What do you dislike about 1E?

[Psion]

Well, 1e was very poorly organized, but the proliferation of rules in 3.x hardly helps. You now have to look up different rules, decide how they interact, and consult several different sources for any official or (more likely) quasi-official errata or ruling on which one takes precedence. When that fails, long theads on email lists and the internet debate the issue, usually without definitive resolution.

In 1e, it was simple: the DM said so.

Certainly, you don't stop the game and start threads for resolution to an issue.

The answer now is, as it ever was, "the DM said so."

 

[orsal]

Level limits for non-humans really doesn't seem fitting to me. XP tables that had no pattern to them. Percentile strength with no counterpart for any of the other abilities. Excessively slow advancement for multiclassing. Completely different rules for human and non-human multiclassing.

Most of what people have suggested have been improved, but weren't a big deal. I never minded the "to-hit" tables, because I just looked at them and noted the THACO. Even though the acronym THACO wasn't in use, you could still figure out what you needed to hit by the same formula. (Keeping in mind that a natural 20 is treated as 25, of course.)

 

[Crothian]

And that isn't true of 2E/3E/3.5E because?

Not too the extent it was in 1e

 

[WayneLigon]

We happily played 1E for many years because it was a better game in many ways than Original/Original + Greyhawk + whatever house rules the GM made up or cherrypicked from whatever source (and there were a lot of sources then, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth).

Then other games came out and we started playing 1E less and less.

I think the one big thing we never liked was 'no skills'.

 

[diaglo]

What do you dislike about 1E?

the shift from OD&D to 1edADnD began in print with Supplement I Greyhawk and the release of The Strategic Review...

what it did was place more emphasis on stats and number crunching to gain the advantage.

you got +1 or -1 pre-Supplement I.

all hps were d6 for all classes. all weapons did d6 damage.

as you introduced fighting men doing +3 to hit and +5 damage in Supplement I and so on... suddenly you had to introduce more things that gave these huge stat boosts.

magic items became the important thing... and now the only thing important if you talk to some people.

massive damage ranges for spells. automatic hits with magic missile...

bah...

what i didn't like about 1edADnD.... it took much of the fun of just roleplaying a character as a person... and made it a stat sheet. it took effort to go back to just treating your mini as a person again.

each edition since has done basically the same thing. power thru numbers.

 

[Gwaihir]

Missing 1e

AD&D (1e) was the best game ever! Of course, We played in Junior High & High School, which were the most fun years of my life ever! so perhaps the two are connected...

Probably any edition played during those years would be the most fondly remembered, when you could play four nights a week or all night long and had no other responsibilities other than getting the lawn mowed sometime this week.

Seriously I miss:
Uber rangers at first level
Building a bard over a campaign
Level titles
Really powerful 14th level Wizards
My Favorite Character (Gwaihir--Had to say it)

Dislike--The inability to be 15 again.

 

[Algolei]

I dislike the lack of new material.

 

[diaglo]

I dislike the lack of new material.

ditto.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

I dislike the lack of new material.

Some of us are working on that, you know.

 

[Von Ether]

I have many fond memories of 1E game days, but like Crothian said, it really did limit leveling for non-humans which was a pain. That is why so many of the players I was associated with when they played a demi-human they would multiclass with one class always being a thief. Why? Because the thief class was the only class in 1E that allowed no level limits for dwarves, elves, gnomes, etc.

Still, with 1E, all you really needed was the 3 core books and we certainly had tons of hours of game play based on those rules and those rules alone.

IMHO, I always thought dual classing for humans and multiclassing with level limts for demi-humans was backwards.

If humans really were the generalists in the game, they should be able to level up in more than one class at a time.

For demi humans, if you used the old dual class mechanic of not getting the benifits of both classes until your XP equaled out, you sort of got natural level limits anyway.

I never tried the house rule, (never like DnD enough to buy all three books) but if unintended result made humans more attractive, that wouldn't have been a bad thing either. It seemed that human clerics must have been pretty persuasive to get several elves and a halfing to give a darn about all those human villages they saved.