I'd just like to give my opinion from a neophyte 1e DM's perspective to this thread. You can blow this off as whatever you please, I just had to reply as the thread is compelling.
Welcome to the club. The world needs more DMs, and especially good ones.
1.) Graph paper and miniatures worked out fine with us. 1 inch equals 10 feet and movement is all pretty clear in the PHB.
Honestly, I never used miniatures in my whole career as a 1e DM. Some DMs favored them, but IME they too easily broke emersion and caused players to imagine the scene as if they were looking down on it, rather than from the eyes of the character. That said, for a truly complicated fight, they can aid clarity and even sometimes dramatic tension. In both editions I try to break them out only when I have to. In some cases, this depends on your players. Some players have excellent spatial reasoning and can easily imagine a scene from your description; others need more help.
When it came to flair (such as PCs bouncing off of tables and using chandeliers like Robin Hood) I had them make basic ability checks if it seemed plausible... with proper +2 and -2 to their roll if it were a detriment or benefit, respectively. It wasn't perfect, but I just took it case by case.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable approach to me. I would like to say though that this is a very much post-3e approach to the 1e game. I would have been very surprised if anyone in 1982 had that sort of consistant, "Say yes or roll an ability check.", approach. In my experience, it took a long time for this approach to develop. More usually, the DM simply relied on his fiat assessment of what was reasonable or realistic (an idea at the time suffered from fetishisation), and said what happened. Fortune mechanics were applied very ununiformly, and often without the DM understanding clearly what sort of probability he was assigning either absolutely or relative to a person of 'average ability'. Probably the most common fortune mechanic at the time was a straight percentage chance, unrelated to player ability. Gradually, asking for a saving throw (save vs. petrification being common) or an ability check rose to more prominance.
I'm perfectly ok with that, but the more I used ability checks and saves vs. petrification in my session to resolve propositions, the more I wondered why I was playing 1e instead of 3e since I felt like I was borrowing a weaker and clunkier version of 3e's generalized fortune mechanic. When I started the session, I was using them almost not at all - drawing on the way I DMed say circa 1992 or so. But the longer the session went and the more frustrated I became in one sense - and here I better pause to say that though I was frustrated with the system I wasn't necessarily frustrated with the session which was a lot of fun - the more I found myself thinking in a very 3e way about problems and just adopting 1e style mechanics.
There are many things in 3e that just aren't covered and I wouldn't want them to be. Personal opinion, I suppose.
No, not really. I don't think that that is an opinion at all; I believe that that is a fact. There are indeed many things in 3e that aren't covered in the rules, and it is important for the DM and players to be aware of that. One way for any game to become a bit dysfunctional is for the participants to mistake the system for being complete, because typically what that means is that they've lost the ability to think outside of the box the rules have put them in. For my part, I saw this mistake come out in the design of supplements to 3e where the designers - recognizing the rules incompleteness of 3e - tried to fill in the holes in entirely hidebound ways that made the problem worse.
Again, I feel an ability check if it's really needed. Figure the appropriate ability, roll a d20, add or subtract modifiers to the roll (or ability if you want to make it easier), and if it rolls under: success. That's how I solved all my physical challenges if they were plausible and provided some opportunity for failure; especially if they were in a hurry to do something.
Except now you are playing almost straight up '3e lite' with a 1e gloss. This mechanic isn't really a formal part of the 1e rules, and the difficulty the designer of the C1 module had in coming up with a mechanic to deal with this well demonstrates that. The more I found myself approaching the game in this way, the more I felt that I just ought to concede and adjudicate the game as '3e lite' with adapted skill checks and so forth. And the longer I played the more I felt that if I were to keep DMing 1e, that in the long run I'd turn it into something a lot like 3e.
Social issues, I made them role-play.
Me too. In every edition. But I want to point out that if you are going to purely do this, you might consider eliminating the otherwise mostly useless charisma ability from the game.
If they wanted to roll it instead of worry about being in character, I allowed that, but I punished it. My wife says that's somewhat unfair, which I can see...
Yeah, your wife sounds like a smart woman; you should listen to here.
My approach here is that I'll ultimately resolve the roleplay via a fortune mechanic, but that that fortune mechanic has to be earned and will be influenced by the content of the player's message. If you want to persuade someone to do something, you first have to present a reason why they should do something. So we play this out in character. Once I feel that we've reached a point where the NPC has to make a decision, I make a 'reaction roll' appropriate to the system in question with modifiers according to how reasonable the PC's request is and how close the relation between the PC and the NPC is. This ensures that player's with high personal charisma won't be able to substitute (entirely) their own charisma for the characters, and likewise that player's with low personal charisma will still get a reward from having a character with high charisma.
And honestly, this system tends to help new, shy, and unconfident players build social skills because the player knows or learns that despite stuttering and otherwise poor presentation of his role play - he's not going to be punished for it but possibly even rewarded.
It sounds like you are already starting to go down this road because you've realized the limitations in ignoring charima (and for that matter ignoring fortune and just relying on fiat).
