D&D General D&D Editions: Anybody Else Feel Like They Don't Fit In?

[Lanefan]

I think the reference is that clerics and MUs cannot use spears or polearms to help out from the second rank with extra melee attack, not that they cannot hire henchmen.

Ah - that does make a lot more sense than the way I read it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

???

I don't remember ever seeing a rule or guideline that said only Fighters could have henches (if you can cite one it'd be a point of interest) and certainly never played with such a rule. Or is that a RQ thing?

That sentence was about being able to use spears, not henchmen.

At lower levels the play-two-PCs-at-once is common here. At higher levels, though, we more often (relative to lower levels, anyway) see a player running a single PC plus a hench. And some players (guilty, y'r honour!) lean farther into henches than do others.

Like I said, back in my day on the West Coast it was about as common as hen's teeth (again, outside of bearers, and even those were in small numbers (just enough to pack treasure).

Ah. I didn't get in until the 1e days, so our experiences will differ for sure.

Yeah, I can't speak more than with passing familiarity about AD&D at all, since that was when I was seeking greener pastures.

As @Mannahnin noted upthread, there's a big difference between henches (levelled adventuring types) and hirelings (usually commoners with limited if any field/combat skills). If your hirelings are in combat, something's gone very wrong; while henches are expected to help out as and when they can.

Like I said, we never saw the point; within the number of characters a GM and/or the players were willing to handle, just play a second character each and move on. After about level four, hirelings that lagged behind the PCs level appreciably where just going to be toast for the first area-effect that came along anyway.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think the reference is that clerics and MUs cannot use spears or polearms to help out from the second rank with extra melee attack, not that they cannot hire henchmen.

Yup.

 

[Guest User]

My username tells you how far back I go. It was a time when AD&D (retroactively referred to as 1st Edition) was it. You played AD&D or you collected comic books. Needless to say, to paraphrase what George Lucas said about Star Wars when compared to Return of the Jedi as it was being filmed, your imagination can open plenty of doors, but when you are limited by the fact that you're in a new world, you tend to stay in one corner of the sandbox, too afraid to try out things that nobody else is trying, either. All I remember is thinking that it took Gary forever to get to the point on many topics and one couldn't tell at times (particularly in the DMG) when Gary was trying to even make a point or if he was just wandering. But again...new territory for all then, even Gary. And yeah...looking back it was correct for DZ Cook to put an emergency brake on Gary's methods of organization, where the rules covering a single aspect of the game were scattered over two or more books and different parts of those books.

For me, my first period of not fitting in occurred upon the release of 2nd Edition AD&D. I cannot speak for everyone, but I do remember every original AD&D player I knew, including myself, wondering "WTF Gary" - not then knowing of course that Gary had skipped TSR back in 1985, because newspapers and the news zines didn't carry these kinds of stories (and still don't) and the excruciatingly slow flow of information regarding the RPG world if you couldn't afford a subscription to Dragon Mag (which I couldn't). Not even cell phones then unless you were a suit, and forget anything even remotely like internet. All I remember is that our group and outside contacts (read: conventions) panned 2nd Ed instantly without having even perused it, of course, because it meant that support for 1st Edition was going away, and we suddenly felt like we all needed to mow about 20 lawns if we wanted to be able to afford even one basic 2e book. We felt "basely betrayed".

A bit of a confession, though. I had already found Strategic Publications Inc (SPI) and their flagship RPG, DragonQuest - which I still play to this day - back in 1981, and had relegated AD&D to the backshelf. Not because I'm a stickler for "old stuff" but because older players which I was in contact with then, who had gone on to college, had discovered DQ and turned me onto it, particularly the absolute logic behind most of the major game's combat, magic, and XP systems; a welcome break from the arbitrariness that was AD&D. I suppose that all 2nd Edition AD&D really did - because I never did buy any of the rulebooks - was affirm my separation from TSR altogether (until the fiends acquired SPI in 1989 and, with the exception of a watered-down 3rd edition publication - snuffed out DQ as a hobby store-bound product forever). The only reason I even own 3.0, 3.5, 4e, and 5e PHBs is because people that I knew were or are playing those systems.

