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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nisarg" data-source="post: 1787680" data-attributes="member: 19893">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</blockquote>

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