Off the Shelf: Legend

The original Legend game by Miongoose Publishing is still in print and worth keeping. This OGL game made all its test content open under the OGL and restates the RQ2 ruleset many loved.

Yes, I get that Mythras has replaced this under a better license. But this is original source data, like an original Unix distribution, much like the first Cepheus SRD, and it forms a pillar of our hobby. And yes, Mythras is a great game (albeit with a tiny font), but Legend is a small-book game that captures my imagination more than the massive hardcovers do.

The only thing that comes close is OpenQuest, another great fork of the original RQ-style rules. Cepheus, OpenQuest, and all the other fan efforts will keep these systems playable and open long after the rights pass to someone else, and things get locked away behind website portals, subscription services, and closed gardens. These will be the last games we can truly own and share.

When companies buy up the last available IP and move to smaller IPs, it will all be locked away, and you will be forced to pay for it through a subscription model. This is already happening in Hollywood, as the franchise series we loved are being merged and bought with the goal of making us rent our happiness and memories.

Even the defunct OGL is a path out of this corporate hellhole we all face.

If you are playing a closed-garden game, you are on the side of the media-powerhouse merger and rental model. They'll sell D&D like this for billions; prices will rise, legal threats will go out, and customers will be shoved into a portal for a monthly fee. Sorry. This is the road we are all looking at ahead of us. And once D&D is sold, other recognizable IPs and similar ones will be sold. Properties will be snatched up. There will come a time when Wall Street comes in and buys everything up like private homes, turning it all into rental properties. Some markets are so hot you probably can't find private homes anymore. 

We haven't gotten there yet in gaming, though in AAA gaming you can see the warning signs. You don't own your games. Physical media is being dropped. There will be no second-hand market anymore. They can wipe your games if you stop playing for a while or say the wrong thing online.

Again, we are a few years out from this, but you can see the warning signs in D&D with digital-only DLC and releases. Once the website shuts down, all that digital content goes poof. Gone forever. Like it never existed, and they can sell it to you again in the next edition.

The line is drawn now, at least for me.

And if you support closed-source games, you're honestly contributing to this mess and what is coming. All the closed-license games get sold. I start talking about them less and less. They're all dead ends, with no future, and really not worth my time. All of them will end up on AI and walled gardens. All of them will be state-enforced rental schemes.

I still have the open community editions of these games. I can still play them in 10 years. I can still create derivative works and self-publish.

In 10 years?

I doubt most people will even have what we have today.

There is Enough Game Here

More isn't better, and these days I will happily choose quality over quantity. I find OSRIC 3.0 far more of a game than I will ever use, and I don't lament losing copyrighted content from the original 1E books. Part of me finds it liberating; my worlds are truly my worlds now, and my creations don't include copyrighted IP. My worlds are mine, and I have enough monsters here to tell any story I want.

Since OSE is a smaller subset of this, and OSRIC is closer to 1E in spirit, this feels like home. I got the classic campaign bad guys here: dragons, demons, humanoids, giants, and all of my favorites. If I want, I have the Swords & Wizardry and Dark & Deep bestiaries close by, just in case I need an odd monster here or there.

I have been testing the rules and getting used to the combat round. The classic party of four, fighter, thief, cleric, and magic-user, is highly capable, and the martial classes shine brightly. They are tougher than I expected, taking down four 2 HD monsters in most fights and taking some damage, but they still feel capable and strong.

But the resource game is at its best. Characters get hurt and stay hurt in 1E, and there are no "cheap rests" to save you. Tabletop gaming has gotten entirely too risk-averse, and if you can't push your luck a little, that is not adventure, and there is no excitement. You take a few scrapes and bruises, and you keep going. You can't "heal your way up," and every resource gets taken down. Playing smart is conserving what you have and thinking your way around encounters. 

Creative play is cutthroat and smart play, not the "e-sport" dungeoning has become.

I don't like what modern dungeon-crawling has become. It is overly concerned with story, to the point where the story is more important than the game. It celebrates copying powers from anime and movies, and sits downstream of pop culture. It isn't itself that others copy. When D&D invented the Dark Elf mystique and culture, something that everybody copied, that was cool. When D&D is shipping "Airbender" classes, get out of here; you are being reductive and copying others.

Be the thing that others copy.

