AD&D 1E Edition Experience: Did/Do you Play 1E AD&D? How Was/Is It?

[Zardnaar]

I've been running 1E adventures lately. Using C&C. Completed The Deadly Sea last week (Dungeon Magazine issue 3).

 

[The Soloist]

We played it a lot between 1981 and 1984. It was great fun. Our GM was well read in history and we did the zeros to castle & land owners arc with several political intrigues on top of the usual dungeoneering.

Currently, I'm soloing four level 1 characters in a classic random hex crawl artifact quest. I failed soloing AD&D 1e last winter but things are going much better this time around. My brain is slowly adjusting to the High Gygaxian prose and rules organization.

Also, the old school illustrations resonate with me profoundly, even the very badly drawn ones. They give me a feeling of 'coming home' after playing all the others editions since 1e for the last 40 years. I'm not saying it's the best edition, just the most comforting for me at this juncture.

 

[CleverNickName]

Woah. What a weird thread to necro.

I guess someone made their resurrection and system shock checks!

This thread is eternal!

I don't know what it says about the edition itself or our nostalgia regarding it, but this thread gets necro'd more often than any of my other Edition Experience surveys.

 

[môrgondír]

Most of my goodwill comes from nostalgia, and from pretty much everything ancillary to the rules themselves, things like the artwork, or the setting, the weather at the time, the food we ate as we played it, the smell of the paper of a book, the gleam of a new set of dice, etc. It would also include the experiences of what happened in the game that didn't have much, if anything, to do with the rules, almost as though most of the fun came in spite of the rules or our attempts to apply / use them correctly, rather than because of the elegance or effectiveness of the rules.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

This thread is eternal!

I don't know what it says about the edition itself or our nostalgia regarding it, but this thread gets necro'd more often than any of my other Edition Experience surveys.

This thread ... definitely brings up thoughts.

 

[CleverNickName]

This thread ... definitely brings up thoughts.

True, but at least it's not that other thread.

 

[kermit4karate]

Played it. Loved it. We did NOT use all the rules.

 

[kermit4karate]

True, but at least it's not that other thread.

Wait -- which thread is that? I don't know what the heck is going on here half the time....

 

[kermit4karate]

Replying to my own post because I'm a weirdo.

One of the things that struck me abotut 5E early on was how much playing it felt like how I remember playing AD&D 1E felt like. I couldn't explain to you why that is. Maybe it's the complexity level, or the robustness and soundness of the system as a whole.

Has anyone else had this experience, or can anyone explain how they're similar?

For me? Because we freely threw out any of the rules from 1E we didn't understand or like, which mostly left us with 5E!

 

[kermit4karate]

Yeah I wouldn't call 1e simple.

I think the thing with 1e is that the people who've been playing it for 35-40 years or more have long since house ruled whatever problems they had with the game and they're familiar with it. While 1e is complex and convoluted in core, it has fewer add-ons than its successors too so there's not as much added to it, especially if a group doesn't like the additional material and ignores it. And how many people really played a "pure" 1e game too? There was a lot of mixing with D&D back in the early and mid-80's. That didn't really fall off until the 2e days, and probably mostly because D&D stopped being effectively published as a separate line. I think that's when players started playing only a single edition, because that's all that was available.

I'd call it simple because we just ignored the convoluted stuff. What we ended up with was simple.