TSR Why would anyone WANT to play 1e?

[Snarf Zagyg]

The simple "you don't die until -10" house rule so many of us used isn't exactly the RAW, of course. Per the 1E Zero Hit Points rule (DMG 82) bleeding to -10 only kicks in if you're knocked to exactly 0HP (or optionally as low as -3), so there's a narrow window to qualify for it. If you get dropped to -4 by a hit, per the book rules (even the softer optional variant) you're just dead.

.....thank you. You have no idea. Ahem.

Anyway, I think the answer to, "Why 1e?" is quite simple.

Think of me as your RPG sommelier.* Like food must be paired with the correct wine, so too must an RPG be paired with the proper music. And as is well-known and cannot be reasonably disputed, 1e has the most amazing music pairings.

Def Leppard's Pyromania? Excellent choice.
Duran Duran's Seven and the Ragged Tiger? It goes down nicely!
Ozzy's Blizzard of Ozz? Might I suggest an apertif of Tomb of Horrors?
Kraftwerk's The Man Machine? A perfect palate cleanser for Barrier Peaks!
Bowie's Low? While controversial, perhaps you'd like to try it against some Giants?


*Admittedly, I did have some disputes with management when I worked as a sommelier. They did not think that it was appropriate for me to give customers two choices each time. I disagreed, because I always believe that the customer should choose! Which is why I always provided every customer two choices to pair with their meal- Gin, or more Gin.

 

[nevin]

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.

Well by default rules anything you got back to safety (town, home base etc) , you got ep equal to the gold piece value of your treasure. Not at the point getting the treasure. So if you used the potions no ep. If they went to your board then ep. There where some vague Stuff about letting PC's create spells and magic items but it was all on the DM to decide how that worked.

 

[nevin]

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.

There weren't any rules for adding magic shops. Perhaps some Advice on.not making access to magic too easy. It was pretty wide open for the DM to run it however they wanted. I played and ran it both ways back then. There was no standard way to do anything back then. Every table was different. That was part of what made it fun.

 

[Voadam]

Gygax did provide a sort of example 1e shop that sells curing potions in the Temple of Elemental Evil. In the ne'er do well town of Nulb there is Mother Screng's Herb shop which has three jars of Keoghtum's ointment she will explicitly sell to good parties after they prove themselves going into the temple a few times.

3. MOTHER SCRENG'S HERB SHOP
This dilapidated frame building is well known in the village as the place to go for all sorts of herbs, medicines, and possibly even special draughts of one sort or another. Mother Screng is old and bent, with scraggly gray locks sticking out from beneath the aged shawl she wears all year 'round. Her daughter appears quite old herself, so Mother Screng must be venerable. This daughter, Hruda by name, is quite ugly, and it is no wonder that she is an old maid, for her personality matches her looks and her tongue is sharp.
Inside the shop are counters and shelves filled with jars, flasks, bottles, boxes, and small drawers. These are stuffed with herbs and like stuff, and various infusions and decoctions made from such. Bunches of vegetation of various sorts hang from the rafters or are tossed onto counter tops to dry. The shop has almost every known herb and spice, and even 3 jars of Keoghtom's ointment which Mother Screng sells to any adventurers of Good alignment who are in real need of the magic salve, after having proved themselves in expeditions to the Temple.

This is also a special NPC in the module who might not be expected to be an exemplar of baseline expectations though.

No idea how Gygax handled buying and selling things in the bustling Free City of Greyhawk.

 

[ilgatto]

A couple months ago I posted a thread about why would anyone want to play RAW 1e, and gave reasons. As a follow up to that, and after several more sessions and talking with friends about OD&D, I realized why I loved 1e, and still do.

Hint: It's to NOT play it RAW.

A little context: We were talking about how OD&D was impossible to learn and play unless you had someone who already knew how to play teach you. After all, it was written with the assumption that you'd be using rules from Chainmail and knew how to play it. 1e was a big advancement, but was still extremely difficult to learn, especially for new players.

But that leads me to this thread, and why 1e was actually great. Because of those flaws, (and probably because rpgs were still pretty new), we all just played how we wanted. Made up our own houserules. Ignored a bunch of other ones. And it was glorious. Rules lawyers existed, but they seemed much fewer in number than now (or the past 25 years). And not just rules lawyers, but players looking to see what the rule is for something they wanted to do. Over the past few decades, as more people became familiar with rpgs and as the rulebooks became easier to comprehend, I've seen a lot less of winging things or making up your own worlds, rules, or features like classes or monsters.

