D&D General Lethality, AD&D, and 5e: Looking Back at the Deadliest Edition

[jasper]

Bowhunting season in my State begins around November 12. We did deer meat and other meat from uncles and dad's hunting friends. This was early 80s. And some my up the creek relatives did hunt and fish to round out the grocery shopping. So still do. And Uncle H road ends 300 feet pass his house.
So real world experience now days can go from hunter gather to coding in MySqL or worse COBOL. Now throw those kids in the stocks who stole my car, grrr, must not post if up at 0225,

 

[nevin]

I grew up on a farm, some people hunted or fished but they were the exception. I did do a lot of camping, backpacking and probably spent far more time outside than a lot of kids do today. But I don't recall anyone hunting with a bow, much less jumping off a barn into a pile of hay while firing an arrow at a target. Just because I grew up on a farm in the 20th century doesn't mean I was transported back to the 19th century with Huckleberry Finn.

A lot of people think farm life these days is still like 1880. Farmers have historically embraced tech. Anything that improves productivity and give them more time is on the table if they can afford it and it works without creating other problems.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

In retrospect, I think Bloodtide was pulling our legs and we all just fell for it. Which, given the theme of the thread, has to be considered well played, sir.

You ever just come back into a thread and you're like ... huh.

The only constant over time is that the experience of the youth today is different than that of those before, and that those before will inevitably talk about how it is worse.

And yet, somehow, the youth today will mature into amazing people doing amazing things. And they, in turn, will complain about the youth.

Back in my day, we had to write our OWN social media posts. We didn't have AI to do all of our writing for us. Sheesh, the kids today don't know how easy they have it.

 

[nevin]

That's why I asked if you grew up among the Amish or something. In the 70s and 80s, how many people in the United States, Great Britian, or any other place where electricity was cheap and reliable do you think made their own soap or candles instead of buying them at the store? Where did you grow up that it was common for children to have experience making soap and candles beacuse they couldn't buy mass market goods at the store?

there are a lot more poor places in the US than the Amish enclaves guy.

List of lowest-income places in the United States - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

note the average yearly income in Little river cdp, California is 3,194. Most of the other places on the list of the lowest income places are around 10k a year. Imagine living on 10k a year or less and 12% or 42 million people in America do it

 

[Oofta]

“Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.”

Attributed to Socrates.

 

[Mannahnin]

“Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.”

Attributed to Socrates.

Related:

Ancient Tablet: The World is Speedily Coming to an End. Everyone Wants to Write a Book – Quote Investigator®

quoteinvestigator.com

 

[Blue]

I'm late getting to this thread. Having played a lot of AD&D and AD&D 2nd, I remember we died. However, a good portion of those I can chalk up to changing expectations on the DM - more antagonistic DMs who saw their role as opposition to the party, as opposed to (co-)storyteller with the players, definitely had an impact.

But there were other things that I feel made it deadlier.

1. Save-or-die spells. One memorable event was several players were late (for our weekly Saturday noon until the wee hours of the morning AD&D 2nd game) and two characters, both in high teens in terms of level, went out on their own to deal with an informant in another city. Teleport over there, meet with them. Oh look, it's a trap, poison in the food. No problems... until the characters rolled a 1 and a 2 for their saves. Dead. With no other party members even in the same city. I think we had to true resurect them, and they both lost their primary adventuring magic items.

2. Lower hit dice and rolled HPs even at first. Back then, HD was just the size of the die you rolled for HPs, there was no self-healing. But a magic user started with d4 in HPs. I have played a character with 1 maximum HP before, a bad roll on a character without a CON modifier. (Oh, and CON mod to HPs maxed out fairly low unless you were a fighter class/subclass.)

3. Adventures (modules) were often adapted from Convention runs, which were designed to to be hard and kill off characters so they could get scored and ranked.

4. Less resources at low levels. A 1st level magic user had 1 spell a day. Period. No cantrips, they needed to use darts, a quarterstaff, dagger or crossbow for the rest.

5. In-combat healing was needed and expected.

6. No OA rules or anything like that to protect your squishy characters.

And things that made it less deadly.

1. Static saves. Saves only depended on the target. We had a high-teen/epic level campaign going on and you made your saves 80%+ of the time.

2. Expectations of loads of magic items.

 

[MNblockhead]

Not only is this not an "Old School" D&D thing, it's not even a "Common Game Thing". This is 100% a DM Thing. And in my view, a Bad DM Thing.

Agree with your overall point, except that it depends on the group. I know discussing rules during the game is anathema at many/most tables, but some groups are okay with a bit of it, or even a lot of it, and even enjoy it. Personally, I'm in the camp of being fine with a quick clarification or correction in game on occasion with longer discussions after or between sessions. And I certainly spend a lot of time reading discussions and arguments about TTRPG rules on discussion boards.

There has been a shift.....but it's because of the massive change in life styles. Life was a LOT different in the 70s, 80s and even into the 90s. Though sure if you lived in a deep urban city you just went to the corner store to buy food...and that is not so different in 2023 except that store is a Dollar General. But for everyone else:

Kids had to learn a TON of stuff. Just take cooking. Come home from school and you wanted a hot dog? Well...you basically had choices like "boil a pot of water on the stove" or "make a clean wood fire and hold the hot dog over it".

