What do you miss from the good ol' days?

[James Jacobs]

1: Short stat blocks.

2: Monster books with multiple monsters per page.

3: Wormy.

4: Working on Dungeon magazine. (although working on Pathfinder's shaping up to be a pretty good replacemet.)

 

[kaomera]

3: Wormy.

QFT. (And I think you just sold another subscription to Pathfinder.)

 

[Fifth Element]

Demihuman level limits. Those lovable, illogical, completely ridiculous level limits.

Seriously though, I do miss the term "demihuman".

 

[Henry]

The main thing I miss? The group I gamed with back then. I love the people I game with now, no mistaking, but I do miss the cut-ups I used to game with back then.

The second thing I miss? The whole "shady rules/player trust in the DM" issue. I know that, speaking to several people who played 1E and Basic D&D years ago, some people had bad experiences and quit, but in my experiences, we had nothing but fun trying to figure out what was fair between "DM's aesthetic" and "player fairness" rather than having it spelled out exactly how many man-sized creatures will fit in the purple worm's gut. Peer pressure kept a DM from using his authority to run roughshod all over the players, and we figured it out as we went, injecting a buttload of houserules along the way. Now, I have little need for house rules, because I have every rules variant under the sun under my fingertips in some book for sale, but lots of variants we kit-built as we went because of a lack of communication with anyone besides just our group.

So in a nutshell, I kind of miss the frontier.

 

[Melan]

Laser guns.

Not that I miss them, since the PCs in my campaign have four or five among them right now, but I can get behind the sentiment!

 

[robberbaron]

Some of you have hit on the thing I miss most. Being a young RPGr.

Playing 1e in my teens/tweens seemed to be much more fun than playing 3e/3.5e in my 40s.
Actually, I think it was more fun. D&D now is a little too complex.


Being able to have an all-weekend game with EVERYONE present, not just the 2 or 3 who haven't got somewhere else they have to be. I mean, Real Life. Who needs it?

Ah, nostagia.

Another thing I miss is that, in 1e, every character was a Core Class character (or 2 or 3).
I really do not like the way that including Prestige Classes make many players think more about how to build the bestest twinked-out character than how to complete the mission/rescue the damsel/save the world.
They are always looking into the future rather than the present.

 

[theredrobedwizard]

I'm guessing we must've had a terribly different experience with pre-3.0/3.5 editions of D&D. I'm pretty sure that we went through characters like they were Fruit Stripe gum (ie. they'd be gone inside an hour and we'd have to get a new one).

Maybe I'm just strange, but most of the things people are nostalgic about are the things I disliked the most about previous editions of D&D.

Heck, the only thing I miss about older editions is... umm... sorry, can't think of anything. Hated the art, hated the demihuman level limit stuff, hated the whole "I'm the DM so the rules don't apply to my NPCs/Monsters" thing (I'm a huge proponent of the 'if a rule applies to the PCs, it applies to the NPCs as well' theory*), hated hobbity halflings (the kender-like-but-not-so-annoying / slightly-gypsy-like halflings of 3e are far more enjoyable to me), hated dual classing/wonky multi-classing rules, hated the multitude of tables everywhere, hated facing, hated THAC0, and hated gygaxian dungeons.

* I'm a firm believer in the idea that it takes a more skilled person to write a story and find out how to make it work within the rules than to just hand-wave it and claim Rule 0. If you can't find a way to make it work, then keep looking.

[tangent]
To the people who complain about 3.x stat blocks being huge, I have posted below the stat block for a 10th level fighter.

Bob Zjerunkul (Human Fighter 10)
S 16 D 12 Co 14 I 8 W 14 Ch 10
HP 76 AC 23[FF 22/T 12] Init +5
Melee +2 Longsword (+17/+12/+7, 1d8+7), Ranged +2 Light Crossbow (+14/+9+4, 1d10)
Fort +13 Ref +8 Will +9
Feats: Power Attack, [Great] Cleave, (WF, WS, GWF) Longsword, Imp. Toughness, Great Fort., Lightning Ref., Iron Will, Imp. Initiative, Rapid Reload.
Skills: Intimidate +13, Craft (Armorsmith) +12
Equipment: +2 Longsword, +2 Heavy Crossbow, +1 Fullplate, +1 Heavy Shield, Cloak of Resistance +2, (random other crap).

Sure, it's bigger than the average 1st Ed stat block, but it only took me 5 minutes and it'll fit on an index card.
[/tangent]

tl;dr - I miss nothing from olde D&D.

-TRRW

 

[jeffh]

Liquid in a store room makes sense. But not mixing in barrels of acid with water and ale. Putting some gold coins at the bottom of said acid makes less sense.

Actually, there's lots of reasons why one might want to do that. This is a good way to test their authenticity, and to clean them off; some acids will ignore gold but chew up most other metals, as I understand it. And of course, it provides a measure of protection against nosy adventurers.

 

[jeffh]

I miss some of the settings, namely the "Known World" (later known as Mystara) and Dark Sun. A couple of quirks like system shock. 1E martial arts. But mostly I miss everything being new to me; being a 20+ year veteran has its perks but it also sucks sometimes. Lately I'm kind of jaded on roleplaying, honestly.

Things I don't miss: different tables for different ability scores, terminally unclear initiative rules (anyone who misses 1E initiative doesn't actually understand it - very few people do!), those stupid dumbass saving throw categories, nobody being able to hide or open locks except theives (and them not being competent at it until surprisingly high levels), things that suprised 75% of the time and were themselves surprised only 1 time in 8 (what happens when two such things meet? ), the treasure type table, different XP charts for different classes, and the problems the latter were an attempt to fix, namely the ridiculous idea that "balance" could be achieved by having a class be hopelessly incompetent early in exchange for being a deity later (magic-user), vice versa (barbarian), or hey, what the heck, let's dispense with it entirely (cavalier, BD&D halfling).

 

[Jhaelen]

I really don't want to get into this again, but that statement is misleading, to say the least. I played 2E for a good ten years, and I use just as many houserules in 3.5 as I ever did in 2E (or 1E, for that matter).

I certainly agree with Wik, though. Except I don't miss having to create hundreds of house-rules. And you HAD to create house-rules because the rules simply didn't cover lots of possible actions.

In 3.5 you can do without house-rules. For the first two years I've played it entirely by the book. Only later did I start introducing some.

As for the comment on rule-lawyers - IME they were a lot more common in earlier editions, precisely because of the predominance of different house-rules. If you played in a group using a certain set of house-rules you tried to convince the players in the next group to adopt them, as well. The chances to successfully change a DM's ruling were also a lot better - again precisely because the rules had so many holes.