My Life As A Gamer: You Got Man-To-Man Combat In My Wargame (Part One)

(Citations from the Player's Handbook (PHB) and Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG) for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition (AD&D1e) as needed.)

In AD&D1e the difference in the rules between this--

--and this--

--is purely a matter of scale. In play, a campaign can move from Man To Man to Mass Battles and back again with the ease of breathing during the same game session- during the SAME BATTLE!

Why?

The answer is as obvious as it is profound: AD&D1e IS A WARGAME!

From here, I will be building on "Combat Breakdown: Mass-Action Design" from Primeval Patterns, so read that first and come back.

A lot of complaints have been made about AD&D1e's combat rules over the years. What all these complaints had in common, and it showed in the game designs for later D&D editions as well as with other tabletop role-playing games, is the presumption that AD&D1e is about man-to-man combat and anything else is an aberration.

This presumption is the basis for the objection over Rounds lasting one minute, despite that abstraction being explained at length (DMG p. 61), as well as the Fighter class being boring and useless compared to other classes, and TSR's publication of Battlesystem did not help this misconception at all.

The presumption is false; the rules are based around Mass Combat first, with man-to-man being the adjunct.

The problem is that most people who do "wargaming" these days do Warhammer or BattleTech and not the historical games that were commonplace in tabletop gaming when Arneson and Gygax made D&D. Those who are familiar with that style of game design, which includes several in the #BROSR, had no problems seeing AD&D1e's rules as a wargame ruleset.

As see at Primeval Patterns' article, this shift in perspective solves all of the common complaints with combat in AD&D1e.

That is not all there is to recover, and recently the #BROSR uncovered another that makes the Fighter one of the most important Classes in the game and thus the campaign- one that fills in the gaps and makes an oddity people talked about for generations make sense.

All of these things deserve proper attention--posts unto themselves--so get ready for another round of remedial education.

Come back for more over the week.