The Gaming Den

don't ask me why, but I'm reading through my copies of the 1st Edition AD&D rulebooks in hopes of giving them a shot. Sounds like it could be fun, and I'm curious as to what they're like. Anyone have any suggestions, memories of 1st, etc.?

Why would you do this if you aren't drunk?

Because I ask myself this whenever my spouse and DM get drunk and drag out the AD&D books.

-Crissa

Are your spouse and DM the same person, or do they just have a tendency to get drunk together?

I played a lot of Rules Cyclopedia styled OD&D.

To be honest, I enjoyed it. But then again, I was 14, and I didn't understand the concept of game balance back then. I don't know if I'd enjoy it at 27.

how bad is it? I think I'm going to do regardless of how bad it supposedly is... partly because I have several adventures for it, and partly because 3.5 balance is supposedly horrible balance wise, but I've seldom seen it...

I mostly found old ed. characters weren't that interesting because nobody got anything after first if they weren't a spellcaster. There really wasn't anything to look forward to development-wise. On the flip side you could just make a character and then focus on having a story in the game rather than constantly worrying about what they are going to do with their character next or how would the optimize them

Yea, gaining levels was freaking simple. No feats, no prestige classes, no skills even (not really anyways, thieves got them from charts). Our average adventurer started as a Assassin and ended as an Assassin. Done.

The down side of this is that every level 5 fighter is identical to every other level 5 fighter (which makes the mass combat thing dramatically better).

ETA before I clean up the computer room and find my 1E manuals is 6 months 3 days and 4 hours. So I'm going off of the top of my head.

I started playing the first edition of AD&D in 1980 and at the time I really had no complaints. The devil is in the details and honestly I don't know anyone who used all the details. Trust me when I say that a "balance" question in 1E often required college level math. Did, for example, the speed factor rules "balance" the light weapon with the heavy weapons? Some said yes and some said no and I never could care less.

There were a lot of stuff, I'll call it the crunchy flavor bits, that I really miss. Don't ask me why but I was always in love with the holy water font rules. The goal of all my clerics was to become powerful, build a church, install a very expensive holy water font and sell water. Magic item creation rules that relied on components (as well as spells) were a two edged sword but they always provided some amusing adventures. (Honestly can you give me a good reason why we wanted to go after that cockatrice other than for components?) Tying max AC bonus to armor material also had a number of interesting effects in the game as well. (As the time when I threw darleks at the rangers ... now what was the max enchantment of darlek armor?)

Don't forget to fully enjoy 1E you need all those tables. THAC0 is really 1.5E at best.

Hahaha, I remember spell components. Primarily that my wizard went along harvesting everything in fear that it may be used or substituted for something.
"You are in a cave, small flightless birds run about your feet"
"awesome, I steal the spiderwebs, preserve the live spiders and steal the eggs of the flightless birds".

"You have slain the mighty dragon"
"We take it's scales, teeth, horns, blood, eyes, tendons, throat, jaw, nevermind, fuck it. You know what? We put it on a Tensers Floating Disk express train to the wizard guild".

Half the fun was after killing the poisonous monster trying to collect the poison without getting poisoned in return.

AD&D has charts. Which aren't even in the right books.

Honestly, the only game worse for charts was Palladium... And they had them in one book. It wasn't until Rifts that they did the AD&D thing of charts in the wrong books.

I suppose being chart-based means it's easier to do while drunk...

And yes, my spouse is sometimes my DM, but usually, my DM is a small jewish guy. Used to be a large jewish guy, but he's in Prague. I hope that's as funny as I hope it is.

-Crissa

So Frank leaves and you replace him with someone of smaller stature?

Frank's mini-me? That'd be pretty sweet.

I just realized something... Gygax's dming style was that of fucking his party in the ass every chance he got... I wonder how much of that carried into the books, and how many AD&D dms were like that... would it maybe be a different experience without the "player vrs. DM" mindset that gygax seemed to have?

You just realized that? People say that all the time, all over the D&D internet communities.

Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1194183066[/unixtime]]I hope that's as funny as I hope it is.

That statement is logically sound. By which I mean it is a tautology.

But that's just a nitpick and an excuse to say a big word.

Yes, Gygax enjoys the "Fuck you up the arse" approach to DMing. It still carries on in the way many people DM, these days. Have you ever had a debate with someone about Wish? I know people who still think that, despite what the book says, it's actually just a case of wording things well, where if you're better at lawyering than the DM, you win the game, otherwise you die. And get fucked. With a rake.

I'm pretty sure it was Frank who said, "…unless your DM is a Gygaxian ass pirate…," something happens, and the something doesn't matter because not only do I want that phrase on a T-shirt ("My DM is a Gygaxian ass pirate!"), she isn't one, which only enhances the irony.

Go read the original Tomb of Horrors and explain to me how anyone could think he wasn't a gigantic dick to his players.

Prak_Anima at [unixtime wrote:1194194311[/unixtime]]I just realized something... Gygax's dming style was that of fucking his party in the ass every chance he got...

I know I hear this urban legend again and again, but the more I hear of the old war stories about Gary's campaigns (remember all the great legends in Gary's books were real PCs in his personal campaigns) the more I realize that compared to the norm of DMs out there at the time, Gary was actually slightly milder than the norm.

Yes we were all vile evil bastards of DMs back then. In fact I saw the trend continue until at least half way into 2E.

