Quote from: PremierTo the original poster:

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but if your players are all old-schoolers and if you have more experience with 1E AD&D than with Hackmaster (which is what I inferred from this thread), then why not just run the game in straight, honest-to-God 1st edition AD&D?

Quote from: James McMurrayI'd missed that the group was made up of previous AD&Ders. In that case I'd suggest using Hackmaster as well.

I guess what I'm thinking and not saying/articulating well, is that it's been over 20 years since any of us have played AD&D.  So, I'm not sure how much our experience will(or in particular, my experience, since I will probably GM) help in preptime/come-up-to-speed time.  

I have the Hackmaster GM/Players guides, paging through them last night, while entertaining, made me slightly glaze over with the amount of tables/rules/etc. contained within. I do like the notion of reputation/honor, I'm a fan of critical hits/like the GM-Player cards....

So, I also have the D&D 3E/3.5E  player's handbook, having read through it, it seemed more streamlined for creating characters/running combat.  I do enjoy alot of the trappings of 3.5E vs AD&D 1E.  No THACO, feats/skills, etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say regarding 3.5E, I'm sort of jonesing to run that, just to give it a spin, and that I've already completed a readthough of it.

I guess I'm weighing running LKotB with 3.5E, with the pro of knowing the system superficially better, but the con of converting monsters/traps, etc. vs. running LKotB with Hackmaster(AD&D1E with some Hackmaster options) where the pro is no conversions and the con is learning/re-learning AD&D 1E with the Hackmaster trappings....

Hopefully clarifies things...


Rich

Well, tough choice.  The advantage of running it HM style is less "prep time" for you out of the game... but if you're wanting to do 3.5 then maybe that prep work would be part of the fun.

Personally like like both systems.  There are a lot of things in 3.5 that I really like and all, but I also love some of the HM changes.  

If you go the HM route I'd really recommend what Grimjesta said earlier and pair down how much HM  you use the first time out... just adding it as you want.  I'm pretty familiar with 3.5 now and i still get pretty bogged down looking up the rules and figuring out how things work for some of the less common things that came up more than I expected (like grappling).  

I think you should look at what would be more fun for you and the group and go with it!

One important thing I forgot to suggest before: ask the players about their preferences.
They might feel that refreshing their knowledge of AD&D is still better than having to learn a completely new system (meaning 3.5E), or they might even consider Hackmaster to be too different. Just a few weeks ago, I started up a small AD&D group with two oldtimer friends, neither of whom ever played anything other than 1E, and even that only 20 years ago. And guess what, nobody had a problem with the rules after the first, I don't know, 15 minutes.
Then there's also the chance that some of them might have had some exposure to either HM or 3.5 (not necessarily actively playing, maybe just reading about it or following online discussions about them), and might have a definitive preference against it. I know I wouldn't touch the latter with a 10 foot pole if they paid me for it.
So, just make sure to ask for their input on the matter - especially since you yourself don't seem to have any strong preferences.

Quote from: rcsampleHmm...assuming some familiarity of AD&D as a player many moons ago, would it be harder to start GMing Hackmaster or D&D3E for: combats?  statting up villains/monsters?

If you did the AD&D thing Hackmaster might be easier. I always found 3.x too drastically different from the AD&D system to use older modules: it's a tedious process, this 3.5 thing. At least from the perspective of using an AD&D or Hackmaster module. That's what got me playing Hackmaster to begin with - I missed running the old modules I grew up with, but restatting them for 3.0 was a nightmare. Hackmaster is AD&D with some extra layers of rules you can even ignore if you wanted to.

Combat is less burdensome in HM as well. If you're looking for old-school dungeon-bashing, you really don't want to slow combat down with 5' steps and AoOs. IMHO, that is.

-=Grim=-

What did you find tedious about it? I've run a bunch of (A)D&D modules in 3.x and never had a problem. Pretty much every monster, magic item, and most traps have already been upgraded. Gold flowed more freely in older editions, partly because of its tie to XP, but dividing everything by 10 usually evens that out.

About the only place where things get hairy is with NPCs, and even then you can just use the ones provided in the DMG if you don't want to do a lot of customization.

Quote from: rcsampleContemplating a new campaign made up of Old-Schoolers who haven't played in years.  Thought about B4, X1, Castle Whiterock.  Looked through Hackmasters LKoTB and thought it was pretty cool from the perspctive of it being similar to B4 and have more detail (for time-crunched me).  Although I'm not sure coverting it to 3e would be easy/worth-the-time.

Any thoughts?

My solution was to take the three versions of the Keep module (B2: Keep on the Borderlands, Return to Keep on the Borderlands, and Hackmaster's Little Keep on the Borderlands) and put them into a blender and ran them with 3.5 with some of my own touches because all three had things I liked and things I didn't like.

If you get Little Keep on the Borderlands, be sure to get the free download Beneath the Little Keep from KoDT.  It adds some dungeons to the Keep.