Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Retrospective: Dungeons & Dragons Companion Rules

The first time I ever read the words "D&D Companion supplement" – or, more accurately "D&D® Companion supplement" – was in the pages of the 1981 D&D Expert Rulebook, which explained that it would "detail levels up to 36 in more detail." [sic] That version of the D&D Companion never appeared. Instead, just a couple of years later, TSR released yet another version of the D&D Basic Rules. A new Expert Rules followed soon thereafter and then, a year later (1984), a box set finally appeared bearing the title, Companion Rules.

Consisting of two rulebooks, one for players and one for the Dungeon Master, the Companion Rules was the third set in Frank Mentzer grand revision of Dungeons & Dragons, with the goal of making it more accessible to a new generation of players. From what I have gathered, it was quite successful in this goal, selling more copies than any previous version of D&D (how it compared to AD&D sales, I'm not certain). 

Unlike what had been stated in David Cook's Expert Rulebook, Mentzer's Companion only covered levels 15–25, leaving levels 26–36 to the later D&D Master Rules. If this irked me at the time, I can't really recall. What I do know is that I was very grateful to see any extended treatment of the levels above 12 or so covered in an official D&D product, even if it was part of the "kiddie D&D" line. I'd long been fascinated by the idea of very high-level play, even though only one character had ever managed to reach such lofty heights. Consequently, I greeted the publication of the Companion Rules with some excitement. I snatched up a copy while I was on vacation with my family in North Carolina and spent many an hour poring over its pages.

The 32-page Players Companion book interested me primarily for its inclusion of its prestige classes avant la lettre. Neutral clerics of 9th level or above could, for example, opt to become druids, while Lawful fighters who eschewed domain rulership could become paladins. This was a very strange concept to me at the time, since I already knew druids and paladins as classes in AD&D that a player could choose at 1st level. Likewise, the D&D line had until this point kept to the formula of only four human and three demihuman classes without exception. Mentzer was now tinkering with this formula in a way that felt simultaneously innovative and transgressive. I wasn't completely sure I liked it, but it certainly had caught my attention. 

The 64-page Dungeon Masters Companion had a lot more that I liked unreservedly, in part because I felt then, as I do now, that it had finally made good on the promise of D&D's post-adventuring endgame, something that even AD&D had never really done. Thus, Mentzer provided rules for administering a dominion and handling large scale combat without recourse to miniatures battles, two things I felt missing in previous versions of the game. Likewise, he began to touch on the matter of planar adventures, though not nearly as much as I would have liked. On the other hand, he did greatly expand the variety – and power – of monsters and magic items, both of which I consider absolutely necessary to the success of a high-level campaign.

Taken together, the two books of the Companion Rules are creditable first steps toward showing in practical terms what it might be like to run a Dungeons & Dragons campaign at very high levels, which is why I have always had a fondness for it. Its reach exceeds its grasp, of course, but I don't see that as a grave defect. If anything, it's strangely inspiring, since Mentzer has already laid a foundation on which an enterprising DM can build. For example, I found the domain management system as presented too limited for my own purposes, so I expanded upon it until I felt it sufficient for what I wanted to do. To my mind, that's what all the best RPG products should do: encourage players and referees to exercise their own creativity. Judged on this basis, the D&D Companion Rules is perhaps the best thing Frank Mentzer ever wrote.

13 comments:

  1. I had this book and it's precursors and it formed part of our D&D mishmash every after, along with AD&D DMG & later PHB- with none ever truly being out of use entirely. (whatever we could grab down in Australia's mid sized towns and occasional city visit, usually 2nd hand and usually years after it'd been released)

    We got most use from the battlesystem (?) mass combat rules which I still like and use (or mine from) actually. We liked the _idea_ of dominion play but never did much in practice aside from create dominions for fun.

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    1. War Machine, not Battlesystem.
      I used (and still use) the domain rules and a few monsters, but nothing else.

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  2. the BECMI run outsold AD&D about three to one, as I understand it. do not under-estimate box sets in the sears wishbook

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    1. Correct!! The BECMI line was the best selling D&D of its time.

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  3. I've never found a need or use for ultra-high level play (levels 14+) We used the Domain and War Machine rules for levels 9-14 (name level domain play).

    I find that extremely high levels made hitting 'name level' a minor plateau instead of a major accomplishement. It also further hurt demihumans, and I did not find the Companion's solution to that satisfactory.

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  4. At first I really loved the Companion, and I even run a short Norwold game with Companion level characters using CM1, CM2 and CM7.
    We had fun, and at the time I wasn't ready with how the game changed at such power level.
    If (using Robin Laws definition) Basic is Cugel-level play, Expert is Turjan, Companion and above are definitely Rhialto-level games.
    In retrospect, and with the benefit of hindsight which is notoriously 20/20, I think many of the mechanics and things introduced in Companion were poorly executed good ideas.
    So, yes, it helped define high-level play, it broke new ground, it's definitely the best work in Mentzer's legacy that I can think of, but I'm very much not as fond of it as I was in 1985-86.
    All-in-all, I think CMI to be the weakest part of BECMI, a situation that the Rules Cyclopedia could have fixed, but didn't.

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  5. When these camee out I was 11 and felt that the move to super high levels in the BECMI series made it feel more Kiddie D&D for me. Mature D&D was a grim and dark grind and this was super hero esq power fantasy.

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  6. My pal Gerry had the Companion Set while I had Basic (Moldvay) & Expert (Mentzer) and most of the others had Expert (Mentzer). By the time Gerry had it our PC were hitting name level and he and I played around with the new weapons and War Machine rules, but generally I thought that it was a bit of a waste of money. I don't remember the domain rules at all.

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  7. I was surprised to see you review the Companion Set once again, since you did an overview way back in 2009: http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/12/in-praise-of-mentzer.html

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    1. What can I say? I like the set in spite of its flaws.

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  8. I'm quite fond of the Companion Set and module CM1. The dominion management rules are sufficiently well-executed and fun to play with.

    The Master Set is a different story: it's an anemic blank slate, nothing more than an inadequate sketch of planar adventuring and a bridge to the Immortals game. (Well, and Weapon Mastery, but who ever used Weapon Mastery?) So the Master Set doesn't stir the same fond feelings, and rightly so.

    But I should think — or at least hope — that I've long since outgrown any foolish notions about gritty, low-level D&D being the only "mature and sophisticated" D&D. I'll leave that pitiable attitude to edgelords with an overinflated estimation of their own maturity and sophistication.

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  9. We also got similar use from the Companion boxed set by way of opening our imaginations to what we could do with setting up dominions and creating fairly quick resolving large scale combats. But we rarely got PCs to these high levels. I bought the Master rules a couple of years later out of curiosity, not because we had PCs that were advancing to those levels. I found it completely uninspiring. I've seen it said that most versions of D&D become unwieldy after about 9th level. Our group certainly found that to be the case. The Companion box created a new style of game that we combined with some of the the Gazetteer settings into a sort of hybrid board game that involved trade, geopolitics, and warfare. It was a far distant cousin to the old survivalist dungeon crawls and high PC body counts.

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