And 1E is the perfect example. A vague notion of what could have been came first with BX, and tabletop gaming peaked with 1E. Everything since has been a copy, a reductive version, or a weak attempt to recreate the original magic. 2E? Written out of fear. 3-5E? Wizards MTG-ification, card-based powers, and ultimately flawed and unsustainable card-season design theory gave us multiple incompatible versions over nearly 3 decades.

1E is the purest implementation of the idea, unburdened by decades of pop culture and fear. Nothing here is driving another book sale, and some argue that adding books to 1E makes it worse. A near-perfect game doesn't need much more, and that is freedom for me to fill in the rest with my ideas.

OSRIC vs. BX

What am I seeing that most of OSR YouTube is missing? Why am I so hyped about OSRIC? How does 1E fix most of BX's problems? Why is 1E superior to BX?

Timing.

In BX (going by OSE Classic), here is the turn order:

Combat Sequence Per Round (BX/OSE)

1. Declare spells and melee movement
2. Initiative: Each side rolls 1d6.
3. Winning side acts:
1. Monster morale
2. Movement
3. Missile attacks
4. Spell casting
5. Melee attacks
4. The other side acts in initiative order.

They follow a strict turn order to compensate for the lack of OSRIC turn timing. Spells must be announced at the start of the turn, so if you lose initiative, the spell can be disrupted if the caster is successfully attacked or fails a saving throw.

Note where missile attacks land in this turn order; this will come up.

If you aren't using this turn order in BX and are playing "fast and loose," you are missing the point and making casters too powerful. The entire BX turn order is a patch that tries to simulate 1E's elegant combat turn, but it breaks or forces attacker classes into a set order, eliminating any granular, meaningful detail in combat.

BX combat is "one size fits all."

Let's hit OSRIC, and I am NOT going to AD&D, since AD&D's initiative order is confusing because you are "rolling for the other side." OSRIC cleans this up and keeps the same core idea. In OSRIC, you roll for the phase when your side starts.

The order of events in OSRIC is as follows:

1. Determine Surprise (d6) and encounter distance.
2. Declare Spells and General Actions.
3. Determine Initiative (d6 and you go in the segment number you rolled, so a low roll goes earlier and is better). Missile attack bonuses may let individuals make ranged attacks before the main group attacks. Also, higher-level fighter-types may attack in specific segments with their Melee Attack Combinations instead of the rest of the group.
4. The party with initiative acts first (casting spells, attacking, etc.), and results take effect (except spells, which have casting times before they take effect). Note: Some actions may let the other side “interrupt” with an action, such as a fleeing attack or attacking charging opponents with spears set against a charge.
5. The party that lost initiative acts, and results take effect (except spells, which take effect when casting time ends).
6. The round is complete; declare spells and general actions for the next round if the battle has not been resolved (go back to step 2).

Seems very similar, right? I can't see the difference, and I did not at first, either. It is "just initiative," but lower is better here? Both sides go on their own roll, so how is that any different than side-based initiative in BX? So there are "10 phases" in a combat turn, so what?

Three things change that number:

1. Casters start casting the spell in their initiative phase and end when they complete the spell's casting time in segments.
2. High DEX missile weapon users can "jump ahead" and lower their phase by the DEX chart modifier.
3. Weapon specialization locks multiattack turns to phases 1 and 10 for those weapons.

There is a fourth thing for what OSE calls "slow" weapons, forcing them to always lose initiative, which is a hack and overly punishing. In OSRIC, weapon speed only breaks ties for combatants in the same phase, and the overly punishing BX rule for slow two-handed melee and missile weapons always losing initiative is gone.

The caster starts the spell in their phase and finishes "casting time" phases later, giving anyone in between a chance to attack them and disrupt the spell. This is the missing caster balance we have been looking for in every edition of D&D Wizards has put out. Are you a fast-attack specialist, or a high-DEX archer? Chances are you will be the one taking shots at enemy mages and ruining their spellcasting. And it is such a simple timing rule! Modern game designers have to think their way around the barn to get what Gygax gave us in 1E, and invent dozens of pages of subclass abilities and combat rules just to capture what a simple timing system built into combat does in 1E.

BX is too simple, and slow spells aren't any different from fast ones. What combat spell you pick matters here. Are you using a fast-cast combat spell (Burning Hands, fast, happens in the same segment), or winding up a massive, slow-casting fireball (3-segment cast time)? This is the baseball "bunt" versus "grand slam" choice casters need to make in combat. Do I cast something in the same phase, or wind up and hit them with a big spell later, risking losing it?

