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

[John Morrow]

Cinematic games that are not Narrativist tend to pastiche - eg cinematic 'action' games tend to be more like a Steven Segal movie than Die Hard IMO.

FYI, I'm purposely trying to avoid "Narrativist" and the GNS model here because it contains a lot of other baggage that goes far beyond the issue of story and setting.

I think "Cinematic" games that give the player some control over their character are an attempt at achieving Dramatist ends using Gamist means. Similarly, settings like Torg that have setting-based justifications for treating the PCs as story protagonists or letting them bend the rules for story-based reasons are an attempt to achieve Dramatist ends using Simulationist means.

What both Simulationist and Gamist games have in common is that both tend to thrive on unpredictable and random outcomes and dice are often (though not always) a big part of that. Dramatist games tend to frown upon random outcomes because some outcomes often produce bad stories (e.g., Luke Skywalker fails his Dex check to catch the antenna and falls to his death from Bespin). "Cinematic" rules and settings are an attempt to skew the odds of unpredictable or random outcomes to make them more controllable by the players and GM. But as a result, they are often forced to treat PCs and NPCs or monsters differently (e.g., the Feng Shui mook rules, D&D rating monsters by "Hit Dice", etc) as part of the rules or setting because protagonists and plot device opponents are treated differently in stories.

But I agree that without a GM or players to guide the process as a story, the result is more often than not a pastiche of a story than a story (that's a great way of putting it, by the way). But I'm not entirely sure that distributing the authority to guide the story across multiple people (as Narrativism seems to do) doesn't have a tendency to do the same thing in a different way. As Larry Niven points out in one of his story collections, "collaborations are unnatural," and expecting a half-dozen people to produce a coherent story in a single pass without revision or planning is a task that most professional authors are not even up to.

 

[maddman75]

But I agree that without a GM or players to guide the process as a story, the result is more often than not a pastiche of a story than a story (that's a great way of putting it, by the way). But I'm not entirely sure that distributing the authority to guide the story across multiple people (as Narrativism seems to do) doesn't have a tendency to do the same thing in a different way. As Larry Niven points out in one of his story collections, "collaborations are unnatural," and expecting a half-dozen people to produce a coherent story in a single pass without revision or planning is a task that most professional authors are not even up to.

What I generally do is allow the players wide latitude in choosing the direction of the plot, while providing the specifics myself as well as trying to bring it all around to one grand finale. The steps are generally like this

- Introductory adventure. For me these are always the hardest to write. Especially given my group's propensity to want to generate characters then immediately play. The compromise we generally reach is that they give me a synopsis/concept for their character, then I make the first adventure based on that and hope no one changes their mind.
- Go Fish. The next adventure generally takes place in a city or other crowded environment, where I can drop several plot hooks in front of them and see which ones they bite on. They may go after several or look into this and that.
- Explore a plot. Then we go into whatever they were interest in in detail. I'll add allusions to whatever BBEG I'm planning for the campaign.
- Consequences. Previous actions come back to haunt them. We continue exploring a plot until it wears out or I run out of plot hooks, and then I go fishing again.
- Climax. After many of these runs, the PCs get an idea who the BBEGs are and what they can do about them, and we have a final confrontation.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

In contrast, I don't worry about the plot at all. I attempt to create what I believe and hope will be an interesting environment for the player characters to explore, and then I sit back and adjudicate what happens when they try to explore it.

And now we've come full circle, back to the thread title. I believe that the single paragraph above explains succinctly and clearly what, for me, the "1st edition feel" was about.

There are other aspects to the 1e feel - the multiplicity of tables, the endearing hodgepodge of rules, Gygax's quirky prose, the sometimes poor quality illustrations, or the fact that only people with an advanced degree in Extremely Obscure Studies understood how the surprise rules apply to a ranger - which still endear it to some of us, but I strongly suspect that in order to understand that particular appeal, you had to be there at the time.

 

[fonkin]

First Edition feel is...

... D6, not D20
... pages and pages of crazy tables
... characters was characters and monsters was monsters
... ZERO-levels!
... death without a saving throw
... Big Red Poppa had 88 hit points, and he was still scary!
... Bad art. I so miss the bad art!
... Ranges: " meant 10 feet indoors and 10 yards outdoors
... 10-foot pole
... Treasure Type U and V!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!