Nitpick: It wasn’t the first. The were earlier “editions” of a game just called “Dungeon and Dragons” (No ‘advanced’) which predated AD&D; AD&D didn’t exist until 1977, but according to Wikipedia “Dungeon & Dragons” came out in 1974.
You can make an argument for classes, honestly; A pretty good one too. There’s a reason they remain so prominent in CRPGs to this very day. Not only do they map pretty closely to the iconci heroes of fantasy, but they also provide niche protection and focus. Levels are a little bit awkward, but a useful simplification in a lot of ways (kinda like hitpoints in that regard) but yeah, Alignment is a weird one. I’m pretty sure it’s only still there because it has “always been there”.
I didn’t play Twilight: 2000, though I think I remember seeing ads for it in Dragon Magazine. I was a distinctly unadventurous gamer until relatively recently.
I have also run a couple of 1st Edition campaigns here on the SDMB.
Keep watching - I may run another campaign!
It’s certainly not as bad as you say (why else would our group still be playing regularly after 35 years?)
I agree that a few house rules were useful, but your questions about thieves opening locks, elves + secret doors and ‘to hit’ are easily answered - you write all that stuff on your character sheet.
There are innumerable possible reasons, none of which have anything to do with the rules.
Sure. This is a fine way of mitigating the awfulness of having 114 different mechanisms all bodged together into one system. The question that arises is “why bother when you can play a game that produces the same experience without bodging together a bunch of completely random rules mechanics that were clearly written in a vacuum to handle one of cases?”
If my time was that valuable, I wouldn’t be pretending to be an elf
I kid, I kid
Honestly though, to each their own (in my own opinion) I think you exaggerate the difficulty of running or being part of a 1st Ed campaign. As you said though, YMMV.
You assert that 1st Edition is a mess.
I offer convincing evidence it isn’t. What evidence would you accept?
Could you list the 114 mechanisms?
(I can only come up with rolling characters, THAC0 and saving throws…)
I have played in a later edition of AD+D as a 3rd level Druid. I had 9 spell powers available. Here’s just one of them:
Call of the Beast
KEYWORDS Charm, Implement, Primal, Psychic
AT-WILL POWER
Attack: Wisdom vs. Will
Hit: The target can’t gain combat advantage until the end of your next turn. In addition, on its next turn the target takes psychic damage equal to 5 + your Wisdom modifier (+4) when it makes any attack that doesn’t include your ally nearest to it as a target.
Level 21: 10 + Wisdom modifier (+4) psychic damage.
This is a fair point. I played a third edition druid for a long time, and in order to do so I had three different spreadsheets: one, nine pages long, dedicated to the different animals I could summon; one, about five pages long, dedicated to different animals I could turn into and what my stats would look like upon transformation; and the last, about six pages long, dedicated to everything else, from baseline stats to equipment to spells.
Druids are exceptionally tricky, but any spellcaster requires a crapload of stuff in order to play well. I’m currently in a Pathfinder game with a fourth-level fighter, and really grooving on my two-sided character page; the most complicated part is the seven different ways I can attack with a bow.
I just think of being “comfortable” with the rules as “I know which books say what and approximately where to flip to find out”. I don’t need to have everything memorized, or even all written down, if I can find it without disrupting the flow of the game.
But I think of more elegant rules systems that I’ve played, such as White Wolf’s d10/5-dot system, and I don’t think it was significantly easier for someone familiar with the rules in both. Certainly easier to teach someone but if you have a group of people who know what they’re doing, both games should be able to keep moving.
I started playing in 1976. I’ve still got my old “white box” rules in a desk drawer at work. Original D&D was simple but sketchy. It was easy to play but there were a lot of gaps in the rules and you were expected to wing it.
I think the reason why classes are still used in CRPG is mostly a legacy and in part a way to simplify the game for many players who prefer a predigested character, with a well known role and function (ie : tank)
Classes limit players, and so completely arbitrarily. “But I want to play a character like Indiana Jones” “You can’t. You can be either a scientist or an explorer, not both”. And it’s much more a problem in tabletop games than in CRPG, since players expect to be able to play whatever they want any way they want, and to be able to do any action that makes logical sense “I search for a secret door” “Your class doesn’t have this ability” “I mean, I search for cracks in the wall, patterns indicative of a secret panel” “You can’t”. “My grand mother taught me to recognize medicinal herbs, and…” No, herb lore is reserved to rangers and healers and you’re a rogue". There’s frankly no reason to keep such limitations.
And archetypes in fact don’t fit the class system. Archetypal fantasy heroes typically have both the ability to fight and to use magic, in particular. The pure sorceror living secluded somewhere, if it exists at all, is a supporting character, not the main protagonist.
I abandoned ADD for these reason : other games offered a streamlined, consistent, rule system (see the comments about ADD 1st edition). They offered original, interesting, intriguing settings (instead of “generic fantasy”). They offered much more freedom to create the character you wanted, play it the way you wanted and make it evolve the way you wanted. They were also more realistic in their approach due to their rules and spirit. They often focused less on combat and dungeon crawling and more on role playing(*)
(*)You might think that you can do that with any system but in fact, the rules, the setting, etc… influence it a lot. If the game puts more emphasis on combat rules than on the world you’re living in, if mostly all skills are combat-related, players and game masters alike will naturally focus on combat.
