Rebuild 1E...

[Dannyalcatraz]

Why? I keep seeing lots of requests for this, but I don't see the need of it. First edition style games don't go to level 20 by default. It's a rather third edition mindset involved here I think. Frankly, all that is needed is to rebalance demihumans with humans enough that the level caps for demihumans are near to the high end of the expected range of play. So, for example, it might be nice if halfling fighters didn't top out at 5th level, but 8th or 10th is not an unreasonable level cap.

Well, personally, I'm in multiple D&D groups, including one that has been running a 1Ed/2Ed hybrid since about 1985 or so, and one of the few mods we made was to raise the limits (not actually remove them). So for us at least, its not an outgrowth of the 3Ed design mentality.

And since we're playing a game in which the party has reached the limits of the charts, we see every time how this warps the game. After a certain point, the Human Wizard simply has no equal besides those of his own race.

For us, the level limits for non-humans fly in the face of the internal logic of the game. Why is a human wizard able to advance infinitely, while an Elf- intimately tied to magic (able to cast spells in armor, no less!) and with a lifespan orders of magnitude greater- has an 11th level cap? Why shouldn't a Dwarven warrior with a lifespan, again, many times that of a human, be able to improve his mastery of the craft of war beyond 9th...one level fewer than their mortal foes bastard offspring, the short-lived Half-Orcs? Gnomes, the only race besides humans able to be illusionists are limited to 7th level in it.

The reasons are for game mechanical reasons, not anything that meshes well with the game's fluff.

I agree with the concept, but not the reasoning.

All I can say is that I saw it time and time again.

No. Again, I find this very justification very hard to believe. I never encountered it in all my time playing, and moreover the D&D spell level system was wholesale adopted throughout the computer RPG industry.

Again, your experience obviously varies greatly from mine. I've played the game since '77, and as an Army Brat, I got to move around a lot, meaning I was frequently in search of a new game. Even after my family settled down in one city, I still had to find new games when I attended college, law school, and an MBA program.

Every time I wound up trying to teach new players D&D, I hit that stumbling block of PC level vs Spell/power level. Eventually, those who liked D&D generally adapted. Others never kept it straight.

I believe a truly generic skill system would get in the way of 1e's focus on player skill over character skill. Skills should be reserved for exceptional abilities. Skill contests and the like should be informal, and really all that is needed is some guidance to the DM in the DMG on how to resolve non-combat contests.

Well, I wasn't intending to expand the skill system by much, just enough to cover things that, like the various thief skills, don't lend themselves to role-play.

No no no no no no no. That's exactly what you don't want to do.

Speak for yourself.

And just to be clear: Psionics would remain an optional rule. I would just have the mechanics work well with the other systems within the game, in order to reduce the complexity of teaching the additional system, in case the Psi rules were used.

This is not the 1e way. First edition is for better or worse an entirely class centric game.

My proposal remains class-centric. There are only 3 classes.

The silos (or whatever they would be called) let you customize a bit, and avoid the later introduction of entirely new classes- Barbarian, Cavalier, etc.- with entirely new XP charts and so forth. Instead, all you need is a new path.

Instead of F5, P5, B5, R5, C5, you just have F(P)5, F(B)5, F(R)5, and F(C)5.

And now you are murdering a sacred cow or at the least unnecessarily complicating the whole concept of subclasses in a whole bunch of ways I don't think you are really thinking through.

The only sacred cow that gets slaughtered is the armored, full-casting cleric.

The reason I do that is because the RW warrior-priest- at least, the Western version- was generally a warrior who had taken holy vows, usually long after years of training as a warrior, and not an actual priest or monk in the traditional sense. And the reason the vows were taken was typically tied to participation in the Crusades.

Which more closely resembles the Paladin than the D&D Cleric.

The rest of it? I'll just say that Priests of Specific Mythoi was one of the things I thought 2Ed really got right, and I disliked that the Druid wasn't simply redone as one such.

 

[Votan]

Going back further in time, perhaps the player ability stats were added in as an afterthought to the original 1974 version of D&D?

Perhaps, but they were a good addition. A modest tilt based on ability scores increases flavor and fun dramatically. Making them central isn't ideal, and ends up requiring ability score arrays or point buy systems.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

My AD&D house rules:

• Clarify spellcasting and initiative.
• Assume anything from Unearthed Arcana or the survival guides is ignored unless I specifically include it (check with me on individual spells).
• Unarmed combat from UA instead of the DMG system
• Secondary Skills from the DMG
• Ignore the training rules. If excess gold is an issue, I'd rather use something like Arneson's "special interest" system from First Fantasy Campaign or the "Orgies, Inc." article from Dragon No. 10.

Oh, and my combat rulings will be informed by the system used in Chainmail and Swords & Spells. For example, bows get a ROF of 2, but both shots don't do off at once; they get divided up across the round. FWIW, I've actually run AD&D with this combat sequence, but it replaces certain AD&Disms that I'd rather keep in AD&D—like segments and casting times.

