What do you miss about AD&D 1e?

[Mouseferatu]

Yeah, I miss that too. It drives me crazy when players don't even try to act convincingly and instead say, "I'll roll to bluff."

But if you want to play a high charisma character, and you're just an average guy in real life, you need something in the game to represent that.

It's hard for me to decide if I like it or hate it.

I find it pretty simple to compromise. The player must make an attempt to roleplay the bluff. Then he can roll the dice. That way, it doesn't matter if the player is actually a good bluffer or not; all that matters is that he puts effort into the roleplaying.

Sure, some people don't even want to roleplay the attempt. They'd rather just roll the dice, and don't want to roleplay conversations anymore than they want to act out combat; they prefer to play D&D primarily as a tactical game. That's fine, of course. They just wouldn't want to play in my games.

 

[Voadam]

Yeah, I miss that too. It drives me crazy when players don't even try to act convincingly and instead say, "I'll roll to bluff."

But if you want to play a high charisma character, and you're just an average guy in real life, you need something in the game to represent that.

It's hard for me to decide if I like it or hate it.

For me it's easy to decide, I hate it. I want roleplay interactions to be roleplay. As DM when I'm talking in character as an NPC to a PC I want interaction, not dice rolling.

From my perspective if you want to play a face man character you have to interact, I enjoy the interactions and I won't remove them from the game for a mechanical replacement that I don't find as fun. I want the fighter and wizard PCs to talk to NPCs, not just the high diplomacy skill characters.

I found that as I was rolling diplomacy checks as a DM I was forcing interactions to go according to the numbers on the dice, sometimes in wierd ways that felt unnatural to me and for no benefit to my game. So I've just stopped calling for them. Luckily none of the PCs in my game has a high sense motive (or any other social skill) so I don't have to be harassed with questions about "do I think he's lying" The PCs just judge for themselves.

I'm reserving skill rolls for mechanical things now, bluff is for feinting and getting an opportunity to hide and sense motive is for detecting enchantments and countering the bluff skill.

 

[MerricB]

Conversely, I love having the dice for skills like Diplomacy. It stops people with a high personal charisma but a low score in those abilities on their character sheets from dominating.

I normally allow bonuses of about +4 for exceptional role-playing on the die; but it still permits failure, even if I have personally loved the story they've spun.

Cheers!

 

[Prince of Happiness]

Conversely, I love having the dice for skills like Diplomacy. It stops people with a high personal charisma but a low score in those abilities on their character sheets from dominating.

I normally allow bonuses of about +4 for exceptional role-playing on the die; but it still permits failure, even if I have personally loved the story they've spun.

Cheers!

I kinda do a combination of that and more allowance for direct arbitration. If I have a pretty clear idea where an NPC is at mentally, and what a PC says leads to what I've planned an NPCs reaction to be, then no die rolling would be necessary.

If it's something I don't have the foggiest about or if it would (and should) go either way, then yeah, roll, bonuses for a good spiel.

 

[iblis]

Daemons. Where can I find Daemons ala 1e for 3.5e, btw? Or do I have to restat and reintegrate the whole damn lot?

The front covers.

Also DMG 1e, Unearthed Arcana 1e, and Oriental Adventures 1e. Is there an original Oriental Adventures 1e for 3.5e, while I'm asking?

...among other things...

In the end, my 2nd fave is still 1st, after 3rd (well, three-point-five-erd) that is.

 

[Nisarg]

add me to the "soul train" school of thought here.. I loved that 1e was more free, had a bigger sense of possibilities, even if its rules made less sense and were in some ways more limiting, in a way those limits were taken less seriously.

There are three elements to the 1e nostalgia: the first being that the rules being all over the place, and highly arbitrary, which made the game in its own unrealistic way very fun to play. This is something you can only really play with 1e, though Hackmaster has an element of this.

The second element is the "wide-open" style and structure of the books; something that was given a kind of tip of the hat by 3rd edition in the way the DMG was obviously meant to mimic the 1st ed DMG. The fact that you had too look up rules all over the place, that there were some areas that had been given huge rules-attention, and others that were given so little coverage you practically had to do it all yourself. The way they had stats for laser weapons and pistols.

The third element, one I come to appreciate more and more the longer I play, was the lack of concern for what today is the sacred cow of "game balance". In 3rd edition, encounters and treasure are matrixed to a CR appropriate to the party. In 1st edition in the wilderness you could easily run into a monster waaaay too powerful for your pcs to handle, and in dungeons the encounters were rigged to the depth of the dungeon level, not the average character level of the party.
Ditto with treasures. There were treasure ratings for the type of monsters you fought, but within that, you had a chance of finding a Holy Avenger sword at 1st level if your DM ran the game in adherence to roll results. Not to mention the dreaded but rare artifacts.
There were more things that could kill you instantly, there were also more things that could give you lots of power really fast.
And no two characters had to "balance out" in power levels.
All of these are things that 3rd ed. goes out to try to regulate and balance, but of course a DM wanting to restore this "flavour" can do so by loosening some of those balance restrictions.
The idea of game balance is important when you're dealing with inexperienced players or DMs, or preferred by certain groups of players/DMs even with experience, but if your group is so inclined there's a LOT to be said for a high-mortality but high-reward game where everyone's willing to work with less concern for balance, and it restores a lot of that "1st edition soul" to the game.

