Holmes D&D

[Admin Pete]

This is the place for all discussion of Holmes D&D and in the sub-forums Holmes D&D Retro Clones and Related Games.

[Yaleric]

Feb 16, 2015 19:28:50 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

This is the place for all discussion of Holmes D&D and in the sub-forums Holmes D&D Retro Clones and Related Games.

Cool, thanks.

[Yaleric]

The 1977 Holmes D&D Blue Book rules were written by Professor J Eric Holmes with some edits by IIRC Gygax. Originally intended as an Intro set to OD&D and then slightly altered with reference to the coming AD&D, but aside from the inserted reference it has nothing to do with AD&D.

A  few interesting rules in Holmes were
2 tiered Alignment System expands the 3-way Law-Neutral-Chaos axis to 5 Alignments: Lawful Good, Lawful Evil, True Neutral, Chaotic Good & Chaotic Evil.
Initiative based on Dexterity

Some people claim separation of Race and Class was new, but that was already in OD&D. 

Greyhawk is referenced with Thieves and I have heard that Blackmoor is referenced, but I am not remembering how.

In 0D&D, Elves could only adventure as a Fighting-Men in one session and only as a Magic-User in the next session, but never both in the same session. Holmes allowed Elves to function as Fighting-Men and as Magic-Users at the same time, splitting all XP evenly between both classes. IMO this was cleaning up a mistake in judgement in OD&D and should be considered OD&D canon.

[Yaleric]

Another thing they did in Holmes was to change combat rounds to 10 seconds long, instead of one minute long.

Daggers could be used to attack twice a round, while two-handed weapons could only attack once every other round. But no variable weapon damage and all weapons do 1d6. This is broken, since it implies that you save money by only using daggers and buy other stuff with the money you save. This is different in OD&D where all weapons get one attack per round and all do the 1d6 damage and while it would still make since to only use daggers for the money savings, I never saw anyone who did that, but with two attacks per round as an incentive, a lot of players did it.

[Yaleric]

Another thing is that Magic Missile did not automatically hit targets. The Magic-User had to roll to hit, as a Long Bow on the Missile Fire table. What do you think, is this good or bad? I am in favor of not rolling to hit for Magic Missile.