How close to the RAW did/do you play AD&D1?

[vagabundo]

No, the real complexity - and one that I had just started to consider - was what weapon did the monsters attacks qualify as? Near the end of my 1e career I started making specific monster vs. AC attack tables to go with each monster entry.

Oh, that way madness lies.

lol I salute your - ahem - attention to detail...

Although, I never played ADND 1e (I was an RC kid) I've always wanted to game there.

 

[rogueattorney]

I think my experience is fairly typical of D&D'ers my age, who began playing D&D in the early 80's...

We didn't play AD&D by the book at all. We played Basic D&D pretty close to by the book. Then we got the AD&D Players Handbook and Monster Manual and grafted those onto our Basic D&D game. We also got the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. We used that for the combat tables and didn't read much of the rest of the book. 2e initially seemed like a cleared up version of 1e because it ignored all the stuff in the DMG that we never knew was there. Fifteen to twenty years later we actually read the 1e DMG and were surprised by what we found there.

Me, I was pleasantly surprised by the contents of the DMG when I reacquainted myself with 1e about 10 years ago. Basic D&D is still my game of choice for the informal pick up games I tend to run. If I were to run a long-term campaign for a group of hard-core gamers, I would have no qualms whatsoever running a close to the book 1e game.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The best way I found to handle this was to create 'to hit' tables specific to each character in the party. Instead of cross referencing a fighter table to figure out if 'Black Joe' hit AC 3 after adding up all the modifiers, you instead created a 'Black Joe' table which cross referenced his sword +3 vs. each AC. Then, all you needed to know was the dice throw and any temporary modifiers because his strength, magic sword, and the long sword vs. AC modifers were already calculated. Ditto for Black Joe's short bow +1, his backup dagger, and his unarmed attack.

It was a small headache to prepare the tables, but it saved an enormous amount of time in play and made using the 'weapon vs. ac' modifiers no harder than not using them. And once you had the tables, they were really cool, because suddenly the game started to make sense at a tactical level. Realism jumped up enormously. You could see that a whip or a unarmed attack were virtually useless against an armored foe (as you'd expect). A heavy weapon designed to penatrate armor was great - if the foe was armored - but suffered compared to a finesse weapon against a lighter unarmored foe. Your longsword, damage king though it was in most cases, could have real issues penetrating something as protective as plate so that there really was reasons to consider using other types of weapons. It wasn't obvious which weapon was best.

As for the AC of monsters, you didn't have to calculate them all in advance and you really didn't have to concern yourself too much with what AC the monsters hide had. Instead, you decided roughly what dexterity the monster had, and then the rest of the monster's AC translated as armor by necessity. This seems like its just as hard, but figuring out if the monster ought to qualify for non-armor AC seemed easier to me than figuring out what armor it had. So, if the monster had an AC 4, but didn't seem particularly agile, that was obviously all armor. Or, if the monster had an AC 2, but was a small lithe fairy, then perhaps that was all 'bonus' (size, dexterity, swiftness, magical enhancement), and its AC was 10 (with a AB of +8). Once you decided for one monster, you just made a note and then you 'knew' and could write it in a stat block (which was like 2 lines back then) when prepping for an evening. And you were really unlikely to introduce more then two or three new monsters in a session, and after a while it didn't much come up.

No, the real complexity - and one that I had just started to consider - was what weapon did the monsters attacks qualify as? Near the end of my 1e career I started making specific monster vs. AC attack tables to go with each monster entry.

Thats a lot of work and still doesn't get the job done.
Lets say we prep an attack table for Joe and we factor in the -2 penalty for his longsword against AC 2. That penalty is applicable against plate and shield or the equivalent. If we have that factored in along with other bonuses on Joe's longsword attack table we still have to adjust whenever he fights something with AC 2 that isn't plate armored such as a wizard with high dex and bracers of defense.

 

[Celebrim]

Oh, that way madness lies.

It wouldn't have been so bad. I'd done it for a few monsters (wyvern for example) and for monsters that used weapons (hobgoblins) before a bad experience with a player turned me off to 1e completely.

You have to remember just how tiny a 1e stat block was compared to a 2e or 3e stat block. When you play a more recent edition you are voluntarily taking on alot more fiddly details than I was doing even at the height of my 1e obsessiveness.

Adding a row to each 1e monster entry showing what it needed to hit a given AC was a one time investment in time that was a trivial edition to a stat block compared to a 3rd or 4th edition monster. Most monsters weapons could be clearly translated to 'dagger', 'short sword', 'broad sword', 'club', or 'mace'.

I left 1e for GURPS not because 1e was awkward and fiddly in combat, but because 1e didn't have a reasonable and unified way to handle non-combat skill challenges, because of fiddly problems with 'infravision' and invisibility and other hard to interpret regular events, because my favored class (thief) was utterly outclassed in combat by fighters and outside of combat by every spellcaster by 10th level, because I was tired of maintaining a system were increasingly so many of my rules were handwritten or in my head and felt cludgy, and honestly because being 'more realistic' had opened up so much game for me that I'd niavely reached a point where I thought 'if some realism is good, then more realism must always be better'.

3e was literally the game I was trying to make, and honestly there are three areas where the 1st edition rules are superior to the 3rd edition rules and one of them is 'weapon vs. AC modifiers'. I miss them alot, but 3rd edition has gained so much complexity in other areas that I've never been willing to bring them back (though I've thought of it).

