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Like many of my generation of gamers I started out with an copy of the red-box set. Mine was second hand, found on a market stall and though the box is long gone, I still have and treasure the original books today.
It was a long road from there to here, but though I'd read a lot of "where it all began", it was not something i'd even experienced myself - so when I got a chance to read the original white-box 1974 rulebooks I leapt at the chance to see where everything started. What I found was completely different from what I had expected.
You hear a lot said about the early rules. They were hard to understand, no-one knew how the game was supposed to work, they don't stand up to modern-day standards. Well, as I had never before had any experience with the 1974 set, I am coming at the books completely untouched by nostalgia and with a history of many years of rpg's, wargames and boardgames to help understand.
That was probably the first thing I noticed about the game itself, It really wasn't as difficult to understand as I had been led to believe. I think perhaps it is simply that the mechanics we are used to today have their roots in these mechanics from the past, so it's simple for me to see what they are attempting to do, but on the whole the rules felt reasonably simple and to-the-point.
It is obvious from the start that these rules were written by, and presumably for, people with serious war games experience. Some parts were also a little difficult to understand as they expected the reader to be familiar with, and own a copy of, Chainmail and other similar games.
It seemed to me then, reading through the books, that D&D had grown out of their desire to add a larger framework to their fantasy war games. To have characters that grew and became more powerful over time, that had a story to tell. This really resonated with me as it is the same reason I always gravitated to Necromunda and Blood Bowl over WFB or 40k, that sense of drama and consistency.
The aim appeared different too. Whilst the dungeon-crawling is certainly there right from the start and a major part of the game, a lot more attention is paid to what -else- happens. Characters set themselves up as nobility, build castles and raise armies, all with surprisingly detailed and workable rulesets. There are rules for clearing monsters out of an area so your people can live happy, and for making war on other nearby castles and kingdoms.
You can certainly do all this in a modern D&D version, such as 3.5, but the rules aren't all included in the core book. Supplements such as the Stronghold Builders guidebook are required, and even then the focus is more on building a home base for an adventuring party rather than attempting to forge an entirely new nation in your own image.
As for the rules themselves, they are sparse and far more emphasis is placed on the dungeon master "winging" it. There was a lot less structure in these early rules, something the independent games of today are re-embracing wholeheartedly. Much of the idea for an adventure site seemed to be a dungeon that was constantly changing, expanding, and delving deeper; with the adventures making many delves into the one dungeon and finding earlier levels re-worked and reoccupied, just as challenging as the first time through. Nethack was far closer to the original source material than I ever suspected.
On the whole, reading the original books and understanding the magic of what they were trying to do, in a time when it have never been done before, makes you understand how D&D grabbed generations of gamers and their imaginations in a death grip and refused to let go.
I guess the most important thing I can say about reading through these rules is that despite my shelves of 3.5e material and many other new(er) games available, I still walked away with an urge to sit down and give the original box set a try. It is a very different beast from the D&D of today.
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Rod Batten
Canada
St. John's
Newfoundland
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing. --R.E.Howard
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A well-written, thoughtful commentary. Thanks!
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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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Frater wrote: It is obvious from the start that these rules were written by, and presumably for, people with serious war games experience. Some parts were also a little difficult to understand as they expected the reader to be familiar with, and own a copy of, Chainmail and other similar games.
There's quite a bit of the game that presumes you have Chainmail. You can play original D&D without Outdoor Survival, but coming to oD&D cold without Chainmail is a lot more challenging: things like who strikes first in a round (and what you can do in a round) are described in Chainmail, not D&D!
You might also find what the "Haste Spell" and "Slow Spell" do rather hard to determine without Chainmail. 
You've written a great overview of oD&D, Nick! Thank you very much.
Cheers,
Merric
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John Middleton
United States
Laramie
Wyoming
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Great review. I have recently re-read these rules booklets and the expansions as well. It is striking how much detail and variety they managed to fit into these little books. You can easily see how each expansion was much more experimental than most modern expansions and the willingness of the authors to leave it up to the DM to decide how things work. Its funny that modern indie games have to include complex mechanics to make a DM "wing it" or sandbox an adventure session.
