An RPG From The Past: Dungeons and Dragons (Moldvay Edition)

Back in the ancient days of this blog, I described my first time playing D&D with a friend named Rob who lived in the neighborhood behind our own. We went to school together, played on the same baseball team together, and played Atari video games together. Typical 70s/early 80s stuff. 

I mean, if you've seen Stranger Things, that was kind of my life. Well, except for the monsters from the Upside Down and characters such as Eleven with "powers". 

I swear I had a shirt just like the one
on the left. From cafemom.com.

That fateful day I'd never heard of Dungeons and Dragons before, but even though I got stomped like nobody's business when our first encounter was five Red Dragons, I was fascinated by the possibilities the game provided. 

Compared to how they're presented
in D&D 5e, dragons back then are far from
being a force of nature. They're still
frighteningly powerful compared to
a first level player, however.
From the Blue cover Holmes Edition
of D&D (circa 1979).

So, when Christmas rolled around, I asked for a D&D set. And this was what I got: 

The original copy is long since
gone. Because, well... Satanic Panic
and all that.

This version didn't look like Rob's, but the guts of the thing were still there. The same six stats --Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma-- the same funky dice, the same classes*, and the same monsters. Compared to some wargames such as Risk, the game seemed very complicated, but compared to modern RPGs, well...

Which character sheet is more easily understood, this:

A scan of a part of Moldvay
Basic Rulebook, page B5.
From tabletopconnect.com.

Or this:

The D&D 4e character sheet.

Admittedly, compared to 4e, the 5e character sheet took a hint from good ol' D&D and made things MUCH easier to follow....

This was admittedly the first page
of three, but still it was more
easily understood. From the WotC
D&D 5e PDF. 

To a player of the modern game, the Moldvay Edition --the one above with the epic Erol Otus cover art-- is incredibly rules light. The entire Basic Rules encompasses 64 pages, and the companion Expert Rules** has the exact same number of pages. Compare that with the D&D 5e Players Handbook, which is  316 pages, and doesn't even include monsters (Monster Manual, 352 another pages) or how to run the game as a DM (the Dungeon Master's Guide, another 320 pages). 

While the basics are understandable to a player of 5e, there are significant enough differences between the two that a first gaming session would be spent with the 5e player saying "Huh, I never heard of that before!" Such as rolling for initiative; in 5e it's all ranked based on individual player rolls and other stuff, but in Moldvay D&D it's "the party and the DM each roll a d6, the higher number determines which side goes first." No fuss, no muss.

From the perspective of a player of today, having a lack of rules for everything and a multitude of monsters means that a session of Moldvay Edition D&D is far more liberating for people who want to play D&D in a freestyle manner. There's nothing keeping a D&D 5e campaign from being played in such a way, but with a rule for everything (comparatively speaking) 5e sits somewhere in that mushy middle zone between Moldvay Edition D&D and rules crunchy games such as Pathfinder. 

Okay, I laughed at this video that Professor Dungeon Master put out back in January. He also got the Fighter on the cover confused with a Dwarf, but it was still a great rant.

***

The appeal of Moldvay Edition D&D is more than just being a rules light version of the game, it's that the adventure modules reflected a different mindset than the modern game has. 

While you can certainly play a classic module such as The Keep on the Borderlands in the modern fashion...

DM/Narrator: When we last left our heroes, they had begun their assault on the Caves of Chaos and encountered the first waves of resistance from the Kobolds... Does everybody remember where they were last time? Then let's begin!

But the way D&D was envisioned by Gary Gygax is somewhat different than that. 

The concept of a stable environment where multiple groups of players campaigned in may sound like it's something out of an MMO, but the so-called West Marches*** campaign style that Gary and Company used in the early days of D&D was just that. During a game session, a party would go out, adventure, and then come back to home base and "park" for the time being. There was no "Okay, we'll stop here and pick up at this location in the dungeon later," your party could only venture out and return within the entire gaming session. That also meant a place such as The Caves of Chaos with its multiple caves of various denizens could be assaulted by various parties at various times during the week. One party would encounter the Kobold Cave, clear it out, and then the next party a few days later would find that same Kobold Cave empty on their campaign session.

