The difference between Ad&d 1st and 2nd edition?

[Ariosto]

That's one way to interpret it.

Fine. What is another way? Let's see ...

But the operations, as described by the DMG, can't be followed without doing a significantly different calculation.

I disagree. A significantly different calculation is not following those operations. That is, quite simply, what makes it different in the first place!

I can't reduce 5 in 6 by the difference between normal and 1 in 8 without putting them in the same terms and changing the die.

Whatever this may mean, I am pretty sure it's at odds with:

The favorable factor normally accruing to party A is 1, i.e., parties of this sort are normally surprised on 1 or 2, but this party is surprised only on a 1 -- therefore they have an additional 1 in 6 to their favor (and not a 50% better chance).

It looks as if you propose

I can take the common denominator approach and see that Party B's 20 in 24 is reduced by 5 in 24 (normal's 8 in 24 - Party C's 3 in 24) to 15/24 or 5 in 8. Notice how that's a different outcome from your interpretation at 4 in 8.

Notice how that's an entirely different process than what is actually printed in the DMG.

What are you doing here? 1/8 divided by 1/3 would be 3/8, and that multiplied by 5/6 would be 15/48, or 5/16. Is that what you really meant to do?

Notice how that directly contradicts the very explicit and emphasized statement that the factor of 1 less than 2 is what applies, "not a 50% better chance".

If, instead of a goof in maths, you've got something even more convoluted going on, then it's only so much further removed from the text.

I am sure the 2E version is even harder to misconstrue. However, someone determined to go through such acrobatics of inserting a multiplication problem pulled out of thin air in direct contradiction of a warning not to do so can probably manage to confuse himself no matter what.

Are you really suggesting adding just 3 to that ...

No. I am suggesting the same thing as MerricB: that the monk's surprise chance "doesn't integrate with the surprise system at all".

That's no critique of the surprise system. It's a critique of the new monk class -- and, more generally, of the haphazard development and editing that did not catch and tie up (or snip off) that loose end. Just what Gary meant to do with it (and probably thought he had, somewhere in those thousands of manuscript pages), I don't know. It is certainly not the only thing that "slipped through the cracks", and (as far as I know) never got corrected.

I have said repeatedly that I appreciate the clarity and organization of the second edition! Being more like that is one of the fine qualities of OSRIC.

 

[MerricB]

Who edited the AD&D books? Mike Carr? Was there even an actual developer at all? Did TSR even use the services of a professional copy editor?

No idea.

That there was a rules editor is known: that person edited out the rule in the PHB that the first 10' of falling was 1d6 damage, the second 10' was 2d6, etc. So, a 20' fall was 3d6 damage and a 30' fall was 6d6 damage, etc. This led to an inconsistency with Unearthed Arcana and the thief-acrobat...

It's probably worth noting that for the AD&D project, Gary was working much more as a developer than a designer. The bulk of the design work was in original D&D + supplements + magazine articles; his role was putting it all together into a coherent system. Unfortunately, he worked on the books one at a time, and the system was in flux the entire time: no AC 10 in the Monster Manual, the monk having a thief's to-hit chances in the PHB and then a cleric's in the DMG...

Of course, Gary's judgement as a developer wasn't the best: he'd include rules (such as the weapon vs armour rules) because his friends wanted them, not because they added anything to the game.

These days, when I look at the 1e DMG, I see a rushed product. I see something that needed more attention before it was released - and someone who could stand up to Gary and say "these initiative rules make no sense" (and realise that they didn't). The DMG shows too many signs of "let's gather all the bits and pieces from Chainmail, OD&D and Supplements and edit them together" rather than the redesign the game deserved.

The game got that when Tom Moldvay and David "Zeb" Cook did their edition of the Basic and Expert game: finally, an elegant version of D&D with the tortured mechanics stripped out and replaced by something that worked. David Cook got the same chance to do the same thing to AD&D when 2nd edition came along, and he did so: the resulting set of rules is far more clear and elegant than AD&D.

Unfortunately - and in my opinion - the clarification of the rules came at the expense of some quirkiness that we would miss. Yes, the division of the Wizard spells into schools is elegant, and allows a lot of easy specialists to be made, but you lost the fascination of the original Illusionist class. Likewise with the Druid.

Cheers!

