Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Retrospective: Dungeons & Dragons Master Rules

Over the years I've written this blog, I've been a consistent critic of what I call "kiddie D&D" – my name for the version of the game developed by Frank Mentzer, starting with the 1983 Basic Rules boxed set. Whatever my feelings on the matter, there's no question that this version was immensely successful. According to some reports (and Mentzer's boasts), TSR sold more copies of kiddie Dungeons & Dragons than any other published during the company's existence. I can believe it too, judging by the large number of gamers just a little younger than myself who look on these boxed sets with a great deal of fondness.

Ultimately, Mentzer's D&D consisted of five boxed sets: Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals. I actually think rather highly of the Companion Rules, but the same cannot be said of its immediate follow-up, the Master Rules, first published in 1985. According to the set's introduction, the Master Rules deal with "the ultimate level of might and glory" (levels 26–36). This would seem to mean that characters at this level are akin to mythological heroes who regularly interact with the gods (called "immortals" throughout this set) and will, in fact, one day join their ranks. I don't find this focus particularly compelling, but it's one with which D&D has toyed in the past. Deities & Demigods, for example, addresses this matter briefly and I remember hearing about campaigns in my youth in which player characters achieved godhood.

The boxed set consists of two rulebooks, one for players and one for the Dungeon Master. The Players' Book consists of three main sections. The first deals with character classes, providing rules expansions to handle levels up to 36. This material is absurd in my opinion. The numbers involved in everything, from hit points to saving throws to the combat charts, are such that one wonders whether it's even worth rolling to determine success. More than that, the mechanical acrobatics necessary to make demihuman characters, who reached maximum level all the way back in the Expert Rules, are laughable. That alone makes me question the wisdom of ever producing these rules. The second section introduces "weapon mastery" rules, a complex system of weapon specialization that requires the use of a very complicated table. The third section introduces rules for sieges for use with the "War Machine" mass combat system in the Companion Rules.

The DM's Book likewise has three sections, the first of which details a variety of rules expansions and additions. One of these introduces "mystics," which are a new character class similar to AD&D's monk. It's in this section that we also get an overview of the various paths to immortality available to characters and that will be expanded upon in the next boxed set. The second section is filled with absurdly powerful monsters, while the third focuses on artifacts. There's also a map of the entirety of the "Known World" setting (later dubbed Mystara), which I imagine piqued many gamers' interest at the time, since we'd never seen anything like it prior to this point.

All in all, the Master Rules are a mess. They seem to exist solely to fill in a gap in the progression toward the Immortal Rules rather than being based on a clear thematic need. The Basic Rules, for example, focus on dungeon adventures, while the Expert Rules expand organically from that toward wilderness exploration. From there, we get domain rulership in the Companion Rules, which is a logical progression. But the Master Rules? What do they offer in this progression? Is preparation for godhood the next logical step? Even if it is, the bigger problem is that rules, as presented here, break down, with new real way to challenge characters whose "to hit" rolls and saving throws are so low and whose hit point totals so high. Mind you, I'm not sure anyone ever played campaigns at such high levels, so the whole matter may be academic in the end. 

31 comments:

  1. I never went beyond Companion back in the day. And the numbers were already pretty ridiculous. So, I never had the Master set in my hands. But when I read the weapon specialization rules in the Rules Cyclopaedia, I found them pretty interesting. Sadly, I rarely got the opportunity to run BECMI D&D afterwards and I've tried them only one at the table.

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  2. This is absurd! The logical next step after domain level play is extra-planar or extra-planetary (imho), yet here is a boxed set containing, in order: better fighting abilities, different ways to get better at fighting, a different way to fight, a new martial class, how to become gods and finally, monsters to fight.

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    1. Planar monsters to fight. And boosted stats for elementally-linked monsters when they're on their home planes. I won't argue that the Master Set isn't bare bones and a low point in the BXCMI line, but does it really need more rules than are given to actually run high level adventures? I don't think so.

      If a skeleton of mechanics is good enough for those oh-so-sophisticated LBB fans, why not for fans of high-level gonzo play as well?

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  3. I actually really liked this when it came out, though probably just for the new monsters, and the compilation of monster stats taken from various modules that had been published at the time (predating the release of the Creature Catalog).

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  4. What a childish idea it was to suggest one would still playing characters at those levels---and that level progression itself was still meaningful.

    Let it go, man. What was Mentzer thinking?

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    1. Zeb Cook had already promised a Companion rules set to go to level 36 in his earlier Expert Set (1981) but that never got published, so I'm pretty sure that's where Frank got his direction to take his line to 36.

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  5. The "kiddie D&D" line was certainly successful, but I was much more of an AD&D (1st and 2nd ed) player back then. Never owned any of the BECMI core boxes but I did pick up the Cyclopedia when it came along and found it enjoyable enough to read, even if I never ran a single game with it. That didn't stop me from happily buying every Gazetteer and pretty much everything that could be called a "worldbuilding" supplement for Mystara (eg Hollow Earth, Dawn of Emperors). Goofy as it often was I liked the setting far more than FR, GH, or DL and it was easy to mine for ideas to use in AD&D homebrew campaigns.

