Discussion of Holmes Rules and House Rules

[The Red Baron]

I've yet to see a holmes clone that is better than the holmes book.

The only real problems with holmes are the large constitution bonuses and the bizarre attacks per round rules, and these are universally house ruled by crossing them out with a sharpie.

[Admin Pete]

Nov 16, 2016 12:54:29 GMT -5 The Red Baron said:

I've yet to see a holmes clone that is better than the holmes book.

The only real problems with holmes are the large constitution bonuses and the bizarre attacks per round rules, and these are universally house ruled by crossing them out with a sharpie.

Just curious, have you looked at Vile Traveller 's expansion of Holmes in any of the above versions? I'm not sure how closely he follows Holmes on everything, such as the rules you mention. I have never looked at Holmes closely and I plan to look at it and Vile Traveller 's efforts more closely in the new year, but what do you consider "bizarre attacks per round rules"? Please elaborate.

Also to avoid derailing this thread I am going to create a new thread and move these two posts for that discussion.

[Vile Traveller]

The Red Baron is referring to the rule that "light weapons" (which means daggers in Holmes) get to strike twice and "Heavy Weapons" only once every other round. This might be fine if you have variable damage, but as written everything does 1d6 which would lead munchkins to arm themselves with nothing but daggers.

The rule was actually mangled somewhat by TSR editing, but even the Holmes manuscript doesn't really work, as discussed on the Zenopus Blog. Which is a pity, because it adds a bit of crunch to the combat rules without going all the way into variable weapon damage, weapons vs. armour tables, and so on.

As far as I can tell everyone simply ignored that rule in actual play.

BLUEHOLME™ ignores the rule, but it does include an optional rule where light weapons do (2d6, choose lowest) damage, normal weapons do 1d6, heavy weapons do (2d6, choose highest), and heavy crossbows do (3d6, choose highest).

[Admin Pete]

Apparently I have never played with a munchkin! Because in the 3LBBs OD&D all weapons do 1d6 and I never had a player try to take all dagger, although with two attacks that might have tipped the balance. Everyone wanted a sword or axe or mace or something.

I like the BLUEHOLME™ optional rule and may give that a whirl.

[greyharp]

Nov 16, 2016 12:54:29 GMT -5 The Red Baron said:

I've yet to see a holmes clone that is better than the holmes book.

How about a Holmes expansion which draws purely from OD&D, like Holmes itself?

After posting on the Single Volume OD&D thread I was doing some idle googling and came across a blog which discussed the document back in 2016. Reading the post prior to the single volume read-through I was surprised to discover a reference to an earlier project of mine that I'd totally forgotten about - Holmes Revised, created in 2010. I had to go digging through my hard drive to find the original files. I'm guessing this document had a much smaller audience than my later Single Volume OD&D and so not many would be aware of its existence - me included it seems.

The idea behind Holmes Revised was to expand the rulebook using the same original sources Holmes used to created his Basic rules rather than just house rule it. For those interested here is an explanation from the back of the revision as to how the document came together:

Reviser’s Notes

The first step in producing this revised version of Holmes was to reformat the text along the lines of the second edition of Basic D&D (Moldvay). Since Holmes suffers the same problem that makes reading the original booklets difficult, that of having the discussion of specific rules spread throughout the document rather than just in one place, it was necessary to draw bits and pieces together from various often unrelated sections. The result of this is that some phrases, which were repeated almost word for word, have been deleted. I also made some minor edits of things like references to other TSR products included in the Basic Rules box set.

Secondly, using as a guide the “Zenopus76” article, List of Changes Made to the Holmes Rulebook (1st/3rd), I set about expanding the “missing” material - various weapons mentioned in the rulebook but not in the equipment list, monsters mentioned but not found in the Monster List, magic items likewise referred to but not listed. The missing material was sourced from the original books of Men & Magic, Greyhawk and even Chainmail. I have listed these additions below.

