D&D 1E Mearls on AD&D 1E

Tony Vargas said:

That's the main thing, definitely, nostalgia shades our perceptions in wonderful ways, sometimes. When they said "you can't go home again" (ie, you can never recapture the wonder of childhood) they reckoned without 1e AD&D.

Mearls certainly managed some 140-character heartfelt near-prose-poems, there. I mean, I despise twitter in general, but reading that, I felt something, genuinely.

That he is essentially talking about the game being a chaotic, unplayable mess, if viewed as a mere game without the experience of having played it back in the day, in no way diminishes that.

Click to expand...

I know one of your frequent talking points is that love for 1e is just "nostalgia", but Mearls isn't just reminiscing about 1e, he actually played it and apparently had a transcendent experience doing so.

Are you writing that off as nostalgia as well? If so, then by what evidence would you accept that some people actually enjoy 1e? Or is all possible evidence automatically just nostalgia? To me that belongs in a category "If you deny the conspiracy then you much be part of it."

Elfcrusher said:

If so, then by what evidence would you accept that some people actually enjoy 1e?

Click to expand...

Dude, I enjoy 1e.

And, yeah, I accept that nostaligia's the main reason. When you're old, enjoying something you did as a teenager, you gotta be open to the possibility that's a big part of it. When the kids, having to listen to you wax rhapsodic about all the honestly-not-nostalgic reasons it's better than the modern alternatives, start to roll their eyes and just nod & agree with everything you say, it's been confirmed.

"Oh, sure, Tony, I totally see how Harryhausen's jerky stop-motion animation is so artistically superior to Avatar, yeah... "

Elfcrusher said:

I know one of your frequent talking points is that love for 1e is just "nostalgia", but Mearls isn't just reminiscing about 1e, he actually played it and apparently had a transcendent experience doing so.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't say that was because of the system, but the setting and the adventure content (as I explain above). I think that's backed up by his friend's recommendation of Joseph Campbell.

Tony Vargas said:

Dude, I enjoy 1e.

And, yeah, I accept that nostaligia's the main reason. When you're old, enjoying something you did as a teenager, you gotta be open to the possibility that's a big part of it. When the kids, having to listen to you wax rhapsodic about all the honestly-not-nostalgic reasons it's better than the modern alternatives, start to roll their eyes and just nod & agree with everything you say, it's been confirmed.

"Oh, sure, Tony, I totally see how Harryhausen's jerky stop-motion animation is so artistically superior to Avatar, yeah... "

Click to expand...

So if we could find somebody younger than 30 who tries 1e and loves it, would you be willing to accept that there is something to love that has nothing to do with nostalgia?

Maybe somebody who had never tried 1e was in that game with Mearls....

Elfcrusher said:

So if we could find somebody younger than 30 who tries 1e and loves it, would you be willing to accept that there is something to love that has nothing to do with nostalgia?

Maybe somebody who had never tried 1e was in that game with Mearls....

Click to expand...

IME, no, it would just get explained away as an aberration or "nostalgia for a thing you never got to experience."

Elfcrusher said:

So if we could find somebody younger than 30 who tries 1e and loves it, would you be willing to accept that there is something to love that has nothing to do with nostalgia?

Click to expand...

Hey, there's edge cases for everything. But, if he played with a bunch of guys who were tripping the whole nostalgia deal, it could as well have been a nostalgia-contact high. ;P

I know my posting style runs pretty cranky-old-man, but I was actually expressing a positive impression of what Mearls had to say. Thanks for challenging me on it. I'll try to live up to the expectation of unalloyed negativity, next time.

Elfcrusher said:

I know one of your frequent talking points is that love for 1e is just "nostalgia", but Mearls isn't just reminiscing about 1e, he actually played it and apparently had a transcendent experience doing so.

Are you writing that off as nostalgia as well? If so, then by what evidence would you accept that some people actually enjoy 1e? Or is all possible evidence automatically just nostalgia? To me that belongs in a category "If you deny the conspiracy then you much be part of it."

Click to expand...

I can accept that the limited nature and problem solving experience of a dungeon crawl is very much a different kind of game than the adventure path or sandbox gaming that's more prevalent today. I think it sounds pretty fun.

I'm not willing to accept that the vague and difficult to parse rules of 1E will somehow open my chakras to ephemeral wonders like I'm roleplaying a ayahuasca retreat.

TwoSix said:

I'm not willing to accept that the vague and difficult to parse rules of 1E will somehow open my chakras to ephemeral wonders like I'm roleplaying a ayahuasca retreat.

Click to expand...

Sounds a fair analogy, to me. I mean, actually being on hallucinogens as an analogy for playing 1e, not RPing being on them. ;P

Seriously, though, there is something to the 90s "bad rules make good games" saw - and 5e reaches back to try to get some of the benefits without going all the way to just being willfully bad - if the players can't trust the rules to deliver a consistent experience, nor manipulate them to advantage, then they finally have no choice but to turn to the GM to get the best possible play experience. That kind of buy-in (and Empowerment, the aspect 5e has delivered so well), really can be a powerful tool to craft a great play experience, if you're up for the challenge. And it can be a blast (that's just the way it feels to me, I should come up with a better expression so I don't always sound like a broken record when gushing about DMing 5e) to run that way, when you get rolling. There's an 'in the zone' thing that can happen, and a session just crosses the line and becomes great, everyone leaves happy and talking about what happened, not bitching about what almost happened, or trying to figure out how to make their characters good enough to make something fun happen...


(..wait, you've got be being positive again! I mean, these games all suck, we all suck, yeah, it's a tragedy of cosmic proportions that anyone gets sucked into this black hole of a hobby...
... and get off my lawn!)

I played 1E 2014 but I did not play it much back in the day as I was 10 years late. Still like it but prefer B/X.

1E at least has excuse for being the way it is. It's 40 years old.

I can run a dungeon crawl in any edition of D&D and it will be just as compelling as Mearls describes. It's not the system.

Dungeons are more prep than, say, a plot-based adventure that takes place in a city which takes all of a couple of sentences (if that) to throw together. This is why I think dungeon adventures are not as common, at least in my experience. But a good dungeon delve is the easiest way to hit the archetypal story beats and people love archetypal stories, often for reasons they can't understand or properly articulate. Leading them, perhaps, to wonder whether the game was the thing that did it as Mearls seems to do.

I think he'll hit upon the truth once he watches that Joseph Cambell lecture.