What was so good about Moldvay D&D?

Over the next few weeks I am going to talk quite a bit about Moldvay D&D, published in 1981.

This is partly a nod toward the Old School, and partly nostalgia for me.  My school friends and I played it a bit, around the age of fourteen.  Later my brother got a copy.  Both of us at different times also played a bit using the Expert Set.  But I will focus on Moldvay D&D in these posts.

That product - the red box with its rulebook, dice and copy of Keep on the Borderlands - was a good product for us.   It gave us access to some high quality role play.  When I think about what made it good for us, the things that occur to me are:

• It’s simple, compared with a lot of rpgs
• It’s easy to read and well organised (compared with AD&D)
• It covers the stuff you’re likely to need as a teenage boy in the early ‘80s
• It’s robust: you can miss a lot of rules, and it still basically works
• It’s a complete game, at several different scales
• It gives you both clear boundaries and plenty of room to grow
• It’s got useful artwork
• It’s fairly random, in a lot of places
• It comes with a ready-to-play adventure

In retrospect, what really stands out is how well the product was pitched at its audience.  It’s probably not a great product for middle aged professionals.  And maybe it wouldn’t work quite so well for today’s teens as it did for us.  But it was pretty good for young teen males in the eighties.

Did you play Moldvay D&D?  Do you play it now?  (Or do you play Labyrinth Lord, instead?) What would you add to my list of 'things that made it good'?

But what I really want to understand is not what makes this particular product good, but what makes for high quality role playing in general.  

In this series of weekly posts, I'll use Moldvay D&D as a source of examples, to start building up some ideas about what creates a great role playing game (moment, session, campaign) in general.  I guess I will also spend some time talking about aspects of Moldvay D&D that were probably not so great, even at the time.  
  
Next: Stuff you're likely to need...