Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
1e is a primordial mess, I dont particularly hold it up to a high standard. Also, most of the 1e game is oral tradition, where gamers are making up rules as they go along, and learning rules from each other. The written texts of 1e are actually not where the game is happening.
1e is terribly different from 5e − by many magnitudes. For example, in 1e, sorting out two conflicting sentences in the Cleric class and subclass about what the word ‘deity’ is supposed to mean in the rules as written, cannot compare to sentences across very many pages in 5e that refer to polytheism. I have tried to create my own version of the 5e core rules that deleted the references to polytheism, but I abandoned the project because it was way too much. The Forgotten Realms setting is too baked in everywhere in the core rule books, most problematically the 5e Players Handbook.
1e offers many conflictive suggests, with a light touch often just mentioned once. It is useful for worldbuilding − especially when everyone has make up their own rules anyway.
Also, with regard to worldbuilding, D&D 1e tends to be more ‘module’ oriented. I normally play one adventure after an other. And after a while, the ‘world’ starts to happen by itself. The world is the RESULT of the kinds of adventures the players want to play, and after a while, plot points expand outward forming a growing map. In other words, there was never a ‘multiverse’. There was never a top-down design for what the world is supposed to look like. For my groups, the worlds are mainly bottom-up, with the decisions of the DM and players CAUSE the world to be what it is, one adventure at a time.
There is something truly beautiful about 1e, where DMs and players experience their own worlds grow and develop.