 

[Nebulous]

2e gets a lot of flack, but we really enjoyed it. Sure, lots of the splatbooks were of iffy quality, but at the time i wasn't really aware of that as it was the only game i played except for the occasional venture into Gamma World, Star Frontiers and Runequest (and D&D was better than all of those combined). I guess the settings were the standout element of 2e, they had such rich diversity, and back then the Forgotten Realms was new and exciting. I have very fond memories of 2e. Oh! And at the time, the Forgotten Realms Atlas on CD, and the Dragon Magazine archive on CD were the coolest things since sliced bread.

 

[TerraDave]

Why, I am working on something related…(see sig)…

First, AD&D was NOT Gygax’s house rules. If only we could be so lucky. It was very much a compilation of many people’s house rules, or at least things that they had been playing with, and sought to tone down the excesses of OD&D (see a pattern here?). Some of the complicated bits were OD&D legacy material, some were foisted on Gygax by others in TSR as part of the very strong trend at the time to add detail and realism. Note that Unearthed Arcana probably came closer to house rule territory, but we will never really know how many of those rules Gygax actually used in play.

Ok, Second edition, or I should say the core books for 2E. The issue with this version is that it many different goals:

-Be backwards compatible,

-Bring the game closer to how people played it (ie, leave out the complicated stuff they were ignoring),

-Bring in more player options without the gonzoness of Unearthed Arcana

-Make monsters challenging over a wider range of levels

-Tone down the elements that led people to link the game to Satanism

-Make the game more generic to support different campaign settings and campaigns.

-This included FR high fantasy, DL story telling, and even historically oriented campaigns, which TSR would try to support.

-Do a total rewrite to remove Gygax’s name from the game (note, this was also part of a pattern, see Dave Arneson).

Most—though not all—were worthy goals. The result was a mostly cleaner playing game that you could use with all sorts of stuff out there that felt like it was written by committee and totally lacked the edge of OAD&D.

Many posters above have also touched on the schizophrenic nature of the game. That is, all the mechanics where there for blasting arch-fiends with your staff of wizardry and taking their stuff, but the game at points was written as if this was a bad thing. This was part of pattern of trying to use moral suasion to address deep issues in the game and, dare I say it, game balance, that actually went back to early 80’s 1E and post Gygax Dragon. "Monty Haul" was to be avoided at all cost. It was more about the world, the story, and having an interesting, if not really good, character. Or at least that’s what they said. Play was something else.

 

[Remathilis]

To piggyback Merric's thought.

AD&D really does assume you know how to play it before you crack the rulebooks. You either learned by watching others, playing Basic, or both before you EVER cracked the AD&D tomes. The result made AD&D's "stream of conscious" layout a mess for looking things up; the encumbrance/movement rules are haphazardly spread through the PHB and DMG, M-U spell acquisition is lost in the magic, scroll, and intelligence sections. Initiative is a mess and appears more like an optional add on than a well-rounded system, and until I read it in OSRIC I never knew what a casting time of "one segment" counted as!

2e at least streamlines some things that needed it; initiative/surprise, casting times/weapon speeds, making the ranger and bard behave like normal classes, etc. I really do wish they'd finish the job; but we got what we got.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Many posters above have also touched on the schizophrenic nature of the game. That is, all the mechanics where there for blasting arch-fiends with your staff of wizardry and taking their stuff, but the game at points was written as if this was a bad thing. This was part of pattern of trying to use moral suasion to address deep issues in the game and, dare I say it, game balance, that actually went back to early 80’s 1E and post Gygax Dragon. "Monty Haul" was to be avoided at all cost. It was more about the world, the story, and having an interesting, if not really good, character.

Yes, this.

1e adventures are organised into dungeon maps, encounter keys, and wandering monster rosters. They have fiendish puzzles designed to test the player's intelligence (and not the character's intelligence score). Monsters are thrown in according to the challenge they present to incoming player characters, regardless of the likelihood that so many large carnivores so close to each other would turn into one carnivore and a pile of bones within a week or so. In 1e, it's perfectly normal to go through entire series of modules without ever meeting anything you're supposed to talk to.

