BTW, what are the indispensible parts of 1E for me?
1) Ease of character creation. Race, class, 6 rolls, and you can fill in the rest of the details as you get started actually playing, including buying equipment. One of the gross errors of 3E design is the requirement for every generated character to invest vast chunks of time reading, understanding and COMPARING MERITS, VALUE, & INTERCONNECTIVITY of feats, skills, class/prestige class features, and even equipment. The entire system itself becomes an impediment to getting started.
2) The ADMONITION that the rules are only guidelines. This actually relates to that thing about system mastery again. Already in this thread is the repeated statement that people enjoyed being able to ignore parts of the rules without breaking the whole. People were able to add their own rules, often without even realizing they were doing so until years after the fact when they went back and re-read the rules in detail. Participants need to be told they are both permitted and even EXPECTED to tell the rules to get stuffed.
3) PC's can and will die, usually capriciously and unavoidably. This is not to say that the game needs to be more lethal, nor that other editions were necessarily less so. It has to do with player expectations of success. I think players now have an expectation of success. They are more concerned with maximizing their margin of victory and guarding against the occasional random threat to their success. I think 1E players had more of an expectation of FAILURE as the default and were concerned with ACHIEVING victory, and not just by manipulation of the numbers on their character sheet alone but by reaching BEYOND what the numbers said they were able to reliably achieve. That is, your character class abilities, ability scores and skills will only take your PC so far - a challenge to your character is not what fits with the tightest margins into what your abilities are, but what your character does beyond that.
4) Not so much something that 1E is but perhaps what it isn't. I don't want to hit this one too hard but system mastery in 1E was fun because it WASN'T a requirement for extending your enjoyment of the game, much less your characters basic success. Knowing the ins and outs of the system had some benefits but it wasn't DESIGNED into the system as a requirement for fun.
5) Random prositutes. I agree that its something that should be brought forward from 1E but it's not enough to just let it go at that. The reasons WHY it needs to be brought forward are what's important. 1E was a game written by adults for other adults. It was enjoyed by non-adults BECAUSE of the expected levels of intelligence, sophistication, and (after a fashion) maturity. The game began to lose important portions of that when with 2E it was inexplicably determined that the game had to be "written down" to be more accessible to kids, more politically correct, less possible to offend anyone. SCREW THAT. Let the kids figure some things out for themselves. Spit Political Correctness in the eyes of those who clamor for it the loudest. Let those who CHOOSE to take offense go play Chutes & Ladders.
D&D designers should be writing D&D to appeal to their PEERS - just as Gygax did with 1E. D&D doesn't have to be EDGY, and rounding off the corners a bit is fine, just realize you don't need to be so aggressive with that file. If you want to write a game for kids then license My Little Pony or Teletubbies for an RPG.
6) Still related to previous points - Balance can go suck eggs. Randomness in the game is a feature, not a bug. The game loses more of its appeal the harder desginers try to ELIMINATE imbalance between races, classes, and skills, and to alleviate all undesireable consequences of random results. EMBRACE randomness and imbalance - stop trying to engineer it out of the game entirely. Even such a seemingly logical and applaudible step as making all the math addition can subtly shift the mindset from one of "success vs. failure" to "success vs. just-try-again".
Otus always had a very narrow appeal for me. To me the CONSUMMATE D&D artist was and always will be Trampier.
