“Old-School” D&D rules that nobody likes or uses (or do they?)

As I said in earlier posts, I missed the OSR party during decades of non-gaming. Now I’m looking at OSR products years after their development. I remain baffled by the ongoing fascination with D&D, among all other possible rule sets that can undergird fantastic role-playing games, and I don’t comprehend why adherence to the old is regarded as better. Does anybody insist on computer coding in the original BASIC when a system that does more is available? I feel that I’m in a fair position to make these observations as I was gaming from the beginning of the ‘80s. I was playing constantly during those “old-school” days now sanctified by hindsight.

In this post, and perhaps in some more to follow, I will point out how those who treat old editions of D&D as the Real Thing are more selective about those rules than they reveal in their clones.

That is fine, of course! Gamers have always used their own rules and modified the rules in the books they bought. But that leads to a question: if the goal was to recreate what had gone by, leaving old rules out seems to call for an explanation. If the goal was to innovate, then that is merely to say that the “old-school revival” was a movement of innovation—which is what I think it was.

Does anybody employ a “caller” in their actual role-playing game sessions?

Gygax used this in the early games he originally ran. It was regular enough in D&D of the ‘70s that it occurs in Moldvay’s Basic D&D red book on page B4. “To avoid confusion, the players should select one player to speak for the entire group… named the caller.” This player was designated as the go-between for the DM and the players. In other words, players would not address the DM directly, but they resorted to one player who would coordinate the whole party’s actions, and the DM would respond only to the caller.

I never met anybody who ever used this, ever, even though the Basic rulebook says players should do this. Do you use it? Do you know anybody who ever did? Do any of the B/X D&D clones use this? I bet they don’t. I don’t see it in Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess. This is an area in which clones of the “original game” are not “authentic.”

OSRIC (not a B/X clone) mentions the “party caller” as an optional rule (not what players “should” do), but does anybody actually use a caller?

Damage variation per weapon by opponent size?

Gygax’s D&D was developed as the AD&D rules, the system in which he was clearly claiming ownership over the direction and development of the entire game, to the exclusion of other early developers. Just read the first two paragraphs of his Preface, p. 5 of the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook (1978), where he asks, rhetorically, and oh-so-humbly, “who better [to write this] than the individual responsible for it all…?” He means himself.

His Players Handbook has a two-page chart of weapons (pp. 37-38) indicating that the damage weapons did varied by the size of the opponent. Thus, a Bec de corbin does 1-8 damage against a “Size S or M” opponent, but 1-6 against a “Size L” opponent. A broad sword does 2-8 damage (presumably 2d4, with a resulting bell curve) against small and medium opponents but 2-7 (with no bell curve) against large opponents, whereas a long sword does 1-8 against small and medium but 1-12 against large opponents. Huh? How on earth was this decided? It suggests that a monster’s hit points were correlated with their physical size in the earliest D&D games, but the reason behind it is obscure.

Even when I was a kid, we ignored these rules entirely in the few times I played AD&D. In a game in which all the mechanics orbit around hit points, it’s bizarre to see something so basic as weapon damage (to hit points) dealt with in such a peculiar way.

OSRIC, which is just AD&D 1e reprinted as a compendium of rules, faithfully reproduces a pared-down version of this weapon chart. (No more Bec de corbin.) At the same time, I wonder: does anybody out there actually use the rule that damage done varies by creature size? If so… why?

All in all, many of those who venerate Gygax seem happy to ignore innovations that he authored as “advanced” and “official.”