Flexor the Mighty!
18/100 Strength!
AD&D for us back in the 80's was 3-6 players. Though most modules were written for 6-10 PC. We just never had that many people to play.
AD&D for us back in the 80's was 3-6 players. Though most modules were written for 6-10 PC. We just never had that many people to play.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Well darn. I guess I need to call up my 3 gaming buddies and tell them that all those years of playing 1e and 2e didn't count, because we didn't do it your way.
Hussar
Legend
Yeah, I realized I said PC's and I should have said "characters". There would likely be 3-6 players and a mitt full of NPC's as well. At least, that's what the presumption was.
Your the one telling me that the presumption was 4 PC's. That an encounter should have multiple dragons because I have so many PC's. But, that's not true. I had the standard number of characters that was expected by the game. 4 PC's as a group wasn't a standard presumption until 3e. Sure, I played with less than that many characters too. But, we're talking about the game, not the game you played at your table or the game I played at my table.
That's one of the biggest problems I always have with talking about AD&D. Folks presume that whatever way they played back in the day was the "norm" and anything deviating from that was just a corner case exception. Never minding what the game ACTUALLY SAYS. No. The game is whatever some particular DM happened to play and everyone else is wrong.
Makes actually discussing older versions of D&D so bloody difficult.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
3-6 players can easily play 6-10 PCs - nothing limits them to one each...
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Below is the presumption from 1e. You guys are looking at modules, often created for tournament or convention play, where you had more players than normal.
From page 7 of the 1e PHB:
"The game is ideally for three or more adult players: one player must serve as the Dungeon Master, the shaper of the fantasy milieu, the "world" in which all action will take place."
That's it. That's the presumption. Three or more. And if the minimum three still qualifies "ideal," then encounters would have to be based around that number or close to it. Four anyone?
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
Why not three players and a GM? That's even closer than 4 in this case! Honestly, you're reading way too much into that statement. It comes nowhere close to making the same statement about the number of players that 3e does with its 4 player design assumption.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
Well, yes, that's how it works -- your preference isn't objective just because you have it. And having an argument doesn't make it so, either. If acting is the superior form of roleplay as you claim, where is the evidence for such? I'm a bit surprised that you're actually arguing this.
You've already acknowledged that roleplaying includes non-acting performances, so let's both ackowledge that roleplaying is broader than acting. Fundamentally, roleplaying is about assuming the role and motivations of a character. Now, it would seem to follow that the closer one can approximate the character's role and motivation, the better the roleplay. Agreed?
Your argument is that this is accomplished by acting out the character in 1st person. I agree this can be so, but disagree that it is always so. Acting is a skill that isn't evenly distributed, and poor acting can act to distance or seperate a person from the character. From the other side, ut's possible to strongly empathize with a character without acting in first person -- ie, a character may be fully and faithfully represented in the 3rd person. Therefore, it stands to reason that acting may be sufficient for roleplay, but it is not necessary, and this carries through all levels of skill at roleplaying.
The above is also not objective fact, but it does put paid to tge idea tgat your formulation is. What I find actually distasteful about your formulation on superior roleplay is that it takes ability in acting and uses this to tell players they aren't as good at roleplaying. This fails miserably if a player is playing a character with abilities outside of their own such that it is impossible for them to act out those abilities in person. It also is saying that the declaration of, "Bob the Sage casts Augury by making the sign of the outworlds to call on Fgthan the Demure," is less roleplaying than acting out making the sign of Fgthan, especially when no one has any idea what this involves.
You may noy be surprised that I also strongly disagree that social mechanics reduce interaction. Free Kreigspeil is not inherently superior.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
How is reading what is says straight out as what it says straight out as "way too much?" If the game is ideal for three of more, a single dragon cannot be balanced against 6-9. That would not be ideal. Rather, one dragon is balanced against around three so as to be ideal and if you have more players than that, you add more dragons.
Celebrim
Legend
This not at all my experience. ''Ease" or "difficulty" is entirely a matter of the DM. I can make a killer dungeon in any edition. I can run through a stack of photocopied character sheets in any edition. It's not particularly hard in any edition to make the game difficult. So I'm having a hard time understanding how you can judge which edition was easier.
