TOP 10 things in 1974's Original D&D that SHOCK modern players!
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- Опубликовано: 13 окт 2024
- ALSO check out DM It All's "History of Original Dungeons & Dragons":
• The History of Origina...
And The Alexandrian's readthrough of OD&D!
• Let's Read the Origina...
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I can never limit myself to 10! =D
ADDITIONS/ERRATA:
-Since Pathfinder came from D&D, this is ALSO the history of Pathfinder! (Thanks to the commenter who brought that up!)
-While Original D&D was written to supplement Chainmail, MOST people who got it didn't have Chainmail: D&D far outsold its predecessor! I should've kept this in mind as well.
-People keep mentioning that the Dungeon! board game came out after D&D. It was published after, but designed at least a year before and shown to Gary Gygax the same night Dave Arneson demo'd Blackmoor, which inspired Gygax to write D&D. I'm looking at the EVOLUTION of the games.
-Magic-Users and Clerics were only restricted from using "magic armor," and clerics from "non-edged magic weapons," suggesting that they could use non-magical versions of these!
-"Man +1" meaning you add 1 to your d6 roll, doesn't tell us what "2 Men -1" means. You can't roll 7 on a d6.
-I've seen many comments saying Gygax based alignment language off of religious languages like Latin. I see the real-world usefulness of Latin among an exclusive clergy, but D&D assumes a language known by EVERYONE of the appropriate alignment. Also, commenters mention that the fiction Gygax drew from had an actual war between people on different sides of the metaphysical compass. That's VERY interesting, but it is never explained here, and not in any later D&D rules publication that I know of, either! Besides, for everyone to develop the same language, using realism, there has to be a LONG period of time where different peoples find it practical to communicate with each other, either through prolonged war against a common enemy. Theoretically possible, yes, but NEUTRAL having its own language in a "cosmic war"?? (Which I'm going to guess was not in the literature Gygax drew from.)
-I really should have added #21: Most of your XP came from treasure. I avoided some things that I think even many modern players know about old-school D&D, but this has such a huge impact on gameplay that I should have covered it!
-My favorite TTRPG blogger, Alexandrian, has an excellent readthrough of OD&D! He also takes the approach of asking "What did this mean in 1974?" ruclips.net/channel/UCcVcBqGoJLYRIN8ckBY8HhQ
how about #22: time between sessions passed normally. Meaning if you played on weekends there was a week going by *in-game* for your characters.
You should check out the relation between early D&D and the original Final Fantasy game for NES.
Final Fantasy is essentially a D&D video game, really.
@@alistairethebluwhich i imagine goes horribly for dungeon dwelling
@@FirstLast-wk3kc It was an incentive to finish the dungeon before ending the session!
@@alistairetheblu ye
Fun fact about Fire destroying magic items. Legend has it that Gary Gygax would take great pleasure describing all the loot that was lost to an errant fire ball spell after a combat. It got so bad that his son, Ernie, created a new spell for later additions that did as much damage as a fireball but wouldn't destroy the items: Cone of Cold.
God gary was a horrible gm
He was going for a different type of game to be fair. The idea that a game has a narrative or that characters were the de facto heroes wasn't even a thing yet. D&D back then was played in a single world with 20+ players all doing their own thing and achieving their own goals. It was less Final Fantasy and more Eve Online if that makes sense. @@orionar2461
@@orionar2461i bet you never played under him
Players: Happily traipsing back home with their magic items
Gary: "Not quite my tempo."
@@orionar2461 He was definitely adversarial at times (see Tomb of Horrors). I imagine he was a lot of fun to play with so long as you came into the game with the right mindset.
I am at an age now where I can appreciate those younger than myself reviewing the history of things, such as Dungeons & Dragons, that I lived through. To you it's interesting history, to me it's fond nostalgia. Keep on keeping on. The memories you make really do keep you company in the end. Cheers to those who introduced me to D&D, among other things. Both still alive, and those who have left the campaign.
A bit surprised you didn't mention the fact that each second out-of-game was supposed to represent one second in-game while the group wasn't playing, to keep the chronology consistent between parties. So if you unfortunately had to stop playing in the middle of a dungeon and your next session was scheduled the same day next week you better make sure your party has enough food and water to survive staying in that same room for a whole week.
That's just so wild to me.
My impression is these were usually run in the West Marches style where the party returns to central keep between sessions. I'm sure some people at some point ran it as sitting in that room for a week, but that seems kind of strange compared to just return to the "hub" area between adventuring sessions.
