Can someone explain what "1st ed feel" is?

[Frost]

I recall Orcus from Necromancer games describing it like this - they don't give you Star Wars, they give you the Death Star. That's what 1e modules (and Necro's modules) do. They don't sell you a prewritten 'adventure' that railroads you into a plot about a young orphan from Tatooine that discovers he has the powers of a Jedi and goes on to destroy the planet destroying battle station. They give you tons of deck plans and detailed encounters with stormtroopers, and leave it to the DM to figure out what to do with it.

Well said. I think that really about sums it up.

Anyway, the bottomline (IMHO) is that it isn't so much the edition, as the gaming group. I've DMed 1e, 2e, and now 3e... I would say that, regardless of the actual edition, we always had "1e feel." To use the example above, you can run a "Star Wars" campaign or a "Death Star" campaign in whatever system you want.

Personally, I'd take the Death Star anyday...

 

[hong]

No, that IS 1E feel. It's just that the module or the setting doesn't DICTATE that feel to you. The 1E module doesn't tell you that the Boss will talk about the coffee for 15 minutes before blackmailing the PC's, it just says that the Boss will blackmail the PC's. YOU fill in the rest to suit your taste (or lack therof as was often the case for us teens back in the day). 1E was not about 6 pages of background, it was about a full character sheet on a piece of notebook paper with background created AS needed, not whether it was needed or not. I love that my players can discuss the merits of elvish coffee in the same way as you and yours. I just don't need or WANT that in my gaming materials. That is for ME to invent and play out to the degree I desire:

Scene 24. The Boss makes small talk over dinner with the PC's and then blackmails them. They can discuss coffee, mustard pies, the new theories of macroeconomics, or how evidence from sage research points to the notion that NOTHING in the world really should work (not economics, physics, sociology, biology, or cosmology) but it does anyway. 1E neither actively promotes nor discourages that - but it doesn't stand in the way of it either if that's what you want.

You know, it's kinda dumb to say that something is part of the "1E feel" if the books never actually mentioned it, just because they didn't encourage or discourage it either. The books also never encouraged or discouraged me drinking beer while running a game. Does that mean beer is part of the 1E feel?

 

[francisca]

One thing for sure: 1e was a game. It wasn't an excuse to put on some black turtlenecks and berets, while smoking cigarettes in a holder, while creating the avant-garde. If "1e feel" is low brow "beer and pretzels" for the unwashed masses, then I'm glad to be counted with the luddites and terminally retrograde, whether I'm playing 1e or 3e.

 

[Ourph]

When we played for instance, if you weren't a thief or ranger it was *impossible* for your character to hide from someone. That's a theif ability and you aren't a thief. Now a flexible AD&D DM would whip up some rule, but there's a lot of us that this kind of thing never occured to.

This is one of the things that frustrate me the most about the edition debate. Many people approached earlier editions with the attitude of "if the book doesn't say you can do it, you can't do it" which is exactly the opposite of the philosophy behind the game as far as I can tell from comments made by Gary, Frank Mentzer, Steve Marsh and others who have talked about their approach to the game and creating the rules. Thieves could Hide in Shadows and Climb Sheer Surfaces. Those are very specific abilities to which other classes didn't have access. Nothing in the rules says that a Fighter can't hide behind a barrel or climb a tree with adequate handholds with some chance of success. Nothing in the rules says how the DM should determine that success, but that doesn't mean it cannot or should not happen. The fact that we had those misperceptions as kids or as inexperienced first-time roleplayers is quite understandable. The fact that so many people still hold onto those misperceptions (not directing this at you maddman) and use them as a basis for criticizing older editions is unfortunate and, in some cases I believe, ingenuous.

Does that mean beer is part of the 1E feel?

In my case no. Though being 12 years old and so hepped up on Dr. Pepper I can't see straight appears to be. That might just be me though.

 

[BJP]

This may be an old thread - but thought I'd put in my tuppence.

For me, similarly to so many others, first edition will always be about nostalgia. Reading this thread brought back an awful lot of memories... Happy days spent with Iuz and Zuggtmoy (after so many years of waiting), Edralve and Stalmin Klim (and the Earth Dragon), Eclavdra and Lolth; Count Strahd von Zarovich (look at the maps!); BlackRazor and Surge; those Sinister Secrets and Assassin's Knots; and that god-darned Keep (surely they installed a rotating door, the number of adventurers who must have come through). For myself, and probably many of you, we were pretty young, and we all have fond memories of childhood - besides which, at that age, we didn't need any of those pesky ecosystems to clutter our dungeons up.

