How did pre-3E D&D "play"?

[Khuxan]

I'm looking into making a short free RPG that "plays like" OD&D and BD&D though it could be mechanically very different. For that purpose, I'm looking for feedback on how you felt pre-3E "played".

For example,
[sblock]

• Rolling 3d6 in order for each ability score.
• Complicated and scattered charts and tables.
• Races as classes.
• Weak low-level mages and powerful high-levle mages.
• Levelling differently.
• Buying guard dogs, henchmen and alchemist's fire instead of fighting.
• Regularly dying and being replaced by new characters.
• DM vs. Players, not DM working with players.
• Clumsy pastiche of pop culture, pulp fiction and mythology.
• Simple game, few options.
• Dungeon as an underworld, where every PC cannot see in the dark and every NPC can.
• Sprawling, nonsensical mega-dungeons.
• Wilderness adventures.
• Invincible overlord.
• NPCs and PCs follow different rules.
• Several different parallel versions of the game.
• Everyone had house rules.

[/sblock]

So how did earlier editions "play" for you?

 

[Crothian]

Depends on which version of D&D, they play differently.

 

[S'mon]

Something I've sought to recapture in my current 3e campaign is that prior to 3e, high level Fighter types could wade through hordes of opponents, including giants and demons (though not dragons, due to their breath weapon). This was the one thing that prevented high level Fighters being overshadowed by Magic-Users.

In 3e, level-appropriate monsters will often smash the Fighters; this was a rare occurrence in earlier editions. I find that in standard 3e it's very frustrating to play a Fighter above about 4th level, you feel incompetent in your sole ability, dependent on the Cleric to keep you alive and the Wizard to destroy the enemy. Hence 'meat shield', a derogatory term that did not exist prior to 3e. I'm planning to run Against the Giants once the PCs reach ca 5th-6th level, and hopefully the party Fighters will be wading through hordes of giant-kind while the Wizards use up their spells.

 

[PeelSeel2]

In 3e, level-appropriate monsters will often smash the Fighters; this was a rare occurrence in earlier editions. I find that in standard 3e it's very frustrating to play a Fighter above about 4th level, you feel incompetent in your sole ability, dependent on the Cleric to keep you alive and the Wizard to destroy the enemy.

My experience is totally different on that accord. I feel that fighters where far more effective in 3.x than in any previous edition. In my campaigns, they where always a 'main' character. All the other players would run like weenies if they felt the enemy could take down the fighter. The fighter, even at high levels, was a damage dealing brute.

Hence 'meat shield', a derogatory term that did not exist prior to 3e.

That term was started way before 3.x FYI.

 

[S'mon]

My experience is totally different on that accord. I feel that fighters where far more effective in 3.x than in any previous edition. In my campaigns, they where always a 'main' character. All the other players would run like weenies if they felt the enemy could take down the fighter. The fighter, even at high levels, was a damage dealing brute.

Can a 5th level Fighter in your game stand against a CR 5 troll? Can a Fighter stand against a giant of CR equal to their level? Definitely not, in my experience - and that's intentional to the CR system; in order to use up 25% of party resources while being attacked by 4 PCs a monster has to be equal to 2 PCs in offense & defense. A 10th level Fighter can probably wade through most CR 5 foes, but in 1e a 10th level Fighter can wade through critters that in 3e are CR 12+.

 

[thedungeondelver]

I'm looking into making a short free RPG that "plays like" OD&D and BD&D though it could be mechanically very different. For that purpose, I'm looking for feedback on how you felt pre-3E "played".

