D&D General I'm a Fighter, not a Lover: Why the 1e Fighter was so Awesome

[The Soloist]

Few examples of 1E rules that I never saw anyone actually using. These were widely considered poor ideas from the start:

• Combat rounds divided into 10 "segments." Everyone tried to make that work.... Shortly thereafter, they gave up. Dumb idea.
• Weapon modifiers based on the opponent’s armor type. Too complex. Most people dropped it.
• Elf, dwarf, halflings, etc. level caps for some classes. Widely loathed. Most people ignored it.
• Weapon speed factors. Way too complex. You would have been hard-pressed to find anyone who used that when it came out.
• Psionics. Almost no one -- and I mean no one -- used the rules for psionics as they were intended and written. Maybe they added a thing or two, but no one was following the psionics rules straight from the book.
• Grappling. Same as psionics. They were widely considered too complex and unnecessary from the start.

You will find many people who played by these rules, but not here. There are specialized forums for this type of game play. As wargamers first, they played by the rules as they understood them. It's a frame of mind.

 

[kermit4karate]

You will find many people who played by these rules, but not here. There are specialized forums for this type of game play. As wargamers first, they played by the rules as they understood them. It's a frame of mind.

I do agree that there will always be people who choose to believe in, or adhere to, any concept or framework conceived of by man.... I'll give you that, but I think things like that say more about "people" than anything else. I'd love to see how they do using the 1E rules for grappling and Psionics! Good luck to 'em!

 

[mixmastashizz]

I do agree that there will always be people who choose to believe in, or adhere to, any concept or framework conceived of by man.... I'll give you that, but I think things like that say more about "people" than anything else. I'd love to see how they do using the 1E rules for grappling and Psionics! Good luck to 'em!

Its working well enough for my group who is relatively new to 1e (~1.5 years)

The WvAC, Weapon Speed, Psionics, Unarmed Combat stuff isn't so bad. Initiative taken in an OSRIC style lens helps a lot.

It flows pretty smoothly for us now after about a month of playing. Though my group collectively understands there are times when the game flows fast, and times where itll flow slow to determine important timing interactions. Its life or death after all!

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

You will find many people who played by these rules, but not here. There are specialized forums for this type of game play. As wargamers first, they played by the rules as they understood them. It's a frame of mind.

I'm not entirely sure about "many people," as I would argue you would need very small values of "many" for that to be correct.

But that's the thing. I don't think that there is a single rule in AD&D that you can't find someone, somewhere, that will claim that they played using it and/or they loved it. It's the nature of the beast. Well, if "the beast" is AD&D.

Which is why I don't think it's helpful to think of AD&D as a single unified ruleset. Instead, it's best to think of it as a collection of rules, heuristics, and norms. That there are rules and then there are ... suggestions. Optional subsystems presented as rules. Conflicts that must be ironed out. And so on. In addition, there was the constant influx and interplay with other subsystems and rules (from other TSR-era editions, from other 3PPs, from Dragon, etc.) that would get mixed and matched.

In other words, I think of it like this-

There are core assumptions (rules) that almost everyone used. A fighter gets d10 hp per level. A fireball is a 3rd level spell that does d6 damage per level of the caster.

Then there are suggestions that might be followed. A fireball explodes into volume and might not be the best spell to cast in a dungeon. Items have saving throws, and that fireball (or the fall) might destroy your precious ... um, your magic items. And so on.

There are subsystems that people may or may not use. The pummeling/grappling/overbearing system. The psionics system.

It's an interesting way to look at the game- not as a collection of rules that must be followed, but a collection of rules and suggestions that might apply to your game.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Something that's being lost here, and I played and DM'd AD&D from the very beginning, is that people back then used house rules and homebrews just as often as people nowadays do -- in fact, more often than they do now. It was customary to create and try your own new rules, borrow ideas from every issue of Dragon, from tournaments, movies, friends and other tables, play D&D using firearms, superheroes characters, Thundercats, Predators or xenomorphs -- people were doing that right out the gate with D&D.

The rigidity with which many view and deconstruct the different D&D editions is relatively recent. When we talk about balance of a particular edition and the "feel" or how well a particular mechanic did/didn't work, keep in mind that most tables, back when these editions were new, were not playing those editions in a vacuum. People were already playing hybridized versions of AD&D with different house rules at every table.

But in this thread, as is so often the case here when discussing D&D (or AD&D), the different versions are being discussed as self-contained things that are completely distinct from each other. D&D has never in my firsthand experience ever actually been played that way.

