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Originally Posted by Lenin
Ah, it must be 25 years since I last laid eyes on a copy of Blackmoor. This review brings a happy tear of nostalgia to my eye. Oh, for the good old days of hack'n'slash, before all this role-playing navel-gazing that infests rpg.net. In those days, your role as a fighter was to kill things, your role as a magic-user was to kill things with magic, your role as a cleric was to kill things and heal the other players, and your role as a thief was to steal stuff. Anything else was just chrome.
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I started out with the Blue Book ("basic D&D") and even then Blackmoor was something that only incredibly old people with beards had heard of. I picked up the vibe even back then that "Original D&D" was purer and better than "Basic D&D" or "Advanced D&D", and that we young'uns had missed the boat. I am not sure I even want to touch one of those old books; it would make the magic go away. Nostalgia really was better in the olden days.
But, but, but, but, but. I can understand that someone might prefer an RPG which was about killing things to one that is about, say, narrative or character development. But guys, Original D&D was a really, really, really terrible combat game. Role a dice. Lose some hit point. Role a dice. Lose some hit points. Continue untile dead.
The function of wizards may have been to kill people with magic, but if I recall correctly, magic users got ONE SPELL, i.e a first level M.U got to act ONCE in the first session. And with a D4 hit points, they could be killed in one blow by a poxy kobold. This, you call play balance.
Of course, if we are right in thinking that D&D was a skirmish wargame, and each player was meant to control a party made up of five or six different characters, then this makes perfect sense: the strong infantrymen have to guard the powerful, single shot, heavy artilliary. But not if one play gets play the wizard and nothing else.
This may have had an evolutionary advantage, of course: D&D was such a terrible, terrible implementtion of such a brilliant, brilliant idea that gamers had basically to read D&D, and then throw it away and invent their own system. "Tunnels and Trolls" (probably) and "Chivalry and Sorcery" (definitely) were two sets of "D&D house rules" which turned into systems in their own right, and both differeed from the original game by actually being playable. Heck, "AD&D" was basically Gygax's houses rules, a mish mash and a miscellany which you couldn't possibly play "out of the box". Was there ever a playable version of D&D before 3rd edition?
I confess to being a smidgeon out of the loop in terms of current systems. But can "Lenin" really be right to say that their aren't any current games which are mainly about combat; and that if you want to play games where fighters fight and MUs mu you're best option is to pick up a thirty year old fanzine that doesn't work?