Old School

Recently I was reading some old school gaming blogs. Guys who basically play house ruled original D&D, white box. The 1974 version (or older).

I occurred to me I've never seen the OD&D stuff. That's not really a problem, but reading the blogs sparked my curiosity. I suppose I had thought about it previously, but in an age before the internet. I mean really...if it were not for the internet finding a copy of the books (there were 3) would be basically impossible. Out of print doesn't even begin to describe how rare those books are now. It's not like they were well made either.

But, I live in 2011 and I can get pdf of the original rules in under 15 minutes. (I think it took 10). How cool is that? F-ing cool.

So, I started reading the first one.

Ho. Ly. Shit.

Let me quote 6:

"Number of Players: At least one referee and from four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign, but the referee to player ratio should be about 1:20 or thereabouts."

Ok. So the MINIMUM is 4 players and the MAXIMUM is 50 (!!!!) and the suggested number of players is TWENTY? (!!!!!)

I once ran a game for 10 guys. It last about 2 hours and nothing got done and we were not following any real rules. We were just screwing around. But 20! Who the hell has ever done that! Is OD&D actually set up to handle that kind of insanity? I seriously doubt it. I have a soft player cap of 7 and a HARD cap of 8. That's using a rules light system. If I were running 4e I'd never (EVER) go over 6 and dread anything more than...well...it's 4e so...I'd just dread it.

Other than that, the rules suggest basically 2 of each dice except for d6s. It suggests (wait for it) 8 to 40 (1) d6s. I want to know when the sweet donkey fuck I will need to roll 40d6! What the hell is the scope of this game?