Well, yes and no, I mean, -2 is -2 is -2, lol. You have to do the math and see, for a given scenario if your DPR goes up or down when you accept that penalty. Only the "you get to cancel this out with the R/AT for your DEX" really just wipes it out (since you would not get that as a bonus anyway). So, if you have a 17+ DEX then (AC issues aside) you are 100% better in any version of the rules to grab an off-hand weapon. Worst case you miss with it! Even if your STR is 18/00 without that DEX adjustment, you're still hitting less, and those are hard hits. OTOH extra hits are hard hits too, but at -4 they better be REALLY hard. I'm not going to try to dredge up all the math, it is straightforward anyway. Nor does multiple attacks per round change anything, if you are getting 3/2 attack routines, great, each one stands on its own for DPR purposes.
You may be underestimating the extent to which 2e was simply codifying existing 1e practice in a lot of cases. -10, or at least something similar, was quite common going back even pre-1e. We were definitely familiar with it, with there being various views on what was good or bad about it. One of the plus arguments was just "otherwise you can only be conscious or dead." These sorts of things were bandied about in the pages of Dragon, and certainly were common fodder at the cons (I only went to a couple, but there was a lot of variety of play. D&D at Origins was a lot different from Gencon).
Punching and Grappling, HAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Once I decided to be evil DM and sprung a band of unarmed orcs on a party of level 1 PCs. The orcs proceeded to punch and grapple, it was a slaughter. The whole party was trussed up and delivered to the BBEG in short order. Another rule section which was clearly 100% not playtested even for 2 minutes. I'd note that basically the same system first appeared in Dragon (#11 IIRC, maybe #12, it was a real early one). That version didn't work much better, but Gary apparently tweaked it a bit, added more modifiers, etc. Boot Hill might also have been an influence. Either way, it was a disaster. For the next 20 years there was a tacit agreement in our group that this subsystem (or its equally bad 2e version) would never be mentioned again. I guess if you wanted to have a pankration match with some ogre one-on-one it probably would have worked fine. I assume the envisaged use case was a bar brawl where nobody would draw actual weapons.What? Are you saying that it was possible for someone to miss the explicit, clear, and easy-to-understand rules as laid out in the 1e DMG?
Next thing you know, you'll be goin' on about how it was difficult to work the whole surprise/initiative/weapon speed/segment system ... when combined with the grappling rules.
www.enworld.org
Oh, I think we were up to taking on ANY published module, whatsoever. We never managed to kill Lolth for some reason, but we did off Demogorgon one time, which was stupid hard. There were other amusing things. Mike and I one day got bored and we were doing up NPC mutants for Gamma World (rolling them up is the most fun part). So I decided to do a mutant plant, and I started out with a redwood tree. A few repeats of 'Large Size' and 'roll 2 more times' later, it was a 2000 meter tall flying intelligent redwood tree with 5,000 hit points, 18 Strength radiation beams, every branch was mobile, a force field for protection, etc. I made the mistake of leaving the character sheet with Mike.
Right, this is a case where there was a rule in 1e, and 2e made it more lenient. I don't know exactly how we played at this point TBH in which year. I think we followed the 1e rules until 2e was released, but I guess it is hard to be 100% sure more than 30 years later... We may have played with the 'variant' at some point. Anyway, Death's Door, while it MIGHT be subject to misinterpretation, does seem to be correct, it is just rather niche in 1e where the character would have had to hit zero and then 'die some more' for a while, and then the spell would help them. Nice for a scroll, or I guess you could memorize it after you camp and then apply it to the hurt guy in the AM.Sorta- except that it didn't exist at all in OD&D. Nor in Holmes. Nor in the AD&D PHB. I previously addressed the history here:
D&D 5E - The -10 Myth: How a Poorly-Worded Gygaxian Rule Became the Modern Death Save
This is a little different; normally, I like to make certain I have my ducks in a row for a thesis, so that other people can shoot them down. It is the internet! However, I'd like to explore a concept I've been thinking about that popped up in a recent thread. @Lanefan wrote the following in...
That is example of how Gygax's poorly worded rule (and, I would surmise in retrospect ... UA and Death's Door ... because almost everything bad goes back to UA) had so many incorrect wishful interpretations that eventually the wrong approach became the new rule.
So I agree with the endpoint of what you stated- that this was an example of 2e codifying a practice that had become more widespread.
Yeah, well, this is fundamentally why I won't play AD&D anymore, because it is just rules dreck really. I mean, the modern d20 system (by which I mean all of WotC D&D) is not exactly ROCKET SCIENCE. In fact we had thought of it by roughly 1980 or so! In fact I rewrote AD&D once around then, and the result is frighteningly similar to the basic core mechanics of 3e in that sense. It was just too much trouble explaining such a variant to every table and then squelching all the various objections and figuring out how to reimplement 100 other goofy rules in a sane way, so we just played basically stock AD&D (to whatever extent such a thing exists).
LOL. I wish I was the one!
Yep, inconsistency was the rule in those days. That is why we were very wary of Dragon Magazine, UA, Dungeoneer Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide. But we ended up adopting them (well, parts of ) anyways.
