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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8964471" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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