OD&D Edition Experience: Did/Do You Play OD&D? How Was/Is It?

[reelo]

Like ability score generation or HP gained when leveling?

Do you like playing characters with 6x18 stats?

 

[Oofta]

Do you like playing characters with 6x18 stats?

I use point buy. Even back when we played 1E we had rules for "adjusting" ability scores to be something we want.

Like I said. I don't want dice to dictate who my PC is, I want to come up with my PC and then implement that vision as best the rules can handle. Obviously there's going to be randomness in play, but over time it averages out. A one time bad roll of the dice doesn't average out.

Everybody plays for different reasons.

 

[Don Durito]

I can no longer be bothered with entirely random generation, even in old school games.

What I've seen too much of is the vicious circle where someone rolls a poor character and then clearly isn't particularly interested in keeping that character alive, because if they die, they just get to roll again.

And to be fair - Personally, I simply these days have absolutely no interest in playing a wizard. If I rolled 9 Str, and 18 Int I would play a Fighter. (So I'm not going to make anyone force the dice to choose their class).

I just have a set of arrays and players can pick one. If players want the random they can roll a die and let that choose which array to use. It speeds up character creation as well.

 

[the Jester]

We play RPGs because we want to go up levels and vicariously experience a long term narrative.

Some of us do. Some play a bunch of one shots because they like the looks of a given adventure, or want to try different things. Some of us don't care a whit about long term narratives and there have always been those players out there.

Gygax and Arneson invented D&D precisely for that purpose. The XP tables are the hard coded promise of that.

Why do you say this? Do you have anything to back up either of these assertions?

 

[Oofta]

I can no longer be bothered with entirely random generation, even in old school games.

What I've seen too much of is the vicious circle where someone rolls a poor character and then clearly isn't particularly interested in keeping that character alive, because if they die, they just get to roll again.

And to be fair - Personally, I simply these days have absolutely no interest in playing a wizard. If I rolled 9 Str, and 18 Int I would play a Fighter. (So I'm not going to make anyone force the dice to choose their class).

I just have a set of arrays and players can pick one. If players want the random they can roll a die and let that choose which array to use. It speeds up character creation as well.

Same here. We just decided long ago in a gaming group far, far away that we'd bypass the middleman and implement options to make sure everybody had a decent character.

I wrote up a whole long rant on this while ago which I don't want to post. If you look a the numbers that will normally be generated for a single group of 6 there is a huge difference in capability from a numbers perspective. I've been in groups where 1 player had super high stats and another had crap, neither of them (I had average) were happy. No thanks, it's a game. I want to play my PC for a long time and I want to feel comfortable with it.

Anyway, that's off topic.

 

[HarbingerX]

It's funny how we really play for different reasons. Having a pre-set idea in mind for my character and their story is not how I want to play. I roll, I see what that gives me and I come up with an idea. Taking a nobody and having them rise to greatness despite the odds is the game I want to play.

It perhaps helps that for a long time I was playing in a sandbox campaign, so no character was ever truly dead and future characters could have some link to previous ones. And no, I'm not talking about Bob III, great-grandson of Bob I....

 

[Oofta]

It's funny how we really play for different reasons. Having a pre-set idea in mind for my character and their story is not how I want to play. I roll, I see what that gives me and I come up with an idea. Taking a nobody and having them rise to greatness despite the odds is the game I want to play.

It perhaps helps that for a long time I was playing in a sandbox campaign, so no character was ever truly dead and future characters could have some link to previous ones. And no, I'm not talking about Bob III, great-grandson of Bob I....

So for you I'd have you roll for which array to use and then what order to place them in if you want random. I even generated a list of all possible arrays just for that purpose. I had way too much time on my hands.

 

[CleverNickName]

I've never played OD&D (but would really love to), so I can't really speak to that experience. I can speak to the random generation, though: I actually prefer it over the "everyone starts out with the same stats and stuff every time" options.

There's nothing wrong with using Point Buy and the pre-selected starting equipment; it's just not my jam. I'd rather roll my stats, roll my starting gold, roll my hit points, etc. Uncertainty is a feature, not a bug.

 

[HarbingerX]

I'll also mention that we found the XP level doubling worked as advertised. If you died and your 1st level character had to hang out with a 3rd level party, you'd have a lot of protection and would get to 3rd by the time they got to 4th. So you didn't stay vulnerable for long. And just like modern D&D, death becomes rarer as you get up in levels, and there are ways to come back, though we never had to use them.

Perhaps too many people's experiences with OSR games is a party entirely of 1st-level PCs, which isn't really how the campaigns looked after about 12 or so session. Long running campaigns are safer for 1st level PCs.

 

[Don Durito]

It's funny how we really play for different reasons. Having a pre-set idea in mind for my character and their story is not how I want to play. I roll, I see what that gives me and I come up with an idea. Taking a nobody and having them rise to greatness despite the odds is the game I want to play.

It perhaps helps that for a long time I was playing in a sandbox campaign, so no character was ever truly dead and future characters could have some link to previous ones. And no, I'm not talking about Bob III, great-grandson of Bob I....

Yes. But that's why when I give out arrays, I arrange the stats in different orders and allow the option of just rolling a D20 to choose. Because some players just want to do that, so I'm not going to stop them. So if you want you can roll, get a 14 match it to an array and see that you're probably best suited for a Wizard and go with that if you want to.

I just don't force people to do that. (I played in an AD&D game last year where the GM insisted on rolling 3d6 in order - against the advice of that game - and 2 out of the 5 players failed to qualify for any class - I just have limited patience for that.)

And really the bonuses you get in basic D&D or Castles and Crusades are so small that a level 1 character really is still a nobody, just a little bit smarter or a little bit healthier than the average peasant.