Things I Miss....

[Neonchameleon]

You don't roll hit points at level 2+?

Max HP at first, rolled at 2nd I think.

Educate me on what you're talking about here.

3e and 4e both have an emphasis on play balance that was missing from AD&D. Which means both have an expected amount of equipment a character has a given level (in GP). Rather than having anything. 4e it's easier to remove because the primary bonusses are more logical and consistent so you can just attacht hem to the character and not worry about being stingy.

I miss...

When Thieves were called "Thieves", not "Rogues". That changed with 2E.

Thieves are back in 4e.

What I really miss?????

One word...

Assassins.

Again, back in 4e

Well, that's my point. There are A LOT of rules in D&D. I dunno about 4E, but I suspect all versions are rules heavy even though some may be lighter than others.

All are - but 4e is exception based. There are a limited number of conditions to inflict (18 on the back of my DM screen) and I could tell you off the top of my head what fifteen did. (The exceptions being Blinded and Deafened, (where I'd have to look up the perception penalty - the rest is obvious for both), and Petrified). And some of those are normally sub-categories - for instance PCs are normally unconscious because they are dying (i.e. on negative hit points) and normally helpless because they are unconscious. Petrified also makes the target unconscious.

For the record, the conditions are:

• Blinded - Can't see
• Dazed - Half out of it; one action per turn (attack or move)
• Deafened - Can't hear. Minimal effect so rare
• Dominated - Mind Controlled. What the enemy can make you do is limited.
• Dying - Yeah
• Grabbed - Light grappling rules.
• Helpless - Can be Coup De Graced
• Immobilised - Can't walk or crawl. Not petrified so can attack. (Clothes pinned to a wall by an arrow would be immobilised, so is grabbed)
• Marked - Used by defenders and used often enough to be obvious.
• Petrified - Turned to stone
• Prone - Knocked down
• Removed from Play - Incredbly rare but obvious.
• Restrained - Tied down. Immobilised and restricted movement.
• Slowed - Limping or slightly stuck. Speed cut to 2.
• Stunned - Out of it for the round.
• Surprised - Surprise round.
• Unconscious - Obvious.
• Weakened - Half damage.

The two not mentioned and that I would are Bloodied (half hp gone) and grants combat advantage (out of position somehow (e.g. flanked, dazed, or prone in melee)) - -2 to defences and doesn't stack. People will get both in their first session.

"Hey! What's the difference between the Bull's Charge and the Charge again?"

If you don't play with that often, you have to look it up.

Charge is a Melee Basic Attack at +1 to hit after you move your speed as part of your standard action. Bull Rush is a strength based attack that if it hits pushes the foe one square (and that almost no one ever uses because most people with high strength have attacks that both push and do damage).

Which is why I find it hard to believe anybody can play D&D without opening the books during a game session unless the DM has been playing a long time and has everything memorized.

In 4e the character sheets contain a lot more information - they run over several pages if using one of the computer generated tools. Pretty much everything you need for your character except the exact details of the rituals and the status conditions you hadn out will be on there (and rituals don't get used that much). And details includes your mundane equipment if you want it.

I know I used to have most of it memorized back in the day when I was playing 1E and 2E, but I'm out of practice now. And, 3E is, although we've been playing a while, still new to us (me and my group).

4e it's easier because you lack the fiddly subsystems. And because you don't need to look up magic in combat - the combat spells are on the character sheet and the big rituals take a minute or more to cast so aren't used in combat.

 

[Stormonu]

Another thing I've recently realized I missed - different XP charts for the diffenent classes. With the variable XP charts, you had more flexibility in setting class power. A 5th level thief might be the equal of a 4th level fighter or a 3rd level wizard.

 

[billd91]

Back on-topic, what about the "space required" stat that they took off of weapon charts. I think only 1E has this.

I miss that. It sure made it easy to figure if you could use a weapon inside a tavern, in a tight space in a cavern, or when your buddy was side-by-side with you in a 10 foot corridor.

I don't really miss it. It all just got abstracted down into the 5' space a character occupies in 3e/4e and squeezing penalties if you don't have your full sized space.

 

[Dedekind]

4e it's easier because you lack the fiddly subsystems. And because you don't need to look up magic in combat - the combat spells are on the character sheet and the big rituals take a minute or more to cast so aren't used in combat.

I think the point in this thread (do threads really have points?) is that some people miss the fiddly subsystems.


