[EDITION WARZ] Selling Out D&D's Soul?

[Numion]

It's never assumed that the players and their characters will find everything, nor is it assumed that they will be able to carry it off easily.

1e adventures have been analyzed on these very boards, and the treasures were neither hard to find nor especially cumbersome (other than for the fact there was so much of it).

1e also includes training costs and other player character expenses such as henchmen and hirelings, taxes and levies, and stronghold maintenance if applicable. And then there was this: "Each player character will automatically expend not less than 100 gold pieces per level of experience per month. This is simply support, upkeep, equipment, and entertainment expense. These costs are to be deducted by the Dungeon Master automatically, and any further spending by the PC is to be added to these costs. Such expense is justified by the 'fact' that adventurers are a free-wheeling and high-living lot." - 1e AD&D DMG, p. 25.

That is one nonsensical rule. A pious cleric is high-living like Conan?

How about letting the players decide how 'high-living' their lot is..

 

[Thurbane]

That is one nonsensical rule. A pious cleric is high-living like Conan?

How about letting the players decide how 'high-living' their lot is..

I agree that that rule is a little silly, but in my mind, not much more silly than "Characters must have X amount of magic and treasure at X level, otherwise they can't effectively fight X level creatures".

 

[The Shaman]

1e adventures have been analyzed on these very boards, and the treasures were neither hard to find nor especially cumbersome (other than for the fact there was so much of it).

I think Quasqueton's methods and conclusions are suspect, for reasons I've detailed in a couple of those threads (and won't repeat here so that this thread doesn't get further off track).

I also have the personal experience of both playing and refereeing some of those modules, and my experience is very different from that assumed by Quasqueton.

That is one nonsensical rule. A pious cleric is high-living like Conan?

No, like Friar Tuck.

In our games a pious character would be using treasure and rewards to do good works while the rest of us blew our purses on whores, ale, and games of chance. (I rarely played a pious anything, myself...)

How about letting the players decide how 'high-living' their lot is..

And as dungeon master, or collectively as a group, you have that choice - tweak it, or toss it out altogether.

The rule isn't "nonsense": it's internally consistent and works in the context of the other rules of the game. If you don't agree with the premise on which it's based, or if it's not something that adds to your enjoyment of the game, that's something else altogether.

 

[FireLance]

I agree that that rule is a little silly, but in my mind, not much more silly than "Characters must have X amount of magic and treasure at X level, otherwise they can't effectively fight X level creatures".

Except that one is an actual rule, and the other is a guideline for judging encounter difficulty.

You know, 3e actually is a fine game, not the soulless, number-crunching exercise that some of the "grognards" are claiming.

 

[Glyfair]

My hat's off to you sir - your post is an inspiration to all of us that remember 1E being a great game, and not the eldritch, unplayable monstrosity that some of these "whippersnappers" are claiming!

I dunno. Many of us are just point out the inconsistancy of comparing AD&D as played vs. 3E as written. In my experience, no one came close to playing AD&D as written.

A lot of the comparisons between AD&D and 3E variations tend to assume that 3E is only played as written, yet AD&D was played without using many of the rules. I disagree, 3E can be played by discarding chunks of the system. Yes, there are consequesces of that, but there were consequences of discarding bits of AD&D. The main difference to me is that most of the rules in 3E were designed with the overall system in mind, but a lot of the rules in AD&D were designed because "we need a rule for this" and the overall structure wasn't necessarily considered.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

I dunno. Many of us are just point out the inconsistancy of comparing AD&D as we played it vs. 3E as written and assuming that other peoples' experiences must have been the same as ours.

Fixed it...

 

[Numion]

I agree that that rule is a little silly, but in my mind, not much more silly than "Characters must have X amount of magic and treasure at X level, otherwise they can't effectively fight X level creatures".

In 3E there's no rule like that. There are recommendations and consequences of that established baseline, but the PCs are still free to piss away their gold on ale and whores instead of magic items.

What if the PCs are lost in a desert for a months, or are shipwrecked on an island of natives, do they still high-live for 100 gp / level?

No wonder though why adventurers eventually retire to sell merchandise or keep a tavern. Even 20th level liver can't take 2000 gp a month drinking sessions for long.

 

[Thurbane]

I dunno. Many of us are just point out the inconsistancy of comparing AD&D as played vs. 3E as written. In my experience, no one came close to playing AD&D as written.

A lot of the comparisons between AD&D and 3E variations tend to assume that 3E is only played as written, yet AD&D was played without using many of the rules. I disagree, 3E can be played by discarding chunks of the system. Yes, there are consequesces of that, but there were consequences of discarding bits of AD&D. The main difference to me is that most of the rules in 3E were designed with the overall system in mind, but a lot of the rules in AD&D were designed because "we need a rule for this" and the overall structure wasn't necessarily considered.

