The good, the bad, and the ugly of B/X D&D

 With my B/X Monsters A to Z series ongoing, I've been focusing a lot on B/X D&D. Also, having mostly recovered from my heart attack and triple bypass surgery, we're hopefully going to reconvene our game group for the new year, and at some point I'll be taking my turn at DMing again, and I'm hankering for a good old fashioned sandbox campaign. So, I'm looking at sorting out my likes and dislikes (yes, there are a few) in good ol' B/X, in preparation for codifying some house rules and clarifications. I should make clear that I like far more than I dislike about the game, but as I ponder what changes I might wish to make, the dislikes are going to come to the fore.

Like: Character generation. It's quick, easy, and there aren't an overwhelming amount of choices to be made. The most time-consuming part is buying equipment. Some players enjoy that part; for the rest, a small selection of pre-built equipment packages would be an easy fix.

Like: The lack of restrictive class requirements. Except for a few fairly lenient qualifications for the demihuman classes, players have full freedom to follow their high scores or to go full-bore against type. Want to play a magic-user with low Intelligence or a fighter whose highest score is Wisdom? Yes, you can do that, and it's roleplaying gold!

Like: The elegant symmetry of the ability score adjustment curve. It's the same for all abilities except Charisma, too, so you can quickly familiarize yourself with it and never need to look it up again. 

Mildly uneasy: With the magnitude of bonuses and penalties possible. +/-3 is pretty hefty in most cases, but I'm not too fussed about it. 3s only happen one roll in 216, and even with the point trade option, 18s aren't too common either. At least if you do things by the book, 3d6 in order.

Dislike: The wild disparity between the abilities themselves. Strength and Constitution have an outsized effect, while Intelligence and Wisdom are of very limited practical value outside their use as prime requisites. I'd like to make all six about equally impactful in their diverse ways.

Kind of dislike: The limited spell lists. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to expand spell lists, and there's a ton of material out there, especially in AD&D, that's eminently adaptable to B/X.

Like: Race-as-class. It makes dwarves, elves, and halflings feel like a little bit more than just humans in different packages. At the same time...

Dislike: The single option for each demihuman type. We could use at least one more class for each. (I'd go with the Dwarf Prospector, a rough analog of the human thief, with less stealth but the ability to sniff out precious metals and gems; the Elf Scout, a thief/magic-user hybrid to match the fighter/magic-user of the standard class; and the Halfling Burglar, which is pretty self-explanatory.)

Dislike: Attack matrices and the wonky progression, with jumps of two points every few levels. (And let's not overlook the weird jump of three points at F7-9/C9-12/MU11-15. What's up with that, anyway?) I'd rather convert this to an attack bonus format, with more frequent advancements of a single point each.

Neutral: Descending AC. I have some nostalgic feelings about it, but honestly, it saves some mental effort at the game table to just use ascending AC, where the AC number equals the number you need to roll.

Like: Group initiative. I'm of the opinion that initiative is not strictly necessarily in D&D, but it does help give structure to the chaos of combat. Initiative by side keeps things running smoothly with a minimum of on-the-fly bookkeeping.

Dislike: How the side winning initiative can do EVERYTHING before the other side can even pick its feet up off the floor. It makes no sense to me that an attacker with initiative can move its full movement and attack an opponent who has had a bow out the whole time without the archer having a chance to get a shot off. Breaking the round into phases of actions before movement and actions after movement, with the winner going first in each, followed by the loser, fixes this rather simply, I think.

Dislike: Fighters get a bit of a raw deal relative to other classes. Fortunately, I've already given some thought to how to deal with this. 

Like: Reaction tables and morale rules. They could both use a little more specificity as to when and how to apply them, but the concepts are really vital to my style of gaming.

Dislike: The implementation of thief skills. The percentages are too low for my taste, and/or only they're limited to a single attempt. In most cases, I'd rather allow multiple attempts, at a cost of time and/or physical resources.

Dislike: The really wonky cleric spell progression. Mentzer does a fine job of revising this in BECMI, though.

Dislike: The wilderness encounter tables. The concept of nested tables isn't bad, but the variety of creatures is wildly unbalanced. You're at least as likely to encounter dragons, for instance, as you are to find ordinary animals in most terrain types. They need some serious retooling.

Like: The dungeon wandering monster tables. With 20 possibilities per dungeon level, you're going to get some incongruous stuff at times, which challenges the DM to find a creative reason why that particular monster shows up.

Dislike: The rules for two-handed weapons, particularly about always losing initiative while using one. Also, the quirk in the variable weapon damage rules that makes any weapon but a normal sword suboptimal for any character allowed to use one. Easy fixes for both these things; just do away with the 2H weapon goes last blather, and recalibrate weapon damage: d4 for light weapons, d6 for medium, and d8 for heavy. There's no particular reason why a three-foot blade must do more damage than a two-foot blade, other than the intuitively seductive but specious assumption that bigger weapons always hurt more.

Dislike: The wildly incongruous imbalance between monsters. If you've ready many of my B/X Monsters posts, you know what I'm talking about. It doesn't make the game unplayable as such, but it does grind my gears.

Dislike: Every magical weapon and armor is based on pluses. It's a model that does have its place, but I'd like some more variety that doesn't depend on the plus paradigm. 

Like: XP for treasure. Every XP model is going to incentivize certain behaviors and not others, but I like XP for loot because it encourages players to see cleverness, caution, guile, and conflict avoidance as viable modes of play, at least as much as combat.

That's all for now. I'm sure if I took the time to comb through the books thoroughly, I'd come up with more, but these are the ones that stand out most in my mind.