TSR Why would anyone want to play 1e?

[Flights of Fancy]

Funny thing is that I thought the same thing when 3.0 came out.

3.0 and 5.0...

 

[Riley]

I allowed the UA human rolls option in addition to the DMG methods in my long term 1e campaign. I think those generated the highest average RAW legal stats in D&D's history of options and had the good stats tied to your class concept. Still ended up with a party that included 4 elves (two grugach and two drow) using DMG stat methods.

We bounced off that 9d6, 8d6, 7d6… system from UA when it came along, as being just too inflated for us.

My system of choice was the 1e DMG’s best-of-3d6-rolled-6-times, rolled in order. IIRC, I determined that averaged about 14(!) in each ability, based on a Basic dice-rolling program I let run for a day or so to test each method.

 

[LordBP]

3.0 and 5.0...

Never made it to 4.0 much less 5.0. I lost interest except for some FR source books in 3.0 (mainly for background) and looked to other things afterwards.

 

[Mannahnin]

Anyway, for this example (30') you have to make three checks according to the DMG (worst case), so odds of making the climb is 72.9% given a typical slightly-slippery dungeon wall. Putting the armor back on of course makes it much worse... just 70% per check or 34.3% to make three checks in a row.

But, in my experience, most DMs did a single check half-way, so 70% for the one check isn't horrible.

Right. Gary's instructions in the DMG run afoul of the classic "if you have to check BOTH to Find and to Remove a Trap, your odds go from crappy to insanely crappy" issue.

But good DMs would make a judgement call and alter the rules to make the game more playable for the Thief. Like we do to this very day.

 

[Mannahnin]

Funny thing is that I thought the same thing when 3.0 came out.

Some folks made similar complaints about AD&D when it came out. That it was munchkinized and PCs were excessively powerful compared to OD&D. More generous ability score generation! Higher HP! Faster healing! Clerics getting a spell at first level, and pretty much always more than one because of bonus spells for a high Wisdom, forsooth!

 

[Sacrosanct]

So basically, it comes down to how 1e rules were written so poorly* that everyone had their own house rules and/or ignored rules to make the game their own, which in turn meant of course it was better than any subsequent edition because those editions weren't your rules you were currently playing with. Plus, the aesthetic was freaking cool man!


*context is important. 1e rules are awful by modern standards. All over the place and contradictory in others, and not easily parsed. But compared to OD&D, they were a huge improvement. And they deserve credit since the genre was still pretty new.

 

[haakon1]

Gary Gygax said WotC's game was no longer even D&D.

Gary said a lot of things. He was garrulous.

He was often very right*, sometimes very wrong*, and more than occasionally grouchy. I put this one down to grouchy.

* “right” means I agree with him, and wrong means I do not. I assume Snarf can confirm these are the legally binding definitions of right & wrong on the internet.

 

[haakon1]

I feel like a thief broke up his first marriage or something, like, what did the thief ever do to him?

He disliked Thieves so much, he called his novel “Gord the Rogue”.

 

[Flights of Fancy]

So basically, it comes down to how 1e rules were written so poorly* that everyone had their own house rules and/or ignored rules to make the game their own, which in turn meant of course it was better than any subsequent edition because those editions weren't your rules you were currently playing with. Plus, the aesthetic was freaking cool man!

I'll add that many times it wasn't about having house rules or ignoring rules, but often about interpretation of the rules.

While people often talk about how different AD&D games were, I'm surprised a bit by that. Whenever I met a player or moved or even when I went to college, pretty much everyone played the same way I had always already played. There really weren't many big differences.

It wasn't until the Internet and meeting people on forums that people claimed their AD&D was vastly different from anothers.

*context is important. 1e rules are awful by modern standards. All over the place and contradictory in others, and not easily parsed. But compared to OD&D, they were a huge improvement. And they deserve credit since the genre was still pretty new.

Yes this is very important. Look at all the RPGs in those days and shortly thereafter and how convoluted most rulesets were. Many were crazy, unorganized, and whatever.

While the organization of the books suffer compared to many modern rgps, modern designers have decades of prior mistakes to learn from. Another issue is the amount of rules that was DM-oriented vs. player-oriented, and how many of those systems have shifted ownership since AD&D was written.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

The reason you see more 1E or BX in the OSR than 2E could just come down to the fact that those two were what was played when it was in the boom era per sales data. So more players from those editions all other things being equal.