Відео

Strange time that was. Lost a friend to it. He joined the church and unfriended us. (He was our GM). Thanks for the share!!

53:20 keep preaching Reverend! I think encumbrance is a nice thing to have in the game. It's just like if you watch videos of hikers packing on UA-cam and what they bring. They take into account weight and what they're bringing with them, especially if they're doing a long through hike of like the Pacific Crest Trail... That's not a 2-hour hike 🙂.

Not a expert at German, but Braun Stein means Brown Stone, so that was kind of on the nose 😂 15:10

I feel like I saw a track similar recently like 5 months ago in Maryland area

4th edition had a five point alignment system. Lawful good, good, unaligned, evil and chaotic evil.

Love this idea for a video.

GREAT video. I'll probably have this playing in the background multiple times going forward. :-) One thing that I'd say is also worth mentioning is that Holmes Basic was the first set of D&D rules to totally ditch references to Chainmail. Classes no longer had "Fighting Capability" designations per level. Also with regard to mechanics the original Monster Manual is almost more of an OD&D supplement than AD&D since all of the monsters have AC's ranging from 9 on down instead of 10 like AD&D. I did not know about the updates Gary made to Holmes' original manuscript. Is there an online resource detailing the changes or even containing the full original draft? Thanks!

I was introduced to D&D late '78 when I saw a copy of Holmes and a laid out table with maps and minis at a friends house while living in the UK. I remember the gaming group I was introduced too, opening these little boxes before play began. They were using OD&D although I didn't really know it at the time. I bought the AD&D books as they were released. Maybe because I was 12 at the time, the differences in the editions had no real impact on how we played - which was all about dungeon exploring, rather than rules comparisons..

“Advanced” and “Basic” were the same terms we used at Campaign Headquarters in Norfolk, VA from 1980 to 1982.

So what was the point of even keeping Charisma in the game? Was it a prerequisite for certain abilities or spells?

Beautiful idea 💡 I plan on implementing something like this for the next game that I run.

You used to walk around with 1-10 HP. It was brutal to go into combat, as well...

The Blue Book version was the first one that was mass produced and sold in the game/ model/ comic shops. That fist batch, you had to reach out there to the Lake Geneva crew to have them print it local and send it out. Back then, you could reach out to the crew personally, if you had questions or additional stuff to throw at them.

Real gamers play using chain mail rules.

Zenopus is an excellent example of a name where the author needs to provide a pronunciation guide for it, if they care to have others say it correctly. The two pronunciations you suggest miss out on the very realistic possibility the primary stress could be on the 'o', which immediately doubles our pronunciation options. I will agree that would be highly annoying were it to be the case, but there are languages that would do it nonetheless, our English-speaking sensibilities being irrelevant to the speakers of that language!

Great video! I do have to point out a mistake you made though. PCs in OD&D were awarded XP for monsters at a rate of 100/Hit Die. See Men & Magic p. 18, the example of defeating the Troll and being awarded 700 XP.

The Exorcist came out in 1973 so I'm guessing the line about female possession victims reacting to a cross is a tongue in cheek reference to that.

Was just recommended this channel by a friend and very excited to have found it!

No one I ever ran across called it just D&D when talking about the Holmes D&D box set, which as you rightly noted wasn't known as that. What everyone called it back then in Southern California gaming areas I ran in was "Basic D&D". I can't speak for other areas (states), but that's what I recall back in 1978-1982 until I joined the military. Holmes did a great job at making D&D much more accessible and of course removing some of the external requirements to play original D&D (Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival & TSR's own Chainmail). Also, most of us started quickly ignoring the exp for gold/treasure, since it made leveling up too fast. Instead opting to give experience for defeating monsters, coming up with good ideas etc. Basically we decided that the reward was in the treasure gained and the items. Good overview, loving the trip down memory lane. Edt: Btw, you were killing me with all the moving around of the books while reading them, then putting one down and snagging another one. Ye ole motion sickness and being old(er) cropping its ugly head.

I have been playing 0E and retroclones but this might actually get me to play B/X and siblings.

