Kit-Bashing as a Calling - Home Brewed D&D and Extended Play

I have played around 50 or so RPGs over my last 3+ decades of play. By “play”, I mean ran/played in at least 4-5 sessions. I have played AD&D first edition for 3+ decades, off and on, I’ve played extended campaigns (more than a few months) in Marvel Super Heroes, Top Secret, Villains and Vigilantes, Gamma World, Traveller and Stars Without Number

But 1e AD&D is the winner by a significant margin. And recently it has increased in frequency, I started a regular home game 7 years ago and it has been continuous, with 7 players, and my two after school games (3 years running) have a total of 14 players. That represents around 500 hours of gaming in 1e in the recent past.

Over the course of my life I’ve lost track of the number of hours of pure joy I have experienced with TTRPGs, the number of hours with friends, screaming with excitement, experiencing victory, loss, and discovering the unknown. It has rewarded me greatly.

The point of all this is to make it clear, I play many games, but I have played this one the most. 

Why?

It’s a good question. It’s not that I’m not interested in other games, I very much am, and it’s not like I don’t like running or playing other games, I very much do. And I have run extended campaigns in other games, and played many other games as well. And it’s not that there aren’t games that are as good or better than 1st Edition AD&D, by whatever metric you choose. 

I've been thinking about this question for a while now, as I wondered why I have stuck with one system for so long.

It's Advanced!

For a number of reasons, and they really don’t matter, AD&D is hard to run as written. Not impossible, but hard. And even when you do run it as written, a lot of what you need to do to run a game, how to sequence encounters, how to transition actions, that sort of stuff, actual play stuff that helps you figure out how things work, isn’t there. 

Gygax wrote 1e for gamers who were already familiar with earlier versions of D&D, and with wargaming. If you need any evidence of that read his discussion of spell ranges and map scaling in the PHB, if you haven’t wargamed before this section is kind of opaque. 1e was the ADVANCED game, so you were sort of expected to arrive with the basics in hand and some experience running a game of D&D. 

For me, who came to 1e first, and had NO background in gaming, it was a slog to put it together. I had to take a best guess at initiative, I missed the note about scaling for spell ranges and was confused for a while. I abandoned unarmed combat, there was so much there, and not all of it fit together well. Some parts were just contradictory (color spray, I see you!), and other parts could not work as written (Enchant an Item, ouch). 

So to make it work, I had to take what I could figure out and patch the rest together with house rules. I had no internet, or gaming community where I grew up. I did read Dragon though, and that helped, as many of the letter writers and article writers tackled things we were all confused about. And many “obvious” things were done, anti-paladins, paladins for each alignment, revised bards, ecology articles that explained weird stuff, new weapons, new classes, new spells, new monsters, different takes on existing monsters (alternatives to level drain!). 

What you saw in the pages of publications like Dragon was people arguing things you had thought about yourself! It was an amazing feeling to see this, it invoked a sense of shared experience and wonder.

I came to realize that I played 1e AD&D because it is a game that was built incomplete, this required me to actively shape the game to make it work, and that produced a real sense of achievement on my part. This was MY game, as I had worked extensively to make it mine. 

It took a lot of work and a lot of reading around, but by the end of college I had what you could call “1e next”, e.g. my best guess at what BTB AD&D first edition would look like BTB with the ugly bits gone, where I tried to resolve all the inconsistencies (color spray), ditch the things I thought were just a dead loss (e.g. unarmed combat) and added a small number of house rules. 

By that point AD&D was an achievement, and it worked really well. I built it myself, so I was familiar with it, and it made running games easy and intuitive. I was still over prepping as I wasn’t confident enough, but the game was working well and our games were great fun.

Over the years I’ve added house rules to my taste. About 90% of them are combat related, the rest are mainly clarifications. But here’s what is interesting. Because I have played one game for a long time, I’ve had the ability to do two things:

Test many house rules

Maintain a baseline of gaming data as I have been using the same base system and changing it as I go, this makes it easier to evaluate the impact of house rules

So for example, I have tested numerous targeting systems, rules for gambling or games of chance, social status rules, rules for conversion by priests, rules for ship to ship combat, etc, etc. Because I know the overall system well, whenever I introduce a change it is easier to see how it impacts the game. 

I tried running 1e with you getting your first level HP roll, then 1hp per level thereafter, except for fighters, who get 2. The idea was to make the game more “dangerous” and “gritty” as HP inflation can make 1e a bit cartoony at times.  It led to a LOT of character death, so we dropped that. 

But it works both ways, I introduced “described damage” to my game back in high school, you don’t get told how many HP damage you take, your damage is described. I’ve been playing that way for 3+ decades. When I first introduced it there were howls of derision. You never know what’s going to stick.

