Three official versions or rules collections exist for D&D: the Basic Set and its companion extension, the Expert Set; the Original or Collectors Edition; and the Advanced D&D series. This makes matters rather confusing to newcomers, as the various supplements and playing aids apply to different versions of the game. In practice, however, the Original edition is obsolete, and only of interest to veteran players and collectors. Players generally familiarize themselves with the Basic Set and then progress to the Expert Set (though the Expert Set is often by-passed), eventually moving to Advanced D&D, where the full scope of the game is realized.
I'm reading Ian Livingstone's 1982 introduction to roleplaying games, Dicing With Dragons, in my lunch breaks at work and the above passage jumped out at me for some reason. The Americanised spelling and missing apostrophe are Livingstone's doing.
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It's only since the OSR that I've realised that OD&D is a viable game in its own right. Back in the day when I was into Moldvay and Mentzer's Basic and Expert, it never occured to me to go "backwards" to the previous edition.
ReplyDeleteYeah it's interesting that "back then", in the early days, it seems that generally people hadn't yet conceived of the idea of new editions not necessarily being a universal step forward. I guess that was before the days of dozens or hundreds of books being released each year, with questionable benefit to the game.
ReplyDeleteI was just a kid then though, and had never heard of OD&D, and AD&D was a mystery.