Any of you pine for AD&D 1/2?

[diaglo]

I believe, as somebody once said elsewhere on these forums, that much of our nostalgia is for the GAMES that we played back 'in the good old days', the friends that we played them with, and the simplicity of our lives back then, rather than any real devotion to whatever RULES set we were using... .

i can refute this claim. i refereed my first OD&D session in about 14 years yesterday. it felt great.

rules are a guideline. they were then. they are now.


however, i'd much rather play/referee under the OD&D rules. both then and now.

BTW, anyone else out there in Enworld reside in Cape Town, or elsewhere in South Africa?

sorry. though, i've got room at my table in Stone Mountain, GA, USA .

 

[MerricB]

I have utmost respect for you for playing 1st Edition.

I have to ask, though: Do you play in the Greyhawk campaign, Mystara/Known World campaign, or your own homebrew world?

Is it true to say that 1E AD&D = Greyhawk?

And, Basic D&D = Mystara/Known World?

Well, of course you can use the above systems with other worlds, but I guess I'm asking: Were those systems designed *for* those worlds? Or, was Basic D&D/1E AD&D designed first and then the worlds were incorporated later?

Basic D&D has an odd history.

The original (Eric Holmes) edition was designed as a simple version of the original D&D game; it was designed at the same time that Gary was designing AD&D, so there are some elements of AD&D in it. It was really intended to point people towards AD&D. It had no world attached to it.

The next edition (Tom Moldvay) divorced it from AD&D, and really made it a separate game, drawing inspiration from the original D&D but doing wonders for organisation and simplicity.

David "Zeb" Cook designed the "Expert" set, and Cook and Moldvay wrote the original module for that setting - X1: The Isle of Dread.

The third edition of Basic D&D (Michael Mentzer) is the classic "Red Box" edition, though I feel the Moldvay edition is superior in writing style and presentation.

Now, somewhere around now, a map of the "Known World" appeared. Certainly one appears in my (Mentzer) edition of the Expert set and the Isle of Dread - I don't know if one appears in the Cook edition of the Expert set.

With the release of the Expert series of modules, the Known World began to grow. It wasn't a world that came from an existing campaign, but rather driven by the map provided in the Expert Set/Isle of Dread. Eventually the world got called "Mystara" - I believe as it was converted to AD&D 2nd edition and they realised it needed a name.

###

AD&D 1st Edition derives mainly from Gygax's personal campaign - which happened to be Greyhawk. Of course, Gygax's Greyhawk is substantially different from the published Greyhawk!

AD&D 1st edition does transcend Greyhawk, though. A classic example would be the Desert of Desolation modules by Tracy Hickman (with others) - that's about as non-Greyhawk as you get, whilst remaining in the 1E mode.

I think that there are many different styles of 1E module, and thus the feeling you get from 1E can be completely different depending on the module. Compare Dragonlance to the Bloodstone Wars to White Plume Mountain to the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh.

I think 3E supports all those styles, however, the Wizard writers of modules aren't really doing the system a great service with the modules they've created. However, part of that may simply be nostalgia!

Cheers!

 

[diaglo]

The original (Eric Holmes) edition was designed as a simple version of the original D&D game; it was designed at the same time that Gary was designing AD&D, so there are some elements of AD&D in it. It was really intended to point people towards AD&D. It had no world attached to it.

2edD&D (Holmes) that came in the boxed set with B1 In Search of the Unknown... actually did have a little bit of a tie-in with Greyhawk.

Inside the pastel B1 from the boxed set there is a blurb on where to place the module in Greyhawk.

edit: lot of good it did tho. without a map of greyhawk. :\

 

[Vaxalon]

Don't miss it in the least. AD&D was state of the art when it came out, but there has been a LOT of progress since then.

Does anyone long for the days of 11 mpg country squire station wagons?

 

[WSmith]

Thanks, dead. I acutally use a homebrew setting. I took the Blackmoor map from Dave Arneson's website and created my own world with it. There is a lot of Greyhawk in original AD&D (Tenser's floating disks, Bigby spells) but it does not neccessarily have to be set there. Many of the other OAD&D players I know use Greyhawk cause it does work nicely with the rules, plus many of the classic modules (Slavers, Giants, Drow, Saltmarsh, etc.) are set there.

Merric is very close on his explanation of Mystara/Known Worlds, with one thing though:

Now, somewhere around now, a map of the "Known World" appeared. Certainly one appears in my (Mentzer) edition of the Expert set and the Isle of Dread - I don't know if one appears in the Cook edition of the Expert set.

On page X61 of the Cook edit Expert rulebook, there is a rough map of the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, which later became the Known Worlds, and subsequently, Mystara. It predates the Mentzer edtion by a couple of years. With Basic / Expert D&D, considering the rules as compared to AD&D, there is little to no mention (at least that I have tried to find) of the Known Worlds being the default setting. Later Products in the Basic D&D line (The Rules Cyclopedia I know for sure, and Wrath of the Immortals IIRC) have Mystara / Known Worlds info in it. I don't have the Immortals boxed set, but there is a section in the RC on the setting. Besides that the rules in that book are pretty indepenant and don't cite the setting as far as I can remember.

 

[francisca]

Don't miss it in the least. AD&D was state of the art when it came out, but there has been a LOT of progress since then.

Does anyone long for the days of 11 mpg country squire station wagons?

Nope. Just '68 Olds 442s. YMMV.

It's a matter of taste guys. I'm currently actively playing Basic, 1E AD&D, and 3.5. When I think about the game I played this past weekend, I don't think about what dice I rolled, whether I needed to roll high or low, or whether or not a skill was used. I remember we held off of horde of Orcs so a small village could evacuate before it became collateral damage from a large war. I remember about 50 miniatures being on the battlemat and the big smiles when a crit was laid on the Orc captain and about half of the remaining warband fled the field.

It's all D&D to me. And it's all good.

 

[James Heard]

The only game I ever played in during that I have any real sense of nostalgia about during the AD&D days is pretty much gone forever no matter what, since everyone moved away or died or whatever. Though, given the GM's sensibilities I'm fairly confident in saying that if he were still alive he'd have embraced 3E pretty quickly even if he would have had to finally nail down some of those crazy things he ad hoc'ed on us over and over. What about the other hundreds of games I ran and played in over the years? Mostly more interesting because I was growing up and raising hell than any particular merit of the game, just like when I play in a game and I'm constantly suffering from deja vu it's not the game's fault. I miss that time. I miss those people. The gameset is pretty distant in importance.

 

[diaglo]

Nope. Just '68 Olds 442s. YMMV.

'48 Studebaker Champion businessman's coupe. candy apple red

3 on the tree.

 

[starkad]

No. I hated the hodgepodge rules and craptastic mechanics. I'll keep 3.x edition any day of the week.

 

[Psion]

The only thing that is a fact is that AD&D and d20 D&D present two different styles of play

I do not beleive this is an established universal fact at all. Unless you count shoring up or ignoring rules as a part of the "play style". The sorts of games and challenges we run now are not at all dissimilar from the ones we ran then.