The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[Hussar]

thats why you use level drain enemies first

It's something I've seen so many times and it just frankly baffles me to be honest. AD&D and D&D combat wasn't particularly lethal. Good grief, look at the encounters in Keep on the Borderlands. You would fight dozens of opponents and be pretty expected to win. These weren't presented as particularly dangerous and, they weren't. Sure, 1st and 2nd level are deadly, but, that's true in 5e as well. Killing 1st level PC's is easy.

But the idea that encounters were particularly dangerous in earlier editions just isn't true. Well, it's true from the perspective of "Well, we're going to ignore the combat rules and just add in stuff that bypasses HP or AC and just make you dead". That's true. That's pretty deadly. But, actual combat? Not really.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Boss, could you stop talking to me about work? I have a game to prep for tomorrow.

OMG this is so true

 

[Malmuria]

It's something I've seen so many times and it just frankly baffles me to be honest. AD&D and D&D combat wasn't particularly lethal. Good grief, look at the encounters in Keep on the Borderlands. You would fight dozens of opponents and be pretty expected to win. These weren't presented as particularly dangerous and, they weren't. Sure, 1st and 2nd level are deadly, but, that's true in 5e as well. Killing 1st level PC's is easy.

But the idea that encounters were particularly dangerous in earlier editions just isn't true. Well, it's true from the perspective of "Well, we're going to ignore the combat rules and just add in stuff that bypasses HP or AC and just make you dead". That's true. That's pretty deadly. But, actual combat? Not really.

I think you can get unlucky in some of those games and die. I mean it is true that healing is hard to come by, rests don't heal as much, and there isn't the safety net of death saves.

 

[overgeeked]

I think you can get unlucky in some of those games and die. I mean it is true that healing is hard to come by, rests don't heal as much, and there isn't the safety net of death saves.

Exactly. Combat was deadlier because resources mattered more, were harder to come by, were less flexible, and they reset less often. Hit points were randomly rolled and generally lower. You healed 1 HP a night of sleep (AD&D), or you healed 1-3 HP per full day of uninterrupted rest in a safe place (B/X). You picked one spell to cast per slot that you’d fire and forget. Clerics didn’t get spells until 2nd level. Characters died at zero HP (dying at -10 was an optional AD&D rule). A lot of people also forgot that Keep on the Borderlands was a B/X module, but ran it as an AD&D module…so the ACs of all the monsters was 1 worse than it should have been, making them 5% easier to hit. That’s not even touching save or die effects, level drain, disease, starvation, etc. Further, wandering monsters were commonplace, yielded next to no XP or gold, and were far more random than modern games. You could encounter monsters who could one shot your characters from full health. In all, the mechanics forced you to think instead of blindly charge constantly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's something I've seen so many times and it just frankly baffles me to be honest. AD&D and D&D combat wasn't particularly lethal. Good grief, look at the encounters in Keep on the Borderlands. You would fight dozens of opponents and be pretty expected to win. These weren't presented as particularly dangerous and, they weren't. Sure, 1st and 2nd level are deadly, but, that's true in 5e as well. Killing 1st level PC's is easy.

But the idea that encounters were particularly dangerous in earlier editions just isn't true. Well, it's true from the perspective of "Well, we're going to ignore the combat rules and just add in stuff that bypasses HP or AC and just make you dead". That's true. That's pretty deadly. But, actual combat? Not really.

It could be true in OD&D at least in the very bottom levels because hit points could be so low there was no slack at all. But I do agree after you hit about 4-6th level it wasn't true for anyone but MUs and thieves (D4's were just unforgiving for hit dice).

 

[trappedslider]

Boss, could you stop talking to me about work? I have a game to prep for tomorrow.

 

[Malmuria]

I had plenty of TPKs when I played Balder's Gate 2, is all I'm saying.

 

[Parmandur]

I had plenty of TPKs when I played Balder's Gate 2, is all I'm saying.

No DM.

 

[Hussar]

Clerics didn’t get spells until 2nd level.

In B/E D&D, that's true. In AD&D? Nope. They got 3 1st level spells with something like a 12 or 14 Wis - not unreasonable for a cleric.

That's the problem with these discussions. People keep mix and matching mechanics to "prove" how hard it was back then. Look, it's pretty simple. In 3e, monster damage maxed out at about 10xCR/round. IOW, regardless of your level, there were monsters (and more than a few) that could outright kill a PC in a single round just with damage. Never minding adding in things like crits (a 3e orc could potentially deal over 40 points of damage in a single HIT, for example).

Even playing things like KotB in Basic rules, we didn't see meat grinders. Your fighters were runnign around with a 3 AC (plate and shield were easily affordable in Basic with starting gold) plus Dex bonus (potentially). Meaning your baddies were only hitting about 20% of the time and doing about 2-4 points of damage per hit. Additionally, you were expected to have a group of 6-8 PC's with half a dozen troopies along with you. Sure, you were fighting 24 kobolds, but, you mowed through them like butter. By second level? Not even a challenge.

This whole meme that AD&D was this impossibly hard game where every PC had the half life of a mayfly is just so much nostalgia glasses.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This whole meme that AD&D was this impossibly hard game where every PC had the half life of a mayfly is just so much nostalgia glasses.

Eh. The problem was that at the bottom end it could very much be that, and you could spend a relatively long time down there. A second level OD&D mage or thief only expected about 5 hit points. That was well within what one slightly above average sword swing could do, and as noted, in that period any sort of survival beyond zero hits was a house rule. Even fighters weren't exciting in hit points (that was when they got D8's rather than D10's so their average at second was 9--you could take one hit, but counting on two was--questionable).

The net effect was you could go through a lot of low level characters before one lasted into the, say, fourth level range where you weren't as brittle. That's going to stick in people's brains.

(Of course being an old RuneQuest player and GM I laugh at people talking about mortality in D&D...)