AD&D, looking backwards, and personal experiences

[Steely_Dan]

Yes. Absolutely and exactly.


Very similar to mine, except I've got at least one player who hates 4e but can't bring himself to play something as "old" as AD&D, so we never made it to playing it, again. The irony is that much of what that player has remarked positively on in 5e are the bits reintroduced from AD&D. If 5e 3ifies AD&D, it's a winner, in my book.

The beauty of AD&D wasn't that the rules were awesome. They clearly had flaws in them. It was actually the modularity and creativity they promoted. You could use weapon factors or not, and your game worked. You could use magic items or not, and your game worked. Okay, that one required a bit of tweaking, but it was so obvious what the impacts were that you could do it on the fly without breaking anything. I built new classes and races all the time, and they worked great. If you try any of that in 3e and 4e, it's actually work -- and it feels like work, not play. There are too many land mines to be too creative with 3e & 4e in the same way as AD&D.

I guess, in a way, AD&D was awesome because it was clear that the rules of an RPG were fundamentally different from a board or card game. The DM wasn't just there to be your door into another world. Gary calling the DM a "referee" was very meaningful. It was the DM's job to make calls on the fly and even to tweak the rules to make the game suit the group, setting, and story.

*golf clap* (sincerely)

 

[Lanefan]

Warhammer Fantasy Battles

Warhammer Fantasy Battles.

Thanks! I thought the 'W' might be Warhammer but I wasn't sure where it went from there.

Lanefan

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Yes. Absolutely and exactly.I guess, in a way, AD&D was awesome because it was clear that the rules of an RPG were fundamentally different from a board or card game. The DM wasn't just there to be your door into another world. Gary calling the DM a "referee" was very meaningful. It was the DM's job to make calls on the fly and even to tweak the rules to make the game suit the group, setting, and story.

I agree with this in spades.

The beauty of AD&D wasn't that the rules were awesome. They clearly had flaws in them. It was actually the modularity and creativity they promoted. You could use weapon factors or not, and your game worked. You could use magic items or not, and your game worked. Okay, that one required a bit of tweaking, but it was so obvious what the impacts were that you could do it on the fly without breaking anything. I built new classes and races all the time, and they worked great. If you try any of that in 3e and 4e, it's actually work -- and it feels like work, not play. There are too many land mines to be too creative with 3e & 4e in the same way as AD&D.

No, the number of land mines is roughly the same. The "problem" is expectation setting.

AD&D 1e was created within a hobby where the expectations for how well an ongoing campaign would work were very low. Success usually depended on the DM tweaking thing so that they were "good enough". Everyone made do.

3e and 4e were created under circumstances of vastly higher expectations. As an old time player, it is shocking to me that some DMs report issues when their players march down to the FLGS and think they can grab the latest splatbook and just use it all without DM tweaking or revision. Huh? (Did a single DM on the planet ever just say "Yes" to Unearthed Arcana? That is The One measly splatbook!)

Just like most old time DMs, there is nothing stopping anyone from using just the 3e or 4e core books, throw out a bunch of the rules that seem a little overweight, and get down to gaming. Want a new race? Want a new class? It is not inherently harder.

 

[Mercule]

Just like most old time DMs, there is nothing stopping anyone from using just the 3e or 4e core books, throw out a bunch of the rules that seem a little overweight, and get down to gaming. Want a new race? Want a new class? It is not inherently harder.

Maybe. I think it'd be easier than the "splatbook of the month" build-up. At the same time, I think the attempt at balancing 3e did bring along some baggage.

In AD&D, I used the pain "module" from Dragon for a while. No problem. After that, I threw in the crit tables from RoleMaster without a problem. The game was deadlier, but it was intuitive by how much and why. There were no surprises for the three years we played that way. I also had a materials-based DR system, similar to the one in 3.5, before 2e was ever announced. Again, it was entirely predictable for a decade of play.

In 3.5, I used a narrow band of books (core + GM approved bits from others). We added the armor as DR rules from UA. We were constantly finding little things that those rules broke. Every time I tried to rebalance the game, something else broke worse. It was a horrible PITA.

There's a fair argument that the armor as DR rule is a more invasive modification than swapping out critical hits -- except AD&D didn't actually have critical hit rules. They were tacked on, wholesale.

I'm okay with the base contention that the expansion cruft provided most of the complication in 3e. I don't think the core RAW were without guilt, though.

 

[Shadeydm]

Just like most old time DMs, there is nothing stopping anyone from using just the 3e or 4e core books, throw out a bunch of the rules that seem a little overweight, and get down to gaming. Want a new race? Want a new class? It is not inherently harder.

Well part of the problem is most 4E groups use the character builder which assumes everything is core. I don't think there is an easy way to switch off everything but the original 3 books on the CB but admittedly I haven't tried so maybe I overlooked it.

 

[Remathilis]

Maybe. I think it'd be easier than the "splatbook of the month" build-up. At the same time, I think the attempt at balancing 3e did bring along some baggage.

