TSR Why would anyone WANT to play 1e?

[Voadam]

I figure it falls victim to the general ghoulishness of gamifying a real disease that real people suffer and die from - like malaria which infects over 200 million and kills about 600,000 people a year. I think there are places that can be a bit touchy to tread on.

I don't think that was quite it, I think for D&D they just wanted it to be more fantasical. They included a bunch of real world diseases in d20 Modern right in the core book and in the d20 Modern SRD so it was there to be used in gaming and it was easy to add into D&D if you wanted.

 

[Pamphylian]

It was Anthony Huso's blog (and modules) that got me interested in AD&D - I had sort of ignored 1e, coming from a background of 5e and some OSR B/X variants, envisioning it as kind of clunky and arcane. Huso seems to play a rather (but not entirely) RAW version, and makes a lot of the arcana seem quite appealing. From this post:

AD&D was not designed to be a linear story and certainly not a short story. AD&D is designed to account for years, decades, even centuries of game time. The characters are meant to come and go. Some will die young. Others will rise to unbelievable heights. Some will grow old and die. Some will have children who take up the old man's sword.

It is not just the combat and the systems that are different about 1st Ed gaming. It is the approach. This is tactical survival. Win some, lose some. Characters come and go.

Begin small. Begin humble. Characters will achieve greatness over time, allowing you (as DM) to create more of the world between games. Instead of reading my blog, or someone else's blog, read the Dungeon Master's Guide. Go to the source. Devour it. Relish it. It is ungainly. But it is a masterwork.

• Begin on Page 7 of the DMG at the Preface.
• Ignore the claim of the Introduction that this book is simple and straightforward. That is a lie.
• Skip ahead to page 28 and look at the hirelings on offer. Wait what? I can hire an alchemist? A spy? The list is long and should help you understand the scope this game is attempting to simulate. This game is not about a band of heroic characters. It is about an entire world that, through player choice and creativity can be interacted with to bring about stunning events and outcomes. Outcomes that you will not plan ahead of time, but discover through play.
• Read on page 38 about Time In The Campaign. It will help you understand why it is important and once again underscore the scope of this system.
• Now skip to page 86 and read about The Campaign. Setting Things In Motion. Climate and Ecology.
• Move on to page 90 and read about Economics. Muse over Monster Populations and Placement. Read Placement of Monetary Treasure. Placement of Magic Items. Read Territory Development by Player Characters on page 93.
• Look at the sample dungeon on page 94 thru 96.
• Read The First Dungeon Adventure on page 96.
• The concept of a Lead Character is somewhat outdated but read the adventure that unfolds on pages 97 thru 100. By doing so you will come to understand that even a spider is a terror in AD&D and the adventure is perilous, tense, and (despite being a ton of fun) serious business.
• Magical Research is covered in DMG page 114 but I have expounded on this concept here at the Blue Bard.
• Take time to actually read and digest the magical items found in the Dungeon Master's Guide (pages 125 thru 169). You will come to learn a great deal about mechanics, about how very little comes for free, about how there are almost always caveats and trade-offs. Why? Because if you have a wand that is 100% spectacular, what's the point of finding another wand? Discovery, exploration, hunger, mystery and threats. These are central to the ongoing game. This sword or that sword should be a question Players ask themselves and perhaps the best answer you can hope for them to reach is, "Well, it depends..."

The scope of the game and its subsystems and the balance of high risk and high reward are hard not to be enchanted by. If you look up a magic item in the 5e DMG and put it next to it's counterpart in the 1e DMG, the comparison is rarely flattering to the 5e version, especially in the realms of flavor and impact. Take the Staff of Withering: 5e's staff does an extra 2d10 necrotic damage and gives an hour Disadvantage on STR/CON saves. Ho hum. AD&D's ages the target 10 years and causes a random limb to shrivel and become useless. I know which one speaks to my heart. I know which one would give my players feelings of power or of terror, depending on who was wielding it. And reading through the AD&D DMG and Monster Manual, there are hundreds of little things like this, that cumulatively say this a game with stakes, consequence, flavor, and the guidance to support a world of fractal detail.

 

[Lanefan]

I think this varied significantly group to group.

I never had henchmen in the 1e or Basic games I played in or ran. Every 1e and Basic adventure was just the party. I DM'd B1 in Search of Adventure and the Moathouse in the Temple of Elemental Evil and there was not a single henchman as they explored the dungeons.

For us at low level we usually have two characters each in the party, thus if (when!) one dies there's still the other to play.

We don't use henches as often as might make sense, largely because players often play their PCs as being too cheap to want to pay them.