What? Betting theory in casting? Take a big risk for a big effect?

Quick, somebody start a crowdfunding campaign to write and sell a new game with these revolutionary rules! The same ones we had in 1980! Somebody make "Advanced Combat Casting" for 5E and sell these rules there, too!

BX spells don't have this built in, and none of them have segmented casting time. This is where 1E clearly beats the too-simple BX. The second part of caster balance is risk-reward, which BX and 5E both simplify out of the game, leaving us with overpowered casters again. They keep spell disruption, but entirely miss the point of the gambling choice casters must make.

It gets better. High-DEX missile weapon users jump ahead and can attack ahead of the party. If you know classic Tunnels and Trolls, this is the pre-combat "missile weapons phase" in that game, where missile weapon fire can happen before party action. The party may lose initiative, but the party's missile-weapon users can still go before the monsters. You can also hold your phase and wait for a monster to start casting, and target them. All this in a simple turn-order rule that other games ignore.

You don't get that in BX or 5E.

It gets even better, as if I need to pile on. The optional weapon specialization rules give you a 3/2 attack rate at levels 1-6 for two proficiency picks. The double-attack turns are the odd ones out, meaning on turn one of every combat, your specialized weapon attacks in phase 1 and phase 10. So, my fighter who picks weapon specialization for their longsword acts in phase 1 at the start of every combat, and they get an extra attack at the end of the turn to clean up. You get two attacks at the start of battle, and you always win initiative with that specialized weapon.

It is like getting a free action surge every other turn at level one. BX needs house rules and zines to spice up the fighter. The 1E fighter is plenty spicy.

5E writes dozens of pages of rules to address this and invents an overcomplicated, slow action economy system. They stack dozens of pages of subclass options to give me what 1E builds into the combat turn. Players flip through their character sheets while my 1E fighter knows exactly what they are doing this turn. 

Going first. Killing things. And mopping up.

And all this for only a moderate increase in turn-order and timing complexity. This is easier than 5E's action economy and overdesigned collection of special action types. Gary Gygax was a genius-level game designer, and today's designers often fumble in the dark trying to simulate this elegance and powerful simplicity. OSRIC just boils it down and makes it very clear what is going on, even to new players.

And since the spell lists have phase timing, it all works together beautifully. BX spells do not have this.

You may prefer BX's simplified combat; there are times when I couldn't care less about phase timing. But never assume "1E is BX with a bigger book and more rules" - it isn't. 1E refactors the BX system by adding a critical timing layer to combat and rebuilding D&D around the phased-combat system to better balance casters and buff martial characters. You don't need to "add spells" to balance martial classes, 5E! We have this in 1E! And OSR YouTube, for the most part, ignores this core difference and presents 1E as "rules-heavy BX."

If you read OSRIC, you will see most of the differences between OSRIC and BX are related to this phased-turn system. Once you understand this simple change, you unlock the power of 1E, and your games get much better and more tactical.

Gygax knew this was how you could fix casters and buff martial classes with an elegant, simple, clean phased-timing combat turn.

It is pure genius.

The 1E Bard

"The bard is an unusual class that starts out similar to the thief class, representing something like a medieval wandering troubadour, but at higher level is accepted into the secret society of bardic colleges and becomes a master of law, lore, and hidden knowledge, allied with the ancient druidic hierarchy."

-The Heroic Legendarium, p24

But OSRIC doesn't have a bard!

It does now.

Not having a bard felt limiting to me; I could hack one together with a multiclass thief/magic-user, but a classic bard class felt like it would push me more toward a 2E clone, like For Gold & Glory. We have an excellent bard, found over here in the Heroic Legendarium, an expansion for 1E material, but it works perfectly with OSRIC and any 1E game.

We have a d8 hit die and thief abilities that progress as thieves, but stop at 8th level. We get a morale buff, singing that negates monster singing attacks, and enthrall. What makes this version of the 1E, 2E, or 3E bard the best is that the book includes entirely unique "bard songs" used for the spells. Yes, bards, here you get your very own spell list. This is the premium deluxe; nothing held back. This book is mine, 1E bard. 96 music-based spells, all yours.