2e adventures are organised into chapters, and they included subheadings like "If the party loses the fight..." followed by various agonised suggestions about how to force the adventure back onto its predetermined track if the three orcs somehow manage to defeat the party of 6th level characters. (1e does not have such sections. If the party loses the fight, then the DM grins evilly as he collects the character sheets and then crushes them beneath his sandalled feet, and hears the lamentation of their henchmen.) In 2e, monsters are placed according to their newly-added ecology sections in the Monstrous Manual, they live in smaller dungeons with fresh water and adequate toilet facilities, and they aren't allowed to use traps unless the player character gets a saving throw at +4. (Otherwise someone might fail and kill someone's precious character, which means the module author has to write a subheading called "If the trap kills anyone....")

 

[Ariosto]

AD&D really does assume you know how to play it before you crack the rulebooks.

At least in the 1st edition, that is a pretty big factor, I think. It's not what Gygax suggested in the first sentences of the Introduction in the PHB, but if memory serves he saw and regretted it later.

Some people have said that they didn't fully "get" some aspects of D&D until they came across the "little brown books", or Best of The Dragon.

Heck, I don't know what the official 1E AD&D frequency is for a periodic check for wandering monsters in the dungeons. There's Table I in Appendix A, but I am pretty sure that was still meant only for the solitaire game. (It might be interesting, though, to try in play reverse-engineering the other entries into 1/20 encounter chances.)

In OD&D, there's a 1/6 chance per turn (average one encounter per game-hour). If that's in the DMG, then I don't know where. The thing is, I had for years no reason even to ask the question! I already knew all about dungeon expeditions.

I think part of the problem was how messy the DMG was, and even just Gygax's prose style. Relatively easy-to-follow adventure scenarios could easily trump the book as pedagogy in how to run the game.

 

[Remathilis]

Yes, this.

1e adventures are organised into dungeon maps, encounter keys, and wandering monster rosters. They have fiendish puzzles designed to test the player's intelligence (and not the character's intelligence score). Monsters are thrown in according to the challenge they present to incoming player characters, regardless of the likelihood that so many large carnivores so close to each other would turn into one carnivore and a pile of bones within a week or so. In 1e, it's perfectly normal to go through entire series of modules without ever meeting anything you're supposed to talk to.

2e adventures are organized into chapters, and they included subheadings like "If the party loses the fight..." followed by various agonised suggestions about how to force the adventure back onto its predetermined track if the three orcs somehow manage to defeat the party of 6th level characters. (1e does not have such sections. If the party loses the fight, then the DM grins evilly as he collects the character sheets and then crushes them beneath his sandalled feet, and hears the lamentation of their henchmen.) In 2e, monsters are placed according to their newly-added ecology sections in the Monstrous Manual, they live in smaller dungeons with fresh water and adequate toilet facilities, and they aren't allowed to use traps unless the player character gets a saving throw at +4. (Otherwise someone might fail and kill someone's precious character, which means the module author has to write a subheading called "If the trap kills anyone....")

Waitasecond...

Sure, there were some terrible 2e railroads, but there were some GREAT 2e modules that don't run on the rails. The Shattered Circle. Dead Gods.

Also, I crushed more than my fair share of 2e PCs under my foot, esp for doing stupid things and failing those trap rolls. What your discussing isn't 1e/2e mentality, its narrative vs. rat-bastard DM play.

In fact, what your describing as "2e" mentality can be found in nearly every edition (I saw it quite a bit in Basic, and it persists into 3e, 4e, and yes even 1e; Dragonlance was a 1e product). I realize you have a vested interest in promoting 1e, but to think all 2e modules were railroads armed with nerf-guns is a vastly inaccurate representation.

 

[WanderingMonster]

The difference is 1 editon.

Showing my work:

2e-1e=1e

 

[pemerton]

Sure, there were some terrible 2e railroads, but there were some GREAT 2e modules that don't run on the rails. The Shattered Circle. Dead Gods.

Is Dead Gods the Planescape module where Orcus comes back to life, and it starts with the PCs going off on an apparently unrelated adventure (maybe with Ratatosks?) and getting sucked into the Orcus plotline?

If so, then I've got it, read it but never tried to run it because it looked to me exactly like a railroad.

But I agree that 3e can have the same problem - I've got Return to the Demonweb Pits but never tried to run it for the same reason. There's no way my players would have their PCs just jump through a portal, or follow the directions of Rule-of-Three on nothing but his own say-so.

Given that RtDP was meant to have a "back to Planescape" vibe, I've always assumed that this railroady flavour was endemic to Planescape . . . but having been put off by this flavour, I've not explored Planescape further.