Without going into a lot of the detail. OD&D was written for the miniature wargaming community of the early 1970s. This was a community used to running sophiscated multi-session campaign. As there was almost no commercial rulesets, people made their system cobbled together from existing games like Diplomacy, miniature wargames, and above all their own experience in coming up with rules for a specific scenario based on historical or in case fiction.

What rules were written were usually typed and mimeographed. Mostly used as a reference (charts, tables, etc) relying on the referee or players of the campaign for the explanations of how to use them.

OD&D was written as a set of guidelines to explain to miniature wargamers how they could run similar campaigns to what they heard was happening in the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva. It was not intended to be for novices picking up a game for the first time off of a bookshelf.

It subsequent popularity outside of this wargaming community caught Gygax off guard and he and later TSR recognized the issue and started correcting it once they had the resources to do so. For example the Holmes Basic Rules.

I recommend reading books like Playing at the World, Hawk & Moor, and the Elusive Shift to get a sense of what was happened and why OD&D was what it was.

This is also important why there are big fans of OD&D. It not because of nostalgia or because it was first. It because it represents that early mindset of the hobby. When people understood that there was great fun to be had with gaming but because of the lack of commercial products* had to come up with their own to play.

OD&D is represent that for tabletop roleplaying. A set of guidelines to be used as foundation for one own campaign. It was understood by its initial buyer in 1974 and 1975 as a starting point for their own campaign. Hobbyists like that idea and build on it for themselves and love how OD&D enables this.

For example how one weaves a basket in a campaign? In a more recent edition or currently published RPG, likely there is an answer in the system. In OD&D, you would have to come up with your own take. Decide which factor the system already has that is important, attributes? class? level? Or perhaps come up something new for characters like a skill system or my own ability system for the Majestic Fantasy RPG.

OD&D by its nature forces the referee and players to come up with their own answers. Gygax when writing used his experience running wargames campaign to put in what he felt would be the most useful material. Most of which are lists of stuff (monsters, items, etc.), tables, and charts.

The characters mechanics were bare bones because wargame campaigns relied heavily on either how reality worked or how it was described in fiction. So if somebody wanted know how far they could jump, then they would look at sports statistics and knowing that a 10 Strength was average figure out what a 15 strength character could do from there. This can be seen in the attitude that Gygax, Arneson, and other referees of the era have about the trend of ever more complex system. One of common answer "Why don't you just look it up in a book or encyclopedia?" Which reflects what they did back in the day.

Overall my view that this is a style of play, not THE style nor a worse style. Some folks don't have the time to the research like they had to circa 1970. They don't have the leisure time and appreciate authors that take the time to do the work and lay it out nicely in a rulebook. Bonus points if it also straightforward and quick to use and find.

It helpful to have a through rulebook when the players and referees are novices as well.

But it doesn't change the fact that for many OD&D does work 'as is'. But it helps to understands the early 70s wargaming mindset to better understand what OD&D does and does not do as a system. In that context OD&D is fine 'as is'.

*One of the few commercially available ruleset for wargaming was Chainmail. Because of that it will well-known among the small wargaming community of the early 70s. Because it focus on medieval combat, along with the fantasy addenum, and also because Gygax was one of the author. It was mention for use with OD&D as a resource to use.

"I have played at tables running B/X or Holmes and, like always if the DM was good the game was good."

There is an element of truth to this that, however, obfuscates an important fact. I'll illustrate by way of analogy.

I know a person here who does magical things with wood to the point I call him "the wood whisperer". I have seen him create wonderful works of art with a pen knife and a repurposed screwdriver. So obviously that's all you need for woodworking, right? Because in the right hands a pen knife and a screwdriver are great woodworking tools!

Wrong.

He wouldn't even agree with that. His workshop has about, conservatively guessing, 50 gazillion chisels alone: not one of which is a repurposed screwdriver.

The fact that a good craftsman *can* make miracles with subpar tools doesn't mean that a) they should, or b) they'd want to.

Yes, some truly great campaigns have been run with Gary Gygax's dross, whether that was OD&D, AD&D, or even ... I don't know ... Cyborg Commando. But every time I hear of these, I wonder inside (and sometimes vocally) how much better they could have been had the GM been using tools that aided him in success instead of gaining success despite the tools at hand.

You're a musician. Imagine being told "a good enough musician can get by with a penny whistle" and as a result being forced to only ever do music with a penny whistle. That penny whistle is the OSR as it presents itself in my eyes.

