Depending on what roll-up method is used, all of these are possible. That said, whatever character you end up with, that's what you inhabit (which is in fact a part of the player-side challenge of hard-coded 0e and 1e, somewhat lost since).
Well, at the time Gygax wrote that introductory text the only known methods of rolling up a PC were exactly one, 3d6 six times in order. Admittedly, 1e PHB doesn't contain those rules and they wouldn't appear for about another year when the DMG was released. Perhaps Gygax was thinking in terms of those nascent rules, which he may have already put into force in his own games? We don't know. I know that those of us who used the PHB in that time period knew of no other generally accepted method of rolling up characters, although I think its possible we may have already started using 4d6 and take the 3 highest, in order six times, maybe. Even that method was problematic. DMG's '4d6 and take the 3 highest, arrange in any order' method which became pretty standard in my experience is a little better, you can generally qualify for at least 3 of the 4 major base classes every time. So it did get a little better with time.
Again true, and again perfectly acceptable as a part of the game (except for the Falstaff Jr. bit). Characters die. It's a realistic result when they stick their noses into dangerous places where others fear to tread.
Yes, and that's not a bad way for a gritty exploration game to go, but you have to admit that it doesn't mesh well at all with the prefatory text you quoted from PHB 1e. MOSTLY you get to play a weak guy who falls prey to some garden-variety dungeon threat while engaged in a looting mission. Its not very heroic at all, and the PCs quickly take on a fairly disposable nature and the game usually ends up played in 'pawn stance' most of the time. There are always interludes where some RP happens, and maybe more so in some groups than others. Interestingly most of that RP happens OUTSIDE of the structured portions of the game, in 'town play' where the rules are much less explicit and most of the game structure is typically put aside.
Yes, the 'logistics' side - something else that has rather sadly been lost over the years.
Depends on level. In 35 years of playing 1e variants I've never seen a party average above about 10th level; and at 10th-ish the non-casters can still more than hold their own.
I don't think we ever, in anything but some very silly early games, played about 14th level either, that's the highest level 1e PC I ever achieved. I would say that if you actually play in maximum 'player skill' mode you want to replace your straight fighters by around 7th level with either henchmen/hirelings (making more room in the party for PC wizards) or at least mixed caster types like fighter/magic-user. Same with thieves, either higher a specialist to do the few tasks that would otherwise waste valuable spell slots, or bring along a thief/magic-user. The 2e bard fills this role pretty nicely. Straight fighters are just a waste of party slots at that point.
The logistics game is fun too, but again, it isn't anything that works well with the mode of play implied in Gary's prefatory PHB 1e text. That mode of play simply does not exist in AD&D 1e if its played straight up as-written. 2e is a testament to what happens when you try to bend the game to do it, you get a pretty incoherent result. 3e was a recognition of that and both espoused 'back to the dungeon' (IE forget story-driven play, this is a game of skilled dungeon crawling) AND at the same time implemented a whole host of changes that were PROBABLY (its hard to say) meant to improve story-driven play. The result is AGAIN somewhat incoherent, the actual common play mode that arises being quite different from what is implied by 'back to the dungeon'.
Once you get to 18th and the MU has Wish available in the field then yeah - it's over.
I just think it is far less than 18th level. 9th is more like it. At that point the fighter finally gets his stronghold. In adventuring terms this is pretty anemic. Its a fortress, which doesn't help at all in the 'party of explorers' mode of play that even high level material presents. Nor do his followers really do a lot for him. I mean, sure, they're cheaper than henchmen, but anyone can fork over gold to get basically the same thing. The best he can hope for is a 6th level follower with a couple minor magical items. That's pretty good! It doesn't compare much to a 5th level spell slot though! And the wizard can pay a quarter share to get his own 6th level fighter henchman.
I really did play in a group where the challenge level was extreme and we pushed hard on 1e to make our party maximally effective. In that game it was all casters. There simply wasn't any room to waste on a fighter after level 6. For levels 1-6 the fighter was a fine character, sometimes quite a bit more useful than an MU or cleric, but they just don't hold up. Not as a PC. Their main role becomes basically infantry to hold a line while the casters do battle. Its just not worth a PC for that when you can hire maybe 10 NPCs to form that line, and if you give them all the magic swords and whatnot you find, they'll be plenty well compensated and tend to be maybe at most 2 levels behind the PCs.
