I wasn't aware of the Basic sets growing up as an 80s kid as I didn't even know what an RPG was outside of on the NES so I'm a late comer to B/X to say the least.   I've recently been watching youtube over/re-views on B/X and BECMI and was curious as to how folks back in the day played the Basic portions of both.   Did you replay with new characters once you reached level 3?   Were there additional levels 1-3 adventures published with regularity or was it the defacto expectation by players and the company that you'd automatically graduate to the Expert set (or AD&D with the '77 Basic box)?   Or did you just keep playing at 3rd level in homebrew adventures thought up by the GM?  Did you use minis frequently or was theater of the mind the defacto baseline?  I know minis were around but wasn't sure how common they were in practice or if they were a luxury for the most elite of teenage/college groups.  I really don't have a frame of reference for the mindset back then in roleplaying so was curious.   Were the rules in the Expert set substantially different (i.e. change the core rules of the game) or were they simply those needed to populate the abilities/powers/spells/items/gear at levels 4-14?

Exploring the earlier roots of D&D that I was previously unaware of (AD&D 2e being my first taste but not really playing until 3e) has been interesting and enlightening.  I finally know why all the OSR/retroclones weirdly stop at the seemingly arbitrary level 14 (instead of 10, 20, or 30!) and I've been impressed with the quality of the art that I wasn't expecting in the older books (though not the quantity!).  The triple column tiny walls of text in the red box though look like they'd be killer on my now middle aged eyes though I'd have been fine with them in my yoot. 

You are likely to get some very different answers on this one, because the experience varied so much depending on the environment of the game.  For me, it was B/X at the same time (Christmas and birthday gifts), followed up in the next 2-3 years with blending in the AD&D monster manual, rest of AD&D, some Dragon magazine things (duelist class, half ogre race, etc.) before they appeared in the supplements.  Mixed in with all that was trying other games, borrowed from relatives.

The big limiting factor in all of that was cost--I worked making cemetery flower arrangements for my grandmother making $0.25 an hour in the mid-70s to get the $12 it cost to buy the Risk board game for example. By the early 80's it wasn't that stark, but disposable cash for games was still very much a rare luxury in our neck of the woods. 

So mostly homebrew modules, with again a few borrowed ones, and occasionally risk buying one. I made square and hex grids on poster board. I made some wooden dungeon tiles out of scrap paneling ripped out of a classic 70's den. For minis, when we used them at all, it was spare dice from board games, wooden dowels, Lego blocks, and later the counters from the Titan board game. In other words, whatever was around or could be scavenged. 

As for upper reaches of leveling, it just didn't matter that much. We played sporadically in season, like we did everything else.  It wasn't uncommon to play for 30+ hours on a long weekend in the winter but go all summer and never touch the dice. Characters died regularly. I think it was 2 years in before we got a B/X character to 5th level--and he promptly died.  We misread the rules and made rulings.  I still remember we'd been playing for almost a year when we discovered that we'd mistakenly allowed wizards to use bows.

Very true (both about cost and lethality).   Since I missed that era completely, I didn't think of the lethality.  I just assumed (incorrectly) that characters would survive until the level 3 cap of Basic as the default rather than the exception that I'm more used to.   Regarding cost, even as a gamer starting out in the 90s, I remember stressing whether I should spend $7.49 on what felt like premium warhammer fig for a character in an RPG that I wasn't yet playing (and had no concrete plans set to actually start!) because it felt so expensive compared with the $3 Ral Partha or Rafm ones. 

My experience of actually using Basic was combined with AD&D. I think a lot of people did that hybrid, going from basic to advanced instead of from basic to expert. Basic wasn't actually all that different from the beginner boxes for AD&D.

I started playing in 1980. We played with the Holmes box for a few months. I didn't own the set but played with the folks that did. I got my own game stuff a bit later getting the Moldvay basic and Cook/Marsh expert boxes together at K&K toys. The boxes were $10 each at the time and I spent most of my grass cutting money on them. We played with those sets for next three years or so until my 14th birthday in 1983 when my dad took me to the store to get whatever I wanted. I got all the AD&D core books and big stack of modules. Best birthday ever!

Back to the basic questions. We played the early low level modules such as B1-B4 and also the expert modules X1-X5. During that time we played without minis. Where I lived there were no close hobby shops. Our D&D material was purchased from toy stores. While learning about AD&D and experimenting with that we still played our B/X campaign from time to time.

There were further lower level modules published a while after the initial run of them. B10 Nights Dark Terror, B11 Kings Festival, and B12 Queen's Harvest were all published later after quite a few expert adventures were published.

There was renewed interest in the basic system when the Companion box was released. Support for mass combat and actual domain management was a huge draw. We had a lot of fun with CM 1 Test of the Warlords. Game time was split between the BECMI campaign and AD&D until I moved to my current location in 1988, found a local gaming club and started playing more AD&D.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on May 06, 2025, 09:03:57 AMBack to the basic questions. We played the early low level modules such as B1-B4 and also the expert modules X1-X5. During that time we played without minis. Where I lived there were no close hobby shops. Our D&D material was purchased from toy stores. While learning about AD&D and experimenting with that we still played our B/X campaign from time to time.

There were further lower level modules published a while after the initial run of them. B10 Nights Dark Terror, B11 Kings Festival, and B12 Queen's Harvest were all published later after quite a few expert adventures were published.

Thanks.  Out of curiosity, did you run your existing (already 3rd level?) characters through the additional modules or just make up fresh ones for each?   I'm curious if it was common to pair a character with each module.  If you instead used an existing maxed out (by basic standards) character, was it still a challenge at 3rd level or a completely different experience?

