Chesterton's fence part 2: idiosyncratic gems in B/X D&D

The strangeness of B/X D&D

Yesterday I began a discussion of how G.K. Chesterton's precautionary principle (to paraphrase: "don't tear down a fence until you understand why it is there in the first place") can allow us to run better games and write better house rules while not missing what the systems we run have to offer in their rules-as-written form. Today I'll continue by talking about a few ways in which this applies specifically to old-school D&D.

The RPG I'm currently running, Old School Essentials, is a much better organized but otherwise identical clone of Moldvay and Cook's 1981 Basic/Expert (aka B/X) D&D. It's a great system - considered by many to be the most concise and playable incarnation of D&D ever written*. 

B/X is also extremely idiosyncratic by the standards of newer editions, containing many rules that seem like oddities to someone who has mainly played 5e. To name a few: "Elf" and "Dwarf" are character classes (character racial heritage and vocation/class are combined instead of being picked separately, also called race-as-class), characters earn XP mainly from recovering/stealing treasure rather than combat or completing story objectives, different classes have different XP requirements to level up, and character attributes are determined entirely randomly rather than being picked by the players via point-buy or slotting an array of rolled numbers into the desired stats. 

Those familiar with newer editions of D&D will recognize that precisely none of the rules I name above have survived to 5e (in fact, none of them made it past 3e). Why is that? Were the original designers of Basic D&D just not quite sure what they were doing? Are the newer editions more perfectly evolved games and the older editions relics we can simply discard? Well, no. They're different games. In fairly stark contrast to some systems whose edition changes are more or less "upgrades" (see: Savage Worlds), each edition of D&D is very much its own thing, chasing a very specific sort of play experience. Different groups will prefer different editions, and each version of the rules tends to be good at running different types of campaigns.

In my (anecdotal) experience, few people who play B/X (I here include those who play the myriad of retroclones that are basically B/X with some house rules) play it entirely rules-as-written. Indeed, hacking the game is a favorite practice of the group of people (collectively known as the OSR, for Old-School Revival/Renaissance) who play these games, other "old-school" versions of D&D, and games inspired by them today. There are about as many versions of old-school D&D as there are GMs who run it, and it tends to lend itself very well to changing and hacking and experimentation. None of the rules I mention at the start of this section are sacred cows in the OSR (though XP for treasure comes close), and they are often bent, discarded, or molded to suit the user's taste. 

As someone who moved from 5e to B/X and has come to look at many of the latter's idiosyncrasies with fondness, I'd like to briefly discuss two of these odd rules, and why after understanding what they add to the gameplay experience, I've ultimately decided they're not only worth keeping, but a vital part of what makes the game special.

Race-as-class

As someone whose favorite D&D character has long been the doughty Dwarven Cleric, wielding mace and shield and holy magic, my first reaction to the idea of folding race and class into a single choice was to look at it as a simplifying design choice that may make things easier for new players, but doesn't really make for a better game. And indeed, both the original (pre-Basic) D&D and all editions of Advanced D&D allow players to choose race and class separately (albeit often with more restrictions than the current edition). 

However, on closer examination this mechanic offers more than mere simplicity in character generation. An underappreciated asset of the race-as-class approach is in the way it absolutely weaves archetype and worldbuilding into the core mechanics of the game. The reason you can't be a Dwarven Cleric in B/X rules-as-written is that Dwarfs simply aren't participants in the same organized vaguely-Catholic-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off religion implied by the Cleric class in D&D. Dwarfs aren't just short bearded Scottish people, they're different, maybe even alien. In the world implied by B/X D&D, it's enough to just say an adventurer is a "Dwarf" or an "Elf". The melding of race and class has significant worldbuilding implications. 

Modern D&D settings almost always imply a cosmopolitan mishmash of a world where everyone is more or less fundamentally human, they just might be humans with pointy ears and a +2 to INT, or short bearded humans with a +2 to CON. Part of this is a chicken-and-the-egg change in the types of fantasy worlds we associate with D&D-type games, but part is certainly mechanically driven. There are no racial class restrictions or level caps in 5e, because as far as the mechanics are concerned, everyone is basically the same aside from bonuses to a few attribute scores.

None of this is to say that if you're running B/X you can't have a cosmopolitan setting. It's quite easy to separate race and class to get that "unrestricted" feel (Basic Fantasy RPG and Old School Essentials:  Advanced Fantasy both do this quite well), and many GMs who run B/X or one of its clones do exactly that. But if you want a setting, perhaps, where maybe the only Assassins are Elves, or maybe Dwarfs are the only people with Clerical powers? It's every bit as easy to just create an "Elven Shadowblade" class or a "Dwarven Stonesinger" class to tack onto the default B/X offerings of (essentially) "Elven Spellblade" and "Dwarven Fighter". You could also take the route I currently take, which is to allow demihuman characters (what B/X calls non-humans) to "multiclass" into human character classes, keeping some of their unique benefits (better saving throws and keener ears, mostly) in exchange for getting a slightly slower start on leveling.