For example, I, too, miss item saving throws. They added a lot of flavor and an extra hint of danger. But, they were a terrible pain, and a high level character could easily end up making dozens of rolls all with different bonuses/DCs when they came into play. They feel unfair and can be awful at some points, but it was a bit of randomness that just isn't there any more.

LOL, one Mordenkainen's Disjunction basically stopped us for a night as we all lost our best magic items (and I lost absolutely everything). So, I think it is a net gain to not have an item saving throw system, but these little character changers don't seem to happen as much.

 

[Jack Daniel]

This is going to be a weird and longish post, but I think it still fits the topic, so bear with me, 'kay?

For some years now, I've been running oD&D campaigns almost exclusively. Lots of things about classic D&D appeal to my sensibilities: I like that the lists of monsters, magical items, and spells are comparatively small. It gives the game a sense of finitude and completeness, even if the only rulebooks you have are the Red Box and the Blue Box, or the Rules Cyclopedia. And I really love the class system: I like that the core of the game describes only fighters, clerics, mages, thieves, elves, dwarves, and halflings, and then it leaves the player to interpret things from there. No need for paladins, rangers, barbarians, gladiators, cavaliers, swashbucklers, and samurai; they're all just fighters. There's no finagling with race-class combinations to produce the most specialest snowflake you can: if you're a dwarf, then mechanically you're a Gimli clone, that's the end of it. You have to role-play to make your take on a demi-human character unique.

But I'll happily admit that I'm starting to miss the AD&D way of doing things. Classes; sub-classes that you have to roll good stats to pick; races that can choose from a handful of classes and multi-class combinations. Plus, I got my hands on a copy of the Advanced Edition Companion for Labyrinth Lord, which translates most of the 1st edition classes, races, spells, items, and monsters (it leaves out the freakshow fighter/thief/druid prestige bard class) into the basic D&D rules. So, perhaps, the next campaign I run will be a return to my AD&D days.

Back then, we played 2nd edition. There are lots of things about 2nd edition that are good: bards and rangers spring immediately to mind. Some things, not so much: clerical spheres and wizard schools, mainly. It was definitely better in 1e, when the four major spell-casting classes (cleric, druid, mage, illusionist) each had their own discreet spell list. To that end, I think I'm going to have to try something that I've oft heard about but never actually tried: the infamous 0e/1e/2e mashup campaign. Labyrinth Lord + Advanced Edition Companion + 2nd edition core rulebooks, to be precise.

I miss 2nd edition's system of class groups. Warriors, priests, rogues, wizards, and psionicists. Everything fell into place under one of these groups. I'm inclined to leave out psionics for a couple of reasons, though: the original psionicist was notoriously unbalanced, and I don't care to use the Skills & Powers version; and anyway, I don't see the need to draw a distinction between psychic and magical powers. Wizards already fill the niche; just because they mumble and gesture doesn't make them seem any less "psionic" to my way of thinking. But this consideration does still beg the question: how do you strike the proper balance between too few classes and too many? After all, by the end of 3rd edition's run, there were definitely too many base classes (and 4th edition suffers from the same problem in my opinion). So just what niches are there that need to be filled?

I think, as one might expect, it comes down to archetypes. What kinds of fantasy characters are so broad or so important that we want a whole class to represent them? After thinking about it for a while, I've come to the following conclusions: (1) standard fighter, (2) paladin or crusader, (3) wild warrior, like a ranger or barbarian, (4) priest or cleric, (5) druid or shaman, (6) kung-fu monk, (7) thief or burglar, (8) jack-of-all-trades bard, (9) ninja/spy/assassin, (10) standard mage, for flashy evoc./conj./trans. magic, (11) illusionist/enchanter/beguiler, and (12) necromancer.

Elegantly enough, this breaks down into three classes per group:
WARRIORS: Fighter, Paladin, Ranger.
PRIESTS: Cleric, Druid, Monk.
ROGUES: Thief, Bard, Assassin.
WIZARDS: Mage, Illusionist, Necromancer.

The illusionist, in particular, I've always liked to re-purpose as the "psychic" specialist. They seem to me the most "mentalist" of magic-users, conjuring up their illusions and phantasms by actually playing with the minds and perceptions of their victims. Like "the Shadow" from the old pulps and radio serials. If you've got a dedicated illusionist class in the game, there's no need for psionicists.

