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

[Maxperson]

All this said, while my experience is the same (and the same as @Maxperson ), I totally believe @Hussar as well.

One of the things I always found fascinating about those days is when you would travel somewhere else and play a game, and see just how differently other people might be playing it! Rules that you took for granted might not be used, or they might be using rules that were "buried in the DMG" that you weren't aware of.

They might be playing a more narrative style, or a meatgrinder dungeon. The lack of the internet made it so that there was a LOT of variation- not just table-to-table, but within localities and regions.

Absolutely. I don't doubt @Hussar at all about this. As you say game play varied too wildly back then.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I always wondered how much people fudged those Teleport chances. They're definitely a discouragement to regular use of the spell.

One thing we did* was arbitrate that the 'too low'---> death assumed that there was solid ground right under the destination point. If you were, say, at the top of a tower (this being why wizards always built towers), well then you should roll distance low just like distance high, and if virtually all of the tower below was open space, then the likelihood of interposing matter was practically negligible (and you would have featherfall in case you appeared at the top of a huge drop. In effect, Teleport became a way that magic users traversed too and from their homes, and used for exploratory transit only in acts of desperation.
*we also played it straight, and completely ignored the specifics (consistency was not a strong point between and within-over-time my playgroups).

 

[Oofta]

That Light is a cantrip now, and thus castable at will, removes light management even from the very low levels; where Continual Light didn't kick in until 3rd or 5th character level depending what type of caster you had.

That's why we paid or did a side quest for the local cleric to cast continual flame.

Even in 1e Leo's Hut is a bit of a headache; I can't imagine trying to DM the juiced-up 5e version.

The caster who does the spell can't leave the hut and can't cast spells that affect anything outside of it so that helps. There was an interview about this, the original intent of it was that you couldn't attack anything outside the hut from inside it so I added that as a house rule. But in my game it didn't really make a big difference - unintelligent animals would just run away, intelligent foes would take other steps to counter it. It definitely did not have a floor. It never functioned as a super bunker in my games.

Indeed, but keep in mind that in 1e these spells had to be pre-memorized and slots were more limited: you could only use a slot of that spells' level to memorize/cast that spell. Ritual casting in 5e removes these restrictions.

There are only a few spells that can be cast as rituals, fewer than you might expect. You could do a lot more spells as rituals in 3.x IIRC.

Is that a 5e thing, that the target doesn't have to answer? We always read the 1e version as compelling the target to answer no matter what, though the answer had to be short.

Not only are answers "...usually brief, cryptic, or repetitive", the corpse is also "...under no compulsion to offer a truthful answer if you are hostile to it or it recognizes you as an enemy. "

Rolling bad on a 5e Teleport puts you a bit off course. Rolling bad on a 1e Teleport could kill you instantly when you appeared - or tried to - in solid rock below the surface. There's a big difference.

Also, 1e Teleport is much more limited in what you can take with you. With 5e Teleport you can easily take a whole (typical) party along.

Fair enough. But if you're teleporting to a city on a coast and make a bad roll I'm going to roll randomly which direction and how far out you are. Roll badly and I hope you can swim for a few hours.

Then again, I think teleport is overrated. If the big bad is across the continent and the only way to get to them is via teleport, the only reason the big bad is across the continent instead of down the street is because the DM knows you can teleport there. At least that's been my experience. That and there are spells that can easily be made permanent that will stop teleportation. I just assume they're part of the cost of building a castle. Since the spells are permanent, even a lot of old ruins are still protected.

Truth be told, though I'm not a fan of Knock I'm also not a fan of what 5e has done to it. What I'd rather see (and might implement if-whenever I start a new campaign and thus can rejig spells again) is that it not necessarily be automatic that it works; that whatever is being opened would in effect get some sort of save.

As for Invisibility, that's a spell I don't mind being a bit OP for its level simply for the cool factor, and that it only gives advantage on stealth in 5e is more than a bit underwhelming.

The effect of invisibility is really up to the DM. At a minimum it gives you advantage on stealth checks, it's up to the DM if there's any way you can be detected at all. For example in my game if someone is flying across a busy marketplace there's only going to be a very small chance they will be noticed. A bird flies into them, they go through some smoke, something.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That's why we paid or did a side quest for the local cleric to cast continual flame.

I am only going to interject on this one thing because I refrained from it the last time, but I can REFRAIN NO MORE!

