Reading the whole damn AD&D 1e DMG
This is yet another 'guy who started with new D&D editions discovers the OSR and decides to read the entire AD&D DMG' post. I won't pretend to have anything particularly novel to say, but it fascinated me to a degree that for my own sake I feel compelled to record my reactions.[^1]
Anyways, without further ado, here's what stood out:
Introduction
I found it funny that right off the bat, Gygax repeatedly violates OSR dogma, encouraging die fudging, emphasizing 'action and drama' over problem-solving, and emphasizing 'game balance'. A good reminder that the R in 'OSR' is there for a reason, and that actual old-school D&D contained the seeds of oft-derided tendencies of later editions.
As I understand it, AD&D was an attempt at standardizing the theretofore nebulous D&D rules for use in tournaments and conventions. This vein reappears throughout the book and from my 2023 perspective it's mildly irritating.
Gygax emphasizes keeping the DMG secret from players. At first I found this off-putting, but in light of how this particular DMG works it makes sense. There are so many fiddly rules in AD&D that the only way to run it (and preserve your sanity) is to selectively deploy them. Letting it fall into the hands of a rules-lawyer would be a disaster.
Early on there's a whole section on probability distributions for different die combinations, implying that GMs who understand the underlying math can call for specific die rolls on an ad-hoc basis in cases not covered by the rules. There's an example mechanic using a special d6 with playing-card suit faces to adjudicate reaction rolls. I love this, and wish there was more encouragement to DIY in the rest of the guide.
PHB Cut Content
The DMG doesn't do a great job signposting or emphasizing chapter transitions, so the structure can be pretty confusing. Case-in-point, the book starts with a mess of highly specific rules that didn't make it into the Player's Handbook, like aging and disease.
We are given the option to do a disease roll once every in-game month on an exhaustively detailed table of diseases and parasites, modified by situational factors. I have to admit, my whole GMing career I've been dropping the ball on simulating tapeworm risk.
We get some helpful breakdowns of what ability scores represent. I always appreciate clarity on how mechanics are intended to translate into the fiction.
A strength of 18 apparently corresponds to being able to lift between bodyweight and twice bodyweight overhead, which roughly fits what I'd expect from elite strongmen.
We are told that Charisma scores greater than 18 are possible for the following reason: Napoleon and Hitler obviously had 18 CHA, but they weren't very hot. We can imagine that a sexy version of either would have been even more charismatic, and therefore higher scores must be possible. Q.E.D.
There's an extended essay on 'The Monster as a Player Character' arguing for keeping D&D 'humanocentric'. This is one of the things that has definitively made it into the OSR sensibility and I do find it compelling.
"All players are, after all is said and done, human [...] to adventure amongst the weird is fantasy enough without becoming that too! [...] [A non-human based campaign] is destined to be shallow, incomplete, and totally unsatisfying [...] unless the creator is a Rennaisance Man and all-around universal genius with a decade or two to prepare the game and milieu. Even then, how can such an effort rival one which borrows from the talents of genius and imaginative thinking which come to us from literature?" (Emphasis mine)
But a part of me, upon reading this, wants to say: challenge accepted.
Huge section on lycanthropy. Mainly mentioning because there is a table indicating how much damage different armor types inflict when worn during a werewolf transformation.
I always thought alignment was inane and have never once used it in any of my games. With that said, Gygax's explanation of the system (especially having recently read Moorcock's Elric series) did help me see it in a new light.
Evil alignments are treated more as quasi-Nietzschean orientation toward strength over weakness.
The description of alignment languages hints at an interpretation where alignments function like clandestine secret societies, which I think is cool. As is, there's ambiguity about whether alignment is a metaphysical property of a character or a more fluid relationship to a subset of gods and cosmic forces. I personally think the latter is more interesting - you become chaotic because you do jobs for the Chaos gods, rather than just being a murderhobo.
Nifty table of reputed magical properties of gems on page 26. This kind of esoteric minutiae is where the DMG really shines.