@@Sensorium19 Oh yeah i obviously assume like 99% of the time parties would be able to get back to town before the end of the session. But like i said, in the case that the session really cannot go on and the party are stuck down there until next session those are the rules as they are written, one whole week in-game would pass.
@@LordZeebee from what i heard, that would mean an automatic tpk in a lot of rulings - dungeon is dangerous, with encounters rolled every 10 minutes. Moreover, dungeon itself tries to act against players, like a monster of it's own.
I don't believe that was codified until AD&D vaguely alluded to it (and it was promptly skimmed over and missed by most players). But maybe I'm forgetting a passage in the white book version.
I saw a video once about a fun house Dungeon that specifically called out that when the party rested, the dungeon would create a bubble of protection for that period of time because not being able to leave was part of the fun house and the writer wanted to allow for multiple sessions
Matt Colville made a long video about point 20. The classes were purposefully inherently weak and were rewarded disproportionately from the magic items they found because that pushed the idea that you went in to dungeons to get powerful, not for any story reason. The dungeon was the whole point. A disengaged player doesn't notice the cool secrets so you have to pay attention if you want to "level up."
Which video is that?
@@amberjones4067 ruclips.net/video/BQpnjYS6mnk/видео.htmlsi=5Bg0qB7tL92R_g1T
@@amberjones4067 I believe it was in his "Toward Better Rewards: Running the Game" video.
If you survive a dungeon, your character will be put into Deities and Demigods.
were the OG rules as I understand them. Autocorrect is pretty good.
@@skullpoker69 But not any little dungeon. Surviving a major portion of a many leveled, focus of the campaign megadungeon.
Gygax played an even harder core rule for fall damage. 1d6 per 10 feet but it was cumulative. So 40 feet falls were 10d6 damage.
Makes low level squishiness even more ridiculous "dies of falling 10ft"... that being said, Gygax preferred level 3 and higher play iirc and levels 1-2 generally were effectively part of character creation - badly played or unluckily rolled characters will die, while characeters with lucky stat, money and hp rolls, which were played well, will survive till level 3, which would mark a decrease in "death from a gust of wind's bludeoning"
@Alex-cq1zr yeah low levels are put through "the funnel" and if you survived those your character had a real chance at becoming worth something. DCC does a real good job modernizing it.
@@deityofcrystals Hence why a lot of ppl skip it and give out 1500 xp at char gen.
Personally, i would say that a set of ruling for running osr stuff without the whole "you made a backstory for a level 1 character? noob move" would be to roll stats three times and pick one array, as well as gain max hp at level 1 and get 1500 xp at chargen, simulating a funnel without the kinda pointless "play with nameless nobody character for the first two levels and only then give them name, backstory, etc."
To be fair, osr stuff still has plenty of "bad roll = instant death", so i prefer nsr stuff like Cairn rpg.
That's actually how it was supposed to be in D&D! But the editor thought it was a grammar mistake, so it got changed. Now we're stuck with ridiculously low levels of fall damage.
@@bobbycrosby9765 it's actually quite high, but quickly becomes low.
Ig the problem is that a controlled fall of 10 meters is considered enough to get hurt.
Plus, hp is supposed to be plot armor or superhuman durability, so past a certain more reasonable amount a charcater should take hp damage for sure - surviving with luck and skill or sheer toughness
I played '76-'84 and coming back to discover 5e was a huge culture shock.
Same here...I still prefer the older version. The newer essentially has each character able to almost everything on their own....as opposed to older system which taught and relied upon teamwork.
I didn’t start *that* early, but in 84 or 85. I still prefer old school D&D over the new stuff.
You had to think about solutions instead of looking for the answers on your character sheet.
@@krunchyfrogg Same time as I started. I do think 5th edition isn't bad but it works best for certain types of campaigns: Heroic movie styled games.
For a good dungeon crawl I still prefer AD&D 1st edition, get me some really paranoid players, my Dwarven forged 3D times and some miniatures and it is always an amazing time. You don't get the same tactical dungeon running in modern versions of the games, the players know that if they don't figure out how the trap in the room works and how to disarm or avoid it, they will lose at least one player so they will need to be careful and smart. I try not to over use monsters and have higher focus on puzzles and traps the players need to figure out instead of just rolling to disarm since those types on dungeons tend to be a lot more fun to play.
