D&D 1E How about a little love for AD&D 1E

[Celebrim]

every time they introduced a new player option, it was usually by taking away something I'd thought all PCs should be able to do (minus some caveats like not tightrope walking in armor) just to give it back as a special option you could take. When the Dungeoneer and Wilderness Survival Guides came out in '86 and included skill proficiencies letting PCs do what I'd always thought they could do anyways, I was unsurprised.

I'm not sure I would go that far. Nothing in the 1e DMG implied that characters had proficiency at more than a list of 'secondary skills', and that in itself implied that everything that wasn't part what you'd conceptualize as one secondary skill was silo'd off as something another character could do. Maybe more importantly at no point did AD&D ever address how likely someone was to succeed in anything. This would have left people to ad hoc what the odds of successfully canoeing a boat through rapids were. All the NWP's did for me is convince me that whatever the odds were, someone who was proficient with boats should have higher odds than someone who wasn't.

For something like the Acrobat skills, none of them struck me as the sort of thing ordinary people would be able to do. I mean, sure, people could jump but most people couldn't "long jump". It was clear that this was an area of skill, it was just not clear that every area of skill needed a whole class or that the approach was helping solve the problem of how to handle non-combat propositions fairly.

From early on there was always this idea that you could propose a character do just about anything, especially anything you could imagine an ordinary person doing, but unless you had some class feature that indicated otherwise, there was no guarantee you'd be good at. Anyone could propose to move quietly, but that didn't mean you were quiet. Anyone could propose to catch a fish or engage in an act of simple carpentry, but no character was just assumed to be successful at it. In any event, the game really didn't tell you how to handle those propositions. You just went with something, and what you went with varied very much from table to table.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I suspect the order is reversed. Barbarian first showed up in Dragon #63 (1982 ), cavalier in Dragon #72 (1983), and thief-acrobat in Dragon #69 (1983), so there was likely a notion that these were up-and-coming classes for the game. Thus it would be a good idea to include them in the upcoming show, promoting new products instead of old (always find new ways to sell more of the core books having not yet become a primary market strategy).

Given what we know about the financial state of TSR at the time, I doubt there was a real plan. Cash was tight and there was existing writing that fit semi-naturally into the book, so they did so and shoved it out the door to keep the lights on.

Yep. If I was a betting man, I'd bet that Gary included those classing in UA because they were popular with the cartoon.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I know there are other fora where I can post this, but since we've got a conversation going here is another question:

Has anyone ever used the Thief-Acrobat? I just reread it, and the acrobatics skills just don't seem to justify the class unless the DM really makes an effort to build 3D dungeon or city maps. They seem to be playing a parkour subgame that no one else can participate in.

A player in my 1e game had a wild elf thief-acrobat. I don't remember the character being any worse or any better than the rest, but my memories are somewhat fuzzy.

I think an acrobat subclass would be great for 5e, though.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I think an acrobat subclass would be great for 5e, though.

Wasn't that supposed to be the monk?

 

[ValamirCleaver]

I'm not saying the class was shoehorned into the game to appease fans of the cartoon, but I'm also not not saying it.

As @Willie the Duck previously posted the 3 classes were previewed in Gary Gygax's From the Sorcerer's Scroll column Dragon Magazine in July of '82 plus January & April of '83. The cartoon premiered in September of '83.

I suspect the order is reversed. Barbarian first showed up in Dragon #63 (1982 ), cavalier in Dragon #72 (1983), and thief-acrobat in Dragon #69 (1983), so there was likely a notion that these were up-and-coming classes for the game.

In Dragon #65, September '82, (2 months after the barbarian preview) Gygax posted about 6 more potential classes (Mystic, Cavalier, Savant, Mountebank, Acrobat, Jester) he was considering for inclusion in an updated AD&D plus additional powers for higher level Grand Druid & clarifications regarding Barbarians.

