Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2233635" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, I completely disagree that I'm overstating the problems.   If anything, I'm vastly understating them.   First edition D&D was a horribly flawed game. But that has to be put in the proper perspective.  I'm prone to picking on Col. Pladoh and offering up various scathing criticisms of his work.  Doing so is something like criticizing Edison for his early attempts at making a light bulb, or criticizing the Wright brothers for thier early work with flying machines.   The fact of the matter is the Col. Pladoh is co-creator of and primary driving force behind one of the most important inventions of the 20th century which has and will have far reaching implications in education, entertainment, and military sciences and which has had an indirect impact in hastening the information and computing revolutions.  It's only a mild understatement to say that Moore's law has been driven by the needs of gamers.  So, while I do think 1st edition D&D to be horribly flawed, I feel pretty comfortable thinking that I won't offend anyone's ego by saying so.  The Kittyhawk is a horribly flawed airplane, but its hanging in Smithsonian for a very good reason.The topic was what 1st edition D&D got wrong.  It would be an even lenghtier discussion to discuss what 1st edition D&D got right.But since you asked why such a horribly flawed game succeeded, I'll give a brief answer:1) TSR put out alot of quality - even revolutionairy - products.   That is such an obvious explanation that it is easy to over look it, but the fact of the matter is that alot of what TSR put out is deservedly classic.  Alot of TSR's competitors could see what TSR was doing wrong, but generally speaking it wasn't until the '90's that TSR competitors started consistantly putting out products that were actually fixing more problems than they were causing.   2) Everyone who gamed knew how to play.   The system was it its heart very simple, and everyone who gamed had played it.  If you wanted to get a game together with friends, it was the only game that everyone would know how to play and would have books for.3) It is was cool in a wierdly esoteric way.  It wasn't a dumbed down product.  It was electic and compelling and strange and exciting.  It inspired the imagination.  Old 1st edition books read like fantastic arcane tomes.   The language was right, even if at some level it was language horribly suited to conveying clear meaning.4) The class/level system and hit point systems are at some level highly elegant despite thier complete lack of 'realism'.   If you don't believe that, then you haven't played enough gaming systems.   One thing you learn playing alot of rules systems is that often a game systems biggest strength is also its biggest weakness.   For example, GURPS has a remarkable level of detail and potential for simulation.   It's also more detail than you really need or as a game moderator can usefully prepare before a game begins.  Rolemaster and MERPS and all the other 3rd generation games reveled in the very esoteric tables (and cross references tables) that we know recognize as another type of hinderance to play.   Pure skill systems are hard to balance, can lead to munkinist one trick wonders, and make describing NPC's tersely extremely difficult.   Just because D&D was all horribly wrong, doesn't mean anyone had really figured out a better way to do things.   Rather, choosing between AD&D and something else typically meant choosing what you considered to be the lesser of several evils.  Several systems proved better at one thing or the other (it was hard to do horror or Sci-Fi in D&D), but in the fantasy market, D&D remained king.   HARN, MERPS, and GURPS in my experience tended to exist mostly as simulationist play things for DM's.   Most of the actual group play that was going on was in AD&D.</blockquote>

Verification