Why 1st Ed?
Recently, someone asked why someone who didn't cut their teeth on AD&D 1E would choose that edition over the others. What follows is an account of my personal experience playing RPGs, from my first books to the present day. I think it shows that my "why" has evolved over the years.
The first D&D books I ever owned was red box which I got for Christmas when I was 8 years old. I'd been saving up my money to buy it myself, so I was able to use that money to buy the expert blue box. My grandmother noticed my interest, and because she ran a flea market, she was always at auctions and thrift stores looking for bargains, and any time she'd see a D&D book, she'd get it for me, so I quickly ended up with a mish-mash, and by the time I was in 6th grade and running my first long-running campaign, 2nd Ed had just come out, so we were playing a mish-mash of BECMI, 1E, and 2E.
The group I played with in high school had gravitated towards 2E--they were just the most readily available books. I still ran mish-mash because I loved being able to pull in content that none of the other kids had because they only had 2E. Though by this time I myself was playing and running mainly 2E. Better organization, etc, the whole laundry list of uninspired and generic praise 2E always garners.
My younger brother was a 1E hold-out. Mainly because I gave him some of my 1E books when I "sold out" to 2E. And whereas I tend to be a big-picture thinker, he's very detail-oriented. He did what fewer gamers do. He read the f***ing manuals. And even though I fought him on it, he pretty much sold me on 1E. So when I decided to streamline down to a single, pure edition--after all, streamlining was one of those generic advantages 2E had (this was right before splatbook mania), I went with 1st.
And then I started reading the f***ing books. Just like I did when I was the only kid on the block who had a red box when I was first learning the game. I especially the 1E DMG. Over and over and over again. Every rainy day. Every time I read it, I discovered something new. And it was stuff no one else was doing and stuff no one else was thinking about. It gave me an edge because, yeah, in some sense RPGs are a competition. As a player (at that age) we all wanted to be teh badd azz. As a DM, we were competing for who gets the head seat at the table and which players we can get to join our campaigns. I ended up losing most of the 2E stalwarts but gained a whole bunch of unaffiliated gamers simply because my campaign had more nuance. It's really the big E double G who deserves the credit for all that nuance because i was just digging it all out of the DMG.
Meanwhile, I began to feel like 2E tried to ram a lot of "sophistication" down gamers' throats. For a lot of gamers, it took. And to this day you can hear them repeat the same time-worn lines practically word for word from the 2E manuals as if they were original thoughts. The game subtly became less and less fun, though its players didn't seem to notice and would actually swear up and down otherwise. But the proof was in the pudding. The old 2E group ended up having a lot of drama among players, even broke out in a fist-fight one night. While the 1E group was having ridiculous amounts of fun. No infighting. No attendance problems. Long-term campaign that wasn't a bonanza of XP and magic items.
When I got to college, I quickly found out who the campus role-players were. I remember this one uber-sophisticated guy who was into 2E repeating some of the aforementioned brainwash lines, like, "Oh, it was just re-writing the rules according to how people were actually playing." I challenged him on it. "Really? You're going to tell me that one day people just decided, you know what would be better than a 2 in 6 surprise probability? 3 in 10." His response was, "Well, maybe it's because that was more realistic," almost as if to imply that in some government lab somewhere they actually studied this and the margin of experimental error was less than three and one third percent so they were able to decide conclusively that 30% is a better basis for surprise.
Another guy was even more sophisticated. He eschewed D&D entirely in favor of Vampire: the Masquerade. Apparently D&D is too "convoluted" and didn't have enough emphasis on story. Meanwhile, all the V:tM campaigns I saw never lasted very long before players, drunk on how powerful their characters were relative to the average human, began making a mockery of the game by doing ridiculous things like flipping cars over and murdering a meter maid rather than pay a parking ticket. Any semblance of an intricately crafted story--even this over-riding masquerade thing--went completely out the window.
Not surprisingly, neither of these people were actually running or playing in an actual game.