Still boil my hot dogs. Hate microwaved hot dogs.

Microwaves were not yet a house hold thing. Needed some soap? You had to make it.

Wait, what!? We certainly had soap in the 70s in rural Minnesota.

Needed some candles, you had to make them too. And on and on.

Are you talking about the 1870s? Never had to make a candle in my life.

And THIS is what started tons of endless arguments. A player would say it is "so easy" to just grab some soaking wet wood, make a spark with a rock and have a massive roaring fire made in less then a minute. And while maybe not "impossible" (with like dry wood and gasoline), the story is not too likely.

Is it that they really believe it is easy or that they are playing a fantasy game and assume a party of adventurers would have survival skills and were not that interested in having to roll a skill check every long rest. I mean, I hear what your are saying, I have experienced people who really don't have any outdoors experience underestimating how challenging some activities can be, but just as often I have people who overestimate how difficult some things are.

The modern player...born in the last 20 years or so....lives in a much different world. Simple push button technology everywhere. Cheap goods are everywhere....Dollar Generals are everywhere. And Microwaves. And the internet. I grew up in a house with no running city water, no city sewer and no gas line (though we had both a gas and water tank) but had electricity and a phone (land) line. And, some places in 2023 are still a lot like that. But less every year. My "old house" is connected to everything today, right up to blazing fast 5G wifi.

So a typical modern player has no back ground to build on....they have never gone fishing, climbed a rocky cliff or made much of anything. But then too, 5E asks nothing from the players. Or the DM, for that matter. Need a character to swim, eh, just roll a easy check......

Having hunted, fished, worked on SCA work crews, and backpacked in remote places around the world, I have a lot of those experiences. But while amazing experiences in real life, I find them rather boring in a simulationist TTRPG.

 

[Hussar]

6. No OA rules or anything like that to protect your squishy characters.

That's not quite true. Once you engaged someone in melee, they couldn't just leave. Getting out of melee with someone drew a free attack. And, because you had the space/reach rules, you could cover a pretty extended front line with three or four characters. A longsword had a 5 foot reach. Which, like 5e, basically meant that you could space your front line ten feet apart and cover anyone trying to get through.

So long as the squishies made a point of staying about 20 or 30 feet back, they were likely pretty safe. At least in dungeons. Outdoors things got a LOT more dangerous.

 

[Mannahnin]

Good post. Nice overview of your experience.

1. Save-or-die spells. One memorable event was several players were late (for our weekly Saturday noon until the wee hours of the morning AD&D 2nd game) and two characters, both in high teens in terms of level, went out on their own to deal with an informant in another city. Teleport over there, meet with them. Oh look, it's a trap, poison in the food. No problems... until the characters rolled a 1 and a 2 for their saves. Dead. With no other party members even in the same city. I think we had to true resurect them, and they both lost their primary adventuring magic items.

2. Lower hit dice and rolled HPs even at first. Back then, HD was just the size of the die you rolled for HPs, there was no self-healing. But a magic user started with d4 in HPs. I have played a character with 1 maximum HP before, a bad roll on a character without a CON modifier. (Oh, and CON mod to HPs maxed out fairly low unless you were a fighter class/subclass.)

3. Adventures (modules) were often adapted from Convention runs, which were designed to to be hard and kill off characters so they could get scored and ranked.

1. Yeah, save or die was big. Poison, or stuff like Hold spells in combat which take you completely out and may let an enemy give you a coup de grace before anyone can help you.

2. We adopted max HP at first level pretty quickly, but yeah, lower HP in general, especially since you needed a 15 or better to get any Con bonus at all.

3. Is something a lot of folks don't realize. We didn't use a lot of modules, ourselves. Most of our DMs were more homebrew.

4. Less resources at low levels. A 1st level magic user had 1 spell a day. Period. No cantrips, they needed to use darts, a quarterstaff, dagger or crossbow for the rest.

5. In-combat healing was needed and expected.

6. No OA rules or anything like that to protect your squishy characters.

4. Yep, though once you got some treasure options like flaming oil were on the table and could let M-Us do a bit more. And throwing daggers could be useful depending on how tough your monsters were and how forgiving your DM's interpretation of missile fire around melee was.

5. But it wasn't very powerful. In AD&D after Cure Light Wounds at 1st you didn't get another cure spell until Cure Serious, a 4th level spell. Cure Moderate wasn't introduced until part way through 2nd edition, as I recall.

6. Depending on the edition, disengaging from the enemy DID usually provoke free attacks. Certainly in AD&D 1E. And the group I played with most also used battlemats for combat, which I was told was because of a DM they had previously had who consistently had monsters run up on the wizards even when the PCs tried to implement formation tactics and block for them. So minis helped clarify things.

And things that made it less deadly.

1. Static saves. Saves only depended on the target. We had a high-teen/epic level campaign going on and you made your saves 80%+ of the time.

2. Expectations of loads of magic items.

2. Definitely enhanced 1; I definitely played at tables which DIDN'T have loads of items. Possibly related to my groups using fewer modules and not basing treasure expectations on them.