Another thing that I've noticed is that the core ground work of the Gygax AD&D books is present in these early books. The main character classes and spells are almost all present, the monster descriptions are often verbatim from the old books to the Manual, and even the silly psionic rules make their first test runs.
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"I think one day most doctors will agree with me that the breakfast burrito is your most important burrito of the day."
United States
Kansas City
Kansas
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I was introduced to D&D(OE) in the fall of 1977 while at college, and my first DM was a guy who had learned the game from a copy of Chainmail. I quickly bought the white box set and first three supplements, and played the game pretty heavily for the next few years, along with some dabbling in Traveller (Classic) when it appeared.
Based on the descriptions of elves, 'hobbits', 'Ents', 'balrogs', 'rangers', 'orcs', and so forth, it was easy to see that original D&D was created so wargamers could have their own adventures in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, which was taking campuses by storm in the mid-to-late 70s. Turns out TSR had used some copyrighted terms, and later had to change them -- 'hobbit' to "halfling", 'Ent' to "treant", and so forth.
I can understand why the game and rules would seem confusing to newbies -- I was confused, too, when I first started reading the tan booklets. There was no real structure to how the rules were presented, and none of the tables of monsters, spells, potions, or magic items were in alphabetical order. What happened was that you gradually learned where certain bits of info were, and could usually grab the right book on the first try to look it up. You had to do this because there was no index of any kind.
Turns out that most players were taught their DM or by other players, and the booklets were more like memory aides than actual rulesets. That's why the booklets have no mention of how combat is conducted -- it was all in Chainmail, and the writers assumed you had a copy already (since it was listed in the Required Items in the first book, along with the map from the game Outdoor Survival).
I gave AD&D a try when it came out, but found the structure of the game too "narrow". I got the impression that a lot of kids had written in to TSR asking for rules clarifications instead of just "winging it", and that AD&D was created to fill in the gaps that kids with weak imaginations were unable to bridge. It seemed to me AD&D was geared toward complete standardization of the rules so everyone was "on the same page", so to speak. I tried playing it a couple of times, but to me AD&D was the "McDonald's" of the fantasy RPG world: No matter where you went and played, you would always get exactly the same flavor of game, with little or no variation.
That's what I missed in trying to shift from OD&D to AD&D: The flexibility and creativity that each DM brought to his dungeon and environs. I gave up trying to switch over and put my AD&D hardbacks on the shelf, where they have stayed for 30+ years.
In the meantime, for my own personal benefit I have taken all the text of OD&D from the six basic tan booklets, scanned it into my computer, converted it to Word documents, and rearranged and alphabetized it for easy reference. I'm hoping I can run a few sessions of "old school D&D" at some of the regional game and SF/F conventions, just to give people a taste of what the fantasy RPG world was like back in the "Stone Age". 
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John Middleton
United States
Laramie
Wyoming
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Gygax had said many times that one of the main reasons for AD&D was to publish a standardized set of comprehensive rules that incorporated the published expansion material and much of the material from Dragon magazine and The Strategic Review into a format that would allow tournament play. The fringe benefit of this is that it would allow players to more easily migrate from games run by different dungeonmasters.
This focus on competitive play is also an artifact from the games wargaming roots and even today there are very few RPGs that bother with tournament level play at conventions.
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Excellent review. It brings it all back to me.
I started with Chainmail and grabbed the white box set as soon as they were available. It didn't take me long to get it and run a campaign that lasted eight years. The introduction of the thief character class in one of the supplements padded it out and the penny dropped for all of us. House rules abounded with the booklets as a seed. In some ways, D&D didn't start role playing. The early adopters invented it with these rules as inspiration.
Being big Elric fans we recognised a good deal of those stories in the initial game, as well as the Tolkein stuff. I devoured AD&D but it dampened the ecstatic play. 4th Ed is just horrible, its way too limiting and I won't play it after my first few attempts.
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