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

[darjr]

Love this thread, and that thing? I strive for it in my games. I wish I could say I always deliver. And it IS the reason I first thought good things about 5e.

 

[TwoSix]

1E at least has excuse for being the way it is. It's 40 years old.

Yea, that's my go to excuse for pretty much everything.

 

[ccs]

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....

Well, I can point you to 4 such people.


Down at the local shop a few years back several of us (old guys) decided to get a 1e game going on the shops slowest night.
A week or two in a couple of the 20 something Magic players showed interest when no other card players showed up. So we added them into the game after a brief explanation & 5 minutes of character creation.
They must have liked it because the next week they came back. With 2 more of thier friends & we added them as well.
Here we are almost 6 years later & they've expanded to playing 2e, 5e, PF, other RPGs, board games, minis..... And they took 1e into thier extended play groups.
All 4 of them though agree that of the RPGS they've tried 1e is thier choice.
They started with no preconceived notion of wich edition was the best (unlike we 4 frogs - who are actually divided on the opinion. It was a 1e game because that was the only edition the shop owner was familiar with & he didn't want to learn 2e+. So since the rest of us were all familiar with 1e, 1e it was.)

 

[Zardnaar]

Yea, that's my go to excuse for pretty much everything.

I think most people played 1E like advanced B/X. Pick class and races roll d6 for initiative go.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I can run a dungeon crawl in any edition of D&D and it will be just as compelling as Mearls describes. It's not the system.

It's not just that it was a dungeon crawl, it was a rules crawl.

I can't match Mearls's eloquence on the topic, so I'll quote it selectively:

AD&D worked in part because the entire game is one, giant puzzle. Everything is just out of conceptual reach. The rulebooks themselves are dungeons to explore, treasures hidden here and there.

... The game dwells at the edge of perception, its lack of definition its defining trait.

 

[iserith]

It's not just that it was a dungeon crawl, it was a rules crawl.

I can't match Mearls's eloquence on the topic, so I'll quote it selectively:

I would say he's grasping for an explanation and, not surprisingly being a game designer, looking to the rules. That's not it though in my view. The rules can either support or get in the way of telling the sort of tale he experienced, but that's about it. It's the archetypal story, not the rules, that creates this emotional response.

Dungeons are representations of the Underworld, the place Heroes - amalgams of the best of human traits - go to face Dragons, symbols of chaos that represent an amalgam of the predators that preyed on early humans. This is one of the oldest stories known to exist and we keep telling ourselves this story because it's deeply important psychologically. It's no surprise to me why Dungeons & Dragons resonates with so many people without them even knowing why. Mearls' use of mystical language to describe the experience is a dead giveaway in my view.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I would say he's grasping for an explanation and, not surprisingly being a game designer, looking to the rules.

That's not it though in my view. The rules can either support or get in the way of telling the sort of tale he experienced, but that's about it.

That sounds like a game-designer, too - just one more of the storytelling school.

It's the archetypal story, not the rules, that creates this emotional response. Dungeons are representations of the Underworld, the place Heroes - amalgams of the best of human traits - go to face Dragons, symbols of chaos that represent an amalgam of the predators that preyed on early humans. This is one of the oldest stories known to exist and we keep telling ourselves this story because it's deeply important psychologically.

That's not the D&D experience, though. Back in the day, you mapped the dungeon, evaded or ambushed monsters, worried constantly about traps, possibly betrayed your buddies, and made away with treasure. Your character didn't amalgamate the best of human traits, you were lucky if you had one or two good stats, and probably had one horrible one, at least. You had a specialty that you could do that was niche-protected so others couldn't.

Now, yes, that can, like Star Wars, map pretty easily to the Hero's Journey. Heck, a trip to the store can map to the Hero's Journey. So, yeah, you could run a compelling Hero's Journey kind of story in any version of D&D, or any other system, for that matter. But it won't be the experience Mearls describes. It might be a great - or a better - experience, but it'll be a different one.

Also, the experience can't be uncoupled from the person experiencing it. Mike's comments resonated with me, because, I'm guessing, we shared comparable experiences with that edition of the game, back at the height of the fad years. Maybe we have some other things in common, too, that shade that experience, the memory of it and the quality of the nostalgiaemotions that revisiting it evokes?

So is it /more/ than the system? Sure. But it's not /not/ the system.

 

[iserith]

That sounds like a game-designer, too - just one more of the storytelling school.


That's not the D&D experience, though. Back in the day, you mapped the dungeon, evaded or ambushed monsters, worried constantly about traps, possibly betrayed your buddies, and made away with treasure. Your character didn't amalgamate the best of human traits, you were lucky if you had one or two good stats, and probably had one horrible one, at least. You had a specialty that you could do that was niche-protected so others couldn't.

The specific tasks and stats are largely irrelevant. You are a person brave enough to go into an unexplored territory, the Underworld say, to slay monsters, possibly a Dragon, and take their gold to share with the community. If you betrayed someone, then you're representing the human Shadow. In the end you're reborn into something more powerful. It hits all the beats.

And some of us do it over and over again with some variation for, what, 40 years now across various rules sets, even ones that aren't D&D? The rules aren't why we do this.

Now, yes, that can, like Star Wars, map pretty easily to the Hero's Journey. Heck, a trip to the store can map to the Hero's Journey. So, yeah, you could run a compelling Hero's Journey kind of story in any version of D&D, or any other system, for that matter. But it won't be the experience Mearls describes. It might be a great - or a better - experience, but it'll be a different one.

Also, the experience can't be uncoupled from the person experiencing it. Mike's comments resonated with me, because, I'm guessing, we shared comparable experiences with that edition of the game, back at the height of the fad years. Maybe we have some other things in common, too, that shade that experience, the memory of it and the quality of the nostalgiaemotions that revisiting it evokes?

So is it /more/ than the system? Sure. But it's not /not/ the system.

As I said, the system can add to or detract from the experience. But the heart strings are plucked by the archetypal stories. And probably no doubt because he was playing this game of mythological stories on what amounts to sacred ground - Gary Gygax's house. By the scion of the creator of the multiverse himself. Throw that all together and you get a pretty potent emotional experience, I bet, which had nothing to do with THAC0.

Out of curiosity, do we know if Mearls played AD&D 1e back in the day?

 

[AkaKageWarrior]

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.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Throw that all together and you get a pretty potent emotional experience, I bet, which had nothing to do with THAC0.

1e didn't use THAC0. If he'd had to cope with THAC0, the whole experience would have been torpedoed.

Seriously (not really, less facetiously), if Luke had been running Dogs in the Vineyard, Mike would definitely have had a completely different experience.