D&D 1E Favorite Obscure Rules from TSR-era D&D

[deganawida]

@deganawida

I would add that if you like Barbarians in 1e, I was always partial to the Asbury version in White Dwarf 4. With just a little bit of tweaking, it is both playable and fits in perfectly with the other classes while keeping the right flavor.

Thank you! While I enjoy the 5e version, I prefer the non-Rage barbarian of 1e and the barbarian fighter of 2e. They feel more like Conan, Thundarr, and He-Man as far as abilities go.

 

[Voadam]

The barbarian is a massively overpowered class that is limited by the Ggaxian gatekeeping of being unable to function in a D&D party if you abide by the rules. They can't associate with clerics until level 2, and they can only associate with magic users at level 6 ... WHEN NECESSARY. By the rules, they can never be in a ... you know ... party with a MU (at level 8, they can do so occasionally, but that wouldn't be an actual party).

I agree the 1e paladin restrictions on companions was a fairly terrible model for a group game of open options and extending that model to barbarians made things worse.

The thief-acrobat is full of flavor, but it loses thief skills at level 5 (when they are still pretty useless) to gain athletic skills that aren't actually useful ... and that's for high-level play! (Levels 6-23!!!!). So it's a prestige class that is actually weaker than the base class.

Gygax was always looking for ways to cripple thieves.

Eh, the big loss is in not advancing find remove traps or pick locks (as if the upper stories are not going to have trapped and locked chests so second story burglars don't sweat that all). They still sneak and climb and backstab and now get tumbling which allows a chance at complete evasion of attacks if they have initiative in a round.

That saved my multiclassed gnome in a high level game when we were trying not to be killed by Baphomet.

The falling reduction is nice too.

 

[billd91]

I agree the 1e paladin restrictions on companions was a fairly terrible model for a group game of open options and extending that model to barbarians made things worse.

It wasn’t merely extending the model, it was also turning it up to 11.

 

[Voadam]

It wasn’t merely extending the model, it was also turning it up to 11.

I found the 1e paladin restrictions fairly restrictive on party composition or allowable adventure plots.

"Paladins will have henchmen of lawful good alignment and none other; they will associate only with characters and creatures of good alignment; paladins can join a company of adventurers which contains non-evil neutrals only on a single-expedition basis, and only if some end which will further the cause of lawful good is purposed."

Druids, must be true neutral, so can only associate on a single-expedition basis and only for furthering lawful good. Not feasible for an ongoing campaign.

Assassins must be evil and so no association.

Thieves are neutral, evil, or (rarely) neutral good. So the "rare" NG thieves only or single expeditions with specific purposes for the neutral ones.

Also alignment is supposed to be fairly secret unless you share the exact same one and signal to fellow specific alignees with your alignment language.

As written this means if you make characters independently there is a decent shot a paladin can't associate with other members of the party.

If you make characters openly then a paladin means everyone else should be good for the campaign and no druids or assassins if you want the group to associate with each other. Or you want PCs to hide their non-good status from the paladin PC.

 

[Lanefan]

Oh it's a magic item in Unearthed Arcana, when you put it on, it allows you to assume a new character class, starting at level 1, and you lose your other class abilities while wearing it. A friend of mine has this wacky multiclass character who owns one of those. Anytime he introduces a new character, we have to ask him if it's his old character in disguise, because he loves doing that, just assuming a new persona and pretending to be a character of a different class.

Ah.

As with about half of UA, I probably read that item over once and ignored it henceforth.

 

[Lanefan]

Unearthed Arcana, man.

It's why I like to differentiate 1e pre- and post-UA. There are a few gems buried in that book, along with a whole avalanche of unplayable and terrible rules that will completely destroy the game's balance if used.

It's almost like it was a cash grab of Dragon articles that was put together in haste, with little thought as to how it would affect play.

Yes, UA was pretty much a collection of Dragon articles, tidied up a bit and organized to a small extent.

As I like to say, there are only two good things about UA-

The polearms, Appendix T. That was cool
The fact that the binding in it was so bad that all copies of it disintegrated within two years.

I'm a bit more forgiving to it than that. There's some cool spells and items in there, and the Cavalier is a worthwhile class once one tones it down a bit. That, and the binding on mine is still in good shape.

The trick is sorting the wheat from the chaff; and there is a lot of chaff.

 

[Lanefan]

I found the 1e paladin restrictions fairly restrictive on party composition or allowable adventure plots.

"Paladins will have henchmen of lawful good alignment and none other; they will associate only with characters and creatures of good alignment; paladins can join a company of adventurers which contains non-evil neutrals only on a single-expedition basis, and only if some end which will further the cause of lawful good is purposed."

Druids, must be true neutral, so can only associate on a single-expedition basis and only for furthering lawful good. Not feasible for an ongoing campaign.

Assassins must be evil and so no association.

Thieves are neutral, evil, or (rarely) neutral good. So the "rare" NG thieves only or single expeditions with specific purposes for the neutral ones.

