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

[Blue Orange]

On the other hand, I have mixed feelings about the rule evolutions proposed in Unearthed Arcana and later books. I often spend time theorycrafting a houseruled version of 1e when I should be working on my 5e campaign.

Have you thought about putting it together and sending it around an OSR forum? There seem to be hundreds of B/X clones already.

I think one of the things overall is that there was much more of an idea of the game as a sort of competitive sport--there were rankings and tournaments, and special rules for tournament play in the early modules. So frequent death would have been logical.

 

[MGibster]

AD&D 1E holds a special yet odd place in my heart. I'd rather use an Ilithid tadpole to clean out my ears than use the rules, but somehow I've got almost nothing but good memories about the game. This isn't just nostalgia at work here, because there are plenty of other games from the era with terrible rules. Cyborg Commando I'm looking at you. It's been more than 30 years since I played AD&D, but I think I could jump in and make a new character with no problem. I think I could even run the game this weekend if I had to. It's etched into my mind in a way most other games are not.

So yeah, mad respect for AD&D over here.

Stench Kow was what my parents called me when I was a wee lad!

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I disagree with the premise.

AD&D doesn't deserve a little love.

AD&D deserves a whole lotta love. That's right. Every inch of it. Apologies to Robert "I'm not Druid" Plant.

Up until 5e, there was only one indisputable golden age of D&D. Just one. The period from 1979 - 1984, which happened to coincide with, you got it, AD&D. Sure, there's a little bit of Holmes. A little bit of Moldvay/Cook. An inkling of Mentzer on the horizon. But astride all of that, like a colossus, was AD&D.

How important and how influential was it? Well, it established the Core Three Books. Love it or hate it, we still have the PHB/DMG/MM because of AD&D.

And, of course, the 1e DMG was such a labyrinthian and bizarre exercise of erudite incomprehensibility that it remains a go-to resource for creative DMs to this day.

What about adventures? The greatest of all the adventures, the ones that keep getting used to this day, were all established back then as well. Temple of Elemental Evil. Ravenloft. Tomb Of Horrors. Queen of the Demonweb Pits. White Plume Mountain. Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Desert of Desolation (PHAROAH!). Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. Against the Giants. Dragons of Despair. Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. Etc. Etc.

AD&D was a confusing and often contradictory morass or verbiage and tables that called out for houserules, and it was brilliant.

 

[Lanefan]

Not sure where you were going wiht this post, but...

One of the things stressed in the original game of D&D was the importance of recording game time with respect to each and every player character in a campaign. In AD&D it is emphasized even more: YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.

On this he's 100% right, particularly so when looking at a campaign where different characters and-or parties are operating independently but might (and probably will) meet up later at some point. Were I writing a DMG I'd put a similar clause in, highlighted in big bold letters and with a bright neon background.

A MONK AT 1ST LEVEL IS CAPABLE OF STUNNING OR KILLING ONLY AN OPPONENT OF MAN-SIZE (M) OR SMALLER. FOR PURPOSES OF THIS DETERMINATION, MAN-SIZE SHALL BE:
Maximum Height: 6’6’’
Maximum Weight: 300#
For each level above the lst, the monk will gain additional stunning/killing ability at the rate of 2 inches of height and 50 pounds of opponent
weight per level of experience gained.

Monks in 1e as written are kinda useless at low levels but I'm not sure what the issue is with this piece.

Saving throws will NOT be aided by magic armor against: GAS POISON SPELLS WHICH DO NOT CAUSE PHYSICAL DAMAGE* petrification, polymorph, magic jar, charm. Saving throw rolls WILL receive an armor bonus against: ACID, EXCEPT WHEN IMMERSION OCCURS DISINTEGRATION FALLING DAMAGE FIRE, MAGICAL AND OTHERWISE SPELLS WHICH CAUSE PHYSICAL DAMAGE* Exception: Metallic armor will NOT add to saving throws versus electrical attacks, although nonmetallic armor will do so.

IMO there needs to be even more detail here. 1e's saving throw system is IMO far superior in principle to anything in the WotC editions, but it could still use some tweaking and detailing. Poison and paralysis, for example, should be split out from death and have their own save matrices.

The Teeth of Dahlver-Nor: If any cleric wos more powerful than the renowned Dahlver-Nor, histories do not tell us. The gods themselves gave special powers to him, and these have passed on to others by means of the great relics of Dahlver-Nor, his teeth. Each of the Teeth has some power, and if one character manages to gain a full quarter, half, or all of them, other grand benefits accrue. In order to gain the power of one of these teeth, however, the character must place it into his or her mouth, where it will graft itself in the place of a like missing tooth. The teeth can never be removed once so emplaced. short of the demise of the possessor.

