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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7622757" data-attributes="member: 4937">This not at all my experience.  ''Ease" or "difficulty" is entirely a matter of the DM.  I can make a killer dungeon in any edition.  I can run through a stack of photocopied character sheets in any edition.  It's not particularly hard in any edition to make the game difficult.   So I'm having a hard time understanding how you can judge which edition was easier.   Is poison less immediately a "save or die" sort of thing?  Sure.  But that doesn't make 1e harder than later editions.  It just meant as a DM you had to be more careful about how you handled creatures with poison, and as a player how you fought them.  Energy drain is similar.  Honestly, the rate which I had PC's lost to poison and energy drain hasn't changed much between the two editions.   That's probably not a ubiquitous experience, but for example with poison most DMs (including myself) in 1e either carefully handled poisonous monsters or if we were going to not carefully handle them, made sure that the resources like Slow Poison, Neutralize Poison, and Keotougm's Ointment necessary to mitigate poison were available in sufficient quantities that if the PC's were careful, they would be able to deal with bad luck.All you are really showing is that 3e was less arbitrary than 1e.  As far as difficulty goes, there are a ton of things in 3e that are vastly more difficult than 1e.  Monsters don't top out at effectively 'CR 10'.   The rules include standardized methods for increasing the HD and difficult of foes through advancement, templates, and character levels.  In 1e, after a party hit name level there were only a few things in the MM that even represented much of a threat to the party.  Monsters now explicitly have strength, dexterity, and constitution.  In 1e, a fighter would often have more hit points than anything he encountered.   In 3e, you often encounter things with 2-3 times as many hit points as the party fighter.  With strength scores, all monsters can hit like a truck, and not just a few high end monsters like giants.  One of the ways that 3e is vastly harder than 1e, is that it was comparatively easy in 1e to buff AC to the point that monsters almost never hit you.  They rarely had bonuses to hit, and they topped off at 16 HD on the standard chart.   It was fairly easy to get to the point that pretty much every thing you encountered would need a 20 or nearly a 20 to hit.   But in 3e, monsters have more HD, better THAC0, and almost always have additional bonuses to hit from high strength.   And on top of that, monsters can critically hit you, turning fights that should be easy into suddenly nervy moments.   Yes, more things get saving throws, but those saving throws don't have static DC's.  A few things in 1e had -2 or -4 penalties to saves.  In 3e, the save difficulties get ludicrously high so that even high level characters are rarely going to pass their saves.  That one change alone in my experience made 3e much harder than 1e, because high level 1e characters could reliably pass saving throws with only a minimal amount of magical boosts.  Plus 3e really stressed all sorts of new challenges.  Swarms for example became a standardized thing and brought new terrors to the game.   Or lets take an example from 5e: 11th level fighter with typical stats and equipment for an 11th level fighter in a solo fight again 1st level fighters with typical stats in equipment.  In a recent thread, someone claimed that in 5e the 11th level fighter could defeat about 11 1st level fighters.   You want to talk about a difficulty spike.   Back in the day I had written a combat simulator for D&D on my Commodore 64 in Basic, and I frequently ran those sort of scenarios - 10th level fighter versus kobolds, 10th level fighter versus orcs, 10th level fighter versus bugbears, etc.   The numbers for a 1e AD&D 11th level fighter versus 1st level fighters would have been around 100.  I seem to remember a scenario where the fighter could get his back to the wall, and he'd go through over 300 orcs assuming they didn't have any ranged or reach weapons.   Name level parties could literally take on armies all on their own in 1e.   Now just a dozen mooks are dangerous?  That's a huge change in difficulty, moved to a different place in the game, granted, but still a huge change. In short, this is all a DM thing.  It's about how the DM uses his tools, crafts his challenges, and how he expects the party to use the resources he provides to overcome those challenges.  How hard things are depends on how stingy the DM is resources, how harshly he rules, and how much he stacks the odds against the party.I've noticed that there is a huge gulf in experience between players that used UA and those who didn't.  While my play goes back to about 1981, I really didn't have a full group and the maturity to really run the games until 1984 or so.  So naturally, UA was just treated as a ordinary thing by me and most groups I met with players about my age.   Slightly older players who had been playing since the OD&D days who didn't adopt UA, had a much different experience.</blockquote>

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