Quote from: migo on May 06, 2025, 08:43:53 AMMy experience of actually using Basic was combined with AD&D. I think a lot of people did that hybrid, going from basic to advanced instead of from basic to expert. Basic wasn't actually all that different from the beginner boxes for AD&D.

Thanks.  Another gap in my knowledge base then as I thought the basic set WAS the beginner box for AD&D throughout the 70s and 80s.   That seems like a fair amount of unnecessary overlap.  Out of curiosity, what benefits did AD&D provide to you versus just switching to expert beyond races as an option for classes instead of being a class and additional classes potentially I assume?

Holmes basic (blue book with a dragon) was written to send you into AD&D after your first 3 levels.

Moldvay (red book with Errol Otus Cover) and Mentzer (Red book with a nice red dragon) were designed as a separate line from AD&D. When you finished 3 levels you'd buy Expert and continue on until you ran out of stuff covered by the Expert set and moved on to the Masters rules. That is why they are often called BEMC (Basic-Expert-Master-Companion). Rules Cylcopedia was BEMC in one book if I understand right (that was after my time).

I don't know anyone that played BEMC, everyone shifted to AD&D as it had the reputation of being the more grown up version although time has opened a lot of eyes on that. Pointless complexity does not actually make it more adult.

Also everone I know used modules for either set interchangably. The games were close enough mechanically it didn't really matter.

I got my start in the fall of '81. A friend of mine had the B/X rules and let me borrow them, and I was hooked from the very beginning. The number of kids at school my age grew in their interest in D&D from there.

Xmas of '81 I got the Basic and Expert rules, but also got the AD&D PHB and the MM. Got Xmas cash to get the DMG later. Anyway, I think for all of us that played, we all had B/X because it was the most affordable. Some of us had rule books for AD&D (like me), and we would share. Most of us had characters for both games.

Things get a little foggy from here. Somewhere along in 82-83, I started to gravitate away from B/X along with one other friend of mine, John. Not to dive into details, by '83 I was fully into AD&D for play, but would also buy regular D&D stuff to collect.

I got into the Moldvay/Cook Basic/expert games in 1980-81.  I played them for a little while with anyone who would sit still long enough, then I found a group of guys who played Advanced D&D.  This was about three months in.  After that I switched over to AD&D and never played B/X again util recently.

I still bought the modules because they were really well written.  I did read the Basic/Expert books a lot.  I found them to be inspirational. 

I never got into the Mentzer BECMI stuff because I didn't need to. 

Back then most kids wanted to move on to AD&D as quickly as possible because of the numerous player options. 

Thanks again for all the responses.  It does seem like folks graduated right out of basic into Expert or AD&D pretty quickly then instead of sticking with it for a while which admittedly was the point.   From an outsider's perspective looking it, it feels like B/X/BECMI gets more love than AD&D from the OSR space (with AD&D 2e trailing behind even OD&D).  Is that because of the general shift in the fandom towards rules lighter systems overall?  Obviously there are exceptions as in every situation but that's the impression I've gotten from my relatively naive/ignorant perspective outside looking in.

I started with Holmes basic and played that for about a year.  When we reached 3rd level, which was the end of the book, I went looking for the source of the higher level spells it mentioned.  I found AD&D and we continued with that

Quote from: RNGm on May 06, 2025, 07:31:52 AM

• Did you replay with new characters once you reached level 3?
• Were there additional levels 1-3 adventures published with regularity or was it the defacto expectation by players and the company that you'd automatically graduate to the Expert set (or AD&D with the '77 Basic box)?
• Or did you just keep playing at 3rd level in homebrew adventures thought up by the GM?
• Did you use minis frequently or was theater of the mind the defacto baseline?
• Were the rules in the Expert set substantially different (i.e. change the core rules of the game) or were they simply those needed to populate the abilities/powers/spells/items/gear at levels 4-14?

Just making your post easier for my thoughts.
If our characters made it to level 3 that was awesome! Seriously tho, we just continued with them until they died. It was generally homebrew unless we had expert/AD&D adventures. The Moldvay/Cook B/X sets came out at the same time so it was really levels 1-14.

It was all theatre of the mind for us. None of us ever had minis, and the town we were in was small enough to not have any game stores to stock them.

The rules were just expanded and continuations of the basic set. I'm not going to say there were zero differences as I'm sure someone has poured over the sacred texts and found the contradictions.

Thanks and I appreciate the answers.  In retrospect, wall/paragraph of text probably wasn't the best choice for formatting a series of questions!  Just moving right into X after B seems like a popular and obvious choice but I'm surprised more folks didn't stick around at the bottom for a while trying out new races/classes for example.

Quote from: RNGm on May 06, 2025, 10:44:24 AMThanks again for all the responses.  It does seem like folks graduated right out of basic into Expert or AD&D pretty quickly then instead of sticking with it for a while which admittedly was the point.  From an outsider's perspective looking it, it feels like B/X/BECMI gets more love than AD&D from the OSR space (with AD&D 2e trailing behind even OD&D).  Is that because of the general shift in the fandom towards rules lighter systems overall?  Obviously there are exceptions as in every situation but that's the impression I've gotten from my relatively naive/ignorant perspective outside looking in.

Some of the most popular games are a blend of B/x and AD&D. The simpler rules procedures from B/X are combined with the extra character options and other bits from AD&D. Games such as Advanced Labyrinth Lord, and OSE does this. The B/x rules are more streamlined and faster in play and and all of the extra race & class options are attractive to players so it makes sense to combine them like this.