Thank you for your channel! I only started playing DnD with 5e in 2021, but I’ve been playing video game RPGs for years. When I get into a hobby, I’m the kind of person that enjoys learning all about the history of the topic. I’d watch (listen) to all the DnD history videos I could, but there wasn’t a whole lot of options. Your channel has been exactly what I’ve been searching for all this time. Been listening to videos for the past month and a half, and it’s great. Thank you for all the work and effort you’ve put into these. It’s appreciated!

This is an amazing series!!

5e uses the dexterity bonus for initiative and there might be a home rule somewhere where the higher dex goes first in an instance of a tie

Core Unified Mechanic

Love the is style of video. Also hoping for one with b/c compared to other editions

The Holmes Basic wasn't initially envisioned as a seperate system. It was more like how many games these days have a "Starter Set" (Big Example, Call of Cthulhu) where you get a set of basic game system rules, and stripped down character options to lead into a more complete "Full Version" to allow people who hadn't come through the wargame/OD&D pathway, to move on to the AD&D system. The Starter Rules are completelyplayable, but you ultiamtely reach a point where you wantmore...so you buy the full version. That was the route I and a lot of people I knew at the time took to reach into AD&D. There was no pathway past 3rd level, so once we had a grip on Basic, we just looked at Advanced. The Monster Manual was easy to convert to (Basic) D&D as the format was the same, ie AC, HD, Attacks/Damage and so on, and simply had expanded rules for alignment, certain magic, powers and Psionics. So it was easy to use it to become familiar with some of the expanded rules that would come in AD&D. It took a bunch of 11 year olds all of about 5 minutes to figure out how the 9-way alignment differed from the 3-way, and in the 40+ years since, no one has ever convinced me that our way was "wrong". I rarely played Moldvay, because it had the same problem as Holmes... it just stopped at higher level. It was only years later when Frank wrote the Companion rules that we dipped back in to play a "BEC" campaign, Never really got as far as Master rules, and had no real interest in the Immortals stuff, but having since read it all... it;s pretty good at creating a well structured progression path from 1st Level to Godhood,(if that's your thing...) and I still consider it the best written, most complete, bottom-to-top, level-based rpg system, where no period of progression is overlooked or broken.

I started playing in 1980 and think of White Box as a prototype rather than a finished product and Holmes as a beta. AD&D and Moldvay were the first truly finished, fully playable products that didn't require extensive game experience or reference to other publications. In some ways we've come full circle with the release of ShadowDark which also requires extensive RPG experience and reference to other publications (e.g. nowhere in ShadowDark does it explain how Hit Points are calculated and it lacks any useful description of monster behavior or environments. It assumes you've been playing D&D 5e for years).

I used to listen to the public radio show "Jazz After Hours" back in the mid '80s and its odd you mentioned that line-up. Like a blast from the past foso... I'll have to give this 1e GW giveaway a shot because thats a heavy duty blast from the past there. I wonder if its as beat up as I am? Great Holmes coverage my man, thanks!

The Zed Edition

I started with Holmes and moved on to AD&D as it came out. Couldnt afford the original D&D books before that, or drive myself the 150 miles to the store that had them.

Thanks for the video! I moved from (O)D&D to 1E AD&D as the 1E AD&D books were released but sometimes have played the various Basic versions when folks who were running them didn't mind me not having the exact rules. I've sat in here and there and let the DM tell me when I needed to know something that was slightly different. The groups I was part of for (O)D&D and later were mainly also wargamers or even wargamers first, sometime before D&D was even first published, like myself. I hear some folks say it was difficult to understand (O)D&D if they hadn't played wargames but we seemed to pick it up well enough, I guess. High Gygaxian has a charm all its own which I suppose I encountered when I was so young, it was seen more as a challenge than a barrier. Now it feels archaic in the best possible way, chock full of nostalgia. I always assumed Zenopus was derived from "Xenopus" which breaks down to "strange + foot" which I have heard pronounced as both "zee' · nuh · pus" and "zen' · nuh · pus" so you're probably fine. Holmes seemed to want to keep the Ability Scores fairly simple but still increase PCs' survivability and buff MUs. Resources were an important part of all early D&D and, IMO, is in any Old School RPG emulation. Alignment and encumbrance kinda got fine tuned for 1E AD&D. Initiative has always been an awkward aspect to D&D that the social contract seems to handle, in that once it is explained, players and DMs accept it and use it, no matter the edition. It works out well enough, as long as everyone is on the same page, and every edition offers ways to nerf it and to wheedle against it for advantage. It's kinda funny that way. Damage differences were a revelation and I am not sure if they first were adjusted to use all the dice more often or they wanted things more realistic and someone realized that since they had all these dice, this would be a place to get use out of them. Magic is in constant revision even during editions, it seems, and probably is often written vaguely enough that from table to table it feels different. I always loved sample dungeons and wandering monster tables! I'm also a fan of some nominal experience for the monsters and also experience for treasure (which can be great!). If you don't have a video next week, have a Happy Thanksgiving! Of course, you have a traveling bar case. Why wouldn't you? Perhaps someday you can find a liquor to mix with cranchovie juice (jk). Thanks again for the content!

