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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 4833057" data-attributes="member: 8863">I think this is it, and it explains the big fallacy behind many of the bad arguments of AD&D fans who insist 1e was the best and everything after 2000 is crap.  (I don't mean that 1e is bad, or that all the fans are like this but there are those who insist these sort of things).Everything I've read about 1e suggests that it was a complicated and fairly arcane system, and that the books weren't organized in the best way either which doesn't help.  People say that, "this was different in 1e than it is in 3/4e", but then when presented with evidence to the contrary, there's often that "well we houseruled that out" backpedal.  From what I can tell, people used the character creation rules from the 1e books, but then ran combats and the like as Basic because there weren't armor mods, weapons speeds, segments and who knows what else that even Gary admittedly ignored.  Ironically, 1e was supposed to be a comprehensive set of rules unlike the orignal 3 books, and wasn't supposed to be heavily house ruled (though some of this was tournament considerations too)!And Remathilis touches on the second point; that in AD&D especially, a ot of new stuff just got tacked on any old way, so one thing was resolves by 1d20 roll high, another 1d20 roll low, and a third, crack out that d%.  If a new rule got added on, it might use a completely different resolution, or it would use one of those three, but in a way that didn't really make sense.  I remember the word for it on Usenet back at the very end of 2e was, "kludgy".  I do remember that 2e had three levels of rules too: official, torunament, and optional.  Offical were the basic rules for all games, tournament was optional for an informal game, but official for any tournament, and optional was just that.  Not bad on paper, but it might have complicated things going from campaign to campaign.The big difference with 3e isn't amount of rules, but how the rules work together.  Everything was integrated with the d20 mechanic, which more or less worked well IME.  Yes, there is alot of spells, feats, PrCs and stuff like that, but much of that is modular.  So I find it easier to plug something new into 3e than it was to bolt a new rule onto 2e.  I can't speak for 4e, but it seems like the designers are continuing the same sort of approach.</blockquote>

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