5 ms·

I am effectively a Stranger Things kid, playing AD&D from 10-14 years old in friends' basements in the early 1980s. A little younger than the pimply nerds in t

I am effectively a Stranger Things kid, playing AD&D from 10-14 years old in friends' basements in the early 1980s. A little younger than the pimply nerds in the Dead Alewives skit, but their depiction was pretty accurate, sans Mountain Dew. When my sons were 6 I decided to introduce them to the game. The 5e Starter Set had just come out and it was so similar to the original Basic Box of my youth. The rules were very different and often not in a good way: it was too sterile and formal, not as shaggy and weird as AD&D. But it was fun, and they loved it. I imagine there will be a time, 40 years from now, when they teach it to their sons.

ozarker 3y ago
My dad played AD&D as a kid like you, and introduced it to us when we were young (like your kids). We got our cousins into it and we spent every summer adventuring. When 5e came out we tried it a couple times and really didn’t like it for the reasons you mentioned. Coming back to D&D as an adult (coworkers play during lunch once a week) has been strange. The new style of play feels rigid. I can understand the standardization to try and create a uniform experience but it feels like a little of that AD&D magic is lost. Also I’m an adult now haha
- kaashif 3y ago
  What do you guys mean specifically when you say AD&D is less sterile?
  - SeanLuke 3y ago
    There's a famous table in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide where, if you came across a prostitute, you could determine what kind of prostitute it was. AD&D was weird and arbitrary and unbalanced and a mess. It was also... more fun to explore.
- tarsinge 3y ago
  I don't think the rules have changed in spirit (especially in 5e) but the mindset has. Basic D&D was very ridig if you followed the rules (like a video game, with codified turns, see "Sequence of play" in B/X https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1509982170193.pdf https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1509982170193.pdf). AD&D already had a rule for everything. But the mindset was DM were loosely following the rules apart from character tables and were making their own house rules for everything. Everybody had a different understanding, sometimes were young, and there was no internet to check if it was correct, as long as it was fun to play.
  - jghn 3y ago
    > Everybody had a different understanding, sometimes were young, and there was no internet to check if it was correct, as long as it was fun to play. I've been realizing more and more how true this was. I haven't played either D&D or AD&D since the early 90s. At the time the people I played with would laugh at how encyclopedic I was about the rules, source material, etc. But these days I'll go to r/adnd or something like that and see someone talking about a thing from 1ed AD&D and my reaction is "WTF? I had no idea that existed!". Or people talking about how of course every group played a certain way, and I never played that way in any group. Which now leaves me always astounded at how much stuff I had no idea existed. To your age point, that was definitely a part of it. I played from about age 8 to late teens. In retrospect, a lot of this stuff was over my head
  - 5040 3y ago
    Comparing different versions of an adventure module that has been released for multiple editions can be instructive. When I did this, it seemed to me that each new edition was more explicit than the last, with more precise and simple language, and less evocative prose.
lucidguppy 3y ago
The wider TTRPG community has dozens of rule sets to scratch any particular itch. One rule set is Dungeon Crawl Classics - https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-advanced-fantasy-box-set https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-adv...
- thinkmassive 3y ago
  How do these community versions, like Old School Essentials, differ from using the real BECMI rules? What would motivate a group to pick up one of these, rather than say a reprint of the Rules Cyclopedia (or using a free digital copy from archive.org)?
  - thinkmassive 3y ago
    I found some useful links below for answering my questions, ironically in a dead (but very informative) comment from johnvak01. tl;dr: old school versions apply clarifications and enhancements to the original B/X rules for smoother gameplay, some add additional content, and many people want to avoid paying anything to WotC
  - allturtles 3y ago
    > How do these community versions, like Old School Essentials, differ from using the real BECMI rules? Not a lot. (though Old School Essentials is based on the earlier Basic/Expert or B/X rules, not BECMI [0]) Generally the biggest change is that almost all OSR games use ascending armor class. > What would motivate a group to pick up one of these, rather than say a reprint of the Rules Cyclopedia (or using a free digital copy from archive.org)? Old School Essentials is far more clearly written and easier to use. A lot of thought was put into layout so that all of the relevant rules for a given topic (e.g. the steps involved in character creation, or the dungeon exploration rules) fit on a single two-page spread. Spell descriptions are bullet-pointed in a way that makes it very easy to check their effects at a glance. You can check out the free version and see for yourself [1]. Edit: Another thing to keep in mind is that when the OSR first started you couldn't get print-on-demand versions of old rule books from Wizards. If you wanted to play with something like BECMI you had to hunt for the box sets or the Rules Cyclopedia on eBay or in Half-Price Books, or get pirated PDFs. OSR games provided an alternative. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/evax7d/bx_vs_becmi/ https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/evax7d/bx_vs_becmi/ [1]: https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-basic-rules https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-bas...