I am now - at this very moment - experiencing what I feel easily qualifies as a second period of not fitting in. I don't really dig all these 3-letter covert operational code names, like OSR, OGL, SRD, etc that are tossed around as if their users learned them in a middle-school English class last week and I'm suddenly a square because I have no idea what in hell they're talking about. I never did podcasts, for many different reasons. My gaming world is totally and unashamedly unaffected when I hear announcements like "BigDog KoolGamer has come out with the seventh supplement for Kagreshikia: Eve of the Chainsaw Dimension Hopper Outlaw T-Rex Poachers". I don't know and certainly don't care who BigDog KoolGamer is, or what he/she's pushing out, quite simply because I'm suddenly made to feel quaint, like that there was some kind of mandatory military briefing regarding TTRPGs that I was somehow expected to attend and didn't get the (e)memo or text for. Forget supplements; I feel like there's a brand new system coming out about every 83 minutes. Even if I was that loaded financially, and even if I had a library the size of the grocery store of your choice to keep all this stuff corralled in, nobody in possession of even a fraction of their marbles could seriously expect me to keep up with it, or even one eighth of it. My definition of a hobby still entails the word "unwind" as opposed to the term "pucker up".

You know what my entire TTRPG world is? My dice bag, my Chessex hex/square reversable mat, my three sheets of plexiglass, my two sets of Vis-a-vis wet erase markers, my 280+ hand-painted miniatures and my 800+ unpainted but Krylon-primed miniatures, and my (mostly) worn rulebooks and supplements for about eight gaming systems, ALL of them - I might add - in hardcopy and purchased in a gaming store or online. At times, it might also include ESV: Skyrim, Diablo II, and the old Commodore 64 game The Sword of Fargoal.

 

[Willie the Duck]

My username tells you how far back I go.

Actually, it confuses me. If you started playing in 76, you would have had to have started with oD&D, as AD&D wasn't out yet. If you were born in 76, then AD&D all the way and buying 2nd edition books meaning a lot of mown lawns makes a lot of sense, but having spurned AD&D for DragonQuest back in 1981 (at age 5) is incongruent. Not that it matters (except that now I'm curious), but just wanted to point out that it brings up as many questions as it answers.

It was a time when AD&D (retroactively referred to as 1st Edition) was it. You played AD&D or you collected comic books. Needless to say, to paraphrase what George Lucas said about Star Wars when compared to Return of the Jedi as it was being filmed, your imagination can open plenty of doors, but when you are limited by the fact that you're in a new world, you tend to stay in one corner of the sandbox, too afraid to try out things that nobody else is trying, either. All I remember is thinking that it took Gary forever to get to the point on many topics and one couldn't tell at times (particularly in the DMG) when Gary was trying to even make a point or if he was just wandering. But again...new territory for all then, even Gary. And yeah...looking back it was correct for DZ Cook to put an emergency brake on Gary's methods of organization, where the rules covering a single aspect of the game were scattered over two or more books and different parts of those books.

For me, my first period of not fitting in occurred upon the release of 2nd Edition AD&D. I cannot speak for everyone, but I do remember every original AD&D player I knew, including myself, wondering "WTF Gary" - not then knowing of course that Gary had skipped TSR back in 1985, because newspapers and the news zines didn't carry these kinds of stories (and still don't) and the excruciatingly slow flow of information regarding the RPG world if you couldn't afford a subscription to Dragon Mag (which I couldn't). Not even cell phones then unless you were a suit, and forget anything even remotely like internet. All I remember is that our group and outside contacts (read: conventions) panned 2nd Ed instantly without having even perused it, of course, because it meant that support for 1st Edition was going away, and we suddenly felt like we all needed to mow about 20 lawns if we wanted to be able to afford even one basic 2e book. We felt "basely betrayed".

I certainly remember similar sentiments at the time. I have to say I didn't really get it at the time. Until the 2e glut of 'splat'books, I didn't even know I was supposed to want support.