For example,
[sblock]

• Rolling 3d6 in order for each ability score.
• Complicated and scattered charts and tables.
• Races as classes.
• Weak low-level mages and powerful high-levle mages.
• Levelling differently.
• Buying guard dogs, henchmen and alchemist's fire instead of fighting.
• Regularly dying and being replaced by new characters.
• DM vs. Players, not DM working with players.
• Clumsy pastiche of pop culture, pulp fiction and mythology.
• Simple game, few options.
• Dungeon as an underworld, where every PC cannot see in the dark and every NPC can.
• Sprawling, nonsensical mega-dungeons.
• Wilderness adventures.
• Invincible overlord.
• NPCs and PCs follow different rules.
• Several different parallel versions of the game.
• Everyone had house rules.

[/sblock]

So how did earlier editions "play" for you?

I'm a little fuzzy on what you mean by "how did/does it play" but this:

Clumsy pastiche of pop culture, pulp fiction and mythology.

is pretty much every FRPG. As soon as you start throwing in big fire breathing flying reptiles, pig-faced dudes who have no inclination except to be bad, guys who memorize formulas from a book and as a result can melt steel and cause 10x10x10 blocks of stone to literally wink out of existence, you have a "clumsy pastiche of..." etc. But the dig is noted nonetheless.

also: "everyone had house rules", again, you're talking about virtually all RPGs, not just fantasy ones, right there. I have yet to find a game master who didn't have something, something in the game that they didn't handwave.


At any rate...AD&D for me, plays like a fantasy combat simulator with very cool and immersive role-play elements provided by myself and the players to the best of our own abilities rather than having them defined by the rules. "Is the king lying?" "Let me repeat what the king said - you tell me if you think your character thinks the king is lying." versus "Is the king lying?" "Give me a sense motive roll."

Is it about the DM being an adversary? Of course! I'm the foeman, the villian, the cold, implacable universe to which there is no appealing nor call for succor. When the characters win, they've defeated a mighty opponent who tried at every turn to best them and they still won. I don't go in for "participatory storytelling".

I guess that right there defines it for me. I challenge the players characters (and therefore indirectly the players themselves) to the best of my ability. It's the way they want to game, and the way I want to game. If I lighten up and let situations slide, let them win without a real challenge...then it cheapens the whole game experience and we have less fun.

 

[WayneLigon]

Rolling 3d6 in order for each ability score.
Never seen anyone do this, ever.

Complicated and scattered charts and tables.
It was a pain, but almost all games had tons of charts and tables early on until we started seeing skill-based games. It was just the way things were done.

Races as classes.
Only OD&D does this; it was something quickly dropped when 1E came out and never used again.

Weak low-level mages and powerful high-levle mages.
It was frustrating.

Levelling differently.
Level differences usually meant a 1-2 game difference in level, that was all. And being different levels was not nearly as critical in pre-3E D&D especially if you were not a spellcaster.

Buying guard dogs, henchmen and alchemist's fire instead of fighting.
That kinda depended on the party and the GM. I've seen some paranoid groups of players that had gypsy wagons tricked out with gear to prevent them from so much as losing a hit point, but henchmen and the rest were adjuncts to fightning, not a replacement for it.

Regularly dying and being replaced by new characters.
It could be a pain, but most GMs I played under could tailor an encounter to keep the game from being a non-sensical meat grinder. Some people seemed to have liked that aspect of it, but we found it trite and boring after the first few times.

DM vs. Players, not DM working with players.
While I've seen this happen it tended to be a self-correcting situation. There were so many games and GMs floating around here in the early days that if a GM got uppity, players just left him for another. I know there was even 'GM advice' to never give the players an even break but for the most part we treated that like the sophmoric nonsense it was.

Clumsy pastiche of pop culture, pulp fiction and mythology.
I don't understand this one. This doesn't happen post-0/1/2E? Of course it does, depending on the GM's world.

I can't say I've ever seen anyone ever, ever run D&D - or any other RPG - as some strict 'you're in the days of King Arthur' re-creation of any one time period or use a narrow genre. Maybe there are some that did but I've not encountered them in 30+ years of gaming.

