The weird beauty of OD&D
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.
But gods, I’ve loved uncovering its secrets. When you look at those little books as a toolkit rather than a coherent game then things start to make more sense. And the more I looked, the more I loved (it probably helps that I enjoy solving open-ended puzzles). Eventually I ran some sessions at work and everyone enjoyed it – most of the players having only experienced the 5e monolith up to that point.
No other edition of D&D has really achieved what the original does. Perhaps the Rules Cyclopedia, but that’s far too grand in scale and rules to compare.
It’s a chocolate box of weird ideas, where riding too close to a wizard’s castle could put the party under a spell to carry out a quest for them, or the lord of a manor may joust a party member and take their armour should they lose. Burroughs’ Barsoom stable can be found in random encounter tables. With the Chainmail rules characters tend to be incredibly competent, particularly fighting men who can eventually one-shot a dragon. Huge battles are a key part of the game, and how players eventually create their castles determines how effective their troops will be. That evil cleric who destroyed your party five levels ago? Time to lay siege to his fort with your army.
Looking at what D&D is now I can’t help but feel we’re missing out on the emergent fun from the oldest edition. It’s been said before but the elements that were core to OD&D are now vestigial in 5e. I know we’ll never see it under the corpo game, but I can still dream (or maybe I’ll just continue playing Delving Deeper).