Is poison less immediately a "save or die" sort of thing? Sure. But that doesn't make 1e harder than later editions. It just meant as a DM you had to be more careful about how you handled creatures with poison, and as a player how you fought them. Energy drain is similar. Honestly, the rate which I had PC's lost to poison and energy drain hasn't changed much between the two editions. That's probably not a ubiquitous experience, but for example with poison most DMs (including myself) in 1e either carefully handled poisonous monsters or if we were going to not carefully handle them, made sure that the resources like Slow Poison, Neutralize Poison, and Keotougm's Ointment necessary to mitigate poison were available in sufficient quantities that if the PC's were careful, they would be able to deal with bad luck.
All you are really showing is that 3e was less arbitrary than 1e. As far as difficulty goes, there are a ton of things in 3e that are vastly more difficult than 1e. Monsters don't top out at effectively 'CR 10'. The rules include standardized methods for increasing the HD and difficult of foes through advancement, templates, and character levels. In 1e, after a party hit name level there were only a few things in the MM that even represented much of a threat to the party. Monsters now explicitly have strength, dexterity, and constitution. In 1e, a fighter would often have more hit points than anything he encountered. In 3e, you often encounter things with 2-3 times as many hit points as the party fighter. With strength scores, all monsters can hit like a truck, and not just a few high end monsters like giants. One of the ways that 3e is vastly harder than 1e, is that it was comparatively easy in 1e to buff AC to the point that monsters almost never hit you. They rarely had bonuses to hit, and they topped off at 16 HD on the standard chart. It was fairly easy to get to the point that pretty much every thing you encountered would need a 20 or nearly a 20 to hit. But in 3e, monsters have more HD, better THAC0, and almost always have additional bonuses to hit from high strength. And on top of that, monsters can critically hit you, turning fights that should be easy into suddenly nervy moments. Yes, more things get saving throws, but those saving throws don't have static DC's. A few things in 1e had -2 or -4 penalties to saves. In 3e, the save difficulties get ludicrously high so that even high level characters are rarely going to pass their saves. That one change alone in my experience made 3e much harder than 1e, because high level 1e characters could reliably pass saving throws with only a minimal amount of magical boosts. Plus 3e really stressed all sorts of new challenges. Swarms for example became a standardized thing and brought new terrors to the game.
Or lets take an example from 5e: 11th level fighter with typical stats and equipment for an 11th level fighter in a solo fight again 1st level fighters with typical stats in equipment. In a recent thread, someone claimed that in 5e the 11th level fighter could defeat about 11 1st level fighters. You want to talk about a difficulty spike. Back in the day I had written a combat simulator for D&D on my Commodore 64 in Basic, and I frequently ran those sort of scenarios - 10th level fighter versus kobolds, 10th level fighter versus orcs, 10th level fighter versus bugbears, etc. The numbers for a 1e AD&D 11th level fighter versus 1st level fighters would have been around 100. I seem to remember a scenario where the fighter could get his back to the wall, and he'd go through over 300 orcs assuming they didn't have any ranged or reach weapons. Name level parties could literally take on armies all on their own in 1e. Now just a dozen mooks are dangerous? That's a huge change in difficulty, moved to a different place in the game, granted, but still a huge change.
In short, this is all a DM thing. It's about how the DM uses his tools, crafts his challenges, and how he expects the party to use the resources he provides to overcome those challenges. How hard things are depends on how stingy the DM is resources, how harshly he rules, and how much he stacks the odds against the party.
I've noticed that there is a huge gulf in experience between players that used UA and those who didn't. While my play goes back to about 1981, I really didn't have a full group and the maturity to really run the games until 1984 or so. So naturally, UA was just treated as a ordinary thing by me and most groups I met with players about my age. Slightly older players who had been playing since the OD&D days who didn't adopt UA, had a much different experience.
jasper
Rotten DM
Every table I sat at had a few players running two pcs to get the party to 6 or 8 pcs to solve the manpower problem.
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