OD&D Edition Experience: Did/Do you Play BECM/RC D&D? How Was/Is It?

[The Sigil]

Regarding Basic, I never played it.

I am curious about its Mystara setting.

I prefer to see a 5e version of it.

I have no interest in old school gaming mechanics, except how its thematic flavor might be relavent to the setting.

Not sure if I can Summon @The Glen but if you want 5e plus Mystara, I'll just drop this link here on his behalf: https://www.rpgmp3.com/mystara-players-guide/ for a free PDF of the Mystara 5E Player's Guide (Can't beat that price!) - formatted so you can print your own on lulu.com or similar if that's your thing.

 

[Voadam]

The "Gazetteer" series never really caught on, which is unfortunate. I preferred it to the "everything everywhere all at once" format of other campaign settings because it allowed me to set the focus: if I intended to play a Viking-themed campaign, for example, I didn't need hundreds of pages about the entire world: I could just pick up GAZ7 and it would have everything I needed.

I feel the gazetter format was really popular. The Forgotten Realms did lots and lots of region specific supplements as did Paizo's Golarion and even Kobold Press's Midgard. If you want a viking subsetting without hundreds of pages about the entire world you can go with Gaz7 The Northern Reaches or pick up Land of the Linnorm Kings.

 

[hoffrg86]

We had the RC and Immortal handbook of (BECMI). We incorporated ideas from RC, players to 20+, and the Immortal path into our 2e game, some of the weapon spec., the mystic - eventually having Immortal characters and having an Immortal Campaign - World & Universe Building.

 

[The Glen]

Not sure if I can Summon @The Glen but if you want 5e plus Mystara, I'll just drop this link here on his behalf: https://www.rpgmp3.com/mystara-players-guide/ for a free PDF of the Mystara 5E Player's Guide (Can't beat that price!) - formatted so you can print your own on lulu.com or similar if that's your thing.

It's a smashing book with some lovely art that I wrote over the course of several years. Far superior to any other classic setting guide for 5e dnd as determined by science.

Tried to come up with new takes on the races and avoided the just add spells mentality that took over 5e's approach to races, classes and feats. Every nation has a subclass that represents them, though a few share. Still working on dmg but that takes time and money

 

[cbwjm]

We had the RC and Immortal handbook of (BECMI). We incorporated ideas from RC, players to 20+, and the Immortal path into our 2e game, some of the weapon spec., the mystic - eventually having Immortal characters and having an Immortal Campaign - World & Universe Building.

A cool concept would be the party making it to immortal status the having them make a new world, populate it, advance the history, then take it and make that the new campaign world.

 

[el-remmen]

I know @CleverNickName said this thread is for BECMI and not B/X. but what if I never knew the difference at the time? I had the B and X boxed sets and just thought of them as "the older better covers and interiors" printing and went from those to C (but then switched to AD&D before M came out).

So in my mind, it is all the same thing and at the time I really loved it, but unfortunately came to think of it as the "kiddie" version (which 1. is not true, and 2. ironically what a kid would think) and so was diehard AD&D (but still using B and X modules occasionally).

I have been wanting to run something using the RC since I got my hands of a used copy for $25 in the late 00s when the shine started coming off of 3E and 4E was a non-starter for me, but still haven't, despite having the book for over 15 years now.

 

[Weiley31]

I plan on combining it with OSE stuff once I get around to playing it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It always strikes me as odd to see those two referred to as OD&D, as they seem fairly different from it to me.

 

[Jack Daniel]

It always strikes me as odd to see those two referred to as OD&D, as they seem fairly different from it to me.

It always strikes me as odd that this changed.

When I was a kid, there was OD&D and AD&D, and OD&D was the name we used for all the stuff that wasn't AD&D, which included BXCMI/RC. If someone said, "Hey, let's play OD&D," the "O" more or less meant "not-Advanced." It didn't mean "the original rules from 1974," it meant "the original D&D game," i.e., the TSR game-line that included the 3LBB, Holmes, Moldvay/Cook, Mentzer, and 1070/RC/1106 editions.

That the rules had changed from edition to edition didn't really enter into it. After all, if pre-UA 1e and post-Skills & Powers 2e can both still be AD&D despite the wide mechanical gulf between them, it's not so hard to grasp that 3LBB and RC can both fall under the OD&D umbrella.

And apart from some discussion on rec.games.frp.dnd back in the 90s advocating for calling BX and later "BD&D" instead of "OD&D," I can't really find any evidence that anyone had a problem with this broad use of OD&D until Dragonsfoot in the early 2000s. (Though it wouldn't surprise me at all if was actually the K&K Alehouse that ultimately instigated the change, on the tenuous grounds that Moldvay and later aren't sufficiently "Gygaxian.")