D&D 1E The indispensible 1e

[HardcoreDandDGirl]

Also: kobalds = dog boys, not kobalds = lizard boys.

Just tell me who to kill make this come to pass...

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Wow, where do I start?

Multiclassing
Morale rules
Surprise rounds
A real ranger
The thief
Save or die
Spells with costs
7 spell Levels for clerics - this is a feature, not a bug
Scary undead
Stat blocks like: Orc hd 1 dmg 1-6
Casting times
Spell interruption
Staggered attacks
A polymorph spell that works
System shock/res survival
Believable stats
Wandering monsters
Hexcrawls
No magic shops
Death at 0 hit points.
No diplomacy/intimidate/et al skills


And that's just off the top of my head.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Just tell me who to kill make this come to pass...

I have a miniature schnauzer that when he stands on his hind legs is the picture perfect kobold...(I imagin him in an old WWII SS uniform with a spear and sheild)

 

[Keldryn]

Character Creation

• Fast character creation: roll your 6 ability scores, pick a class and race, buy equipment, name your character. Roll for/choose a secondary skill and adjust abilities for age category if you're using those rules. 10 to 15 minutes and you're done. The flexibility of having hundreds of feats, powers, alternate class features, and substitution levels can be nice, but searching through half a dozen books to find just the right ability for your character can easily push character creation time to a couple of hours.
• Organic character growth. You don't plan your advancement from 1st level through the "endgame" to make sure that you can qualify for everything that you need to "realize your character concept."
• Characters of similar archetypes are differentiated by what they do in the game instead of what special abilities and modifiers they have on their character sheet.

Magic

• Magic that is very powerful but potentially dangerous. Teleport spells that can make you materialize inside solid rock if you're not careful. Spells like haste that can age you prematurely. Polymorph spells that carry a risk of killing you (system shock roll). "The thing about magic -- there's always consequences -- always!" Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Powerful magic that isn't easily recovered. 1st level spells require the caster to have slept at least 4 hours and take 15 minutes per spell to memorize. 9th level spells require 12 hours of rest and 3 hours of study to memorize a single spell. A 10th-level magic-user going nova with all of his spells in a 15-minute adventuring day would mean having to rest a full 8 hours and then spend almost 10 hours preparing all of his spells again.
• Divine and arcane magic don't have a great deal of overlap
• Clerics and Druids have no more than 12 spells per level on their spells lists -- when you get to choose freely every day from your entire spell list, it needs to be a pretty concise list
• Resurrection that isn't guaranteed to work, and which has an upper limit (-1 to Con every time you are brought back to life).
• Illusionists have a distinct spell list from magic-users, including many exclusive spells.
• Acquisition of spells and magic items are mostly up to the DM

Gameplay

• Combat is abstract; 1-minute rounds allow for any reasonable character actions without having to enforce a structure "action economy"
• Combat is fast; a low-level encounter can often be resolved in 10 minutes. Even higher-level encounters with a large number of combatants are unlikely to take much longer than 30 minutes.
• XP for treasure acquired: oft-derided as not making sense, this is simply a quick and easy way to judge the "challenge level" of an adventure. The assumption is that the most valuable treasures will be hidden in the most difficult-to-reach locations and PCs will encounter the most dangerous monsters on the way there and back.
• Group initiative: this makes combat move quickly and keeps all of the players engaged in the game as they all take their turns pretty much simultaneously.
• Hit point acquisition levels off. Once characters reach "name" level (9th to 11th depending on class), they stop getting a full hit die plus con bonus to hit points and simply gain 1, 2, or 3 hit points per level. There are no monsters with 500 or 1,200 hit points.
• Saving throws that aren't affected by caster or monster level. A high-level fighter can resist most spells cast at him and shrug off a dragon's breath simply because he is tough and awesome.

And perhaps one of the most important things: the players don't need to know all of the rules, and a brand-new player doesn't have to learn much before he can start playing. I've never had a new player not "get" how to play Basic D&D or AD&D within minutes, unlike my experience with teaching WotC D&D to new players.

 

[Steely_Dan]

I have a miniature schnauzer that when he stands on his hind legs is the picture perfect kobold...(I imagin him in an old WWII SS uniform with a spear and sheild)

Okay, that's it, I have always wanted a Wind in the Willows campaign, so a Sausage Dog Nazi sounds great, and a Chicken Monk (Cluck Fu, I mean, come on).

 

[JRRNeiklot]

[*]Combat is abstract; 1-minute rounds allow for any reasonable character actions without having to enforce a structure "action economy"

Yes. This also allows for spells that may be cast in our out of combat to be useful. Summoned monsters can clear rubble or investigate rooms. With 6 second rounds, there's not much they can do outside of combat. How far can you spiderclimb in 6 seconds?

 

[RHGreen]

What was good about 1e?

The revised covers (good art) and the smell of the books. They smelled liked grandparent's books. Old and mysterious. They seemed to come with pre-applied musty attic dust.

Can't think of anything else.



I liked BECMI and when I bought the AD&D books I was disappointed that they seemed like a collection of nonsensical and illogical houserules made by a drunk autistic. The rules weren't realistic, just more cluttered, eratic and complicated.