Simple game, few options.
We made it a non-simple game with many options. Pretty much every third-party publisher recognized the holes in D&D early on and made things to fix them. Extra classes, sub-systems such as skills, romance rules, alchemy rules, rules for building your own magic items, additional or replacement weapons systems, replacement magic systems (Rolemaster began as one of these), re-done spells, additional spells (including 'utility spells' for things like 'Make Pregnancy Easier'), we used what we needed. There was quite a wealth of it, even in the pre-internet days. If there was a hole, people filled it and this is not even counting all the Dragon articles. Of xourse back then, there were many more magazines for gaming. White Dwarf was an awesome gaming magazine before it became a miniatures catalog. Different Worlds, Space Gamer, Fantasy Gamer, and others were chock full of variants, fixes and substitutions for various systems.

Dungeon as an underworld, where every PC cannot see in the dark and every NPC can.
Um, every PC except for humans already could see in the dark. I don't understand why this statement is here.

Sprawling, nonsensical mega-dungeons.
That got old really quickly, so we stopped doing it. We were doing 'hey dungeons had to have water sources, food sources, etc etc' long before I saw the first articles about such things.

Wilderness adventures.
This is different between editions? I suppose so if you were part of that earliest year or 18 months of OD&D gaming, but by the time the third supplement was out people were roaming all over the wilderness and having entire campaigns inside cities, etc.

Invincible overlord.
The single best third-party resource for many, many years. It was sad that subsequent things from Judge's Guild never followed up on it's greatness.

NPCs and PCs follow different rules.
Yeah, that stuck in our craw a lot. We disliked it intensely. One of the reasons for moving away from D&D in some people's cases.

Several different parallel versions of the game.
You mean 'several' as in 'two'? I never knew anyone to use the Basic D&D line for anything except idea books; never saw anyone play it after 1E was introduced. It might have been something you gave your kid brother for Christmas but by June he'd have graduated to 1E and put that away. We did mine the modules for maps and ideas, especially the very nice Known World series, and Night's Dark Terror. But at the end of the day we didn't consider Basic 'the real game'.

Now, here is where my experience is significantly different from people who came into the game later. I was almost 17 when I was introduced to the three brown books. D&D was something college kids did, not high-schoolers. I was already in college by the time I saw the first Basic sets, so they held no interest to me or the majority of the people who were gaming at the time. It was something we'd already passed through and felt that 'races as classes' was a huge step backwards. We were always kinda baffled it even existed.

Everyone had house rules.
Here you finally come to the main difference.

It was simply assumed one would have a hefty book of house rules, or be using one of the more extensive third-party system replacement texts. After seeing games with skill systems or better magic systems, it was simply impossible to go back to D&D-as-written, so we only seldom did.

Sure, we'd get a burst of nostalgia where we're go 'Hey, let's get back simple ol' D&D as written'. 'Yeah, that'll be fun!" and it would last three or four games before we'd remember why we used house rules, and start a new house-rules campaign.

 

[RobJN]

I can 't speak for how AD&D 'feels' in play, never having played enough to develop much of a feel for it, but I can say that Basic D&D played nearly nothing like the bullet points you outline in the OP.

In many games, my players did, in fact, run 3d6 in-order characters. After a bit, we went to 4d6, drop the lowest, but the PCs did remarkably well with the original rules. So what if the Fighter didn't have an 18 STR? So he wasn't the strongest man in the world. He bought a helmet and got over it.

All the tables the PCs needed to play were right there on the side of the DM screen. Their Saves and the amount of XP they needed for the next level were written on their character sheets. There was no "complication" nor "scattering" of charts until it came time to hop from Basic to Expert and then to Companion sets. But then you just pulled out the next boxed set and moved on to the adventure...

"Races as classes" and "levelling differently" went hand in hand. If you played an elf, you payed for that ability to use magic and fight with a hefty dose of XP.

My games certainly weren't "DM vs Players" affairs. Sure, the DM challenged the characters and their players, but outside of combat, the relationship was not adversarial. Maybe you're thinking of Hackmaster.

