My house rules for B/X D&D

Howdy all!

I've got a few posts in the works I'm pretty excited about: my first #Dungeon23 project (teaser: Minotaur in a bow-tie), my system for handling magical research and other long-term projects, and at some point a detailed discussion of my personal remake of the thief (a rite of passage for old-school D&D bloggers).

However, I've also got a 3-week old baby and a 2-year old... so some of those are progressing slower than I'd like. In the meantime, I'd like to share the most recent version of my collected house rules for B/X D&D. These have changed quite a bit since last I shared them - I think for the better. :)

(Google Sheets link) Matt's B/X House Rules

The link above is to a Google Sheets document that collects modified race/class ability and progression tables into one place, and that always contains a link to the latest PDF of my house rules (v2.4 as of date of publishing). These tables have been really helpful for quick reference, as the accumulated changes to racial abilities and class progression were getting a little too cumbersome for my players to parse from lists of individual rules changes. 

My favorite rules in this updated version (each of which I could write an entire post on - and would like to at some point) are:

• Character advancement: I've developed my own take on how to split race and class while neither causing humans to be overshadowed by demihumans nor making demihumans much worse at higher levels.
• TL;DR is I ditch the demihuman level caps, preserve the class limitations (e.g. no Dwarf magic-users), and allow humans to take +1 to any ability score at the cost of -1 to a random ability score (no one need pick a demihuman ancestry purely for the stat bonus). 
• Humans are also slightly better at raising their ability scores with level (another major change, but one that has worked really well so far at the table especially given that my injury rules can cause ability scores to be damaged).
• Weapon tweaks: I filled out some "missing" items in the B/X weapon list (two-handed mace, small axe, etc.), and made some very very small mechanical tweaks to give axes and blunt weapons a little bit of love while still preserving swords as the "primary" weapon.
• Favorite is probably "imploding" dice for axes. When you roll a 1 on the damage die for an axe, reroll the die and add 1 to the result (stacks). This has the same average value as an "exploding" die that rerolls and adds on max value, which is to say slightly less than a +1 bonus... but avoids the wildly high potential results of the exploding die. Axes feel a lot more fun, even if swords still do more damage on average.
• Thieves (and their skills): As alluded to above, I've remade the thief. I've gotten great feedback on this from the one player who's played a thief in my campaign since I introduced it. 
• My thief has the same element of player skill progression choice present in popular revamps like LotFP's specialist, but instead of simplifying everything to d6 rolls I keep the d100s (I see their fiddliness as a thematically appropriate feature, not a bug) and add a few additional abilities on top that are picked from a "menu" as the thief levels up. 
• The goal is to make each individual thief a fairly customized character, though I've got on my to-do list a few "example progression" tables for players who don't want to deal with that element of choice.
• Narrative (simultaneous) initiative: This is my attempt to do the impossible - preserve the simultaneous feel of the AD&D initiative system while avoiding all the intense player-facing complexity.  
• I used the B/X combat sequence religiously for a while, but eventually my list of exceptions and rulings (especially regarding held actions and the like) got long enough that I decided I just needed to make my own system.
• TL;DR is everyone declares everything up front (as in AD&D), and combat is then resolved in 3 phases corresponding to whether characters' actions are happening before, during, or after their movement. The phases are largely just GM-facing, the players don't really have to mess with it.
• The initiative roll (still side-based d6 initiative) just breaks ties within a given phase, but if an orc is closing to attack an archer with a readied bow from 40 ft away, the archer can still get a shot off before the orc closes even if she loses initiative (as in Moldvay's example of combat where he breaks his own combat sequence, B28)

Additionally, I've made some significant QoL improvements - the whole document is much better organized (and now includes a ToC). Most grouped sets of rules now fit on a single page or a single two-page spread. It's not quite OSE "control panel layout" levels of nice, but I'm pretty proud of it.

Are there any of the 4 highlights above you'd most like to see a longer explanatory post on? Perhaps something different from the house rules doc? Let me know in the comments below.