Celebrim
Legend
We were unexpectedly short a player, so I broke out Lost Shrine of Tamoachan, quickly threw together the outline of some characters, randomly distributed them, and set to play with the expressed goal of seeing how long the players could go before I TPK'd them.
On the good side 1e plays fast.
But it also reminded me very very quickly why I left 1e behind and why I'd never go back. It's just not the game for me.
1) It's very difficult for a DM to run. No, it doesn't require tons of math, but it does require tons of judgment. Switching from my 3e homebrew to 1e was like switching from Visual Studio to Notepad to do my programming on. Sure, it's a leaner and cleaner text editor, but its really doing nothing to help me run the game. There was scarcely a proposition the players could offer that didn't require a major judgment call and an ad hoc ruling for me to evaluate. It's almost impossible to know how fair you are being. The module itself recognizes this deficiency and spends most of its time describing the ad hoc rules you are expected to judge common propositions by. As a result, despite the leaner cleaner monster entries, it often required more rules text to describe an encounter than 3e would in the same situation. This resulted in a situation where upon reflection, you realized that a lot of the details about the situation which would have been nice to know where left out in favor of describing miniature throw away rules systems, many of which scarcely seemed fair themselves. So despite fairly large text blocks, I was forced to make more stuff up on the fly than I would for my own work. This was especially true because the system encourages PC's to propose concrete highly tactile actions, yet from encounter to encounter the particular details offered changed, resulting in situations where if the PC's approach problem with an existing toolbag, the DM has to wing it as to whether its still relevant.
Many DM's say that they enjoy this but I have never understood why. This is not the sort of things that I want to waste my time thinking about during a game. I want to spend my time making play evocative, funny, colorful, and exciting, not trying to figure out what the situation is and how I should handle basic propositions. I write things down so I don't have to remember them or create them during the stress and pressure of the game. I have rules so that I won't have to make fiat judgments all the time. 1e failed repeatedly on this measure.
2) Despite being overly vague, the rules managed to be overly fiddly. Lacking any unifying abstract fortune mechanic, the tendency encouraged by the text was to create a very fiddly subsystem for resolving situations not covered by the rules. Since there is no way to tell whether some one can climb something, they either fiat do or don't or you create a fiddly system for figuring it out on the spot. Since there is no unified swimming or atheletics mechanic, the rules created a fiddly system that measured to the 1% chance the chance of drowning, which took into account the encumbrance of the individual at the 5 pound interval, his dexterity, his constitution, and how bulky his armor was. And despite all these realistic inputs, the resulting resolution mechanics after the fortune was determined in no way resembles anyone's ordinary experience in a swimming pool, ocean, or pond and were so wacky, illogical and arbitrary as to leave me struggling for explanations to provide the players for why something occurred as it did. And the fiddly math and statuses that I was supposed to remember did add up.
3) The system really did disempower the players. This is something I never really noticed or gave voice to back when I was running and playing 1e, because I had no real basis of comparison and no language to describe the problem if I did, but it was easy to see very early on that the players were suffering from disempowerment relative to my homebrew. Too often they were forced to play, 'mother may I', to interface with the game world. Too often they were in a situation were they couldn't meaningfully interact with the world because they had no way of knowing what the world expected. Too often they were out of control of the situation, because they lacked propositions that would meaningfully effect the game's fortune, resulting in - however well I described them - outcomes decided solely by random chance. All of this occurs to some extent in any game, but it was a clear difference in degree between my 3.0 homebrew and 1e.
4) Terrible balance between characters. I'd always known this was a problem, because well, I've got about 15 years experience with 1e, but the balance of using unbalanced classes, random hit points, and random ability scores is just terrible. Every character was a one trick pony to a much greater degree than in my 3e inspired game. Some characters were basically hopeless. One of the things that drove me away from 1e in the first place is just how much the system tempts players to cheat, and I could tell that those sort of pressures would be back in force if I were using this as my primary system. My power gamers were definately unhappy to one degree or another. If nothing else, all that imbalance is just bad for a tables social dynamics - jealousy, discouragement, anger.
In short, I've decided that for all the speedier, quicker, and leaner play provided by retro-gaming, it's probably mostly nostalgia. We had fun, especially those of us that had played 1e/2e back in the day, but my new players who'd never really played anything but my 3e game were clearly frustrated and not because they weren't used to offering concrete and tactile propositions (something I require for my 3e game as well). But rather, because they were used to having more feedback from the system with regards to the risks they were taking and the probable rewards. This mattered rather little for a one off, but it did remind me why I'd left D&D in disgust about 15 years ago.