Nisarg

 

[greymist]

What about the Thief-Acrobat from Unearthed Arcana? Or the Bard (if I remember correctly Fighter then Thief then Druid then Bard?)
AD&D had a few anomolous prestige-like classes.

I would think of these more like multi-class than prestige classes.

 

[Akrasia]

Conversely, I love having the dice for skills like Diplomacy. It stops people with a high personal charisma but a low score in those abilities on their character sheets from dominating.
...

If a player does not role-play his/her charisma appropriately, he/she should be penalized by the DM for that. It is simple. No need to resort to rolling diplomacy, etc.

Likewise, if an uncharismatic player is trying to role-play a charismatic character, any DM worth her salt will give the poor guy a break, and assume that the character is saying whatever the player is saying with much more finesse and charm.

IMO the only benefit of diplomacy, etc., rolls is to summarize a day's worth of social interaction in a short time, for those points in a gaming session where the DM needs/wants to move things along at a quick pace. But really, you don't need special diplomacy, bluff, etc. skills for that. Earlier editions could accomplish the same thing by making a charisma "ability check."

 

[ValamirCleaver]

Gygax's prose and other fluff text

Art by Trampier, Otus, Roslof, Dee, Easley, Holloway, LaForce, Sutherland, Pekul, Elmore, ect.

Overall the art focused more on complete scenes as opposed to character poses

Overall weapon and armor depictions were based more on real world historical examples

AD&D did not try as hard to distance itself from real world medieval history and technology

Halflings were Hobbits and not kender gypsies

Demons, demodands, daemons and devils were refered to as such...none of this tanar'ri, gehreleth, yugoloth, baatezu nonsense while trying to keep below the radar of conservative evangelical Christians

Demon princes, arch-devils, and the Oinodaemon on their home planes were as powerful as lesser gods

Demon lords and dukes of Hell on their home planes were as powerful as demi-gods

Extraplanar creatures did not speak in pseudo-Berkshire dialects

Seven Heavens, Nine Hells, Concordant Opposition, Nirvana, Olympus, Twin Paradises, Hades, Tarterus, Happy Hunting Grounds and Gladsheim were known as such

The para-elemental and quasi-elemental planes

The border ethereal

 

[DMScott]

But before I take the plunge, let me ask a simple question: What do you folks (those of you who were around back in the day) miss about AD&D 1e? Am I just seeing things through nostalgia-fogged goggles, or was there really something special in AD&D 1e, something that we've perhaps lost?

I've been gaming since 1978, so I guess I qualify as an old fogey.

Your question is interesting to me, because recently I moved across the country and found myself looking for a new gaming group. I found a few local groups in the "not sure if we're going to start a game, but we'll take your name down" phase, and I was kind of surprised that two of the possible groups played 1E. So just in case, I dug through some boxes and found I still had a decent core of 1E rulebooks - PH, DMG, MM, MMII, Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures, and the two Survival Guides (Dungeoneers' and Wilderness), with the latter 3 being books that I still use today. So I sat down to read through the PH, DMG, and UA just to refamiliarize myself.

The verdict: frankly, I'm amazed I became a lifelong RPGer. The rules are clunky and obviously unplaytested. The writing style is irritating. The books manage to be both awful for teaching the game and awful as references - that's a pretty good trick, if I've ever read another rules set like that I've blocked it from my memory. I started remembering why every DM I gamed with (myself included) had a big binder of house rules.

The weird thing is, I have other RPG rulesets that are almost as old - Traveller, Thieves' Guild, Aftermath, and a few other bits and pieces from various systems (heck, I even have Tunnels and Trolls kicking around somewhere). All of those are better written, better edited, better laid out, and better balanced than AD&D.

So as far as I can tell from 25 years later, the good memories I have of AD&D are all nostalgia - they center on the people I gamed with, the fact that I was growing up through the AD&D years, and so on. Basically nothing to do with the game itself, I became a lifelong D&Der mostly because that's what my dad picked out when he went bought me a gift from a local game store in 1978, and decided I might like one of those newfangled role-playing games. Funny how life works.

Which is not to say I wouldn't play first edition if I found a fun group and that's what they played, the DM and the group are far more important than the rules. But AFAICT, there's nothing sacred, nor even especially impressive, about the 1E rules.