Old Times hardships and obstacles

[Quasqueton]

There's currently a lot of claims that old time D&D was harder and more deadly. Recovering from death was unlikely, and everyone started over at 1st level.

If games were so hard, raising the dead so unlikely, and everyone started back at 1st level, how did anyone reach name level in such games? Did anyone reach name level?

Quasqueton

 

[Lanefan]

I suspect - from what I've read in here and by my own experience - much of the time when individual characters died (which they did) any replacement would come in at or slightly below the party's average level.

1st-level start-overs came after the much rarer (but still possible) TPK, which seems to be more what's being discussed of late.

Lanefan

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

There's currently a lot of claims that old time D&D was harder and more deadly. Recovering from death was unlikely, and everyone started over at 1st level.

If games were so hard, raising the dead so unlikely, and everyone started back at 1st level, how did anyone reach name level in such games? Did anyone reach name level?

Quasqueton

Lanefan has it right as far as gaining levels are concerned, I believe. Certainly it was my experience that you didn't "have to start over" and that you did, eventually, gain levels.

I don't believe campaigns lasted longer "back in the day" and because the speed of gaining levels was slower, reaching name level (whatever that was) took longer or often didn't happen. Was name level about 9th-level in 1e?

I believe that at lower levels gaming was actually deadlier in 2e (not taking into account such obvious things as gaming style, etc). Sure your enemies weren't uber, and were often quite wimpy compared to their 3e counterpart, and maybe you could deal 1d8+6 damage with your uber rolled Strength (enough to split any orc in twain) while they couldn't have more than 8 hit points, but good luck making yourself tougher. You had to roll exceptionally high to get more than, say, +1 Dex bonus to AC (and you couldn't even get bonus hit points for being a dwarven cleric with Con 17, due to silly rules). Buffs were rarer, healing spells basically sucked, saves started out mostly lame, etc. Maybe even the rules clarity was partially at fault; I never saw anyone cast Dispel Magic on an NPC using Stoneskin, for instance, until 3e came out (and then, in a 2e game, I suggested maybe someone should try casting that spell).

In 2e, designing a powerful character without using kits or uber items boiled down to luck. How many 16s+ did you roll during char-gen? That was character power. Even with high stats, some classes plain stank. It wasn't like in 3e, where (using just core stuff and avoiding the obviously broken stuff) you can still build an optimized but reasonably powerful 1st-level character with a 15 or 16 in their "prime" stat... and double the hit points due to decent Con and rules that made having a decent Con actually possible.

You were more likely to die in 2e because you couldn't make the save vs "paralyzation, poison or death" or whatever roll you had to make because you stepped on a pit trap, whereas in 3e any character who isn't going out of their way to have a high Reflex save is probably going to survive (albeit with injury) for accidentally stepping on a pit trap simply due to having more hit points, or could be pulled out of the trap and then healed afterwards, or maybe because making the "Find Traps" roll in 2e was very hard at low levels whereas in 3e it isn't that hard.

Note that, due to a host of rules factors that might come up often in some games and rarely in others, we're never going to agree on this. A game where saves hardly came up might be less deadly, and there's no "rule" for saying how often saves had to come up in 2e.

I played 2e a long time ago, so I don't really recall where all the character deaths came from, but I recall Dragon Mountain being deadly because several characters "touched things" without investigating first. I think in 3e traps would simply be more logical. (Dragon Mountain had some really inventive and deadly traps but, saving throw differences aside, there's no reason such traps couldn't exist in 3e and be just as deadly.)

 

[Storminator]

I still have a binder full of name level PCs. They stand atop the Pyramid of Death.

Every module half the party would die. Then we'd run another 1st level module with another party. Half of them would die. Then we'd merge the 2 parties and run a 2nd level adventure. Half the party would die. Repeat.

Once you hit about 6th level, you drop to losing one PC/adventure. I imagine that to get the 10 or so PCs in my binder we lost probably 200 PCs.

And we totally metagamed it. "don't save him, we have another ranger in the other party and we don't want to split the EXP. Take his stuff."

PS

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

I still have a binder full of name level PCs. They stand atop the Pyramid of Death.

Funny, I have a similar binder.

My very first 1st Ed. character died in the first encounter I ever played in. Lizard man stuck me with a spear and that was that. Luckily my DM was kind and had me raised via NPCs.

That character and two others are now reside in my "Dead But Not Forgotten" binder of old characters.

 

[Varianor Abroad]

People reached name level. There were just a lot of false starts, or kind DMs making raise dead available from helpful NPCs. (Sometimes your character might die multiple times in a single adventure. Sometimes you had a backup PC along.)

 

[Andre]

There's currently a lot of claims that old time D&D was harder and more deadly. Recovering from death was unlikely, and everyone started over at 1st level.

