Has anyone went back to 1E AD&D from 3E?

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I've been thinking of switching the party back to 1E rules after this whole campaign is over. It was simpler to me, and I feel the game played a lot quicker. Of course we used a lot of house rules, but mostly played by the book. Of course I've got over 150 bucks of 3E stuff so I don't know.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Whatever floats yer boat, as a friend of mine used to say. Personally, I'd never do it. If I did, I'd switch to HackMaster, which fixes a lot of the old 1e and 2e glitches, and which has much meatier core books.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I have every 1e book so there is no way I'd bother with Hackmaster. I never felt there was any problem with 1e rules.

 

[Vhane]

I wish more people thought this way. I frequently miss the older versions of the game.

 

[mattcolville]

???

I can't imagine ever seriously going back to 1e or 2e. So little of those systems made any coherant sense. I'd play in a Hackmaster game for shahits and grins, but not for anything serious.

I can imagine someone seeing the new game out, remembering how much dun they had playing 15 years ago, starting up a 3E game and saying; 'I liked 1E better" and going back to that but I suspect that's just nostalgia for a time and a place that can't ever be recaptured.

 

[Psion]

It's madness! Pure madness I tell you! Munchy barbarians, cavaliers, and assassin? Fledgeling proficiency system (if you use optional books)? Munchy weapon specialization? Percentile strength? No meaningful way to customize characters? Munchy multiclasses? Level limits for *coff* demi- *coff* humans. Dual classing?

Yeesh. Nosir, not for me.

 

[Lunn]

I left D&D in 1978, just before the first AD&D PHB came out. I only returned to D&D with 3E. Enough said.

 

[William Ronald]

Originally posted by Psion:

It's madness! Pure madness I tell you! Munchy barbarians, cavaliers, and assassin? Fledgeling proficiency system (if you use optional books)? Munchy weapon specialization? Percentile strength? No meaningful way to customize characters? Munchy multiclasses? Level limits for *coff* demi- *coff* humans. Dual classing?

You summed up much of my argument. Let's also throw in vastly overpowered psionics with nearly unreadable charts, grappling, pummeling, and wrestling rules that were a struggle to deal with, and fireballs that have to have the area calculated precisely.

I always thought demi-human level limits were a bad idea and ingored them. The justification just did not seem logical.

Despite the problems I have with 1E, I think we have to honor Gary Gygax and the others who worked on it. For its time, it was radically different than any other game on the market. First edition helped to spawn the entire RPG industry by showing there was money in it. (RPGs - not just for miniatures enthusiasts.)

 

[Psion]

Despite the problems I have with 1E, I think we have to honor Gary Gygax and the others who worked on it. For its time, it was radically different than any other game on the market.

Definitely! At the time it was great!

In it's time, the model T was great, too!

 

[Agnostic Paladin]

I'm not at all interested in going back to 1st or 2nd, but I've been feeling nostaligic about basic lately. I don't know if its the art or the style of writing or what, but it looking at the expert and basic rule sets recently got me thinking how much more fun D&D was back in the late eighties when I started playing... (I suppose it might have been the age difference, but I've been toying with the idea of trying to convince my group to have a quick game with Basic...)