D&D 1E How about a little love for AD&D 1E

[Bedrockgames]

Although I have moved on to 2E - well, as far as one can actually do so because there isn't such a thing as "editions" - I still consult DMG1 first whenever I need to look up anything - for it is the only trustworthy source of information about anything.

What I also like about it is how much it tells you about EGG and what he thought of all those pesky players who were only ruining "his game". Dave Arneson, anyone?

"in writing" (!):
View attachment 277731

"non game boredom":
View attachment 277732

"barracks room lawyers"
View attachment 277733

One of the things I like about the 1E DMG is how irritated he seems to be at some of the hypothetical players and groups. I would say my style of GMing is quite different from Gary's, but the book has a ton of useful tools, approaches that if you go back to them can often reset ruts that have become the norm but don't add much to actual play, and it is brimming with personality (which makes the reading of it that much more enjoyable). My second favorite to that is the Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide that supplements the 2E DMG.

 

[ilgatto]

If one has read the 1e training for levels description it is extremely obvious that that (training for levels) was supposed to address this issue.

Ah, yes. Training for levels! We actually never did that after, say, the first two times one of my PCs advanced in level but I've always used variations on the theme in my 2E games, typically without the costs. So I never forgot about it and decided to implement the rule to the letter when we were revisiting 1E for a while some time ago.

It is brilliant.

It is the ultimate way to drain the coffers of PCs and it was strangely satisfying to see the reactions of my players when I first told them the details. They'd become quite cocky after (mostly) surviving the first levels of the dungeon and were saving up to "go to the city" where they thought the "magic shoppe" would be (there wasn't, not really).

"WTF? How much is that gonna cost? How much? No way! What about the magic shoppe?! Hold on... does this actually mean that some of us cannot advance in level!?!"

I'm grinning evilly at the memory even today.

 

[Voadam]

Every time I read people saying that they miss 1E/2E I always wonder why on earth they did move on.

For me when 3e came out I had been DMing AD&D for more than a decade, I had tons of material for it, worked material from other games into my AD&D, was comfortable with it, enjoyed it, and expected to play it for the rest of my life, occasionally incorporating some stuff from other games into my AD&D ones.

Nevertheless I still had issues with AD&D.

3e surprised me in addressing a number of my issues with AD&D with innovations I liked, enough to try it out then to switch.

1 Having an explicit design goal of all classes being balanced for combat.

2 All classes being designed to be balanced against each other each level for combat.

3 Universal xp chart so the party can remain equal.

4 Universal xp chart so xp tracking can be dropped and go with group milestone levelling

5 Races being designed to be balanced with each other.

6 No non human level or class choice limits.

7 No classes having level limits.

8 Stat bonuses working off a steady progression instead of a reverse bell curve.

9 Thief skills not being their own one off thing.

10 Thieves being designed for combat.

11 Level one hp being maxxed out so that one shot death was less of an issue.

12 Energy drain changes.

13 Changing save or die poison effects to stat damage.

14 Cantrips as an option for low level magic-users to do more than one spell (and to do more than the 1e UA super minor effects).

15 Monster templates.

16 Ascending AC.

 

[Dioltach]

One of the changes that 3E brought that I liked most, besides standardisation (and multiclassing, to a lesser degree), was that it got rid of the randomness and finality of restrictions. No more "only this class can do this", "this race can't do that". If you were willing to take the appropriate feat or pay the skill point cost, you could do pretty much anything.

 

[ilgatto]

One of the things I like about the 1E DMG is how irritated he seems to be at some of the hypothetical players and groups. I would say my style of GMing is quite different from Gary's, but the book has a ton of useful tools, approaches that if you go back to them can often reset ruts that have become the norm but don't add much to actual play, and it is brimming with personality (which makes the reading of it that much more enjoyable). My second favorite to that is the Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide that supplements the 2E DMG.

Favorite 1E source books... hmmm...

That's gonna be tricky.

First, my all-time favorites are Cities of Harn (Columbia Games Inc., 1983) and Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names (Troll Lord Games, 2004), which is actually the best source book of ever.

For 1E books, DMG1 takes the top spot. After that, I suppose I'd have to say the early prints of Deities & Demigods because I like to do a lot with religions and how deities influence everything and also because Melniboné and because I like how summary the descriptions are in DDG.
Then Manual of the Planes.
I also still tend to use the Wilderness Survival Guide fairly often, but never on the fly and mostly when I have to get into detail for some spell or monster write-up, the weather, or, say, encumbrance and movement for mounts. Usually a bit of a pain to consult, though.

My guilty pleasure is Unearthed Arcana, not because I actually use much from it but, er, well, because I like it for some reason I can't put my finger on.

 

[James Gasik]

Now I won't claim that 3e is, or ever was balanced. It attempted to be, but the developers were still assuming people would play 3e the same way they played dungeon crawling D&D. They were caught completely off-guard by the emergent gameplay of 3e, which didn't go far enough to balance character classes fully against one another.

By balance here, I mean, that each character gets an equal amount of "spotlight". Everyone shines equally. But once people started evaluating the different options available to them, and campaigns almost instantly busted out of "ye olde dungeon crawl", things got wonky.

The most amazing thing to most old players was the realization that nothing really forces monsters to engage with a Fighter. In fact, 3e radicalized the Fighter to a great degree. The high AC, more hit points than a small keep, sword and board character now had more AC, more hit points, but their attack was defanged by a combination of the new multiattack rules, the weakening of weapon specialization, and increased monster hit points.

