NOT AN EDITION WARS THREAD: 1E'ing 3E

[babomb]

4) Reintroduce some version of the armor vs. weapon type modifiers.

People keep saying this, and it's fine for a computer-based game. But I found the armor vs. weapon type modifiers to be too much of a hassle (in 2e; 1e is before my time). Combat is slow enough without me looking up a modifier in a table all the time. I'd be okay with a particular weapon getting, say a +2 against plate mail as an exception, but not as a rule. The most I would be willing to accept is a piercing AC/slashing AC/bludgeoning AC/touch AC, (and remember that all of those could be modified by flatfootedness).

But it strikes me that, since the reason for this change is verisimilitude, you might as well go all the way and replace armor giving AC with armor giving DR, and have the DR vary by type; i.e., DR x/piercing y/slashing z/bludgeoning. I still wouldn't break it down by individual weapons.

 

[thedungeondelver]

Aha! I forgot:
7. Remove social skills from the game. Right now. KILL.

You know what? Yeah. All of that. Gone.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Basically, if you want to achieve that feel, you need to achieve a situation where:

1. A player character death is not a major PITA. This needs both mindset and ruleset: a system whereby the player can create a satisfactory replacement character and get back into the game in a couple of minutes without GM intervention, and players who're prepared to run with the idea of essentially disposable characters.

2. You use a combat system streamlined enough that you can resolve a fight between a party of five characters and nine henchmen on one side and twenty-six orcs with a shaman on the other, in about thirty minutes. Realistically this means dropping an awful lot of the 3e combat mechanics.

3. You have players who're prepared to treat the game as a blend between a game of exploration and a tactical miniatures wargame, and you put them in an environment which challenges the players rather than the characters.

If you can't achieve that, then I suggest that you forget it. You can't convert the hardcore roleplayers who want their characters' intellectual and social skills to solve problems -- they will definitely hate it.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Basically, if you want to achieve that feel, you need to achieve a situation where:

1. A player character death is not a major PITA. This needs both mindset and ruleset: a system whereby the player can create a satisfactory replacement character and get back into the game in a couple of minutes without GM intervention, and players who're prepared to run with the idea of essentially disposable characters.

2. You use a combat system streamlined enough that you can resolve a fight between a party of five characters and nine henchmen on one side and twenty-six orcs with a shaman on the other, in about thirty minutes. Realistically this means dropping an awful lot of the 3e combat mechanics.

3. You have players who're prepared to treat the game as a blend between a game of exploration and a tactical miniatures wargame, and you put them in an environment which challenges the players rather than the characters.

If you can't achieve that, then I suggest that you forget it. You can't convert the hardcore roleplayers who want their characters' intellectual and social skills to solve problems -- they will definitely hate it.

QFT.

A big step in that direction would be to take out your 1e Monster Manual. Now, assuming a base AC of 9 for the monsters in that book, change this to a base AC of 10 and add +1 AC for every step from which a monster deviates from that AC (so that an AC -2 monster is now an AC 23 monster). Look over the monster's special abilities, and use the 3.X (3.0 or 3.5) ability instead, if it seems appropriate. Assume that a non-classed monster's damage already takes its Strength into account. Use these monsters instead of the 3.X monsters. You will need to switch to a flat exponential XP system (I would suggest using the Fighter's XP table from the 1e PHB), but then you can use the XP for the monster as suggested in 1e.

Build classed monsters out of these monsters, to taste. Your fights will become much, much faster.

Once your fights are faster, exploration will seem like less of a PITA (because it is no longer such a waste of time). You can create larger, more intricate and interesting complexes with more monsters inside them.

This alone, IMHO and IME, would do much to give you 1e feel.

EDIT: You would also have to assign attack roll bonuses & saves; I'd just steal them wholesale from the 3.X books.


RC

 

[Henry]

C&C.

Sorry, but that is (now that I've looked over that system some more) by far the best alternative I can think of, that would meet your requirements.

That's my feeling, as well. It uses the Basic language of d20, but it restructures classes, DCs, and assumptions about character power to aesthetics that are much closer to AD&D 1st edition. OSRIC is great for bringing AD&D1 itself back to life from OOP death, but C&C is a good bridge between 3E and 1E that already exists.

 

[kaomera]

One thing I think that no-one has mentioned yet: for me, at least, AD&D games went much, much faster, in a real-time : game-time sense. Even assuming that combat, etc. goes just as fast (a slight stretch for me, but I know there are those who don't have the same issues...), in AD&D it was not abnormal to have several weeks or months pass between or even during adventures, often with little more than a hand-wave or a brief description by the DM. in 3.x I find that players expect their characters to be doing something useful every second of every day, and a three-day trek to and from the dungeon gets eyes rolling... (Perhaps this is just my experience...)

 

[Henry]

In 3.x I find that players expect their characters to be doing something useful every second of every day, and a three-day trek to and from the dungeon gets eyes rolling... (Perhaps this is just my experience...)

Never had that experience these days, and pretty much had the same experience back when playing 1E that I do now. Only time I've ever seen time crunches was when there was a deadline: In-X-days-a-madman-will-destroy-the-world sort of scenarios.

 

[RFisher]

I think my top three would be:

Spells: Invisibility would have an indefinite duration again. Hold Person would have a decent duration again. &c. There'd be fewer buff spells or I'd make them easier to handle somehow.

Skills: The thieves would get some of their special abilities that were reduced to skills back. Spot & some other skills would probably get tossed altogether.

Progression: I'd go for a more double the XP of the previous level up to "name" level sort of progression. Character progression would start to level off somewhere around 10th level.

Edit--Oh, & a fourth: I'd reduce the number of special cases in combat stats. e.g. Use a single AC in as many cases as possible instead of always adjusting it to the specific situation.

 

[Umbran]

I'm another in the "you don't need to do much mechanically" camp.

Cut down on the XP awards so it takes several years of play to reach 20th level. For my group, Monty Haul was the standard 1e mode, so I'd take the lid off the wealth guidelines, so that a mid-level group can have ludicrous amounts of magic, and take my inspiration for item choices from the 1e books, rather than 3e (so, relativley few stat-buffing items).

Making dungeon crawls a mainstay of your operation goes a long way. Kill things, take their stuff. I'd avoid longer story arcs, in favor of more episodic play to emulate the module-driven style of 1e play I experienced.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Me either. Our 3E games run pretty much the same as our 1E games did. Our style of play hasn't changed much at all. Magic items are more obvious, but that's about all that's changed. The mechanics are different, but the feel remains the same, for us.

Thirded.