Inconsistant/Arbitrary rules...

[Keefe the Thief]

What took the cake for me as a wiz... i mean magic-user-player was the spread of good and bad spells over levels in AD&D. Total "meh" levels directly beside levels filled with spells so awesome and all-applicable it hurt. Getting level 3 spells as a M-U was orgasmic.
But even back then i always asked myself.. why? Why does the cleric get a couple of levels with mildly interesting heal-guys stuff and then BAM - hold person a.k.a. "rape the opposition, dude!" Why is Sleep just so much more useful? And why does something like Fireshield look so cool - but never gets memorized because most of the time, other stuff was more awesome?
AD&D + an at will/encounter/utility-split for spells would have been killer.

 

[DeusExMachina]

The poisition rules for flanking never made much sense to me. So I get why two people attacking one enemy from two sides get a bonus. The enemy needs to defend 2 sides, needs to divide his attention.
However the third guy moving in and attacking him does not get the flank bonus because there is nobody directly opposite on the other side of th enemy helping him? The enemy now divides his attention between 3 attackers, but that third one is somehow easier to defend against than the first 2???

 

[roguerouge]

Darkvision and Hide in Shadows rules in 2e. Hide in Shadows allows you to avoid detection from both darkvision and normal vision. Unfortunately, hiding in shadows would entail finding a place that matched your body temperature--near a roaring fire, say, for humans. That would be a bad place to hide against anyone with normal vision.

Now imagine you're hiding from one person using darkvision and another person using normal vision.

 

[Hussar]

Y'know, in 1e, I never worried too much about the conflicting stuff. Like others, I probably just ignored it and ignorance was bliss. What always bugged me was the schitzophrenic nature of the books. Taking a 2e example, and the Complete Priest, and you get two completely opposite opinions about what a specialty priest should be. In the PHB, they point to the Druid as a specialty priest example. IN the Complete Priest, they take clerics out, beat the ever living crap out of it with nerf bats and stuff it back in a soft cover book.

1e suffered from this as well. Going by what the DMG said, I should have been playing a low magic, gritty game where magical items were special and whatnot. Going by the modules, written by the same guys that wrote those hard cover books, I got more loot in a single encounter than I could spend in a lifetime.

 

[MerricB]

1e suffered from this as well. Going by what the DMG said, I should have been playing a low magic, gritty game where magical items were special and whatnot. Going by the modules, written by the same guys that wrote those hard cover books, I got more loot in a single encounter than I could spend in a lifetime.

Actually, once I got to know the 1e DMG... a lot later in life, long after I stopped playing AD&D... I discovered that it didn't actually say run a low magic, gritty world.

What it actually said was:

* Don't give away so many magic items that they make the characters overpowered.
* At low levels, be extra careful.

Cheers!

 

[Ariosto]

Most early TSR modules originated as tournament rounds. As such, they were not necessarily the best examples for campaign play. Judges Guild releases were quite variable in all regards, and the City State in particular reflects some standards and assumptions specific to JG rather than "baseline" D&D.

The characterization of AD&D as "low magic" makes me wonder ... relative to what?