What do you miss from the good ol' days?

[Son_of_Thunder]

I don't miss anything from the good ol' days cause we play the same game we played back then.

Correction, I do miss the huge amount of free time I used to have as a young man.

D20 Fantasy Edition is not D&D to me.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

-Much faster character creation
-Players NOT CARING if rules were "official", and not constantly bitching about them because they're not expecting rules to be FLAWLESS.
-1E Monks
-Paladins not afraid to friggin' kill things
-Rangers having more in common with Aragorn than Drizzt
-Having a single character level spreading over several adventures, and not a single adventure resulting in several level-ups per character. That is, characters able to take down a single, 50-room dungeons without having to rest overnight three times and not levelling up twice in the process too.
-The glorious, munchkin, power-gaming train wreck that was 1E psionics
-Monsters with pronounceable names
-3d6x6 for character creation but players who enjoyed playing with what they were stuck with ANYWAY
-Wormy
-Campaign settings with a great deal more raw wilderness than civilization - and leaving it that way.
-having a game that ran every Saturday from 12 noon to sometime before daybreak on Sunday.

 

[Wik]

Wait... humancentric?

Maybe my games were weird... most of my group you had to almost beg to get them to be a human... humans dun used to stunk!

I miss just not having to worry about everyone scheduling a game... We just gamed on game nights, and when we had free time we gamed some more.

Not our games. In 2e, everyone was a human or half-elf (another thing I miss - half-elves as a viable character race). It wasn't that we played for long times or anything - every player just looked at the racial limits on class and said "I don't want to risk capping out at 12th level while everyone else keeps going".

And no one ever multi-classed. Hell, the one time I multi-classed (playing an enchanter/druid), I begged the GM to let me take it back so I could just be a straight druid. I hated being a level or two behind everyone.

But, everyone's experiences are different, right?

 

[Lanefan]

Thought of a few more things I miss:

- the word "dweomer" rearing its ugly head now and then
- magic item creation being something done by someone else, often centuries ago, rather than by the PCs while in town on a break
- watching the game evolve before our eyes at a tolerable pace each month in Dragon (one rules expansion book in 4 years; that being the original UA, mostly compiled from re-worked Dragon articles)
- low rolls being desireable sometimes
- +10 to hit or damage being a really big deal
- drunken dungeons
- Judges' Guild modules (these last two go hand in hand surprisingly well!)

Lanefan

 

[Victim]

Honestly, I think the game is more human-centric than ever. They're just that good!

Cheers!

Yeah, I saw more elves or half elves than humans playing 2e.

 

[danzig138]

My youth.

Nothing else of relevance has changed that defined the "good ol days".

Word. All I miss is being 20 years younger, stronger, and healthier. My gaming is just as good, if not better now, then it was then.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

Do you really have players coming forth to play characters like this? Really? Or is this some kind of thinly veiled attempt to bait people into another board spanning edition war?

In my admittedly limited and anecdotal experience, no. Characters tend to be of one, maybe two base classes, often with one prestige class on top of it (rarely two).

 

[Baby Samurai]

Word. All I miss is being 20 years younger, stronger, and healthier.

Yeah, but you still look pretty young and virile, judging from your avatar.

 

[Baby Samurai]

Some of these are kooky, but I still miss them for some reason:


-Rangers and monks gaining 2 HD at first level.

-Rangers having low level magic-user spells.

-The Illusionist class.

-Typed demons – in the old days Balor was just the name of one of many Type VI demons.

-Geryon.

-Moloch

-1st edition OA martial arts.




…I'll get back with some more.

 

[Peni Griffin]

Striving to qualify for a character concept. Man, bards rocked - if you could get the stats for one and then proceed through all the steps without him dying on you. I understand why they changed it, but a lot of the romance went out of the class. Paladins, monks - those were hard to qualify for, too. But then monks were kind of weird.

I think I may be peculiar in that I like playing limitations. Sonnets are so much more satisfying than free verse. I don't want to tweak the numbers and figure all the builds and come up with "the character I want." I want to take the numbers in the order they're rolled, find the best class/race fit, maybe even roll for social class, and play the heck out of what I've got, scratching and clawing my way up and really earning every level. I never could sell anybody on this, but I always wanted to play in a Hindi campaign where you rolled up the character stats and then rolled which "caste" you were born into. High STR, Low INT? Too bad, son, you were born into the wizard caste, here's your material components bag and your spellbook, go beat your karma.

I can have fun with the current version; I just feel like later versions are too complicated and too easy at the same time. There's a certain kind of challenge 3.X and point-buy systems don't present me with.

Look at it this way - any old cardplayer can win the pot if he has the means to build a full house. It takes a real poker player to win with a pair of dueces.