Core takeaway. " I think there is room for the OSR concept: simple, fun-focused, hack-and-slash or exploration-oriented, pick-up-and-play games that also have room for depth and soul but that don't have a need for the millions of pages of rules for every contingency." My OSR experience starts with Rules Cyclopedia. I have earlier rulesets but only to collect and browse. I have played at tables running B/X or Holmes and, like always if the DM was good the game was good.

I think part of the thought process behind love of OSR is players remembering their early experiences and how much they loved the game when they started playing. The problem is that each of these players is remembering the game as it was played at their table and it was played differently at every table.

I've never actually used the full Cyclopedia, but I did follow the Basic/Expert/whatever the next level was called stack up to that point and found it pretty decent. It was a bit limiting and had some things that really grated on me (like "elf" being a class, or "dwarf") but the information presentation was good and the system was mostly clean, if limited in scope.

It did lack, however, things that other games had (like elves who weren't 100% fighter/magic-users!:D), like that coherent framework for governing situations not specified in the rules. I understand that was finally added on much later, but by then I was already tearing through dozens of other games and really had left D&D behind entirely.

What I really want from an "Old School Revolution" is something that has that simple, pick-up-quick vibe of the Basic/Expert/whatever chain but informed by nearly half a century of subsequent game design. Something with a single core mechanism, say, that covers combat, social situations (like hiring henchmen, or bargaining), physical feats, etc. in a single unifying mechanism.

Like, say, the Cepheus line of rules. Those are looking pretty nice these days.

@ZDL
1) My overall thesis is that the initial release of OD&D was sufficiently coherent for its audience. And unlike 15 years ago, we have folks like Jon Peterson who done the research and documented what was going on. Which is often at odds with what people remember.

The problem with OD&D is that it quickly escaped the confines of that audience. Gygax and TSR played catch up throughout the 70s as a result.

2) I am not sure how you read "Rules for everything" in my comments on what good for novices. But I think we can agree that if you want to write a book that teaches people who never gamed how to play tabletop roleplaying, then you have to more than just be a concise reference for a system however simple or complex it may be.

Original OD&D was not written for novices to the miniature wargaming hobby at the time.

@ZDL
As for the format of OD&D, of course it could be better. We are fifty years in and as a hobby and industry we learned a lot about how to explain and present OD&D.

THE issue of OD&D is that it assume the reader is part of the miniature wargaming community of the early 70s. If the reader wasn't then it a lot of important context was lost.

For that audience, OD&D was a superior presentation compared to what was currently available. It far more coherent than the other rulebooks for miniature wargaming that I read from that time period.

To say that Gygax should have done better assume that he had knew or planned for his game to spread beyond the miniature wargaming community.

Nor is comparing it to publishing standards outside of the wargaming community valid. The wargaming community of the time was it own world and publisher did what they could with the time and budget they had.

And today in 2021, we know so much more about what happening and what was being done. Thanks to collectors zines, games, and other material from the era has been found and documented.

As a result OD&D wasn't some poor first attempt but an important step and revolutionary in its own right. And because we have things better documented we can fill in the missing context and enjoy the game 'as is'.

And to clear there is no "lost' manuscript of missing rules out there. No additional rules. What documented that referee of the time used the rules as a framework and added their own research.

@Hairlarry
"Do you have any handle on pre D&D rules sets, scans or text files? Thanks."

I would sign up for the OD&D discussion forum or one of the old school facebook groups. There is https://www.acaeum.com/

Also the Comeback Inn for Arneson and Blackmoor.
https://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/

Prepare to be disappointed if you are looking for rules. The pre-D&D manuscript are pretty much what in the 3 LBBs of OD&D but specific details added or omitted as Gygax tried out things in his Greyhawk campaign.

Or in some cases some enterprising playtester got a copy and make their own take.

Don't get me wrong it is interesting and worthwhile to read and discuss about. But in the end in my opinion it all amount to what I outlined before. They thought of something to play, did the research, assembled or wrote some rules, played, tweaked and played again. Then repeat for something else.

Because of that most of what there are references, charts, and tables that supported this stuff. Everything else was word of mouth or ad-hoc inspiration.

"It helpful to have a through rulebook when the players and referees are novices as well."

More helpful is a coherent core system upon which people can hang consistent decisions.

I mean I EXPLICITLY SAID that "having a rule for everything" was insanity.

There is a huge difference between "having a rule for everything" and "having a rules framework that can cover everything".

Perhaps it might be best to read what you're replying to before you churn out two responses almost as long each as the original piece? You might not then feel the need to 'splain history I mentioned I was there for most of. Or to answer issues already addressed in the piece.