But if I want to run some epic campaign where the players are the countries great heroes, 5th edition or if I want it a bit more dangerous, AD&D 2nd edition are my go to fantasy games. Well, I also like Infinty's edge if I am going for a bit Isekai when I still want fantasy but want an entire different feel to my game.
I still think that AD&D 1st edition in many cases are perfection besides the terrible layout of the books and Gygax sometimes weirdly written explanations, but as I said, it depends on what kind of campaign you want to run.
@@loke6664 agreed. Let’s face it (this is not meant as a criticism): 5e is more cinematic. You don’t have main characters dying in the middle of the movie like you do in old school games.
I’m not saying you can’t die in 5e, but it’s a heck of a lot harder to do than it is in the old school versions of D&D.
@@krunchyfrogg Yeah, that is for certain. It is a huge achievement to reach named level back in AD&D, in 5th ed with a normal DM dying requires either some very bad luck or you totally screwing up.
Honestly, I think most groups would benefit if they tried both systems because both can be very fun. There is a certain rush only the old school version can give you, the sense of danger and beating the odds but there is also something to playing a more cinematic campaign.
Not every player would enjoy both experiences of course, if all you want is to tell a fairy tale like story 1st ed AD&D ain't for you and if you are only interested in beating super hard dungeons, 5th is hardly your cup of tea either.
But I do think a lot of players who only played 4th, 5th ed or Pathfinder is missing out.
A lot of the idea for Alignments came out of Moorcock's fantasy books, which posited the cosmic forces of Law and Chaos that are in eternal conflict. Some also from Poul Anderson, but Moorcock names the concepts and deals with them explicitly. Most creatures would support one or the other, either consciously or unconsciously, and there was the idea of a final conflict that at some point would sweep away everything. The idea of Alignment languages makes some sense in that context, where it's essentially like a cosmic alliance whose banner you have taken up - and where someone of the opposing alignment really would have been a mortal foe.
I've also observed something like it in political discussions, where people use the same terms to mean completely different things. IIRC, Gygax at some point compared it with Latin in the medieval Catholic church, and I think the Chaotic language gave way to Thieves' Cant in later editions (though there was also historical inspiration for that). Characters speaking Lawful or Chaotic could be using the same vocabulary as characters speaking Common, but with nuances, jargon, outdated pronunciations, and even "wrong" definitions that would make the conversation resemble word salad to outsiders.
@abyssimus
Alignment Language and Thieves' Cant excited concurrently, asking with Druid Tongue.
The unique aspect of Thieves' Can't, is it is less a language itself, but utilizing phrases, signs (hands & drawn) with alternate word meanings to communicate.
This is often badly misunderstood in alignment duscussion. Players these days think it was about personal small actions individually when it was a bout a grand game at cosmic levels where you looked at an entities cumulative effect. This let you have things like evil races with neutral or even good members or tribes but it would not be enough to alter the overal racial impact. Player races typically show up as N in the MMs becuase as a race they were to variable in impact at the cosmic scale.
Alignment languages are based on the real world actually. Most organized religions have their core beliefs coded in its original language, and followers, or at least priests, are expected to know it regardless of their own language. For Islam it's Arabic, Jews have Hebrew, Hindus Sanksrit etc... Christianity in that regard is outlier. It used to be rooted in latin, but anglicanism and protestantism broke that and translating holy texts became the norm.
Fun fact: Thieves cant is also actually based on real world secret code used in england by outlaws up to 19th century.
It also is probably where the 1stAD&D idea that Druids were always strictly neutral came from. In Moorcock, neither law or chaos could be allowed to win. Chaos was obviously bad, but if Law won, the multiverse would become sterile and lifeless. The gods of Law and Chaos realized this, but the gods of Chaos were too ill disciplined to care and were constantly threatening to destroy everything. As originally conceived, the Druid class was much more historical and rooted in Celtic civilization. They were considered neutral because of their role as scholars and diplomats, but closer to evil than good because of the whole human sacrifice thing. By 1st AD&D they had morphed into Moorcockian protectors of the cosmic balance, while now they're just shapeshifting nature clerics with no set ideology.
I was a DM for years using the white box game system. I still have the game, forty five years later. i can confirm that the game was highly lethal and a character's stats were a minor matter. Magic items were extraordinarily important.
