D&D 1E Mearls on AD&D 1E

[Tony Vargas]

. That brings me back to my theory on why the guy this thread is about found 1e so different: he didn't spend the game looking up stats and instead allowed himself to become immersed.

In 1e, stats gave different bonuses & penalties to different things in different units at different break-points. So you were either forever looking up stats, or had your character sheet filled out in agonizing detail & cramped writing, or finally memorized all the columns of all the stat tables.

 

[Lanefan]

In 1e, stats gave different bonuses & penalties to different things in different units at different break-points. So you were either forever looking up stats, or had your character sheet filled out in agonizing detail & cramped writing, or finally memorized all the columns of all the stat tables.

Or you just memorized the ones that mattered to your PC, as there really weren't very many of them.

Dex 17 gives +2 to hit with missiles, to some saves, and to reactions; and -3 on AC - and that's about it for perhaps the most complicated example I can quickly think of.

Things you'd (hopefully!) rarely need e.g. system shock and resurrection % you'd just write on your sheet. Ditto for things like bend bars-lift gates %, which also doesn't come up all that often; or maximum henches allowed, which IME has never come up in the history of anything.

The only ones that I've ever found to be a nuisance for this are thieving skill %ages, as not only are the a bunch of them but they change every level.

 

[howandwhy99]

Good for Mearls. The hidden design game strikes again.

 

[Mistwell]

 

[Hussar]

I always thought that coming to the game through 1st Edition was the best preparation for studying Anthropology in college, Gygax’s rulebooks not being the usual “create rules for a game we’ll play” one sees in most RPGs, but rather “distill the rules of the world we’re playing in to a form that we can share,” like a sort of participant-observation text with a combat matrix. Having Dr. Holmes then come to look through the extant versions to distill Basic I was that even more so!

/snip
In my mind, D&D gradually moved away from the arbitrariness that 1e required, and 3e finally codified everything in a unified system. Whereas in 1e a Death Dog might do 1-10 per attack "just because", maybe because the designers wanted it to be really freaking deadly, in 3e it would just do 1-6 because medium creatures do 1d6 with a bite attack. Things became much more formulaic and, in the process, may have lost some of the charm of the earlier systems. But unquestionably the game lost the aspect of rules exploration that was so prevalent for me and my friends, and that was always something I enjoyed. It's a pleasure all its own that is hard to replicate in any other way.

It's always rather funny to me that two people, looking at AD&D, come to exact opposite, incompatible views of how the rules work. On one hand, we have @AmerginLiath arguing for Gygaxian Naturalism, and on the other, we have @Schmoe arguing that the 1e rules were arbitrary ("just because") and it wasn't until 3e that we see the rules become more simulationist in approach.

 

[Hussar]

Sheesh, read all the way to the end of the bloody thread before looking at dates. Bloody threadomancy.

 

[Charlaquin]

So if we could find somebody younger than 30 who tries 1e and loves it, would you be willing to accept that there is something to love that has nothing to do with nostalgia?

Maybe somebody who had never tried 1e was in that game with Mearls....

Of course there’s something to love about it that has nothing to do with nostalgia. That’s how become beloved enough to get nostalgic about in the first place. The thing about nostalgia is that it smooths over the wrinkles. Things that you actually found annoying at the time (“ugh, why can’t the rules just be written clearly?“) become part of what you miss about it (“the rules themselves were a puzzle! Brilliant!”). And it becomes harder to appreciate new innovations, because they look like deviations from the thing you remember loving.

I haven’t played 1e, but I don’t doubt it’s an excellent game. It didn’t become the world’s most popular roleplaying game for nothing. But when I read Mearls waxing nostalgic about it, throwing in little condescending asides about “yes, with mapping!” I can’t help but roll my eyes. And I actually think dungeon delves where you map as you go are a lot of fun! But man is it hard to take someone seriously when they get like that about it.

 

[Charlaquin]

4 things:
1) there was a pretty good DM
2) with a pretty good adventure
3) with pretty good (and hopefully pretty, oh, RPG nerds forget it...) co-players
4) he was PUI (Playing Under Influence of pretty good drugs)



Honestly, I played 1e, the first time I ever played RPGs in 1986.
Let me say it like this:
D&D only became better with each edition. Okay, except 4e, which sucked big time.
But with all 4 points above, rules and systems don't matter.

You were so close to having my like, but you just had to throw in a jab at 4e.

 

[Charlaquin]

Luke really should stream some of his games cause I don't the spirit of ADnD can be expressed in text.

I’m not sure it would come through on camera either, to be honest. Seems like the kind of thing that really needs to be experienced firsthand.

 

[Charlaquin]

Well, I just realized this thread was a necropost and now I’m embarrassed