Since these are written for 1E, all spells have casting times and include segments. This is where BX spell lists break when trying to use them for 1E, and you can't claim 1E compatibility unless you include casting time all the way down to the segment, since 1E needs this for caster balance. Without segment-based casting, casters begin to become far too powerful. Time has always balanced casters, and lesser designers simplified the concept, thinking the audience couldn't handle the depth.w

Gygax knew how to balance casters: put them on the clock, let them get hit, and the spell gets lost. Instant martial advantage, and a huge buff to ranged, and rogues, the party's fast attackers were the anti-caster "spell defense" of the party. What do we get today? MMO DPS classes with a few skill tricks.

The more you see how Wizards removed the time factor in its versions of D&D, the more the house of cards starts to collapse. Even BX is weak to this comparison, and all BX derivative games share 5E's problems because of oversimplification. I have to call this out. I love BX, but I will call out its weaknesses and point to a superior design that fixes the fundamental flaw of oversimplifying casting time.

These bards are cool. They are the bards we deserved, and this book plus OSRIC is a match made in gaming heaven. You are not borrowing spells from other caster lists in a lazy hack, some sort of "house band" that never plays its own stuff. You get your own spells here, never borrowed, and you are not a "cover caster" recycling the greatest hits of other spellcasting classes.

Well, that makes a lot of my books useless, and it puts a lot of these other lazy game designer bard implementations to shame. If I see another bard implementation that sloppily borrows from everyone else's spell lists, I'm tossing the book out the window.

If you want 1E's superior design and a bard the game deserves, check out the OSRIC 3 plus Heroic Legendarium combination.

It's music to my ears.

The More I Learn OSRIC...

...the worse 5E gets.

There is an element of timing attacks, delays, spell disruption, and weapon specialization that OSRIC (1E, or AD&D) does in the base combat turn that renders most D&D 5E level 1 to 5 fighter abilities useless. The more I learned about OSRIC and its massively cleaned-up AD&D combat turn, the more Gary Gygax's genius shone through in a way that shocked me.

This is seriously good stuff. The original "advanced" game beats 5E by a mile, and my first-level fighter with a longsword specialization is making two attacks every other turn, starting with the first. So, an AD&D fighter has a permanent "action surge" every other turn?

Lethality is way down from Old School Essentials and most BX "death at zero" games. Because death happens at -10 hit points and "aid" isn't a roll, I have rarely had any outright deaths at level one. Even if my party is completely defeated, rarely, they go as low as -10, and as a game master, I can rule that the PCs are captured and ransomed, or that they need to attempt a breakout a week later from a cell.

AD&D is less deadly than BX?

What? This is not what D&D YouTube is telling me.

INT casters have a "max spells remembered" that is separate from Vancian magic slots, and they fill those slots from this "max pool," which they need to swap out and relearn from their spellbooks. Magic users are powerful, yes, but they are treated with far more respect and have more interesting learning and memorization mechanics here than "member a million spells' games. Magic users are cool and need to think ahead about the challenges they'll face.

Casting time and phased combat balanced caster power.

As I force myself to learn the system, the wisdom comes through. And future editions begin to fade. We really did have the best game back then. What 5E tried to do with special powers, 1E originally handled through structure and attack timing. We had all that before they tore it out of the turn structure and forced you to write it down as "subclass options" and powers they give as you level. They removed all the built-in options the turn structure gave us and turned them into record-keeping on the character sheets.

And a lot of new games live on assumptions and fallacies from older games, push some new designer trick, and call the old games clunky and too complicated. Design-wise, many crowdfunded games can't hold a candle to 1E. 5E breaks at high level; 1E doesn't, and it took us that many editions to figure out the company running D&D ships broken editions every time they bump up the version number.

1E doesn't break, and if you learn the system, it offers greater tactical options and a deeper caster game.

A few thousand monsters and spells, along with hundreds of subclasses, don't make a good game. It makes a worse one.

1E in the Age of BX

"Dictums are given for the sake of the game only, for if ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is to survive and grow, it must have some degree of uniformity, a familiarity of method and procedure from campaign to campaign within the whole." 

"If it is all too plain and too easy, the players will quickly lose interest, and your effort will prove to have been in vain. Likewise, if the campaign is too difficult, players will quickly become discouraged and lose interest in a game where they are always the butt; again your labors will have been for naught." 

"The danger of a mutable system is that you or your players will go too far in some undesirable direction and end up with a short-lived campaign. Participants will always be pushing for a game which allows them to become strong and powerful far too quickly."