The people who actually were playing had a 2E campaign going, but I noticed they'd frequently take breaks to play a fantasy themed board game like Heroquest. This puzzled me. If you felt like playing a board game--and a fantasy-themed one at that--you know AD&D can DO that if you want. Plus you could even play the same characters, continue to build their XP and story while you get your "change of pace."
Despite all the "change-of-pace" nights, their DM got burnt out and I was asked to take over. I insisted on running 1E, but I let them keep their characters--one of my peeves in the various campaigns I played in high school is every time a new DM stepped up--or even just had an ass itch and decided it was time for a new campaign, it was time to make new characters. I can't even recall the names of the countless characters I rolled up who only saw a session or two of play. Some didn't even see 1. Seemed like a waste of time, all those "Session 0's."
This wasn't without its challenges. One player had a psionicist which had no 1E equivalent. I just made him a thief with psionics, so he gained a few abilities. Another a 2nd Ed ranger which was substantially different from a 1E. He was bummed when a trap caused him to lose a few points of Dex but happy when I pointed out 1E rangers don't need it, and you don't need to wear paper armor or whatever to retain your stealth ability.
Another player I guess just didn't like his character and wanted to start over with a new character. He requested to play a gold dragon. I actually let him. Had to start at age cat 2, and I made it clear he couldn't actually level like everyone else. He just had to age into being more powerful. Initially, he'd seem more powerful than the others, but they would creep ahead of him. Having both found terms we could agree on, he got his gold dragon, and it worked just fine in the campaign.
And off we went. Nobody burnt out. Some of our sessions did resemble board games. The nice thing about that is the game rules tied everything together. This allowed the "flavor text" to be a lot more free-form, and I felt people got into their characters more without the oppression of a big over-arching story. There was some story to it. The story framed the adventure, and sometimes the framing of several adventures linked up to tell one big story.
One player did complain about fighting monsters. He wanted more interaction with humans. It was Greyhawk. So I introduced the Scarlet Brotherhood. Soon he was laughing at himself as he requested that we please go back to fighting monsters.
The dropout rate among freshmen was high, so when the year drew to a close, so did the campaign. In the new school year, Magic: The Gathering had absolutely exploded on campus. And that's pretty much all I played. Summer break, I'd go home and get to play an actual RPG. My younger brother had continued to carry the torch, but he had switched to Dangerous Journeys, so that's what I played while at home, and that's what I read while in school.
Senior year, a new fire had been lit for RPGs again. WotC was heavily marketing the forthcoming 3E promising a return the Greyhawk "one kicked-in door at a time." The number of role-players on campus had grown substantially and we had multiple campaigns running simultaneously. One group was playing V:tM, one was playing random silly games like Kobolds Ate My Baby, one group was playing 2E (initially, this was the most popular group).
I ended up running two separate campaigns. One was AsteRogues, an unpublished beta version of a game by Gary Gygax, the first one to use the Lejendary Adventure system. It was heavy RP, and I did a lot of experimental stuff there. A lot of improv theater. It was great for some laughs but didn't have the staying power of straight up adventure campaign.
The other campaign I ran was, once again, hard-ass, dungeon-crawling 1E D&D. Although the 2E campaign was initially most popular, my 1E campaign is the one that really took off. As people got burnt out on the other campaigns, as they were falling apart, they drifted to my campaign. Part of what made what I was doing successful is I just didn't care who showed up one week to the next. I stipulated that each session must begin in town and end in town. Whoever shows up, that's who plays.
So people who had a gap in their schedule would sometimes show up. No commitment or pressure to come back. But what really fascinated me about this is the attendance of the core group. They never missed a single session. It's almost like, without some grand story, you're not lost if you miss a session, and when you feel free to miss a session, showing up is about fun, not commitment, not a chore, and so as a consequence people had more fun and were more likely to show up. Between the solid core group, the occasional visitors, and the fact that some of those visitors themselves got hooked, at its height there were 13 players around the table, not including the DM.
