Hi James: I'm a new board member, and hope that reviving old threads is not, in context, a terrible sin. I was excited to discover S&S and this board and particularly this thread because, hey, it fits my preoccupations!
I'm not an "old-school gamer" as such. I did start playing 3LBB-plus-Greyhawk back in January 1979, but these days I'm happy to play everything from Dogs in the Vinyard to Hollow Earth Expedition. Nevertheless, back a year or so ago when it was possible I picked up the PDFs of white-box, Greyhawk and Chainmail, with special interest in how Chainmail fit into the whole picture. (We indeed pretty much immediately started using the "alternate system" as modified by Greyhawk.) And OMG, discovered that standard Chainmail combat is a die-pool system (TN 6!)
with mook rules. Not only that, but it has the ancestor of the Minion rules from Spirit of the Century in it: IIRC in a mass combat, a Hero/Superhero attached to a base of troops takes no damage until all the troops he's attached to are wiped out. (I think a Hero also doesn't die unless he takes four kill results (6s) in one roll.
That was kind of mind-blowing.
Then, the way you explain the other subsystems tends to mitigate complaints a lot of people have with D&D as it evolved. Frex, ablative HP are less of an issue if higher-level combatants are also
dealing multiple dice of damage. And when one considers that the M2M and MvM tables were "one roll engines," the old "AC makes you harder to 'hit'" bugaboo makes more sense. Since it originally wasn't a roll "to hit" at all, but a roll to kill, it's just a reasonable level of abstraction for fast-play combat resolution. To me, if you're going to add damage rolls to that, it makes
more sense that damage by weapon be uniform - rolling enough to get past the armor on the M2M table means you've already determined that this blow is a potentially deadly strike.
You've laid it out nicely, and I'm particularly intrigued by the deadliness of the standard missile rules. Something that comes up in fantasy system discussions all the time is that when Conan is stopped in the street by some guardsman with crossbows,
he bloody well freezes for them, because he's afraid a couple of crossbow bolts
might kill him. Chainmail as you explicate it here fits with that kind of thing.
Also, if I read you right, higher-level fighters on the M2M table take multiple actions per round, so if you have two higher-level fighters going at it together, it would be like a flurry of attacks, right, before a new round begins?
Now, couple thoughts:
1) How about interleaving attacks on the M2M table during a flurry. e.g.A won intiative so A goes then B then A then B until each has used up all their attacks for the round?
2) The polyhedrals. They're not part of the "non-alternate" combat system, but they seem to be the "official" way to do some other things. One could, well, use them for those things.
3) Alas, deliberately nerfing low-level magic-users seems to have been core to the game from the very beginning. And when you've got fighters throwing multiple handfuls of dice for damage and making several attacks per round even at relatively low levels, the disparity in viability is that much greater.
4) Hit dice: Here's a crazy optional idea - don't roll & record static hit points. Roll them as a "damage save" every time you get hit. If you're a first level fighter with "1+1 hit dice" you have
1+1 hit dice. If someone beats your AC on the M2M or MvM table, they roll damage and you roll your hit dice and compare the scores. Then . . . well, I haven't worked that part out yet.
5) What's a good way to reintegrate "driven back" or some result beyond "you're dead" or "you take X damage" into a Chainmail-based system? Maybe a defender can always trade space for damage if she has room behind her and is willing? (If you're trying to defend other party members maybe you have to suck it up. If there's a wall at your back, oh well! If there's a chasm at your back, how can the
attacker choose "driven back.")
6) Is it anyone else's sense that morale checks should be a much bigger part of combat than they became by the time we all standardized on some interpretation of AD&D? If so, what to do about morale checks for PCs? Never? PCs can ignore at a cost in effectiveness?
7) Ramble ramble ramble!
Best,
Jim