A bit of a confession, though. I had already found Strategic Publications Inc (SPI) and their flagship RPG, DragonQuest - which I still play to this day - back in 1981, and had relegated AD&D to the backshelf. Not because I'm a stickler for "old stuff" but because older players which I was in contact with then, who had gone on to college, had discovered DQ and turned me onto it, particularly the absolute logic behind most of the major game's combat, magic, and XP systems; a welcome break from the arbitrariness that was AD&D. I suppose that all 2nd Edition AD&D really did - because I never did buy any of the rulebooks - was affirm my separation from TSR altogether (until the fiends acquired SPI in 1989 and, with the exception of a watered-down 3rd edition publication - snuffed out DQ as a hobby store-bound product forever). The only reason I even own 3.0, 3.5, 4e, and 5e PHBs is because people that I knew were or are playing those systems.

I/we branched off to Traveller, and GURPS, and then Star Wars and Cyberpunk and Shadowrun and many many more (once lawn mowing and paper routes turned into HS and college jobs, 'let's try this system' became easier). I remember having the same 'this is so much more logical' reaction to GURPS as you did for DQ (now days I'm seeing 'arbitrary all the way down' more and more).

I am now - at this very moment - experiencing what I feel easily qualifies as a second period of not fitting in. I don't really dig all these 3-letter covert operational code names, like OSR, OGL, SRD, etc that are tossed around as if their users learned them in a middle-school English class last week and I'm suddenly a square because I have no idea what in hell they're talking about. I never did podcasts, for many different reasons. My gaming world is totally and unashamedly unaffected when I hear announcements like "BigDog KoolGamer has come out with the seventh supplement for Kagreshikia: Eve of the Chainsaw Dimension Hopper Outlaw T-Rex Poachers". I don't know and certainly don't care who BigDog KoolGamer is, or what he/she's pushing out, quite simply because I'm suddenly made to feel quaint, like that there was some kind of mandatory military briefing regarding TTRPGs that I was somehow expected to attend and didn't get the (e)memo or text for. Forget supplements; I feel like there's a brand new system coming out about every 83 minutes. Even if I was that loaded financially, and even if I had a library the size of the grocery store of your choice to keep all this stuff corralled in, nobody in possession of even a fraction of their marbles could seriously expect me to keep up with it, or even one eighth of it. My definition of a hobby still entails the word "unwind" as opposed to the term "pucker up".

It certainly is endemic of the business model tabletop RPGs have ended up with. We have this one entity at the top that everyone knows about*, and then an ever present halo of other games, associated games, third party products, review sites, and purveyors of 'hobby enhancements' like novelty dice or 3D-printed figures. *and even then, one can have wildly different investment in the current names and trends and 'media figures' related to current-edition D&D

You know what my entire TTRPG world is? My dice bag, my Chessex hex/square reversable mat, my three sheets of plexiglass, my two sets of Vis-a-vis wet erase markers, my 280+ hand-painted miniatures and my 800+ unpainted but Krylon-primed miniatures, and my (mostly) worn rulebooks and supplements for about eight gaming systems, ALL of them - I might add - in hardcopy and purchased in a gaming store or online. At times, it might also include ESV: Skyrim, Diablo II, and the old Commodore 64 game The Sword of Fargoal.

Sounds like you are having fun with where you've found yourself.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I definitely feel like I'm not finding the "right D&D" for me and my main group. 4E was probably the closest to perfect for us, weirdly enough, but was ultimately too crunchy, especially at higher levels.

Right now I feel like parts of a dozen games (including 5E and 4E) are what we want, but there's no singular game that's even say, a 70% match. I really don't want to have to write that game! I hate writing RPGs! I want to pay money to someone who already did it for me! Such is my curse, I guess!

I don't really dig all these 3-letter covert operational code names, like OSR, OGL, SRD

Not to be difficult but matey, two of those terms are from 25 years ago, and the other one is from like, 15+ years ago (OSR). Unless you only recently came back into discussing the hobby online, you probably should know what they mean by now, and even if you did come back recently, it's a bit odd that you seem to be blaming/attacking others for using them, with snide comparisons to schoolkids and so on. To us, these are ancient terms like THAC0 or BAB is ancient. Nobody is using them to exclude you or make you feel bad.

