On the Inscrutability of AD&D and Ye Olde Styles of Play

lowkey13 · Jun 17, 2019

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TwoSix · Jun 17, 2019

It's difficult to find anything approaching a true commonality for how we all approach the game. There's generational issues, age issues, and a bunch of local and personal idiosyncrasies at work. Did you learn to play in 1977, or 1987, or 1997? Did you learn to play when you were 10, or when you were 25? Were you first exposed to the game by a friend inviting you to play, or did you learn by seeing a book (or boxed set) in the store, and picking it up? Was there a dedicated group of gamers in your town, or was it just you and a couple friends?

I mean, just as an example of local idiosyncrasies, to this day I still find the idea of running modules and dungeon crawls deeply weird. When I learned to play, roll some characters and make up a story so we can fight stuff was the expected style of play. There was a general vibe that running a published adventure (this was in the mid 1990s, so published adventures also weren't a big thing at the time) meant you weren't a creative DM.

It's why the general hoopla of "What classic adventure are they bringing back now" is completely lost on me. For me, AD&D nostalgia is completely focused on things like Planescape, or Spelljammer, or Birthright, or the cool red and blue and green books that were part of the AD&D 2e line. The AD&D experience in the '70s and '80s is completely opaque to me.

lowkey13 · Jun 17, 2019

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JonnyP71 · Jun 17, 2019

TwoSix said:
There was a general vibe that running a published adventure (this was in the mid 1990s, so published adventures also weren't a big thing at the time) meant you weren't a creative DM.

Whereas, my experience was playing with a very niche groups of friends scattered widely over a large city - thus we met up infrequently, often at very short notice ("are you free tomorrow for some D&D, get a bus over to my place for about 11 in the morning, we'll play until my parents get home and kick us off the dinner table"). This was mainly due to me going to a private school some 12 miles from my house, therefore my school friends were mostly not local.

The traditional image of a group of local geeks meeting up for lengthy gaming sessions in a spacious basement simply did not exist for me. Our houses do not have basements, we played on family dining tables and thus needed parents to be agreeable to their house being invaded by shrieking teens too! I knew 1 player, who also went to the same school, within walking distance of my house, and he was very studious with strict parents, thus he spent more time on schoolwork than gaming.

Thus modules were a necessity. We needed something we could just pick up and play. We rarely finished them either. Thankfully though this was the mid 80s, so the modules we had at our disposal were from the earlier 1E era, and thus generally very good - their format allowed us to dip in and out of them.

Running a long term, self written, cohesive campaign was simply never an option.

lowkey13 · Jun 17, 2019

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Fenris-77 · Jun 17, 2019

People who's formative gaming years happened before the advent of the popular internet had a fundamentally different set of experiences that people who didn't. Also, people who actually played version X when it was the current system tend of have very different opinions of those systems than people who only understand them as artifacts. Prior to forums and chat groups there was no general consensus, no easy access optimization, and no need to do anything except what the actual gaming group wanted to do. Now people have internet opinions, by which I mean they've read stuff about how things work, or what's over-powered, or whatever, but don't hold those opinions necessarily because of any actual experience on their part. This phenomenon isn't localized to D&D either, the various GW games suffered the same growing pains magnified by an order of magnitude. This isn't about good/bad or right/wrong just indexing the difference in opinion that can stem from different formative experiences.

TwoSix · Jun 17, 2019

JonnyP71 said:
Running a long term, self written, cohesive campaign was simply never an option.

Oh man, "long term" and "cohesive" are really strong words for how we played back then.

A "campaign" usually meant we remembered to bring our character sheets from last time and didn't have to start over.

Sacrosanct · Jun 17, 2019

I think the only real objective truth in this whole topic is that people played with more variation of rules back in 1e than people do today with 5e. For many of the reasons cited (how rules were written back then...ahem...weapon v armor chart, and with technology bringing more people together). Outside of that one truism, it all comes down to anecdotal experiences I imagine.

Dausuul · Jun 17, 2019

It really was a whole other world before the Internet. Throughout the TSR era, my experience of D&D was entirely shaped by the groups I played with, and everybody had their own take on the rules; ranging from fast and loose in some cases, to one where there were enough house rules to make a whole new book. (I'm not exaggerating. There was a three-ring binder just for the house rules. It was... something. I only played with them once or twice, so I never got to explore The House Rules in all their glory, which is a pity.)

And of course, every group thought the way they played was the right, obvious, and true way*, and was shocked to discover that other people played differently.

These days, I only play with the one group that I've been playing with for a decade-plus. We play about twice a month, for ~4 hours per session. My experience of other groups comes entirely via the Internet, mostly this forum. Far greater exposure to the theory of D&D, but a good deal less practice.

[size=-2]*Well, except the group with the binder full of house rules. Presumably they had figured out that other people did things differently, and therefore set out to codify every single one of the differences. I can't decide if they were heroic, insane, or both.[/size]

Shiroiken · Jun 17, 2019

lowkey13 said:
But it did make me think- if people had trouble finishing the 1e modules, how on earth are people finishing the APs? Anecdotally, I know that some of the teen groups that I taught and gone off on their own haven't been able to finish an AP.

From my understanding, a lot of campaigns die out before they finish the AP. Honestly there are quite a few old BECMI, 1E, and 2E adventures that could easily become a full AP with very little additional work (assuming you don't have to start at level 1). Castle Amber is a great example of this, and the Desert of Desolation trilogy is another.

I've found when converting old adventures into 5E, it's easier to just take the concept of the adventure, then boil away a lot of the extra stuff. I ran Against the Cult of the Reptile God in 3 sessions of 4 hours each by cutting the temple down to 1 encounter of cultists and the lair itself into 6 increasingly difficult encounters. If I'd tried to run it as it was, my players probably would have tired of the combat before finishing the temple.