Continual light. Continual LIGHT. Continual LIGHT. Continual LIGHT.

Thank you. Now that I've gotten that out of my system, we can return to our regularly scheduled arguing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think gotchas (the most prevalent of which in my experience were simple traps) were a routine cause of death. Or at least some of the most remembered because each time you fell to one you kicked yourself for not foreseeing it (or kvetched that the warning signs the DM thought were obvious were not). Simple damage took people out at a very variable rate. I think when we played Shieldwalls and Chokepoints (perhaps somewhat close to what Gary intended) -- with hirelings and retainers and the fighters rotating out of the front line as their hp approached 0 and retreating-when-necessary under a hail of dropped coin, food, and burning oil -- we did pretty well at surviving (if not always thriving) against opponents with hp-depleting effects. Monsters with SOD effects (or level drain), on the other hand, man! Those were often a 'learn there's an enemy down here with this ability by someone's character dying to it' situation. I recall* hearing that saving throws were intended as the last line of defense and that the real first defense was supposed to be clues which let you avoid them in the first place. However, excepting rattlesnakes or hyper-realistic statues in a medusa lair, I don't remember a lot of that happening in our games.

Traps had their issues, but they were rarely lethal in and of themselves after first level. Honestly, most of the kills I saw happen were area-damage based; dragon breath, fireballs, all that could easily eat a MU or thief's lunch if the save failed, and it was unpredictable on clerics.

*either from Peterson, one of Snarf's analysis of Peterson, or one of my convos with one of the there-in-person folks like Mornard or Chirine.


Agreed, D&D wenthas had the ability to go off the rails either from the jump or the jump plus one year (oD&D doesn't have all the worst spells, but also fewer of the counters, so it is something of a wash). Open-ended spells like Transmute Rock<-->Mud, Control Weather, Wish (with no downside but 2d4 days downtime); magic items like Spheres of Annihilation or Deck of Many Things; artifacts (okay, so there from the jump plus two years for Eldritch Wizardry) -- all had the ability to totally disrupt the game and have been there for approaching 50 years.

Yup.

Or heck, to bring this back to the stuff Necrofumbler was primarily focusing on (early magic obviating large parts of the noncombat pillars): for all the talk about the early game being about careful weighing of food/water/torches encumbrance versus having encumbrance space to pull as much gp (=xp) out of the dungeon, bags of holding existed from the beginning and seemed to appear wildly more frequently than their actual chart likelihood would indicate. Necrofumbler is not wrong that D&D 5e does a good job of turning off modes of gameplay, but only that this is a new development.

I suspect that had more to do with what people bothered to keep. There's a lot of random misc magic that people would go "Anyone want this?" Almost everyone would hang on to a BoH. And barring failed saves when relevant, they'd stick around unlike scrolls, potions, wands staves.

Re: darts -- somewhere along the line, we heard that darts weren't pub darts, but some kind of war-darts. I think we interpreted that as short javelins, moreso than jarts/plumbata. I remember them existing more in 2e rate-of-fire specialist fighter theory-craft than on our AD&D magic users. I think mostly we realized that dagger = melee and ranged. Also that staying behind shield walls and lobbing oil and the like is really safe.

Well, honestly, the difference between short javelins and plumbata is subtle anyway.

 

[bloodtide]

1. Lore. Obviously, darts were ... weird. While we can say today that they were modeled after Roman War Darts (Plumbata) ... we didn't know that then. To us, darts were things you played with in the rec room or at bars. They weren't combat weapons. Conceptually, the idea of a MU using darts seemed stupid to us, since it wasn't something that was ever within any fiction we had come across.

Well, not to share yet another thing from the past that many will say did not exist or they never even heard of where they grew up.......but we did have Lawn Darts. And, no, not the safe Nerf ones you can buy at Wal Mart today. We had plastic fins...with weighted long metal spikes. They were exactly as dangerous as they sound.

Also, depending on the location, a lot of American tribes used lots of "small, sharp pointed, hand thrown weapons"..

I've always had more "primitive" magic users take darts. And a couple others, just to stay out of melee. Pure elf magic users used darts too.

Also, I have found that 5e is much more focused on roleplaying than on combat (4e would be your most combat-oriented edition, IMO). This may be less about the rules than the culture, though, as the rise of actual play shows has effectively acculturated a mass audience towards heavy RP.