Also at least none of them are LFQW!

 

[scruffygrognard]

I have been playing and DM'ing "Dungeons & Dragons" since the early-80s, and I am feeling more and more like there is no place in the hobby where I truly "fit" anymore. I grew up with the mechanical simplicity of B/X D&D, starting with the 1980 B/X Boxed sets supplemented by an AD&D Monster Manual. We quickly abandoned "race as class" and cherry-picked rules from the hardcover books (I read them all, and still have my Dungeoneer and Wilderness Survival Guides, but that basic game continued. I had some enduring campaigns as 1st-Edition turned to 2nd, and I kept playing D&D, but I always longed for a better skill system; as the combination of "wing it" and Nonweapon Proficiencies never quite cut it for me.

Hi,

I've been playing D&D since 1981 and have a nostalgic love for BX and AD&D but would never play them again.

In order to "update" them, I came up with my AD&D3e rules and a d20 take on BX (with some advanced options tacked on in the appendices). The rules are a mix of 3e, Castles & Crusades, and 5E.

Here are links to my rules:
PHB
DMG
Monstrous Manual
BX3e

I hope you find bits that you find useful!

PS: My apologies for the slow download speeds. I just migrated to a free web hosting service (altervista.org) since I no longer want to pay nearly $500/year for web hosting, domain renewal, and security.

 

[TiQuinn]

My username tells you how far back I go. It was a time when AD&D (retroactively referred to as 1st Edition) was it. You played AD&D or you collected comic books. Needless to say, to paraphrase what George Lucas said about Star Wars when compared to Return of the Jedi as it was being filmed, your imagination can open plenty of doors, but when you are limited by the fact that you're in a new world, you tend to stay in one corner of the sandbox, too afraid to try out things that nobody else is trying, either. All I remember is thinking that it took Gary forever to get to the point on many topics and one couldn't tell at times (particularly in the DMG) when Gary was trying to even make a point or if he was just wandering. But again...new territory for all then, even Gary. And yeah...looking back it was correct for DZ Cook to put an emergency brake on Gary's methods of organization, where the rules covering a single aspect of the game were scattered over two or more books and different parts of those books.

For me, my first period of not fitting in occurred upon the release of 2nd Edition AD&D. I cannot speak for everyone, but I do remember every original AD&D player I knew, including myself, wondering "WTF Gary" - not then knowing of course that Gary had skipped TSR back in 1985, because newspapers and the news zines didn't carry these kinds of stories (and still don't) and the excruciatingly slow flow of information regarding the RPG world if you couldn't afford a subscription to Dragon Mag (which I couldn't). Not even cell phones then unless you were a suit, and forget anything even remotely like internet. All I remember is that our group and outside contacts (read: conventions) panned 2nd Ed instantly without having even perused it, of course, because it meant that support for 1st Edition was going away, and we suddenly felt like we all needed to mow about 20 lawns if we wanted to be able to afford even one basic 2e book. We felt "basely betrayed".

A bit of a confession, though. I had already found Strategic Publications Inc (SPI) and their flagship RPG, DragonQuest - which I still play to this day - back in 1981, and had relegated AD&D to the backshelf. Not because I'm a stickler for "old stuff" but because older players which I was in contact with then, who had gone on to college, had discovered DQ and turned me onto it, particularly the absolute logic behind most of the major game's combat, magic, and XP systems; a welcome break from the arbitrariness that was AD&D. I suppose that all 2nd Edition AD&D really did - because I never did buy any of the rulebooks - was affirm my separation from TSR altogether (until the fiends acquired SPI in 1989 and, with the exception of a watered-down 3rd edition publication - snuffed out DQ as a hobby store-bound product forever). The only reason I even own 3.0, 3.5, 4e, and 5e PHBs is because people that I knew were or are playing those systems.

