Taking the 3 LBBs Seriously

I had the opportunity to play OD&D for the first time ever tonight as a DM, and it was an incredible experience. Easily tied for the greatest D&D experience I have ever had. I ran it on the philosophy that the rulebooks, no matter how unhinged or unfinished, are completely correct in everything they say. It not only required enormous worldbuilding work to justify why Martians are in the desert, Arthurian Knights in the woods, and Dinosaurs in the swamps, it also tested every skill as a DM when the players interacted with this zany gonzo world in utterly unexpected ways. It proved to be the most unpredictable game I have ever been a part of, and I love it for that. 

On a game design level though, the experience was illuminating in one especially important regard. The 3 LBBs (and OD&D in general) reference the Chainmail wargame rules regularly; its referenced in combat, in monster determination, in castle encounters, and the rules assume it is standard. The "Alternate Combat System," featuring a d20 rolled against armor class to determine a hit, was clearly stated as an "alternate" system. Despite this few ever used the Chainmail rules, Gygax and Arneson included (by both their own admission on Dragonsfoot and the OD&D forums, as well as testimony from their players on rpgforum). By the time the first supplement, "Greyhawk," was published, any pretense of being a Chainmail spinoff was entirely abandoned. 

DM'ing tonight, my principle was "the rulebook is always right." This was mostly building on the work of the Sempter Initativus Unum blog and it's landmark document "The Original D&D Setting." This document attempts to do serious, consistent world-building using the Original D&D books, and notes how strange yet tantalizing it is to imagine a heavily depopulated world with the kinds of encounters detailed in the wilderness tables. I took this further and declared that not only were the rulebooks right about the setting, they were right about the game - Chainmail was the default combat system and the d20 was an alternate if I didn't have Chainmail. I do have Chainmail. 

What I found myself surprised at was just how often I used that wargame book. The players rolled a random encounter with a red dragon (successfully avoided by an artful dodge into a cave) and I expected to have to pull up the Fantasy Reference Table. Combat in multiple dungeons led to referencing the Man-to-Man Table. Wandering near the Castle of a local lord meant playing a game of Jousting as detailed in the Chainmail rules. 

People often call the 3 LBBs "unfinished" (or, to be less polite, "unplayable RAW"). They aren't wrong. I found myself leafing through booklets multiple times in our 3.5 hour session only to shrug and go "there aren't any rules for that, so I guess I'll say X." But I think the rulebooks are less incomplete than we often think. We look backwards on these rules as RPG documents and try to ferret out from them the RPG gameplay loop. Yet I think, on its own terms, OD&D has a very different gameplay loop - a Chainmail one. 

Take Jousting. There is no XP gained from jousting, so there is no character advancement from it, no magic items gained from it, no defeat of monsters or exploration of dungeons. You are challenged by the local Lord and if you win, you get lodging; if you lose, you give up your armor. This makes almost no sense from an RPG standpoint since it doesn't fit into any of our preconceived ideas about an RPG game loop. But it does make sense if you eject the idea of OD&D as an RPG and instead see it as an expansion pack for Chainmail. Chainmail includes Jousting rules. You aren't playing an RPG with Chainmail elements, you are playing Chainmail and adding RPG elements on to it. You play Jousting because it's in the core game - because it is, alongside mass combat, the core gameplay loop. Having a class, race, and XP are expansions on a core gameplay loop that exists in Chainmail. 

Again, I understand OD&D wasn't played this way even by its creators. Chainmail had become the de facto "alternate" combat system well before the books were even published. Yet the books still assume those rules are the default - why is that? Having played, I think its because the game had become something else (a "role playing game") sometime between development and publication. The rules were still grounded in the initial months of game design, however, when Chainmail presumably was still a dominating force in determining what Dungeons & Dragons would become. That means its incompleteness as an RPG was in development by Gygax, Arneson, and Co., while the game we all read as an incomprehensible mess is typically deprived of its assumed wargame context. OD&D only seems as incomplete as we claim because we don't see Chainmail as the core game. Chainmail was not indispensible to OD&D as played, but it is indispensible to OD&D as written.

I don't mean to present all this as a way to gloss over OD&D's shortcomings. It is not a complete game. But when it is seen as adding RPG elements to an existing wargame, rather than an RPG that uses a wargame for combat reasons, our entire understanding of what this game is, how it functions, and how complete it is changes radically.