AD&D is not "rules light"

[Bullgrit]

I see this statement a lot around here: "AD&D is rules light"

I have the books. I've read the books. I played the edition. AD&D is in no way "rules light".

Now, the way I played it, I ignored a lot of the rules (weapon vs. AC, helmet, psionics, pummeling/overbearing, potions and segments, training, etc.). But that doesn't make the game as written rules light.

Someone explain to me how this concept of "AD&D is rules light" has seemingly become an accepted fact.

Now, OD&D and BD&D were rules light. But AD&D? No way.

And since I'm sure someone will claim this is an edition war, let me state: I don't think being rules light makes D&D objectively better or worse.

Bullgrit

 

[Cadfan]

Now, the way I played it, I ignored a lot of the rules (weapon vs. AC, helmet, psionics, pummeling/overbearing, potions and segments, training, etc.).

Well, that's the answer, like it or not. The game wasn't rules light, but a lot of the rules were obnoxious so people ignored the ones they didn't like and relied on DM fiat for the rest.

That's certainly how my 2e playing friends still do it. Back in the days of 3e there was this one who used to constantly try to convince me that 3e had "killed creativity" by giving a rule for every situation. I was always baffled by hearing this from a fan of 2e of all things, but then I realized that her group was really playing a freeform RPG with an AD&D book sitting somewhere nearby on the table unopened. So I could see how she might perceive a difference.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

I see this statement a lot around here: "AD&D is rules light"

I have the books. I've read the books. I played the edition. AD&D is in no way "rules light".

Depends on what yardstick you use. Compared to 3e/4e or even late 2e, it's light as a feather.

 

[Doug McCrae]

If you took out all the bad rules it became rules light.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

I could say the same about 4e. If I took out all the bad rules, I'd be left with dice and a pencil.

 

[Bullgrit]

Depends on what yardstick you use. Compared to 3e/4e or even late 2e, it's light as a feather.

First, I can't speak to 4e.

Second, I don't think D&D3 is heavier in rules than AD&D.

Third, even it what you say is true, saying Saturn is a smaller planet than Jupiter doesn't mean Saturn is a small planet.

Bullgrit

 

[Bumbles]

I have the books. I've read the books. I played the edition. AD&D is in no way "rules light".

Except, perhaps in the meaning of whatever folks are saying it. Which is possibly in comparison to something else, but who knows, you didn't reply to any posts, so it's hard to see how we can clarify their meaning for you.

 

[Piratecat]

Stop with the edition war nonsense.

Correct me if i'm misremembering, but it seems like AD&D was rules-heavy -- but that a far greater amount of the rules had to be known only by the DM. Players had a much smaller burden than they do in 4e (or even 3e.)

 

[Dausuul]

It wasn't rules light, exactly, but here's the thing: In 2E, the rules could be divided into two sections. There was the chunk of rules you absolutely needed to create a character and play the game - character generation, core combat mechanics, and so on. And then there was a mass of other rules that did nothing very much.

If you threw out the latter, and played with the former, you had a fairly rules-light game. And you could do that, and many people did... even, I venture to say, most people. I've been a gamer for over twenty years, much of that playing 2E, but I don't remember anyone ever using the weapon versus armor tables, or the pummeling and overbearing rules.

In 3E, the addition of feats, the drastic increase in the number of things affected by stat modifiers, the increase in magnitude of those modifiers (such that you no longer needed exceptional stats for it to have a game effect), the inclusion of skill points, and the multiclassing system, all added up to a huge expansion of the "indispensable" section of the rules. You could tweak or house-rule this stuff, but you couldn't just ignore it. Trying to do so would leave you with a great gaping hole in your game.

Furthermore, those "indispensable" rules had many more hooks into other areas. For instance, you could pretty easily ignore the 2E rules for pummeling and overbearing, because they were their own little bubble floating off in space. But in 3E, every monster and its brother had Improved Grab; and if the fighter picked up Improved Grapple, well, then, grappling just became indispensable. You couldn't get rid of it without either a) screwing over the fighter or b) making up a detailed set of house rules.

2E was not so much rules-light as rules-modular.

 

[Piratecat]

Dausuul, good analysis.

3e tried (with quite a bit of success, I'd argue) to mitigate their rules expansion by using one unifying mechanic: the d20 roll. I found that in 3e I could almost always guess what an unknown rule was, because it cleaved quite closely to every other rule. (The Turn Undead table is the one rule that springs to mind as a proud nail.) The downside of this integration, of course, is that if you didn't like a rule it was much tougher to simply remove it.