Playing a single game for a long time means you can push through resistance, and see if there is anything on the other side. And playing one game for a long period of time also means you get to pillage other games ruthlessly, stealing their mechanics and ideas if they work well with your game. And since you are playing that game for a while, you can see how the rules impact your game, and decide if you want to keep them.

I’ve pinched location of hit tables and critical tables from multiple different games, from Judge’s Guild to Warhammer, I’ve adopted stat modifiers from classic D&D, borrowed skills from Warhammer, ship to ship combat methods from Stars Without Number, I borrow anything that will work in my game.

So one of the benefits of playing a single game for a long time is that you can make it into whatever you want. Sometimes it becomes a Frankenstein monster, I have a few discarded iterations of D&D lying on my floor, but if you keep at it and, ironically, READ AND PLAY OTHER GAMES, you will get a sense for good design, and start to edit yourself.

As a DM I had a process that I assume is similar to the process of many other long term DMs. I started playing the game and added house rules to fix things I didn’t understand or didn’t work for the kind of game I wanted. That got out of control and the game wasn’t enjoyable anymore. Then I reread the books and went “full Gygax”, trying to get a “BTB” game. That burned up a lot of time, and eventually I had a stripped down version of the game that was “BTB compatible”, e.g. best guess on the confusing stuff and as is on as much as possible.

I got a good year out of running the stripped down BTB game, and it was a lot of fun, but eventually we got bored. So I started tweaking more, but at this point with decades of experience behind me, I learned that tweaking for flavor is as important as tweaking for mechanics, that risk and danger make the game exciting and seem to have a universal appeal, that your job as a ref is to get out of the way and let the environment respond to the PCs actions, let them create the game world as they play. 

The house rules I have enhance that, so rather than house ruling to “fix” the game, I was house ruling to create a particular kind of vibe. 

So for example, I use BTB 1e AD&D Xp rules, XP=GP, training pay, minimal XP for monsters, differential XP tables by class, because I find that these rules encourage smart play and avoiding combat. 

I use BTB 1e magic rules for casting, components, the whole 9 yards, as the system restricts magic to keep it from dominating the game, and the spells in 1e have a mountain of flavor.

So I don’t change what works, I change the rules for things I don’t like. I use a custom monk class, but I run 1e bards BTB. I change multi and dual classing (I open them to everyone), I use all non-traditional races, and I don’t have evil humanoid races. 

Playing a game for a long time allows you to customize it. And here’s the thing you won’t notice until you play ANY game regularly a number of years, the longer you play, the more customization will become desirable. As you play you will discover that certain parts of your game aren't’ working the way you want. So you’ll patch it up. There can be exceptions, I’m sure someone out there has been playing RPG X exactly as written for 30 years, but I suspect many people change things about these games when they play for a long time. Customization should be thought of as fine tuning your game to your group. 

On the player side, assuming they are enjoying themselves, players can develop and reach long term goals in game when you stick with it for a long time. I had a player in my after school program become a 1e bard, legally. Boom. That’s madness, it takes forever. But he did it as we had time. Extended play in a single game allows a game world to grow and the players get to see their role in making it grow. They set down roots, in all my games the players ask to have some sort of headquarters or living space, they don’t want to have that handwaved, they want to put down roots. 

You get that kind of buy not just through a flavorful setting or a more detailed world but also through playing in that world for an extended time. The more memories you have about what your PC did in a past game the more “real” the continuous game becomes, the more immersive as it mimics real world past experiences and their ability to create a sense of reality. 

Players can also move around. I had a player who always played magic-users, and he lost a MU to an intellect devourer. He was reincarnated as a wemic, and suddenly had the ability to whack things with weapons and move around. He then stopped casting spells for the most part and played as a fighter. It ends up he was much happier doing so, and likely wouldn’t have discovered that if we were switching systems all the time. The longer you play with a system the more the players can find their niche within the system. 

This isn’t a recommendation to stop playing new games, playing new games helps you to fine tune your main game, and taking a break from your “main” game helps you to gain new perspectives, discover new mechanics/setting features that you like, and try other genres. Sticking with one game for an extended period of time doesn’t mean you ONLY play that game, just that you come back to it repeatedly and grow it more each time. 

There is no contradiction between having a “favorite” or “go to” game that you love AND playing and enjoying extended runs on other games. There seems to be an all or nothing, zero-sum game attitude towards TTRPGs these days, if you like game X you don’t like games A,B,C etc. 

That’s nonsense. There’s value in trying different things, and there is value in deep diving into things you are already familiar with. 

My advice is this: keep trying new games, keep experiencing other ways of exploring imaginative play, and someday you may find your unicorn, the game that works for you, then tweak it until it’s a perfect fit for you and your group. Keep playing other games, keep exploring, but don’t be ashamed of having a favorite that you keep coming back to. The rewards of long term play with a given system, whatever that system is, are unique and well worth pursuing.