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Message: <blockquote data-quote="maddman75" data-source="post: 2064925" data-attributes="member: 2673">I've done a lot of arguing about editions on the net - served a lot of time at Dragonsfoot debating in the EW forum.  I've come to a conclusion about 1e, and why some people love it and some hate it, and they talk about it as if it were two different games.  Its because there were two different games.The first, IMO, was the much larger group.  They were average DMs - it was a lot harder to find good DMs in the old days.  Not knocking old timers, but it just makes sense.  I've been doing this for 15 years now.  Back when AD&D came out, *no one* had put that much time into it.  Even the creators, it was all too new.  So they looked to the book.  Book says you can't cast on horseback, you can't cast on horseback.  Book says you die from some random effect, you die from some random effect.  Now that bit in the afterword may come into play after a lot of arguing or if there were no rules for the situation, but that's about it.  Most DMs would assume that Gary Gygax was smarter than them, he made up the game.  So they went with what he said.That is the 1e this group remembers.  Good times yes, but rulebooks that were hard to understand and poorly organized.  They remember being restricted by the arbitrary nature of some rules, they remember playing for months on end to finally get their fighter to 4th level, only to die because the mage cast haste on them.  They remember a game that was mostly hack & slash, and you didn't get too attached to any paticular character.Then there's the second group whose DM didn't let the rules restrain them.  They did what made sense and was fair, and didn't kill off characters because of some random event from the book.  They had an open to interpretation, rules-light system and can't imagine anything better.Then these two groups get on the internet and wonder why they can't see common ground.</blockquote>

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