My appreciation for the D&D line and the RC didn't happen until the late 2000s when I became more Internet savvy.  I started playing 1st AD&D in 1984 and my first campaign world exposure was to Greyhawk through the modules that my DM's used.  When I saw the D&D line materials in the game store I thought, why would I want to play basic D&D when I am already playing Advanced D&D?

So I missed out on this wonderful product and its line of materials such as Mystara.  

Also, I am a bit of a collector and packrat so I couldn't afford to acquire every RPG product out there so I had to concentrate on certain product lines like Forgotten Realms and AD&D.

Quote from: Omega;739306Yeah, AD&D and the B/X/??? series are different animals from the same genus. Wolverine and Badger as it were. Except the badger mutated into a dire badger.

In a way the boxed sets felt a little like a testing ground for ideas that might be adapted into AD&D later. Or a repository for ideas that werent deemed suitable for AD&D.

Holmes Basic was very much as you describe.  We see things like initiative-by-DEX, the parry move, the five-point alignment.  Somethings were used in AD&D, somethings not.

With B/X, OTOH, the authors have said that they largely looked to the original three OD&D booklets, though they kept some revisions from Holmes, like the monster XP table.  Distinct new features were morale, and the spelled-out Order of Events in a Game Turn and Combat sequence.  Also, the nearly unified ability score modifiers.  Perhaps the only thing brought in from AD&D was the use of d6 to determine initiative, though the system itself is far simpler than AD&D's.

As far as the BECMI box sets go, Mentzer had strict orders from Gygax not to incorporate anything from AD&D.  Basic and Expert were essentially the same as B/X, while Companion and Master went in whole different directions.  BECMI was then studiously ignored when it came time to design 2nd Ed.  They even removed the d6 initiative that was in 1st Ed. AD&D!

Quote from: JeremyR;739214I really don't get the love for B/X.

It's treated like the holy grail of D&D in the OSR, yet it existed for what, all of 2 years before getting replaced by TSR? Back in the day, it wasn't even a blip on the radar, yet today it's the greatest thing ever.

The Mentzer version of the game is just flat out better. Better written for beginners, clearer rules. The RC just combines all that in one book, with some improvements.

Then again, I love the artwork in the RC as well. Very distinct style.

And the race of class thing was not in OD&D, I don't know why people keep saying it, it was invented for B/X.

Ehhh...I prefer a lot of aspects of BECMI, but I wouldn't say it was flat out better. I never played B/X back in the day, either, so there's no nostalgia talking there. The vastly larger level spread in BECMI creates its own problems, for example, and B/X works better in play for certain types of game.

I do think a lot of the complaints about RC's complexity versus AD&D are completely spurious. Even with all the stuff in the RC (much of which is content from separate books in AD&D), it's still a far simpler game.

When it was new, I thought it looked pretty neat for packing so much into one hardbound book (which seemed a good deal compared with the boxed set versions I already had).

The Mentzer texts and the art didn't exactly send me, nor did the "stretching" to 36 levels (especially of Thieves), but there were bits peculiar to that edition (such as the War Machine system) that I liked.

We tend to love what is familiar. People who got hooked on D&D with this or that edition are likely to have a special fondness for it, whichever it may happen to be.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;739217And what in the hell was Frank thinking when he put the equipment list and character sheet right in the middle of all the classes?  That made no sense.

Wasn't all the lists in the middle meant as a pull-out section to have all charts in one place?
Or was that a convenient coincidence in the German translation?

No, your initial assumption is correct. They were meant to be pulled out as reference sheets and a character sheet to be used/photocopied.

Quote from: RunningLaser;739004Interesting way of putting it.  The art in the RC never offended me.

Same here. I liked some of it; generally speaking, it was perhaps not as impressive as some of the best pieces in 1e AD&D books, but it also didn't have some of the really crappy pieces that those books also had.  And I thought the art in the RC was better than the shitty art in some of the 2e books.  And I'd probably take any of the above over the art style in 3e and 4e.

Quote from: Silverlion;739005In addition, BECMI had some of the most interesting support in the forms of the Gazateers which for the most part are superior to same period AD&D offerings.

Damn right. The gazetteers were some of the best setting-sourcebooks ever.  They were definitive to me, in the sense of literally defining how to make really great setting books.

RPGPundit

Quote from: thedungeondelver;739304Having read the thread thus far, the conclusion I come to is this: I think I am looking at the RC through the wrong end of the telescope (as it were).

Holding the RC up to AD&D as-I-know-it is wrong and, I think, a bit unfair.  The RC is a decidedly 90s D&D product, far, far removed from the heady days of OD&D and AD&D.  By the time the RC was released, AD&D was fairly awash in a great amount of dross products.  The complete this, the that-handbook, the other campaign world, etc.  For a lot of people, the RC was an "OD&D re-release".  I recall looking, back then, at D&D (I re-started play in '99, after the Wizards buy-out, but with AD&D 1e, not 3e although I played that too), around the time the RC came out and wondered what the hell happened to AD&D?  It was like it'd vanished, completely.  TSR's web-presence was nascent, and I didn't use pay services like CompuServe or wherever they were entrenched, and didn't think to look on Usenet or anywhere else...so from my perspective, AD&D was "gone".

