commonly given to Mentzer's edition, "BECMI" (for "Basic–Expert–Companion–Master–Immortals").

• It is impossible to mention BECMI without also mentioning two important lines of game supplements that greatly expanded the scope of the OD&D game, taking it in a very different direction from the old supplements of the seventies. These were the Known World Gazetteers, which described the world of Mystara, and the Creature Crucibles, which provided rules for playable monster characters.

• In 1991, the BECM sets were slightly revised and collected into the D&D Rules Cyclopedia by Aaron Allston, alongside a new introductory boxed set, the (New, Easy-to-Master) D&D Game by Troy Denning. In 1992 came the heavily revised Wrath of the Immortals (also by Allston, replacing the Immortals Set). This version of the game was supplemented by the Thunder Rift setting and the Challenger Series and Hollow World releases. Finally, the 1991 D&D Game box (known commonly as either "the black box" or "1070," read aloud as "ten-seventy") was replaced by the Classic D&D Game by Doug Stewart (sometimes called "the tan box," better known as "1106" or "eleven-six"). This last boxed set was actually released twice, with tan trade dress in 1994 and black trade dress (and cover art matching the 1991 set) in 1996.

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Honorable Mentions (retro-clones and such)

The phrase "Dungeons & Dragons" means many different things to many different people. It is suffused with nostalgia and loaded with the fiery spark of a thousand undying nerd kerfuffles that flamed their way across fanzines and bulletin boards and onto the modern internet. Is it a single game with a specific set of rules? A family of related games? A brand-name? A folk tradition? A way of life?

On this blog, when I speak of the tradition, the genericized way that we all "play D&D" whenever we sit down to play any tabletop RPG (the way every video game console was "a Nintendo" because your mom couldn't be arsed to know what a Sega was), I shall leave the phrase in plain, unitalicized type. 

When I refer to the brand, that ephemeral thing that got bought by a trading-card company before the trading-card company was itself bought up by a toy corporation, I shall refer to D&D™.

But when I refer to D&D, in italics and without the trademark symbol, I mean the specific game that Gary & Dave made, the one with five saving throw categories and descending Armor Classes and a different experience point table for each character class. If I need to specify, I will refer to the advanced game as AD&D (either 1st or 2nd edition) and the original game (so thoroughly outlined above) as OD&D (original white box/blue box or classic red box/black box in the event that further hair-splitting should ever be deemed necessary; the latter can also be called "BXc.," read aloud as "B-X-cetera," for short).

Since I hold to the notion that D&D is a set of game-rules and not a brand, that means that any game using those rules is still D&D, even if it doesn't explicitly say so on the cover. That means that OSRIC and For Gold & Glory and Hyperborea are all still AD&D. And it means that Swords & Wizardry, Blueholme, Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy RPG, Dark Dungeons, Old-School Essentials, and many others are all still OD&D.

If your coat of mail imparts a base AC 5, you're playing D&D, branding be damned.

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Thus concludes my taxonomy of the original D&D game publications. With one of the more important key terms defined, the groundwork is now in place to move onto the next pertinent question: why am I playing this game at all, and why OD&D over alternatives (such as AD&D)? ■