Thursday, January 26, 2012

Question of the Day: Can you use B/X and Labyrinth Lord together?

Hi all, don't have much time to post today. But I wanted to ask another question, this one inspired by my re-readings of late. I've been delving once again into the pages of both the original B/X books as well as Labyrinth Lord. But since I have such limited time, one thing escapes me: true knowledge how the two would work together in actual use during a game session.

What I mean is, say I'm using the B/X books for reference and the players have copies of LL for reference. What problems would we run into, if any?

So, the question: can one safely use B/X and LL simultaneously during a game session and not get into trouble?

10 comments:

  1. The LL cleric spell progression table is slightly different, as is turning, and all the other LL experience tables are slightly off. As long as they use those player facing items, you should be fine with everything else. I use BX and LL and AEC together all the time.

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  2. Thanks Beedo, but what about spells? Are all the B/X spells in LL? And doesn't LL have more/different spells? I would probably be using B/X for all the character progression mechanics, but I'm thinking that my players who are running spellcasters would be using my copies of LL to look up spells. Any pitfalls there?

    What this all boils down to is I have one copy of B/X and two copies of LL. I want to avoid having to obtain any more copies of either rule set, should I ever want to run some B/X action.

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  3. The spell lists looked the same to me. I didn't compare one to one. But I would expect it to work fine.

    The equipment and armor lists are a bit different, as they are derived from the d20 SRD. You might want to check those out.

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  4. Armor is incrediblier cheaper in B/X than in LL. We had a guy running around in leather because that's all he thought he could afford because he only had the LL pdf. He could have had plate.

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  5. Couple of other things:

    The monster reaction table is reversed; lower is better (as in, a more friendly reaction) in LL, higher is better in B/X; consequently, high CHA subtracts from the roll in the former and adds to it in the latter, so be careful not to mix the 2 or you'll end up penalizing someone for a good CHA score.

    Also, some of the saving throws for the various classes are just a little bit off, so you'll want to pick one and stick with it so as to avoid confusion. Of course, the saves for Dwarves & Halflings differ between B & X, too, so there's that to consider as well (expert is considerably more generous, at least in the copies I have; I don't know if this was rectified in later printings).

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  6. LL MU Spells go to ninth level. B/X tops out at 6th. Not sure how well they match up during character levels 1-14, where B/X stops.

    The To Hit Charts are different. Smoothed out in LL. They ultimately end up in the same place, but the Fighter has an edge most of the time, if he's using the LL Hit Progression.

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  7. Hmmm...it's really looking like they can't be seamlessly used together, in the strictest sense. I'm going to have to choose between nostalgia and functionality, I suppose ;-)

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  8. I'd say they can be used seamlessly in the strictest sense--you just need to decide whether to use B/X or LL XP tables for advancement. As James said, the To Hit charts end up in the same place, so characters should be 99% compatible regardless, with only minor negligible differences here and there.

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  9. Jason: well, in reading the other comments, it would seem that there's more of difference than just in the advancement tables. But if people are running successful games with both B/X and LL at the table, then it's possible, granted. Just not sure if it's possible for me, with my limited brain power ;-)

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  10. In my experience it really depends how anal your group members are. If it's a group looking to have fun then yes, you can use them together. If there are rules junkies then perhaps not.

    We use LL+AEC because it is fast and cheap to tell people where to get the rules.

    As an alternative, Dan Proctor makes the texts available in Word (I think) on the LL site. Some people have taken those and made edits to print their own house rules and rulebooks.

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