 

[Lanefan]

I feel they are so clearly worse than Fortitude/Reflex/Will I don't know why anyone would go back to that level of ambiguity unless you want wriggle room to just make the save whatever your player's worst one is. Why is Rod/Staff/Wand even THERE? It's just Spells with a +1 bonus. I'm aware that there is a saving throw priority list in the 1E DMG. This just proves my point. Like pretty much all of 1E, it's sloppy and haphazardly designed.

I don't find the 1e save system ambiguous in the least.

I did, though, split out Paralyzation, Poison, and Death into their own categories to allow me to tweak the tables a bit for each one.

As for which to use, I put the matrices on a chart and now all I have to do is read from left to right until I hit the first applicable category. Thus, if you're hit by a Slay Living spell (could be save vs Death or save vs Spell) I look at the chart and find Death to the left of Spells, so Death is the matrix used.

The key thing is that the save type is driven by what you're saving against, not by how you-as-character can best resist it.

 

[jasper]

the weirdness, the crazy, how each dm world was different. And to relive my younger self.

 

[Draegn]

It is what I pulled out of my brother's box of games along with Dragon magazine content added in.

 

[nevin]

I think the biggest reason a lot of people don't want to play 1st edition AD&D is the rules. If you can get past that hurdle, it's a really good edition of the game. Who wants to deal with the myriad rules you may or may not use, different point amounts for leveling based on class, THAC0, level caps based on race (we don't have species yet), or trying to have a Barbarian in the party who insists on destroying magic items? Is the random harlot table and the bonkers number of polearms really worth it?

Well take out unearthed arcana and that's a fair amount on problematic rules simply gone.

 

[Flying Toaster]

Whether you could buy healing potions was variable as well, I never played in an AD&D campaign where that was something you could buy or realistically make.

My memories on this point may be faulty, but my impression was that “magic shops” were one of those things that EGG absolutely forbade, somewhere in the advice section of the DMG. But I also seem to remember rules for selling unneeded magic items and counting them as monetary XP rather than magic item XP. And what were NPC alchemists doing if not selling healing potions, poison antidotes, stone-to-flesh elixirs, etc to cashed-up adventurers?

I do not see it get mentioned much, but I think that in the 1980’s CRPGs had some influence on many younger players and their expectations about how to play D&D and other TTRPGs. When I played B/X and 1E with my elementary and junior high school friends in the mid-to-late 80’s, we all had experience with games like the Wizardry, Ultima, and Bard’s Tale series, plus Sierra On-Line adventure games like King’s Quest and the older text-based adventure games like the Zork series by Infocom (now does that sound like the name of an 80’s computer company or what?). Some of those games lifted LOTS of inspiration from D&D, so much so that I am surprised TSR did not try to sue over stuff like race/class choices or the first Wizardry game (Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord) being a mad mage megadungeon below a castle, with each level down increasing in difficulty and danger just like Blackmoor or Greyhawk. The Wizardry series usually had one stop shopping for adventurers who needed to sell off extra magic items and stock up on potions, but we never tried anything like that in D&D for some reason.

Of course we generally avoided peaceful non-combat NPC interaction in general, because we were “hack and slash” by the parlance of the time, even if we did not quite realize it.

 

[Flying Toaster]

Wizardry also had ASIs and proto-prestige classes. Your abilities had a random chance to increase every time you levelled up, and occasionally that would allow a character of the four basic classes (Fighter, Mage, Priest, Thief) to switch to elite classes usually unavailable at level 1.

Bishop: Mage/Priest combo with ability to identify magic items, cannot be Neutral

Lord: Fighter with Priest spells and undead turning, must be Good

Samurai: Fighter with Mage spells and deadly crits, must be Good or Neutral

Ninja: martial arts assassin with high chance of deadly crits, must be Evil

 

[Mannahnin]

My memories on this point may be faulty, but my impression was that “magic shops” were one of those things that EGG absolutely forbade, somewhere in the advice section of the DMG. But I also seem to remember rules for selling unneeded magic items and counting them as monetary XP rather than magic item XP. And what were NPC alchemists doing if not selling healing potions, poison antidotes, stone-to-flesh elixirs, etc to cashed-up adventurers?

In the DMG it's more a matter of implication. All the discussion of rarity and how difficult it is to make them. The charts do tell you how much you can sell magic items for "on the open market", but don't seem to mention magic shops. Even the rules for alchemists make them only of use helping M-Us of 7th level or above in making potions. Not in making them on their own.

B/X was more generous- you have to pay alchemists 1,000gp/month, but if given a sample to duplicate they'll actually make potions at half normal cost and twice normal speed (per X51 an item which duplicates a spell effect once normally costs 500gp per spell level and takes a week of time per spell level). Or they can be paid to do magical research (on potions only) like an M-U, but at double the cost and time an M-U would take.

Amusingly, in the first Gord novel Gary's protagonist buys a magic dagger from a weapon shop.