I'd been itching for some by-the-book Moldvay basic edition D&D inspired by reports of Ben Lehman's Gencon game. This game is crazy. You literally roll 3d6 for each stat in order, no re-rolls, no shuffling. John's first character (of three) had a 3 intelligence, which the rules tell us means he "has trouble speaking".
So everyone rolled up characters and marched off to the dungeon where a band of Kobolds slaughtered them in their first combat. Everyone actually seemed OK, with this, as we'd determined the game is nasty deadly. Everyone rolled up new characters and kept right on going. I'm considering making a fantasy game that uses character churn to drive collaborative world-building, but that's another story.
In the end, a group of characters did emerge from the ziggurat with a bit of magical treasure, a fortune in jewlery, and a map to even greater exploits.
Basic is a blast, and the rules tell you exactly how to run it. When the party meets a monster, for example, they have the option to run, fight, talk, or wait. The whole party does the same thing, and these are the only things you can do. As long as you play in this sprit, it seems to run pretty well. As soon as the players start wanting to get the best of both worlds (and they will, because everything can kill them), it can start to fall apart.
This game rewards embracing the rules and running with them. It's really almost a board game with a role-playing element. The rules are so deadly that the players will naturally want to turn to the role-playing aspect to save their measly lives. This has the potential to break the game down. There aren't really any procedures beyond GM authority to resolve the resulting situations. Yes, I know this is all old news to many of you, but now that I've actually seen it in play, I feel I can talk about it.
As an experiment, I combined the Basic D&D game with a solo dungeon-construction game I've been working on called How to Host a Dungeon. How to Host a Dungeon essentially gave me a dungeon campaign map that I could call upon to add some context to the players' adventures. I drew up a hex map of a human kingdom showing all the possible entrances to the dungeon and handed it to the players. Once they decided which entrance to use, I made up the adventure on the fly using a combination of ideas I jotted down and the Basic rules dungeon generation system. It worked so well that I'm not going to add a section to How to Host a Dungeon about using it to create maps for dungeon crawl games.
You can do some shuffling of stats, or at least combined raising and lowering. The rules for it are on page B6.
I've also seen some discussion about the use of hirelings, seemingly something that has been overlooked by many players over the years (myself included until this last year). Adding some spear carriers, torch-bearers, and porters would seem to improve a 1st level party's chances greatly.
Ewilen has also found a discussion of the wonders of using the spell research rules from Expert to increase low-level M-U flexibilty, and why a party might want to throw some GPs in the kitty for that.
This thread on OD&D play really helped me understand the deadliness as well as a lot of the weird rules stuff from older editions of D&D. It really does make sense when you imagine each player is controlling 10-20 characters instead of just one.
I played in this game, and it was a fascinating to revisit this territory with new eyes. I started my own roleplaying life with the Holmes edition of Basic D&D (the one prior to Moldvay) that then drifted to AD&D when we got the Player's Handbook. So I missed out on this particular branch of the D&D tree. There was definitely some familiarity, but the Moldvay edition is clearly much more structured than what we played.
As players, we (or at least I) were initially a bit taken aback by the starting TPK, but we bounced back pretty quickly. By the end, I had gotten into the "clear a few rooms, loot, exit, restock, repeat" groove. Two of the second batch of characters survived to the end, and two players were on their thirds. I wound up with a whopping 650 XP. Almost a 1/3 of the way to second level! :)
It was nice to have the perspective to see the game for what it was, and not what I wanted it to be. My second character was a Lawful Cleric (Abelard of the Holy Sepulchre), and at the very end of the game when we were looting the tomb of an ancient dwarven king, I had a brief moment of "my character would be offended by this", and then I was all like "yeah, but this is the only way the game rewards you", and gleefully helped tot up the treasure and XP. Deep character motivation can be fun, just not in *this* game.
Tony's observation on the multiple characters per player is also insightful. My initial D&D play was in this mold. At the time, it was simply born of necessity, since we typically played with a GM and one to two players, and the modules were clearly set up for 8+ adventurers. I'd always assumed that people that *didn't* live in out of the way hellholes where more than three people played D&D, *of course* did one player, one character, but now I'm beginning to suspect not!
It was also nice to compare the feel of retro-D&D with my own retro-game of choice, T&T. It's pretty clear after this outing that while they may appear similar on the surface, the motivations and outcomes of the two are radically different. As John mentioned, even though we were joking around during play, there was the undercurrent of the grim grind of death and survival, whereas T&T is more about the lighthearted awesome and skivyness.
Not something I'd want to play every week, but it was a refreshing change of pace and perspective.
Posted By: LarryZiggurat of the Dwarf Lords? Ziggurat of the Dwarf Lords?!
That justsoundsauthentically oldskool awesome.
Back when all you needed to be a gaming genius was a thesaurus and some dwarves! Actually, perhaps I'm too harsh. I think almost every game is better with a little Zigguration.
Disclaimer: I by no means mean to belittle the fun of the Red Box so please don't take this to mean it's any less of a game or anything.
I have found that after spending so much time in the story game circles and playing the shit out of dozens of story games, it was kinda refreshing to play a few traditional games. It was definately something I was willing to appraoch again with my own D&D game. There are some issue I have to think about but stepping away from traditional gaming for a few years helped lighten up my problems with "the grind" and what was burning me out.
This sounded like a lot of fun. I'd love to hear more, - Don