To be fair to 1e, though, it was fun and interesting ploughing through random rules brick-a-brack. I just had absolutley no interest in playing it and didn't see it as an improvement on BECMI. In fact the opposite.

 

[P1NBACK]

What was good about 1e?

The revised covers (good art) and the smell of the books. They smelled liked grandparent's books. Old and mysterious. They seemed to come with pre-applied musty attic dust.

Can't think of anything else.



I liked BECMI and when I bought the AD&D books I was disappointed that they seemed like a collection of nonsensical and illogical houserules made by a drunk autistic. The rules weren't realistic, just more cluttered, eratic and complicated.

To be fair to 1e, though, it was fun and interesting ploughing through random rules brick-a-brack. I just had absolutley no interest in playing it and didn't see it as an improvement on BECMI. In fact the opposite.

Can you start your own 1E hate thread?

 

[Ed_Laprade]

BTW, what are the indispensible parts of 1E for me?

1) Ease of character creation. Race, class, 6 rolls, and you can fill in the rest of the details as you get started actually playing, including buying equipment. One of the gross errors of 3E design is the requirement for every generated character to invest vast chunks of time reading, understanding and COMPARING MERITS, VALUE, & INTERCONNECTIVITY of feats, skills, class/prestige class features, and even equipment. The entire system itself becomes an impediment to getting started.

2) The ADMONITION that the rules are only guidelines. This actually relates to that thing about system mastery again. Already in this thread is the repeated statement that people enjoyed being able to ignore parts of the rules without breaking the whole. People were able to add their own rules, often without even realizing they were doing so until years after the fact when they went back and re-read the rules in detail. Participants need to be told they are both permitted and even EXPECTED to tell the rules to get stuffed.

3) PC's can and will die, usually capriciously and unavoidably. This is not to say that the game needs to be more lethal, nor that other editions were necessarily less so. It has to do with player expectations of success. I think players now have an expectation of success. They are more concerned with maximizing their margin of victory and guarding against the occasional random threat to their success. I think 1E players had more of an expectation of FAILURE as the default and were concerned with ACHIEVING victory, and not just by manipulation of the numbers on their character sheet alone but by reaching BEYOND what the numbers said they were able to reliably achieve. That is, your character class abilities, ability scores and skills will only take your PC so far - a challenge to your character is not what fits with the tightest margins into what your abilities are, but what your character does beyond that.

4) Not so much something that 1E is but perhaps what it isn't. I don't want to hit this one too hard but system mastery in 1E was fun because it WASN'T a requirement for extending your enjoyment of the game, much less your characters basic success. Knowing the ins and outs of the system had some benefits but it wasn't DESIGNED into the system as a requirement for fun.

5) Random prositutes. I agree that its something that should be brought forward from 1E but it's not enough to just let it go at that. The reasons WHY it needs to be brought forward are what's important. 1E was a game written by adults for other adults. It was enjoyed by non-adults BECAUSE of the expected levels of intelligence, sophistication, and (after a fashion) maturity. The game began to lose important portions of that when with 2E it was inexplicably determined that the game had to be "written down" to be more accessible to kids, more politically correct, less possible to offend anyone. SCREW THAT. Let the kids figure some things out for themselves. Spit Political Correctness in the eyes of those who clamor for it the loudest. Let those who CHOOSE to take offense go play Chutes & Ladders.

D&D designers should be writing D&D to appeal to their PEERS - just as Gygax did with 1E. D&D doesn't have to be EDGY, and rounding off the corners a bit is fine, just realize you don't need to be so aggressive with that file. If you want to write a game for kids then license My Little Pony or Teletubbies for an RPG.

6) Still related to previous points - Balance can go suck eggs. Randomness in the game is a feature, not a bug. The game loses more of its appeal the harder desginers try to ELIMINATE imbalance between races, classes, and skills, and to alleviate all undesireable consequences of random results. EMBRACE randomness and imbalance - stop trying to engineer it out of the game entirely. Even such a seemingly logical and applaudible step as making all the math addition can subtly shift the mindset from one of "success vs. failure" to "success vs. just-try-again".

Darn, I really, really wanted to give you XP for this! Agree with everything you said!

 

[grimslade]

Too tied to nostalgia to be specific

Although I started in BECMI, AD&D were the first books I purchased with my hard earned cash.
How can I be objective about my first RPG love?

I think the number one essential 1E thing to be brought forward was the diversity and breadth of information in the DMG. Appendix N, artifact creation, morale, civilization creation, the AD&D DMG still is a resource no matter the edition or system. Yes, it was disorganized and the layout was crazy, but by Bieber there was a nugget of true wisdom in every column.

Rules wise, henchmen and hirelings need to be brought back. There needs to be a legacy system available for long running campaigns. Henchmen filled that niche ably.

The expectation that there was more to D&D than dungeon crawls. Training to level, research for new spells, running kingdoms, gathering followers allowed for breathing space before the next horror filled crypt. There was a chance to reflect or send the flunkies/henchmen out on a new adventure.