The stories I could tell about this campaign are endless. It was by far the most fun I'd ever had playing RPGs, and I could tell for those participating it was the most fun they'd ever had as well. At its absolute peak, it had all the fervor of a sporting event. It was pretty wild.
After that, though, I went all in with the Lejendary Adventure RPG. Then 3E was released, and I found it to be a major disappointment. If I have to learn the game all over again, I may as well just learn a completely new game. So I stuck with LA. That culminated with me running an 8-month long adventure--longest single adventure I'd ever run at that point--which was the Hall of Many Panes.
Actually, I was on GMing hiatus at the time trying to focus on more adult things like career. But when I started reading this module, I was hooked immediately. I thought it was the most brilliant and original thing I've ever seen. I just HAD to run it. The group that ran through that was 11 players at its peak. And once it was over, I so badly wanted to run it again. So I figured, to make it interesting, I'd like to run it using 1E.
From then on, I began thinking in both systems simultaneously. The reason for the return to 1E, especially when now we're up to 5E, is different from what my reasons had been in the past. I now have a new RPG which I like better than any version of D&D. The only reason I'd ever play another fantasy RPG other than LA is if it brought something different to the table.
And that's where 1E shines. Later editions of D&D feel too generic to me. 1E has a certain feel to it. At times dark. At times gritty. At times humorous and idealistic. Powerful characters can smite an entire mobs. It has the potential for that level of glory. But it can also be brutal at any level. While "modern" design pats itself on the back for being able to produce equations so elegant that nerds become sexually aroused, there hasn't even been an attempt at tackling the monumental task of reinventing the game to capture a spirit as strong or as unique as what 1E had.
I have my doubts as to whether the know-how to do something like that is within the capabilities of anyone at WotC--in the tail end of my M:tG days, I did watch as they systematically destroyed every nuance of that game thinking they were improving it.
And that, dear friends, is why of all the editions in all the RPGs in the world, I've chosen 1E.
The first D&D books I ever owned was red box which I got for Christmas when I was 8 years old. I'd been saving up my money to buy it myself, so I was able to use that money to buy the expert blue box. My grandmother noticed my interest, and because she ran a flea market, she was always at auctions and thrift stores looking for bargains, and any time she'd see a D&D book, she'd get it for me, so I quickly ended up with a mish-mash, and by the time I was in 6th grade and running my first long-running campaign, 2nd Ed had just come out, so we were playing a mish-mash of BECMI, 1E, and 2E.
The group I played with in high school had gravitated towards 2E--they were just the most readily available books. I still ran mish-mash because I loved being able to pull in content that none of the other kids had because they only had 2E. Though by this time I myself was playing and running mainly 2E. Better organization, etc, the whole laundry list of uninspired and generic praise 2E always garners.
My younger brother was a 1E hold-out. Mainly because I gave him some of my 1E books when I "sold out" to 2E. And whereas I tend to be a big-picture thinker, he's very detail-oriented. He did what fewer gamers do. He read the f***ing manuals. And even though I fought him on it, he pretty much sold me on 1E. So when I decided to streamline down to a single, pure edition--after all, streamlining was one of those generic advantages 2E had (this was right before splatbook mania), I went with 1st.
And then I started reading the f***ing books. Just like I did when I was the only kid on the block who had a red box when I was first learning the game. I especially the 1E DMG. Over and over and over again. Every rainy day. Every time I read it, I discovered something new. And it was stuff no one else was doing and stuff no one else was thinking about. It gave me an edge because, yeah, in some sense RPGs are a competition. As a player (at that age) we all wanted to be teh badd azz. As a DM, we were competing for who gets the head seat at the table and which players we can get to join our campaigns. I ended up losing most of the 2E stalwarts but gained a whole bunch of unaffiliated gamers simply because my campaign had more nuance. It's really the big E double G who deserves the credit for all that nuance because i was just digging it all out of the DMG.