So it sounds weird to say, but 1e's complicated and hard to follow rules was a good thing because it gave us more freedom to make the game our own. Easier to make it how our table preferred to play. And boy did we. It's one reason why I'm glad Shadowdark is so popular, because it shows that we weren't all just outliers. Rulings over rules can, and is, a fun playstyle for a lot of people. So....1e, take a back handed compliment

Edit edited the title for clarity, because the sarcasm didn't come through. the original thread was "why would anyone want to play 1e RAW" as a sarcastic title, meaning, "1e RAW is really bad I can't see how anyone would want to play it." This title was a mirror of that, but apparently the sarcasm didn't carry over. The intent was "why wouldn't you want to play 1e NOT RAW, because it's great!". Apparently that didn't carry over well.

Bah! I saw the name of the original thread a couple of months ago and I've been mulling about that question ever since until the answer suddenly hit me today. And now you tell me this? Not really a question? Sarcasm!?

But you shall have my answer anyway!

Why would anyone want to play 1e?

In a nutshell?

Because it's a struggle.

Because it's not about character builds, and not about avatars, but because it's about character building.

Because the world is not there to wait until you win, and not there to please you, but because it is there and you're gonna have to deal with it.

Because it's lethal and your character will feel much better about it if he, she, or they reaches or reach name level, not when.

Just my five copper. Or is it thirty pieces of silver? I forget.

Probably fits better in here anyway.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Probably fits better in here anyway.

What you're saying is it fits in better in this thread-

Why would anyone WANT to play 1e?

Than this thread-

Why would anyone want to play 1e?

I haven't been this confused since someone was trying to explain to me why punctuation in texts was aggressive.

 

[Mannahnin]

Well by default rules anything you got back to safety (town, home base etc) , you got ep equal to the gold piece value of your treasure. Not at the point getting the treasure. So if you used the potions no ep. If they went to your board then ep. There where some vague Stuff about letting PC's create spells and magic items but it was all on the DM to decide how that worked.

Yep, you did have to get it back to town (not use it up on the adventure) to get XP for it, but note that 1E gave XP two different ways for magic items:

1) If an item was sold immediately for cash instead of being kept, it awarded XP at the cash value.
2) If an item was kept by a PC who could use it, they got a fixed (lesser) xp value per the magic item charts.

This is a difference from B/X and BECMI, which don't grant XP for magic items at all. They're considered their own reward.

And in 2E they kept XP values for magic items in the charts, but you only got that XP if you created the item (DMG 135). Not for finding it as treasure. Cash values were removed from the charts entirely, in keeping with 2E's relegation of treasure-seeking to a secondary motivation.

OD&D also granted XP for finding magic items, but was vague about values, leaving them up to DM discretion, though Gary gave some suggested values in The Strategic Review issue #2.

 

[Sacrosanct]

What you're saying is it fits in better in this thread-

Why would anyone WANT to play 1e?

Than this thread-

Why would anyone want to play 1e?

I haven't been this confused since someone was trying to explain to me why punctuation in texts was aggressive.

I changed the title of this thread because apparently it was super confusing and the sarcasm didn't come through like it did the original. Now it's a mess.

It was originally:
Original thread: Why would anyone want to play 1e (cause RAW it was awful, here's a thread about all the challenging things about it).
Newer thread: Why would anyone NOT want to play 1e (cause it was so bad RAW that it actually had net positive result that was super fun for these reasons...) Written in the context of something like, "Why would you NOT want to watch Firefly, it's awesome!"

So originally the titles were opposite. But then folks took the title here literally without reading the context of the OP and just repeated the same things in the first thread.

 

[Voadam]

I changed the title of this thread because apparently it was super confusing and the sarcasm didn't come through like it did the original. Now it's a mess.

It was originally:
Original thread: Why would anyone want to play 1e (cause RAW it was awful, here's a thread about all the challenging things about it).
Newer thread: Why would anyone NOT want to play 1e (cause it was so bad RAW that it actually had net positive result that was super fun for these reasons...) Written in the context of something like, "Why would you NOT want to watch Firefly, it's awesome!"

So originally the titles were opposite. But then folks took the title here literally without reading the context of the OP and just repeated the same things in the first thread.

I answered in the original thread straight, answering the title question, giving reasons to play 1e.