In AD&D, I used the pain "module" from Dragon for a while. No problem. After that, I threw in the crit tables from RoleMaster without a problem. The game was deadlier, but it was intuitive by how much and why. There were no surprises for the three years we played that way. I also had a materials-based DR system, similar to the one in 3.5, before 2e was ever announced. Again, it was entirely predictable for a decade of play.

In 3.5, I used a narrow band of books (core + GM approved bits from others). We added the armor as DR rules from UA. We were constantly finding little things that those rules broke. Every time I tried to rebalance the game, something else broke worse. It was a horrible PITA.

There's a fair argument that the armor as DR rule is a more invasive modification than swapping out critical hits -- except AD&D didn't actually have critical hit rules. They were tacked on, wholesale.

I'm okay with the base contention that the expansion cruft provided most of the complication in 3e. I don't think the core RAW were without guilt, though.

I think here AD&D's greatest perceived weaknesses is actually one of its strengths.

For the most part, AD&D's mechanics were often disassociated with one another. Its where the "subsystems and minigames" of older D&D went. It meant you could rip out elements of the game and replace it and often have little or no resistance from the rest of the system. Replacing (or eliminating) surprise, for example, did little to change initiative or stealth rules for thieves. Likewise, you could replace the Strength table with your own (removing Exceptional Str) and it would only effect PCs, a few NPCs, and a handful of magical items. It was a tinkerer's paradise because it usually meant you could alter things and then balance-test it on the fly.

3e could do that, but it took much more work. You couldn't remove skills like you could NWPs without majorly re-writing classes. Likewise, feats were not removable unless you gutted the fighter. Changing XP gained changed magic item creation and treasure balance vs. EL. Deadlier crits screwed up CR. Replacing the 3e ability score table with Basic's slower progression would force you to re-write every single monster in the game. It was too unwieldy to change all the stuff due to interconnection.

That's not to say AD&D's rules were better in all places (the elegance of Fort/Ref/Will still puts AD&Ds Five Arbitrary Categories to shame) but they were a lot more modifiable.

 

[pemerton]

Replacing (or eliminating) surprise, for example, did little to change initiative or stealth rules for thieves.

There is a flip-side to this, though: whereas the rules for suprise when the party has a ranger are fairly clear (3 in 6 rather than 2 in 6) the rules for suprise when the party has sneaky thieves in it are not clear at all.

That's not to say AD&D's rules were better in all places (the elegance of Fort/Ref/Will still puts AD&Ds Five Arbitrary Categories to shame) but they were a lot more modifiable.

I think I prefer AD&D to 3E saving throws. In AD&D a wizard could have a rasonable save vs spells, or vs wands, because s/he was able to subtly manipulate the enemy magic. In 3E, though, the wizard is stuck with a bad save vs Fireball or a Wand of Polymorph, becaus the saves were recategorised from looking at the effect, and then leaving it to the table to imagine how a given PC might defend against that effect, to looking at the PC's capacity (at dodging, at enduring, at mental steadfastness).

 

[howandwhy99]

I think most folks, like me, looked at Advanced D&D and "Basic" and figured they were smarter than the average bear. AD&D is a hecueva lot harder though and not as fun unless you really do love all the fiddly bits and subsystems. I get most of AD&D now, but only because I've spent many games playing earlier versions of D&D. It isn't easily picked up (and definitely far from clear) and presumes certain shared definitions that are not longer held by almost everyone. That said, it has some wonderful elements to it would would advocate for most any D&D game.

Stupid me, of course, thought using a graduate-level mathematics book would be a better place to start than beginner arithmetic.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Well part of the problem is most 4E groups use the character builder which assumes everything is core. I don't think there is an easy way to switch off everything but the original 3 books on the CB but admittedly I haven't tried so maybe I overlooked it.

The off-line CB let you create a 'campaign' file you could share with your players, and you could ban whole books or even individual items. It was extremely annoying to try to go through in detail, though, and banning a book often banned part of another book you wanted to use. There was also little you could do for house rules or new material - you could add new things, but they didn't integrate with the sheet. So if you created a new race and gave it a +1 to hit with longswords, say, the player who chose it wouldn't get the +1. Not devastating, but it was definitely more convenient to play 4e 'straight' if your players were using the CB.

 

[Hussar]

There's a point to remember about 4e though when we're talking about allowing splats. 4e, by and large, still hasn't had any really breaking point additions. Nothing on the order of things like the original Unearthed Arcana, or various 2e splats (elven bladesingers anyone?) or the umpteen really, REALLY broken splats that came out for 3e (sometimes from WOTC, sometimes from 3pp - *cough*Mongoose*cough*).

Telling a 4e player to use the CB and then maybe restricting races and classes (such as you might find in Dark Sun, for example) is pretty easy. You have a pretty good idea that nothing that player brings to the table is going to blow your game out of the water.