I've never played AD&D1

[MerricB]

I know 3.x uses cyclical initiative, but don't players have to declare their character's actions prior to the first round of combat?

No. You declare and resolve when it is your turn.

Cheers!

 

[Agamon]

No. You declare and resolve when it is your turn.

Not only that, you can partially declare and resolve during your turn. If you cast Magic Missile, you can use as many missiles as it takes to kill one creature and then have the rest attack another. Or if you have mutiple attacks in a round, you can attack once, and if that's enough to drop the foe, move instead. Otherwise you can keep attacking.

So 3E is basically the exact opposite of 1E when it comes to this.

 

[dcas]

If you cast Magic Missile, you can use as many missiles as it takes to kill one creature and then have the rest attack another.

Do you mean that you can shoot 3 missiles at a kobold, check to see if it is dead, and then have the remaining missiles strike another foe? Or only that you can decide which magic missiles hit which targets when your turn comes around?

 

[Agamon]

Do you mean that you can shoot 3 missiles at a kobold, check to see if it is dead, and then have the remaining missiles strike another foe?

No, actually you can't. That was a bad, no, false example. My bad.

 

[tx7321]

But most of that other stuff (e.g. "Attacks directed at spell casters will come on that segment of the round shown on the opponent's or on their own side's initiative die, whichever is applicable" -- with absolutely no indication how you're supposed to decide which is applicable!) I agree -- Yuck!

Interesting to know there are so many different interpretations of the rules.



As far as stating before you role, I suppose we missed this as well until reading it at DF.
At first I was like you and didn't like it. However, it makes since and now always use it.
You would infact start acting before you know if your going to win the upper hand and get to act first.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't know how typical I am, but I tended to simultaneously adhere closer to the rules AND to have more and more house rules as my 1st edition games went on. This was because I'd get disatisfied with the way some action was resolving, I'd go ahead and dig through the DMG and finally pay attention to it, but then I'd not really like the rule exactly as written and would try to adapt it.

So I guess I've never played 1 ed. AD&D either. Every DM I knew had various house rules. Almost everyone but me ignored the 'weapon vs. AC' table.

I initially started out playing something like Basic D&D with AD&D feel. But then I noticed a couple things that annoyed me. One was that swords - longswords and two-handed swords in particular - were the 'best' weapons in the game used to the exclusion of all others and for good reason. That didn't fit with what I knew from my increasing knowledge of medieval combat. Then I really noticed that confusing 'weapon vs. AC' table for the first time. Suddenly it made sense. Spears, picks, and maces were actually really good weapons. They didn't do as much damage, but against the tough foes they were more likely to hit.

This created a problem though. I realized that not all AC was created equal. A character with no armor and a +2 leather armor didn't have AC 2. He had AC 8 with a +6 bonus! I divided AC into two categories, AC (armor class) and AB (armor bonus). Figuring out the appropriate AC in the case of an NPC was easy. But figuring it out for monsters was harder. To do it, I had to figure out which part of the AC was from DEX, size, and 'magic bonus' and which part was from 'armor' and 'hide'. Then I had an AC and AB. Still, I only had to do this once when the monster was first used, and then I could just make a note of it.

Most everything worked great, except I didn't like the 'weapon vs. AC' bonuses for axes, so I house ruled those to a level between picks and swords, and I also ruled that certain well made weapons could use the best of two or even three lists (in the case of some pole arms) depending on how you wielded them. Once I figured out to prepare to hit tables for each PC with thier various commonly used weapons ahead of time, the system even worked smoothly.

I had lingering unease with the fact that there was no 'claw', 'talon', 'bite', 'gore', 'horn', 'trample, and 'fang' category on the weapon to hit ac chart (a clear oversight) but I never ended up dealing with that.

Sometime in the middle of this I discovered the weapon speed factors and other issues relating to the initiative system. Some of it seemed like a good idea, but some of it seemed just wrong from my own melee combat experience. Sure, a dagger was a handier weapon, but in practice the spear would always get the first attack and would tend to keep the initiative right up to the 'killing' blow. So I assumed Gygax had the right idea but just got it wrong. The problem was I couldn't figure out how to make it right. That's when I hit on the idea of the 'parry'. If your weapon was significantly longer than your opponent's weapon, when he made an attack roll, you got to try to beat it. If you did, he got the option of either taking damage as from an attack or losing his own attack. You could do this as many times per round as your attacks per round. That slowed things down a bit, but it made combats more interesting and 'cinematic' and it solved the problem of long weapons losing the initiative but could still get the 'first' attack. And it made spears and pole arms even more powerful, which was inline with my readings of martial history.

What I discovered was this 'parry' concept had wide application. It further answered questions like, "Why do Saughin use weapons when thier natural attacks do so much more damage?", "Why is being large such a drawback with no real advantage?", and in general, "Why isn't it a good idea to box with a guy who is wielding a sword?". I quickly decided that an age old problem I'd always had with a person doing something silly like reading a book or quaffing a potion or firing a bow or whatever didn't involve protecting himself from melee attack could be resolved by saying that the action drew an 'automatic parry'.

I used the grappling system from the DMG, but not the unarmed attacks because it wasn't necessary given the other rules previously mentioned. Grappling proved to be really powerful, but it did draw an 'auto parry' against an armed foe. Many a time was my players swarmed by grappling zombies to be cut down by the horde.

I had alot of rules and they changed about every month or two. I was working on rules for 'clinching'. I had developed a proto-DR system, but had never hit upon the great idea of fixing 'need +1 or better' to hit (even though it annoyed the heck out of me). Eventually, I grew tired of the house rules, the persisting problems with action resolution, the lack of balance between classes, the fact that most ability scores didn't matter (mainly because it encouraged cheating during character creation), the lack of a skill system and all sorts of things. So, I switched to GURPS.