    Think I have to credit that "Voyage of the Princess Ark" article series in Dragon for a lot of my fondness for Mystara - and probably some of my related love of Spelljammer. Flying fantasy ships are just neat.

    The game mechanics though - yeah, not so great, particularly at high levels.

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  6. I never owned this, having stopped RPGs around this time. Never bothered as a collector either later on.

    It sounds like good ideas to me- powerful mortals interacting with
    immortals- much like Earth mythology or Glorantha, but with poor execution.

    D&D on the whole is absurd, when you really think about it. Good rules, or bad. But it *is* a lot of fun!

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  7. "Kiddie D&D"? How needlessly belittling.

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    1. Quintessential edition wars.

      The best system is the DMs favourite system. There is no faking enthusiasm.

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  8. I never ran the Master's Set (nor any other of the BECMI sets) but I stole things from it - mainly the monsters.

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    1. You and me both. Although I did crib the idea of the Immortals for my campaigns. There were no "natural" gods that weren't originally mortal, although there were Mythos-style "unnatural" gods from other multiverses that acted as their primary enemies. Not that any PC ever got close to apotheosis before meeting a sticky end.

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  9. I ran plenty of campaigns into the Master levels. The progression was natural and the modules one could create were great: often a mixture of world politics, quest-based stuff, and extra-planar adventure. The game mechanics being simple and unpretentious meant that things ran smoothly and that rules rarely got in the way of execution. It always far outperformed than the cumbersome and needlessly opaque, oblique, outré AD&D that so many people around me mistook for being somehow "more advanced" when it was in fact in several ways simply less sophisticated.

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    1. Everything you just wrote sounds like a foreign language to me. I have no words to respond.

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    2. That sounds great, though possibly a tricky line to tread between an engaging milieu and a preposterous storyline in which the players feel they have little agency. Can you think of any published fiction that reflects the possibilities of the system?

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    3. I found some words:

      The game mechanics being simple and unpretentious meant that things ran smoothly and that rules rarely got in the way of execution. It always far outperformed than the cumbersome and needlessly opaque, oblique, outré AD&D that so many people around me mistook for being somehow "more advanced" when it was in fact in several ways simply less sophisticated.

      "far outperformed"...so you ran the same campaign both ways? (BECMI and AD&D). One would have to be equally fluent in both as a DM for a fair comparison as well.

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    4. @squeen Burr under your saddle? Just let it go. It's a foreign language, remember?

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    5. Gopsie wrote: "It always far outperformed than the cumbersome and needlessly opaque, oblique, outré AD&D that so many people around me mistook for being somehow 'more advanced'"

      1st ed never had quite so many hands to wave as BECMI, which is where the concept "advanced" comes from: details.

      BECMI always seemed better suited to campaigns that ran more like fairy tales instead of fantasy stories (although the gazetteers were an exception, disjointed though they were among themselves).

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    6. De gustibus … !

      When I say ‘performing’ about a game, I refer to (my necessarily subjective opinion of) its capability to fulfil what it was designed to do ~ usually to entertain, occasionally to educate.

      I find complexities introduced in AD&D rarely correspond to a proportional increase in entertainment. Some people enjoy its quirky language and find its wilfully esoteric writing endearing. Some take pleasure in exegesis of its obscure paragraphs. Pride in the mastery of its intricacies. Our wonderful host masterfully injects himself in discussions of such hermeneutics. And I always enjoy reading what he has to say about them.

      But my experience with the game at hand is different from his. I find the detailed rules of AD&D more conducive to fairy tales. Free-form D&D tends to manifest in something closer to fantasy stories. Still I cannot easily think of any closely analogous example of such stories in a book. For the narratives weaved in RPGs rarely form clear meta-plots as traditional written prose requires.

      So I speak merely about my experience from these games as diversion, recreation. If there were "edition wars" in the days when we played high-level campaigns, I was oblivious to them. I played D&D on Mondays and AD&D on Thursdays. Mostly with the same crowd. Years of doing so suggested that high-level play was more fun on Mondays. Perhaps 'sophisticated' is not the right term. Just more enjoyable.

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  10. I had Moldvay and Mentzer Expert and a friend bought the Companion set. Apart from the War Machine Rules we didn't use any of it at all and found it otherwise silly. So we steered clear of the Master's Set and bought AD&D books instead.

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  11. As much as I liked the concept of CMI in BECMI, I ended up liking it very little in pratice.
    Excluding the spells, monsters and magic items, I found most of the additional material to be poorly executed yet nice ideas (wrestling, war machine, weapon masteries... to name a few).
    The thing that makes me look with a bit more sympathy on the Companion, Master and Immortal sets, is that they were the first ever attempt of extensively codify rules for most of these things.
    The RC (the best single D&D book ever, to this day, imho) had the chance to fix most of these things, but saddly didn't, probably adding even more confusion instead.

