Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 4451107" data-attributes="member: 32740">I only ever saw this in OD&D and even then you could still make adjustments.  Not MANY adjustments as you were sacrificing one stat at a rate of 2 points for a 1 point increase in your "prime requisite" stats, but it was never, EVER 3d6, in order without changes. Scattered, yes.  Complicated, no.  Well, I shouldn't really say that, 1E combat rules regarding surprise and initiative were STUPIDLY complicated and with details spread everywhere.  IIUC not even GARY used it as written - he put it in as a sop for the grognards of the time who just couldn't live without such foolishness.  For surprise and initiative most people _I_ knew used house rules much like 2E long before 2E came along.Never played much OD&D before moving to 1E and never played ANY BECMI which are the only two places you find this.  AFAIC nobody really missed it in moving from OD&D to AD&D.Yep.  It really isn't too hard to institute house rules to keep them from sucking quite so badly at low levels but then it's harder to keep them from being dominant at high levels.  Never did see a solution to the problem at the time that I cared for.  Mostly you just lived with it and made sure that tactically wizards at least didn't get a free pass - keep them harrassed whenever possible. Levelling up always took TIME in-game.  There was no video-game "ding" and suddenly you attack better, defend better, know more spells, have new abilities, etc.  Neither approach is particularly appealing though as DM I always appreciated the "downtime" it created as characters levelled that allowed a more gradual introduction to new adventures, characters that had opportunity to do more than JUST crawl through dungeons, and so forth. Not, "instead of", but, "as a valuable supplement to..."  It also drove a certain amount of creativity and player-driven campaign development. Yep.  But it got old fast.  At least by late 1E it was my experience that you'd go through several low-level characters but then you'd eventually get survivors (even if by sheer luck) and not have to worry about it.  With a VASTLY simpler character creation process it was at least FAST to whip up those replacements.  I got so I could do it between encounters and IME at least players explored a LOT of different characters in doing so. Well it was more... tolerated I guess you'd say, in the old days.  Mostly because nobody really knew any better.  But again IME, the more time you'd get as a DM the more you knew that that sort of mindset could too easily kill the fun for everyone. Pulp fiction and mythology yes, but the only paen I ever saw to pop culture was the advent of the Drizzt-inspired ranger - which was, IMO, a tragic mistake. You say that like it's a bad thing.  The game sure played faster and was easier to run off-the-cuff.  Game prep could be as little as a few minutes rolling up hit points or random encounters.  Stat blocks?  What the hell are those?  You roll up their hit points maybe but the actual data on the critters is what you had a MM for. Now you're talking!  And that's the way it SHOULD be! Naw.  They were a rarity IME.  Biggest dungeon in pre-3E was probably Temple of Elemental Evil and it was hardly worthy of being called a "mega-dungeon" and certainly wasn't nonsensical.  Really that sort of thing started in 2E with places like Undermountain, and only really became a problem in 3E when everyone and his brother started shovelling out mega-dungeons that put anything from 1E to shame - and this for an edition whose paradigm screamed for SMALLER dungeons, SHORTER adventures than previous editions had seen because of the increased, measured pace of advancement. When players were too bored to pick up clues to an adventure, or when I as DM was too bored to bother creating one the PC's used to go "wilderness adventuring".  They'd pick a direction and march, then just see what the random encounter tables threw at them. If you mean the City State of the Invincible Overlord then yes, yes, a thousand times yes.  That place stood in for EVERY major city in EVERY campaign I ran or played in until FR started detailing every city with a population over 50. They still do - in MY games anyway. Not where I came from.  It was years before I knew there was still that OTHER version and it got ignored entirely by everyone.  IME, of course.  And even so there were just two versions of the game - AD&D and Basic D&D.  When 2nd Edition came along there may have been holdouts who didn't make the switch but they had nobody to complain to publicly and nobody cared.  There were always just two versions - the current version of AD&D and whatever other people played. The only difference between then and now is that back then house rules were necessary to make the game what YOU wanted it to be, they were openly accepted as part of the hobby, and while people even then argued about what the ACTUAL rules said and meant, anybody who tried to claim that house rules weren't just part and parcel of the hobby but YOUR RIGHT AND RESPONSIBILITY would be laughed at until they shut up. YMMV</blockquote>

Verification