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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 9373191" data-attributes="member: 11999">I'm quite certain that in all of the years that I played AD&D (1e & 2e), I never once called for a system shock roll as DM or witnessed one as a player. It was just one of those many AD&D fiddly details that everyone dutifully wrote down on their character sheets, but never actually used in play.Mostly, I think it's because we just forgot about it during play than a deliberate decision. We started with Basic/Expert/Companion D&D and when we moved on to AD&D, we mostly just kept playing the game the same way, but with AD&D races, classes, monsters, spells, and magic items. I do remember reading the 1e DMG section on Initiative when I was 12 and thinking that it was way too complicated and nonsensical, so I just stuck with how we did it in Basic. I suspect that I came to the same decision about a lot of the AD&D procedures and rules.Looking back at the system shock mechanic now, I think that it's a very punitive and unfair attempt at balancing powerful spells. AD&D 1e had far too many "make a successful roll or die immediately" gotchas that weren't fun for anyone except adversarial and sadistic DMs. We ignored a whole lot of those.But I don't remember anyone really abusing the Haste spell back in the day. 3rd level magic-user spells meant Fireball or Fly.</blockquote>