(I note also that you utterly failed to address another key point: that even within the milieu of the time, OD&D's writing was INCOHERENT ROT. It was crap writing just from straight information presentation perspectives.)

Thanks to everyone for their comments. Looks like we've got a hot button issue here. All opinions welcome. Please share.

Specifically for ZDL. I started on Rules Cyclopedia and a mix of that with AD&D. Do you think that Rules Cyclopedia, the whole game in one book, accomplished it's task? By the time it was published everyone knew there was mass market potential.

robertsconley - I played Gettysburg and other war games in the sixties but I was never in a club. Then I skipped forward to Rules Cyclopedia and AD&D because, life. Vivian aka sound played fantasy role playing with miniatures in the early seventies from some of the mimeograph sheets you mentioned. This was in Beebe, Arkansas. Carl helped us research on the internet and we found a war gaming club with a zine that had three or four pages about fantasy role playing. This was pre D&D. Do you have any handle on pre D&D rules sets, scans or text files? Thanks.

@robertsconley "Thanks to collectors zines, games, and other material from the era has been found and documented." This is what interests me. Do you have links, book titles, ...?

@hairlarry

I recommend right off

Playing at the World by Peterson.
Warning: Very Academic and very through.

Hawk and Moor by Kelly
Gets more into the personalities not as academically rigorous as Playing at the World but far more readable and approachable.

The Elusive Shift by Peterson
Documents what happened to the hobby after the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons. It charts the emerging concept of tabletop roleplaying as something distinct from wargaming.

Also more relevant to how the hobby is today than the pre-D&D era because of the fact that D&D was written with an audience of miniature wargamers in mind. As a result everybody outside of that like hex and counter wargamers and science fiction fandom developed their own interpretation of what the game meant. And the consequences of these interpretations remain to us this day.

And it documents those who have some of the exact same objection about OD&D that that ZDL's article has. As well responses to those objections.

thanks

No problem, I don't expect folks to always agree with me but folks should be aware of the wealth of documented history we now have. That it is there for folks to read and draw their own conclusions if interested.

> Original OD&D was not written for novices to the miniature wargaming hobby at the time.

Again, *I KNOW THIS*. This is why OD&D is *NOT* a good thing to fall back on for "simplicity". It is literally a set of guidelines written for a very small group of people in a very narrow area who'd been presumed to know certain things already (like Arneson's long-running proto-RPG campaigns), who had access to specific rulesets (Chainmail, chiefly), and thus knew what Gygax was talking about once you got through his absolutely terrible writing.

My thesis wasn't "OD&D was a bad thing for its time and place". It wasn't (Gygax's writing notwithstanding). It's a bad thing for *NOW*.

The goals of the OSR are laudable. Their weird worship of an incoherent mass of lore is not one of those laudable things. That is the point.

Thanks that clarifies the thesis of your original post.

As for folks and OD&D in the present, what you are not taking into account is that w now know about that "small group of people in a narrow area".

It not a mystery to the OD&D community and more than a few folks including myself wrote out about it.

For example Philotomy's Musings.
http://www.grey-elf.com/philotomy.pdf

Or Finch's Old School Primer
https://www.lulu.com/...age=1&pageSize=4


Folks talked to folks who ran successful OD&D campaign from back in the day and the few that continued to present.

It not 1995, when people only had the 3 LBB to go by and scratched their head at what looked like a incoherent mass of lore. By 2005 those who didn't dismiss OD&D found out there was more to its story, including myself.

By 2015 that story had become well known enough that folks figured out and expanded on the different ways to approach OD&D and it had regained some popularity and was supported again. Largely because OD&D did not turned out as incoherent as people thought.

So unless what had happened for past 20 years is addressed I don't see how a thesis that OD&D is a bad fit for *NOW* can be supported.

I think I'm going to just start replying by quoting things already said that you apparently didn't bother reading.

===========

I know a person here who does magical things with wood to the point I call him "the wood whisperer". I have seen him create wonderful works of art with a pen knife and a repurposed screwdriver. So obviously that's all you need for woodworking, right? Because in the right hands a pen knife and a screwdriver are great woodworking tools!

Wrong.

He wouldn't even agree with that. His workshop has about, conservatively guessing, 50 gazillion chisels alone: not one of which is a repurposed screwdriver.

The fact that a good craftsman *can* make miracles with subpar tools doesn't mean that a) they should, or b) they'd want to.