ozarker 3y ago

My dad played AD&D as a kid like you, and introduced it to us when we were young (like your kids). We got our cousins into it and we spent every summer adventuring. When 5e came out we tried it a couple times and really didn’t like it for the reasons you mentioned. Coming back to D&D as an adult (coworkers play during lunch once a week) has been strange. The new style of play feels rigid. I can understand the standardization to try and create a uniform experience but it feels like a little of that AD&D magic is lost. Also I’m an adult now haha

kaashif 3y ago
What do you guys mean specifically when you say AD&D is less sterile?
- SeanLuke 3y ago
  There's a famous table in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide where, if you came across a prostitute, you could determine what kind of prostitute it was. AD&D was weird and arbitrary and unbalanced and a mess. It was also... more fun to explore.
tarsinge 3y ago
I don't think the rules have changed in spirit (especially in 5e) but the mindset has. Basic D&D was very ridig if you followed the rules (like a video game, with codified turns, see "Sequence of play" in B/X https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1509982170193.pdf https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1509982170193.pdf). AD&D already had a rule for everything. But the mindset was DM were loosely following the rules apart from character tables and were making their own house rules for everything. Everybody had a different understanding, sometimes were young, and there was no internet to check if it was correct, as long as it was fun to play.
- jghn 3y ago
  > Everybody had a different understanding, sometimes were young, and there was no internet to check if it was correct, as long as it was fun to play. I've been realizing more and more how true this was. I haven't played either D&D or AD&D since the early 90s. At the time the people I played with would laugh at how encyclopedic I was about the rules, source material, etc. But these days I'll go to r/adnd or something like that and see someone talking about a thing from 1ed AD&D and my reaction is "WTF? I had no idea that existed!". Or people talking about how of course every group played a certain way, and I never played that way in any group. Which now leaves me always astounded at how much stuff I had no idea existed. To your age point, that was definitely a part of it. I played from about age 8 to late teens. In retrospect, a lot of this stuff was over my head
- 5040 3y ago
  Comparing different versions of an adventure module that has been released for multiple editions can be instructive. When I did this, it seemed to me that each new edition was more explicit than the last, with more precise and simple language, and less evocative prose.

lucidguppy 3y ago

The wider TTRPG community has dozens of rule sets to scratch any particular itch. One rule set is Dungeon Crawl Classics - https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-advanced-fantasy-box-set https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-adv...

thinkmassive 3y ago
How do these community versions, like Old School Essentials, differ from using the real BECMI rules? What would motivate a group to pick up one of these, rather than say a reprint of the Rules Cyclopedia (or using a free digital copy from archive.org)?
- thinkmassive 3y ago
  I found some useful links below for answering my questions, ironically in a dead (but very informative) comment from johnvak01. tl;dr: old school versions apply clarifications and enhancements to the original B/X rules for smoother gameplay, some add additional content, and many people want to avoid paying anything to WotC
- allturtles 3y ago
  > How do these community versions, like Old School Essentials, differ from using the real BECMI rules? Not a lot. (though Old School Essentials is based on the earlier Basic/Expert or B/X rules, not BECMI [0]) Generally the biggest change is that almost all OSR games use ascending armor class. > What would motivate a group to pick up one of these, rather than say a reprint of the Rules Cyclopedia (or using a free digital copy from archive.org)? Old School Essentials is far more clearly written and easier to use. A lot of thought was put into layout so that all of the relevant rules for a given topic (e.g. the steps involved in character creation, or the dungeon exploration rules) fit on a single two-page spread. Spell descriptions are bullet-pointed in a way that makes it very easy to check their effects at a glance. You can check out the free version and see for yourself [1]. Edit: Another thing to keep in mind is that when the OSR first started you couldn't get print-on-demand versions of old rule books from Wizards. If you wanted to play with something like BECMI you had to hunt for the box sets or the Rules Cyclopedia on eBay or in Half-Price Books, or get pirated PDFs. OSR games provided an alternative. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/evax7d/bx_vs_becmi/ https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/evax7d/bx_vs_becmi/ [1]: https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-basic-rules https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-bas...