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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMScott" data-source="post: 1787873" data-attributes="member: 11734">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.</blockquote>

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