The Original Tradition: Trusting Your Imagination

Whitehack, p. 14

Volume 3 The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, p. 36

I've often introduce or explain both Whitehack and OD&D to players as "high-trust" games as I firmly believe that trust itself is core for these original tradition games. You have trust from the game's designers that things are better off in your capable hands, and that you will make the experience of the game your own. There's trust in your own imagination, and in the idea that nearly anything you or your fellow players can come up with is valid because you've all been playing make-believe with friends in form or another your whole life. 

While it may seem rote to point out house rulings are part and parcel of these style of games, written permission being emphasized is a powerful thing indeed. I think what I am really getting at is reinforcing that Whitehack and it's great ancestor OD&D's biggest strength is less about their elegant mechanical minimalism (something oft touted in old school adventure gaming and certainly at play here) and rather more about their own creative confidence in the people reading them. The base assumption of the texts, holding true even after people start questioning where the hell the initiative rules are in OD&D or how figuring miracle costs work in Whitehack, is that all the ad-hoc rulings, chatter, and explorations into these open spaces between the lines of rules text that you and your fellow players will run into are not misfires or signs of some deficit in systemic rigor, but rather the actual point of the damn game! These small books are screaming at you to make them your own. To boldly lay claim and form the table's ideal experience with the rich foundations so given in the texts. Write in pen! Fill the margins!

Getting back to this base foundation of understanding, something that seems like it comes so easily and naturally when we are first able to conceive of play, is a major boon for games in this original tradition and any branching from it and I am always pleased to see it emphasized in game text. Forget figuring out wrong way or right way! There should only ever be figuring out the way that does right by your table!

And therein lies the beautiful challenge of wrestling with these beasts of the original tradition. It requires a touch of vulnerability and humility. It requires a willingness to adapt. That the folks at the table release their hold and come to terms that the real driving force of such a game is not sitting within the pages of a book waiting to be discovered, but trust that it's been sitting around the table itself from the start.

B/X House Rules - Updated

Dead Lords by Brom

In February of 2023 I kicked off a B/X campaign with some friends of mine using B4 The Lost City by Tom Moldvay. Over two years later, with a hiatus here and a break there, we still meet and deal with the ancient secrets of Cynidicea on game nights. 

Below is the simple list of house rules we use to run the game. A few items added we added earlier have fallen off, some things we've tried haven't stuck. These ones have seen a fare bit of use so far and have stuck around.

I actually tried 3rd edition...

Redgar by Todd Lockwood

I'm not sure what exactly prompted it, but at a certain point in the past year my friends and I began talking about trying our 3rd edition (3.5e to be specific). Perhaps it was my starting a new work position or maybe ongoing AD&D campaigns were on a bit of a break. Why not try it? We've tried plenty of other games hadn't we? This quickly turned into several sessions and my first real exposure to 3.5e, its books, and the traces of its online presence. The results were interesting to say the least! What's more, my groups playing of OD&D and AD&D over the past few years combined with this trial of D&D 3.5e definitely changed my preconceived notions. 

I was a relatively late joiner to the G+ scene of OSR games. I was at the tail end of the year google pulled the plug when I started a Labyrinth Lord campaign and instantly loved it. Ever since I started rooting about this corner of the scene, I've heard chatter about 3rd Edition, its evils against humanity, and ultimately how it is oft cited as an antithesis and impetus for everything folks espoused old school games and their ilk were about. Having never looked at the books, I saw it as just a crunchy game that I probably wouldn't like. A cursory search leading to whole forums and sites dedicated to just building and optimizing characters didn't help this either. What follows are some of my thoughts on the whole thing after actually trying it.

The Transformation

In preparation for the game and in part due to some morbid curiosity, I did read quite a bit of  material from this edition. And while I wasn't insane enough to use any of the many splat books, I did end up reading a fair selection of them and skimming a good portion of the remainder to get the general vibe. Much like how reading far, far too much into OD&D made some traces of choices and mechanics roots very apparent in later editions, playing so much AD&D did help elucidate why some things are the way they are... most of the time.

I consider it a relatively cold take to categorize the core books for 3.5e as a "standardized take on AD&D 2e", where the strange mechanics are homogenized. Where the attitude of "here's the rules, work out what's left" was replaced with very extensive defining and a "check the rules, it's probably there" attitude. The (optional but oft used) Proficiencies of AD&D transformed into Skills and Feats. Everything got stats. The explanations and suggestions for various things in the DMG turned into an almost simulations framework. Monsters gained ability scores, stats, and feats as well as defined types to justify their abilities and nature. 2e's Kits became a core feature, turning into Prestige Classes or Feats.

As a general result of this, a lot of the early stuff is comparable to later AD&D. While HP totals are huge due to many bonuses, HD amounts are largely similar across the board if not fully identical (especially so in 3.0 books). As are many spell effects and monster abilities. The DNA of why many design choices were made is quite clear even if it is a different game. Aside from mechanics, the conceptual evolution lines up with a lot of the later 2e modules and material pumped out. 

As much as I love the esoterica of AD&D, mechanical standardization and clarity do have potential benefits. Many established benchmarks and definite examples can be a good resource to make judgement calls in a more complicated system. I'm no stranger to crunch and I don't see it as an innate issue per se. As long as you don't treat the text as some inflexible legal/holy text of course.

The Culture

For my purposes, reading older posts in various communities impressed upon me that the popular culture of play surrounding this game was completely alien to me. Maybe its a trad game thing, I don't know. It's clear it quickly evolved away from what the core books presented at least with the expectation that magical items in the DMG were actually an extended shopping catalog readily available, ideas about balance, that Prestige Classes were a given, and that the execution of a planned build was a fine art form. Where people argued rules in a vacuum on various forums in a manner as if the RAW text of the game, while certainly fallible, was to be utilized and exploited to the utmost letter. Where decisions on items and abilities were made before play even started (if it started at all), rather than being emergent choices. Oh and some of these choices could now be wrong apparently. So wrong that various options and classes were tiered based on their potential and a near-omnipresent grading of classes looms over such discussions. Now some of this is just ttrpgs hitting the internet and is by no means exclusive to 3.5e, but the tenacity of such discourse was quite clear.

One of the most striking examples I can think of was reading on how controversial the "Leadership" feat was among the 3rd edition forums. All this feat did was allow characters to accrue followers at higher levels, kinda like how name-level characters attract followers. Apparently this was considered incredibly overpowered! The baseline assumption seemed to be that the player created their follower and controlled them (this was stated nowhere). So effectively the feat was viewed as "make another character." Another example is the idea of a "diplomancer" where, rules being rules, you could convince anyone to do anything if your Persuasion roll was high enough, seemingly ignoring the rules that the DM decides what is actually possible or impossible in favor of this limitless interpretation. It was really wild stuff all around.

This was clearly a "game away from the game" and I am not the first to make this observation. Much like making an army list or building a TCG deck, the meticulous assembling of a character and sorting wheat from chaff was clearly a massive draw for many people (and in many cases probably their only engagement with the game, I'd wager). The massive drive for optimization and evaluation of options is definitely easy to compare to such competitive games and even video games, with people talking about the various aspects of the game as if they are characters in a fighting game and their tournament viability is up for debate.

Suffice to say, it was quite strange having only read the core books. And maybe I'm looking back with a good deal of hindsight, but it seems safe to say that the play culture diverged from the original text and the later material warped to cater to this new cultural norm. Because played straight, none of this should really even be a thing as far as I can see. We certainly didn't have any of these come up as an issue.