Old School Dungeon Wars

Next time you play old school D&D try waging war on the dungeon...

Fighter, cleric, mage, thief (FCMT). Over the years it has become the fundamental party framework, and the idea has carried forward from the old-school into modern games. D&D 4e seemed explicitly tuned for this framework, but it goes way back. Certainly, the Holmes rules include the four core classes even if OD&D did not.

Old school D&D doesn't play very well if you assume FCMT is the ideal, at least not at low levels. You need a whole squad of fighters -- meatshields -- to form the front line. Even then, casualty rates in any combat are going to be high. The average F1 Veteran will only be able to take a single good hit, just like a solider on the battlefield in Chainmail. After all, he's just one guy, not a Hero or Superhero!

In the Holmes wandering monster tables for a dungeon level 1, you could encounter 3-12 kobolds or 2-8 goblins. They're not particularly tough creatures, but it would be wise to run from an encounter with 12 1d6-damage-dealing kobolds unless you've got a crack grog squad forming a shield-wall.

This definitely doesn't fit with the FCMT party-of-four paradigm. Your fighter will quickly be surrounded by four-to-six kobolds, your cleric will take a hit or two (and has no spells at first level anyway), and your magic-user and thief are easy to hit. They'll fall fast. You need that shield-wall.

Old-school D&D shows its wargaming roots. You're not intended to go into a dungeon with a handful of specialists (at least not at low levels). You're intended to go in with a small army of metal-clad warriors to beat back the hordes of darkness. This is war and you'd better bring a platoon (in plate armor if you can afford it).

I grew up with Moldvay and Mentzer Basic D&D (with some AD&D 1st and 2nd edition mixed in), and the FCMT party was my assumption of how the game was to be played. Even though I was playing old school when it was the only school, it wouldn't have occurred to me to treat a dungeon crawl like storming the castle.

I remember one particular game of Moldvay, where my best friend's brother had rolled up a roster of twenty characters and we battered our way through a maze full of death and demons. The twenty were whittled down to ten, and then to five. They were mostly anonymous, defined more by their roles than anything resembling a character: elf wizard, dwarf fighter, hobbit thief, and so on. Clearly it struck a chord, because that was the early 80's and it's now 40 plus years later and that game still stands out in memory.