Somehow I've missed this one over the years - is it a UA thing?

 

[Lanefan]

Agree with the snipped bits. However.....

I mean rather I dislike the extreme lack of character balance, and the fact that published rules variants (like Unearthed Arcana) only made the problem worse. I dislike from a GM's perspective the lack of unified and functional skill systems for dealing with PvE of every sort that isn't combat, leading to the sort of one off rulings over rules nonsense that shows up most clearly in things like the flash flooding room in Hidden Shrine of Tamochan where the rules on drowning presented are the worst combination of incomplete, fiddly, unrealistic, and unbalanced on top of being essentially marginalized to a particular specific encounter. There was just no consensus in the published text at how to handle characters interacting with the environment, leading to massive headaches as a GM when you were forced to ad hoc those interactions. You didn't have a skill system. You had every encounter with its own set of custom rules that were usually bad in multiple ways. I dislike that you are essentially on your own for figuring out how to run a campaign beyond name level. I dislike that lack of guidelines for creating interesting monsters, and the fact that the designers of high-level monsters largely hadn't figured out how to do that even 10 or 15 years into the edition's existence.

...I think you're either missing or ignoring a very important aspect here: 1e was the ultimate kitbasher's edition. Just about every one of those issues can (and, let's face it, in some cases needed to) be fixed by a kitbashing DM with an afternoon or two's work.

And 1e actually had a wonderful soft-coded skill mechanic that could be almost universally applied when nothing else superceded it, that being roll-under-stat.

I thought very long and hard about house ruling up my own OSR style version of 1e AD&D because I do have so many good feelings about it. But the more I looked at the problem, the more like 3e D&D the version got, to the point where the effort just wasn't worth the work.

Well, we've done pretty much just this over the years; and while a few 3e-isms (and 2e-isms) have crept in, its 1e chassis is still recognizable.

There are things that I miss about the rules though. I miss casting times on spells. I miss weapon vs. AC tables. I miss exponentially increasing XP needed to level up. I miss having a real motivation to collect treasure and explore because 2/3rds or more of your XP was finding loot.

I scrapped weapon-vs-AC tables the moment I started DMing. Casting times on spells, though, should never have been taken out; and WotC's doing so is one reason casters got right out of hand in 3e and have yet to be reined in since.

2e had the right idea in dropping xp for treasure, though.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I think a lot of criticism towards 1e is through modern glasses. I don't think it should be forgotten that it was completely new at the time. It's easy to see the flaws when viewed through decades of experience, but if you view it as it came out during the time, it was pure genius.

It's not just ttrpgs that owe to D&D, it's a ton of video games as well. Created a whole new genre. Just like Journey to the Center of the Earth might not be the best sci-fi book written to date, you can't deny its greatness and ingenuity when it came out and what it did for science fiction.

 

[ValamirCleaver]

Somehow I've missed this one over the years - is it a UA thing?

It's from the artifacts listings in the magical items section of the DMG, page 161, second column to be exact. It also has a somewhat different and more detailed description in the 2e Book of Artifacts, page 101.

 

[Blue Orange]

It was a gag about the weirdness of it--taking a dead guy's teeth, knocking out your own, and putting the dead guy's teeth in their place for magic powers is kind of gross (of course, so are the more famous hand and eye). Something you didn't see as much later on. And, you know...who's to say the fantasy world can't be gross? The real world often is. Rot grubs and ear seekers...well, parasites are real. Even parasites have parasites. It helped give the book that kind of forbidden air heavy metal had for cooler kids (not that heavy metal fans didn't play D&D...I'm told it was almost expected in some places).

The monk bit was a joke about the absurdly specific rules--the ability worked depending on height, and it increased by 2 inches a level, so if you wanted to know if your open hand attack worked you had to know if your bugbear was 8'2" or 8'4".

 

[Celebrim]

Somehow I've missed this one over the years - is it a UA thing?

Artifact, 1e DMG - with those wonderfully incomplete entries where exactly what the artifact did was up to the DM so that it could be a campaign level secret.

 

[James Gasik]

Artifact, 1e DMG - with those wonderfully incomplete entries where exactly what the artifact did was up to the DM so that it could be a campaign level secret.

This was the best way to go about magical items, really. What powers does it have? The DM decides!

That having been said, I've long drooled over legendary magic items that I will never actually own (I've been playing for 30ish years now and I've still never had a Rod of Lordly Might, a Helm of Brilliance, or even a Daern's Instant Fortress. I feel really deprived!).