I am now - at this very moment - experiencing what I feel easily qualifies as a second period of not fitting in. I don't really dig all these 3-letter covert operational code names, like OSR, OGL, SRD, etc that are tossed around as if their users learned them in a middle-school English class last week and I'm suddenly a square because I have no idea what in hell they're talking about. I never did podcasts, for many different reasons. My gaming world is totally and unashamedly unaffected when I hear announcements like "BigDog KoolGamer has come out with the seventh supplement for Kagreshikia: Eve of the Chainsaw Dimension Hopper Outlaw T-Rex Poachers". I don't know and certainly don't care who BigDog KoolGamer is, or what he/she's pushing out, quite simply because I'm suddenly made to feel quaint, like that there was some kind of mandatory military briefing regarding TTRPGs that I was somehow expected to attend and didn't get the (e)memo or text for. Forget supplements; I feel like there's a brand new system coming out about every 83 minutes. Even if I was that loaded financially, and even if I had a library the size of the grocery store of your choice to keep all this stuff corralled in, nobody in possession of even a fraction of their marbles could seriously expect me to keep up with it, or even one eighth of it. My definition of a hobby still entails the word "unwind" as opposed to the term "pucker up".

You know what my entire TTRPG world is? My dice bag, my Chessex hex/square reversable mat, my three sheets of plexiglass, my two sets of Vis-a-vis wet erase markers, my 280+ hand-painted miniatures and my 800+ unpainted but Krylon-primed miniatures, and my (mostly) worn rulebooks and supplements for about eight gaming systems, ALL of them - I might add - in hardcopy and purchased in a gaming store or online. At times, it might also include ESV: Skyrim, Diablo II, and the old Commodore 64 game The Sword of Fargoal.

These are the kinds of posts that I find really frustrating. Not because you drifted away from the game, or felt like you didn't fit in when AD&D became AD&D 2nd Edition (I have my own thoughts here - having played the vast majority of 1e adventures under 2e rules with little issue given that 2e was designed to be extremely backward compatible), or when new terminology and acronyms reared their head, but because you've created this scenario where some creator or fan that you somewhat derisively name BigDog KoolGamer launches or expresses interest in a game that you go on to mock because you see the name as outrageous in some way. I feel like you're giving people the old "Look at this weirdo" kind of elbow nudge when you talk about "Kagreshikia: Eve of the Chainsaw Dimension Hopper Outlaw T-Rex Poachers" -- whatever that is supposed to represent.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Thirsty Sword Lesbians? All Flesh Must Be Eaten? Cadillacs and Dinosaurs? There are a lot of games (and comics) out there with "weird" names but none of them demand your attention - so why do they receive your derision? If it's not your thing, then it's not your thing. Let people enjoy what they like.

OSR, OGL, SRD - these are not new terms. They've been around 20+ years at this point, give or take, but likewise, they don't really demand your understanding. The OGL and the SRD are industry facing terms that fans have also been interested in because they enable third parties to create compatible products for D&D, which a lot of people consider a good thing, but the pecularities of them are not really necessary for a fan to understand the differences. I admit I have the same issue when people talk about trad, or neo-trad or classic games but I can certainly look up those differences if I really need to - I just don't know if I find the groupings of these games to be either clean or useful to me. But the existence of these terms are no more a barrier to playing games than anything else. Believe it or not, I have the same bag of dice and boxes of miniatures you do.

But what really surprises me is that somehow through all of this you were able to wrap your head around Elder Scrolls, Skyrim, and Diablo II, and link them in the same sentence with a Commodore 64 game, which suggests to me that at some level, you're able to enjoy "newer" computer games as opposed to the ones you grew up with. It's not a total mental block towards anything "new" (I say this in quotes because even those games are considered old now but certainly much newer than anything that came out in the early or mid 80s.)

So what gives? Was this just planting your flag out there and saying "I'm a grognard and proud of it?"