-Gary Gygax, AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, Page 7

The huge push for AD&D 1E had two parts: D&D's early game was going in a million directions and getting out of control, and business reasons (royalties) to consider when creating a new game. That last part sucked, but I get it. But Gygax's words at the front of the original DMG warned us against much of what came after.

One is a warning against BX. I get it; BX is an amazing creative platform, far better than AD&D, and people knew that back in the late 1970s when this all started to come apart and AD&D was needed. Go to a convention, sit down to play "D&D," and you don't know what you're playing. You see this today with 5E tables, and the push for standardization is strong and needed for organized play.

Another warning worth heeding is making the campaign "too plain", which you see today in the multiverse-of-magic model modern D&D 5.5E is built on: every world is a colorful box of marshmallow shapes, everyone has magic, the planes are everywhere, and magic replaces technology. Today's modern, cosmopolitan, sci-fi, alien-packed D&D is both too mundane and far too magical. No unique ancestry is special anymore. Magic is so common it is boring.

A power level that gets out of control kills your game and drives players away. I don't like DMing a game where players laugh at carefully created challenges, and D&D 5.5E is horribly broken above 10th level, and they admitted they slacked off on testing the game's balance. Gygax carefully balanced AD&D to work all the way up to high levels. Ever since AD&D 2nd Edition, they have been destroying that.

But compared with BX, AD&D gives me more mental stimulation and puzzle-solving, which I enjoy more than BX's straightforward, highly malleable game. BX is like Silly Putty; it can be anything you want: a sci-fi game here, a detective game there. Where BX falls short for me is in being too simple and too malleable. There is nothing to "sink my teeth into" regarding weapon speed, reach, and encumbrance playing a major role in my martial character's survival.

There is a sidebar here about "BX Incorporated" which feels like a lot of the OSR these days, and the non-BX options feeling like second citizens. Gary's feelings about BX being so malleable and undefined are both its greatest strength and fatal flaw. I love BX, but not every retro-clone needs to be it, and we've forgotten plenty of what made AD&D so great.

My BX mage can choose from infinite spells and understand them all instantly. In AD&D (specifically OSRIC 3), I have a maximum number of "understood" spells per level, which defines the pool I can memorize daily spells from. Sure, I can play an INT 9 magic-user, but I can only understand 6 spells per spell level, and I will need to swap them out and relearn them from my spellbook to put them into that memorization pool. Practically, your INT is high enough that you don't hit the limit unless you are very high level and have collected a few hundred spells. Realistically, this is the balance we have always needed for casters: it forces them to study and build spell pools to pull from when it's time to memorize daily spells.

I like this feeling for magic! The spells are so big and complicated that they're hard to hold in your head, and you need to keep studying to swap things out and pull in ones you haven't used in ages. This one rule creates the Gandalf who sits by the fire, reads his spellbook, makes room in his head for that wall-of-ice spell he never uses, and tells the others to be quiet so he can get his understanding to roll, so they can all live tomorrow.

In BX and D&D 5E, mages have infinite RAM in their memories and can hold 300 first-level spells in their brains, plus 1500 others. There is no "re-understanding" a spell, and mages become entitled and overpowered mana conduits of death, with far too much spell choice, no forced thematic study, and, frankly, boring and overpowered. BX at least makes them less survivable, but I love AD&D's quirky thematic rules that force a magic-user to "act like Gandalf."

And games that copy elements of AD&D but forget these Gygaxian fiddly parts emulate the math but miss the finer details that "make the dish complete." The new OSE adopts AD&D-isms, but it omits all the intricate, Swiss-watch, deeply thematic, genre-defining minor rules. Watered-down AD&D is sometimes like a fast-food restaurant trying to make its own version of what a 5-star chef would prepare. 

Better than the burger on the menu? Yes. Is it exactly the same as what the master chef gave us?

Clearly, no.

And AD&D 2nd Edition, a game I love, lost its soul and started to creep into story gaming, moving away from the fiddly, intricate mechanics that forced players who learned the rules to act like the class the rules presented.

And OSRIC 3.0 is the community-supported version of the game, always there, and easy to learn and teach. People can publish for this. Until Wizards puts the original books back in print (unchanged) and open-licenses them, this is the best we got. You can't touch perfection. This is as close as we can get, and it's something we can build a community around.

