I think I found my dream version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Sadly, I don’t think I’ll ever find a group with which to run or play it at this point in my life … but them’s the breaks. I’m just happy to have found it, to have read it, and to just know it exists. Someday …

The way I was introduced to playing D&D was sort of weird. However, I think it happened in a manner that many gamers who started playing in the late Seventies and early Eighties (like myself) would understand. I made an elf as my very first character, using the Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert rules set for D&D – the ones with the Erol Otus covers. With a little “tweaking” from the DM, I played that character in “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” … a module written for 1st-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. My sister Laura had a similar experience, as she made a halfling from the B/X D&D rules and played it in “Tomb of Horrors” as her first adventure – talk about a trial by fire! In both of our cases, we made characters for one rules set and played them in another that was sort-of-but-not-really-100%-compatible … and, for the most part, it worked.

Most of my earliest gaming experiences worked like that, randomly bouncing things between “boxed set” D&D and the “rulebook” AD&D, like playing assassins in “Castle Amber” and other such things. For a long time, it didn’t really occur to me that there was anything really different between the two. Both D&D and AD&D were all supposed to be “Dungeons & Dragons”, so I assumed (as did most gamers I knew at the time) they were all meant to be part of the same game.

At the time, I was also flying model airplanes in competition events where there were four skill levels: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, and Expert. For some reason, I assumed that D&D worked exactly the same way as my model airplane competitions, and that “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” was somehow supposed to slide neatly between “Basic” and “Expert”. The fact that a careful analysis of “Advanced” D&D would instantly shoot holes in that logic never fazed me; at the time, that’s just what I believed. (I also spent an inordinate amount of time searching for “Intermediate” D&D rules, to no avail …)

Though the D&D/AD&D games I played back then eventually moved over towards something far closer to what was in the AD&D rulebooks, and the Basic/Expert D&D elements eventually got phased out, those games that I played always remained, by and large, houseruled games. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this in recent years, and I think it’s one of the main components of what I’d call the “grognard” experience. Basically, I learned how to play D&D/AD&D not from reading the rulebooks in any great detail, but simply by playing with more experienced gamers who “already knew the rules”. I learned enough of the rules so that I could make a character, but I never really knew a lot of the fiddly details. It was much more of an informal experience – rather than relying on the Rules As Written, there was much more of a reliance on the Rules As Played. When I eventually started running my own AD&D games, I essentially took the rules as I’d learned them through play, and used them to run my own games, despite the fact that a close examination of the rulebooks would’ve revealed I wasn’t doing certain things “correctly”, or at least with the Rules As Written.

I think this is how a lot of gamers learned to play back in the late Seventies and early Eighties. There was no online community, no global group of gamers with which to easily check and compare ways to interpret rules or to optimize characters. The only way to get rules clarifications from TSR was to mail a letter to “Sage Advice” in Dragon Magazine and hope that it got answered … in a couple of months. Rules disputes and interpretations back then were all handled within the group, without relying on “official” rules interpretations.

Compare that now to D&D 3.0, or 3.5, or 4E. When 3.0 was released, everyone started from the same playing field, so to speak … it was no longer a matter of learning from group to group, but an entire community learning how to play a game they loved all over again all at once. And, with the advent of the Internet, it was easy to share that experience, and to compare notes with one another, and to get “official” rulings and errata from the writers of the game very, very quickly. That’s when the game shifted more from something that had rules which varied from group to group, to something where everyone could adhere more strongly to the Rules As Written. I don’t look at either method as necessarily right or wrong … they’re just different.

I’ve learned over the years that I really liked the loose flexibility of my old AD&D games. I never really liked the mechanical bloat of D&D 3.0/3.5 and its stubborn insistence on explaining how everything works. I like D&D 4E a little better, but it strays perhaps a bit too far from the old versions of D&D/AD&D for my liking. I like both of those versions of the game, and enjoy playing them a lot, but they’re far from my own personal “ideal” version of the game.

My own dream version of D&D is something that’s rules-light, and that doesn’t rely on miniatures for combat. While I used to love painting miniatures, I never really used them in my own games, apart from big battle or when combat would get super-crazy in terms of the number of opponents the characters faced. I never used the weapon speed factor chart from AD&D as written (then again, who did?), instead relying on a slight penalty for polearms and a slight bonus for darts and daggers. I never used the flanking rules, or a whole bunch of other combat rules listed in the good old original Dungeon Masters Guide (most of which I didn’t remember, or even knew existed until a careful re-read of the book a few years ago!).

In short … my ideal version of the game is Basic/Expert D&D, with a healthy smattering of 1st-edition AD&D thrown in for good measure.

A few years ago, Goblinoid Games put out a game called Labyrinth Lord, a “retro-clone” of the Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert rules set for D&D. Now, they’ve just put out the Advanced Edition Companion for Labyrinth Lord … an optional rules set that lets gamers add in fun stuff to their Labyrinth Lord games like gnomes, assassins, and the demon lord Orcus.

Kind of sounds like Basic/Expert D&D, with a healthy smattering of 1st-edition AD&D thrown in for good measure, and it is. And it works beautifully.

The main thing I love about the Labyrinth Lord/ Advanced Edition Companion combination is that it retains that wonderful “old school” simplicity while streamlining and cleaning things up. A Labyrinth Lord game using the Advanced Edition Companion wouldn’t be like the old days of mishmashing B/X D&D with AD&D – the Advanced Edition Companion makes the amalgamation of the two concepts pretty damn seamless.

Granted, I wish there were a few more tweaks to the Advanced Edition Companion rules that more closely matched some of the better house rules I’ve heard for AD&D (like giving magic-users a spell bonus for high Intelligence, in the way clerics get a spell bonus for high Wisdom), but overall, I can’t complain. It’s done extremely well. Kudos to Daniel Proctor for making such a great addition to an already great game.

So now, the Advanced Edition Companion sits on my shelf, patiently waiting to be played someday. Realistically, that day might never come. Most of the gamers I know right now are much more into D&D 4E, or Pathfinder, or Exalted. Of all the gamers I know and roll dice with, “old school” D&D seems to be something that only interests me at the moment.

But if you want a game that provides a fantastic old-school gaming experience, one perfectly suited for the dungeon crawling days of yore, look no further than Labyrinth Lord and the Advanced Edition Companion. It’s a perfect fit for that open style of gaming.

And who knows? Weirder things have happened. The Advanced Edition Companion may get its chance someday …