#becmi

They’re super fun to read, btw! Maybe I’ll make some posts exclusively on the fun things I learned about the older D&D editions. But for now, let’s just appreciate the illustrations from AD&D book.

The D&D Rules Cyclopedia is, in my opinion, the best-ever edition of D&D, for a few main reasons.

First, because it is a single book that contains all the rules you'll ever need to play. It's a Players' Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual all in one.

Second, because it was a consolidation of the Basic, Expert, Companion, and Master rulebooks (which, along with the Immortals expansion, are referred to as the "BECMI" edition of D&D). This edition of D&D focused on being easy to learn and play (hence being released in five different sets, allowing a group to add more advanced rules only once they're ready), putting simplicity first while still allowing for lots of character customization with the skills and weapon masteries you could gain as you leveled up.

And third, the BECMI edition had a very strong focus and core identity. Namely, it was a game about dungeon crawling (and hex-crawling) first and foremost, with rules designed to support that style of play. While 5th edition tried to make dungeon crawling possible, it's really not designed for that playstyle at all (while also having slow and clunky combat rules that make tactical fights less fun to play than in a game like 4e).

Add in the many helpful bits like the morale and NPC reaction rules (providing solid mechanics for roleplaying NPCs), rules for retainers (giving players the ability to spend their hard-earned gold on recruiting NPCs to accompany them on adventures), and rules for building strongholds and attracting followers (giving PCs another excellent "gold sink" and the ability to expand the scope of the campaign to domain-level play if desired), and this version of D&D succeeds in creating the specific flavour of fantasy it aims for to a degree never reached by any other edition (except maybe 4th, though that game aims for a completely different genre).

OKAY so I am seeing so much misinformation about dungeons and dragons in stranger things online right now particularly on Reddit where I’m seeing people apply 5th edition rules to stranger things where they literally play BECMI AND ADVANCED D&D! So this is for anyone who wants a break down of the characters’ broken D&D classes!

To begin in the first seasons on stranger things the main party play Basic and Expert dungeons and dragons (aka BECMI) this is important because if you play 5E D&D the rules are really different. For starters what we consider races and classes are fused into one category which means being a halfling counts as a class like fighter although race adjacent classes are categorised as Demi-humans they are still a class and magic users have to always be human.

This all breaks apart though when you look at some of the Parties D&D OCs in season 1:

Will: Elf, Cleric and magic user

Dustin: Dwarf, Bard

Okay so because race and class are the same thing in BECMI you can easily look at these characters and assume that they are multi classing right? Except multi classing isn’t a thing in BECMI so how is Will three different classes and Dustin two when you can only be one, the only way I can justify the writers doing this is if you say that the party are using dual classing rules from Advanced D&D and fusing them with BECMI even though it’s implied that the party only started playing AD&D in season 2 as that’s the first time we see one of the books which really begs the question of why don’t the party just play advanced then if they prefer the rules? Also another point is Dustin’s character being a bard which yet again is not a class in BECMI… but is in AD&D

Also side tangent but Will’s character is actually so overpowered because BECMI classes are really unbalanced so for him to be playing a Demi-human and a magic user is really overpowered and I don’t know why Mike would allow him to do that.

Unlike the worlds in which AD&D is set, be they Greyhawk, Dragonlance or soon enough The Forgotten Realms, the world in which BECMI D&D was set was never really fleshed out in any systematic way. In fact it was usually known as "The Known World" without having a name settled for it up until 1991 when the name Mystara will first appear in print. 

This and the upcoming Gazetteers will do much to flesh out the world in which BECMI is set by giving in-depth information about all kinds of areas of the world. In this volume of around 65 pages, we get everything we need to know about Karameikos, a place in which several published adventures have been set and which can serve as a good starting point for new players. We get  details on geography, history, politics, economy as well as notable characters in the Grand Duchy.

All this would have been invaluable information for DMs who wanted a world which felt lived in and in which every detail was thought out. This is the kind of treatment that BECMI players deserved, good world-building supplements, instead of having to divine everything from tidbits of information spread around a number of different modules and sets.