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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Irda Ranger" data-source="post: 4452167" data-attributes="member: 1003">Eh. The above are play styles. They're not limited to AD&D and OD&D. I like "Wilderness adventures" and games where "Buying guard dogs, henchmen and alchemist's fire", so that's what my 4E game is like.  Certain of the others (Underworld, mega-dungeons, pastiche) I have used or not used in AD&D and 3E/4E alike. As for "DM vs. PC", I can live without it, in any edition. It's stupid anyway, since a DM that wanted to "win" can do so whenever he feels like.Rolling 3d6 in order for each ability score.Partly this is (as Philotomy Juriment described) about letting the game choose for you what class you're going to play. Rather than come to the table with preconceived notions, you simply sat at the table and said "Deal me a hand." You played the best you could with the hand you were dealt, and success or failure was measured against the difficulties you overcame (including a sucky Con).  In 4E everything has to be "fair", but OD&D recognized that life is never fair, and we respect each other for coming from different backgrounds with different handycaps.Back then, "character building" didn't mean the same thing at all.But if you're asking about "low" stats, you're missing the point. The real difference was that stats mattered less. You could have a Fighter with 11 Str and it just didn't matter that much. As long as you qualified for the class, you were in. That's the real difference.Complicated and scattered charts and tables.Complicated? Not really. And if they were scattered, it just taught me to use my memory. I had all the table's page numbers memorized, and the most frequently used ones I could open the book right to without the benefit of a bookmark or nothin'. Frankly, it's just a different kind of "system mastery", and 3E's version was one I wasn't ever that fond of anyway.Races as classes.This was OD&D only, and it was lousy. I moved on to AD&D in this respect and never looked back.Weak low-level mages and powerful high-level mages.This had an interesting effect. It was understood that the wizard had to be protected at low levels, and that he would return the favor at higher levels. We were a band of brothers, and the wizard rarely needed reminding that "You'd be dead a hundred times over if it weren't for the rest of us." A simple concept governed here: gratitude.Raistlin was Evil in many ways, but one of the key ways was that he accepted his brother's protection when he needed it, but never returned the favor.Levelling differently.Just a different kind of class balance.Simple game, few options.Maybe the Core was. We complicated it quickly enough. This is one respect in which 4E is better. By providing simple non-combat rules for Skill Challenges and such they provide a guide for making house rules that are simple and intuitive. NPCs and PCs follow different rules.Huh?Look, the PCs don't get to see over the DM Screen. They don't know how an NPC was built, or how he came by his skills, or what his equipment can do. All they can see are: AC, HP, Dmg, BAB (or their pre-3E equivalents). As long as the NPC has those variables, and they match up with the PCs variables, it's "the same rules" as far as I am concerned.  The PC classes are built for players do make characters, not for DMs to make NPCs.  They're a means to an end; not an end of themselves.Everyone had house rules.And that's different from 3E/4E how? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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