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Can you give me specific rules for dungeon crawling in 1e that offer a better table experience and specific rules in 2e that make that experience a complete mess? What rules in 2e make it a high fantasy adventure compared to 1es rules that do not?

Murdock. Best personality, and as an aviation buff myself, naturally I found his character appealing. I liked him so much, in fact, that one of my most memorable PCs I've ever created was named Murdock.

Ah! Thread necromancy! I didn't mention it at the time because I was still working on it, but I was doing something similar (that I finished in Nov 2022). I compiled all the OD&D and 1e monsters from Strategic Review and Dragon into one book. Like you mentioned, it was all manual retyping...

"We are making a video game. BG3 is a video game. Ours will be a game like that game. Serious and published. With computer programming. And graphics."

Looks at your avatar... ;)

Coincidentally, I just got an email from Tactical Adventures that Solasta II will be upgraded to 2024 rules.

I don't necessarily think it was ironic. I think it did make sense. Remember, there weren't RPG mechanics before D&D so they didn't have decades of being used to AC being ascending. In fact, the idea of higher AC being better was counter intuitive. "Armor Class". And in a class-rated system...

It was for two reasons: 1. In order to keep a human-centric world, demi-humans had to be restricted and limited (also to make up for their racial abilities). 2. Every class and race was built around a very specific version of fantasy--European Tolkienism. Archetypes outside of that vision...

True story. There's a quote from Skip Williams from years ago: "Of course we thought about ascending AC, but we wanted players to be able to keep playing all their 1e stuff."

On a somewhat related note, wanna know something I always thought funny? And by funny I mean a bit odd, in a cognitive dissonance sort of way. 1e's rules were clearly pulled from early wargaming rules. Just going over these initiative rules and it's pretty obvious they make more sense when...

You know how small the font was in the DMG right? Well, there’s several pages dedicated to initiative alone. That should tell you something. I started in 1981. And not once did I ever meet a player who used those rules. Hence my original post 😉

It's so freaking slow. And not easy to grasp. Here are the steps in order: Determine if a side is surprised. Determine distance between sides (It's random. Surprise! you roll d6+4 in 10s of feet for dungeons and yards for outdoors for it...) If no one is surprised, then roll initiative. BUT...

I can believe it. Going back to late 80s me, and I only knew of a handful of non-D&D fantasy authors, and most of them were for books written in the 60s and 70s--hardly NYT best sellers in the 80s. Terry Brooks and David Eddings were one of the only ones still churning them out, and Robert...

The fixes for 1e are pretty simple, yeah. Just ignore the rule. No need to make up a new one with the exception of initiative. We immediately went to individual initiative, rolling d6 and adding speed factor. Resolve all attacks on your turn rather than splitting them up.

I don't know if it was easier to kitbash, but you pretty much had to. If you used all rules, you were constantly referring to tables and charts (weapon vs AC, speed factor, initiative, etc)

Not literally every mechanic word for word and only word for word, but the same core mechanics. Someone familiar with 5e will recognize most of the mechanics of BG3, for example. Same races, classes, d20 system, initiative, spells, feats, ability scores, etc.