D&D General Lethality, AD&D, and 5e: Looking Back at the Deadliest Edition

[MNblockhead]

What planet did you live on that a kid of 13 in the 80's had downed a buck with a bow and arrow? ROTFLMAO. I grew up about as rural as you can get in Canada and I guarantee that ZERO people in my town had done that. Never minding a kid of 13. "Trapped a rabbit"? Good way to get a visit from the game warden.

In my current Minneapolis exburb I can legally kill rabbits in my back yard, any time of the year, without a license. Laws vary state to state but I doubt a game warden or any authority is going to get involved in most locations if you kill a rabbit on your own property.

 

[MNblockhead]

What? You've never had to put a band of brigands to the sword on your way to school?

When I was in elementary school I walked with a girl to school because she was scared of squirrels. In my mind those squirrels qualified as a band of brigands.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I grew up on a farm, some people hunted or fished but they were the exception. I did do a lot of camping, backpacking and probably spent far more time outside than a lot of kids do today. But I don't recall anyone hunting with a bow, much less jumping off a barn into a pile of hay while firing an arrow at a target. Just because I grew up on a farm in the 20th century doesn't mean I was transported back to the 19th century with Huckleberry Finn.

I certainly know of people who did a fair amount of hunting to supplement their food in some rural areas in the 70's. But bow hunting? It might have had some patchy areas where it was used more commonly, but its not like it even vaguely compared to use of a firearm for that purpose. That's probably been true for more than a century now.

 

[MNblockhead]

You never went hunting with a bow and arrow? You know this is a real thing?

And your not exactly growing up in a "rural" area if you just go to a store and buy food like it's 2023. A big part of the rural life is growing, trapping and hunting your own food.

I think we all know bow hunting is a real thing. But it was more of a hobby sport even in rural areas. Most people hunted with guns even "way" back in the 70s. Especially if they cared more about the meat than the sport.

And sure, most people I know in rural Minnesota hunted, fished, and had gardens. They still went grocery shopping. Maybe is was only once a week because it was a long drive and not a quick trip to a corner mart. Also, we had Schwan's delivery groceries in the country long before home-grocery delivery was a thing in most cities and the Sear's catalog before Amazon. I mean, sure, there were (and are) some areas of the country that are so remote that you have to rely on growing and hunting your own food and making your own stuff. But that was certainly not true for most of the US in 1970s and probably not since the late 1800s.

 

[Willie the Duck]

In retrospect, I think Bloodtide was pulling our legs and we all just fell for it. Which, given the theme of the thread, has to be considered well played, sir.

I didn't think we were allowed to call people out on trolling, but I'd fathom a guess most everyone knows he was either seeing how far he could go or doing deliberately over-the-top* kids-these-days self-indulgence and are simply reacting as if they buy it (because what purpose does it serve to call them out? Then it just becomes 'nuh-uh' vs 'uh-huh'). *because, seriously, this is all straight out of Little House on the Prairie-style survivalist notions. Soap is one of the earliest mass-produced commercial products in existence and has incredible economy of scale in the creation process. If your time or efforts are worth anything at all, it is more economically efficient to buy the stuff than make it unless it has to be carted by horse and wagon across a continent or the like.

Trying to salvage some of this, I'll pretend this is in earnest and note that this is one of the reasons why many people have a resistance to the OSR, playing TSR-era D&Ds, or the suggestion of including gameplay loops those systems favored over what has come since. There is value in some of these things like making combat less advisable, making the PCs hungrier for resources, and/or making the game less predictable. However, if I the hypothetical gamer won't explore these facets because they assume the person suggesting it just wants to revel in/impress upon the newer gamers how more hardcore it was gamed 'back in the day (TM)' ('uphill both ways, and we liked it!'), they aren't going to bother.

Anyways, moving on...

I'm late getting to this thread. Having played a lot of AD&D and AD&D 2nd, I remember we died. However, a good portion of those I can chalk up to changing expectations on the DM - more antagonistic DMs who saw their role as opposition to the party, as opposed to (co-)storyteller with the players, definitely had an impact.