In Dragon #67, November '82, under the column Loyal Readers: A letter from EGG to you, the subject of the proposed upcoming classes were addressed again, the informing of intent to separate the Monk class in to a separate appendix and eventually being separated into an upcoming Far East Asian supplement (this eventually became Oriental Adventures) in addition to a preview of the upcoming Comeliness stat.

In Dragon #103, November '85, under the column The future of the game: What the Second Edition books will be like, added a little more information as to what to expect from Gygax's planned AD&D 2e.

On his Greyhawk Grognard blog, Joseph Bloch, the author of Adventures Dark and Deep has collated this information in greater detail starting here, AD&D’s Lost Second Edition.

 

[JohnSnow]

On his Greyhawk Grognard blog, Joseph Bloch, the author of Adventures Dark and Deep has collated this information in greater detail starting here, AD&D’s Lost Second Edition.

I definitely appreciate Mr. Bloch's historical research into this, while also finding the provenance of Adventures Dark and Deep to be highly suspect. I'll get to that more later in the post.

That being said, it's very interesting for someone to have collected all that was being published in Dragon at the time, since, as a pre-teen with only limited access to my FLGS, I wasn't exactly collecting the issues myself. So my timeline of events is based on what was published in the actual game books that I ended up buying. So, as a gamer at the time, it was my perception that the cartoon came first, and Unearthed Arcana came along later and published the 3 classes that appeared in the cartoon. The historical notes about the Acrobat being used as the framing for a genre-less version of the Monk class is fascinating. It also pretty much concurs with what Gary wrote in his introduction to Oriental Adventures (published in 1986), which I hadn't looked at in years - but just did.

I think it's highly likely that, of ALL the variant classes that showed up in Dragon (and, as you pointed out, there were a LOT), there's a reason that they chose the 3 new classes that showed up in the cartoon to supplement all the other material that went into it. Whether that's because someone pushed their 3 favorites when the cartoon was originally conceived, or whether TSR was later trying to capitalize on said cartoon, I can't begin to guess, and we'll probably never know.

Returning to Adventures Dark and Deep, while I totally believe that Gary was working on an AD&D Second Edition that was vastly different than what was ultimately published, I have no reason to believe Adventures Dark and Deep (which curiously could also abbreviate to "AD&D") bears any more resemblance to said game than the actual Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Second Edition. Joseph Bloch's history notes are interesting, but I don't really think that he knows that much more about what Gary was planning than I do. But I'm glad he managed to publish a game that some folks like.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Wasn't that supposed to be the monk?

 

[Celebrim]

I realize that I've started complaining about 1e AD&D more than praising it, so I feel the need to rectify that.

I adore the implied world building and hex crawl nature of the Monster Manual with its "number appearing", "percent in lair", rarity and treasure type tables. I love the monster entries for things like goblins and orcs that suggest how to stock entire dungeons and what resources monsters will have. It's possible to improvise a pretty decent campaign just by randomly generating a hex crawl on the fly from encounter tables and monster entries.

I adore the archaic language and the numinous weirdness and strangeness of 1e AD&D. I honestly feel at time my own world building gets inhibited by being logical. I get why 'weird fantasy' has such an appeal in OSR (even as I see problems with it). Things like potion miscibility tables and all the rest of the weirdness just need to remain things.

I love the entire 1e AD&D DMG but special mention has to be made to the random dungeon generator in the appendix, which, without a doubt will produce a more interesting dungeon than 90% of novice DM's are capable of producing on their own.

I love the examples of play in the text. Examples of play are probably the most underrated aspects of good RPG design and are probably in many ways more important than the rules. AD&D's example of play tightly follows from the rules in a way that so few examples of play in the last 30 years do, as there is often huge disconnects between the provided examples of play and how the game actually plays in modern design first games.

I love the adventure design from that period. There is some proof in pudding in that almost no one has ever been able to write better adventures since then and we are still looking back to that era for 90% of the all-time best work. DItto with the fact that every single classic monster dates to the 1e of the game. No one has ever introduced a monster since then that has captured everyone's imagination (with the possible exception of the Tiefling).

