These days, I'm not looking backward at AD&D. I'm staring it in the face. After years of running 3e and 4e, I find myself slightly over a year into an AD&D that was started, in all honestly, as a lark on a dare.
I've probably voiced most of the common criticisms of AD&D over the 27 years since I was introduced to RPGs through it. I've made house rules. I've moved on. I've mocked the various D&D-isms that place the game at odds with the fantasy fiction I enjoy.
And you know what? I'm kinda loving it. At it's core, it's a very simple system. I find I can run a session --while steadily drinking wine-- off of a handful of pages in the DMG and PHB (I lost my DMs screen ages ago). And the charts! So many wonderful charts from which unplanned situations can emerge. Why I've even made my peace with random monsters and crazy-quilt nonsense dungeons.
To be fair, the success I'm having with AD&D now is, in large part, due to all the wonderful/practical advice I've read over the years at places like ENWorld, from people with real insight into pre-3e D&D.
AD&D is not my end-all-be-all system. No system is. It's just the right tool for the job, for now. There are dimensions of play present in the later editions which are simply absent in AD&D --hey, I like char-op, too, and more robust mechanical modeling-- and when we miss that sufficiently I imagine we'll change systems.