And AD&D/OSRIC is far less complicated than D&D 5E, especially when you factor in the action economy, how builds interact with it, and what's allowed and what isn't. Mid- and high-level D&D 5.5E play is more complex than GURPS, and the combat turns take far longer to figure out. With AD&D, the mid-complexity is harder than BX and low-level 5E, but it keeps a flat difficulty curve all the way up to level 20. BX stays too simple, while 5E gets far too time-consuming.

And the complexity pays off, especially for martial characters balancing weapon speed and reach, picking specializations, gaining those bonuses, and fine-tuning their combat profile. Oh, and if you are not wearing a helmet, roll a d6. On a 1, your AC is 10 this turn as the blow comes at your head. Ah, thank you; all those dyed Supercuts hairstyles in 5.5E with characters missing head protection, go away. Football players and soldiers wear helmets, so should you. BX doesn't do that unless house-ruled, but why house-rule when we have it here, and it is a standard rule at all tables?

The more I sit down, forget the biases modern games have implanted in my mind, read the original AD&D books, and learn the classic 1E game, the more I see what's wrong with today's dichotomy between BX and 5E.

Off the Shelf: OSRIC 3

I love Adventures Dark & Deep, but it is a massive game. The low-level starting guide helps a lot, but I'd still play it after I'd exhausted 1E. And there is a lot to play in 1E. Dark & Deep feels like a massive modded game, and while I absolutely love those, sometimes a clean, basic ruleset appeals to me more than a "more stuff" game.

I want something clean, tight, with limited options, easy for new players, and expandable.

And I want a game that works.

OSRIC 3 will never let us down, nor will it ever be torn up and changed. Version 2 was very close, and version 3 is the closest yet to perfection. The first edition was one of those perfect games, and the downfall started when they messed with the formula, started commercializing the game, and sanitized it in reaction to the Satanic Panic. The second edition is really only as good as it is because of the first edition, but it was always a step down from its peak.

OSRIC is like OSE Classic for AD&D.

Sometimes, BX or 1E is all I want or need. A simple alchemical base. A clean, constrained, blank canvas from which I can create a million ideas. I don't want the extra stuff, and I can add most of it myself. Sure, this game doesn't have bards, but the book above has a great bard, and people have been hacking homebrew classes into 1E for nearly 50 years. Besides, the bard has been a bit of a trash fire for the last three editions of D&D, and I don't mind a game that lets me step away from them for a while and bring back the one I really like. This is true of many other expansion classes, too.

BX works well with 1E, and most of it is fully compatible.

1E is the only game that ever delivered balanced high-level play. Forget 2E; the expansions and splat-books blew it up. 1E is the only version of D&D that you could play to maximum level, and it still worked. BX only goes to 14. 1E goes all the way. It will never be broken since, like the original OSE, it is a reference work.

And high-level play is still very deadly. Resurrection is never guaranteed. Death has a price. All characters will die in this game, either after a short, adventurous life or after settling down and having heirs. Any other game that keeps your character alive forever is lying to you.

And OSRIC is community-supported. This is its biggest strength. Sure, I can buy POD copies of the original books and keep them safe, but those will not be on sale or available forever. OSRIC will endure long after the company and IP are sold off and merged into another trillion-dollar entertainment monopoly. I love the original game, but I love the community more. This is why I support OSRIC. It is open-licensed. They can never take this away from us. It will never change. It uses the fixed numbers and math the hobby's creator approved.

It's a beginner's game for 1E. That has never been done, and not even the original 1E game is easy for beginners. I can teach someone this pretty easily. I can do this with the Dark & Deep basic book, too, but OSRIC feels like OSE Classic Fantasy to me. I can teach anyone 1E.

But why 1E over BX?

For the same reasons Gary made AD&D: to standardize the rules. To have consistent convention play.  To reduce arguments and eliminate rule inconsistency. To have a balanced high-level game, something we've lost in 50 years of D&D and never had since.

Sure, BX is the beginner game and always was, but for people who come together and play seriously, 1E was the version of the game best designed for official and convention play. 2E fell into the story-gaming and power-gaming trap, lost its edge, changed the math, and it bankrupted the company. BX does not create a solid, long-term, convention-ready ruleset that eliminates ambiguity and house ruling. You don't have to make much up to play 1E, and everyone can agree on the rules and rulings. Ultimately, this speeds play and standardizes the experience for everyone.

Gary knew 1E was the best version of the game for long-term play, and in more than 50 years, that is still true.

While my 1E books are the original source, OSRIC is the community edition of the classic, and far easier to hand a new player and for the community to support.