Armored players are assumed to wear helmets, and we are given a fiddly subsystem for head wounds to punish the recalcitrant.
The hireling section is enormous, impressive, and exasperating.
Do we need separate daily costs for tailors, leather workers, and limners? Surely a single 'artisan' entry would suffice.
The mercenary section is actually kind of cool, I see the wargaming roots here and imagine army-building could be quite fun.
The sage section is quite funny. The rules place so many restrictions on sages' availability and expertise that one starts to wonder why there's a sub-system for them in the first place (as opposed to ad-hoc invention and placement by the DM).
The infamous 'Time' section shows up on page 37. Enough has been made of this and I don't have much to add.
There's a long section on spellcasting. The big takeaway here is that early D&D was way less generous with handing out free spells on leveling up, making the hunt for new spells a potential driver of exploration. Big thumbs-up from me, especially having been reading Jack Vance recently.
- There's an aside explaining the 'physics' of spellcasting: spells (words, signs, movements, and material components) act like electrical conductors allowing energy to flow from the positive energy plane to the negative. Gygax specifically alludes to Jack Vance and John Bellairs as influences.
Long sections on wilderness travel, aerial combat, and underwater adventuring. All cool but not much to say.
I had been curious about how the planes/multiverse element would be presented. Their inclusion in later editions always baffled me somewhat and I usually ignored or replaced them in my campaigns. Gygax leaves them pretty open-ended ('are the stars actually suns at a distance? or are they the tiny lights of some vast dome?'). There's the suggestion that the Moon counts as another plane, and that one could post a breathable atmosphere allowing flying creatures to traverse between it and Earth.
Combat:
Very confusing time-keeping. Rounds are 1 minute, but there are also 6-second 'segments'(?) I confess, this area is one I am least likely to use so I didn't strain myself trying to decipher it.
Standard clarification that for PCs, hit points =/= physical wounds.
Gygax specifically disavows the need for a death and dismemberment system citing (1) that this would not be fun for players (fair, but I disagree) and (2) that this would take too many charts and tables (there's a table for 87 types of dinosaur but you draw the line here??)
In a later section (p. 82) it is loosely implied that the CON bonus to HP denotes physical ability to withstand wounds while the die roll reflects 'grit'. None of this really matters but I do see it debated a lot so it's interesting to learn how Gygax envisioned this mechanic mapping onto the fiction.
I like that reaction rolls are part of the initiative procedure rather than what determines if initiative is rolled. This adds a cool prisoner's dilemma element to encounters.
- Two of the reaction entries specify 'unknown but 55% prone toward [positive/negative]'. I assume that we are intended to use a d20 to resolve this but it's unclear.
I like how robust the pursuit system is, and that players are incentivized to distract pursuers by tossing out food and treasure.
Everything else about the combat system seems like a nightmare to run, and the example of combat provided did little to dispel this.
I think it's cool that there's an entire subsystem for psionic mind-duels.
Interesting section on saving throws: "Yet because the player character is all-important, he or she must always --- or nearly always --- have a chance, no matter how small, a chance of somehow escaping what otherwise would be inevitable destruction.
Extremely detailed insanity table --- fun.
Gold-for-XP --- as with the time section, not much new to say here, but it did make me reconsider my interest in more diegetic advancement systems.
- We are told that basing experience gain off of regular old training is boring, but then the next several pages stipulate how actually leveling up requires exactly that boring old training...
The Campaign
I'm still not totally clear on where the PHB cut content actually ends, but this section header on page 86 seems like a good place.
Building a campaign will "require the use of all your skill, put a strain on your imagination, bring your creativity to the fore, test your patience, and exhaust your free time." Way to sell it Gary!
A recurring theme in this book (and tough lesson I have had to internalize) is that the core of the campaign is A Town + A Dungeon. All you need to begin is a place to adventure and a place to rest, and the remainder can be built out from there.