I don't think it's being lost by folks. Heck, we even mentioned this several times in the thread re: houserules. The reason we (I) are talking in the context of RAW is because that's the baseline. Basically, at least for me, it's, "We ignore or houserule all these things that favored the fighter, then complain how the fighter sucks."

That's why talking RAW, even if that's how none of us played, is important when discussing just how good the fighter actually was designed.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Few examples of 1E rules that I never saw anyone actually using. These were widely considered poor ideas from the start:

• Combat rounds divided into 10 "segments." Everyone tried to make that work.... Shortly thereafter, they gave up. Dumb idea.
• Weapon modifiers based on the opponent’s armor type. Too complex. Most people dropped it.
• Elf, dwarf, halflings, etc. level caps for some classes. Widely loathed. Most people ignored it.
• Weapon speed factors. Way too complex. You would have been hard-pressed to find anyone who used that when it came out.
• Psionics. Almost no one -- and I mean no one -- used the rules for psionics as they were intended and written. Maybe they added a thing or two, but no one was following the psionics rules straight from the book.
• Grappling. Same as psionics. They were widely considered too complex and unnecessary from the start.

Funny enough, the current 1e game I'm in is completely RAW and uses all of that. I even created a thread about it here

 

[kermit4karate]

Its working well enough for my group who is relatively new to 1e (~1.5 years)

The WvAC, Weapon Speed, Psionics, Unarmed Combat stuff isn't so bad. Initiative taken in an OSRIC style lens helps a lot.

It flows pretty smoothly for us now after about a month of playing. Though my group collectively understands there are times when the game flows fast, and times where itll flow slow to determine important timing interactions. Its life or death after all!

Then perhaps the 1E rules for Psionics, Unarmed Combat and Weapon Speed are like wine and get better with age....

The last time I tried cod liver oil I thought it was disgusting, but it has been a while. Maybe I should give it another try.

 

[kermit4karate]

Funny enough, the current 1e game I'm in is completely RAW and uses all of that. I even created a thread about it here

Funnily enough but not surprising. People can choose to like anything.

 

[kermit4karate]

That's why talking RAW, even if that's how none of us played, is important when discussing just how good the fighter actually was designed.

"...just how good the fighter actually was designed."

That's the part that I don't think playing RAW helps determine. There are too many other, long-ago abandoned rules and mechanics that influence a game within which a 1E fighter appears, to isolate the fighter and conclude how well/poorly those rules perform.

I would say that you're in uncharted waters because people back in the day didn't follow the 1E rules religiously. I'll say again, I never saw anyone try and stick to (for any length of time, like a campaign) the 1E rules as they were written. They tried but quickly deemed many of them flawed.

It didn't stop the game's eventual takeover of the TTRPG world because, again, nothing was stopping people from changing the rules, but the rules were never wholly adopted as written.

 

[The Soloist]

I'm not entirely sure about "many people," as I would argue you would need very small values of "many" for that to be correct.

But that's the thing. I don't think that there is a single rule in AD&D that you can't find someone, somewhere, that will claim that they played using it and/or they loved it. It's the nature of the beast. Well, if "the beast" is AD&D.

Which is why I don't think it's helpful to think of AD&D as a single unified ruleset. Instead, it's best to think of it as a collection of rules, heuristics, and norms. That there are rules and then there are ... suggestions. Optional subsystems presented as rules. Conflicts that must be ironed out. And so on. In addition, there was the constant influx and interplay with other subsystems and rules (from other TSR-era editions, from other 3PPs, from Dragon, etc.) that would get mixed and matched.

In other words, I think of it like this-

There are core assumptions (rules) that almost everyone used. A fighter gets d10 hp per level. A fireball is a 3rd level spell that does d6 damage per level of the caster.

Then there are suggestions that might be followed. A fireball explodes into volume and might not be the best spell to cast in a dungeon. Items have saving throws, and that fireball (or the fall) might destroy your precious ... um, your magic items. And so on.

There are subsystems that people may or may not use. The pummeling/grappling/overbearing system. The psionics system.

It's an interesting way to look at the game- not as a collection of rules that must be followed, but a collection of rules and suggestions that might apply to your game.

Fair... and they've been and are dying of old age. The first cohort is in their 70s and 80s. We lost a few last Winter. No more posts. Then months later we get the news. Never met them but it's sad.

My group had no problem using 10 segment rounds, up until the end of 2e, even with individual initiative. The M-U insisted on it, it made sense to us. Race level limits were thing at my table. Weapon vs Armor modifier were important to us.

Speed factor was one step too much for us. Psionics never came up as no one rolled high enough. I vaguely remember devils and demons used them against the party. Grappling? I can't recall.