Babbling on LL’s “AEC”, Descending AC, and other things.
Here’s my thing: When it comes to retroclones, I mostly only keep tabs on them for when someone is looking for a particular flavor of an out-of-print edition of D&D. Most of the time I point peeps between either Labyrinth Lord or Dark Dungeons; the latter because it’s a clone of my personal favorite iteration (the Rules Cyclopedia.)
That said I hardly ever play with them, because I own a crap ton of the original old books. And a lot of the peeps I play with have them, too. Usually if I’m printing out or purchasing an OSR-driven title, it’s because it does something new or different that makes it stand out as its own game. A good example?Stars Without Number by Sine Nomine.
But one book that has caught my attention is Labyrinth Lord’s “Advanced Edition Companion.” I originally wrote it off as “Yay, LL made an AD&D clone” and left it at that. I may have underestimated the cool here by quite a bit.
Advancing a Game Without Being Advanced
Instead of directly cloning AD&D, it presents all the cool options as just that: Options. It was written to be built off of the Labyrinth Lore core rules to expand the system instead of replacing it. Same mechanics, same number scales, same hit charts and everything. Racial classes from the core game can mingle with advanced character Race/Class combos without any changes really.
Not present are a lot of the complicated fiddly bits they stuck into AD&D. Don’t get me wrong, those fiddly bits can be pretty damn fun, but after a while I’ve learned to appreciate simple combats over some crazy combat maneuvers (I get frustrated every time I see a Fighter with 18/00 strength throwing shit tons of darts as multiple attacks and killing off half the room.)
I also love the presentation and order of the rules in the AEC. Instead of binding it as a single, solid book…I printed out the whole thing and stapled them together in packets of sections. Character creation and equipment is one packet, spells are a couple other packets, magical items, monsters etc….doing it this way was perfect since it allowed me to label and quickly grab parts I wanted as they were needed.
So in short: The ability to tack in races, classes, and more spells like they had in AD&D but keeping the simple, easy and loose mechanics of “Basic” D&D. Hot damn, I found my sweet spot. Even better….despite the fact that LL was based on a different iteration and scale (the B/X rules) than the Rules Cyclopedia (Mentzer’s BECM), I’ve had no real problems using it instead of the core LL rules.
Some Little House Tweaks
We’ve also started playing a house rule to speed up combat. It’s inspired by the combat mechanics from Stars Without Number, and it works quite awesomely with old D&D. Essentially, all characters get an Attack Bonus equal to the difference between their THAC0 and 20. When attacking an opponent, the roll is now 1d20+Attack Bonus (and any modifiers)+Opponent’s Armor Class. Any rolls of 20 or higher is a hit. This makes it a LOT easier for new players (or players of modern editions) to grasp the idea of a lower AC being better, since it’s pretty much lowering the bonus to attack. It also gives a static difficulty/target number to beat.
If anyone who is running Labyrinth Lord would like to give this variant a spin, I whipped up a quick reference chart and a modified character sheet that I’m using for my campaigns. Feel free to download these suckers for personal use:
Advanced Attack Table for Labyrinth Lord (uses the same to-hit as core LL)