 

[Wombat]

I played very little of AD&D (1st or 2nd) -- I played OD&D and then didn't play a much D&D until 3e.

What little AD&D1 I played were heavily house-ruled, though, so I would say about 40% house rules.

 

[Celebrim]

Thats a lot of work and still doesn't get the job done.

Says the guy who never did it?

Lets say we prep an attack table for Joe and we factor in the -2 penalty for his longsword against AC 2. That penalty is applicable against plate and shield or the equivalent. If we have that factored in along with other bonuses on Joe's longsword attack table we still have to adjust whenever he fights something with AC 2 that isn't plate armored such as a wizard with high dex and bracers of defense.

Sure. But you got to remember that by this point, I'd stopped thinking about things having 'AC 2' as if that was a single all inclusive number. Creatures and PC's had an AC like 4+2, where AC 4 represents chain and shield (or equivalent) with an armor bonus of +2 (from whatever source). Incidently, if you started digging into the rules of 1st edition, you found that that was exactly how AC was supposed to work under the covers, it was just unfortunately 'bundled together' as a single number. High dex didn't turn your AC from 8 to 6, it gave you a bonus to AC of 2. All I really did is started forcing the bonus to AC and the AC itself to be reported separately.*

So maybe Black Joe has a shield +1 and plate mail +1 for an AC of 2+2. Black Joe is fighting a Bugbear with a 17 str and a mace and an AC of 4. I've got my tables lined up ahead of time. Black Joe needs a 12 to hit AC 4, all his player has to do is report the die - no math generally required unless Bless or something has been cast (which was rare). The Bugbear needs a 13 to hit AC 2 with his footman's mace, but because Black Joe's AC is 2+2 he needs a 15. Done.

As for a wizard with bracers of defence, I ruled that counted as armor. So a wizard with Bracers of Defence AC: 6 and a Ring of Protection +1 had an AC of 6+1 (NOT 5), or AC 6 and AB 1. The fact that I had to add in a number here to adjust the attack generally didn't make combat any more complicated than it was if I wasn't doing what I had been doing (which generally involves to hit modifiers anyway), and most monsters didn't qualify for much in the way of AB anyway (ei they had less than a 15 dex and no magical enhancement) so most of the time I didn't even have to adjust the players attack but just read off my table. Looking up a particular player table wasn't any worse than looking at the one on my DM's screen, so no loss there either. The only loss was an hour or so at character creation when the tables were initially created. Since I generally had players submit characters before the campaign started, this was just start up costs and changes to the table generally didn't happen more than every third or fourth session.

 

[Treebore]

Me, I was pleasantly surprised by the contents of the DMG when I reacquainted myself with 1e about 10 years ago. Basic D&D is still my game of choice for the informal pick up games I tend to run. If I were to run a long-term campaign for a group of hard-core gamers, I would have no qualms whatsoever running a close to the book 1e game.

I have always loved the 1E DMG, however, I too have had thoughts of running 1E again, and with some house ruling (initiative, grappling, etc...) using newer and better written rules I think it would be a great game to run.

My biggest problem is saves being made 90% of the time at higher levels, so if I could convince a group to allow me to use the Castles and Crusades save rules instead I would do it.

I think with my players taking a liking to how deadly and challenging Hackmaster Basic has been, I think they may be ready to go with such a deadly "save or die" game.

 

[Dausuul]

We used the chargen rules and the core combat rules, both with tweaks, and the spell descriptions. A lot of the other stuff we just ignored, and I don't remember how much of it there was because, well, we ignored it. So I can't really say what percentage we used.

 

[rogueattorney]

My biggest problem is saves being made 90% of the time at higher levels, so if I could convince a group to allow me to use the Castles and Crusades save rules instead I would do it.

Heh. And my biggest problem with C&C is the "sliding difficulty scale" on saves and other actions.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Says the guy who never did it?

That would be an accurate statement.

Sure. But you got to remember that by this point, I'd stopped thinking about things having 'AC 2' as if that was a single all inclusive number. Creatures and PC's had an AC like 4+2, where AC 4 represents chain and shield (or equivalent) with an armor bonus of +2 (from whatever source). Incidently, if you started digging into the rules of 1st edition, you found that that was exactly how AC was supposed to work under the covers, it was just unfortunately 'bundled together' as a single number. High dex didn't turn your AC from 8 to 6, it gave you a bonus to AC of 2. All I really did is started forcing the bonus to AC and the AC itself to be reported separately.*

That AC separation was not so explicitly outlined in your first post. Either way it is an adjustment to the AC of a creature rather than to the result of the die roll which is the important bit.

So maybe Black Joe has a shield +1 and plate mail +1 for an AC of 2+2. Black Joe is fighting a Bugbear with a 17 str and a mace and an AC of 4. I've got my tables lined up ahead of time. Black Joe needs a 12 to hit AC 4, all his player has to do is report the die - no math generally required unless Bless or something has been cast (which was rare). The Bugbear needs a 13 to hit AC 2 with his footman's mace, but because Black Joe's AC is 2+2 he needs a 15. Done.

This would not be correct strictly speaking. Spells such as bless also adjusted the armor class of the target rather than the die roll. If Joe had the benefit of a bless spell in this scenario then he would need an 11 to hit AC 5 instead.