There were multiple parties of adventurers playing in the same environment, sometimes cooperatively and sometimes competitively. There were no Adventure Paths at all. The model I used was a plate of spaghetti. The strands of pasta were the plot lines and the sauce was the random monsters (which were prevalent). A beginning player was not at the beginning of an adventure; he had to locate it. A major consequence of this is that players succeeding in an adventure commonly felt it was "their" adventure more than mine. You should have mentioned "Hold Portal" in your discussion about doors. Players naturally wanted superiority in movement, which usually favored the monsters. "Charm Person" is very powerful, but everyone knows about it. It was at the top of the "Don't get caught doing this" list.
The moat important element of D&D appears in the afterword. The writers discourage players from making rules inquiries unless they are completely at a loss. "Why have us doing any more of your imagining for you?" It was expected that rules and procedures were not going to be uniform from game to games. There were two combat systems, remember.
It took a while for the designers of RPGs to realize how attached players were to their characters and how murdering people en masse wasn't really any fun for anyone. Except Gygax, apparently.
@@christophertaylor9100
I can definitely confirm that a large part of PC treasure went to raising or reincarnation of killed characters. Much of the PC to NPC diplomacy was to remain on good terms with NPCs who could bring back the dead.
@@christophertaylor9100 this is dead wrong. The first few editions of D&D are the basis of Rogue and the Rogue-like genre, currently the biggest thing in indie game development.
@@HerricktheMildlyPerturbed The key word here is "indie". There's a reason rogue-likes never made it mainstream, most people don't like dying all the time.
@@corbanbausch9049Idk man, roguelikes, soulslikes, and metroidvanias all have lots of dying in them, and they all seem to be quite popular
The indie scene isn't exactly the small thing it used to be either
The advent of digital distribution did wonders for closing the gap between indie and AAA scenes
About the alignment languages, I believe the idea was that they were languages spoken at a place of worship. This would be like a person from Brazil who speaks Portuguese and a person from America who speaks English both also knowing Hebrew as they both attended Synagogue rather than people magically understanding a language based on their alignment like a primal ability.
I wasn't a designer for the original D&D (believe it or not) so I can't say for sure, but this was my interpretation.
IIRC, Gygax (or at least one of the later OD&D books) specifically mentioned Latin within the context of the medieval Catholic church. Daddy Rolled a 1 highlights how "Law" and "Chaos" were originally more like geopolitical factions instead of cosmic ethics, which would also make them like variations of Common.
@@abyssimus
Well, unless you counted the Elric of Melbourne books, which created the Law-Neutral-Chaos alignments back in the early 60s. In which case it very much has some aspects of Cosmic forces, just not as all encompassing as they appear in modern dnd
@@jasonfurumetarualkemisto5917While Michael Moorcock's Elric novels were written before and inspired parts of D&D, there was Poul Anderson's Three Lions and Three Hearts -- where Law and Chaos are an almost explicit allegory for the Cold War. I mentioned that Daddy Rolled a 1 has a video on alignment, where he goes over how the concept was used in Chainmail and even earlier games: it's original use in wargaming was entirely geopolitical. Likewise, for Chainmail, it was there simply for the fantasy gamers to know what units might appear in what armies. The earliest editions of D&D didn't really attach any ethics to Law or Chaos, and barely any magical mechanics.
Also, in Moorcock's Elric novels, Law and Chaos are *the* cosmic forces, and are used in other Moorcock stories that don't feature Elric. Most of Moorcock's work centers around one of the facets of the Eternal Champion (of which Elric is one) restoring the balance between Law and Chaos. Even his sci-fi time travel story "Behold the Man" fits into this, as well as his work on Dr Who. Moorcock's influence is what made Law and Chaos the all-encompassing cosmic forces that appear in any setting whether it makes sense or not.
@@abyssimus
I guess that makes sense, so Alignment in its modern context is due to Elric, but in the original game it simply signified which army you fought for.
I assume Chainmail did not have much in the way of monsters, because as of Ad&d the vast majority of monsters where sorted into Alignment, and the only real consistency b/w them you could see there was if they where explicitly a jerk they'd be sorted as Chaotic without fail.
@@jasonfurumetarualkemisto5917No, Chainmail had monsters. Most of the PC races were on the side of Law (with Elves Neutral), and most of the monsters were on the side of Chaos. Things got rearranged as things went on. It's a bit of a balance thing, if you have Treants on your side, you don't get Ogres. If you have Kobolds, you don't get Gnomes.
The door being almost monsters by default is pretty fun, and they remain formidable enemies after all this time!