When 3rd edition came out, I initially wasn't interested. Then a friend showed me the PH and I realized that this was the game system I was always trying and failing to make out of 1st edition.

I still miss the weapon vs. AC modifiers. They added alot to the game in my opinion, and though I probably wouldn't do them exactly like 1st edition I'm still tempted to bring them back. I would bring them back if 3rd edition combat wasn't already so potentially slow and drowning in modifiers.

 

[Aaron L]

Do you mean that you can shoot 3 missiles at a kobold, check to see if it is dead, and then have the remaining missiles strike another foe? Or only that you can decide which magic missiles hit which targets when your turn comes around?

You can't do that, but you can take one attack on one target, and then switch to another target. Or take an attack, and then decide weather to full attack or move depending on if the target is dead or not, for example It's because of the 6 second combat round, much closer to realtime combat than the 1 minute rounds of earlier editions.


But personally, the process of declaring actions, then rolling for initiative, and then actually taking the actions, always seemed way to cumbersome for everyone I've ever played with, and was discarded long before I ever started playing. That;s why I implemented it in one of the first games I ever ran, because I didn't realize how cumbersome it was.


Hell, we even removed the action declaration phase in Battletech because it was just annoying. I'm pretty sure that later editions of Battletech even removed that step.


As someone said, it was an artifact of D&D's wargame roots, and it really only fits in a wargame where there's a lag between command and execution, and the possibility of troops acting on outdated orders from a commander, but when it's an individual acting on his own initiative there isn't really a reason to be committed to a possibly useless action regardless of the current situation. In the middle of a fight most people don't stop once a minute to plan out their actions and then carry through with those actions regardless of what's going on around them, they respond to the current situation immediately, changing their actions in response to what's happening at that moment.

However, it did fit the long and involved spellcasting process that 1E modeled, but not the melee combat. 3E spellcasting is much more like Doctor Strange's spellcasting, dodging and weaving and throwing spells in seconds instead of minutes. (In fact, that's the exact image I got when first reading the 3E PHB spellcasting section, Doc Strange and Dr. Doom fighting Mephisto in an old graphic novel. Combat Casting, indeed! )


But weapon speed rules are just whacked. Yes, a dagger is faster that a two-handed sword, but have you ever tried to attack someone with a two-handed sword while wielding a dagger? You won't get to attack them, because they'll skewer you with their 6 foot long blade while you're trying to get close enough to stick them with your foot long toothpick. 1E had it right, with weapon length being the first determiner, but 2E was just nuts, where all that mattered was the supposed speed of the weapon, and the guy with the dagger got to hit the guy with the two-hander regardless of the weapon's respective lengths. That's the major reason why I dislike weapon speed factors all together.

The weapon vs Ac adjustments I actually really like, but they just proved too cumbersome for everyone but me. I just wrote down a descending matrix on my own character sheet for each weapon, but no one else wanted to bother with it. I liked the fact that a quarterstaff was largely useless against a man in full plate, and maces ignored a large part of a suit of chainmail's protection, but no one else felt it was worth the extra bookkeeping.

Expediency won out. It just didn't add enough to the game to make it worth keeping track of.


And the helmet rule I wanted to enforce at first, but then I started thinking of all the books I've read and movies I've seen where it didn't matter if the hero was wearing a helmet or not, it was his skill that mattered, and I realized I wasn't trying to model reality, but those novels and movies instead. So that rule went away, too.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Not only did I never use all the rules, I never gamed with anyone who I know did (maybe Lawrence Schick, who was in my group at a gaming convention).

I got it into my silly head that I wanted to try that once. ONCE. I plowed ahead with the attempt for a few weeks but when I was unable to get the surprise and initiative rules to make sense I gave it up and slowly (at first, but with increasing acceleration) went back to many of our usual house rules.

Mind you that even resorting to a more faithful adherence to the AD&D1 RAW was superior to the bizzare bastard child of an initiative system that had been in use in the group for a number of years even before I joined.

I can't believe anyone would be unaware, however, that AD&D combat required declaration of actions prior to intiative. It was one of those rules that you loved to hate. Particularly when you declared action X versus enemy Y, but Y got killed by character Z prior to your initiative, and your PC wound up doing nothing. We generally resolved it by shameless meta-gaming so that nobody got left holding the bag, or by accepting a house rule of a Dex roll (or somesuch) needed to change your declared action.

Ahh... the memories, the agonies - the glorious, lovable, pathetic kludge that was AD&D. How I adore it and still want to drive wooden stakes into it and fill its mouth with garlic and holy wafers.

 

[Griffith Dragonlake]

Back in the day when I was running 1st Ed. games I came awfully close to running combat per the RAW. Helmet rules, weapon length, weapon speed, weapon vs. armour, and surprise were the best parts of the combat rules IMHO. Of course I'm also ex-SCA and partial to combat rules that reflect that experience. FWIW, the guys who wrote Runequest were also ex-SCA and that combat system bears a striking resemblence to AD&D 1e rules.

Oh and I also prefer that spellcasting takes minutes and not seconds. I just don't like comic book style magic---not my cuppa tea.

Some of my players whined and some ate it up. The former had no real world combat experience while the latter were either martial artists or SCAdians. Ironically almost all the wargamers fit into the first category. Go figure.

 

[Aaron L]

Well, to be honest, SCA combat doesn't bear that much resemblance to actual medieval combat, either...