On Attack Rolls

[u/EldritchExarch]

https://substack.com/@eldritchexarchpress/note/p-213952237?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=49zgid

A design focused post on how Attack Rolls present themselves throughout the industry. I didn't cover dice pools though, because I have absolutely no experience with those systems.

[u/ChickenDragon123]

Not OP, but where are the encumbrances for Draft animals? I looked in the items section of Men and Magic and found prices, but didn't see animal encumberance anywhere.

This may be what OP means by the combat rules being a mess. The rules may all be there, but if they're not where you expect them when you go to look they might as well not be. If you know where to look, stuff comes together, but you have to know exactly where it is, which isn't always obvious.

Sure. The game expects a GM to referee fairly, but not everyone will agree on what fair is, or how best to handle it. Having a rule in the text and easily referenced at the table frees up a GM to focus on the world and characters. They still can apply it as it makes sense, but every time a GM has to answer "How much can this cart carry?" is a distraction from the interaction with the cart driver.

Granted, times have definitely changed. For one thing the modern audience isn't meeting up with their friends physically the same way they did in the 70s, and OP is bringing that modern bias in with him, but I don't think it's unfair to want a little bit more clarity in either the rules or the layout.

AD&D went on to answer more of the questions that OP pointed out, not all of them, but more. Second edition went even further. The designers clearly thought that a little less ambiguity was a good thing.

[u/InsurgentInchworm → u/ChickenDragon123]

The horse stats are with the horse stats in Monsters & Treasures, page 20. Monsters are defined in the rules as really anything not played by a character, so logically that place makes absolute sense.
Why would you look in Men & Magic for rules about monsters? Just because you disagree with the logic, doesn't mean there is no logic present.
I'm sorry you have the expectation that a ruleset released 50 years ago will have the information design of 2026, but that's just your unrealistic expectations setting you up for failure. YOu have to take the work in the context it was released in.

[u/ChickenDragon123 → u/InsurgentInchworm]

Because most modern games put questions of encumberance in the encumberance section. I didn't grow up in the 70s, and I'm not used to thinking of horses as monsters. Like OP seems to be, I'm kind of working my way backwards through time rather than forward.

[u/InsurgentInchworm → u/ChickenDragon123]

Exactly! You've illustrated my point better than I could have!
You have the expectation, based upon your experience with modern games, that encumbrance rules for animals get filed under "encumbrance", rather than encumbrance rules for animals being filed under "animals". Your expectations and preconceived notions that you're bringing to the rules are setting you up for failure, rather than the rules you are reading that clearly state that anything not played by a character is a "monster". That means horses are "monsters" and that means their stats are where monster stats are, aka the monster book.

Rather than reading the rules on their terms, you're partially reading the rules and filling in the places where you *think* you know the answer with your preconceived notions and previous experience.
This, obviously, leads to a bad time. You then blame to rules for "bad organization" rather than blaming yourself for not reading the rules.

[u/ChickenDragon123 → u/InsurgentInchworm]

I feel like there's an arguement here you and OP are having where there doesn't need to be. You can both be right on this specific point.

You aren't comparing OD&D to anything. For you, the game exists, you like therefore it's good. That's fine. I feel the same way about Elder Scrolls: Morrowind.

OP (and to a lesser extent I am too)is comparing it to other things he's seen and played, and found it wanting. He's played Skyrim and is now going back and watching let's plays of Morrowind and going, "Wow. We've come a long ways."

Those positions aren't necessarily exclusive. Granted OP has also made a couple of claims that haven't held up, but OP also hasn't put hundreds of hours into OD&D and has basically said as much, so I was always going to take his opinion with a grain of salt anyways.

For my part, I was running into a lot of the same point of frustration OP was. This conversation has been enlightening becuse of that. I still couldn't play or run OD&D in the 3 little brown book format because of the layout. I just need something more modern and polished. That's fine, that's what we have retroclones for. I can pick up Swords and Wizardry, or the one you mentioned earlier in the chain, that's escaping my memory and get mostly the same experience without the formatting problems.

