This morning, Luke Gearing’s long term hour-long Snackrifice Rutghast Megadungeon Campaign came to a close. Just around 5 years of play, ~153 sessions, with 78 characters (including dead and retired) and countless players (the server currently has about 40 users; some are inactive but some who played in the game are no longer in the server, so). I got to retire an OD&D Elf character. That’s insane.
So, now it’s on my mind, if I were to run this, what would I do differently? What system would I use?
Part of the appeal of the Rutghast Campaign, I think, was that we were “playing OD&D.” We primarily used Delving Deeper to do so. As the campaign went on, we made changes to the rules (as evidenced above), figured out what worked for our table and time slot. We also had our own rules (NO THIEVES) and things we wanted to achieve. We decided how certain spells interacted, how to decipher certain things in the Delving Deeper rulebook (as opposed to using the 3LBB on their own).
As I ponder this, I think back to a Reddit comment I made about the differences between OD&D and B/X. I like a lot about the OD&D format and how we played it, but I think if I were going to run a game like this, I would run it using B/X (OSE) and make some changes to make it more “OD&D-like.”
These are the rules I’d use to make the game more like OD&D:
- All hit die are d6s, including monsters. Fighters get +1 on their HD rolls. Players reroll all HD when they level up; if the total is less than their current HP total, they add 1 to the total (or 2 if they are Fighters). Monster HP is always rolled during the encounter.
- All weapon damage is d6. (I would not use the Wolves weapon table in the Snackrifice house rules above, since it turns out in play we basically never used it anyway, including seemingly the size rules.)
- No thieves. The only classes available are Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, Phase Elf (see below), Dwarf and
Halfling.(If someone really wanted to play something else from the OSE line, I would consider it, if they were a good friend and had a reason to do so.) Likewise, I personally would not restrict the levels of the demihuman classes, but you may choose to do so if you wanted a more “authentic” OD&D experience. - Elves use the Phase Elf class from Carcass Crawler 2. (This neatly emulates the restrictions of the OD&D Elf.) Maybe I would allow them to cast in magic armour.
- Monsters give 100XP per HD. Originally in Rutghast, we did not divide the XP gained by what dungeon level we were on (as suggested in the OD&D rules) but eventually we implemented this rule as we were rapidly killing like groups of 23 lizardmen on level 1 or 2 as massive level 5+ characters and getting huge XP for it. Rutghast only ever had 4 dungeon levels though so I think there is some wiggle room about for how that evens out.
- We would use the OD&D spell list. Probably I would make a custom document for this, using the OSE equivalent spell text but the actual spell list and levels for OD&D. I would probably still use the B/X rules for learning spells, instead of the OD&D “full level spellbook.”
- Likewise, on the referee side I would simply use the OD&D treasure and monster tables. I might use Delving Deeper or Marcia’s Fantastic Medieval Campaigns or the Littlest Brown Book for this, or I would just make my own bestiary and treasure clone if I was a crazy person.
And here’s the rules I’d probably use just as a generality:
- Elves and Dwarves do not have infravision.
- Combat would probably use split initiative, where players roll some kind of check (just plain d6 with no modifiers probably, or roll under DEX if we are being fancy) to see if players go before or after the enemy. This results in (effectively) players > monsters > players every time, unless the monsters surprise the players. Likewise we’d stick to the B/X combat rules, without any Chainmail or weapons vs armour tables.
- Use the To Hit bonus table from the Snackrifice house rules doc (above). We’re also ignoring prime requisites.
- We’d use some form of slot based inventory
- We’d use Ascending AC because fuck you
Will I ever run this? I dunno. If I were going to run an “OD&D experience” at my home table this is probably what I would do.