 

[Lanefan]

The only sacred cow that gets slaughtered is the armored, full-casting cleric.

We did the opposite, and gave said sacred cow a class of its own: War Cleric. It's a sub-class of Cleric (along with Nature Cleric, i.e. Druid reskinned), with a very tweaked spell list - they can't cure worth beans and their divining isn't much to write home about but their combat-affecting spells are all enhanced. The counterbalance to the better combat spells is that the somatic component is often the act of charging into battle (when casting a battle spell, a War Cleric cannot be interrupted unless Silenced, knocked out, physically restrained, or killed) which means they get pounded into dogmeat on a regular basis. They use a to-hit matrix somewhere between that of Fighters and (Normal) Clerics, can use any weapon, any armour, have a d8 hit die, etc. Long-term results say they're average at low level, rock hard at mid level (about 5th-7th) once their really useful spells kick in, and get ugly at high level because their hit points can't keep up with all the damage they take and so they spend far too much of their time dead.

On another related topic: if the jumping-off point is to be core 2e as some suggest, then the first thing that needs doing is to put back all that 2e took out: Assassins, Illusionists, various other classes, Demons, Devils, etc., etc. Otherwise, you're tearing 1e down, not rebuilding it.

Lan-"still rebuilding 1e after all these years"-efan

 

[evildmguy]

Wow.

Just wow.

There are some really good ideas here. I almost wish I could go back to 1980 with my ideas to run 1E with 30 years of understanding based on this thread. It's too bad I can't.

What I am seeing is probably what Gary intended, which is that each group tailors the rules to what they want to see. As others have pointed out many times, there is agreement that mages at low levels aren't mechanically balanced but no agreement on what the issue is because of how each person approaches the game. Their own ideas of magic come into play, not the base rules. And that's fine! But it also makes finding a common solution problematic, if not impossible.

It's all about the group's style of play. And that's important even today. I had several players join and leave within a few sessions because it's obvious our styles of play were not the same. It's taken me a long time to figure that out. I don't know if I could declare my style 100% but I at least know it better now.

It's also interesting to see how style is affected by simple things. If I had a group that played three times a week for five hours, my goals would be different. If I have players that do character write ups or track spell components down to the grain of sand, then it's also a different style and what I would do with those players would be different. (What I currently have is a weekly gaming group made up of older professional people who have kids, jobs and lives outside of the game table, and want to do something fun together. That also influences style and the games that fit.)

I still think it is too bad that 1E/2E/3E play differently at different levels. For me and my group, I want a heroic game where the players aren't afraid to jump into the action with their characters, with some strategy, compared to the mage that almost wants to hide as well as the thief because as soon as he casts a spell he knows he will be a target and can't take more than a hit or two. Again, though, these are all style choices.

But, I do think I would do a much better job DMing 1E now that I did back then. Sure, that's obvious but I am more lamenting that I won't get a chance to try it and see how much better it could be.

I do have a comment on one thing said.

In particular, they should never get in the way of common player centric challenges. So 1e skills should strongly avoid modifying mental activities, strongly impacting social situations, replacing dungeoneering, or problem solving and instead reflect only unusual skills that the player cannot assert he ought to have. Skills essentially should be reserved for the sort of physical challenge resolution that the combat rules themself. "Can I accomplish this difficult physical or technically difficult feat?" Furthermore, they shouldn't completely overshadow attributes, because 1e basically assumes that someone with high dexterity is widely compotent at virtually everything related to gracefulness. So the modifiers applied by skills should be small when they impact things 'anyone can do' (jumping, dancing, swimming, etc.), or else they should open up abilities we normally associate only with great skill and training. Skills must remain minor benefits to help round out a character. They can't be the focus of a 1e style game.

One of the things that I never learned back in the day about 1E, or any RPG, is that there IS a difference between the player and the character. I firmly believe that the game mechanics should be there to show the player and DM that difference. Now, you might not have meant this quote they way I took it but I glommed onto "player centric challenges" that you wrote above instead of "character centric challenges" (emphasis mine) as a very big difference and something that should be addressed by the game.

I had way way way way way too many arguments because the game didn't help us understand that it's not the job of the player to convince the DM that his character could have haggled down the price but for the character to convince the NPC.

(Some of you may have known this. As an eight year old player and a twelve year old DM, I didn't. And it influenced my groups and style of play for decades.)

To that end, there needs to be some way for the mechanics of the game, whatever game, to help a player define his character in a way the player and DM can agree. Whether it's skills or adjectives, there needs to be a mechanical way to resolve most tasks, with role playing giving a bonus but not needed. That took me a long time to figure out and I personally think it's important.

Unfortunately, 1E and 2E never address this and even 3E doesn't state it in clear terms. And maybe this is part of the evolution of RPGs. I don't know. But I do think there needs to be a way for a player and DM to be clear on what a character can and cannot do in the mechanics. It's not as simple as having role playing rules for Monopoly, for example, but that's the direction I am thinking. What this does, imo, is let role playing be as important or not as the group wants it to be.

