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...