TSR Why would anyone want to play 1e?

Mannahnin said:

I think this is highly variable from table to table. Given the DMG example of such a pool, and the one from B1, it's highly likely that a fair number of people's campaigns featured at least semi-regular instances of weird magic which could raise ability scores.

OTOH you'd also have DMs like adolescent me, who never played B1 and was balancing that pool example in the DMG against Gary's insanely stingy restrictions on Wishes increasing ability scores, and concluding that I should make such magic rare.

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It's not just the rarity of such items. It's making everything align:

• PCs find the item
• No one else takes/uses it
• the item gives the stat increase to the right stat needed
• repeat the above a few times to get the stats up the requirements.

How likely is that?

Sacrosanct said:

• THAC0 is more intuitive than attack matrix tables
• 1e has a ton of rules and charts that slow the game down to a crawl and are handled better in 2e. Rules and charts that pretty much everyone ignores anyway.
• 1e thieves are garbage. You suck at everything you're supposed to be good at until you get near name level, but 95% of the game is played before that, so....
• 2e cleans up that mess by being able to distribute your points at at least be decent at a few things.
• Don't get me started on 1e bards (even if I am not a fan of the class to begin with)
• If you're a fan of psionics, stay away from 1e's rules

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I am not familiar with the differences between 1e and 2e, but I have to say that these (other than maybe the first one) do not sound objective but subjective. Which means, to someone else the preferences may be simply reversed.

Li Shenron said:

I am not familiar with the differences between 1e and 2e, but I have to say that these (other than maybe the first one) do not sound objective but subjective. Which means, to someone else the preferences may be simply reversed.

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The number of rules and charts 1e has over 2e is objective. I haven't had a stop watch, but I think it's fairly objective to say that referencing these rules and looking up the charts slows the game down.
My comment about thieves being garbage is subjective, sure, but it's objective that they are woefully bad at things they are supposed to be good at and 2e improved on this significantly by allowing you to distribute the points how you want.
I think it's also objective that 1e bards are way more complicated than 2e bards (as the above discussion illustrates)

Sacrosanct said:

It's not just the rarity of such items. It's making everything align:

• PCs find the item
• No one else takes/uses it
• the item gives the stat increase to the right stat needed
• repeat the above a few times to get the stats up the requirements.

How likely is that?

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Depends on over how long a period we're talking. Potentially years of play. A given DM might easily have a "Tree of Strength" or "Fountain of Wisdom" which specifically increases a given ability score, and which the players might be able to hear rumors of and quest for, or otherwise be a little more generous than the specific very random examples from B1, X2, and the DMG which we're thinking of.

Especially given how AD&D reserves most ability score bonuses for scores of 15 or above, and how Gary outright tells us in the front of the PH that a character will probably need at least two 15s, I could totally see DMs feeling like ability score increases (especially the moderate ones needed to qualify for most classes; 15s or below) were fair game for rewards/treasures; not really overpowered at all. The more I think about it, the more I feel like that's correct, and so it seems more probable that better DMs than me back in the day might have done so.

Sacrosanct said:

The number of rules and charts 1e has over 2e is objective. I haven't had a stop watch, but I think it's fairly objective to say that referencing these rules and looking up the charts slows the game down.
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I think it's also objective that 1e bards are way more complicated than 2e bards (as the above discussion illustrates)

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Agreed.

Sacrosanct said:

My comment about thieves being garbage is subjective, sure, but it's objective that they are woefully bad at things they are supposed to be good at and 2e improved on this significantly by allowing you to distribute the points how you want.

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That's definitely how I felt when I was playing 2E.

Might as well sink all my points into M/S and H/S since stealth should be my shtick, and at least get to be mediocre at them (1st level Elf Thief with 17 Dex can start with up to 50% at each, in leather, or slightly higher unarmored).

In retrospect I don't much care for that design either. Because the Thief has a whole range of skills and he's still going to suck at most of them, while if he focuses on two, he still needs to spend all his points on them for at least the first three levels to make them reliable (80% for the above character). But the Thief who does so is still going to suck at picking locks and removing traps until at least 5th level, during the levels where such skills are most relevant, btw! Meanwhile there are still three more skills getting neglected.

I think I prefer Thieves to have at least a moderate chance with ALL of their skills even at low level, and I prefer explicitly generous adjudication so they don't get boned for trying (like DMs who make a trap automatically go off if you fail to disarm it). My usual house rule is to ditch the percentages and give them the Hear Noise chance for everything (higher for Climb), so they get to be broadly competent (at least, combined with not defaulting to killing them if they fail a roll). YMMV, of course!

Mannahnin said:

I think I prefer Thieves to have at least a moderate chance with ALL of their skills even at low level, and I prefer explicitly generous adjudication so they don't get boned for trying (like DMs who make a trap automatically go off if you fail to disarm it). My usual house rule is to ditch the percentages and give them the Hear Noise chance for everything (higher for Climb), so they get to be broadly competent (at least, combined with not defaulting to killing them if they fail a roll). YMMV, of course!

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I think that depended a bit on what you considered all of a thief's appropriate skills to be. This was in the heyday of character customization, soon to be followed with kits to customize them even more. If my thief is mainly a fence in a city campaign, I might not worry so much about climbing walls or hearing noise as much as I might want to be able to disarm any booby traps on purloined goods. Or I might be a pickpocket, or a cat burglar, or even a safecracker, specializing in certain skills (at the reasonable expense of others).
The main gist here is they were no longer one-size-fits-all like they were in 1e AD&D - they were more responsive to our own priorities as players.

