ADAD: It Morphs Into My Game

I wrote down house rules from our past AD&D games this morning, and it hit me.

Any first-edition game you play will become "your game" after a while.

Granted, this is also likely true for any B/X game; we did house rule those back in the day, but this is very true for any first-edition RPG since they are so fiddly and have lots of little parts to set and tweak. OSRIC, AD&D, and ADAD all qualify, and you have tons of little settings in here, from hit points, racial level limits, allowed races and classes, and so many other things to tweak to your liking. B/X did not have that much to tweak, so we more-or-less played it as-is.

As I write down house rules, any first-edition game becomes mine increasingly.

And I remember the game we had, and it was highly tweaked and tuned to our liking. This wasn't your usual "mix of B/X and AD&D" but a vastly expanded game with pages of house rules, tweaks, classes, monsters, spells, adjustments, weapons, powers, and so much more.

With Wizards of the Coast, the design mentality is "you all will play the game our way." Sure, there has been a lot of homebrewing in every modern version of D&D since 3.0, but the game's mentality is set to a default of "only what is in the official books is legal play."

Even the new edition focuses more on "mechanics and rules" than "you and the act of playing a role-playing game." This is a huge loss for the game. People don't play because of mechanics; if they do, they will play Pathfinder 2. Crunchy, mechanical editions drive players away.

The design of D&D has become heavy, with intricate subclasses defining character power, and those subclasses "level up" and get increasingly complicated. The longer I play 5E, the more books I collect, and the more complex the game is. It gets to such a point of obese overreach that the game is impossible without referencing a dozen books from the company and third parties.

With every 5E book, Kickstarter, or crowd-funded book I buy, my 5E game becomes less mine and more theirs. This is the fundamental difference between today's games and the ones we played.

5E is a game where you will never own your game. There is no investment or attachment.

Could I house rule 5E? I have.

Will I? No, there is too much to buy. I own too much stuff.

I never needed to house rule 5E. I bought a version of the game that worked for me. The framework of 5E puts you in a dependency relationship with the company that makes the game. You don't need to house rule; you have enough stuff! Look at all this stuff! I have more books than three lifetimes of stuff!

When I have eight shelves of 5E books, why house rule?

Here comes another Kickstarter for another 5E book; I do not need to be creative or imaginative. I need to be a good consumer and pay for the next thing. The new edition does not include monster design rules; they tell you to buy theirs.

I have one book for OSRIC, AD&D, or ADAD. The first edition is more of a simple framework, and the game has room for my ideas. I am not overwhelmed by 5E's rules, subclasses, multi-class exploits, relationships, and all sorts of action economy or cross-class issues.

But the first edition is designed to house-rule. I started a page here with my thoughts, preferences, and optional rules. I will improve, tweak, and test them as I play so they will get better. This set of house rules will grow and be my investment into my game - making it mine. If things are broken, I will fix them. If things are blah, I will drop them. If things work great, they will be kept. It is just like getting into the hobby of modding games like Skyrim; it makes the game yours.

The characters are simple.

The classes are simple.

The races are simple.

The rules are simple compared to 5E. If I want the easiest, I will go with OSRIC. If I want some of the modern classes, I will go with ADAD. I have both books, and they are nearly identical regarding the engine.

The game is built to mod.

The game will become yours, given time.