 

[Guest User]

Not to be difficult but matey, two of those terms are from 25 years ago, and the other one is from like, 15+ years ago (OSR). Unless you only recently came back into discussing the hobby online, you probably should know what they mean by now, and even if you did come back recently, it's a bit odd that you seem to be blaming/attacking others for using them, with snide comparisons to schoolkids and so on. To us, these are ancient terms like THAC0 or BAB is ancient. Nobody is using them to exclude you or make you feel bad.

Also at least none of them are LFQW!

Used to be I decided what I was supposed to know or didn't. Forgive me if I wasn't 'hip' whenever it was that I was expected to be; I didn't get that particular heads-up. In simpler terms, I feel like I shouldn't have to know these terms at all just to have a conversation about TTRPG or anything else for that matter. People toss around terminology these days as if everyone is supposed to know it right off the bat, but the hard truth is that people invent needless terms to bloat their own importance in the discussion, with the purpose of wielding them as weapons when others either don't know them or use them out of an undisclosed context (see above for an example). Hey, it's certainly easier than actually trying to meet people halfway in a common goal of understanding. I expect the alphabet soup deluge from governmental institutions, not from a casual discussion about a hobby. In short, I don't give a frog's green ass if you have a secret handshake or an entirely new sign language; the point is, the only thing anyone in any hobby should be expected to know is how to communicate ideas clearly without referring to a specialized glossary. Hope I cleared that up.

Lest we forget, the topic of the thread was inviting anyone who felt like they didn't fit in to speak up. I spoke truth on this forum as I would speak to anyone in a spirited discussion, with the bark on. It's replies like yours ("You should know this", etc.) that turn these kinds of discussions into contests.

 

[Guest User]

These are the kinds of posts that I find really frustrating. Not because you drifted away from the game, or felt like you didn't fit in when AD&D became AD&D 2nd Edition (I have my own thoughts here - having played the vast majority of 1e adventures under 2e rules with little issue given that 2e was designed to be extremely backward compatible), or when new terminology and acronyms reared their head, but because you've created this scenario where some creator or fan that you somewhat derisively name BigDog KoolGamer launches or expresses interest in a game that you go on to mock because you see the name as outrageous in some way. I feel like you're giving people the old "Look at this weirdo" kind of elbow nudge when you talk about "Kagreshikia: Eve of the Chainsaw Dimension Hopper Outlaw T-Rex Poachers" -- whatever that is supposed to represent.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Thirsty Sword Lesbians? All Flesh Must Be Eaten? Cadillacs and Dinosaurs? There are a lot of games (and comics) out there with "weird" names but none of them demand your attention - so why do they receive your derision? If it's not your thing, then it's not your thing. Let people enjoy what they like.

OSR, OGL, SRD - these are not new terms. They've been around 20+ years at this point, give or take, but likewise, they don't really demand your understanding. The OGL and the SRD are industry facing terms that fans have also been interested in because they enable third parties to create compatible products for D&D, which a lot of people consider a good thing, but the pecularities of them are not really necessary for a fan to understand the differences. I admit I have the same issue when people talk about trad, or neo-trad or classic games but I can certainly look up those differences if I really need to - I just don't know if I find the groupings of these games to be either clean or useful to me. But the existence of these terms are no more a barrier to playing games than anything else. Believe it or not, I have the same bag of dice and boxes of miniatures you do.

But what really surprises me is that somehow through all of this you were able to wrap your head around Elder Scrolls, Skyrim, and Diablo II, and link them in the same sentence with a Commodore 64 game, which suggests to me that at some level, you're able to enjoy "newer" computer games as opposed to the ones you grew up with. It's not a total mental block towards anything "new" (I say this in quotes because even those games are considered old now but certainly much newer than anything that came out in the early or mid 80s.)

So what gives? Was this just planting your flag out there and saying "I'm a grognard and proud of it?"

The whole point behind the topic was to chime in with our feelings in response to the question as to whether we felt like we didn't fit in or not. You pretty much took every one of my points out of context so you could throw them back in my face. Bravo. It's replies like yours that exactly illustrate my point. None of what I said was intended as a direct attack or an attack of any kind, and thus your words are not well-taken. They weren't attacks, they were how I felt inside. WTF is wrong with you people, anyway?