One thing the earlier editions didn't do was coddle the players by inherently stacking the sysem in favor of PC success. There was less min-maxing. As a player, your wits counted just as much as your sword arm in dealing with the challenges the DM threw at you. There was more on the DM's shoulders in terms of arbitrating those types of encounters rather than letting the dice decide the outcome outside of combat.

Oh, and take a look at the Weapon Mastery rules in the Masters set or Rules Cyclopedia and tell me that's "simple."

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

A few comments on your list:

Rolling 3d6 in order

The idea with this is "take what fate gives you and see if you can make it work." It's a challenge, which is part of the fun. In my experience, there's a different attitude when starting a 1st level PC "old school:" you start with a blank slate. You see what fate gives you. Then you start imagining, from there. Any background you give the PC is sketchy; a more elaborate background will come about through play...if he survives. You might roll up a backup 1st level PC "just in case."

This is a very different attitude and approach than the popular one, these days, where you envision the PC you want to play and *create* him, complete with background, et cetera. (In some cases, you even have an idea of his "destiny.")

I should also note that ability scores weren't as important, originally.

Complicated and scattered charts and tables

Complicated? I wouldn't characterize them as such (although I'm coming from a white box OD&D point-of-view). Typically the PCs one or two charts that apply to them, and they can write down the column or row that applies directly on their character sheet, or just rely on the DM (who has the relevant tables at hand on his screen or in his DM Ref Sheets).

Weak low-level mages/powerful high-level mages
Leveling differently
I comment on the different power-curves in my musing on experience and advancement.

Henchmen, hirelings, guard dogs, et cetera
This is certainly something that I associate with older edition play. Adventuring parties were often quite large. Henchmen provide a source of replacement PCs, in case of PC death. Hirelings (including men-at-arms) provide additional muscle, torch-bearers, and such. All NPCs provide a rich source of role-playing interaction and dynamism to the situation. Loyalty, morale, and such become very important considerations, especially if the NPCs are strong enough to start considering the PCs an easy source of instant wealth.

Regular Dying and PC replacement
I touched on this earlier. It's all about attitude and expectations.

DM vs. Players, not working with the players
Eh, I'm not really with you on this one. I think this is more of a caricature than anything. I think an old school DM's role is to act as a judge or referee: an impartial arbiter. In my games, I'm rooting for the PCs, but I play the monsters and present the challenges accurately and appropriately. However, when I play the monsters against the PCs, I still chuckle evilly when I make a good roll or pull off something nasty. Superficially it might *seem* like I'm a vicious bastard enjoying my attempts to kill them, but that's not the whole picture. I think a lot of the "DM vs. players" thing comes from this type of thing.

Clumsy pastiche of pop culture, pulp fiction, and mythology
Yeah, I guess. I wouldn't say that's necessarily an old school distinctive, though.

Simple Game, few options
Yes, although I'd say something like "fewer codified options/systems." Much more left open to DM adjudication. I don't find that a simpler system means fewer options in play, though. Again, there's something of an attitude difference, here. What the PC does (or can do) in a given situation comes very much from what the player wants to attempt, rather than a list of options on his PC sheet. And the DM has a lot of leeway to handle this or interpret it.

I don't consider these holes to be patched, or areas where new rules need to be applied. Rather, they're areas where rulings need to be made as individual situations come up.

Dungeon as an underworld, where every PC cannot see in the dark and every NPC can.
Sprawling, nonsensical mega-dungeons
This is a subject I talk about in my musing on the dungeon as an underworld. I'm big on the concept of the "underworld," which goes a long way towards mitigating and explaining the "nonsense factor;" it provides a believable reason for the weirdness. Of course, not every dungeon need be a megadungeon or a mythic/mystical underworld, but I think most old school campaign should have one.

Wayne, your point/question non-humans already being able to see in the dark is answered in that dungeon/underworld musing I linked to, above.

