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[Henry]

Originally Posted by Umbran

The at-will/encounter/daily powers mechanics, the detailed reliance on positioning and movement, the balance of classes - all of these steer the game far, far away from having a 1e feel for me and my group.

It's the last point, about monster staying power and the daily "shortcut" resources, where the similarities are for me. It wasn't until I was reminded, playing some 1E convention games for the NC gamedays, of this phenomenon, watching PCs smacking around wights, giants, gnolls, hellhounds, etc. In 1E, unless spells were involved, you just could not take down opponents over 1 or 2 hit dice in one shot. If you faced a roomful of hill giants, it was going to take anywhere from 4 to 8 hits (more likely around 8) to bring one down. This left time, over several rounds, for them to call reinforcements, to shift into corridors that only allowed facing them one at a time, to monologue, to do several things that were largely gone from all the 3E games we played. PCs had an upper max damage they could do, which the monster hit dice took into account. Even when PCs stopped gaining hit dice at 9th level, monsters still gained hit dice, and spells became even more crucial to bringing them down. In OD&D, it was even more pronounced, with the prevalence of d6's and very few bonuses.

In 3E, you have martial types able to do anywhere from 10 to 20 damage even at first level (for those big barbarians with the greataxes) to literally a hundred points of damage in a round, with their bonuses stacked high enough to ensure almost every attack was a hit. Spells could bypass spell resistance, rip off half a monster's hit points in a single attack, or in some cases just make the monster die in a single round, and caster's don't get a piddly amount of spells -- they get dozens to cast, and scribe scroll & equivalent feats make it relatively easy to add even to this total. Admittedly, as you rise in levels in 3e, the bottom levels of spells become less useful, but it still leaves quite a few spells to compensate.

However, the monster's hit points did not rise enough to compensate for a character being able to do its hit points in damage in any given round. 3E has a far looser cap on damage per level per round over time than 1E does in this regard. 4E has brought back that cap that was there, this time tighter than before. (I am not even sure the cap was intentional by Gary or not, and I say Gary rather than Dave Arneson here since it appears Gary was more the "mechanic" than Dave was, "Woz" to Dave Arneson's "Steve Jobs" so to speak.)

In regard to tactics in 1E, if one played by the rules in the DMG, actively tried to decipher them and put them to use, or looked at some of their precursors in Chainmail, there was a tactical element to them. You had to decide to charge or cautiously engage; weapon speed made a difference in ties; initiative order was by the whole party rather than by individual, so you did have to coordinate with your fellows to avoid screw ups (I once saw a thief wander into a magic-user's cone of cold because of the way inits were called in 1E and then acted on); weapon length was quite important, because someone who charges the guy with the longer weapon screwed up (something they actually took out of 3E, and only partially addressed it in 3E with reach). Beyond these, facing played a role; amount of opponents in a given space was important (so just like in 3E and 4E backing into a narrow hallway in the face of superior numbers was a good tactic). All these things played into the game as written to make a tactical difference. The old argument of "your old school vs. my old school" comes in here, because a lot of people jsut plain dumped these tactical elements because they were not clearly explained in the DMG. As a result, a lot of "boardless" combat went on under 1E and 2E, and gave some people a very different experience.

That's what really comes to mind for me when I compare the two. When I see similarities between them, they both play similarly under the 1E and 4E rules, as opposed to how 3E plays. It's almost as if they really looked under the hood of 1E and saw some of the things that made it play the way it did, and saw how they could get there with different mechanics, but I doubt that's the way it happened. Instead, it almost seems like the design of a game going full circle, because some things worked very well for it in the past, and in going away from it, natural process design kind of "pushed" it back in that direction subconsciously.