D&D 1E Mearls on AD&D 1E

When I was 10 years old, I got my first RPG: the Basic Set Red Box. These rules weren't as dense and labyrinthine as AD&D, but they were every bit as idiosyncratic and nonsensical.

And you know what? It bugged the out of me. Playing with my 10-year-old friend and his 8-year-old brother, I was the DM, and it was just frustrating having to make everything up. And the rules that were present weren't any better. Who the heck has a flat 1-in-6 chance of finding any secret door? Why, for the love of Pete, does a wizard spend all morning memorizing a spell, and then forget it the moment it's cast? How does one hold a sword in a hand-and-a-half? I don't have any half-hands!

I'm not trying to claim that I was some sort of 10-year-old rules prodigy, or that people who enjoyed earlier editions were having badwrongfun. (In fact, if I were a rules prodigy, maybe I would have been a better DM and the whole experience would have gone differently.) It's just that the argument that "poor rules make good games" has always fallen flat for me. I think, good DMs make good games. Good rules make good DMs, and early D&D trained a lot of bad DMs. 3E's over-specified ruleset was a direct response to this.

Do I think Mearls is wrong? No, I think some people learn DMing best in a harsh, sink-or-swim environment like 1E. But those people are rare and probably would have become good DMs eventually anyway. And it helps if your last name is Gygax. For most people, we need clear, helpful game rules as a crutch, simply so we function as DM.

It's probably a poor idea to post in a thread with 100+ posts after having only read the initial post but I'm going to do it anyway.

There really is something magical about a dungeon crawl. It was my introduction to D&D - and probably yours. My first introduction to D&D was 1e - and it might be yours, too.

I'm glad that Mearls was able to experience that dungeon crawl feeling again and not just relay it via a memory of D&D's past. I've been playing 1e and D&D adventures in my current 5e campaign and attempting to capture some of that old feeling (including mapping!).

77IM said:

It's just that the argument that "poor rules make good games" has always fallen flat for me. I think, good DMs make good games. Good rules make good DMs, and early D&D trained a lot of bad DMs.

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Good DMs do make good games, especially in spite if bad rules. Bad DMs run sucky games, too in spite of good rules. That's why the old saw (it's only from the 90s) rings true. But it's off. Bad rules cant stop a good GM, but they run interference for the bad ones, helping them blend in with the OK and well-meaning and still-improving ones.
Good rules make the bad GMs obvious, and let OK GMs run reasonably good games, too.

Tony Vargas said:

1e didn't use THAC0. If he'd had to cope with THAC0, the whole experience would have been torpedoed.

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It did. You'll find Thac0 in assorted modules & Dungeon issues, squeezed into various stat block lines.
It's also used in the back of the DMG in the monster charts.

77IM said:

How does one hold a sword in a hand-and-a-half? I don't have any half-hands!

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You know what we did when we ran into terms & stuff like that we didn't understand? We looked it up.
Yay, encyclopedias & the dictionary for the win! Or often just Dad as he was a history prof.
But more than once we delved into strange areas (at least as far as 12 year olds were concerned) of the local library looking up stuff we ran into in our D&D books.....

And there were a good # of odd conversations at the dinner table. Such as:
12 year old: "Dad, what's a Brazen Strumpet?"
10 year old: "Yeah, and a Trull."
Dad: "..... Where did you guys learn those terms?"
One of us: "In the Dungeon Masters Guide. They're in the Random Harlot Table."
Dad: "......"
Mom eyes him.....
Dad goes on to explain those terms & others - as well as why we shouldn't use them at lunch during school. Probably also swore at Gygax when we couldn't hear.

Later editions? Just lacks such teachable moments. They get blander & blander the further out we get. It's pretty sad really.

Tony Vargas said:

I'm sorry, that's not merely 'muddied.' The 1e attack matrixes and 2e's THAC0 were quite different. I recall the DMG appendix with compressed monster statistics, but never seeing the abbreviation, and THAC0 wasn't just an abbreviation in 2e, it was a methodology that gave different results from the 1e attack matrixes.

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....the different results only came at the top end of the scale, the part of the table with repeating 20s. On all other parts of the scale THAC0 worked just fine, just as long as you were able to get to grips with the 20* entries (20 to hit AC1, meaning nat 20 to hit AC20)

THAC0 = To Hit Armour Class 0 - that was in the appendix of the 1e DMG
I hear it was commonplace in magazines - I didn't see those (being in the UK)
But it was standard in any well-edited adventure module from 1983 onwards - for example the UK series

I began playing D&D in 1983. THAC0 has been an integral part from the moment I started. It did not suddenly magically appear in 1989 with 2E.