The third step was to expand Holmes beyond the third level, but to do so in a way that was faithful to Holmes intention of producing an introductory version of the original D&D game. (I should mention here that the belief that Holmes was an introduction to the AD&D game has well and truly been laid to rest, although a few diehards stubbornly cling to it despite all evidence to the contrary. It was a belief based mainly on the 8 references to AD&D that Gary Gygax later admitted had been inserted by TSR into the finished manuscript in order to direct customers to the as yet unfinished advanced game, even though it was “obviously a different game system” – From the Sorcerer’s Scroll, The Dragon #35, March 1980.) Geoffrey McKinney’s research into the origins of the material in the Holmes rulebook concluded that “Holmes is about 98% derived from the 1974 D&D boxed set and from Supplement I: GREYHAWK”.* And so I too have used these two books, and only these two, in expanding the levels.

Although Holmes used the Thief class and alternate hit dice from Greyhawk, the bulk of the rules are based mainly on the original three booklets. Holmes himself said “I even used the words of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Collectors Edition (the original books) whenever possible.” (Basic D&D points of view, The Dragon #52, August 1981.) In doing so, he left in a few references to the Chainmail booklet that had no explanation in regards to rule mechanics, such as refering to pegasi as fighting “as a heavy war horse” and unicorns “as a mounted lance or spear and as a heavy horse”, and so consequently I deleted those references. In expanding the levels, I too relied more on Men & Magic than Greyhawk, and given that Holmes is largely an edited version of the former, this made for a seamless process, except in one area – 3rd level magic-user spells. While Men & Magic lists spells at 3rd level as three 1st level spells and one 2nd, Holmes instead has two 1st level and one 2nd level spells. I’m guessing he did this because it seemed a more logical progression. It caused me to make a decision, either to ignore Holmes and use the Men & Magic progression, or go with Holmes and house rule my own spells per level list for higher levels. I chose to go with the former.

The closest I came to house ruling the rules was the addition of a few Greyhawk spells – the 4th level magic-users spells of Monster Summoning II and Ice Storm, and the 3rd level clerical spells of Prayer and Speak With Dead, all from the Greyhawk supplement. I did so to balance the numbers so to speak. In Men & Magic there are two more 5th level magic-user spells than 4th level ones, and six 4th and 5th level clerical spells, compared with only four 3rd level spells. My solution is a nice balance and true to Holmes use of Greyhawk spells to increase the size of his spell lists.

The only other quirk I allowed through was Holmes strange reference to zombies and salt.

[dragondaddy]

Nov 17, 2016 4:22:46 GMT -5 Vile Traveller said:

The Red Baron is referring to the rule that "light weapons" (which means daggers in Holmes) get to strike twice and "Heavy Weapons" only once every other round. This might be fine if you have variable damage, but as written everything does 1d6 which would lead munchkins to arm themselves with nothing but daggers.

The rule was actually mangled somewhat by TSR editing, but even the Holmes manuscript doesn't really work, as discussed on the Zenopus Blog. Which is a pity, because it adds a bit of crunch to the combat rules without going all the way into variable weapon damage, weapons vs. armour tables, and so on.

I adopted the variable weapons damage immediately from Greyhawk by the end of 1977 or by very early in 1978, after I had purchased all the LBB available in the original D&D series. The additional damage that two-handed swords would do 1d12, seemed to match the actual heaviness of the weapons, and it also made sense that a short sword would deal 1d6 damage while a Long Sword, Falchion, Cavalry Sabre, or Bastard Sword would deliver 1d8 because they were a bit larger and heavier.

Everyone knows Eric Holmes writing career as a fantasy writer and rpg author, but not everyone knows more about his experiences prior to this, when he was younger. The two attacks per round with daggers in the Holmes rules reflects a reality that Eric Holmes knew well. His real profession of course, ...was as doctor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California's School of Medicine, but that was much later on in his medical career. He was Eric Holmes, M.D. He was also on staff at Los Angeles County Hospital.