A lot of terrifying spells no M-U would ever touch because of the dreaded "save neg." were suddenly being used to shut down combats entire, due to the fact that their saving throws typically got harder to make as they went up in levels, and the fact that no one had bothered to adjust their damage (that 5d6 fireball that murdered in AD&D was now quite sad).

Clerics being able to actually prepare and cast spells other than Cure X Wounds was an eye opener as well. And it wasn't like spells were radically changed from AD&D, it was just how spells were used shifted, and again, no one was really prepared for it.

So yeah, you can't just change a bunch of rules and expect the game to function the same way, a lesson I learned trying to make house rules in AD&D as a DM. Sometimes changing even one rule can have unseen repercussions. Maybe that's what Gary was trying to say when he told us that we could both change the game how we wanted to, but if we did, we weren't play "AD&D".

But to really understand why people left 2e, you have to go back to examine why people left 1e. Or even original flavor D&D. And I think a lot of this people naturally assume "newer and shinier is better". Oh sure, there are individual selling points that may have drawn you in, maybe there was a rules change you liked. Or the presentation was more crisp. Or the art more eye popping.

Maybe Gygaxian prose made a rulebook read less like stereo instructions and more like a secret tome of knowledge, and you were being inducted into a secret club of "true gamers".

As a younger man, I was one of those idiots who always championed the newer, shinier thing, because I mean, it just had to be better, right? Now that I'm older, when people get all hyped about some new thing, I'm like "uh huh, and that's better than what we have now, why?"

And I usually get blank stares. So maybe it is an age thing.

 

[fuindordm]

And I usually get blank stares. So maybe it is an age thing.

It's a perpective thing -- it takes trying several options to understand what is really valuable and important, in our own personal calculus.
I know a lot of people, including older gamers who have tried many systems, who settled on Pathfinder. And I understand why! But in my circle these are players, not DMs, ad Pathfinder is clearly a game for players who love the subgame of character creation.

 

[Voadam]

It's a perpective thing -- it takes trying several options to understand what is really valuable and important, in our own personal calculus.
I know a lot of people, including older gamers who have tried many systems, who settled on Pathfinder. And I understand why! But in my circle these are players, not DMs, ad Pathfinder is clearly a game for players who love the subgame of character creation.

On the DM end Pathfinder also has fantastic bestiaries, extensive online srds, and adventures that are really useful for a DM.

Golarion is a pretty cool setting too. A lot of it can easily be used in other systems, but there is a number of d20 specific material for it as well.

 

[James Gasik]

I remember long hours as a 3e/PF1 GM poring over stat blocks and assembling encounters. Rolling up treasure. Deciding whether or not to equip monsters with masterwork weapons. Or to change their Feats. Carefully comparing attack bonuses to AC's between the monsters and my parties.

Only for the actual encounter to be resolved in about half the time it took me to make it, lol.

Then I think back to 4e, where the digital tools let me throw together an epic encounter inside of ten minutes, lol.

But experiences can vary; I'm sure there's old hands who can eyeball a group in AD&D and instantly know how many Orcs are required to actually make them feel like they're in a fight. That's not a skill I ever developed, lol.

 

[ilgatto]

(...)
I know a lot of people, including older gamers who have tried many systems, who settled on Pathfinder. And I understand why! But in my circle these are players, not DMs, ad Pathfinder is clearly a game for players who love the subgame of character creation.

That got me thinking.

“Character builds”.

Another thing I like about 1E (less so 2E), is the simplicity of “building a character”. For me, the fun in the game is to actually pretend to be someone else and I always know that I’m getting close to what I want to achieve when I hear my character suddenly say things I would never have said myself – or do things that seem to come from somewhere else than my own mind. In one very early example, our group decided that it would be fun to go “rob a castle”, sort of heist style. So enter our low-level Thieves and, to cut a very long story shot, we ended up staying as guests of the merchant baron who lived in the castle and my Thief wooing one of his wives as part of the plan. Thief and wife ended up… getting along quite well and then, after some weeks, while returning from riding to hounds, our heroes found the castle ablaze. So we sped to the castle to save as much from the treasure vaults as we could until the DM described the blaze and I suddenly heard myself say, completely out of the blue, that I – the PC – was going to rescue my lady love from her burning tower. In fact, I suddenly felt waves of love for her overcome me – the player – and it was an extraordinary experience, fortunately the first of many to come.

So, typically, when I start a new character, I have decided to see if I can find out what it would be like to think like, say, a Paladin or an evil overlord, or what it would be like to be a Magic-User in a magical multiverse.
If I can come up with one or two basic principles for this character (e.g., he’s shy, she’s poor, he hates women, whatever) I roll some stats, fill out some spaces on a character sheet and start playing to see where the journey takes me. For that, I don’t want to think about career paths – in fact I very much like that I can use only a few basic principles as a guideline. Pockets need picking? Lemme at it. Undead need turning? Not for me. It frees me up to develop and think about the personality of my PC, to incorporate events in it, to wallow in it, and then to surprise myself again and again. It creates an actual person instead of a series of many, many stats to facilitate die-rolls.

For me, that is perhaps the most important thing a role-playing game can do. That is not to say that this isn’t possible in other games, editions, or rule sets, it’s just that, for me, 1E is the best tool for this.