What do you dislike about 1E?

[Crothian]

No, Complete Arcane has clarifications that, if you read through the rules in the PHB, you could figure out on your own.

evidence in the rules forum and wizards forum though shows that people can't figure it out on their own. Some obviously can though.

 

[Kanegrundar]

They end, just not satisfactory. But the threads end, usually with a lock and thrown away key

The issue just goes dormant for a little bit, but it ALWAYS returns.

 

[Storm Raven]

evidence in the rules forum and wizards forum though shows that people can't figure it out on their own. Some obviously can though.

Or alternatively, people don't want to go through the work of figuing things out on their own, and would rather pay someone to work it out for them.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

This might be the problem. I'm not just talking about D&D and its many versions. When I say games have improved in the past 20 years, I'm talking across the board of RPGs. To just compare the editions of D&D invited edition wars and those never end well.

Fair enough. I'll still say that the trend over the last 20 years has been downhill. RPG's have moved towards poorer prose - in terms of quality of writing, concision and entertainment value, not just spelling and grammar - combined with a kind of horrible rules-bloat that characterises pretty much every RPG product since 1990.

The oldest games (T&T, original Traveller, OD&D) felt light and fast in-play and were generally quick to resolve. Thanks to a lack of artwork and stat blocks, and also due to production costs at the time, they also had a content -v- page count ratio that modern games simply couldn't even begin to approach.

If you subtracted the artwork, the stat blocks and the unnecessary verbiage from most modern gaming products, then what remained would be minuscule.

An honourable exception is Castles & Crusades. I'm not personally a C&C player (I refuse to fork out money for a product that's so similar to game systems I already own) but I do approve of the approach.

 

[The_Gunslinger658]

Hi ya-

Some great replies here and more importantly, this thread has not yet degenerated into a flame war!

With that said, I sit here at my computer planning tonights game, As a DM I'm trying my level best to run a few challanging encounters, to do that, I as the DM must be familier with key abilities of my NPC's IE Druid type abilities, Wizard types and so on.
It really puts me off sometimes to even attempt a major encounter with 3E, its like, I try to limit the combats to perhaps two per a session sense they take so long to resolve. At high level of play it takes much longer.
With 1E it was simple, sure there were a few warts, but running an encounter was a breeze. So this brings me to my next question, why on gods green earth is 3.5 so popular if it is such a pain to DM? Heck, I have even seen groups offering to pay DM's to run a 3E game which was unheard of back in the day.


Scott

 

[Dinkeldog]

When this same topic came up a month ago, here's what I said:



Read that last sentence again. Edition wars are utterly, utterly pointless.

No, Eric. They establish that I am Right(TM), and you are Wrong(TM). Until you accept that, I'll have to keep telling you. I am Right (TM). You are Wrong(TM). Most likely in another month.

 

[amethal]

Hi-

It seems to me there are a few people who seem to miss 1E but I sure as hell dont miss it. What a pain in the butt it was to look up countless tables or try to undertsand badly written rules. This I think for all of its faults makes 3.5 shine, I rarely have to look at my DM's screen nowadays.


Scott

I liked all editions of D&D / AD&D. They were and are a great way to have fun.

What I didn't like about 1st edition was greatly outnumbered by what I did like. However, as this is a thread about dislikes :-

- the fact that we had to ignore chunks of the rules to get a decent game e.g. psionics, weapons vs armour, weapon speed factors

- the virtual impossibility of rolling high enough to play a paladin or ranger

- magic users being useless at low levels

- the complicated (at least to us) method of calculating XP for killing monsters

- there being no reason to play a human (as our campaigns never lasted long enough for demihuman level limits to matter)

- almost everything in Unearthed Arcana

- the four page errata sheet that came with my copy of Unearthed Arcana

Other stuff which people have complained about didn't bother us at the time - non-weapon proficiencies were fine, we didn't mind the racial class / level restrictions, all those tables, the lack of rules for common situations. Its only when these have been "fixed" that I realised they were problems.

Now it feels like a more innocent age, somehow.

At least the DMs never had to worry about how they were going to

a) houserule the persistent spell / divine metamagic combination; and
b) deal with some whining player who has built his entire character concept around abusing this combination and takes it as a personal affront when I explain that I've used "old school DM fiat" to outlaw it

Anyway, Castles & Crusades is looking more and more like my next RPG purchase - and the C&C Players Handbook costs less than any of WOTCs publications.

 

[Angel of Adventure]

Yeah, about 1E . . .

Very cumbersome and pro-DM. What amazes me, though, are how threads pop up from time-to-time discussing how to get the 1E feel in 3.5. Just play 1E and you will definately get that feel! Why rearrange something that works (somewhat) efficently back to something that is very inefficent?

-AoA

 

[Ourph]

OD&D (1974) had all the rules you needed if you could figure them out on your own.

Diaglo, you are, without doubt, the Friedrich Nietzsche of old school gaming!

 

[Crothian]

If you subtracted the artwork, the stat blocks and the unnecessary verbiage from most modern gaming products, then what remained would be minuscule.

So, you don't want RPG books you want VCR manuals. RPGs books are more then just rules.