Interesting. We went straight from original D&D to AD&D. I'm familiar with later "basic" D&D (B/X, BECMI, Rules Cyclopedia) but not Holmes. Thanks for the overview.

Will you show how BECMI and Mentzer are different from both ODD and ADD, as I only realized in the last year that they were different. I started playing in '81 I think and I never new they were different.

Fun Fact: while originally requiring an attack roll to hit the target in the initial release of 4th edition (and dealing dice damage to the target), Magic Missile was updated and errata'd with the release of the Essentials product line to no longer requiring an attack roll and dealing flat damage to the target instead.

I heard Gygax intentionally used that kind of language to help improve the reader's skills.

Did you read Deep Cuts from Image Comics?

John Holmes wrote "Mahars of Pellucidar" which eas my favorite book as a kid (it gave me genuine nightmares, but I loved it). I ran a Blue Book D&D open invite hex crawl game set in Pellucidar on his birthday for a few years to celibrate all Mr Holmes did to shape my nerdom. Its been a while since I ran it, but it was a great tradition while it lasted. I really should revive it, or compile the notes somewhere.

Ha! I am glad to see this video. I just started watching and just have to say that this is the box set i first bought. I came into a bookstore and the owner was opening his stock of books, i was looking for the Hobbit. He showed me the newest D&D game Holmes , I could see on display the white box game and chainmail book. Well I tell you i had soo much fun with the basic set. You could just start playing so quickly. Really enjoyed it better than Advanced because of the playability. Well back to your video 👋🏻

Magic Missile is an automatic hit in B/X edition.

bonus comment: Cheers 🥂 on the passing of Roy Haynes. Sitting in with the angels now. I was gonna bust your shoes for talking parsley, sage,rosemary, and thyme without playing Simon & Garfunkel, but a passing jazzman gets you a pass.

Don't forget the UCSD group. They also published some of their stuff in 3pp supplements (even before the feist books). Having started in 90/91 myself, with 2e (and still playing it now), and almost immediately jumping into Dark Sun when it came out, I can assure you that, RAW, 2e is all in on encumbrance and other forms of resource management. How much of that is applied at the table of course depends on the group, the DM, and what of 2e's virtually endless variety of supplemental/alternative systems are being used.

Great topic, and cast charm algorithm

I still, in many ways, prefer the Holmes edition to all others. Especially for new or young players. When this hit the streets there was a perfect union of timing with the, then, recent release of the first The Hobbit 1978 movie by Bass/Rankin. That movie evoke a feeling very much in line with what Dr. Holmes was trying to create with his version.

The best thing about Holmes was the introductory dungeon in the back. Honestly a much better intro to the game than B2, which I got in the box with it.

Thanks!

That was my first D&D set. We used the blue book to start and transitioned to AD&D.

I have always consider the Blue Book as OD&D. I stand corrected. Thanks for the share!!

By the lizards front claw there appears to be letters, though it’s just as likely to be shading. I’m seeing letters possibly, W. LINIL Or my eyes are squinting too much 😂

Please cover more OD&D supplements. It's a relatively untouched section of D&D history.

My idea for Magic Missile is to make it work like Yondu's arrow. You enchant it to be a +1 magic arrow (or maybe the bonus scales with level) for one minute. In that time, the Magic-User can function as a decent archer with their magic arrow that they can move and recall psychically.