Wilderness adventures
The thing about old-school wilderness adventures is that they were often "hex-crawl" type of things, where they PCs mapped out an uncharted wilderness, et cetera. The focus was on exploring the unknown. That theme of "exploring the unknown" is also very prevalent in old school dungeon play.

Invincible Overlord
I love Judges Guild stuff. The Wilderlands is probably my favorite published setting.

NPCs and PCs follow different rules
Yes. Here's my take: the rules for PC creation and advancement are there because that's central to the idea of the PC. PCs can be in the game a long time, advancing over that period; they benefit from a framework that guides their advancement and development. NPCs and monsters simply don't need to be built by the same set of rules. They don't need the advancement guides; they need whatever abilities and stats the DM wants for them to have. It needn't be explained in terms of PC rules; not everything in the campaign world is built on PC rules.

Several different parallel version of the game
Hah, yeah. My early games were a mix of Holmes and AD&D, with a few things from B/X and Holmes D&D making appearances at times, too. At the time, we didn't really draw big distinctions between the various sets of rules, although there are quite a few.

Everyone had house rules
Sure. I'm not sure that's necessarily limited to old school, though.

Okay, all that said, here's a few things to consider:

Challenge the players, not just the PCs
Touched on above.

A focus on exploring the unknown
Touched on above.

Let the players drive the story, and let the story develop through play
(Another aspect of this is letting the players go where they want. They should be able to go straight to the 7th level of the dungeon, if they want to. They should be able to go to the wilderness lair of Snagcatha the Wyrm if they want to. They shouldn't assume that they are on a track where everything they encounter is placed there with their general levels and capabilities in mind. This also made scouting very important. And also research and rumors about a particular site. You tried to see what was ahead of you, and you had to know when to run. And when you ran, you had to know how to prevent or delay pursuit. Hold portal. Wizard Lock. Iron spikes wedged under doors. Drop food. Drop treasure. Et cetera. All this is very old school.)

Rulings, not rules
Touched on above.

Heroic, not superheroic scale
PCs start of pretty weak -- barely more capable than the average man. Even at higher levels, they're never Superman. They're Batman.

Fewer XP for monsters, more more treasure (or goals)
XP for treasure is a story goal, where the story is "PCs seek fortune and glory." In old school play, you didn't get very much XP from combat, compared to the XP you got from treasure (the goal). This encouraged goal-oriented play. Wandering monsters were to be avoided, as they sap resources without having much treasure. Clever ways to acquire the treasure without fighting were always good. An old school approach rewards the goal. Killing the things is actually incidental...it's taking their stuff that's really important.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I forgot to comment on this:

Races as classes
I think the race-as-class thing got taken a lot farther and more literally than it was originally intended. In the OD&D rules, Dwarves and Elves and Hobbits weren't technically classes; it's just that all Dwarven PCs were Fighting Men, and all Elven PCs were both Fighting Men and Magic Users, et cetera. Later editions made this implied race-as-class approach official. Still later adventures and supplements implied that ALL elves used the PC elf rules, et cetera.

I think the original approach was just a convenient shorthand. That is, it was a humanocentric campaign world (that was a very common assumption of fantasy, at the time). It didn't mean that every Elf on the planet was a classed Fighter/Magic-User, it just meant that all PC Elves were, because that was the archetype, and the kind of Elf adventurer that would be expected.

Actually, the same goes for human classes. For example, I think that the Cleric class got taken far too literally as "priests and holy men of all sorts are classed Clerics." I don't think that's a good approach. Instead, the Cleric represents the kind of priest of holy man that would go on these types of adventures. A templar-style warrior-priest.

I touch on some of this in my musing on class and race. I think it's also associated with the "not everything in the world is built on the PC rules" concept. In my campaign, there's no reason that a 0-level holy man can't be the High Priest of a given church -- and he can probably cast raise dead, too, even though he's a 0-level "normal man" without a class.