Think about that for a moment: instead of an instanced session for each party, we're talking about something closer to an actual world in implementation. 

This method of campaign design has one great built-in advantage: if someone can't make it that week, that's perfectly fine. They stay back at The Keep instead of adventuring. Players aren't tied down to a specific date and time per week for game sessions; the game world goes on without them if they take a break or they move to a different day.

Here's a couple of other videos describing the system and how old school D&D would work with it:

***

Yes, nostalgia does play a significant part in my love of the Moldvay Edition of D&D. Oh, and why "Moldvay Edition"? That's because while the authors were Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the Basic and Expert Rules were edited by Tom Moldvay. The previous version, the one Rob had, was edited by Eric Holmes, and the D&D BECMI version that came after the Moldvay Edition (the one with the Larry Elmore cover art) was revised and edited by Frank Mentzer. The three different editions reflect a progressive split with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which is more well known today as 1e; while they aren't interchangeable with AD&D, the three so-called "Basic D&D" versions also aren't interchangeable with each other, so I'll stick with the one I know.

Besides, I have a bias toward the artwork in the Moldvay Edition.

I always wondered if Wizards of the Coast
retconned this Red Dragon into being
Genieveve, the mascot of GenCon.
Page B1 of Moldvay Edition D&D.

Those early years of TSR had artwork primarily done by students and amateur artists --the AD&D Monster Manual is a prime example-- and the weird combination of Sword and Sorcery vibes with Superhero outfits was very much a thing.

Pretty sure that female Fighter isn't protected
very well. And... oh hey, that cloak looks
like it was lifted right from Doctor Strange.
From the back cover of X1 - The Isle of Dread.

Another reason why I enjoy Moldvay Edition D&D is that Tom Moldvay rather subtly put the game together with an eye that everybody can play, not just adolescent males:

I detect the influence of Conan here...
From page B6 of Moldvay Edition D&D.

It didn't cover everything by any stretch of the imagination, but whenever someone grouses about "all these wimmen invading his game" I am fond of pointing out that Moldvay Edition D&D had not only artwork showing both men and women playing the game but the character creation example is for a female Fighter, Morgan Ironwolf. 

Skin-tight armor is not just
a video game thing. From page
B20 of Moldvay Edition D&D.

In addition, the example of play in the Basic rulebook showed that 2 of the 5 players (judging by their names) were women, and Morgan herself was the Caller, or Party Leader.

So if anybody ever tries to pull the "Women don't play D&D" bullshit, you can show them that even back in the beginning the game was inclusive toward people.

Realism in the artwork, well....
That's a different story.
From page X1 of Moldvay Edition D&D.

***

Close to a decade ago I decided to right a wrong and obtain copies of Moldvay D&D for myself. It took a bit of doing, but yes, I was able to track down copies on eBay that looked decent enough for me to put bids on.

I should spend a little time repairing
the boxes. I'd forgotten that the Basic box
had pink on the sides, which likely freaked
out the hyper masculine crowd.

Missing the d20 die, but it had
an additional solo adventure AND
the TSR catalog!!

This copy even included the crayon to
fill in the numbers on the dice.

I did make an attempt to play Keep on the Borderlands with the mini-Reds, but I got busy --and so did they-- so that fell by the wayside. Maybe it would be nice to start up a campaign again, but life has a way of messing with my ability to play pencil-and-paper RPGs.

But I felt it incredibly important to take back a part of my past that had been thrown in the dumpster, sacrificed on the altar of saving me from the fires of Hell. 

*With the addition of the Halfling (!), the Fighting Man was shortened to Fighter as well.

**I got that set for my birthday.

***The name came from Ben Robbins' own campaign set in --wait for it-- The West Marches. Although all due honor should go to Ben for coming up with the campaign style and popularizing it, there is plenty of evidence that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson played D&D in that style in the early days. Obviously by the time of the big modules such as the Against the Giants trilogy that style had begun to fall out of favor, but as Ben Milton from Questing Beast describes it (below), the West Marches campaign style is the key to understanding a lot of how original D&D was constructed.