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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5848067" data-attributes="member: 4937">On that I would agree.  The big question of what system works for you ultimately comes down to, "What problems most annoy you?"   And ultimately that question is personal and different for everyone, and can change over time as you experience different things.   And what you experience can depend on a lot of things: how many players you have at a table, how many different groups of players you've ran, how many different personalities you've encountered, how long you've been playing with someone, how new that person is to the game, what their prior baggage from older games is, etc.By the time I gave up on 1e, I had dozens of pages of house rules and that wasn't counting the extensive rules sets I was importing from Dragon magazine in my count.   Moreover, I'd be very surprised if your three pages of house rules fully enumerated the errata you are applying to your game.   Until you've gone through every page of every book in use at your table and done a, "This text supercedes that text.", you don't really know how many house rules you had.   When I started my house rules project, I thought I only had a couple of dozen pages.   When it reached over 100 pages, I realized that I pretty much needed to just rewrite the whole book. I played 1e for more than a decade with probably 8 different DM's.  I never played at one table that only had 3 pages of house rules.   If you only have 3 pages of house rules, your the most by the book 1e DM I've ever met - and I was by the book enough that I used the 'to hit vs. AC' weapon tables.  Except, I ended up tweaking them. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />You don't beat around the bush do you.   I've written about a small book worth of text at EnWorld on the exact particular problem of search and full concealment.   Suffice to say that this is the most complex problem I know of in the 3e game, and that we'd totally hijack the thread to address it.   However, the root problem of communicating to the DM different degrees of concreteness in a proposition is one that shows up even in 1e.   How it is addressed differs from DM to DM: do you lead the players by prompting them for more information, or do you risk angering the players by making assumptions about their actions without taking their inputs?   Very difficult problem, and I'd be happy to tackle it in another thread.That may be true, but that is a style or design problem and not a rules problem.   Moreover, by the explicit description of the skill, the above isn't by the rules.   A search allows you to search a 5'x5' area; there is no such thing as 'searching a room' in the rules, and a proposition to 'search the room' has to be broken into its components in 3e in the same way you'd have to break the same proposition in 1e.   There are ways to address this issue in the encounter design within the rules by enumerating the issues required to find the ruby.   Do they search under the bed?   This requires explicitly checking a 5'x5' area.   But if they 'search the bed' does that mean that they search under the bed.   Typically what I do hear is set a high DC to find the loose floorboard, then set a modifier on the roll for certain specific helpful actions.   For example, I might give the search check a +10 bonus if they explicitly move the bed to search under it, and so forth.Potentially, but you can also bog down the game in too many concrete propositions.   If you are really going to hide rubies under loose floorboards, then be prepared for, "I tap the first floorboard to see if it makes a hollow sound.  Ok, now I take a crow bar and try to pry up the first floor board.  I carefully sift through all the dust looking for items.   Now, I carefully inspect the board for hidden hollows.   Now, I replace the floor board, and move to the second floor board."   I have experienced 1e games that bog down as the PC's move to that level of what 1e haters lovingly refer to as 'pixel bitching'.   Of course, they use that term to refer to my 3e, 1e inspired, game as well.It probably will be no surprise to you that I rewrite published modules extensively as well.Sure, but that's a DMing style issue.  The rules can be interpretted as supporting my style of play as well by focusing on different statements in the rules.   And in fact, in my opinion the rules support both styles of play as valid and its up to the DM how to handle the situation as best he sees fit.   The fact that other DMs handle the situation differently is not something I let impact my game.It sure sounds like it.  But, ok, I admit that that is a provocative way to state the problem and I'll drop it.True of high level 1e as well because I've been there.   Of course, I've also experience 1e high level play where the initiative check could be considered 'mid-combat' because most combat in the first round - if it wasn't actually over in the suprise round.   High level 1e PC's are just enormously powerful if the DM doesn't keep an extreme check on the game.Again, true of 1e as well.I'll grant that to a certain extent, but what I've lost in prep efficiency since the 1e era I've more than made up for with the power of the word processor.   However, if I tweaked my expectations abit, I could prep for 3e in exactly the same time it took me to prep for 1e.   Not that much longer than 1e unless you are referencing a monster manual entry, in which case they are about the same length.   I'm willing to bet that you ignore the psionic stat block for high level monsters in your game (which would require you to select disciplines), and that you ignore the fact that in the 1e text, the monster powers tend to be part of the text and not part of the stat block.   Can be true of 1e as well.True of 1e as well.The thing is, most people who play 1e do play minimalist 1e.On that I also agree with you.  That isn't to say however that I still want to use its rules, but for all its problems of editting, it's still the best written and most inspiring RPG supplement of all time.And that is the voice of inexperience.   I don't doubt that that is your experience, but give me the benefit of the doubt that I'm conveying a real experience to you instead of saying, "No, that couldn't happen.  That's impossible", as if you could convince me that I didn't experience what I have experienced.Not in your opinion, but rather, in your experience.   First edition can generate just as big hit and damage bonuses as 3e and just as much a feel of superheroes in a fantasy setting.   The big difference between the two games is that 1e monsters are, barring new invention by the DM, rather capped in their abilities.   Whereas 3e monsters are not so capped (or handicapped) and can match any player power and ability with powers and abilities of their own.   While it is true that the raw numbers are somewhat higher in 3e, in 1e the PC's numbers tend to be higher than the monsters - and ultimately much higher - while in 3e the monsters numbers tend to be much larger than that of any one PC.  I partially agree.   However, it's worth noting that the 1e orc probably does 1d6 damage, where as the 3e stock orc does 1d12+3 damage.   And that's just a non-leader orc.   In 3e there is a much better chance that all the orcs are 4HD warriors with elite stat arrays and feats of their own.   So how frail a character in either edition is can't be evaluated in isolation, but only in comparison to what he is facing.   And in the long run, that 1e fighter can with a reasonable CON bonus expect to exceed the hit points of every single monster he fights.   A high level 1e fighter can have over 100 hit points, more than pretty much every non-unique monster in the book.   And once he gets his AC in the -4 to -6 range, every monster he faces is going to need nearly a 20 to hit him because monster to hit is capped at paltry 16HD and mosters generally don't have to hit bonuses.  The same cannot be said of the 3e.Again, those are play style statements.   Depending on the DM/campaign, 1e leveled as fast or faster than 3e.   It sounds like you and me both favor slower leveling, but its easy to see from something like the GDQ adventure path or 'Temple of Elemental Evil' that 1e supports fast leveling as well.As I said, 1e play balance broke much harder in favor of the PC's than it does in 3e.I first want to point out that for most of my time at EnWorld I've been one of the 1e defenders, and in another context I probably would be.  Believe it or not, there are threads on EnWorld where me and Water Bob are on the same side of defending 1e play and 1e style play.   However, I wanted to post about my experience of actually playing 1e after years away from it and how it made me much more sympathetic to those that really don't like it.   And, I was curious as to what the defenders of 1e would say to my experience.   To a certain extent, I expected a bit of the general 'You aren't a strong enough DM' bias and a lot the advice about how to run a game, which - in the context of who they are telling it too - is a bit redundant since its pretty much how I've been advising and telling people to run any game - whether 1e or 3e - for years now.   I'm still hoping to learn something about why people like 1e more than 3e.</blockquote>

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