My favorite moment - an adventure I wrote (my first one, I was probably only about 10 or 11) - it had a room with 6 achaierai (I only chose them 'cos I liked the name) hiding under a table waiting to jump out and surprise the party. My friend, who ran the adventure, didn't know what they were, looked them up, and found they were actually 15 foot tall.

That's one hell of a concealing table! And that, to me, is 1e in a nutshell - no consistency, no sense, just darned good fun - but probably more a function of age than anything else.

Sigh - those were the days.
Jim.

 

[Kitsune]

For me 1e feel is also that a city is just a big dungeon. Thats what we did anyway, in the days of past. Our adventurers were a menace to any city they visited. We just systematically knocked on doors or busted them in, just like in the dungeon. Or bought an empty house, and started digging tunnels to other houses. Or some other 'genious' plan.

I must thank you, sir, for providing me with much-needed laughter. The thought of someone doing dungeon-crawling 'business as usual' in a city full of innocent people is something I can all too easily imagine in D&D.

 

[haakon1]

Can someone explain what a "first edition feel" is?

I think it's kinda like the difference between classic hard rock and current day rock-rap. Which is worse -- to be a dinosaur or to be derivative of somebody else's idea?

Anyhow, the salient points of 1st Edition feel:
- No funky races for PC's. Standard PHB races, which is to say, Tolkien races plus gnomes, and gnomes are pretty much ignored. MAYBE in far extremes of funkyness, a lizard man or centaur or selkie or evil drow assassin in disguise -- some old school monster preferable with real mythology (instead of a game book) behind it. Definitely no half-dragons.

- Greyhawk/Tolkien meanings of races. Halflings are hobbits, not kender. Gnomes are ignored, not steampunk little tinkers.

- Most classes are normal, not prestige. Archetypal warriors and spellcasters, not blood magus of the yadda-yadda order.

- No Forgotten Realms stuff. Rangers are not Drizzt, they are Aragorn. Drow are not seen. Players are supposed to pretend they don't know Drow exist. PC elves know, but it's not something they talk about at parties. Merchants are delivering wine, not magical bunny rabbits. No magical street lamps -- no street lamps at all, since we're talking medieval here, but if there were street lamps, they'd burn oil -- which you can throw at folks to 1d6 damage!

- The stuff banned in Second Edition is back. Demons are demons and devils are devils, not whatever the euphemisms were. Assassins and half-orcs are a normal part of the game, not secret adult-swim stuff. (Thus, in some ways, 3rd Edition is more 1st Edition than 2nd Edition was.)

- No spikey armor. Armor looks like armor. (A pet peeve for me with the 3e PHB is the silly bondage-spiked plate mail. Yeah, neato.)

- Classic storylines. Meet in the tavern, loot the dungeon, steal the McGuffin, save the kingdom from the lizard men, that sort of things. Not a bunch of kender droppings about the outer planes, clockwork monsters from the ancient wars, or whatever new nonsense them young kids are up to these days.

First Edition feel can be found in:
- Goodman Games
- Atlas Games
- Necromancer Games (though they mess with the rules too much for my taste -- part of First Edition ought to mean following the actual rules of the current game -- yes, a fountain that produces endless undead for no game-rule reason, and casters who are too low-level to create the effects in their lair, these things annoy me)

 

[Maggan]

Yikes

I must thank you, sir, for providing me with much-needed laughter. The thought of someone doing dungeon-crawling 'business as usual' in a city full of innocent people is something I can all too easily imagine in D&D.

Ouch, I've seen it happen in Cyberpunk as well... nasty stuff...

Cheers!

Maggan

 

[Virel]

(I'm guessing your DM doesn't make you map the damn thing! )

Daniel

Daniel,

I have a question, not meant as flame etc because we all have our likes and dislikes in our D&D games. I play 3e in a friends 3e group, and I enjoy playing it:

If the corridors bother you doesn't the 3e's "cyclical/round robin" initiative system and magic item creation bother you at least as much?

The idea that say 15 characters and monsters go in order and wait until one another finish their actions before proceeding to the next person/creatures turn pretty much in and of it's self blows the suspension of disbelief out the window. Correctly, used the quirky 1st ed initiative system allows the actions to be interleaved and various actions disrupted etc.

Likewise, the 3e group got around to crafting magic items. My PC ended up with ~5,000 gp worth of “magic powder” to make whatever he wanted. Seemed way to generic to have much “feel”. No material components needed no spells to cast to make it, just generic skill check. Yawn. I decided to have my character give his “magic powder” to the party’s cleric rather than participate in using an ultra lame game mechanic that I found wrecked my suspension of disbelief. Did that make me anti-3e? Not in the least, I still play and enjoy it.