Meanwhile, I began to feel like 2E tried to ram a lot of "sophistication" down gamers' throats. For a lot of gamers, it took. And to this day you can hear them repeat the same time-worn lines practically word for word from the 2E manuals as if they were original thoughts. The game subtly became less and less fun, though its players didn't seem to notice and would actually swear up and down otherwise. But the proof was in the pudding. The old 2E group ended up having a lot of drama among players, even broke out in a fist-fight one night. While the 1E group was having ridiculous amounts of fun. No infighting. No attendance problems. Long-term campaign that wasn't a bonanza of XP and magic items.
When I got to college, I quickly found out who the campus role-players were. I remember this one uber-sophisticated guy who was into 2E repeating some of the aforementioned brainwash lines, like, "Oh, it was just re-writing the rules according to how people were actually playing." I challenged him on it. "Really? You're going to tell me that one day people just decided, you know what would be better than a 2 in 6 surprise probability? 3 in 10." His response was, "Well, maybe it's because that was more realistic," almost as if to imply that in some government lab somewhere they actually studied this and the margin of experimental error was less than three and one third percent so they were able to decide conclusively that 30% is a better basis for surprise.
Another guy was even more sophisticated. He eschewed D&D entirely in favor of Vampire: the Masquerade. Apparently D&D is too "convoluted" and didn't have enough emphasis on story. Meanwhile, all the V:tM campaigns I saw never lasted very long before players, drunk on how powerful their characters were relative to the average human, began making a mockery of the game by doing ridiculous things like flipping cars over and murdering a meter maid rather than pay a parking ticket. Any semblance of an intricately crafted story--even this over-riding masquerade thing--went completely out the window.
Not surprisingly, neither of these people were actually running or playing in an actual game.
The people who actually were playing had a 2E campaign going, but I noticed they'd frequently take breaks to play a fantasy themed board game like Heroquest. This puzzled me. If you felt like playing a board game--and a fantasy-themed one at that--you know AD&D can DO that if you want. Plus you could even play the same characters, continue to build their XP and story while you get your "change of pace."
Despite all the "change-of-pace" nights, their DM got burnt out and I was asked to take over. I insisted on running 1E, but I let them keep their characters--one of my peeves in the various campaigns I played in high school is every time a new DM stepped up--or even just had an ass itch and decided it was time for a new campaign, it was time to make new characters. I can't even recall the names of the countless characters I rolled up who only saw a session or two of play. Some didn't even see 1. Seemed like a waste of time, all those "Session 0's."
This wasn't without its challenges. One player had a psionicist which had no 1E equivalent. I just made him a thief with psionics, so he gained a few abilities. Another a 2nd Ed ranger which was substantially different from a 1E. He was bummed when a trap caused him to lose a few points of Dex but happy when I pointed out 1E rangers don't need it, and you don't need to wear paper armor or whatever to retain your stealth ability.
Another player I guess just didn't like his character and wanted to start over with a new character. He requested to play a gold dragon. I actually let him. Had to start at age cat 2, and I made it clear he couldn't actually level like everyone else. He just had to age into being more powerful. Initially, he'd seem more powerful than the others, but they would creep ahead of him. Having both found terms we could agree on, he got his gold dragon, and it worked just fine in the campaign.
And off we went. Nobody burnt out. Some of our sessions did resemble board games. The nice thing about that is the game rules tied everything together. This allowed the "flavor text" to be a lot more free-form, and I felt people got into their characters more without the oppression of a big over-arching story. There was some story to it. The story framed the adventure, and sometimes the framing of several adventures linked up to tell one big story.
One player did complain about fighting monsters. He wanted more interaction with humans. It was Greyhawk. So I introduced the Scarlet Brotherhood. Soon he was laughing at himself as he requested that we please go back to fighting monsters.
