This is a response to Eric Diaz’s “The AD&D burger” so you may want to go and read that first.
I do agree with Eric that AD&D is better than B/X, but I think his chosen analogy (the burger) is reflective of a discursive problem with how the OSR community often approaches AD&D (and by AD&D in this post, I strictly mean AD&D - 1e and 2e, published by TSR and later by WotC until August 2000).
Eric discusses the burger as something you can take and remove from - it’s twice as large and twice as filling as the hypothetical “B/X meal”, but it’s also easier to remove toppings you don’t like from the burger. His examples are “bards and monks, weapon versus armor, and weapon speed,” to list a few.
He notes that many OSR games, including his own, try to reach a “happy medium” between the two; choosing specific things (like separated race and class) to add to the B/X standard; but he also notes how his “ideal D&D” would be a cut down AD&D (implied to be 1e) at around 120 pages, instead of B/X with AD&D parts added onto it.
I think this still reifies the discursive problem. Everyone thinks of creating their own OSR system or retroclone as choosing B/X (or rarely AD&D) and stitching the two together by addition or subtraction from one base to the other. It’s a mix, but a mix of whole parts: this is perhaps why Eric is reaching for the burger analogy, because it matches this discourse. You’re taking parts from one and sliding them into the other, customizing the burger (which is what Eric describes.)
But I think this does AD&D a disservice both in terms of how it was designed, and what it can offer us as designers/DMs/players/gretchlings/screaming small children of the crying moon.
One thing that’s well known about the design of AD&D 1e was that Gygax was trying to make the play rules of D&D more concrete and consistent for reliable tournament play (the prevailing model of conventions at the time.)[1] Because of this, the AD&D 1e rules go over many of the same game situations and concepts as B/X but in more detail or more systematically, contributing to AD&D’s greater “meatiness.” (Eric Diaz touches on this element in his own “what can be taken from the 1e DMG for B/X review” series, with an example here: https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2023/07/ad-dmg-cover-to-cover-part-v-pages-47.html)
I think it’s elements like these clarifications and consistencies of the basic moments of play that get missed under the “burger model.” Discursively, the OSR will flip through the core rulebooks for AD&D 1e, grab race/class split, grab the bard, and maybe grab a few polearms, but when you’re looking through the DMG to add “extra” to your B/X game you’re not going to look at Appendix O about treasure weights and container limits despite it possibly being the single best written description about how coin-based encumbrance works in actual play.
Another good example is in the 2e DMG - we’re always looking at random encounter tables, how to do them better, how to tweak the probabilities, how to make them have “memory” or cross-table compatibility. Did you know that the 2e DMG discusses creating random encounter tables that cover all of this? Seriously, check out Chapter 11: Encounters (in the “black book” revised or premium reprint editions) which walks you through creating random encounter tables and building your own library of them for your game. Again, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an OSR game touch on these materials, despite it being a clear example of how to create and use these play structures (and I know this for sure, because when I was 9 and learning AD&D encounter tables were one of the things I realized I had to make ahead of time for my first, disastrous adventure. They weren’t good tables but I had them!)
One thing I’m struck by, paging through the 1e PHB as part of writing this post, is despite it being “advanced” that so much of the “extra text” (the “double meat” part of the burger) is devoted to explaining the core gameplay elements of D&D in a way I’m not sure I’ve seen any other player-facing D&D core rulebook do. It actually explains what tricks, traps and specials are from the player’s perspective, and provides advice and suggestions for handling each.
So yes, the AD&D core rulebooks are the “bigger burger” but I think they have a lot to recommend that isn’t taken as burger toppings.
That’s why I think the OSR should move away from the “burger model” and towards a “meatloaf.” Unlike the burger, when you make meatloaf you get all your ingredients, you put it in a bowl, you mix it up (and if you have a morale score better than a goblin’s you do it with your fists like a Superhero) and the end result is a congregate heterogenous combination of everything you put in there. Yeah, if you’ve ever made homemade meatloaf you know it’s not perfectly mixed (again if you’re doing it with your hands THE RIGHT WAY) and you do sometimes get a bit that’s got a lot of onion or sage or whatever, but everything is mixed together.
And that’s why I think we should look at meatloafing our B/X and AD&D mixes. Don’t just grab parts that you like, whole. Read both in comparison, in conversation to each other, like people would have back in the day, and let the rules seep into each other. Let the B/X uncomplicate the AD&D when it fits, and have the AD&D offer more suggestions, clarity, and expansions of core mechanics when it suits you.
Don’t take this as me saying you need to take everything from AD&D though. While I know why weapon speed and segments exist, we’re probably better off without them and just grabbing something like a 3e concentration check if you want that mechanic. (And the conversation of how much we should really be taking from 3e is left for another blog post.)
Joesky Tax: I ain’t got one. I’m blogging in a literal homeless shelter and while I do have something gameable I could post, it’s best suited to a post about how I’m actually running a game in said homeless shelter. Fail!
[1] The 2e AD&D core rulebooks do the same thing, although with slightly different presentation as the “tournament rules.”