JonnyP71 said:

....the different results only came at the top end of the scale, the part of the table with repeating 20s. On all other parts of the scale THAC0 worked just fine, just as long as you were able to get to grips with the 20* entries (20 to hit AC1, meaning nat 20 to hit AC20)

THAC0 = To Hit Armour Class 0 - that was in the appendix of the 1e DMG

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Yes, in the experience point tables - and that's the only place it appears in any of the early stuff. It's not in any of the Monster Manuals, it's not in Unearthed Arcana, nor the PH, nor any modules (other than the UK series - see below) that I can think of.

I hear it was commonplace in magazines - I didn't see those (being in the UK)
But it was standard in any well-edited adventure module from 1983 onwards - for example the UK series

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I think the UK series might have been unusual - or even unique - in this regard. I don't remember seeing THAC0 as a regular published thing until 2e.

I began playing D&D in 1983. THAC0 has been an integral part from the moment I started. It did not suddenly magically appear in 1989 with 2E.

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I'm starting to wonder if maybe THAC0 is a thing that (other than the one place in the DMG) originated as a common practice in the UK and only later worked its way over here. You're in the UK by the look of it and have used THAC0 all along; the UK-series modules used it but really nothing else did before 2e; and nobody I know ever used it here until 2e days (and I've never used it at all when DMing as I find it just gets in the way of the arithmetic I have to do anyway).

Lan-"and it seems there's hope for Mearls yet"-efan

People will probably disagree, but rules DO make a game in many instances. Rules strongly influence how the game runs, how it feels, and how it works in conjunction with one's game. RPGs are like organized communal imagination...where we play games with each other but rather than have it completely free form, we have rules to organize ourselves in a cooperative gaming experience.

Different RPGs feel differently when you play them. Each has it's own...spirit, I suppose is what one could call it. Even though closely related, B/X, BECMI, AD&D and AD&D 2e each have their own spirit of sorts, but MUCH more closely aligned and feel much more like each other than later iterations of the D&D such as 3.5 or 4e.

When you try to describe this feeling...it's like trying to describe salt. How do you expressly describe such a feeling of the game?

AD&D has it's own flavor, and it is one that I absolutely love. Just as some dislike chocolate while others love it, games are similar at times. However, I don't think the flavor of a game is merely down to nostalgia, I think games themselves have an actual feel to them, and AD&D is one that resonates heavily among many people (including myself). To some, when they experience this, just like trying to describe salt, if they are swept off their feet by it, it can be impossible to put into words just what it is they are feeling.

So, I ascribe (unpopular as this opinion probably will be) that different RPGs have different flavors as different as ice cream...and people can experience these different flavors of ice cream as distinctly as each RPG is different from another. AD&D has a special feel to it (and 5e does as well, as do most other RPGs) that for some, that flavor is especially sweet.

JonnyP71 said:

....the different results only came at the top end of the scale, the part of the table with repeating 20s

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For the first columns of several attack matrices, the string of 20's started at AC1, the THAC0 methodology doesn't have that, it is a different thing from attack matrixes. When people bitch about THAC0, they're bitching about using it to calculate what they need to hit, not about the abbreviation, itself. Look at Mike's comments in the first post, that's the kind of experience you get from having attack matrices in the DMG, not from THAC0 in PH.

I began playing D&D in 1983. THAC0 has been an integral part from the moment I started.

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I've been playing since 1980, and AD&D used attack matrices until 2e.

Tony Vargas said:

For the first columns of several attack matrices, the string of 20's started at AC1, the THAC0 methodology doesn't have that, it is a different thing from attack matrixes. When people bitch about THAC0, they're bitching about using it to calculate what they need to hit, not about the abbreviation, itself. Look at Mike's comments in the first post, that's the kind of experience you get from having attack matrices in the DMG, not from THAC0 in PH.

I've been playing since 1980, and AD&D used attack matrices until 2e.

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When the 20s started at AC 1 then it was just written as THAC0 20*.

It wasn’t just in the UK series Lanefan, there were others. I cited the UK series as they were at the forefront in terms of editing quality. I’m pretty sure S4 had it shown on the monster roster pages. Also some BECMI products. I’ll take as look when I back home tomorrow.

Tony, because you didn’t use it, that does not mean it did not exist. Yes, my own experiences may differ from the US norm as the UK modules were widely available and popular here..... but it was in the DMG too