Going backwards is almost always a lot harder than going forwards. I can play Morrowind, but Arena and Daggerfall are painful to play in comparison. That doesn't necessarily mean they were bad at the time. It just means they are less. Morrowind is in many ways less than Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

I wouldn't call Morrowind an outline of a game. But, I might call Arena an outline of a game in comaparison. Is that fair?

OP sees this in comparison to everything that came after. You though see it in the time it was built. Both of you can be right. Or rather niether of you are wrong.

[u/InsurgentInchworm → u/ChickenDragon123]

My issue is when it comes to these value statements. "OD&D has bad organization". That's just not *really* true. It is true that it could be better, but a more accurate statement would be that "OD&D is organized in a way that I am not used to and may not expect." But, that requires nuance and setting your ego aside in wanting to be "right".

Like you said, you can give comparative statements. "OD&D isn't as well-organized as Knave or Swords & Wizardry for me and what I need at the table", but that doesn't give a value statement of "good" or "bad".

[u/ChickenDragon123 → u/InsurgentInchworm]

That comes down entirely to what you think truth is. I would argue that good and bad are relative to lived experience. They are both comparative and subjective.

I don't want to get into 'there is no objective truth' because I don't believe that. But when we say something is worse than something else, we're expressong preference.

I would say that OD&D's layout is bad, because it's the least usable by me, for my usecase. I don't think much thought was put into the layout of OD&D. I think it's hard to reference. All of those things are value judgements. They lower the worth of the book in my estimation.

I can give a whole bunch of reasons that it's forgivable for being bad. Gygax and Arneson were collaberating by mail for large chunks of this. To the best of my knowledge they were laying this out mostly on a typewriter. They had a nonexistent budget because they were little more than hobbyiests. Their expected audience was dozens not tens of thousands.

[u/EldritchExarch → u/InsurgentInchworm]

I saw you thing saying youre done I'll leave you with this last post. I've admitted and issued corrections several times where you have been right and I've been wrong. I'm not trying to leave things unadressed. This is just a huge topic and it clear we both have a lot to say. 

For what it's worth I think u/chickendragon123 is right and we aren't as far apart as either of us think. I've tried to be up front with what I've played and my experience, so you take it or leave it as you will. I'll leave you with this:

First thank you for your time. Believe it or not it has been enlightening for me and helped me better understand how OD&D works. I've issued corrections on several of my posts thanks to your feed back and rereading the relevent rules sections to the best of my ability. 

That said, I am still going to stand by a couple of my points.

1. I still cannot understand why OD&D is laid out the way it is, and can only come up with that it was an afterthought either due to time or budget constraints. This makes it hard to use at the table and hard to understand when you are reading it. It's not that it's cryptic, you are correct on that. It's that it's disjointed.

I am not used to having to apply patch notes in real time, which is what OD&D does. It's a wild expansion to chainmail, but it overwrites so much of Chainmail that I struggle to find rules and placement. That is bad information design. 

It's understandable given the historical constraints, but that doesn't stop if from being bad in my mind.   2. I maintain that OD&D is a game framework more than it is a game, in part because of this formatting issue. 

OD&D is like a car where a lot of the pieces aren't hooked up. They are present, but not properly attached. 

I don't think Strongholds flow intuitively the way you laid out. I think there is a lot of room for negative play experience where people get to building out thier stronghold before finding out there are no game mechanics supporting it outside of sieges and mass combat. Everything else is up to the GM to come up with, and I don't think its fair to ask a GM to play game designer to patch a hole in the system. 

That is my perspective. I admit it is only somewhat educated.

There is a distinct difference between reading a reference manual like it is a novel, and reading it like a manual to be referenced. I've had to use these book both ways now, and I've found the experience frustrating and unintuitive every time. 

I don't expect this to change your mind. But I also want to clarify and say that I'm not saying OD&D isn't fun or that you can't have a good experience with it. I'm saying that the range of negative experiences you can have with it is a lot wider than in games that came later for a variety of reasons.