As you can see, the condition of the box left something to be desired. I don't know if someone sat on this or if it was just at the bottom of a stack of books, but the box is more caved-in than my underboobs. As you can see, the cat is dying to play.
Here are the rulebooks--yes, they used that exact same piece of artwork THREE TIMES. It's even more lazy and shameless than 4th Edition's recycling of 3rd Edition art. Notice also how the text is juuuuuust inconspicuous enough so it's easy to start reading the wrong one by mistake. How clever of TSR. These books are in okay condition--kind of fragile, but so long as you don't go throwing them against a wall they'll be fine. Whoever owned this thing last marked one of the DM Rulebook pages with a paperclip, leaving rust stains on the tops of several pages. The box was also supposed to contain dice and a crayon (more on that in a bit), but this copy didn't have them.
By this point in its history, Dungeons & Dragons was already well into the multiple-edition-clusterfuck stage. This was no less than the third version of D&D Basic in six years. Players were supposed to start with Basic and progress into Advanced as they grew more accustomed to the game, but TSR wound up dividing into camps--Gary Gygax, working on Advanced, wanted specific rules to cover any and every situation, while Basic's developers preferred a more improvisational approach--and the two versions of D&D effectively cut ties. Further adding to the confusion, the original tan box wasn't discontinued until 1979. Stickly, it's like they WANTED their fans to dissolve into squabbling factions. There's also a bizarre rumor that Basic was a plot to screw Dave Arneson out of credit and/or royalties. If that was the plan, I probably wouldn't have thanked the guy at the beginning of the Player's Guide, or listed him as D&D's co-creator at the beginning of the Dungeon Master's Rulebook, but maybe that's just me. (To make this even funnier, I've also heard a rumor that the second edition of AD&D was a plot to screw Gygax out of credit and royalties. Can we just agree these guys were shit businessmen and move on, please?)
Of all the various editions of D&D, this one is the most like a toy. The books are written to be easy for children to comprehend, and it bends over backwards to avoid causing offense ("no, a cleric's religion ISN'T important--look, let's just not talk about it, OKAY?!")--this might be the only pre-3rd version not to have any chainmail bikinis. Perhaps the most toy-like aspect, though, would be the dice--apparently you were supposed to color in the numbers on the dice with the crayon. What the hell? Was number-paint an option TSR forgot to order? Did the little paint-in-the-numbers robotic arm at the dice factory break down? Was a few dabs of paint just some unspeakable financial hardship but that closet full of crayons was just sitting there? I wanna know, dammit!
Speaking of the art, apart from the flagrant copying it's pretty good--nothing in here looks like Erol Otus fingerpainting on a Trapper Keeper with his own feces. Sure, it mostly rips off Barry Windsor-Smith, but what fantasy artist didn't back in the 80s?
The Player's Guide introduces you to the rules in an unusual way by D&D standards--it starts you off playing solo. Naturally you play a fighter, since we're still in the period where that's the only useful class at 1st level. I played this section myself (NO, I didn't use the included character sheet--I just wrote it all out on scratch paper) and I have to admit it worked pretty well. What's really odd, though, is that the Player's Guide also plugs a few solo modules. Funny, I can't imagine those being big sellers. Also, I don't know if I would've thrown a solo 1st-level fighter up against a rust monster. I mean, I beat it, but still. Actually, since the Basic rust monster isn't capable of physically hurting you, it occurs to me that an effective strategy would be to strip naked and beat it to death with your fists.
A bit about classes--I think it's funny how the Player's Guide basically admits "yeah, you can play a party of all fighters and you'll probably be okay". 1st-level wizards--sorry, "magic-users", because why use one word when you can use two, right?--are even more useless than usual; their spellbook is very, very heavy and they don't even get to pick their own spells. Clerics are as boring and indispensable as ever, and thieves use WAAAAAAY too many percentile rolls. Also, the non-human races (elf, dwarf, and halfling) are their own classes because TSR were a bunch of cocksucking racists. They claim the demihumans are more powerful, but that only really seems true of one of them (PROTIP: it's the elf).
This edition uses the deeply, deeply stupid lower-is-better Armor Class system, with chart for what you need to roll to hit depending on AC and hit dice. I actually approve for once--this is aimed at children, after all, but why make things easy on the little bastards? Just wait 'til they see THAC0--then they'll beg for Uncle Gary's red box! BEG, I TELL YOU!!! *pant* *pant* Sorry.
The Dungeon Master's Rulebook contains the standard DM stuff--monsters, treasure tables, and a sample adventure. This set is only for levels 1-3, so it doesn't have TOO many insta-kill traps/monsters, but it can't resist putting a few in there (such as the normal poison rules, and one trap in the sample adventure involving a set of golden plates). To paraphrase Blackbeard, if TSR didn't kill one of you occasionally, you might forget who they were. It's actually not nearly as sadistic as AD&D, though--the Rulebook warns DMs that just because you can throw ten goblins at once at a 1st-level party doesn't mean you should and so forth. What's really weird, I think, is that experience is partly--hell, mostly--based on how much lewt you wind up with (1 gp=1 xp). Yes, excellent! They'll be fighting over treasure division as it is--maybe this way they'll even shed blood MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Sorry again.
So, if the opportunity came up, would I play this? Yes. It's as bare bones as D&D gets--there is pretty much no fluff of any kind in these books, even the alignment system is so abstract they might as well have left it out--but that just increases its pick-up-and-play value. This edition is almost perfectly suited to one-shots. It's a great edition for dashing off characters you have nothing invested in and killing them off in increasingly hilarious ways, and sometimes that's what you're looking for in a D&D game. I'm not about to toss aside 4th edition or anything, but yeah, I'd play this. Probably enjoy it, too.
TSR, however, were still racists. Who liked the taste of penis.
No comments:
Post a Comment