Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Mass Combat

I once heard of an AD&D game I couldn't be in. It was right after Third Edition came out: I had already been around a long time. I've played D & D since 1979, so I couldn't imagine why anybody wouldn't welcome an experienced player, but I also didn't understand why they weren't playing 3E. It was the state of the art, an upgrade devised by the admirable creators of Magic: The Gathering. Their open-source experiment inspired the old-school roleplaying movement, but I followed the crowd. Nobody brings D & D to the masses like Hasbro & Paizo, and I felt upholding the name of the game was meaningful.

Over time I have become disenchanted with the profusion of character abilities among which the player must choose. Every design cycle some mechanical elements of the game are simplified, but it never gets easy to play as an expanded framework of background and professional abilities is filled with options thought to appeal to players. I particularly dislike keywords. They are pretty much the opposite of the emphasis on believability in the rules of the OG. That's what I had missed before. When you play old-school, you're creating an experience, and not everybody plays the game for that.

We were teenagers (mostly, when we started) and we missed some aspects of the game I'm trying to add to mine. Our DMs fudged; it's incredibly dangerous to be a low-level PC in AD&D, and we ignored or overlooked some compensating factors given in the DMG. Most of these pertain to how I present the monsters (they can still kill you) but a big one on the player side is hirelings. It's cheap, easy, and assumed in the game that you will hire footmen, right at first level. Managed wisely, they enable you to cope with the hordes of evil humanoids populating the wilds, acquire treasure, and build your own power base. Classes work a little differently; heck, races work a little differently but I'm there to explain. There are random tables for your height, weight and occupational background so you don't have as many decisions to make, and even your own character can surprise you.

There are provisions in the game to get you up to a level where you can cope with the massive threats that come in from the wilderness. Not every character will live, and players who are still learning the system will start new characters at first level. In addition to increasingly more capable hirelings, most characters will acquire henchmen later, who also start at first level. Only in later editions is there anything normal about characters who are not novices joining an adventuring group! I don't use every single rule; I'm working on a system to speed up really big battles.

I'm not trying to have the world's most popular D & D campaign, or attract people who are trying to capture some novel or vintage experience. My game will appeal to those who seek an authenticity of character more like the books of J.R.R. Tolkein, than the movies of J.J. Abrams. I still have room for a few players who wish to take part in a world being created one story at a time, where evil is ascendant but not unopposed, and heroes can overcome it with what is inside them, destiny or courage rather than weird contrived powers. (And some magic, of course: that's canon!)