On the good side 1e plays fast.
But it also reminded me very very quickly why I left 1e behind and why I'd never go back. It's just not the game for me.
1) It's very difficult for a DM to run. No, it doesn't require tons of math, but it does require tons of judgment. Switching from my 3e homebrew to 1e was like switching from Visual Studio to Notepad to do my programming on. Sure, it's a leaner and cleaner text editor, but its really doing nothing to help me run the game. There was scarcely a proposition the players could offer that didn't require a major judgment call and an ad hoc ruling for me to evaluate. It's almost impossible to know how fair you are being. The module itself recognizes this deficiency and spends most of its time describing the ad hoc rules you are expected to judge common propositions by. As a result, despite the leaner cleaner monster entries, it often required more rules text to describe an encounter than 3e would in the same situation. This resulted in a situation where upon reflection, you realized that a lot of the details about the situation which would have been nice to know where left out in favor of describing miniature throw away rules systems, many of which scarcely seemed fair themselves. So despite fairly large text blocks, I was forced to make more stuff up on the fly than I would for my own work. This was especially true because the system encourages PC's to propose concrete highly tactile actions, yet from encounter to encounter the particular details offered changed, resulting in situations where if the PC's approach problem with an existing toolbag, the DM has to wing it as to whether its still relevant.
Many DM's say that they enjoy this but I have never understood why. This is not the sort of things that I want to waste my time thinking about during a game. I want to spend my time making play evocative, funny, colorful, and exciting, not trying to figure out what the situation is and how I should handle basic propositions. I write things down so I don't have to remember them or create them during the stress and pressure of the game. I have rules so that I won't have to make fiat judgments all the time. 1e failed repeatedly on this measure.
2) Despite being overly vague, the rules managed to be overly fiddly. Lacking any unifying abstract fortune mechanic, the tendency encouraged by the text was to create a very fiddly subsystem for resolving situations not covered by the rules. Since there is no way to tell whether some one can climb something, they either fiat do or don't or you create a fiddly system for figuring it out on the spot. Since there is no unified swimming or atheletics mechanic, the rules created a fiddly system that measured to the 1% chance the chance of drowning, which took into account the encumbrance of the individual at the 5 pound interval, his dexterity, his constitution, and how bulky his armor was. And despite all these realistic inputs, the resulting resolution mechanics after the fortune was determined in no way resembles anyone's ordinary experience in a swimming pool, ocean, or pond and were so wacky, illogical and arbitrary as to leave me struggling for explanations to provide the players for why something occurred as it did. And the fiddly math and statuses that I was supposed to remember did add up.
3) The system really did disempower the players. This is something I never really noticed or gave voice to back when I was running and playing 1e, because I had no real basis of comparison and no language to describe the problem if I did, but it was easy to see very early on that the players were suffering from disempowerment relative to my homebrew. Too often they were forced to play, 'mother may I', to interface with the game world. Too often they were in a situation were they couldn't meaningfully interact with the world because they had no way of knowing what the world expected. Too often they were out of control of the situation, because they lacked propositions that would meaningfully effect the game's fortune, resulting in - however well I described them - outcomes decided solely by random chance. All of this occurs to some extent in any game, but it was a clear difference in degree between my 3.0 homebrew and 1e.
4) Terrible balance between characters. I'd always known this was a problem, because well, I've got about 15 years experience with 1e, but the balance of using unbalanced classes, random hit points, and random ability scores is just terrible. Every character was a one trick pony to a much greater degree than in my 3e inspired game. Some characters were basically hopeless. One of the things that drove me away from 1e in the first place is just how much the system tempts players to cheat, and I could tell that those sort of pressures would be back in force if I were using this as my primary system. My power gamers were definately unhappy to one degree or another. If nothing else, all that imbalance is just bad for a tables social dynamics - jealousy, discouragement, anger.
In short, I've decided that for all the speedier, quicker, and leaner play provided by retro-gaming, it's probably mostly nostalgia. We had fun, especially those of us that had played 1e/2e back in the day, but my new players who'd never really played anything but my 3e game were clearly frustrated and not because they weren't used to offering concrete and tactile propositions (something I require for my 3e game as well). But rather, because they were used to having more feedback from the system with regards to the risks they were taking and the probable rewards. This mattered rather little for a one off, but it did remind me why I'd left D&D in disgust about 15 years ago.