Interesting. I certainly know that both AD&D's rulebooks repeatedly went to the well of the notion that the DM needed to keep the players from trying to get away with something. Similarly, stereotypes and spoofs and comics (such as Knights of the Dinner Table and such) suggested that gaming was rife with players trying to get away with stuff and DMs trying to shut that down with draconian consequences (and, them being comedies, often ending in horrific results). However, I didn't experience that much in my own games. Most of those were among people who were friends (or at least classmates) outside gaming. You didn't want people to coming away with the notion that you were picking on them. Honestly, we wanted all the deaths to seem 'fair,' even if it was fair within an highly dangerous scenario where the PCs often had to guess at what was safe or not.

3. Adventures (modules) were often adapted from Convention runs, which were designed to to be hard and kill off characters so they could get scored and ranked.

I honestly don't know how often this was the case. Now, rather famously some of the earliest published modules were simply Convention modules ported over with little conversion, and often it was not made clear that they were built on a last-man-standing framework. However, many of the other classic modules seem to have been written up specifically for publication as general purpose modules. I don't know if anyone has done a full analysis, but it would be interesting to see.

5. In-combat healing was needed and expected.

For us, in general, if our party fighters were at low HP, they/we ran away instead of tried to get healed in-real-time. Sure, the to-hit likelihood to chance-of-dropping-if-hit was different, but in general it was still gambling against an enemy attack that did about as much damage as a cleric healed. I think I remember clerics doing more in-combat healing, but IIRC that was simply because often a cleric (at least one who wasn't an AD&D 2e combat-specialist variant, or the like)'s other available actions were less likely to help end the combat sooner (than they are in 5e or the like).

 

[MNblockhead]

I grew up in a rural Minnesota town which I believe had 173 people in the last census. Directions to my childhood home involved "turn off the paved road" if that helps me build rural credibility. None of what you said even remotely matches what I or any of my friends experienced growing up. While we didn't have spacefinder apps, we definitely did have a handy invention called a compass to help us avoid getting lost while camping in the woods. Frozen TV dinners, Kool-aid, and instant mashed potato were all things back then too. No one hunted or trapped animals for their food. Some of my friends lived on farms, so I can't say for sure whether they ever leaped out of a barn while shooting arrows at a target. I'm assuming they'd brag about it at school if they had.

As a fellow rural Minnesota (well, okay, suburban summer-rural, my dad was first off the farm, so I was sent to the farm in the summers), I will admit to doing all sorts of stupid and ill advised things jumping off a barn. But everything else you say tracks.

 

[Oofta]

As a fellow rural Minnesota (well, okay, suburban summer-rural, my dad was first off the farm, so I was sent to the farm in the summers), I will admit to doing all sorts of stupid and ill advised things jumping off a barn. But everything else you say tracks.

Gee, most pets sent off to the farm never come back. Glad you made it.

 

[MNblockhead]

I'm late getting to this thread.

You sure are. We've moved on to debating rural life in the 1970s.

 

[MNblockhead]

I certainly know of people who did a fair amount of hunting to supplement their food in some rural areas in the 70's. But bow hunting? It might have had some patchy areas where it was used more commonly, but its not like it even vaguely compared to use of a firearm for that purpose. That's probably been true for more than a century now.

Has been true for over 500 years for European Americans. Native Americans started adopting fire arms in the early 17th century, but adoption was not uniform. Modern bow hunting in American began in 1934 when Wisconsin debuted its annual archery deer season after advocacy by archery enthusiast Roy Case and conversationalist Aldo Leopold. Bow hunting is a modern sport. People who actually rely on hunting for food have used guns for a looong time.

 

[nevin]

“Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.”

Attributed to Socrates.

From Isaac Asimovs Book of facts....

"Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching." From an Assyrian clay tablet, circa 2800 BC.