In January, we lost famous gaming pioneer Jennell Jacquays. Much has been written about her in that time. The day the news came down, I sent a message in my Discord that I would be running her classic Judge’s Guild module, The Caverns of Thracia, in OD&D (Original D&D from 1974), with a handful of house rules, partially inspired by Luke Gearing’s Snackrifice.
I told the players that this was expected to be a one-off but could expand a little bit if we were having fun. I didn’t anticipate finishing the dungeon as it’s fucking huge, but I did figure we would get through to some of it. The first session had a total of 7 players and me–a real OD&D party! Scheduling eventually got in the way and after only two sessions, I could tell that this basically wasn’t working, for a variety of reasons. Let’s talk about what I learned.
The first thing: OD&D is the wrong system for this module. For a while I was under the impression the module had been published in 1975, which is how I pitched it to my players.
Part of this was ostensibly so I could deal with descending AC all on my side of the screen without the players worrying about it, but inevitably there was an argument about how descending AC works and what target numbers you actually want to hit were. Felt like a right of passage.
Anyway, it turns out the module was released in 1979 according to the copyright. I had chosen OD&D because I was inspired by playing in Snackrifice and wanted to try running OD&D out. I had a few house rules–I added the Paladin and Bard classes from the original Strategic Review sources, but no others. I redid the equipment and weapon lists from Snackrifice, and tweaked a thing or two here and there. You can check out the house rules doc here.
The problem is: Jacquays was on the fucking cutting edge of this shit. At one point there is a gnome who has Illusionist levels, something I hadn’t accounted for at all in my prep. There are several monsters not present in OD&D, but would have been in the Strategic Review or in Dragon or even in the AD&D Monster Manual by 1979. (These monsters are perfectly useable in OD&D, as they don’t even account for the AC changes in the AD&D 1e Player’s Handbook.) So, I was learning, there was a lot of stuff in the module that the system wasn’t really set up for. If I were to do it again, I’d use Old School Essentials with the Advanced Fantasy add-ons.
The second thing: The group didn’t like the system. With 7 players, it’s hard to suit everybody. Most players of mine are happy to go along with whatever bullshit I’m doing and have a good time; some of them are clearly happier about doing an OSR dungeon crawl than others, and even those who clearly aren’t into it as much are happy to be a good sport to be in a game I’m running. I would say, though, that the overwhelming amount of my players ended up really chafing against 1975 standards, or even OSR standards in general.
They balked at the idea that sometimes you want to roll the d20 high and sometimes you want to roll low (Thracia occasionally calls for roll-under stat checks), that sometimes situations call for a 1:6 chance and other times they call for a d20 check or even a saving throw, they balked at the weird saving throws and then further got frustrated and confused when the module called for a weird saving throw.
(I recall one trap that called for a save vs. breath to avoid it; the player was baffled when I explained that vs. breath is typically “vs dragon breath, but sometimes they use it as a catch-all Dex save,” something many of us are comfortable with and accept, but honestly, they got rid of this shit for a reason.)
Even if I had used a system like Old School Essentials, I don’t know that it would have “worked” for this particular group. Many of them have lots of 3.5e or 5e experience and would probably prefer a system with a unified resolution mechanic–something like bastards with its unified d20-roll-under-stat mechanic would probably have worked fine! Just player preference, is all. I could have decided to run this in 5e and those players would have been as happy as a pig in shit. (Not an indictment of 5e or those players, btw.)
The third thing is that, even against those grains, the players had fun, and engaged in good faith. They engaged in a little bit of faction play, openly communicating with the lizardmen on two different occasions. They mapped their own dungeon and even let it get a little fucked up (but not too fucked up!), and checked for secret doors and all the normal bullshit. One guy got fucked up from a crit from the carrion crawler in the very first encounter, and immediately had that character’s son show up with the exact same stats, but with a fucking helmet this time. (I even gave that guy a save vs. Death at 0hp, which he sadly failed.)
After 40 minutes or so, everyone was engaged in the OSR 70s mode as much as they could be, looking for ways to use their limited spells or abilities (the Bard charm came in handy twice!) to bypass encounters rather than engage in combat as first resort. They didn’t care about backstories, recognizing that the goal here was to get treasure, because treasure = XP.
I also used my longstanding house rule of not dividing XP. If the players found 1000gp, they got 1000 XP. They still had to divide the gold up evenly amongst them. This meant that players started to level up pretty quickly early on, but I suspect this evens them out around 4th or 5th level. I don’t mind doing this in harder edged OSR systems (like OD&D or OSE) because we likely aren’t going to play longer than a handful of sessions. For some of these people, this might be the only time they ever play OD&D. Let them level up a little bit. It’s not going to hurt anything. I even didn’t make them go back to town or anything, just let them level up right there in the dungeon, like it’s Dragon Quest or something. These are all millennials who have been playing JRPGs their entire life, nobody gives a shit.
Mind you, I think they got a little too much XP from monsters. Delving Deeper (and I think all of OD&D) says that monsters should give 100XP per hit die. That’s obviously a little too much especially if I’m not dividing them between players, so if I were using OSE or something that provided different numbers for monster XP, I probably wouldn’t have had that part of the issue.
All in all, I still had a great time. I think if I’d ran with OSE to begin with, or chose a system with a unified resolution mechanic, then the game would have lasted a little longer. I was up for a third session, but we had scheduling problems and so I decided to call it good there, and no one seemed all that upset about it. One day I’ll return to Thracia–hopefully after Goodman Games puts out a nice, beefy Original Adventures Reincarnated version. Maybe I’ll even run it in 5e.