So, I wonder if for many people (maybe some of you fans?), that the RC wasn't a hedge against AD&D as I remembered it but the terrible mess that 2e was.  Without forums, .PDFs of old rules, or the glut of Gen-Xers selling off piles of AD&D and OD&D and Basic D&D rules on an easily accessed information network (and before those same Gen-Xers started dropping them off at used bookstores), older, simpler D&D's had vanished.  And so the RC was the only way to get that back since TSR was so, so anti-fan and downright hostile to the very notion of the older systems.

Is that about it?

In that context

Blimey. Pre-internet 80s/90s change over period saw me and friends discovering D&D (BECMI) and then suddenly finding this 'new and advanced' edition was coming out. We bought in. It was a really smooth transition from low-level BECMI to having all you need for 'all' levels in AD&D 2E. Buying beyond the red box was expensive.

Rules Cyclopedia is something that I wasn't aware of until sometime around 2007. With the big push for AD&D 2E, older D&D vanished. A few other games reared their heads: Palladium Rifts etc, Battletech, MERP, Paranoia and some Games Workshop stuff. But poor old BECMI and anything that came before it just wasn't in the running.

Start a new group and one guy has the RC. How quaint!

Quote from: thedungeondelver;739304Is that about it?

In that context

More or less. I wasn't really aware of the whole context. I knew AD&D (2e at the time) had those settings with lush Elmore covers and boxed sets and novels and shit. D&D BECMI Gazetteers were a rare sight around here.

At the time the RC did look more open-ended and less caught up in the setting madness (some 2e groups, I recall, looked down on homebrew settings). That plus being enamored of the RC's richly detailed endgame, made me prefer it to 2e.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;739304For a lot of people, the RC was an "OD&D re-release".

For a lot of people, Mentzer Red Box was an "OD&D re-release", leading to the false assumption that OD&D had race-as-class while AD&D "evolved" the concept into race + class. (Especially in foreign countries where it was the first D&D publication ever.)

I have to admit that my 1984 self was more than ready to accept this, despite the gnawing feeling that the (for its time) slick Mentzer game simply felt wrong as the predecessor to the organizational (and procedural) mess that was AD&D1.

Quote from: JeremyR;739214I really don't get the love for B/X.

It's treated like the holy grail of D&D in the OSR, yet it existed for what, all of 2 years before getting replaced by TSR? Back in the day, it wasn't even a blip on the radar, yet today it's the greatest thing ever.

The 'blip' corresponded with the crest of D&D's popularity. The Moldvay basic boxed set is likely one of the top-selling RPG products of all time, even in that limited two-year lifespan.

So it's popularity vs BECMI probably has to do with when you started playing D&D. I know that even as adolescents, we disliked the tone and look of BECMI, and felt it was aiming at a blandified, mass-market audience. And since we took a dim view of high-level play, assuming it was the purview of 'fakey' powergamers who had been playing two months and had a level 30 Paladin, the whole 'CMI' part was a major turn-off.

Quote from: RPGPundit;740006Same here. I liked some of it; generally speaking, it was perhaps not as impressive as some of the best pieces in 1e AD&D books, but it also didn't have some of the really crappy pieces that those books also had.  And I thought the art in the RC was better than the shitty art in some of the 2e books.  And I'd probably take any of the above over the art style in 3e and 4e.

Yeah, for those rare few of us that discovered D&D through the "black box" Basic Set, the art in the RC does hold some nostalgic value.  One thing I liked about the pieces in the RC was the multi-cultural look of adventurers.  Your PC could be anything: a gypsy thief, an Aztec warrior, a pseudo-Arabian magic-user, or swashbuckling musketeer.  The piece in the table of contents showing a group of adventurers interviewing henchmen is classic.  Then there's pieces like the elf with leaf camo, and the fighter that looks like a wind-up toy.  Oh well...

Quote from: thedungeondelver;739304Having read the thread thus far, the conclusion I come to is this: I think I am looking at the RC through the wrong end of the telescope (as it were).

Holding the RC up to AD&D as-I-know-it is wrong and, I think, a bit unfair.  The RC is a decidedly 90s D&D product, far, far removed from the heady days of OD&D and AD&D.  By the time the RC was released, AD&D was fairly awash in a great amount of dross products.  The complete this, the that-handbook, the other campaign world, etc.  For a lot of people, the RC was an "OD&D re-release".  I recall looking, back then, at D&D (I re-started play in '99, after the Wizards buy-out, but with AD&D 1e, not 3e although I played that too), around the time the RC came out and wondered what the hell happened to AD&D?  It was like it'd vanished, completely.  TSR's web-presence was nascent, and I didn't use pay services like CompuServe or wherever they were entrenched, and didn't think to look on Usenet or anywhere else...so from my perspective, AD&D was "gone".

So, I wonder if for many people (maybe some of you fans?), that the RC wasn't a hedge against AD&D as I remembered it but the terrible mess that 2e was.  Without forums, .PDFs of old rules, or the glut of Gen-Xers selling off piles of AD&D and OD&D and Basic D&D rules on an easily accessed information network (and before those same Gen-Xers started dropping them off at used bookstores), older, simpler D&D's had vanished.  And so the RC was the only way to get that back since TSR was so, so anti-fan and downright hostile to the very notion of the older systems.

Is that about it?

In that context

The way I see it is like this: The Rules Cyclopedia was the last Old School D&D game ever released by TSR.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;740990The way I see it is like this: The Rules Cyclopedia was the last Old School D&D game ever released by TSR.

RPGPundit

Now that, I think, is a very salient point.