If the rules make fighting dangerous (say, the equivalent of a goblin can kill outright the equivalent of a 20th level fighter if he’s very lucky), players and DMs will approach combat and adventuring in an entirely different way.
If the characters are “doomed” (the game setting makes it so that long-time survival is pretty unlikely), they’ll focuse more on actions than on character progression, they’ll take risks, they’ll remember fondly their heroic death, etc…
If half the rulebook is about mythos and players have competences like “rites” and “mythology”, they will focus on that just because it’s there.
If the rule system includes personnality qualities and flaws, players will suddendly, say, haggle, hesitate to buy the best weapon, argue about sharing the spoils, reject the “good” path because they’re “greedy”, resulting in more interactions.
If there are a lot of “social” competences, players will focus on that too. They will argue, bribe, organize minstrel shows, seduce, enquire in academic settings, etc…(and they will have as much fun doing it, because it’s also a challenge, because they want their character to progress, because that’s how the adventures are structured, etc…).
Having played various different campaigns with different systems in the same gaming group, this (and the other points about how system changes the playing style) is made very clear as time passes. Even going from GURPS where you have social skills but they aren’t very fleshed out to Warhammer 3rd Ed. where you get actual social actions and Fellowship is an important stat clearly increases the time and amount of detail we spent on social stuff. Some of our guys with high Guile could pull off some amazing stunts at times. Even when that backfired, it was quite entertaining and part of that was because the system (skills, actions, dice mechanics, the stress/insanity rules etc) helped make it so.
I do like (A)D&D partly from nostalgic reasons and partly because the flavor of high fantasy combat-oriented roleplaying it offers is something I enjoy, but it’s never been very impressive system for all the stuff that happens between dungeon crawling. My first D&D box for low level characters didn’t even have rules for wilderness adventures, just for dungeons.
Depends a lot on the game and people. Pretty much any campaign for any game I’ve played would allow you to try something and assign some sort of chance to it, however slight: “I want to throw a rope across the ravine and loop over a rock”, “Ok, roll a d20 against your Dexterity minus 6 since you have no rope use skills” or “I examine the amulet in the bowl”, “Ok, [dice clatter] you made a Wisdom roll so your basic knowledge of faith interprets the medallion to probably be a holy symbol of some sort.”
But then even 1st Ed AD&D (eventually) put out sets of nonweapon proficiencies so people could take First Aid or Herbalism or Gem Appraisal.
Of course, any discussion like this not only encompasses a bajillion games but a bajillion gaming groups both casual and “hard core”, Game Masters who design their own worlds and those who stay with purchased modules, those who love spending five hours in a tavern and those who just want to cleave apart goblins, etc. While my groups always ignored “Elf clerics can only progress to 5th level” because it was more important for the person who was into their character to enjoy the game, I’m sure someone else rigidly adhered to the rule since it was printed right there in black and white.
But “we have a good time with game X” is not the same as “Game X is a good game.” Indeed, if we’re ever going to be able to talk about games critically, it’s a crucial distinction. If we’re going to be able to talk constructively about this stuff we can’t just go on saying “Any game can be good if your GM ignores all the rules and just makes stuff up depending on whether you roll high or low on your d20.”
Strength scores alone had like 3 or 4 associated mechanics, including two different dice - one for “opening doors” and one for “Bend bars/lift gates”. Heck, the stat itself has its own mechanism in that if you have an 18 you roll seperate dice to generate a NEW magical number that doesn’t work anything like any of the other ability scores. Saving throws (against spells that allow them, and they’re all completely arbitrary. It might be a spell, but you might be saving against “wands” rather than against “Spells”) work different from attacking with weapons, which works differently from (ugh) psionics. One racial ability might have you roll d6 to do something, while another racial ability might give you a percent chance to do something else.
I don’t have my 1st edition Player’s Handbook handy, but the number of disparate systems that seem to have been invented in a vacuum was pretty large. Knowing about any one portion of the game does very little to inform you about how any other portion might work.
None. Because it’s all right there? The only actual mechanic (Keywords don’t count, keywords literally DO NOTHING by themselves) here is what “wisdom vs will” means. Fortunately, that’s one of the standardized core mechanics of the system. There is literally no table, no lookup, no “What die do I use for wisdom?” nothing.
It’s a crapton better than the 3rd edition druid too.
I somewhat disagree; The more edge cases and exceptions your rules have, the more often you will need to look up the specific wording of something. Yes, system mastery reduces the amount of this, but unless you play a game every day, you’re just not going to remember the fringe cases. (Quick! How does Mind Blast interact with Tower of Iron Will?) So the more you can reduce fringe cases, the less interruption your game will suffer from needing to look stuff up, even among relatively experienced players.
No, it’s definitely not COMPLETELY arbitrary. Actually, again, I think this ties back to archetypes pretty strongly.
This is a pretty bad hypothetical, since it’s out of genre.