I felt this at first. I really did, but as I learned how the game ought to be played and really cultivated my imagination and my oral skills, this issue you're describing, which I think I understand, became a non-issue. We had a thief looking for traps. I didn't just let him roll for traps, but let him poke around and figure how the trap mechanics worked. I had an image in my head and I'd try to describe it. As a DM, I learned I was the conduit for the player's world. They didn't know what kind of traps are in the world, so they what I told them was imperative. I think what hurts this is the lack of skill system, as PCs could just roll on a chart to see how well they do. As long as you ensure to stick to a cohesive, logical idea to your games: this shouldn't be a problem. Foreshadowing helps amazingly well with this as well. I taught the thief what kind of traps are out in the world when he made it to town to "level up". He'd be exposed to more of the world and trained to be better. This came with experience after a few months of AD&D and I've read that you've played the game for a long while beforehand, so don't feel I'm lecturing. I'm merely telling you what worked for my game and for my players.
I don't really understand your thesis in this section, nor am I convinced you understand my issues with the 1e system. I will say you seem to be learning quickly.
I don't want to get derailed into a 'searching for traps' argument because searching is an extremely complex topic. Much as with social interaction, I agree that concrete propositions and interaction with the game world is preferred. However, I will briefly state that one should avoid romanticizing concreteness in redundant actions like attacking and searching. If someone is going to search the flagstone floor for pressure plates 78 times in the dungeon, at some point you'll either need or want to abstract out this process.
I'd rather talk about an easier to approach topic like swimming. In 1e, if you want to be fair about it, whether or not someone sinks is a very complex question without a lot of obvious answers simply because of the overwhelming number of factors involved. In 3e, everyone has a swim value basically precomputed and if I need to answer the question, who swims, who sinks, how fast can they move, all I basically need to do is say, "Swim check." During the session I had to ask, "Can I see your character sheet? How many wounds do you have? How much weight are you carrying? What sort of armor are you wearing? What's your strength?", and so forth. Its an interruption, and one that produces less than satisfying results. Obviously, you could just wing it, with ability checks and so forth, but ultimately that would end up being 3e inspired mechanics.
I love imbalance. I really do. I like the feeling that some players are more geared for combat than others and this WOULD be a problem for 4e, but because 1e provides more freedom and offers a chance for players to really think outside the box rather than just worry on their stats, that imbalance can be easily met and demolished by smart, creative players.
I think that there are a few things to be said.
First, regardless of the system, I don't mind having characters that 'shine' at different points in the game. Not everyone needs to contribute equally to every situation or every combat. Not everyone needs to be good at everything, and flaws and weaknesses are welcome and often inspiring additions to character. But I do think you are making the mistake of equating the concept of diversity with imbalance. Diversity is good; imbalance is not.
1) A smart creative player with a weak character still shines less than a smart creative player with a strong character. Why in the world make the assumption that its always going to be the smartest, most experienced, most creative player that ends up with the weak character? First of all, why not assume that all your players are smart and creative? Secondly, what happens when its your smartest, most creative, most experienced player that ends up with the strong character, and its your player that's least inexperienced, least confident, least assertive, and least creative that ends up with the weak character? You shouldn't assume that every player is going to overcome this deficit easily, or that if they fail to that they are a bad player. The more players you DM, from more backgrounds, with more personalities, and more diverse age groups, the less this elitist notion will be attractive I think.
2) People who make this argument invariably don't carry it to a very strong conclusion. They always present as 'the weak character' someone who is actually not that weak but has some strong characteristic that the player can rely on, or is at least in the hands of a very skillful player and isn't too crippled. I really feel that these people ought to read 'A Weekend with Wendell' to recall what imbalanced role play really is. "Here's your characters. Bob, you play Earth's mightiest swordsman. Jeff, you are playing the world's mightest sorcerer. Ed, you are Jack the Shadow, the greatest jewel thief in history. Jim, you are playing Eustace, a mentally disabled beggar with crippling arthritis - make the character your own." If Jim has the right sort of personality, that's fun for 1-3 sessions. Eventually, it gets old for everyone, especially the third or fourth time your character dies through no fault of your own and you still roll up a chump. If you want to make an argument for imbalance, don't try to make it off a character with 19 Str and some non-crippling social weaknesses.
3) Not everyone role plays for the same reasons. People who have reasons to role play other than the ones you enjoy aren't bad gamers. If you DM long enough and with enough different players, you'll have to learn to deal with power gamers, ego gamers, people engaged in escapism, problem solvers, and so forth and treat them as valuable players with something to offer your game. If the player is playing the game for the experience of vicariously being a hero, he's probably not going to be happy to being relegated to being the comedic sidekick, the coward, the Jar-Jar, the Wonder Twin, the Dr. Zac, the guy the rest of the team has to rescue, the minion, or so forth. Alot of players will see that as a great oppurtunity for role play and characterization, and be perfectly happy with and that's great, but don't expect everyone to. A balanced system that allows for a lot of diversity will ultimately make more of your players happy, than randomly assigning losers to your players.
4) I spent most of my 1e player career playing thieves, which is a lot like deliberately handicapping yourself so that you're forced to rely on your player wits.