- There's more emphasis on the town side than I expected --- conventional wisdom now is to start PCs off at the dungeon entrance (or even in its depths), but here the suggestion is to place them in a town seeded with rumors.
Some notes on ecology, mainly concerned with how to support a huge population of apex predator monsters.
On page 88, there's an explicit disavowal of sticking too closely to medieval social structures. There's also a fun (but perhaps unnecessary?) list of government forms, including geriatocracy (rule by elders) and syndicracy (rule by guilds).
There's a long economics section, acknowledging that the abundance of gold is a fictional conceit. The section on taxes & duties is absolutely ridiculous but did inspire me to incorporate slightly more annoying bureaucracy into my games. With that said, relying on taxation to dampen loot-based inflation seems... tough to balance.
The Monster Populations and Placement alludes to the wild west several times --- player activity is explicitly described as having an ordering and 'civilizing' effect on the wilderness. There's obviously a highly critical reading here, but in a more sympathetic light I think the takeaway is that player activity should impact the world, and DMs should be mindful of the large-scale dynamics of adventure hooks. Are they 'clearing' areas, or is there a counterforce to replenish the slain monsters and looted treasure?
The treasure placement section suggests 'a supply of oil' as a possible non-monetary reward. Perhaps a giant while carcass with navigable organs that must be cleared of (human-sized) seaborne parasites before the blubber can be rendered?
On page 94 there's a section on how to run a peasant/slave rebellion should the PCs prove to be bad masters...
With oddly little fanfare, we get a sample dungeon starting on page 94.
The map is nice and includes numerous loops. One thing that does stand out to me is the hall/room ratio; my own tendency is to place square-ish rooms and connect them with narrow corridors, but large parts of the sample complex are either 10-foot wide corridors or 20-foot wide halls. For new-school 'room by room' dungeon crawling this isn't ideal but I guess if you're measuring out feet traversed per turn it doesn't matter much.
There's a save-or-die in room one lmao
The key is very wordy but has some cool details, like the barrels being soaked in room 2. I appreciate the usability innovations of more modern (bullet-point) RPGs but there's something to be said for wordy maximalism.
Dungeon doors are explicitly assumed to be quasi-magical, impeding players but allowing monsters free passage. (Also 7.5 feet wide on average!?)
The example gameplay covers the rooms given in the key - seeing how the dungeon key maps onto the play example is awesome, I wish more games did this.
- Near the end of the example, a gnome gets one-shotted by a ghoul and dragged off, but the DM doesn't tell the player how much damage was dealt or what happened(!)
Lots of NPC tables. I'm lazy about NPCs and doubt I'd use most of these when the NPC tags in Atlas of The Latter Earth exist, but there's some neat stuff. The 'general tendencies' table has good, meaty cues (e.g. 'capricious/mischievous,' 'opinionated/contrary', or 'servile/obsequious') --- I feel like I could role-play any of these.
The 'intellect' table gives cues for NPC thought processes --- are they dreamy, ponderous, or scheming? We are told that 'brilliant' NPCs will perform above their INT score --- I actually like this a lot, as it hints at a resolution the player-skill/character-skill debate (where INT is more limited to specific skill at magic vs. general intelligence).
"Dealing with [non-hireling NPCs] should be expensive and irritating", followed by an example of a player trying to get help from an NPC wizard reminiscent of Cugel's travails in Eyes of The Overworld.
There's a whole section on non-human soldiers, including a 'racial preference' table to track whether, say, goblins and gnolls will willingly serve side-by-side.
There's an extensive section on Conducting the Game with notable advice.
If the rules don't cover a specific situation, make up a probability and use a d% (p. 110).
The possibility of permadeth is important. Players may die to freak die rolls, but so will monsters.
We are encouraged to ask troublesome players to leave but also given permission to bully them with game mechanics if they won't.
Some very fussy advice about introducing new players to an ongoing campaign --- the suggestion is to run extra adventures till they are level 3 or 4. Who has time for that?