I don’t really think this is the case; If anything, SKILL systems are what is going to limit this. Most classes in most class based systems just aren’t broad enough. In order to tell someone ‘No you can’t do that because you aren’t/don’t have X’ there needs to be an X for them to not have. And if you just look at core classes in D&D, they don’t tell you whether they can search for secret doors, and they don’t tell you if they can use herbs, and they don’t even tell you if you can hide in shadows once you get past 2nd edition. They tell you “Hey, you can use these weapons and wear this armor, and cast these spells and use the following special abilities” but they don’t restrict things that most games cover with their skill system. It’s when the game creates an “herbalism” skill and says “You can’t use this untrained” that the person who didn’t put any points into herbalism because unable to know about herbs.
Conan was certainly not magical. Neither was virtually the entire cast of Lord of the Rings. Yes, Gandalf could fight but I don’t think saying heroes “typically” have magic is at all accurate.
Absolutely. “System Matters” is one of the core tenets of modern RPG design.
No, sorry, you haven’t explained it to me - even if we are only talking D&D which fine by me as overwhelmingly played that back in the day, together with a little Traveller and Chivalry & Sorcery.
Too much early history has been skipped. You cannot lump everything pre-3rd edition into one bucket. I have only heard of 3rd edition - but then I stopped playing in 1983, maybe '82. It’s all a long time ago.
For me, it started with playing the original D&D game once or twice that somebody else DMed using the original three books in a brown box. I was blown away and started playing by basically winging the whole game as DM. This would have been 1976.
I only had a character sheet and a few memories to go on and I back engineered the rest. The campaign ran for almost a year as I gradually wrote up my own rules. I had four or five players who had no exposure to RPG apart from my game (we were all mainly historical miniature wargamers - so same background as the creators of D&D). I did not play D&D other than DM my own game.
Finally I could afford what I call the blue starter book. It only covered the 1st to 3rd levels and a few monsters and spells in a 40 page (guessing there) softcover blue book. I think it may have been released only in the UK - costing a fiver maybe. I have just looked it up - it was called Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set rulebook and was released in 1977.
I then purchased the four supplements to the original three books (which I still did not own and did not buy until another year passed). There was a bit of confusion and those rules and the starter book did not completely tie up, but then I was still using a mixture of all those rules and my made up set of a couple of years earlier.
We finally moved over to Advanced D&D a little while after the players handbook came out. I would guess by 1980 we completely moved over, and ran a consistent game with many of my original group also DMing their own games within a wider group of perhaps ten players. Most played exclusively within our group, with a few outings at Conventions in the UK.
From 1980 to 1982 - during my 6th form years - AD&D dominated our game time. Then the first of us went off to University and it was never the same again. Withing two years we had all abandoned D&D.
I still board game, mostly German style games, and I still have my FRPG stuff somewhere, and my miniatures and my board wargames but they never see the light of day. The majority of my gaming is now spent playing chess quite seriously, in the Edinburgh and Scottish National Leagues. Funny really, as chess is where it all started for me, aged about eight or nine (right after the Fisher v Spassky world championship match).
Oh, and I don’t blame you for your innocence, but everything before your beloved 3rd edition was not “primitive”.
Original D&D and Advanced D&D was a huge change. Many players resisted the change as AD&D was considered **way too complex ** for what should be a game driven by imagination and story telling within minimal rule guidance. AD&D brought conflict between the DM and players - in that there was a rule book accepted by all that the players could support their dispute with the DM. In my view it was all downhill from there and D&D became “just another game” and sport for “rule lawyers”. But AD&D marked the high water mark for the games popularity I would state and the time it went mainstream - so that is 1980 or about 20 years before your date.
"Rule Lawyer-ing "would never have been tolerated in the time of the real original D&D and would havef brought down divine intervention on the party arguing and not letting the game move on. The fact that we stuck with it for two or three years is testament to the residual love of the game. I liked AD&D as it was a gateway for my group to feel confident enough to DM their own games rather than have to invent their own wheels - and so I could get back to playing a character again for some of the time. I was still the go to DM however over the period.
If everyone is enjoying themselves, and does so week in and week out, it is by definition a good game. If the DM is good enough he doesn’t even need a game system or a rule book as I proved with my original group.
We all had an absolute blast. The introduction of a game system, AD&D in our case, was the beginning of the slippery slope. Obviously YMDV (*does *rather than may).
The “game” can be good - as in “The game experience at the table.”
The “system” is unarguably bad. The fact that it can be mitigated by an extremely good GM does not change this.
But the question remains: Why would you select a system that requires an amazing GM to produce a good game? Why not use a system that works with the GM to produce an even MORE amazing game? If the system contains rules that need to skipped over, modified, rejiggered, or otherwise fixed by the GM, why not throw the system away in favor of a better one? Or, as you point out, no system, if you swing that way.
There’s no system that is unarguably bad, since you can’t really make statements like that about an inherently subjective judgement. I mean, christ, there are people who play and enjoy Hackmaster - a system that is a satire of bad systems! For them, Hackmaster is a good system. I don’t get it and I wouldn’t want to play it, but that doesn’t mean the system is unarguably bad. It just means that it doesn’t appeal to me.