John Eric Holmes was born in February of 1930, He graduated from Stanford in the class of 1951, with a degree in Psychology, of Portland, Oregon. He joined the Marine Corps Reserves Officers training program and attended Officer's School at Quantico, Va., before shipping out to Korea. He then entered medical school at UCLA, where he was chief resident in neurology, and did a neurology residency at Harvard. He joined the faculty at USC in clinical neurology and taught for many years, retiring in 1982. He also taught medical students as a volunteer at the Oregon Health Sciences U., where his last act was to donate his body to the anatomy department. A prolific writer, he published his first story as a senior at Stanford and went on to write several science-fiction novels and a rule book for the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons that sold more than 1 million copies. Survivors: his wife, Sig-Linda Jacobson; his four children, Jeff, Christopher, Marie and Tristan; and two grandsons.

He spent at least two years as a first lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps in Korea between 1951-1953. If you know anything at all about that time, you know the Korean War was raging full on, and it was a very bloody affair, with plenty of hand-to-hand combat in trenches in the hills of Korea both South and North of Seoul. The Marines were in the very thick of it, and in the winter of 1951 made it all the way up to the Chinese Border, where the entire Marine Expeditionary Force was surrounded at place called Chosin Reservoir by Twenty Chinese infantry divisions. In subzero weather, outnumbered by more than 5-1 the U.S. Marines with air and artillery support broke out of their encirclement, and made their way to the Coast, where they were evacuated by ship. They then were re-landed on the coast opposite of Seoul, and spent the next two years in close combat in the hills North of Seoul about where the DMZ is now. John Eric Holmes was right in the middle of all that. Almost every unit deployed on the front after 1951 (and especially the Marines who always wanted to fight in the most dangerous combat zones) faced massive night-time overrun attacks where the Chinese attacked in very large numbers with them old Russian machine guns, primitive rifles, bayonets, and daggers. There was lots of desperate night-time hand-to-hand combat using rifles as clubs and bayonets and daggers and such...

Eric Holmes had not had time to study to be a doctor by then as he had followed in his fathers footsteps in joining the Military. His father, Wilfred Jay Holmes was a Navy Captain born in 1900 Who served as a junior officer on the Battleship USS Nevada until 1932, and then commanded one of the Pacific Fleet submarines until 1936 after which, he retired. He was recalled to active duty after the attack at Pearl Harbor, at the end of 1941 commissioned as a Naval Commander, and assigned to work in counter-intelligence as part of ULTRA team in the Japanese code breaking section, where he was a valuable part of the team that broke the Japanese Naval and Diplomatic communications codes at Pearl Harbor. In early 1942, right after breaking the codes, it was his idea to send un-encrypted messages in the open, describing problems on Midway Island and setting the stage for a planned U.S. evacuation of the Island. The Japanese took that bait, and dispatched a coded (they had broken some of the codes, but didn't know the Japanese target code...) message confirming their plan to send their entire fleet, complete with battleships, heavy cruisers, and troops transports along with six aircraft carriers in order to capture Midway Island. (they wanted to have a base close to the U.S. to strike the American Mainland with, and Midway was it! The Americans, with only three Aircraft Carriers left in the Pacific Fleet, along with a few destroyers, ambushed the Japanese Fleet sinking the four heavy Japanese Aircraft Carriers, and heavily damaging two more Japanese light carriers, and stripping the Japanese Midway Invasion Fleet of their air cover Forcing them to turn back.

They bought the  U.S. time to repair the heavily damaged Pacific Fleet, and clearly showed the superior doctrine of air superiority over traditional naval combatants. Wilfred J. Holmes baited the japanese into revealing their plan of attack and set that all up. For that service he received the Distinguished Navy Cross in 1946. After the war, he retired from the Navy a second time, and became the Dean of the Engineering College at the University of Hawaii. But let's get back to his son, John Eric Holmes, whom you all know as the author of the Dungeons & Dragons Blue Book, as well as a Medical Doctor.

After Korea, John Eric Holmes went back to Medical School in order to become a Doctor, mostly, ...probably, because he wanted to fix up as many of his injured military friends and other military veterans as possible. By the Mid-60's he was also on staff at LA County General Hospital which was just starting to see large numbers of Vietnam War veterans, along with the usual LA gunfights and knife fights, and gang fighting stuff, not to mention civil unrest and anti-war riot injuries from poor protesters who generally couldn't afford care from the private medical hospitals. Eric Holmes spent time helping all those people, and evaluating what caused all these different injuries, and of course worked on mentally and physically rehabilitating these people, and helping them deal with pain. I have a paper recording him attending a Physical Therapy conference at Oxford University in the UK in June of 1966, and he published Neurology articles in both the Astounding and Analog Sci-Fi/Fact magazines beginning in 1951 and continuing through the 60's and into the 1970's.

