Weird weapon weights - has this been updated?

[Dessert Nomad]

I think it is less about consensus and more about how some people either don't remember or didn't play with the rules -- house rules were the norm, not the exception during that period of time. I don't think I ever played in a group that played entirely RAW. It could also be a matter of tactics and group size (see below).

I say it's about consensus because the initiative rules are spread out, complicated, and highly non-intuitive, It wasn't just that people chose to play with house rules, people often didn't even know what the real rules were before they came up with house rules. And as I understand it, even Gary Gygax didn't actually use the official system himself. This PDF is (probably) accurate, but if you look at it it takes an incredible ten pages to explain how initiative works, and how the D6s people rolled are often completely irrelevant. http://knights-n-knaves.com/dmprata/ADDICT.pdf

I am glad that this prompted me to find that document, but the correct initiative rules are actually even more confusing than I remember!

 

[WaterRabbit]

I think this is more about what type of player you are talking about. AD&D was a much more simulationist game than other versions. If you were a wargamer (especially miniatures) by background, these rules weren't that troublesome. At the table we reformatted them into a flow chart (similar to your linked pdf) and we had all of the tables incorporated into our character sheets (the parts that applied) so we didn't really find them that complex.

In some ways I miss these rules as they made combat much more tactically interesting than subsequent editions. They were poorly formatted, but once you understood them they worked fairly well. That had a bit of wonkiness to them with negative ACs and such, but those were easy fixes. Initiative was so much more important that it is in the current version and rolling it each round wasn't difficult. It also made player coordination much easier. In the current version it has been my observation that it is much more difficult for players to coordinate their actions.

With 5e you can almost just do everything with storytelling and rolling a single die to determine any outcome 1-10 failure, 11-20 success. It is the least tactical of any version of D&D. You can almost just get rid of the different weapons -- just make every weapon a d8 and call it whatever you like as they have been so homogenized compared to previous editions. In AD&D each weapon felt different and had subtle advantages and disadvantages associated with them. With the 5e focus on never having disadvantages on anything, it is a bit more bland.