Race-as-class, despite the name, isn't really saying humans are the only fantasy race with any variety in adventuring professions (even though that's true of the setting implied by the core B/X rules). Rather, it's a different way of setting up character creation that is, yes, simpler for new players... but also does significant worldbuilding work for you if you're willing to leverage it. 

XP for treasure

For as long as D&D has existed, players have wanted to gain XP. Throughout the editions, it's always been the main metric judging how they "make progress" in the game, and is thus one of the main incentives the GM has for motivating player behavior. Fundamentally, when designing incentive structures you should incentivize the behaviors you want to see. In the context of a game, you want to see players doing things that match with the theme of the game, so that's what you should incentivize... and here's where we get to B/X being a fundamentally different game than its successors. 

Since 3e (or so), D&D has been a game primarily about fighting monsters. That's what you earn XP for doing, that's how you make progress in the game, so that's what the game is about. At least until 5e where there's a bit of a "or you can just advance whenever the story says" loosey-goosey cop-out offloading that work from the game designers onto the individual GMs... but I digress. B/X is a game about treasure-hunting because that's how players gain XP. It's not like XP actually represents anything specific in the fiction of the game. Diagetically, it hardly makes any more sense for the magic-user to get better at casting spells by stealing a golden statue from a forgotten temple than it does for him to get better at casting spells by killing 100 orcs. 

Realistically simulating how an adventurer improves at their craft has never really been the point of XP as a mechanic (see Gygax's note on p. 85 of the AD&D DMG). The point of XP in D&D has always been to incentivize the behaviors the game is designed around. In new D&D, that's making progress in the story and/or killing monsters. In old-school D&D, that's recovering treasure from dangerous locations by whatever means is most effective - could be violence, could be subterfuge, could be convincing the leader of the goblins that the Great Green Goblin God wishes them to steal the orcs' treasure and bring them to the party, who are of course the emissaries of the GGGG. 

The 5e GM needs to make a special ruling for the players to be rewarded for such a cunning plan - "OK, I guess I'll give you the XP the module would've given you for killing the orc chieftain even though you didn't fight him". The B/X GM (and the B/X players) know that it doesn't matter how the party got the treasure, what matters is that they got it and they will be duly rewarded with the currency the players actually care about (XP, not ingame gold, if that wasn't clear). 

Ultimately, it's pretty easy to turn B/X into a combat-centric game or 5e into a plunder-centric (or anything-centric) game... but I find the starting point of B/X to make for a much more compelling game. XP for treasure does seem odd, at first glance, to the GM coming from a newer edition - but it serves a vital purpose in shaping the play experience.

Idiosyncratic gems

Both of those idiosyncratic rules (and several more besides) could probably (and probably will at some point) fuel a blog post on its own, but for now I'll leave it at this: Almost without fail, whenever I pick up the oddly shaped rock of some strange B/X rule, there's a gem underneath. (pearl? worm? not sure how well this metaphor is working...) Not always, mind you. There are certainly a few design decisions in the game I think are simply wrongheaded. I will never, ever use the "two-handed weapons always lose initiative" rule from B/X, for example. But the vast majority of the time - there's a reason for the fence, and once I see what that reason is I often find myself nodding thoughtfully rather than reaching for the Sawzall.

Of course, I still have my 6+ pages of house rules for B/X. Chesterton's fence need not be left standing forever - simply pondered for a time. :)

In conclusion...

First off, I want to apologize to my high school English teacher (should he read this) for the title of this heading. Won't happen again.

Phew! That was kind of a long one, huh? I don't anticipate most posts being quite this verbose, but I think the meandering took us to some interesting places, at least. While I definitely intend to try to share plenty of more immediately gameable content, I'd also like to put out a series like this now and again - bit more "thinky" and philosophical, still related to RPGs but synthesized with some outside concepts. At least, if people like this sort of thing. Let me know what you think down below!

Further reading on Chesterton's fence: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/

*For more on the lost "Basic" (as opposed to "Advanced") line of D&D systems, see this rundown. The newer systems most will probably be familiar with - 5e, 4e, 3.5e, etc. - those are all descended from "Advanced" D&D, which ran parallel to the "Basic" version of the game for many years before TSR folded and Wizards of the Coast decided to end the Basic line and rename AD&D simply: D&D.