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  12. I did get 8x10's of Elmore's covers from BECM (Easley did the "I") and put them all into a single frame and I'm very fond of it. In my town nothing was ever available beyond Basic & Expert, whether it was Moldvay/Cook B/X (which is what I started with) or Mentzer's BECMI, so the Companion & Masters rules were always this fantastical thing that we never saw in person. (In fact, as kids playing D&D we thought it was supposed to go Basic, Expert, Advanced and mixed and matched like crazy without realizing or caring that AD&D was supposed to be a different edition than D&D)

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  13. Always a good idea to make fun of the games that people a few years younger than you played, or that you can't imagine playing yourself. It makes you all look very much like Masters.

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    1. Haha.

      To paraphrase Peter Scott Graham, the golden age of D&D is 14.

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  14. I don't know, but I always liked the Companion and Immortals box sets as it helps introduce the concept of high levels of play. I always felt if I wanted to do an Amber-like campaign, I would use Immortals as a starting point.

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  15. I ran a nine-year BECMI campaign from 1987 to 1996 in which the PCs steadily progressed to levels in the high 20s. It got really challenging to run, and I found the Master rules extremely useful. The Weapon Mastery system in particular added granularity to combat (we incorporated it much earlier in the campaign) and we used the siege machine once or twice. The spells and monsters were also frequently dipped into.

    If you're running a BECMI campaign, you need the Master Rules far before PCs get to those levels. It's a great system, and if it weren't for "real life" getting in the way, our group would have complete my overarching campaign in another 2-3 years.

    Running one of those Master level modules (M1-5) at a convention one day is on my bucket list. James, I will invite you to the table.

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  16. I'll vouch for the "kiddie" in kiddie D&D. Between the ages of 8 and 13 our little group in Alpine, Texas relied on Mentzer's Basic, Expert, and Companion boxed sets, and we didn't see our parents going in for the AD&D yellow spine books. This would have been about 1983 to 1988. Mentzer's writing made for a very easy to understand game for kids, adults, whoever. We loved the Jeff Easley and Larry Elmore artwork, but especially Elmore. Those covers! We hadn't read fantasy or sci literature outside of Arthurian legends and the Hobbit so those images dovetailed easily with our more limited imaginations and experience. Without Mentzer I don't think we could have played D&D. Alpine has about 5,000 residents. At the time there was no hobby store, let alone book store. We didn't know anyone else who played D&D, and the nearest population center of consequence was Midland and Odessa, about a two hour drive. We were aware of AD&D and it seemed so beyond our reach, and yes, more adult. So we played the kiddie version of D&D and loved it. About a decade ago as a language student in Beijing seeking some escape from Mandarin I found James' Grognardia blog. which was like turning on the light in a room that had only been half-lit. Back in 2011 it vastly opened up my RPG world, introduced me to the Old School Renaissance movement, and educated me on the history of my favorite hobby. I don't always agree with James' views and I am sorry that a version of D&D I enjoyed so much as a kid made older folks feel your game was ruined. I'll conclude in writing that the Basic through Companion boxes are seen by many in the OSR community as one of the better, if not the best, distillation of the D&D game. I had the Master box set and agree with James. It was a waste of money and we never used any of the content. I never got to play AD&D. When we finally decided we were worthy of the advanced stuff 2nd edition had already come out. We played a hybrid of 2nd edition and BEC (no MI) that worked very well. We did buy the AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide while it was still available, which gave us a sense of how complicated the original AD&D rules could get. But the ideas in that book remained inspirational, especially since our game table was often a boulder on the side of a trail during a hike. I'll end by writing that I started playing D&D at age five or six with a partial copy of the Holmes rules which my mother helped explain to us. I remain a huge fan of David Sutherland's art, not least because it was imprinted on me at such a young age. Finally, thank you James for returning to Grognardia.

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  17. I, too, was in elementary school when this came out and as a Basic-Expert-Companion player I just HAD to buy it because it was the latest expansion and had the highest levels, the craziest monsters, etc etc. I haven’t reread it in decades but from memory I agree with your assessment. The powergamey desire to get to level 36 made it as must-buy, but even then I was disappointed they didn’t, for instance, create new extra-extra-high-level spells and that the high levels had so little new stuff. I guess the core problem for me was it actually wasn’t even more gonzo… 😂

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  18. "According to some reports (and Mentzer's boasts), TSR sold more copies of kiddie Dungeons & Dragons than any other published during the company's existence. "

    Gamers are often completists, they buy up everything hoping for ideas or hoping to complete a set. That does not mean a ton of people played a particular version. I had ODD, Holmes, and BX but actually only played AD&D (and to further confuse things I made no distinction between modules written for one or the other). I suspect I am not alone in this.

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