Celebrating Uniform Fighting-Men

Mechanically identical.

The further back in the history of the game we go, the more uniform the Fighting-Men become. Without feats, without weapon specialization and no weapon proficiencies, there is very little difference between one man and another. Especially when you go back to ODD74 and Holmes, where each weapon does 1-6 damage and stat bonuses are minimal.  Not incidentally, the same objection can be made about Clerics as well. (It is less true for Magic-Uses because by memorizing different spells, they can play very differently from one another.)

The mechanical differences between two fighting men from ODD74 and several OSR offerings are: level, hit dice, hit points (both level-dependent) and character stats. But we already know stats are minimally important most of the time. So mechanically, two Fighters of the same level are just about identical.

The first large point of differentiation you have control over is gear. You can make sure your man has everything he will need, and nothing he doesn't. You can have him buy great armor and a shield: and a hat and a rope and a pole and a lantern a long bow and so forth and so forth. OR, you can have him buy leather armor and a pole arm, and count on stealth, foot speed and reach. To a lesser extent, you have the ability to bargain with the other players for magic items, but what items there are to bargain over is up to the Ref. Even though magic items can make a huge difference, you have much less control over what you get.

All of this however is preamble when we get to the single biggest factor that differentiates one figure from another: the player. Not the character sheet, not feats, powers, or magic items; the player.  In chess, no one complains about two knights being identical; you just use them the best you can. Even with the minimal mechanical differences between fantasy medieval knights, you get to do the same thing! Similarity breeds familiarity. You can translate what you learn with one fighting man to the next fighting man figure you play. You don't have to start from scratch every time.  Therefore, uniform Fighting-Men is a feature, not a bug, of the early games.

Just as dungeons are endlessly iterative, so are fighting men. So are clerics and so are magic users. I'm in my 34th year of playing D&D and I'm drawn to simpler and simpler versions, even though they are not what I started with.  The reason I think is because the more you strip away the system's crunch, the more that player skill, at the table, in real time matters. That's what "playing the game" means: one player (the Ref) poses problems in the form of a mysterious and dangerous setting, and the several players work together to think through problems posed and then risk their pieces to conquer the setting.  That's another way of stating the bargain implicit in D&D: risk life and limb in exchange for fame and fortune!