What's good about Moldvay D&D (part IV)

So what about completeness?

I think of Moldvay D&D as a ‘complete game’ in the sense that if you follow the instructions in the book (granted they may be a bit out of order), and provided you already have the basic idea of how to play an RPG, you can actually play the game using the bits in the box.  

This was important at the time.  It could not be said about AD&D (which appeared over the preceding few years) unless by ‘can play’ you mean ‘could, in theory play’.  I know.  I got a copy of the Player’s Handbook (soon followed by the other two books when I worked out the PH was not enough to play the game) before I ever saw Moldvay D&D.  But it sat unused for years, until we’d learned enough playing other games to be able to face the incoherent complexity of AD&D.

So what do I mean when I say Moldvay D&D is ‘complete at several different scales’?

Well ‘scale’ here refers to both the scale of the game world (space measured as dungeon, surroundings, world; time measured as hours, days, weeks, years; diversity measured in characters, monsters, spells, magic items) and the scale of the game play (time measured in hours, weeks, months, years; complexity measured in... whatever - number of pages of rules used?).  


Maybe ‘scale’ is not the perfect word for the concept.  For obvious reasons I prefer to avoid the word ‘level’.


What I mean is that there are games within games here.  If you have an ‘adventure module’ (which you DO, because it came in the box), then you can play an adventure (which in Moldvay D&D is defined as a single session of play).  That is a perfectly playable game in its own right.  But you can easily extend this into a campaign by playing a series of consecutive adventures, with each taking up where the last left off.  And this is a complete game on a different scale.  


Even a very efficient team of dungeon crawlers will find several sessions of play in the Keep on the Borderlands, without anybody actually having to make up anything new.  And I can’t help thinking we were not very efficient.

But campaign play brings experience, which leads to characters gaining levels.  And this also introduces a new dimension of play: it makes that experience, the getting and the losing of it matter.  Even though Basic D&D covers only character levels one through three, this allows quite a bit of scope.  You can play ‘campaigns’ of ten-or-so sessions - that’s an eternity to a thirteen year-old - without even changing characters.  


Any time you like, you can expand into a larger game laterally (and conceptually) by using the rules given to make up dungeons of your own.  If you want, you can build your dungeons into Keep on the Borderlands - there’s even a special spot on the map for you to do exactly that - or you can start with a clean slate.  Once you are able to do this, you can play an infinite variety of campaigns without, for example, adding a single new rule, monster, spell or magic item.  

This is partly because the rule book contains a generous amount of ‘spare’ detail.  There are seven character classes, with eighteen spells (more if you count a handful of higher level spells described for the DM’s use), fifty four magic items and one hundred and two monsters.  On the player side, seven character classes gives plenty of replay value.  Once you’ve played a Fighter up through the levels, you can try your hand at a Magic User, Thief, Cleric or (good luck) Elf.  On the DM side there are plenty of treasures and monsters in the rule book that do not appear in Keep on the Borderlands.  So there’s plenty of fresh content you can mix and match to create new experiences for your players.

Now this may not sound like a big deal today.  Young people are used to computer games like World of Warcraft with dozens of race-by-class combinations, scores of levels, hundreds of skills, thousands of items.  But back in the early eighties, the game experiences you were comparing with were classic boardgames like chess or backgammon, classic card games, family board games like Monopoly and very early arcade games.  For the record, chess has the grand total of six types of pieces.

Finally there is a much wider game surrounding the ongoing campaign that we didn’t explore very much at that age.  Page 60, under the heading, ‘The DM is the Boss’ contains the immortal statement ‘The DM decides how these rules will be used in the game’.  A close reading of the text (i.e. closer than we ever gave it) shows several other places (e.g. rolling for monster morale) where the DM receives explicit permission to choose an outcome or disregard a rule.


Many people (myself included) tend to interpret this as granting DM's  authority to alter, ignore or replace the written rules - either case-by-case or more generally by establishing ‘house rules’.

The Old School Renaissance (OSR - for one view of what that is, try this) has promoted this principle with energy and enthusiasm.  But the OSR and its adherents are not alone.  I’d guess that many, many role-players work with some form of ‘The DM makes the rules’ assumption.  Certainly I have been playing games this way for a long time.  That one rule is, in fact, almost a game in itself.  Once you start applying it, the other rules stop mattering in quite the same way.  How widely teenage gamers used it in 1981, I don’t know: but it was there if you wanted it.

The point is that the game could be played at all of these different 'scales' of commitment and complexity.  This made it easy to learn, and meant that young players could easily and naturally expand their range of play as skill, patience and understanding increased.

Next: On the then-value of Fantasy Images

What's good about Moldvay D&D (part III)

Last time I promised to talk about how Moldvay D&D is robust and complete.  But after thinking about it further, I am going to postpone my discussion of 'completeness' for a post of its own.  That means that this post is about what I think of as Moldvay D&D's robustness.

So what am I talking about?

When I talk about about a game being robust, I mean that you can make mistakes in applying quite a few of the rules without the game falling apart.  It degrades gracefully into something not quite what the author envisaged, but still fun and still playable.  That is not at all the same, notice, as being able to play the game badly and still have a good time.

Traditional-style RPGs are often quite robust (for reasons I'll explore another time), and Moldvay D&D is no exception.  We made heaps of mistakes in reading and applying the rules.  But the game still worked and it was still enjoyable.

What kind of mistakes did we make?  

Well, off the top of my head I am pretty sure we never really followed a uniform sequence of play for the combat round - it varied from encounter to encounter and session to session.  I'm absolutely certain we didn't follow the strict sequence given at page B24 of the rulebook (I still question whether the rules as written are quite coherent, but that’s a subject for another post).  There was recurring confusion about how and when Magic Users can learn new spells.  Nor were we ever very clear on the meaning or implications of 'character alignments' or ‘alignment languages’.  We hardly ever kept track of time outside combat.  And we never noticed that ‘Any character has a 1 in 6 chance of finding a trap when searching for one in the right area’.  There were probably other mistakes, too.  But this gives you an idea of the kinds of ‘errors’ we perpetrated.  

We also played pretty fast and loose with some rules.  As I recall, any player character thief was pretty much guaranteed one ‘backstab’ attack at the start of each combat on any monster its player chose.  It was a bit like being invisible, because after that one attack, the thief usually got hammered.

You could look at this and think if the game still worked, then those rules were simply unnecessary from the outset.  This is true, so far as it goes.  You need very few rules of any kind to play a coherent RPG.  But it is also true that if we had followed the rules as written, the game would have been different, arguably subtler and possibly more fun.  We didn’t, and as a result, the game was changed, but not badly damaged.  That’s what I mean by robust.

Next: Completeness...