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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 8109717" data-attributes="member: 32740">The way to get 1E "feel" is to use 1E rules.  Simple as that.  No edition has an expiration date, so I'd advise critics they shouldn't be pretending that because it's not on the shelf at Barnes & Noble it's by definition NO GOOD or never was.  That's the first thing needing to be said.Second thing is that if you're going to CRITIQUE 1E then do it by the standards of the time in which it was written, and by the rules as they handle themselves, not according to "standards" being used by games 40 years later and the rules THEY have produced for THEIR intended ends.  At the time it was written there WEREN'T other RPG's to speak of.  There was Basic D&D and Holmes Basic. The select few other KNOWN RPG's at the time 1E actually got published would be Boot Hill, Petal Throne, Chivalry & Sorcery, Traveller, Metamorphasis Alpha...  Hell, 1E AD&D was still INVENTING RPG's out of what was mostly thin air and that makes it outrageously unfair to discredit it for NOT being hip to 40 years of both successful and failed RPG design.  5E stands on achievements made by 1E (and Basic D&D, 2E, etc...), it doesn't disrespect and discount those achievements, it actually wants hardcore 1E fans to be lured by its attempts to BE more like 1E.Personally, I believe that the biggest thing that makes 1E different from more recent D&D editions, is that at the time the people playing it knew the game was theirs to make of it whatever they wanted.  Hell, the author repeatedly advised DM's to tell rules-lawyering players to shut up.  The game was NOT about pre-planned optimization, or character "builds", or LIMITLESS player options, and especially not about fanatical adherence to written rules - it was about the creativity of both DM's and players using whatever they had.  It was also still primarily written as a dungeon exploration game with some roleplaying elements rather than first being a roleplaying game featuring dungeon environments.  Most mechanical customization of character abilities was done by acquiring magic items - which were overwhelmingly randomly distributed from charts.  Now because it was such a hodge-podge of rules and mechanics (and in practical terms was nothing more than a massive assemblage of a lot of house rules from previous Basic D&D campaigns) it was quite amenable to being savagely sliced up, modified and rebuilt even to great extent.AD&D was built from the bottom up - the new ruleset latching onto a wide variety of ideas that DM's from anywhere had thrown against the wall and happened to mostly stick.  That was then collated into one set of rules with a lot of the author's own advice regarding how HE PERSONALLY runs the game.  If there was a stated desire that players stick to the rules-as-written it was because the new edition was heavily envisioned as the basis that would be used by everyone going forward in tournament play - which obviously needs a single set of rules and not rules highly individualized by each DM.  Nowadays a new D&D version is built from the top down - a select committee of designers and marketers using their own creativity to be sure, but also building upon decades of developed RPG and general game design theory, and ideas already tested in the crucible of the real world for decades.  And it simultaneously seems to be trying to provide not a tournament-like shared experience, but a shared experience for all players in the form of book-sized combination adventure/campaigns.  Nothing wrong with that because that's a good way to make money in selling D&D materials, but sure tends to put individual creativity of campaigns and DM's solidly into secondary consideration territory.1E "feel", properly embraced, just isn't going to sell as well anymore.  1E "feel" would be putting more creative tools and ideas into the hands of individual DM's and still leaving to them most of the individualized campaign rules and adventure creation.  But it was learned way back after the death of TSR that selling to PLAYERS was where profit was really going to be found and there's no doubt in my mind that they design editions of D&D with that SOLIDLY in mind.  So they can throw a bone or two at 1E "feel" but they'll likely never really achieve it again.At least that's what I mostly see.</blockquote>

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