So I do know where you are coming from about the corridors…but I think a well ran game with good players, over comes that sort of thing for most of us regardless of if it's OAD&D or 3e. I like playing both 1st ed and 3e, and to me 3e feels more like 1st ed than 2e does.

I would also like to add the grim and gritty feel that most like in their games, is IMO hard to achieve with 3e because of the extreme concern for "balance" and fair CR's. If you adventuring in a grim world, things many things will be unfair and unbalanced, there won't be someone overseeing to make sure things are kept in line by "hatch, axe and saw" etc. OAD&D can and has been abused by incompetent DM's. On occasion in the past there were those who were on hung up on power trips or too addle brained to actually think. The nature of the 1st ed system when DM’d properly is one of being concerned with fun, fast intense play, cool tricks and puzzles rather than "equality". This is part of what makes it a great system for getting grim and gritty. How much grimmer can you get than, save or die when put forth in the right context of the story? Likewise, an occasional encounter with level draining undead (no save if your hit) quickly create true grim and girt feel. A good DM might allow measures address unfortunate events if the party gets maimed if the players played well etc.

BTW - Daniel, I live in North Carloina and am not that far away from where your located. Your welcome to sit in and play with one of my OAD&D groups if you wish. After all we can have a character ready to game with in minutes.

Cheers

 

[DarrenGMiller]

Well, so far I think a few things have been said that really sum it up for me. Allow me to quote:

Following up on my previous post in the locked thread (in which I put forth that IMO "1st edition feel" is the interpersonal dynamic that comes from a friendly competitive game in an atmosphere of mutual trust -- i.e. the players are 'competing' against the DM and vice versa, but both sides have agreed to 'play fair' and trust the other side to do the same) I suppose it's worth pointing out that this feel need not be limited to any particular ruleset, and thus there's no reason why a discussion of "1st edition feel" must necessarily turn into a discussion of the pros and cons of the 1st edition rules. A game in which the participants are operating under this sort of 'social contract' will have the "1st edition feel" even if the rules being used are 3rd edition (or GURPS or HARP or whatever else); likewise a game in which the DM abuses his power in order to punish the players, or in which the players are munchkins and rules-lawyers who are constantly arguing the DM's rulings, or for that matter a game in which there is no sense of competition and the DM and players are simply engaging in a collaborative storytelling effort, won't have the "1st edition feel" even if the 1E rules are being used.

One thing for sure: 1e was a game. It wasn't an excuse to put on some black turtlenecks and berets, while smoking cigarettes in a holder, while creating the avant-garde. If "1e feel" is low brow "beer and pretzels" for the unwashed masses, then I'm glad to be counted with the luddites and terminally retrograde, whether I'm playing 1e or 3e.

Anyhow, the salient points of 1st Edition feel:
- No funky races for PC's. Standard PHB races, which is to say, Tolkien races plus gnomes, and gnomes are pretty much ignored. MAYBE in far extremes of funkyness, a lizard man or centaur or selkie or evil drow assassin in disguise -- some old school monster preferable with real mythology (instead of a game book) behind it. Definitely no half-dragons.

- Greyhawk/Tolkien meanings of races. Halflings are hobbits, not kender. Gnomes are ignored, not steampunk little tinkers.

- Most classes are normal, not prestige. Archetypal warriors and spellcasters, not blood magus of the yadda-yadda order.

- No Forgotten Realms stuff. Rangers are not Drizzt, they are Aragorn. Drow are not seen. Players are supposed to pretend they don't know Drow exist. PC elves know, but it's not something they talk about at parties. Merchants are delivering wine, not magical bunny rabbits. No magical street lamps -- no street lamps at all, since we're talking medieval here, but if there were street lamps, they'd burn oil -- which you can throw at folks to 1d6 damage!

- The stuff banned in Second Edition is back. Demons are demons and devils are devils, not whatever the euphemisms were. Assassins and half-orcs are a normal part of the game, not secret adult-swim stuff. (Thus, in some ways, 3rd Edition is more 1st Edition than 2nd Edition was.)

- No spikey armor. Armor looks like armor. (A pet peeve for me with the 3e PHB is the silly bondage-spiked plate mail. Yeah, neato.)

- Classic storylines. Meet in the tavern, loot the dungeon, steal the McGuffin, save the kingdom from the lizard men, that sort of things. Not a bunch of kender droppings about the outer planes, clockwork monsters from the ancient wars, or whatever new nonsense them young kids are up to these days.

With that said, as I am getting older, I find myself trying to recapture my "glory days" of gaming. I know it may be a futile quest, but I am hoping to at least find a group that wants to try to capture the feel outlined above.

DM