Just from my first flip-through it became clear I was never going to be able to run anything with these unless I spent some time reorganizing them for myself and house-ruling away the many ambiguities and a few things I just don't like, but my understanding is this is in keeping with the received wisdom about OD&D: no two OD&D campaigns are going to be the same, because every DM is essentially forced to house-rule and interpret them. So I've been essentially writing my own personal "clone" of the rules, for my own use and for distribution to whatever players I could rope into playing this thing with me. That accomplished, I also plan to make a version that incorporates the various changes and additions from Supplment I, for an "AD&D Light." I may or may not incorporate the rest of the supplements, because it seems like the more you add the more you might as well just be playing 1st Edition AD&D.
But working through the rules in this fashion has made me realize in a tangible way what I've always read in regard to OD&D: that it's the most "hackable" version of the game, i.e. the easiest one to turn into whatever sort of broadly D&D-descended game you want. It's the most barest-bones version with the most room for moving into various different directions thanks to the aforementioned ambiguities.
So now I've been thinking about what my ideal version of D&D would look like. Here are some scattered thoughts on what I'd retain/add/change if I was building my own version of D&D out of the OD&D core:
- XP for gold would absolutely have to stay. More and more, I've been thinking that this and this alone is the most essential thing for the "old-school" D&D feel.
- No elves, dwarves, or halflings, i.e. no Tolkienisms. Whether or not these might be replaced by other races, and whether that would be in the form of race-as-class, would probably depend on the setting/feel/flavour I wanted to capture. Which leads me to my next point:
- Setting baked into the rules. If I'm hacking the rules for myself anyway, there's no point in keeping them generic. It's not like I'm trying to be the umpteenth person to market their own version of D&D that anyone can use for whatever settings, I'd want something perfectly tailored to whatever I was trying to do. So monsters, races, spells, items and all that jazz would probably all be cooked up from scratches, or at least heavily tailored.
- Speaking of spells, I really want to make magic seem fucked-up, dangerous and otherworldly, and I think one of the easiest way to do that is to ditch Vancian magic. Not that it isn't weird and otherworldly, because as I've written elsewhere, I think it is, but as I also wrote there I think a lot of effort is required on the DM's part to really shake off the veneer of banal acceptance that's glommed onto that system after decades of ubiquity. To that end, I think something like Palladium's Witch (or, for that matter, 3rd edition D&D's Witch) would be the main spellcasting class, i.e. magic is a matter of making bargains with one or more dark powers. As such, it's inherently Chaotic, and doing it in public will probably get you burned at the stake.
- Not sure whether I'd want to keep Clerics/Divine magic; if "regular" magic is the result of making bargains with otherworldly entities, then Divine magic would seem to be the same thing. I guess I really depends if I want there to be any "good" gods or not.
- I'd make the combat rules a little more codified, which is mostly a concession to some of the people I regularly play with who found OD&D combat unsatisfying. Something like what Lamentations of the Flame Princess does for explicitly formalizing the kinds of actions you can take in combat, or maybe even something as complex as AD&D.
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