Tuesday, September 29, 2009

All about combat, huh?

The other day at my board game group, we were discussing RPGs in general, and D&D in particular with a new guy, Dave. Someone mentioned that OD&D only had rules for combat. Of course that's pattently wrong.

Today I went through the LBBs (on .pdf, don't have the real thing, unfortunately). Here's what I found.

In Men & Magic, there are about 4 digest size pages worth of combat rules (counting the weapon lists). Monsters & Treasure has 0 rules of combat, although I suppose the monster listings count. Maybe I should go back through that for completeness. Maybe not. Anyway, Underworld & Wilderness Adventures has 10 digest size pages of combat rules, including mass battles, sea battles, and aerial battles. There are 22 digest size pages of exploration rules.

So that's 11 pages of exploration rules, 7 pages of combat rules.

Case closed.

2 comments:

  1. Perhaps they're confusing OD&D with Chainmail? It is a common mistake, particularly with people who did not game in the 70's and 80's.

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  2. I wondered about that myself. And they might have. But anyway, now I've got the ammo to argue with them about it (in the good sense of argue, not the belligerent one).

    If I have time, maybe I'll also go through Holmes, BX, and BECM to see how they compare page-count-wise with rules for combat and exploration.

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