TSR Why would anyone want to play 1e?

Why I loved 1e?

It was my introduction to RPG’s and gaming in 1982, summer before 8th grade. Introduction to a lifelong hobby and some of my closest friends.

Why I didn’t like 2e?

I was playing a Half-Orc in college when it came out. (We were a party of racial “exemplars” allied to stop a big bad - my race and class was “banned”.)

Also, I liked the classic adventures - all set in Greyhawk or “no setting”, all in Basic or AD&D rules - and the 2e adventures didn’t seem as good.

I liked Greyhawk - grew to love it - and was annoyed by From The Ashes. It seemed they were deliberately trashing the setting and all things from the Golden Age of Gygaxian D&D.

As an increasingly estranged player who didn’t read the novels, I didn’t get what the truck load of Forgotten Realms books were about, why all the new weirder settings, why all the Complete this, book of splat that.

I bought some things but I started running non-D&D RPG’s, 1e, and OA again - early adopter of “Earlier Editions”. Anything but 2e.

What’s my relationship status with 2e now?

Tolerance. I’m reading and reviewing every issue of Dungeon, and I am deep in 2e now. There are some great 2e adventures in there and some stinkers. It’s fine.

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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Castles and Crusades is my go to when the rare occasion presents itself that I want to run a D&D game. You are right that it's a D20 hack but it simplifies the D20 system while having an old school feel. When I play it I feel like I am playing a 2E game (even though I started with B/X and 1E, 2E is my favorite). I don't think the intent of C&C is to trry to emulate the rules of 1E or 2E but instead is being presented as a simpler and faster D&D than 1e, 2E or 3.x that "feels" like 1E or 2E. When I do run it I usually use 1E or 2e adventures. I am actually considering running a campaign soon, either Against the Giants or Night Below.

I started with B/X-CMI (I never knew there was a difference between my Basic and Expert sets and the continuation in the Companion Set until sometimes in the 2000s!) but dropped it before M and I came out in favor of AD&D.

I'd probably try any edition of D&D with the right group (except probably 3.xE which I played the most of - so long, I didn't even know 5E had come out until 2019).

I will say that for me THAC0 is infinitely preferable to attack matrixes, which I found so hard to read on the fly, I made up the number needed to hit more often than I read the chart. Once one of the 1E UK modules introduced THAC0 (so many people think THAC0 is a 2E invention, it is not), I was away at the races!

My DM just pointed out another example of 1e craziness:



Switching between tabletop inches and diegetic feet without rhyme or reason

Sacrosanct said:

My DM just pointed out another example of 1e craziness:

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Switching between tabletop inches and diegetic feet without rhyme or reason

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Ranges are in game units, which are 10s of feet indoors and 10s of yards outdoors. I could understand if you find that strange.

Descriptions of objects are in real world terms, not the game mechanic used for measuring range; I don't think that is surprising or crazy. It even says twelfths of a foot instead of inches, to help ensure there is no confusion.

The game is quite consistent with this, which is why a fireball (for example) has a fixed volume (in cubic feet) but a variable range (in tabletop inches).

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.
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)

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I don't think so. Speed and complexity are real but what I think is, that it is very subjective that all those features are negative aspects in a game, for anyone, which is kind of what your thread title claims... although you did say the title was click-bait. Some people can definitely prefer more complexity or having to look up charts, or even a harder character to play, and that can give them other reasons beyond nostalgia on why they prefer 1e over 2e.

Li Shenron said:

I don't think so. Speed and complexity are real but what I think is, that it is very subjective that all those features are negative aspects in a game, for anyone, which is kind of what your thread title claims... although you did say the title was click-bait. Some people can definitely prefer more complexity or having to look up charts, or even a harder character to play, and that can give them other reasons beyond nostalgia on why they prefer 1e over 2e.

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Case in point -- sure, I'll concede that 1e bards are more complex. But they're not meaningfully more complex and, in any case, they're fundamentally better in every way that I care about.

As to charts -- if I have to name a favourite game, it's going to be Rolemaster over any edition of D&D, so clearly I have no objection to the existence of charts. What matters is whether or not the chart is filling a useful purpose, which is generally going to be a very subjective assessment.

I fell for the clickbait, so I answer with why play 2e when there is 3e, 4e, or 5e? Each of these new editions is an effort to update the game and make it better, supposedly.

It is kind of like asking if you would rather drive this 77' Toyota pickup or this 89' Toyota pickup, when you could drive a 2014 or even a 2024 version. Sure it is cool to pile the kids in the truck bed and go down the highway or spin the handle to make the window go down, or even dig out that one mixed tape you still have kicking around to listen to it. The new version is designed to be safer with airbags and crumple zones to help keep you safe, or now requires you to sit in a seat with a seatbelt, but it has backup cameras and can park itself, not to mention can show you how to get anywhere and allow you to listen to any music in any language.

I guess things depend on what kind of ride you are looking for.

billd91 said:

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.

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Sure. I get the rationale. I'm a bit concerned that it's kind of a trap option, or just a design which ostensibly addresses the issue while actually not fixing the problem. Which is that Thieves are, in the TSR editions, just bad. Incompetent at their role and also terrible at combat. Like I illustrated with my example, with a 17 Dex and the right race choice you could pick two skills and dump all your points in them and be 4/5 reliable by 3rd level, but that would still leave you really incompetent at everything else bar climbing. Even with the points customization option, TSR-era Thieves are bad at most of the things they do. At least until higher levels, when their skills are increasingly sidelined by spells and magic items.

Mannahnin said:

Sure. I get the rationale. I'm a bit concerned that it's kind of a trap option, or just a design which ostensibly addresses the issue while actually not fixing the problem. Which is that Thieves are, in the TSR editions, just bad. Incompetent at their role and also terrible at combat. Like I illustrated with my example, you could pick two skills and dump all your points in them and be 4/5 reliable by 3rd level, but that would still leave you really incompetent at everything else bar climbing. Even with the points customization option, TSR-era Thieves are bad at most of the things they do. At least until higher levels, when their skills are increasingly sidelined by spells and magic items.

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I definitely agree that the thief had numerous problems beyond the thief skill values. I used to swap the thief and cleric attack\THAC0 tables - giving the thief the nod on offense while the cleric had defense - but I ended up preferring 3e's solution which was to just put them on the same improvement rate. I also always felt that the thief's saving throw table in AD&D was abysmal.
Thieves are quite the contrast between AD&D editions and WotC editions.