Chainmail

[VoxRationis]

So what do people know about the game Chainmail, from which D&D sprang? Does anyone have personal experience of it? Is it easy to learn? Easy to adapt? Could someone make use of the rules without sinking money into miniatures? I'm going to run an AD&D campaign sometime in the near future and foresee use for a system which can tell the outcome of large-scale battles.

[Potatomade]

I don't know that much about Chainmail itself specifically, but if you're running AD&D, there's Battlesystem, which is basically Chainmail modified to be 100% cross-compatible with AD&D. There's both a 1E version and a 2E version, so you'd just have to get the right one. Having played a bit with the 2E version, it's simple enough to learn that I didn't have any problems. There were rules for converting characters to and from AD&D 2E, and rules for magic and special weapons. The 2E version also has a separate rulebook for skirmishes too, for those fights too big to go smoothly with normal AD&D detail, and too small to count as full battles.

[Mutazoia]

Chainmail is not D&D. D&D evolved from Chainmail, which started out as a set of rules for strategic fantasy wargamming wih minitures, later evloved to handle individual units (generals/heroes), which then evloved into D&D as the players had more fun controling their "Hero" units.

It will not adapt well.

If you are looking for large scale combat using mini's, hunt down a copy of the Bloodstone Pass (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=tsr+bloodstone+pass) module, which were witten with large scale battles between armies in mind (About the time TSR was playing around with their "new" Battlesystem rules.) The Battlesystem rules (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=tsr%20battlesystem%20pdf) take magic into acount more accurately than Chainmail would (as most of the magic in A&D did not exist in Chainmail, as well as the more "recent" developments in character/NPCs in AD&D that were not present in Chainmail.

[Knaight]

So what do people know about the game Chainmail, from which D&D sprang? Does anyone have personal experience of it? Is it easy to learn? Easy to adapt? Could someone make use of the rules without sinking money into miniatures? I'm going to run an AD&D campaign sometime in the near future and foresee use for a system which can tell the outcome of large-scale battles.

You don't need to sink money into miniatures. The vast majority of miniature games can be played with chits, and chits can be printed for relatively cheaply - good card stock isn't super cheap, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper than minis are. If there's few enough types of things on the field at once you could also probably get away with just buying a set of poker chips or similar, keeping notes on what means what, and calling it a day. Chainmail does have compatibility issues though, and its not a great wargame to begin with.