[wolverine876]

As I understand it from people who played it and from interviews with Gygax, the primary difference is that OD&D was far more free-form than than later editions - so free-form that it placed a tremendous burden on the dungeon master to fill in the gaps and limited its audience to hardcore gamers.

Again, based on what I've read, part of Dave Arneson's original innovation that became OD&D [1] was that your character continued from game to game, giving the player a personal interest in the character and also engagement in developing them. That would seem to disagree with the parent's description.

[1] Like all innovations, Arneson's was a product of earlier ones such as Braunstein by Dave Wesely.

[da_chicken]

> As I understand it from people who played it and from interviews with Gygax, the primary difference is that OD&D was far more free-form than than later editions - so free-form that it placed a tremendous burden on the dungeon master to fill in the gaps and limited its audience to hardcore gamers.

It depends on exactly what you mean. OD&D ran from 1974 to 1977 or 1979, so there's actually a fair bit there. If by "original D&D" you mean the first boxed set which had three booklets: Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, then it really is as I described it. There were 3 character classes, stats didn't really do anything, and the guidance for the DM was "create a dungeon with a minimum of 7 levels for the players to explore" or something like that.

However, there were a lot of supplements, for OD&D too: Greyhawk (thief, paladin, non-Chainmail combat rules) and Blackmoor (assassin, monk, underwater rules) in 1975. Eldritch Wizardry (psionics, druids), Gods Demi-Gods & Heroes (real-world and literature-inspired pantheons), and Swords & Spells (large scale combat) in 1976.

There was also new content in The Strategic Review (precursor to Dragon magazine) like the Ranger class, the Bard class, and (I think) the first printings of the Thief class. I think other stuff appeared in White Dwarf.

By the time TSR decided to go with the Basic/Advanced approach in the late 70s, most of everything we find in AD&D had been printed in some way. Both Basic D&D and AD&D were collections of existing rules as much as revisions or refinements to it.

[wolverine876]

That matches the history I know, generally. The original Basic, the 'Holmes Blue Book' by J. Eric Holmes, was indeed a much simplified restatement of OD&D, intended as an introduction. AD&D had many changes and much more material, though obviously it drew a lot on its predecessor.

I don't know that OD&D, even at the end of its publication run, offered nearly as much as AD&D. For example, where is the DMG? The modules?

However, while I know that OD&D had sparse rules as you say, and that the DM was expected to fill in the gaps and dungeons, where does it say that the characters didn't continue from adventure to adventure, from game to game?