Now, as to the races in the game... I've tended in the past to take a pretty kitchen-sink approach. When you have rulebooks like Creature Crucible and Orcs of Thar, with whole classes dedicated to playing pretty much whatever, of course I'm going to allow the players to pick weird races and play them. But I'm starting to miss the simple focus of by-the-book AD&D. I might even turn the dial up to eleven. Humans: a must have. Dwarves: ditto. Do I need both elves and half-elves? Probably not; the vagaries of fantasy genetics aside, I think it's easier to just say that that the mixed children of humans and elves take after one race or the other. (Practically speaking, half-elves always seem to get the short end of the game-mechanical stick, so I'd rather just drop them.)

Then there's gnomes and halflings... I've often heard people on these very boards argue about why they drop one race or the other. "Halflings are too Tolkien." "Gnomes are too DragonLance." Whatever: I love both gnomes and halflings. But there is a valid point here: they both seem to fill the same archetypical niche of "sneaky little people." The natural thing, it seems, is to combine them: call them gnomes (the name caries folkloric weight) and fluff them as hobbits.

Then we come to the bruisers. Half-orcs and half-ogres. I prefer to drop these guys for the same reasons I'd leave out half-elves. I don't want my AD&D campaign to become a smorgasbord of half-breeds, templates, and rejects from a Xanth novel. But I want a bruiser in the lineup. Ogres? Too monstrous. Goliaths? Too artifical. Centaurs? Now we're talking: that's a species with some mythological heft. Plus, hey, I'm a Shining Force fan.

So... the race-class combos. It's kind of a ritual, when coming up with homebrew rules for an AD&D game, to delineate these. (In fact, I think this might be the part I miss the most.) Anyway, here's what I'm thinking now:

HUMANS: Any one class; humans other than paladins, monks, and bards can become dual-classed.
ELVES: Fighter, ranger, cleric, thief, or mage. Elves can be multi-classed with any combination of two or three classes that does not incorporate both cleric and thief, hence: F/C, F/T, F/M, M/T, M/C, F/T/M, and F/C/M (F = fighter *or* ranger).
DWARVES: Fighter, cleric, thief, assassin, or necromancer (to give dwarves a potentially creepy edge). Dwarves can multi-class as F/C or F/T (T = thief *or* assassin).
GNOMES: Fighter, cleric, thief, assassin, or illusionist. Gnomes can multi-class any two of their classes together (except, of course, that thief and assassin are in the same group and can't be combined).
CENTAURS: Fighter, ranger, druid, bard, or mage. Centaurs can multiclass F/D, F/M, or F/D/M (as with elves, ranger can substitute for fighter in these combinations, assuming some relaxed alignment restrictions that allow for good druids, thus making ranger/druid a legal combination).

*Whew*... I can't believe how long that actually turned out. I went from, "hey, I miss this about AD&D, wouldn't it be cool if...?" to "hey, listen to this campaign manifesto I'm writing up..." So... sorry about that. Anyway, that's what I miss. 2nd editiony race and class stuff. (Wow, that was a lot quicker and easier to type.)

 

[Raven Crowking]

Everything I missed from earlier games are in my current game. Everything I like about current games is included. Everything I dislike about earlier or current games is gone. I have weapon speeds (Very Slow, Slow, Normal, Fast, Very Fast). I have slower level progression, and a smaller power curve. I have weapon skills, and tactical combat that doesn't need a grid. I have stunts. I have skills. I have psionics, mutations, and planetary romance.

I have a game tailored to my needs. It's a lot of work, but it is worth it.



RC

 

[Clownmite]

I have weapon skills, and tactical combat that doesn't need a grid. I have stunts. I have skills. I have psionics, mutations, and planetary romance.

Do you have these posted anywhere?

 

[JamesonCourage]

Do you have these posted anywhere?

I think there's a link in his signature. I'm not 100% though, so don't quote me on it.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Do you have these posted anywhere?

There is a link in my .sig to the Beta Playtest, but if you wait a bit longer, I am working on a finalized First Edition, which will be far more comprehensive, and which will include changes made as a result of a lot of playtesting.


RC

 

[Clownmite]

I think there's a link in his signature. I'm not 100% though, so don't quote me on it.

Haha, I saw the "My free mostly-OGC OGL game" part and stopped reading, not knowing what those acronyms were and assuming they weren't related. My bad.