A great fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the Buck Rogers Sci-fi serials of the 50's and 60's he quickly adopted D&D as part of the original group that coalesced around the game, hearing about it from their friends at the University and Sci-Fi circles. He wrote Mahar of Pellucidar his Fantasy tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs sometime prior to 1976 as it was published by Ace in 1976, and had plenty of common interests with Gary Gygax, as both were fans of military history, fantasy, and science fiction, and after Eric Holmes received a copy of the Original Dungeons & Dragons, wrote Gary a letter, offering to edit a more detailed Introductory book for D&D, which became the Holmes Blue Book edition of D&D after 1974, but prior to its publication in early 1977. Being a war hero, the son of a war hero, as well as an already published fantasy author gave Eric Holmes enormous credibility for both Gary and Dave, and all of the decisions made about the Introductory Blue Book set were made in 1975-1976.

By this time Eric Hoilmes was late into his medical career at least twenty years in, and probably had professional expertise in a lot of actual injuries, and could write credibly about them. Daggers have a reputation as being a dangerous weapon, How does this add up, in the real world...

Five most Dangerous Combat Knives


How Dangerous are knives, really?...


Conquest - Knives & Daggers


Military History - Military Knives & Daggers


Deadliest & Most Useful Tools - Axes, Swords, & Knives



I don't know anything about the zombies and the salt, only that Voodoo, and arcane religious practice involving turning living people into Undead was getting a lot of media attention back in the 70's with lots of movies being made about Voodoo zombies and such, and it was capturing the public imagination in much the same was as terrorism is these days...

 In the dedication Bluebook is for Jeff, and Chris, ...his sons. One way Eric Holmes connected with his children, was by playing D&D with them.

Sadly, they don't seem to have taken the connection to heart. Chris Holmes is over on his website now selling off his Dad's collection of Fantasy, and Sci-Fi Novels.
www.holmeswest.com/the-books.html

Once a great website, Chris Holmes website dedicated to his Dad is now a shell of its former glory...
www.holmeswest.com/home.html

So literally we have to keep his memory and dedications for his children alive...

A couple other links for interested readers here today;

Confessions of a Dungeon Master (1980)
questingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ConfessionsOfADungeonMaster1980.pdf

From the National Institute of Health Archives when those psychos from the religious right were attacking D&D as Satanic, and had sent a query letter to the Surgeon General asking his opinion on different aspects of D&D
profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/QQBCBC.pdf

Additional Reference Links 

Oxford Physical Therapy Conference Volume 46, Issue 6, June 1, 1966
academic.oup.com/ptj/article-abstract/46/6/654/4616464?redirectedFrom=PDF

Wilfred J. Holmes -- Columbia Firefighters Honors Page
www.columbiapage.com/uploads/1/6/1/8/16183816/havholmes1.pdf

Stanford Magazine - Alumni Obituaries
alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=29102

Eric Holmes grave site (both Father and Son were buried with full military honors at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in the Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu)
www.findagrave.com/memorial/99491116/john-e-holmes#view-photo=69598574

National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Memorial_Cemetery_of_the_Pacific

[mormonyoyoman]

Nov 16, 2016 12:54:29 GMT -5 The Red Baron said:

I've yet to see a holmes clone that is better than the holmes book.

That's because there's no space like clone.

Or is it “no place like Holmes"?

[True Black Raven]

Apr 30, 2018 0:14:15 GMT -5 greyharp said:

Nov 16, 2016 12:54:29 GMT -5 The Red Baron said:

I've yet to see a holmes clone that is better than the holmes book.

How about a Holmes expansion which draws purely from OD&D, like Holmes itself?

