For some reason there seems to be a big customer base for B/X clones with elements of AD&D bolted on: Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition Companion, B/X Advanced, Advanced Labyrinth Lord, Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy (one of the latest attempts to cash in on this audience), and countless splats for inserting race-and-class or assassins and druids into B/X. But why is it always about piling shit onto B/X rather than trimming some fat from AD&D?
I mean, if you really want a middle ground between the two branches (Intermediate D&D, for argument's sake), it's not really that hard. Cut the races down to three or four, cut the classes down to three or four, change to three-point alignment, remove some of the weapons and armors (the LBB model of leather/chain/plate is elegant in its simplicity), and delete the subsystems you find clunky.
I've half a mind to slam something together based on this idea and sell it on drivethruRPG.
I think because the starting point is different. If you add to B/X or Labyrinth Lord you have a brief system that is already a game in itself. You can run a whole campaign with that ruleset. But one might want some variety. So you add the nice stuff from AD&D to it. The race/class split, the new classes, the extra monsters. The stuff that people liked.
ReplyDeleteAD&D, as much as I like it, is a bit of a clunker. I find it great as a reference, or as inspirational reading, but having to find all the pieces of fat and trying to trim them is a bit of a daunting task for someone not already intimately familiar with the system.