Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arthnek" data-source="post: 3788614" data-attributes="member: 55333">I find it tiresome to hear game developers bashing on AD&D.The first comment in this thread which stated that monsters in the old monster manual were basically slapped together to see if they were fun and usually were not is completely wrong.Writing good adventures is a bit like writing an adventure story or fantasy novel.  A fantasy writer does not sit down with his slide rule or calculator to create a mathematical formula to balance one character against another.  They write something creative and entertaining and there is a certain amount of art involved in the process.This is what happened with the monster creations for AD&D.  It was meant to be fun and the monsters were written up as a fantasy game with a lot of shoot from the hip and artistic creation going on more than anything else.To say that they were not fun to play is total hogwash.  I find it disturbing that the game designers working on the new D&D are not fans of the old D&D.I am sorry to hear that the original poster had such a horrible time in his apparently deep and lengthy experience running monsters in the old D&D.  My memories of the game and those of everyone I know who played avidly in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's - are absolutely different.  We had a great time playing the game then.  We had no problem having fun with the monsters as they were written and in using that largely artful, non mathematical slide rule method of writing up an adventure so that it was fun.All the number crunching smacks loudly to me of GURPS and Hero.  I like Hero for playing super hero characters but for running anything else which requires a lot of adventure creation I find that massive time involved in building -anything- in that system to make it unwieldy and -not fun- to game master.Using it to pit a couple of villains against a couple of heroes is great.  Trying to write up hundreds of monsters, dungeons, modules, magic items using the system sucks so much time out of writing the story and setting and into building stat blocks for mobs and items that I have largely abandoned Hero as unwieldy.Now I have to number crunch encounters to make them "fair"?  The entire notion of writing good stories seems somehow completely lost in this mix to me and like I said to start with I was pretty offended to read about how the old monsters and the old game was not fun.It was fun and remains a lot of fun.I am sure someone is going to post..hey..old guy...if you don't like 4e then why post?This is why I am posting here young padi-wan.  As a player and DM with more than 30 years of experience running this game I have a great deal of experience and perspective.  It was my dollars and my input as a player and DM along with hundreds of thousands of other people like -me- that took D&D out of the little stapled books and into a major hobby.  If it was not for us leading the dungeon parties and adventuring groups over the last thirty years you wouldn't have a forum or a game to be discussing.Telling us old timers not to post because we are not thrilled with some of the stuff we are reading is frankly insulting.  We were the ones making this game happen when many of you younger folks were not even born yet.</blockquote>

Verification