I’ve played various incarnations of the Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper roleplaying game since I was 14, and I’ve never been entirely happy with any of them. The old AD&D 2nd Edition rules that I started with were clunky and haphazard, often requiring some pretty annoying charts, and some fancy number-juggling on the players’ parts. Sometimes rolling high was better, and sometimes rolling low was better. That -5 to my armor class…yeah, that negative number was actually a good thing. And I don’t know why exactly I needed to roll a saving throw vs. rods, staves, and wands to avoid getting wuss-slapped by some damn monster, but that’s what the rules said…so that’s what I did. I certainly have some great nostalgic memories of playing and running AD&D 2E games aplenty back in high school (which I plan to one day relate on this blog), but in retrospect, the game’s mechanics made very little logical sense.

It only got worse when then-D&D publisher TSR heaped supplement after supplement upon us, further obfuscating the rules and piling on some of the most unbalanced game mechanics I’ve ever allowed at the table (I still shudder when I think about some of the character kits from the “red book” series). Two books in particular, Player’s Option: Combat & Tactics and Player’s Option: Skills & Powers, devolved the game into unabashed munchkinism at the mechanical level. All was lost.

Then in 2000, a few years after Magic: The Gathering publisher Wizards of the Coast acquired and assimilated TSR, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition hit store shelves. At first glance, it seemed like a better game. The math made far more sense across the board: high rolls were always good, armor class started at 10 and went up (as opposed to 2E’s absurd 10 to -10 scale), cryptic game mechanics like saving throws and multiclassing suddenly became a lot more intuitive, and all the various races and classes struck a much better balance.

Six years and one marketing-driven rules revision later (it’s D&D v3.5, everybody!), I’m frustrated with the game again. Game mechanics like feats (which is…and let’s be honest here, fellow D&D geeks…basically a replacement for the old kit-style mechanics) and prestige classes (the sheer number of these advanced character classes strip all meaning from the term “prestige class”) have once again molded the game into little more than a number-juggling arms race (and don’t even get me started on the attack-of-opportunity rules).

You can imagine my joy when I recently discovered a game that combines all of the good parts of these D&D editions with almost none of the bad. Castles & Crusades, by Troll Lord Games (pictured above), is a fantasy RPG geek’s dream come true: all the classic races, classes, and simple combat mechanics of early AD&D editions, combined with the elegant simplicity and flexibility of D&D 3E…without all the annoyances-disguised-as-rules. Best of all, it’s compatible with pretty much everything from every edition, meaning I can break out all of those old, unused AD&D 2E adventures I never ran.

A lot of “classic” campaign settings and material supports this system, too Troll Lord Games’ own Castle Zagyg campaign setting, authored by D&D creator Gary Gygax himself, basically revisits the fan-favorite Greyhawk setting under a new name. Goodman Games’ “Dungeon Crawl Classics” series will come dual-statted for use with both D&D and Castles & Crusades in the future. And, best of all, Judges Guild (publisher of the infamous City State of the Invincible Overlord) recently announced that future supplements for its Wilderlands of High Fantasy setting will (beginning in 2007) utilize the Castles & Crusades rules.

Sadly, I’ve already heard rumblings over on RPG news site EN World about a possible D&D 4th Edition in 2008, geared much more toward the use of collectible miniatures in combat (3E’s already pretty bad in this regard, too). It’s well-known (and unsurprising, knowing the RPG industry) that D&D isn’t one of Wizards of the Coast’s most profitable product lines, so it makes a certain sense that the bean counters at parent company Hasbro would demand a push toward collectible-friendly mechanics in the next edition of D&D. I’m just wondering how casual gamers will react to a move like that.

Former D&D Brand Manager Ryan Dancey recently laid out one possible scenario, citing the dependence on miniatures and a speculated lack of Open Gaming content as the causes of D&D’s eventual downfall: “Such a radical break would almost certainly result in a 3rd party version of the game, published under a new brand name, becoming the de-facto inheritor of the D&D player network externality, coming into direct competition with whatever faux ‘D&D’ product is being marketed, and probably crushing it.”

And when that day comes, Castles & Crusades will be here to fully inherit the legacy. I hope. In the meantime, I’m working on a new Castles & Crusades campaign to see how good this system really is. Hopefully it doesn’t let me down.