If games were so hard, raising the dead so unlikely, and everyone started back at 1st level, how did anyone reach name level in such games? Did anyone reach name level?

Quasqueton

Speaking of OD&D (white box) and 1E, death was much, much, much, much more likely. Two of the reasons are 1) death at zero hit points (none of this -10 business), and lots of "save or die" effects (or just plain "die" effects).

It wasn't unusual to take six characters into the dungeon and come out with one or two alive.

Much as Storminator said, players tended to have many characters, and could easily whip up a new one if needed. Even at the middle levels, losing a long-running character wasn't unknown. Once characters got high enough level to cast raise dead, things tended to stabilize quite a bit.

Playing in small groups, with players running multiple characters, did help quite a bit. Teamwork was much better when a player controlled more than one character at a time. Of course, role playing was more difficult, but very early D&D tended to be more about survival (or the lack thereof) than improv...at least in the groups I played in.

 

[KingCrab]

I suspect that there was a lot of, "lets just redo that last battle and pretend it didn't happen."

 

[kaomera]

There's currently a lot of claims that old time D&D was harder and more deadly. Recovering from death was unlikely, and everyone started over at 1st level.

If games were so hard, raising the dead so unlikely, and everyone started back at 1st level, how did anyone reach name level in such games? Did anyone reach name level?

Up until about 82 or 83 most of the games I played in you didn't even get a new character. There was a pretty large group of local kids who played at least semi-regularly, and lots of wanna-be DMs. Parties would whittle down from up to 20+ players with up to 3 characters apiece to 6 or 8 players with one each by 3rd or 4th level. Players left without characters would go off and form a new party under a different DM. If parties got too small some characters would switch campaigns and two parties would merge. Having different characters at different levels was the norm. Above 5th level Raise Dead and the like started to become somewhat available, but there where still plenty of instances where even if he body could be recovered a Raise could not be, um, raised... (or the survival % check was failed...) In about four or five years of play most (but not all) players managed to get one or two characters to name-level. Some got more, but there was a tendency for players to pit their high-level characters against one another, to see "who was best" (and not coincidentally to pool their magic items!) Also there where TPKs. Usually we where quick enough to beat feet from the bigger nasties in the dungeon that at least some of us escaped, but nothing was foolproof. High-level characters (sometimes even sixth or seventh level) where generally retired, only dusted off for special one-shot adventures, or to serve as mentors to new PCs.

When I got into junior high (or at least around that time) a lot of things changed a bit. Players became more focused on individual characters and less focused on the campaign as a whole. We no longer really wanted to have our characters names mentioned to new players as being the local big-shots as much as we wanted to actually adventure with them. We also started rolling 4d6, dropping the lowest, and arranging as desired!!! DMs tried harder to keep each PC alive, groups became smaller and much more static, and new PCs (if needed) tended to come in a level or two below the highest remaining PC. We started having more adventures at higher levels. Also the game became quite a bit less "go where you will" as DMs had specific adventures and modules they wanted to run. With that adventures became much more "level appropriate" as a DM would no longer run an adventure for "5th to 7th level characters" for a party of one 7th level MU, a 5th level Fighter, and a bunch of 3rd and 4th levels... In fact, IIRC, parties where pretty consistently at the top of the suggested levels range, which led to both an easier time in the dungeon and more magic overall, but less powerful items as well.

I think the split was because we started thinking of losing a character as a "hardship" or an "obstacle". We where doing much more "real" roleplaying and our characters mattered much more to us. One time a fiend of mine was telling this story, which he had told numerous times to just about every new player to come to our table (or to anyone who would sit still for it, really): His Fighter had been helping to defend a castle from an army of goblins, and this huge, nasty, ugly troll comes lumbering up through the ranks. Most of the guys on the wall just take off, they're just about exhausted from fighting goblins all day and they want nothing to do with this monster. So, he's standing there, and he's put like a dozen arrows into the thing, with no effect, and it starts climbing up the wall at him, just digging these huge, filthy claws straight into the stone! And the player is really getting worked up here, building to the big finale, and the guy who was playing the Magic User that day (who flew down and fireballed the troll, scattering the goblins and saving the day) is there and he gets all upset... Because that's his character swooping down and explodinating the bad guys. And Fighter-guy is, of course, put off because that was our campaign. But we mostly agreed that you shouldn't be telling other characters' stories. Nowadays, I'm not so sure, but then again maybe it's just the nostalgia talking...

 

[Glyfair]

If games were so hard, raising the dead so unlikely, and everyone started back at 1st level, how did anyone reach name level in such games? Did anyone reach name level?

Not in any games I played. However, I only played D&D regularly for about 2-3 years. After that I jumped from games to game, hitting D&D less and less until 3E.

However, I will note that death was pretty rare in our games, as well. We just rotated between campaigns a lot, with different DMs wanting to run, or DMs who wanted a break.