I think both myself and several other people have commented that we use as many house rules with 3.X as we did with 1e and 2e...certainly in my case, anyway. I strongly dispute any claim that any edition of AD&D was "unplayable" out of the box. I have played in completely vanilla (i.e. no house rules or 3rd party rules) AD&D many, many times and never had any problems. And yes, we even used weapon vs. armor type modifiers.

 

[Hussar]

NPCs specifically designed to present challenges to the player characters - I don't understand why this is so surprising.

Except for the fact that a number of those same "NPC's" were pre-gens intended for the players to play. Take the Heroes of the Lance as a prime example. Four fighter types in the original 8 characters and 3 of the 4 had 18 percentile strengths.

"It will often occur that initiative determination results in a tie. This merely indicates that each party has equal chances for acting and that attacks occur simultaneously. In cases of equal initiative score, damage occurs to both groups regardless of what is inflicted." - 1e AD&D DMG, p. 63.

And, thank you for pretty much making my point for me. Why the heck should that be written like that and how could anyone possibly defend that as good game design? How bloody hard would it have been to write:

In case of ties, all those with the same initiative resolve their attacks before applying damage.

This one pretty much illustrates exactly my point that the writing is opaque. Confusing writing and convoluted style equate with poor game design, IMNSHO.

As far as dwarves hating elves and vice versa - one group lives in large forests and the other lives under mountains. They don't even share the same real estate. How often could they actually come into conflict? This was only there because of Tolkein.

As far as

For a fantasy roleplaying game based on the fantastic literature of Professor Tolkein, Lord Dunsany, Shakespeare, Le Morte d'Arthur, and the Arabian Nights?

umm, what about Howard, Doyle and Burroughs, none of which were high literature, dense or difficult to understand? Or should we simply ignore those inspirations?

Ok, now that I've stirred the pot sufficiently, how about this?

When 3e came out, it was pretty well received. Scratch that, it was very well received. And, by and large, it has been credited with reviving the hobby to a large extent.

How about a little thought experiment? If we could change history a bit and reverse the order of editions, how would 1e be received? If 3e had been released in the 70's, followed by 2e then 1e in 2000. Would 1e be well received in 2000? Why or why not?

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

This one pretty much illustrates exactly my point that the writing is opaque. Confusing writing and convoluted style equate with poor game design, IMNSHO.

Opinion noted.

Personally, I don't think the 1e initiative rules were very well thought out and I junked them more than twenty years ago in favour of a heavily house-ruled d6-based system. 1e certainly isn't perfect; initiative, weapons -v- ac type, weapon speed factors and psionics are all rubbish and very few people use them.

Having said that, I don't agree that the writing is too hard to understand. It's aimed at a literate and intelligent reader; those who failed English 101 shouldn't be playing D&D anyway.

When 3e came out, it was pretty well received. Scratch that, it was very well received. And, by and large, it has been credited with reviving the hobby to a large extent.

Yup.

The only thing 3e did really well was to reverse some of the "plot" and "story" assumptions from 2e. You know, the railroady DragonLance-style plots which were written in "Chapters" and contained long sections called "When things go wrong" which told the DM how to return to the hackneyed and formulaic progression of events which were supposed to happen when, inevitably, some bored player tried to exercise a bit of free will.

Those assumptions weren't there in early 1e. They crept in during what I call 1.5e -- the modules from 1983 and on started to take the onus away from the DM to create a proper game environment for the players to explore. Instead, the DM was supposed to tell the players what to explore, in what order.

How about a little thought experiment? If we could change history a bit and reverse the order of editions, how would 1e be received? If 3e had been released in the 70's, followed by 2e then 1e in 2000. Would 1e be well received in 2000? Why or why not?

Turn it round.

RM2 was available in the early 1980's (and as I've demonstrated at length in this thread, 3.x is basically RM, not D&D). It was a moderately popular system, but had nowhere near the popularity of 1e.

Systems like 1e have become available since 2000. Look at Hackmaster, C&C and OSRIC -- all attempts to recreate the 1e ruleset. They've been moderately popular, but have nowhere near the popularity of 3e.

(OSRIC turned into a Silver download from RPGNow within 3 weeks of being put up there... if all the OSRIC downloads from all the sources were included in that, OSRIC would be at least triple platinum, and possibly octuple platinum or more; I have no idea how many copies are floating around right now.)

What does this tell us? It tells us that a lot of people buy the "official" version of D&D. It tells us nothing about which is the better system.