And I find it to be 100% opposite. 5E is all about rolling dice and skipping all role playing.

When a 5E game has something like "two half orc guards by a back door", the players need not even look up from their phones as they roll. The player mubles they got like a 30 for a DC of 10, and the DM just says "wow...you..um..somehow..got past the guards". And the players just nod a bit.

In The Before Time, there were not very many such rules. Not in the offical rules. Sure there where lots of stuff floating around....but not in the rules. Players had to ACT, that is role play their character, for REAL and craft a REAL life way, in the game, to get past the guards. Players would come up with all sorts of REAL role playing ways using no rules or dice, to get past such things.

And this is quite on display in my games with "other" players that are not part of my gamer pool. As I ask for descriptions of "what your character is doing". And most of the "other" gamers will answer with "Aww, come on DM I don't know how to make a fire...but my super smart character rolled a 18. Can't we just say he does it?'

And when you Role Play Act for Real, there is always a chance of something happening...up to and including character death. When the sneak is caught in 5E they just roll a "whatever whatever check" and "alter reality" and are let go. In the old days the player would have to speak in character and come up with a story or explanation. And if they name dropped the wrong NPC or said the wrong things...the character would be killed right there.

 

[Sacrosanct]

In The Before Time, there were not very many such rules. Not in the offical rules. Sure there where lots of stuff floating around....but not in the rules.

Yeah there were. Heck, you rolled on the reaction tables before you even got a chance to role-play. Did we all play that way? No. Just like most tables of 5e don't play the way you are describing either.

 

[billd91]

Rolling bad on a 5e Teleport puts you a bit off course. Rolling bad on a 1e Teleport could kill you instantly when you appeared - or tried to - in solid rock below the surface. There's a big difference.

Check that table again. Depending on how rash a teleporter you are, mishap becomes a very likely occurrence - sometimes more than one mishap. My players hit it at least twice in a single teleport to an area seen once. Everyone on that 'port took at least 6d10 damage.
Granted, that's not insta-death, it's damage. But it's not just being a bit off course.

 

[bloodtide]

Yeah there were. Heck, you rolled on the reaction tables before you even got a chance to role-play. Did we all play that way? No. Just like most tables of 5e don't play the way you are describing either.

Did the "reaction rolls" let the characters alter reality and do whatever they wanted? If not, you might have the wrong rules....

 

[Clint_L]

And I find it to be 100% opposite. 5E is all about rolling dice and skipping all role playing.

When a 5E game has something like "two half orc guards by a back door", the players need not even look up from their phones as they roll. The player mubles they got like a 30 for a DC of 10, and the DM just says "wow...you..um..somehow..got past the guards". And the players just nod a bit.

At this point, I am really questioning your anecdotes. Apparently everyone you grew up with was Huckleberry Finn, and everyone you play with is a stereotype. I run games for actual people, ranging from my cohort to tweens, and I have never encountered the behaviour that you describe. Not once. I find players of all ages are usually engaged and excited to be playing D&D. They are into the story and love coming up with all kinds of ideas to deal with challenging situations. If you think the situation you describe above is what is actually happening in games, you are just choosing to believe a delusion.

And this is quite on display in my games with "other" players that are not part of my gamer pool. As I ask for descriptions of "what your character is doing". And most of the "other" gamers will answer with "Aww, come on DM I don't know how to make a fire...but my super smart character rolled a 18. Can't we just say he does it?'

Wow, the player doesn't know how to make fire for real? How dare they come to the game without your set of life experiences! What a jerk! They should be mocked and punished!

Didn't you create a thread asking why you were having so much trouble DMing for young players? I think the answer is pretty obvious.

And when you Role Play Act for Real, there is always a chance of something happening...up to and including character death. When the sneak is caught in 5E they just roll a "whatever whatever check" and "alter reality" and are let go. In the old days the player would have to speak in character and come up with a story or explanation. And if they name dropped the wrong NPC or said the wrong things...the character would be killed right there.

I mean, I half thought you were going to state that the player would be killed right there, so at least we haven't gone that far. But seriously, you come off like a parody of what Snarf described in their OP...which was already a parody. I honestly can't tell whether to take you seriously or not. If you are trolling and I am falling for it...well, you are doing a good job and I hope my responses are at least entertaining.