Mannahnin said:

Hyperborea, really? That's incredible to me. Right up front that one makes substantial changes to races and classes to better suit its own setting and to fix/replace multiclassing (respectively), which is the furthest thing from trying to be purist about Gary's vision or the mechanics coming second, if at all.

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To me, going by what I've read, Hyperboria leans heavily into how Gary would have created D&D without the outside pressure to add Tolkien elements. Since that's the primary vision that drives all the other mechanical decisions, such as leaning into "Apendix N" and having a human eccentric world (Gary disliked playable races), I think it's fair to add it to the list.

Also, a reminder that my focus was trying to puzzle out why designers like Talanian gravitate towards 1E over 2E despite both being mechanical similar. I do think a love for Gary is that primary reason.

Voadam said:

The one that surprises me in that list is Castles and Crusades. C&C is very much an OSR style 3e era d20 hack simplifying a lot of d20. I guess Erde as a setting is going for a sort of Gygaxian Greyhawk type of feel, but C&C as a system I don't really see it as emulating Gygax's 1e. Maybe more allowing free form ad hoc crazy stuff with their siege engine mechanics to match Gygax's seat of the pants dungeon mastering actual playing style.

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I included Castles and Crusades because the entire project (when it evolved past just their houserules) was an effort to clone (as close as they thought they could get away with it back then) AD&D specifically so Gary could write material for them.

I would play 2E over 1E but only if you used just the core 2E material. Once you add in the splat books (as flavorful and good as some of them were...) the game starts to take on a complexity that was missing in 1E.

As a general trend, characters have grown more complex and the game systems less so. I prefer it the other way around, give me a complex game that is easy to play, not a simple game that is complex to play.

My 2 cents anyway.

Sacrosanct said:

I just think in practical purposes, they were awful mechanically. Not just because it's highly unlikely you were rolled at least three 15s, a 12, and an 10, but at bare minimum, you couldn't start being a bard until you were level 11. And most people didn't play to that level.

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Oh, I don't know. I saw a number of 1E bards in my AD&D 1E/2E days. One of the things to remember is it wasn't really "11th level" like we think of it today because of the XP tables.

5th-level Fighter: 18,001
5th-level Thief: +10,001

So, rounding up a bit let's say 30000 XP to "become a bard" (assuming you didn't shift right away).

The equivalent is:

• Cleric: 6th level
• Druid: 6th level
• Fighter: 5th level
• Paladin: 5th level
• Ranger: 5th level
• M-U: 5th level
• Illusionist: 5th level
• Thief: 6th level
• Assassin: 6th level
• Monk: 5th level

So, XP-wise becoming a bard didn't really take long. It was also one of the reasons why nearly every demi-human was multiclassed.

Granted, the four 15's were harder to get, but most tables just rolled until you got what you wanted to play what you wanted. shrug

Ah... ninja'd...

Maxperson said:

You had to be a 5th level fighter(18k xp) and a 5th level thief(10k xp), so 28k xp total. Even if you were single class only, neither of those two classes would be anywhere near 11th level. Thief being the easiest class in the game to level would only be level 6 with 28k xp. So while the levels would total 11, 5/5/1, they really wouldn't be 11th level with regard to what level people played to. They'd reach bard when the other classes(except thief) in the party were 5th level, which pretty much every game played to if they didn't die/TPK first.

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Precisely!

Maxperson said:

You also have the stat requirements off by a little. It's not three 15s, a 12 and a 10. It's two 15s, a 17-18 strength, a 12 and a 10. To switch classes you had to have a 17 or 18 in the original class, which had to start as a fighter.

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This, however, is incorrect. To dual-class you had to have a 15 in the first class, 17 or better in subsequent classes.

Maxperson said:

having to start over at level 1 three times, being unable to use prior class abilities(except hit points) until you exceed the former class(s).

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While this the rule for DUAL-CLASSING, the path to a Bard wasn't that. You could freely use your fighter abilities while gaining your thief levels. I could see how someone might play that way, but strictly speaking that wasn't the rule in the book. shrug

Maxperson said:

Remember, one of those 15's(strength) had to be a 17-18 or you couldn't switch classes to thief

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Again incorrect. You are conflating dual-classing rules with the rules for the bard path. Different things. Again, nit-picky and I guess I could see someone playing that way... just not in the rules.

Sacrosanct said:

We always interpreted the bard rules to mean you could overwrite that requirement, but in hindsight, we were probably doing it wrong and the bard section is a typo.

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No, I think you were correct. Otherwise it would have specified a 17 Dexterity. I think they already saw the four 15's as punishment enough to get the class...

It is also a reason why it was separated from other classes. Why not just be a Fighter/Thief/Druid with STR 15, DEX 17, WIS 17, and CHA 17 if they wanted to follow normal dual-classing rules? Bard was not a dual-class path but its own thing in my opinion.

Sacrosanct said:

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I have this one as well! One of my favorites.

As far as art goes. there is an image in the Revised 2e DMG that made me reassess my view of thieves generally, although it actually got me thinking more about how I can build strong, tough thieves in Rolemaster than in D&D. This guy isn't just suited to skulking in shadows, he'll happily beat someone down in a straight fight.