Good morning, dear readers.
I've been recently involved in an interesting project that has seen me running many editions of Dungeons & Dragons in sequence- and due to my nature I'm trying very hard to get all the details right. Since this project may end up on the web someday, I get frustrated with myself when I get a rule wrong here or there because more than three decades of gaming is rattling around in my brain. But I always make sure I get it right in my own head for purposes... well, like this.
I don't think anyone can be a walking encyclopedia of every. Single. Rule. I have become pretty damn adept over the years at remembering esoteric little pieces of rules, but I think anyone who transitioned from D&D Basic (in its many and slightly different forms) or AD&D 1e to 2nd Edition ever really avoided the common table rule of including things from different editions together. Having talked to a lot of grognards older than myself I find that many D&D players never played the "Rules as Written" and there were plenty of table rules and exceptions floating around. Weapons vs. Armor, multiple attacks due to Weapon Speed, level limits for demihumans, even the basic imitative rules of First Edition... so many things that were very often dropped, fudged, houseruled or modified. So when I needed to learn how Chainmail worked with 1974 D&D, one of the answers I heard most often from older players, message boards and other blogs was "We never used it. We always used the Alternative Combat System on page 19." The ACS is basically the rules we use today- roll a D20 versus Armor Class. The AC runs upward these days, and we use attack bonuses instead of THAC0, but it was there from the beginning.
So, I was born a year after 1974 D&D dropped. I never had the temporal opportunity to be in a position where a copy of Chainmail and Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival were the current solutions for combat and wilderness maps. I now own both as part of my effort to become a historian of gaming, but these were experiences that passed me by until I started to become active in the Old School Renaissance community. I was kinda flying blind when I was asked to run 1974 D&D with Chainmail. I'd played a LOT of Swords & Wizardry White Box, but we always used ascending armor class and the integration of Chainmail wasn't a thing yet. I found THIS PDF which has some great advice on how to use Chainmail with OD&D, and a lot of wisdom from other gamers in many forums about how to do it. Thing is- there was no absolute consensus. Some folks never used it. Some did. Some insist it's three systems to use whenever they seem appropriate. Some think it can somehow be hammered into a single resolution. It's by no means a universal answer. I came, I saw, I ran. And here's what I found.
Chainmail has several subsystems for adjudicating combat, and the ones that are most useful to D&D in the games I played were the Man-to-Man rules and the Fantasy Combat Table. The Mass Combat system could also be used, and might be a lot of fun from the perspective of a "Hero" mowing down scads of enemy troops or goblin-level baddies. It was in these rules that I found a couple of D&D epiphanies. Here's what I found:
1) "Hero" and "Superhero" as the titles of 4th and 8th-level Fighting Men really drive home the original intent of what a character level represented. A Hero was literally worth four regular soldiers. In the Mass Combat rules, a Hero was treated as four soldiers. A Superhero was treated as eight. That's an incredible amount of power difference. Today, most gamers think of 4th as "low-level" and 8th as "mid-level" at best. It's clear that 9th level was originally the beginning of a change in the game- where characters become nobles and rulers, settle down, build a castle, join the PTA. I'd always had this feeling from the placement of some other titles on the various tables- particularly 3rd-level Clerics being "Village Priest." That's the final title for many clergy members, and the title for the lead clergy for a temple. As in, an entire town might have a Village Priest as their highest level Cleric. 3rd Level then, is a Big Deal.
2) The Fantasy Combat Table doesn't even have an entry for normal humans. This seems to indicate that until Hero status is achieved, many fantasy monsters are simply beyond the ability of normal warriors. Even masses of them. This makes these creatures quite fearsome indeed, and the need for Hero-level adventurers to deal with them even more imperative for a town besieged by, say, a Troll.
3) The restriction of Magic-User characters to daggers makes a lot more sense when one looks at the Man-to-Man combat tables. For those of us who began with a version of D&D where all attacks did 1d6 damage, it was often confusing why this distinction was important. After all, in Moldvay for example, every class had the same chance to hit Armor Class 0 at 3rd Level, and did the same 1d6 damage. So what's the big deal? Well, this is borne out on the Man-to-Man table which pits each weapon, listed in a Weapon Class going from 1 (Dagger and Hand Axe) upward to 12 (Pike) versus Armor Classes going from 1 (No Armor) to 8 (Plate Armor and Shield). Note that the numbers for AC only appeared on the Individual Fires with Missiles table, not on the Man-To-Man Melee Table, which called out the type of armor and shield or lack thereof specifically with no associated number. This meant that the Dagger potentially had very, very different chances to strike a person in a given type of armor than another weapon. For example, Dagger versus unarmored required a 6 or better on 2d6, where a Sword needed a 7- the Dagger was superior here. But where a Sword needed a mere 10 to pierce Plate armor, the dagger needed a hail-Mary roll of boxcars (12) to make the same hit.
4) In line with 3) above, Armor Class was quite literally classes of armor. It was not the numerical progression it is today. Looking at the Man-to-Man Melee Table, each weapon is rated separately against each type of armor with and without a shield. This means it's not a simple matter of each class of armor giving a simple adjustment of 1-in-20 either way when progressing upward or downward along the list of possible Armor Classes. It was specific to what each weapon could do. This explains the Weapon vs. Armor tables that appeared in AD&D 1e, and the more general optional rules for piercing, slashing, etc. versus types of armor that appeared in 2nd Edition and later versions of D&D.
5) Hit Points were likewise a MUCH bigger deal in their very existence, aside from how many a character had. Here's why: In Chainmail, the Man-To-Man Melee Table clearly states this is the number to meet or beat on 2d6 to kill the target. So, pre-HP, a hit was a kill. Period. So, add the Hit Die and 1d6 damage per hit rules and what you've now done is create a completely new paradigm for life and death. Even a character with a measly 2HP now has a chance- no matter how small- to survive what would have been a killing blow. Someone who rolls average on their single Hit Die at 1st Level still now has a 50/50 chance to survive a wound that would have killed a rank-and-file trooper. A Hero (4th-Level Fighting Man) with 4 Hit Dice has an average of 14 Hit Points give or take. This means this character cannot be killed by any less than three deadly hits. Impressive, eh?
6) Monsters. Holy crap. Each monster gets an attack for each Hit Die they possess. This means the Troll I threw in got eight attacks per round. Now, I was treating the Troll's claws as daggers on the Man-to-Man table, but it got to try eight times per round to eviscerate the PCs.
So, what did I learn?
I learned a lot of the things that still exist in D&D had their genesis in Chainmail and still influence the game in some ways through tradition and mechanical evolution. I learned that the intent of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the original D&D was that achieving "Name Level" was a big freaking deal. Becoming a Lord or Wizard or Patriarch (Matriarch wasn't listed, but it was 1974) was a huge achievement, and characters of even 3rd- or 4th-Level were not to be trifled with. I learned things were a lot scarier when it took a Hero or Superhero to have any chance at all against some monsters, akin to needing magic weapons to hit in the editions with which I am more familiar. I learned that playing D&D this way is a whole hell of a lot of fun, but is very much an exercise in "Rulings, not rules."
All in all- I'd happily repeat this experiment with my home table, or at a con. It was a lot of fun, and kind of educational in the evolution of my hobby. I hope to have the opportunity to teach this version of D&D to folks out of a desire to spread that knowledge of our collective pasts around a bit.
Until next time. Someday, you'll find it. The Chainmail Connection. The lovers, the dreamers, and me. <<This reference brought to you by holy crap, I'm old.>>
