Dungeons & Dragons Basic/Expert vs The Lost March

Compare Dungeons & Dragons Basic/Expert and The Lost March side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	Dungeons & Dragons Basic/Expert	The Lost March
Genre	Fantasy	Fantasy
Tags	Classic Fantasy, Dungeon Crawl, Hexcrawl, Resource Management, Deadly, Vancian Casting, Descending AC, Domain Management, Sandbox, Random Tables	Classic Fantasy, Sandbox, Exploration, Hexcrawl, Dungeon Crawl, Faction Play, Domain Management, Random Character Creation, Vancian Casting, Inventory Management
Core Mechanic	Roll 1d20 with the relevant modifiers and meet or exceed the target shown on the attack or saving-throw table. Attack targets account for the opponent's descending Armor Class.	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	High	Low
Availability	Paid	Free core rules
Runnability	5 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 Hobbies, Inc.	Fausto Botta
Year	1981	2025
Languages	English, French	English
Best For	Groups who want dangerous fantasy expeditions built around exploration and managing supplies. Campaigns can grow from dungeon treasure hunts into wilderness travel and ruling a territory.	Groups who want a long old-school sandbox campaign that turns treasure into faction rank, training and eventually conquered land.
Highlights	Ten-minute dungeon turns make searching and resting consume supplies under wandering-monster pressure. Reaction and morale rolls give encounters outcomes beyond fighting to the death. Stronghold construction and settler taxes turn adventuring wealth into territorial responsibilities.	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	Playing through level 14 requires both the Basic and Expert rulebooks. Class-based advancement offers little customization beyond equipment and spell selection. Characters die at zero hit points, and some failed saves kill them immediately.	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.