Thanks!

edg

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Far more limited than you do. My central complaint about Fireball is that defensive magic is harder in D&D than it should be, and that it invalidates armies. There should be relatively common low level spells for warding and defending a location against magical attack. Some of the 3e rules for cover and evasion did alot to resolve the problem or at least gave the tools to do so.

Of course the thing about invalidating armies is that 1E operates only with concern for enabling Player Characters to take on huge monsters and hordes of enemies because it's fun and heroic for PC's to do that. It doesn't think for a moment what happens when armies are logically ivalidated, or what happens when the PC capabilities are widely used by NPC's in the same way.

I have to say that I like the idea of increased defensive magic if it can be kept from becoming like 3E character buff spells.

The vast majority of all spells in 1e are fine. There are only a few famous ones that need some touch up, and in some cases that touch up is contextual (like the fact you can fireball something, but not easily create an immovable magical ward that reduces or blocks fire). Reducing the damage from fireball might be a good idea (maybe to 1d8/2 caster levels) to prevent it from being an uberspell and dominating certain forms of play (notably, martial focused campaigns), but really I think it is a pretty minor issue once you've put into place everything else.

Actually I thought that increasing damage on a logarithmic scale would be preferable, so adding each additional die of damage requires one more level than adding the last die required. E.g., a 5th lvl wizard does 5d6 with fireball. 6th level does 6d6, 8th 7d6, 11th 8d6, 15th 9d6, 20th 10d6. Spell damage thus still scales by level but provides diminishing returns.

 

[Votan]

I have to say that I like the idea of increased defensive magic if it can be kept from becoming like 3E character buff spells.

I agree; letting magic make the prepared side infinitely more powerful plus adding to mechanical complexity is bad. I wonder if a mechanic that worked like smoke on a gunpowder age battlefield would help. If it inhibits everyone then it dramatically weakens high level casters on battlefields (although they'd still be useful) and thus make an army hard to stop with just a high level mage.

Easy warding against spells could easily backfire into making many opponents too easy. The closest D&D seems to come is magic/spell resistance (and that did not do good things when PCs were allowed to acquire it).

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Is there an optimal number of classes? Is the paladin really the fighter/cleric? There was 10-12 classes in the PHB, counting the assassin and bard?

11 classes if you include the 1E bard:
Cleric
Druid
Fighter
Paladin
Ranger
Magic-user
Illusionist
Thief
Assassin
Monk
Bard

If you were to replicate the multiclass options for demi-humans as single-classes you'd add 13 more:
cleric/fighter
cleric/fighter/mage
cleric/ranger
cleric/mage
cleric/thief
cleric/assassin
fighter/mage
fighter/illusionist
fighter/thief
fighter/assassin
fighter/mage/thief
mage/thief
illusionist/thief

Interestingly, seeing them listed that way what I suddenly see for the first time is that they are almost all just ways of adding clerical or fighter abilities to other classes. I might be inclined to interpret this as a sign that a) clerical healing was deemed in critically short supply, and b) decent melee ability was in similarly short supply. Of course there are other ways to look at it but that's what it suggests to me.

I've always thought of the Paladin as a fighter/cleric rather than a cleric/fighter, if you take the meaning. That is, the Paladin is a fighter who gets some clerical ability, not a cleric who gets better fighting ability. In any case I'd FAR rather see a Paladin being pushed as the equivalent of the multi-class combination than a nameless, flavorless cleric/fighter multiclass.

What's the optimal number of classes? The number that enables a DM to create the kind of campaign world he wants. Yep, just that alone.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Yeah, once I figured out how the Psionics system worked, especially the combat matrix, I liked it.

I LOVE that table. It LOOKS like it is just jam-packed with subtleties and crunchy goodness. But near as I've ever been able tell all it does is provide a slow means for the psionic with the most points to win - every time. And since points were utterly randomly assigned and never increased actually having psionics was a liability as often as a strength unless the DM deliberately kept psionic combat rare and lightweight.

There is potential in there somewhere. At least my gut tells me so even if I can't find it myself. But Gary was right - it was a mistake to put out such a half-baked system. That combat system is just no good as it sits.

 

[Treebore]

I LOVE that table. It LOOKS like it is just jam-packed with subtleties and crunchy goodness. But near as I've ever been able tell all it does is provide a slow means for the psionic with the most points to win - every time. And since points were utterly randomly assigned and never increased actually having psionics was a liability as often as a strength unless the DM deliberately kept psionic combat rare and lightweight.

There is potential in there somewhere. At least my gut tells me so even if I can't find it myself. But Gary was right - it was a mistake to put out such a half-baked system. That combat system is just no good as it sits.

Hmmm. I'll have to reread my DMG, because I may have added in some house rules to it, but if I was doing it by the book stunning/putting opponents to sleep were possible results. If that isn't in those tables then I added some house rules to it and got so used to it I forgot they were house rules.