Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition vs The Lost March

Compare Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition and The Lost March side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition	The Lost March
Genre	Fantasy	Fantasy
Tags	Classic Fantasy, Crunchy, Descending AC, Dungeon Crawl, Inventory Management, Random Tables, Resource Management, Strong GM Support, Tactical, Vancian Casting	Classic Fantasy, Sandbox, Exploration, Hexcrawl, Dungeon Crawl, Faction Play, Domain Management, Random Character Creation, Vancian Casting, Inventory Management
Core Mechanic	Attack rolls use a d20 against class-and-level matrices to hit descending Armor Class. Other actions follow distinct procedures rather than a universal check.	A skill check rolls a pool of d6s equal to the skill level: one to five dice, plus a die for some class bonuses. Normally a 6 is a success and a 5 is a partial success. An Ability adjustment either widens the success range or adds a critical-failure range on the lowest faces. Settlement, wilderness and combat checks are opposed by the referee's dice, where equal results cancel and a partial success downgrades a full one. In combat, successes and partial successes are assigned to attack or defend. A hit deals the weapon's maximum damage on a success or its minimum on a partial success.
Dice	d20	d6 dice pool
Complexity	Very High	Low
Availability	Paid	Free core rules
Runnability	4 of 5 book tools	4 of 5 book tools
License	All Rights Reserved	Proprietary
Third-Party Publishing	No verified route found	No verified route found
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	TSR Games	Fausto Botta
Year	1977	2025
Languages	English, French, German	English
Best For	Groups who want a referee-built fantasy campaign driven by treasure expeditions and careful resource planning.	Groups who want a long old-school sandbox campaign that turns treasure into faction rank, training and eventually conquered land.
Highlights	Recovered treasure earns experience, rewarding successful expeditions back to a safe base. Prepared spells make choosing tomorrow’s magic part of expedition planning. Dungeon generators let the referee create unexplored passages during play.	There are no hit points: wounds lower Ability scores directly, so an injured character can carry less treasure home. The lawful factions sell ranks and months of training for gold, so treasure replaces experience as the advancement currency. Each exploration turn, the referee secretly rolls hazard dice sized by difficulty (1d6 on plains, 3d6 in swamps), and each 5 or 6 adds a complication or an encounter.
Considerations	Racial limits restrict which classes and advancement paths a character can choose. Successful hits interrupt casting and expend the spell. Failed saves against many monster attacks can kill characters outright.	Dice resolve only a set of defined checks, so players usually get past traps and puzzles by describing what their characters do rather than by rolling a skill. Wounds normally heal at one Ability point per day of rest, and ten or more days of healing cost a month of training. Characters begin as agents of a supremacist colonial reconquest, a premise the book states openly and asks the referee to expose through play.