Monday, February 20, 2012

Falling in Love...

...with OD&D is pretty easy.

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 systemsItalic 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!

2 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. @ 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.
    : )

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