I love the weapon vs. AC tables, probably the most overlooked and most underrated aspect of 1e AD&D. I loved the idea that you would use a different weapon against a heavily armored foe than a light and dodgy one, and I wish that more foresight had been put into the rules explanation to make those modifiers easy to calculate. They added a whole new level to the game that I adored.

I love casting times as way to balance spellcasting.

I love exponential increasing XP needed to level up. It just makes for good demographics and allows PC's of different levels to interact in a much more functional way than linearly increasing XP. It also encourages sticking to the games sweet spot.

I have a love/hate relationship with gold = XP. I hate it because it never made sense and constrained play. But if you take it out, so much of the exploration pillar of D&D gets chipped away because the players lose that urgency to interact with the environment and explore it. I've never really been able to find a substitute that motivates the players in such a clear and direct way.

I love the art. While I think 2e probably had the best era of art overall, the old black and white ink art has a special place in my heart as well and that particular style has never been surpassed despite frequent imitation.

 

[James Gasik]

1e could be especially arcane. Sometimes, rules will be shoddily explained, if at all; Gary liked to just say "do it this way" and not explain his reasoning. He loved him some d% rolls, in a system where you normally rolled a d20.

But even when the game was at it's most inexplicable, Gary's purple prose and matter of fact way of explaining things made young me feel like I was reading books of secret lore; that much like a D&D Wizard, this was information that wasn't supposed to be easy to grok- this truly was "secrets men were not meant to know, especially those dirty bastard PC's!".

You felt like you were gaining some greater insight or enlightenment from your understanding of the rules. I still love the hell out of my 1e DMG, so much that I replaced my old battered and water-damaged copy with a reprint! The random information for things that DM's might find interesting, like rules for gambling games, types of governments, titles for religious leaders, properties of gems and gemstones, what sorts of ingredients one might need for a potion- it's all fantastic.

Even the way artifacts were described, with the DM deciding their powers! Magic items truly seemed wondrous and incredible, and you wanted them, even if some weren't really all that great in practice.

And there is merit to reading these books; you gain the ability to judge other game systems by their merits! You can spot at a glance when a rule is nonsensical or obtuse and quickly find weak points that can be exploited or break in edge cases- often to the annoyance of other players, lol.

 

[Voadam]

I love the weapon vs. AC tables, probably the most overlooked and most underrated aspect of 1e AD&D. I loved the idea that you would use a different weapon against a heavily armored foe than a light and dodgy one, and I wish that more foresight had been put into the rules explanation to make those modifiers easy to calculate. They added a whole new level to the game that I adored.

I really wanted to like them and have them work. In concept having adjustments for types of armor and whether there is a shield or not is really cool and could add a bunch of nuance to weapons and situations. Chain mail with no flat surfaces has different advantages and disadvantages against some types of weapons than say splint mail. Shields are better against some weapons than other weapons.

Unfortunately it is not connected directly to a particular armor type and the presence or absence of a shield but to an AC range of 10 to 2 going from unarmored with no shield to plate and shield. From ACs 7 to 3 however any of those ACs could be a specific armor type, or a different armor type with a shield due to the range of armors in 1e. So the only place you know for certain that shields are being considered is AC 9 (unarmored with shield) and AC 2 (plate and shield).

Chain mail and shield then has the same adjustment as splint mail with no shield. Ring mail with no shield has the same adjustments as padded armor with a shield.

Sometimes the chart has specifics where having a shield or not makes a difference. Take the bo stick, at AC 10 unarmored no shield there is a +3, at AC 9 unarmored with a shield there is +0, at AC 8 for leather or padded but no shield it is +1. For all the 7 to 3 ACs there is one adjustment for both cases with a shield and without.

It was a lot of looking up specifics to get to an adjustment that might or might not be intended for whether your opponent has a shield or the actual armor they have, but might have been intended for a different set of specifics.