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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9065216" data-attributes="member: 7035894">We, and everyone we knew (we learned to play from my friend's college-aged brother and his group) used a number of house rules to make AD&D less deadly. One that I think was pretty widespread was letting everyone start with maximum hit points at level 1 - my first character was a ranger with an 18 constitution (he rolled a 17 then got +1 for his age, which was an AD&D thing) and so had 24 hit points at level 1. Take that, 5e! On that note, we also used the "roll 6 dice and keep the best three" ability score method from the DMG, so our scores were pretty high. We almost always had hirelings with us, which was a fairly standard part of many campaigns back then, I believe, and routinely used them for anything risky; when we got to higher levels we had followers for the same purpose. I don't remember being super cautious, and characters seldom died, but it did happen. I played that same ranger for years.Also, characters would travel between campaigns. So, for example, when they needed a few extra people for the college-aged game (we were in junior high school, so this was very exciting) we would just bring our regular characters. It was quite a different method of play than is common now.I did just insta-kill one of my player's characters fairly recently: their level 6 cleric was low on health and got hit by an adult green dragon's breath. There's a caveat though: another player could have revivified them, but the cleric's player decided this seemed like a fitting and heroic end for that character's story and refused the revivify.</blockquote>

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