Dessert Nomad
Adventurer
One thing that I remember about 1st edition era AD&D is that people really didn't see the rule set as something sacred and set in stone; people would pick and choose which rules to use, and casually would mix and match rules from Dragon Magazine, OD&D, BECMI, 2nd edition, and other games without thinking too much of it. Even crossing game systems was not frowned upon, the DMG rules for crossing over with Gamma World or Boot Hill were not an aberration, and doing things like running a D&D campaign but switching to a miniatures game for epic battles was not unheard of (TSR's Battlesystem was built for that, but people did it with other rule sets).
Someone might not like a particular additional rule because it was overpowered (especially things like optional classes), because it didn't fit the story of the campaign (extra races especially), or was too complicated, and it was consistently 'the DM decides what is valid in his campaign world(s)', but there wasn't an attitude of 'you're not REALLY playing AD&D because your campaign started off in the basic set' or 'That's not 1st edition because you used the psionics class from the 2e psionics guide' or 'your game doesn't count because you used a spell points system instead of Vancian magic'. And you wouldn't really expect to be able to just show up at a new group's game and drop in an existing character (or roll a new one by the rules), you'd need to check what all of their house rules and optional rules were before you could do that.
People also didn't feel the need to use the entire ruleset. For example, I never actually encountered anyone who used the full speed factor rules for 1e, where if two weapon-using combatants fought you compared speed factors and one could get 2-3 extra attacks depending on the ratio of speed factors, but also compared weapon lengths and the longer weapon would always hit first. The psionics rules were usually ignored and if someone did want psionics 'if you roll a small % chance, you basically get an extra class grafted onto your character for free'. The demi-human level limits were often just chucked out if a campaign got to the level where they became relevant.
So my question is: when did this change? My experience is that 3rd edition is when the game really went through a shift from 'jumble together whatever rules you want to use' to 'these are the real rules, and you're probably going to use them while maybe tacking on some specific variants'. I think part of it is that 3e (and later 4e and 5e) was mechanically different enough from 1e and 2e that you couldn't casually mix and match bits with the older editions - there were radical changes to ability scores, hit tables, core combat mechanics, and other areas that made this infeasable. The internet also really took off between the release of 2e and 3e, which made it much easier for players around the world to talk about rules and interpretations, instead of being limited to a local group that had an occasional person go to a convention.
What prompted this is that in a recent thread, some people accused me of lying about having played 1e because I used the term THAC0 when doing a quick 'how would this work' combat. Aside from the many logical flaws of the argument, I looked and found that THACO was used in TSR products going back to 1981, and that it wasn't actually coined in 1989 with 2nd edition like they claimed. This got me thinking about how casually (at least in my experience) people mixed rules back in the day, and how someone using monsters straight from 2e sources for a 1e campaign or running a 1e module for 2e characters didn't seem the least bit odd.
Someone might not like a particular additional rule because it was overpowered (especially things like optional classes), because it didn't fit the story of the campaign (extra races especially), or was too complicated, and it was consistently 'the DM decides what is valid in his campaign world(s)', but there wasn't an attitude of 'you're not REALLY playing AD&D because your campaign started off in the basic set' or 'That's not 1st edition because you used the psionics class from the 2e psionics guide' or 'your game doesn't count because you used a spell points system instead of Vancian magic'. And you wouldn't really expect to be able to just show up at a new group's game and drop in an existing character (or roll a new one by the rules), you'd need to check what all of their house rules and optional rules were before you could do that.
People also didn't feel the need to use the entire ruleset. For example, I never actually encountered anyone who used the full speed factor rules for 1e, where if two weapon-using combatants fought you compared speed factors and one could get 2-3 extra attacks depending on the ratio of speed factors, but also compared weapon lengths and the longer weapon would always hit first. The psionics rules were usually ignored and if someone did want psionics 'if you roll a small % chance, you basically get an extra class grafted onto your character for free'. The demi-human level limits were often just chucked out if a campaign got to the level where they became relevant.
So my question is: when did this change? My experience is that 3rd edition is when the game really went through a shift from 'jumble together whatever rules you want to use' to 'these are the real rules, and you're probably going to use them while maybe tacking on some specific variants'. I think part of it is that 3e (and later 4e and 5e) was mechanically different enough from 1e and 2e that you couldn't casually mix and match bits with the older editions - there were radical changes to ability scores, hit tables, core combat mechanics, and other areas that made this infeasable. The internet also really took off between the release of 2e and 3e, which made it much easier for players around the world to talk about rules and interpretations, instead of being limited to a local group that had an occasional person go to a convention.
What prompted this is that in a recent thread, some people accused me of lying about having played 1e because I used the term THAC0 when doing a quick 'how would this work' combat. Aside from the many logical flaws of the argument, I looked and found that THACO was used in TSR products going back to 1981, and that it wasn't actually coined in 1989 with 2nd edition like they claimed. This got me thinking about how casually (at least in my experience) people mixed rules back in the day, and how someone using monsters straight from 2e sources for a 1e campaign or running a 1e module for 2e characters didn't seem the least bit odd.