Also alignment is supposed to be fairly secret unless you share the exact same one and signal to fellow specific alignees with your alignment language.

As written this means if you make characters independently there is a decent shot a paladin can't associate with other members of the party.

Yep. And if-when someone tries to bring in a Paladin* there's usually a pretty entertaining (if one likes brawls) shakedown period where the either the Paladin shapes the party or (far more common) the party punts the Paladin.

I expanded Paladins such that they can be of any extreme alignment (LG, CG, LE, CE), and each version has a corresponding class it refuses to associate/adventure with.

* - even worse - and I've seen this many a time - is when someone tries to bring in a non-Paladin character but self-applies Paladin-like ethics and restrictions to it.

 

[James Gasik]

See, I "graduated" from the red box to AD&D 1e pretty late in 1e's run- I've never played the game without Unearthed Arcana! And even though 2e came out not long after, we continued to use a lot of AD&D stuff in our games- one of my DM's not only insists on using Comeliness, but he rolls Comeliness for his characters in other games, even when we tell him we're not using it!

OTOH, as near as I can tell, he uses Comeliness entirely as a shorthand for "how attractive this person is". When I applied the bonuses for high Charisma and modifiers for race for my characters, and started saying things like "NPC's of Wisdom less than 12 of the opposite gender are fascinated by me", his eyes crossed (I've never insisted on this point, since I have no way of knowing how Wise an NPC is, I just brought it up in passing).

I've played with 1e Rangers, 1e Monks, Cavaliers*, Paladin Cavaliers**, and a Barbarian once (and never again. Attack me for casting a cure wounds on you? Then stay at negative hit points, jerk!). Never a Thief-Acrobat (shame, they sound neat) or an Illusionist (given my experience with illusion spells, I'm not surprised why- it's especially bad that Wizards get a lot of illusions too!).

I've never used the abundance of polearms (my DM swears by his glaive-guisarme though), but I've long found "bohemian ear spoon" to be a lovely, humorous thing to say. But there were other things in UA that were never mentioned, and I didn't find out until recently, like the changes to multiclassing- there are some very neat combinations, like Halflings being able to be Druid/Thieves, that I'd love to have tried out!

Most of the magic items are silly, like Anything items or the Cyclocone, a Wizard hat that can create a tornado or somesuch- the only reason the Hat of Difference ever popped up at all was because it was in a published adventure!

At the end of the day, I understand why 1e fans didn't care for the book. It's on the same level as my Best of Dragon collections- it's a mixed bag, and it made changes to things people likely didn't want changed (see also Tasha's Cauldron of Everything). But for me, it's hard to talk about 1e without it, because I never experienced that version of AD&D. And if nothing else, the gonzo in that book prepared me well for the gonzo insanity of later 2e with flying ships shaped like squids, space nazi elves, Arcane selling wheel lock pistols in Waterdeep, devil people as PC's spouting Victorian gutterspeak, space bug renegade surgeons, double-specialized Elf Wizards, 10th level spells, characters with a page and a half of psionic wild talents, and the rise of multiclassed mythos priests with the abilities of every character class combined and more!

*Hate them.
**Hate them more.

 

[Alzrius]

I'm trying to find where the rule was (assuming I'm not making it up completely) about the plusses from magical bows only applying to attack rolls, while the plusses from magical arrows only apply to damage, but I can't seem to locate it. A check in the AD&D 1E DMG and the Rules Cyclopedia confirms that both have bows' plusses applying to attack and damage rolls, with the plusses from arrows being counted in addition to what the bows offer. Surely that has to be somewhere though, right?

 

[JEB]

I'm trying to find where the rule was (assuming I'm not making it up completely) about the plusses from magical bows only applying to attack rolls, while the plusses from magical arrows only apply to damage, but I can't seem to locate it. A check in the AD&D 1E DMG and the Rules Cyclopedia confirms that both have bows' plusses applying to attack and damage rolls, with the plusses from arrows being counted in addition to what the bows offer. Surely that has to be somewhere though, right?

OD&D, Book II, page 31:

Magic Arrows have a +1 chance of hitting their target and do additional damage to their target unless specified otherwise due to the type of monster being shot. Thus, a Magic Arrow normally does from 2–7 points of damage when it hits.

Magic Bows give all arrows a +1 for hit probability, but they confer no damage bonus. A Magic Arrow shot from a Magic Bow has a +2 chance of hitting.

So you were close - magic bows only provide a +1 to hit, but magic arrows have both +1 to damage and to hit.

EDIT: This was also still the case in 1977 (Holmes) Basic:

Any magic arrow, in addition to being +1 on their chance of scoring a hit, also does +1 additional damage, unless specified otherwise due to the type of monster being shot. Magic bows merely confer +1 on the probability of a hit, the arrows do no additional damage. A magic arrow shot from a magic bow has a +2 probability of a hit.