One important thing that people tend to forget is that for all the wonders of 1E it was rolled out in one of the worst God awful manners known to man. I've heard rumors that this was because they wanted to keep selling their inventory of D&D material along with the new edition. The PHB was released in 1978 and the DMG would not be released until 1979.

Never the less the fact that the 1E DMG was the only D&D book whose index covered both PBH and DMG was priceless to this new (at the time) DM and I really missed it in the later editions.

As to the Tomb of Horrors, the entry in Wiki says it better than I ever could: "Tomb of Horrors is a 1978 adventure module for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, written by Gary Gygax. It was the original tournament dungeon used at the Origins 1 convention." Call me an old fashioned sot but convention tournament dungeons are supposed to be meat grinders and your characters are supposed to die in horrible but memorable ways! It does not reflect in any manner the general attitude Gary had towards his own campaigns and players.

Koumei at [unixtime wrote:1194201818[/unixtime]] Have you ever had a debate with someone about Wish? I know people who still think that, despite what the book says, it's actually just a case of wording things well, where if you're better at lawyering than the DM, you win the game, otherwise you die. And get fucked. With a rake.

Yeah. Had that discussion not long ago, right after 4th was announced. A guy's response to the idea that the Wish economy broke 3rd edition was 'well, if they're using Wishes, I can screw them over with that'. At that point it was just better to leave the conversation.

But yeah, I can remember the bizarre array of subclauses, terms and conditions that people would try to attach to a wish, and they made it even funnier by trying to get everything out in one breath. It was terribly amusing.

actually what I meant was that I just realized in connection to this idea... I actually have referenced Gygax's backwood's mississippi hillbilly sodomy on here before, and haven't seen anyone else do so.... I've actually used Gygax as an example as what not to do when dm'ing.

Amusingly enough, wish is going away, ahey, ahey.

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=211253

It does not reflect in any manner the general attitude Gary had towards his own campaigns and players.

Yeah, for that you need to crack open the AD&D DMG to the "Monsters as Player Characters" essay on about page 20.

In it he says that players who want to play anything other than a "demi-human" are just playing out a sick power fantasy - after all noone could possibly identify with a main character in a story who wasn't human. Even players who say they want to play dwarves or women are suspect. Then he says that the correct way to handle this is to give the player all of the abilities out of the Monster Manaul straight off as a first level character and then have them horribly outshine all the other characters.

Then you should ramp up the difficulty until their character can't possibly survive. And if they don't figure it out, you should do this over and over again until they do.

---

Yeah. I'm not even kidding. His advice is seriously to just TPK any party where someone asks to play a hobgoblin or a giant. No rules. No empathy. The entire section is just a rant about how people who want to play non human characters need to have their character sheets ripped up in front of them.

-Username17

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1194286324[/unixtime]]

It does not reflect in any manner the general attitude Gary had towards his own campaigns and players.

Yeah, for that you need to crack open the AD&D DMG to the "Monsters as Player Characters" essay on about page 20.

In it he says that players who want to play anything other than a "demi-human" are just playing out a sick power fantasy - after all noone could possibly identify with a main character in a story who wasn't human. Even players who say they want to play dwarves or women are suspect. Then he says that the correct way to handle this is to give the player all of the abilities out of the Monster Manaul straight off as a first level character and then have them horribly outshine all the other characters.

Then you should ramp up the difficulty until their character can't possibly survive. And if they don't figure it out, you should do this over and over again until they do.

---

Yeah. I'm not even kidding. His advice is seriously to just TPK any party where someone asks to play a hobgoblin or a giant. No rules. No empathy. The entire section is just a rant about how people who want to play non human characters need to have their character sheets ripped up in front of them.

-Username17

What about monsters that are just plain crappy, like the Flumph?
Also, to the bold, I think that Gygax sounds just like that, judging by what I hear of "Gygaxian DMing."

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1194286324[/unixtime]]
Yeah. I'm not even kidding. His advice is seriously to just TPK any party where someone asks to play a hobgoblin or a giant. No rules. No empathy. The entire section is just a rant about how people who want to play non human characters need to have their character sheets ripped up in front of them.

Nah. His rant on page 21 of the DMG actually is summarized to something like this.

Gygax Page 21 1E DMG wrote:
Monsters suck because they can't gain levels and otherwise "don't fit" in a humanocentric world. Instead of just saying no to people who want to play monsters, you should explain this situation to them.

-Intelligent PCs will realize this and either not play them or play the monster for a short time before switching to something else.
-Stupid PCs won't realize this and will play the monster anyway, in which case, their own stupidity will kill them.

Gygax has this weird idea that anybody who doesn't think like him is an automatic moron and will get themselves killed in the adventure anyway, so they're not a threat to the game, since they're obviously to stupid to make even basic tactical choices. He's just that egotistical.

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1194286324[/unixtime]]Yeah. I'm not even kidding. His advice is seriously to just TPK any party where someone asks to play a hobgoblin or a giant. No rules. No empathy. The entire section is just a rant about how people who want to play non human characters need to have their character sheets ripped up in front of them.

I'm going to disagree. His rant was that people who wanted to play "monster" characters were doing so because they wanted to play something powerful over and above the norm, so the only proper way to combat such power players is to throw power back at them in an even greater manner until they realize that the game is not about power in as much as it is the persuit thereof.

If you didn't play the game the way he thought it should be played, especially at that time, you got no mercy. But that's a different situation from the idea that in general he wanted to totally TPK his gaming buddies on a daily basis.