Drop in any Saturday night to the game I play in.
And yes, there's not much incentive to do much with your character until it's survived a few adventures...which is why I generally don't; and have no problem with not doing so. I bang out the numbers, give it a basic personality (sometimes more over-the-top than others) and see how it goes from there. Background etc. can wait till later.
Yeah, I just don't think it ever lived up to that blurb. That was why I found 4e to be quite cool because as soon as we started playing, you felt like you were playing that game that Gygax kept describing but never quite delivered the rules for.
You're very very VERY trusting of your players to not more or less subtly bend this transparency and play-style to their advantage. If you have such trustworthy players, good on ya; but they're a very rare breed.
Ah, see, in our way of playing there's no 'advantage' for them to bend it to. RPGs don't have winners and losers. There's no points to be scored, no conflict between the participants in their roles at the table. The very notion that I'm 'giving up advantage' to the players doesn't exist in that model, its not like that. I mean, we CAN enter into something like that mode with say 4e's tactical play where I can as DM run a bunch of monsters and the rules are ALMOST completely objective (and I could spell out with terrain powers and such many of the grey areas). Then we could play a 'no holds barred' sort of tactical wargame-like combat scenario. There can even be some skill uses and whatnot that are handled using related rules (the combat uses of skills for instance) and 'page 42' also helps, though it does rely on some DM judgment.
I could even have a bit of a surprise for the players in terms of maybe an encounter is suddenly stronger than they expected or different in some way. That would probably in response to some expressed but not (by meta-game procedures we use) brought explicitly into play by a player. So, there CAN be a sort of 'secret'. In fact its also quite conceivable to have a scenario where the players say something like "give us a murder mystery to solve" and the GM creates that without consulting with the players BEFOREHAND, so they don't necessarily know the details and they uncover them through play. Of course, even then, the players are on a par with the GM in terms of story, so they COULD all agree (GM and players together) to rewrite some element or introduce some new element and end up with a different solution than the one that was originally created secretly at their behest. Or they could simply enjoy solving the thing in-character and proceed to do so.
That, and I see it as a bit more adversarial; in that the game world (as reasonably run by the DM) is out to make the PCs miserable in one way or another and the PCs are out to survive and mitigate and win through said misery.
Only to the extent that the players desire that. If they want a scene of glorious triumph for their characters, then they'll probably get that too. Heck, they could all agree to play a game where the story of the characters seems to logically follow from them simply being ordinary, if gifted, individuals with no special place in the world except what they make of it. In fact, I've found that a lot of groups kind of naturally fall into that zone. They just play, doing what the PCs 'would do' and maybe now and then they invoke some authorial power to bring an element into play that they find interesting.
Yeah, that's overdoing it on the part of that particular DM.
Sounds like he wasn't one for hitting player-thrown curveballs. Pity.
He was, and is, truly unique IME amongst all people, in both personal and D&D terms. Some people hated playing with him, but myself and others of his friends were cool with it. After a while we'd take a break for a year or so and play other campaigns, and then we'd eventually go back and find out what was going to happen next in his crazy world. It was oddly fun.
Depending on the story being told, I'd findsomething like this to be either a great game or a crashing bore.
But - I'm a chaotic player; and it's pretty much guaranteed that at some point I'd have suggested the party abandon the whole thing and just go bash ogres in the hills. Wonder how he'd have handled that?
Lanefan
Yeah, well, sometimes we did do that, lol. He'd roll with it, but inevitably the meta-plot would catch up with you. He was also good at getting the characters integrated into the game world, so if you were name-level (and we had a large stable of PCs in his game that usually were in that level range) then he'd happily have the meta-plot arrive at your castle door and start breaking it down! lol. You might even just hear about it when a few of your followers found you and said "boss, the dragon ate the castle!" lol.
