Trollish Delver

I did a quick straw poll on BSky asking whether, back in the day, players of BX/Basic/OD&D actually saw combat as a fail state. This is the thinking that came from Matt Finch’s Old School Primer and has become the standard for OSR games or people playing older D&D.

While edition wars are the purview of a rotten mind, I’m here to convince you that the best version of Dungeons & Dragons isn’t your favourite one.

The magic circle is the space and time when the usual social constructs of reality are replaced with the artificial notion of play. We gather around the table or computer to play a TTRPG and the circle is formed. We become others. We create heirarchy. We roll dice to find out.

For the past couple of years I’ve been fascinated with the LBBs of OD&D. While I’ve previously attempted to delve into them, I couldn’t seem to grasp much of what it was saying. I felt like someone trying to make sense of an enochian manuscript. Of course, this was before Holmes had put things into a neater ruleset, when really what I was reading was scraps of houserules and a Jackson Pollock of thoughts.