Why does no one ever bring up how well designed (and gamist) saving throws were?

[Celebrim]

Or maybe just didn't care.
But it's not /that/ complicated, really, just arbitrary and inconsistent.

Well, I don't think it was that they didn't care. They cared, but they weren't thinking in the terms we are thinking in now. Some of the language we employ hadn't even evolved yet.

The words I'd use to describe it would be mostly organic and evolved. This is a system that's being built from scratch through play without no prior guide as to what an RPG system is like. New things come up, and they are dealt with on the spot, new ideas jangle around in the back of Gygax's head, and then he gets an opportunity to try to put all this experience he has built up over years as a DM onto paper, and what it ends up looking like is a rules equivalent of a collection of very early airplanes when people weren't exactly sure what shape an airplane needed to have to function well as airplane.

The thing is, some of those rules are actually really well built evolved solutions to particular problems. And others are just cobbled together with bailing wire, string, and tape and are pretty ugly. And some are like those planes crashing off the end of the pier in a mass of collapsing struts.

But my point about the complexity is that it meant that to analyze the situation while not complicated requires an enormous amount of time, even in an era with modern spreadsheets and scripting out solutions to analyze data. Beyond that, I think all that complexity helped obscure the idea of how you'd go about analyzing it in the first place, or even that you needed to, because everything was created in play and tweaked in play and everyone was used to just relying on their gut. Nobody had the habit of doing the math before hand, and it's not until the 80's that you start to see in Dragon people start advocating for these mathematical models to inform design. That's not to say that I think there is no math and forethought in Gygax, but I don't think even in the 90's that everyone was in the habit of analyzing a system in that fashion.

But if you do go read some of those Dragon articles, they are hugely informative and I wish looking back I'd paid more attention to the seemingly boring lists of calculations that people were doing to prove various points. I might have actually produced house rules for 1e coherent enough that I wouldn't have left it eventually in frustration.

 

[Dragonsbane]

I find saves based on all six stats has been the best version so far. Those old saves . . whew, I remember when I was really young playing 1st ed. Those save catagories, looking back, were horrifying!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I find saves based on all six stats has been the best version so far. Those old saves . . whew, I remember when I was really young playing 1st ed. Those save catagories, looking back, were horrifying!

Of course, if we're speaking of the 5e version here, it's more like "three saves plus some oddballs." Dex, Wis, and Con saves dramatically outnumber all others, and (nearly?) every class gets proficiency in one of those three, and one of the other three. Of the remaining saves, Cha is the least useful IIRC, as it has few truly "debilitating" effects (unlike Int) but is relatively rare even in monster abilities (unlike Str).

All of that is kind of neither here nor there, though, since this is not the 5e board and the topic is OD&D.

On the one hand, OD&D is dramatically more gamist than a lot of people give it credit for--it's just got the benefit of obfuscation, tradition, and familiarity (yes, the last two are different!) to make that harder to see. On the other hand, just as [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] puts it, a lot of it was "grown organically," or perhaps more accurately (if less charitably) cobbled together over time, and what particular things fell under any given save were often among the bits you had to squint to make sense of. Neonchameleon's OP doesn't quite sell the "well-designed" aspect of it, since a number of his statements (especially about the consistency of particular end-effects falling under particular saves) doesn't seem to line up with the reports I have heard previously. I've never played OD&D (my closest experience is a handful of B/X, or LL, sessions) so I cannot speak from personal experience, and thus cannot overtly deny any of the claims here. But...that said, it strikes me as...doing a similar thing as what the "what do you mean it's gamist" group does, just inverted. Brushing aside the clutter and focusing only on the parts that are consistent, rather than overlooking the parts that are consistent and focusing on the clutter.