At least, if you have already played the other editions and found them (at times) wanting or too bulky, there's just a certain romantic charm to those three Little Brown Books and their utter simplicity.
On the other hand, I can see how having no prior experience with the game could lead one to more than a little bit of frustration...and how different DMs using the same "basic" rule set as the LBBs could create wildly diverging systems
with their own house rules.
with their own house rules.Which I find utterly charming and a little horrifying at the same time.
: )
Anyway, as I work on D&D Mine, I find myself drawn more and more to the LBBs as my base, my foundation. It's just hard not to appreciate these little books and how damn "portable" they are. I checked out Swords & Wizardry (again) and it is a fairly impressive compilation...especially with its side bar notes and extra options. The artwork, too, is great (and a step up from that of the original books, I have to admit). Still, at 150 pages, it's more rule book than I want...certainly more than I need, personally. It's a good piece of work, but I'm still going to do my own.
Tomorrow, I'm going to have a good, long chunk of time to write and I'm spending my free time today thinking up my itinerary of writing projects. In fact, the blog will probably be off-line until Wednesday (probably...we'll see). Just so you folks know.
Happy Presidents Day!
I still have a great appreciation for the LBBs, even with all the weird organization or lack thereof. Things were fairly sketchy and a lot more free-form, which allowed for infinite customization without breaking the whole system. If you incorporate some of the clarifications that come in with Holmes, I find it to be an amazingly elegant and malleable rule set.
ReplyDelete@ Bob: Yeah, I've never played Holmes, though I do own a couple copies at this junction, and I really dig it and appreciate it as its own edition.
ReplyDelete: )