Early D&D - Thoughts on the first roleplaying games

My first roleplaying game, back in about 1983, was a slim blue book titled Dungeons & Dragons. This was what is now called the Holmes edition of Basic D&D. It wasn't actually written by Garry Gygax, none of the editions of Basic D&D were, he delegated them out to other writers while he focused on his magnum opus Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

Holmes D&D was super bare-bones, but an incredible eye-opener for me at the time and I've been in love with roleplaying games ever since. I went on to get all the Advanced D&D books and read and re-read them compulsively.

Soon after my brother and I picked copies of RuneQuest II and Traveller and moved away from D&D, but it was the first and I'd like to re-visit the early editions of Basic D&D as they are still seminal influences on the hobby. I read through them recently and it was a very interesting experience that I think is still very relevant to game design and play today.

Basic D&D is a very striped down game, and particularly in the Homes edition. You really don't get much in the way of advice as to how to play the game at the table, so the game very much relied on cultural transmission of player or Dungeon Master to player. I think this was a key motivator for many of the early authors of rival RPGs. They couldn't really see how to play this thing, needed to fill in a lot of the gaps in the rules, and ended up throwing out the few rules that were there in the process.

The next edition of Baisc D&D was written by Tom Moldvay. This is by far my favourite edition of basic D&D. I only read it a few years ago, and boy did I miss out over all those years.

Unlike Holmes and the later Mentzer edition, this version of the game has a spirit of fun, collaboration and generosity threaded all the way through it. Want your character to be able to ride a horse, swim or navigate a ship? Just write it into their background. It still has some oddities, the alignment rules are flat out unplayable, but it has a secret twist hidden in the GM advice section at the back.

The paragraph is titled “There’s always a chance”. If no other rule covers something a player wants to do, they just roll a D20 and try to get under an appropriate characteristic. There you go, simple extensible heroic roleplaying adventure rules as easy as you like. Interestingly The Black Hack  is a great recent lightweight OSR game based on the same mechanic and now has an excellent Second Edition.

The next edition of Basic D&D by Frank Mentzer came soon after. It added a lot of advice on how to run a game, but also squashed down some of the openness and exuberance of the Moldvay edition. I wish I'd come across Moldvay Basic D&D back in the 80s. I doubt I would have picked up on it's merits as much, I was very excited by the explosion of more flexible and capable game systems of the time. Sill, it's an interesting taste of what might have been.

The Burglary Move in Monster of the Week

One of the playbooks in the roleplaying game Monster of the Week is The Crooked, a former criminal that now uses their larcenous abilities to battle supernatural monsters. I recently played The Crooked in a run of the game GM'd by Blake Ryan under the auspices of the Gauntlet online roleplaying community.

As my character's signature criminal move I chose Burglary, here's the move text:

Burglar. When you break into a secure location, roll +Sharp. On a 10+ pick three, on a 7-9 pick two:

• You get in undetected
• You get out undetected
• You don’t leave a mess
• You find what you were after

This came up in the game when we broke into a house looking for clues about the were creature we'd tracked down there. The problem I hit was that although you make the move when you first break into the house, you pick things that affect future events like getting out undetected. How do you reconcile that with playing through or describing the burglary itself?

This move is great if you want to resolve the whole scene with one roll and it's done, but in the game we wanted to play through the burglary and have the character react to what he found. Fortunately PBTA games have a mechanic that allows that - hold. Here's a reformulation of the move in this way:

Burglar. When you break or slip into somewhere you’re not supposed to be, roll+Sharp. On a 10+ hold 3, on a 7-9 hold 2. During the intrusion you may spend your hold 1-for-1 to do the following without having to make another move:

• Get in clean.

• Avoid or disable a trap.

• Avoid detection until danger passes.

• Have exactly the right tools or equipment.

• Clear up evidence of the intrusion.

• Get out and clear.

I had a chance to test this out when I ran a fantasy PBTA game I'm working on and it worked really well.

Minimalist Roleplaying - World of Dungeons and it's hacks

World of Dungeons and it’s descendents are a really interesting phenomenon. The game started as a kickstarter bonus for the Dungeon World RPG, and is just a handful of pages.

It’s true WoDu itself in particular is so minimalist it’s just barely playable, but then that’s also true of the earliest versions of D&D. I think Breakers, the first WoDu Turbo game, was a real watershed. It’s a much more complete game, ditches the legacy stats and has an up to date and highly functional character sheet design. It even comes with a handful of monster stats. Leading on directly from this is Rovers from Aviatrix Games, a really awesome Traveller mini-clone, complete with starship design system and a world creation system in just a few pages. Rovers completely floored me, next time I feel like running Traveller, or a Firefly or Dark Matter inspired game this is what I’m reaching for. Yes you get less than in any edition of Traveller, but terseness and simplicity are by themselves incredibly valuable attributes.

Another game I can’t pass by without comment is Streets of Marienburg. It seems to bypass Breakers mechanically, but it still one of the most complete WoDu hacks out there, even including a mini setting! Character Generation is appropriately expansive for a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying inspired game, and it has a nice mini magic system.

Breakers was still quite minimalist, but focused on a specific premise that made it feel much more complete than WoDu. Rovers and Marienburg though both bring a lot more to the table, fleshing out the game with extra options and mechanics that add flavour, and focus on a specific setting or activity but still in a super stripped-down way.

My one caveat about all of all these games is that you really need to already know how to play an RPG to really make them sing. That’s absolutely true of WoDu itself. As a kickstarter stretch goal for Dungeon World it was aimed squarely at people who already knew how to not just play RPGs, but PbtA games specifically. Breakers, Rovers and Marienburg take a little more space and effort to provide a more complete package. Still though, they rely on a lot of existing knowledge and experience in the reader. That’s not a bad thing though, why repeat a lot of ‘boiler plate’ introduction to roleplaying stuff unnecessarily? It just means they're not great as introductory games by themselves.

One niche these games fit particularly well is that they are pretty easily adaptable for a new setting. If you want to adapt WoDu or Marienburg to a new fantasy genre it's pretty simple to do. Similarly Rovers is fairly easily adapted to your favourite SF setting. This is a lot more work for the heavyweight, 'complete' PbtA game systems.