After posting on the Single Volume OD&D thread I was doing some idle googling and came across a blog which discussed the document back in 2016. Reading the post prior to the single volume read-through I was surprised to discover a reference to an earlier project of mine that I'd totally forgotten about - Holmes Revised, created in 2010. I had to go digging through my hard drive to find the original files. I'm guessing this document had a much smaller audience than my later Single Volume OD&D and so not many would be aware of its existence - me included it seems.

The idea behind Holmes Revised was to expand the rulebook using the same original sources Holmes used to created his Basic rules rather than just house rule it. For those interested here is an explanation from the back of the revision as to how the document came together:

Wow that sounds really cool, I can't now but will read those links later.

[True Black Raven]

May 1, 2018 11:31:30 GMT -5 mormonyoyoman said:

Nov 16, 2016 12:54:29 GMT -5 The Red Baron said:

I've yet to see a holmes clone that is better than the holmes book.

That's because there's no space like clone.

Or is it “no place like Holmes"?

That is priceless!  


dragondaddy, thank you for all that info, I cannot imagine selling that collection off.

[magremore]

Well, I don’t know about his website but Chris Holmes is active in the Holmes community and very supportive of others who specialize in carrying on his father’s work, so I think you should reconsider those comments. Also, Zenopus’s manuscript review shows that the Holmes combat rule had nothing to do with privileging daggers.

[dragondaddy]

I have reconsidered my comments, and stand by them. It is clear that at one time, Eric Holmes had a great fantasy/sci-fi library. I didn't plan on building a huge gaming library when I started playing wargames, and role-playing games. I simply bought the books liked. Both gaming books and traditional fantasy and science fiction works. Almost every gamer who really appreciates these works of fantasy, science fiction, and games do. Now my games & fantasy/sci-fi library has a value comparable to my home. As an investment, it is continually appreciating, and is actually gaining value, as well. Many of the games and books in my collection now, ...are rare, and are becoming difficult to find. I have some books of fiction, that are super rare, and pretty much impossible to find, and can only be acquired these days, ...if one happens to be extremely lucky, ...or ridiculously wealthy.

The same thing is true of Eric Holmes original Fantasy & Sci-Fi collection. If he wanted to, ...you know, sell them himself, because he didn't want the books anymore, I would completely understand. He completely chose to keep those books though, through his entire life, and beyond. I'm sure he thought about it, just like we are thinking about it now, and I'm pretty sure he wanted his children to have these books, for enjoyment, and as reference, because these were things that brought him joy and satisfaction, and he wanted to share that with his children.

... his children are now selling of these books for a few paltry dollars. Just from the listing that remains, that is a library that will not be easy to replace. If they really just need the money, it could easily be earned by doing something much more productive than decimating a rare library that Eric Holmes had built for himself, and his children. One would think that they would want to safeguard something like that.

Also, Chris, at one time, had some great writeups over on his website about the days when they had first started gaming together, and about how his Dad actually got in touch with Gary and agreed to write the new version of D&D. He had really wanted to re-write D&D completely, by-the-way, and settled for editing the Introductory version of D&D. Little tidbits of detail like this, as well as many of the photos of the early days are lost or omitted, because those pages are no longer on the website. So, as a result his Dad, and his contribution to D&D, won't be properly remembered. I find that lamentable, and am lamenting here...

For those of you that don't know, The Holmes Introductory edition of D&D was the all-time best selling edition of Dungeons and Dragons, and that was a record that was only broken after Ryan Dancey & WOTC took over TSR and republished the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

I really hope Chris reads this, and reconsiders selling the gifts that his father bestowed upon him, and in better maintaining his gaming/art website.

[mormonyoyoman]

May 2, 2018 5:22:41 GMT -5 magremore said:

Well, I don’t know about his website but Chris Holmes is active in the Holmes community and very supportive of others who specialize in carrying on his father’s work, so I think you should reconsider those comments. Also, Zenopus’s manuscript review shows that the Holmes combat rule had nothing to do with privileging daggers.

I forget whose comment(s) you're referencing, but it's such an effective defense for Chris that you deserve an exalt. It will arrive in your mailbox inside a plain brown rapper. (The rapper will have his mouth sealed to avoid the charge of sending obscene materials through the federal mails.)