The dropout rate among freshmen was high, so when the year drew to a close, so did the campaign. In the new school year, Magic: The Gathering had absolutely exploded on campus. And that's pretty much all I played. Summer break, I'd go home and get to play an actual RPG. My younger brother had continued to carry the torch, but he had switched to Dangerous Journeys, so that's what I played while at home, and that's what I read while in school.
Senior year, a new fire had been lit for RPGs again. WotC was heavily marketing the forthcoming 3E promising a return the Greyhawk "one kicked-in door at a time." The number of role-players on campus had grown substantially and we had multiple campaigns running simultaneously. One group was playing V:tM, one was playing random silly games like Kobolds Ate My Baby, one group was playing 2E (initially, this was the most popular group).
I ended up running two separate campaigns. One was AsteRogues, an unpublished beta version of a game by Gary Gygax, the first one to use the Lejendary Adventure system. It was heavy RP, and I did a lot of experimental stuff there. A lot of improv theater. It was great for some laughs but didn't have the staying power of straight up adventure campaign.
The other campaign I ran was, once again, hard-ass, dungeon-crawling 1E D&D. Although the 2E campaign was initially most popular, my 1E campaign is the one that really took off. As people got burnt out on the other campaigns, as they were falling apart, they drifted to my campaign. Part of what made what I was doing successful is I just didn't care who showed up one week to the next. I stipulated that each session must begin in town and end in town. Whoever shows up, that's who plays.
So people who had a gap in their schedule would sometimes show up. No commitment or pressure to come back. But what really fascinated me about this is the attendance of the core group. They never missed a single session. It's almost like, without some grand story, you're not lost if you miss a session, and when you feel free to miss a session, showing up is about fun, not commitment, not a chore, and so as a consequence people had more fun and were more likely to show up. Between the solid core group, the occasional visitors, and the fact that some of those visitors themselves got hooked, at its height there were 13 players around the table, not including the DM.
The stories I could tell about this campaign are endless. It was by far the most fun I'd ever had playing RPGs, and I could tell for those participating it was the most fun they'd ever had as well. At its absolute peak, it had all the fervor of a sporting event. It was pretty wild.
After that, though, I went all in with the Lejendary Adventure RPG. Then 3E was released, and I found it to be a major disappointment. If I have to learn the game all over again, I may as well just learn a completely new game. So I stuck with LA. That culminated with me running an 8-month long adventure--longest single adventure I'd ever run at that point--which was the Hall of Many Panes.
Actually, I was on GMing hiatus at the time trying to focus on more adult things like career. But when I started reading this module, I was hooked immediately. I thought it was the most brilliant and original thing I've ever seen. I just HAD to run it. The group that ran through that was 11 players at its peak. And once it was over, I so badly wanted to run it again. So I figured, to make it interesting, I'd like to run it using 1E.
From then on, I began thinking in both systems simultaneously. The reason for the return to 1E, especially when now we're up to 5E, is different from what my reasons had been in the past. I now have a new RPG which I like better than any version of D&D. The only reason I'd ever play another fantasy RPG other than LA is if it brought something different to the table.
And that's where 1E shines. Later editions of D&D feel too generic to me. 1E has a certain feel to it. At times dark. At times gritty. At times humorous and idealistic. Powerful characters can smite an entire mobs. It has the potential for that level of glory. But it can also be brutal at any level. While "modern" design pats itself on the back for being able to produce equations so elegant that nerds become sexually aroused, there hasn't even been an attempt at tackling the monumental task of reinventing the game to capture a spirit as strong or as unique as what 1E had.
I have my doubts as to whether the know-how to do something like that is within the capabilities of anyone at WotC--in the tail end of my M:tG days, I did watch as they systematically destroyed every nuance of that game thinking they were improving it.
And that, dear friends, is why of all the editions in all the RPGs in the world, I've chosen 1E.
I humbly agree. Out of all the recipes for chicken soup these days, Gary's remains the best.
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