The more far-fetched aspects of leveling up can be attributed to divine favor (i.e. don't beg your deity to intervene, they already have) (p. 112).
On page 112 there's a section that (to me) anticipates the 'epic fantasy' direction later editions would take. "There must be some purpose to it all [...] some web which connects evil and good, the oppising powers, the rival states and various peoples. [...] As [players] progress in expertise, each eventually realizes that he or she is a meaningful, if lowly, piece in the cosmic game being conducted."
Items & Stuff
A large chunk of the book is devoted to magic items, treasure, crafting, monsters, etc.
A surprising number of magic items have an identical-seeming cursed twin (e.g. Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals vs. Bowl of Water Death). I like this, particularly as a way to mess with experienced players who might recognize items from their descriptions.
The 'OSR-ish' consensus on magic items seems to roughly be that they should be peculiar gadgets to enable problem-solving with minimal interaction with game mechanics and (almost) never direct ability to deal damage. The AD&D items mostly don't follow this pattern.
Interesting how many items made it basically unchanged into later editions.
The Marble Elephant Figurine of Wondrous Power has a subtable to determine if it's an african elephant, asian elephant, mammoth, or mastodon.
The legendary items all require the DM to generate their powers, with fillable blanks in the DMG. I think this is neat, and want to fill out the blanks in my copy just for the hell of it.
The random dungeon generator (which is overall fantastic) has a 60% chance of generating an empty room.
Encounter tables:
The astral and ethereal encounters are cool, particularly the psychic wind and ether cyclone subtables.
Psionic encounters, triggered when a PC uses a psionic power or spell resembling one.
Pleistocene and dinosaur sub-tables. Hell yeah.
In city encounters, we have the infamous 'harlot' subtable. I quite like the 'gentleman' entry, which could generate a 'foppish dandy' wit sycophants, or merely a 'well-dressed fighter type'.
Pretty great demon generator in Appendix D. Takes forever but produces some great fever-dream hybrids.
Example demon I rolled up: bat-like head, with one horn, an overall skeletal visage, trumpet-like ears, small, multifaceted amber eyes, nose slits, and a sucker-like mouth. A short, rubbery, spider-like body with a stingered tail (weakness poison: 1 HP/HD permanently lost), exuding a sweaty odor. Its skin is yellow and scaly, it's back is humped, and it has two animal-like arms(?), one ending in pincers and the other in talons.
(This AI did better than I expected tbh.)
In Appendix E we get a handy table of all the monsters in the Monster Manual, one line per monster. I feel like this alone is enough to kludge together the monster for the OSR game of your choice.
The trap section feels a little thin given the outsized role they play in the game's popular perception.
In Appendix J we have an enormous list of the magical/healing properties of what must be 100+ herbs. Amusingly, some are listed with a (?)2.
Appendix N is shorter than I expected, and I was surprised to see Clark Ashton Smith omitted.
The afterword: "NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS-ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU, IF IT GOES AGAINST THE OBVIOUS INTENT OF THE GAME".
Other Reflections
As I alluded to several times above, I was struck by how AD&D included elements that evoked both OSR and 'neo-trad' styles of play. My sense is that a lot of the content in the DMG was an effort to evolve D&D from its roots as (loosely) a survival-horror wargame to a game that could support epic fantasy (which Gygax seems most enthused about).
The manifest urge to collect everything into lists and tables is my favorite thing about the book - like something out of Borges. His personal failings aside, I do admire Gary as an autodidact-polymath, a guy who knows was a barbican is and what mugwort was used for.
I can't imagine ever wanting to actually run a game of AD&D as written, but the best parts of this book are applicable to pretty much any dungeon fantasy game - I'm glad I bought a copy and I plan to keep it handy whenever I need inspiration.
[^1] As a disclaimer: I do not remotely endorse any of the offensive opinions Gygax espoused, and do not wish to idealize him. He was a flawed person who happened to make something interesting.