Especially funny when they were magical and sentient and talked. Ran into one of those and the adventure totally changed direction when I bargained with it and bribed it to get it to change allegiance and let me unhang it and install it in my stronghold. So the rest of that day's solo (one player, one DM) adventure was breaking this door loose and hauling it out of the dungeon.
@@EdAllen this is amazing
You're definitely correct with regard to the massive importance of Greyhawk. Ex-TSR employee Tim Kask estimates that they sold nine copies of Greyhawk for every ten copies of the '74 boxed set. Playing just the boxed set in its own seems to have been pretty rare. It might even be more popular as an experiment undertaken by curious 21st century gamers than it was between 1974 and 1978.
Gygax credited both Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock for the 3-sector alignment system (Law, Neutral, Chaos). It was in one of the first modern fantasy stories, "Three Hearts and Three Lions" by Poul Anderson. Although the metaphysical underpinnings were much older Anderson first introduced it in a short story in 1953 and then a novelisation in 1961. In 1972 Moorcock wrote the Elric stories, which also featured this concept. Addendum: Anderson introduced "Law" and "Chaos" as stand-ins for good and evil. Moorcock took this concept and introduced a kind of "balance" or neutral ground between them.
I started in 1974 with the white box, 3 book set and had been playing chain mail first. Your points are pretty much spot on but we progressed to Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry and Gods, Demigods and Heroes pretty quickly when they became available.
The thing about time pressure and magic items became very important, as the game was one of resource cost vs dungeon delve reward. Also only magical weapons could harm undead outside cleric turn undead abilities.
There was quite a few save or die things to deal with as well and the most dangerous thing to encounter in the dungeon was another group of heroes.
Something you didn't mention was the massive prevalence of traps and puzzles.
I would be interested in your other video ideas for sure.
Actially, not many of us used pre-written modules or professionally created worlds...we all mostly made our own.
@stephengilbert8166 Yep. Dungeon mazes on graph paper, with the nearby "town" just a place to trade gold for healing potions and (eventually) better weapons and armor at the "magic shop." 😊
We had "blessed weapons" that we recorded as +0, to denote they were capable of harming undead.
There were certain monsters that weren't undead (e.g. gargoyles) which could only be hit by magical weapons. Any party without a magical weapon or a magic-user with a Sleep spell that ran into one of those ended up being a TPK pretty quickly.
The Greyhawk supplement added polyhedra dice, changing the hit point dice and combat system. For D&D we always used that, and I only ever remember playing Chainmail as a tabletop miniatures game.
I remember playing those booklets, just a year or two after they came out. Looking back, they were - to coin a phrase - 'more like guidelines, y'see'...
And yeah, I bought Chainmail, played a few little battles with it. For a while, we allowed players to choose whether to use the D&D armor-class system or the CHainmail 'heroic combat' system for any given fight.
Yup, so laced with things undefined or loosely trying to integrate with Chainmail that everybody had to houserule some stuff to make a reasonably coherent campaign.
I remember Advanced DnD introducing the "Identify" spell, which was not only incredibly difficult to cast but also would incapacitate if not outright KILL most magic users. Whoever made that spell *really* wanted you to trial and error stuff.
and no buddy used the PHB spell definition... save for artifact grade items.
@@zarthemad8386
I have never seen "nobody" written as "no buddy" before today, and I am fascinated.
More than likely I bet it was from using voice to text and the AI just understood him saying no buddy instead of nobody.
The identity spell was next to useless. Gary intended for you to hire a sage and spend thousands of gp on finding out about magic items. Or trial and error, which could be deadly.
I'm so delighted to see you covering some gaming history! Part of my ttrpg hobby is being an avid gaming historian, and it's so wonderful to see more channels beginning to cover this fascinating and rich topic!
The first Basic set by Holmes did much to compile, streamline, and clarify the rules from the core OD&D rule books and the supplements. It was around for about 5 years, and its importance can't be downplayed as it introduced most new players at the time to much more understandable and playable rules, especially since the AD&D Players Handbook would not come out until a year later and the DM Guide two years later. Monster stats barely existed in OD&D, but in Holmes, likely due to the influence of the Monster Manual that also came out in 77, we see most of the basic stats. In my opinion, the Moldvay, Cook, and Marsh basic and expert sets from '81 made the original rules even more playable and clean, and really became a standard for easy, fast play without getting bogged down by searching through multiple massive rule books. This is likely why so many OSR games are based on B/X such as Old-School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, B/X Companion, Lamentations of the Flame Princes, Saga of the Splintered Realm and several others. The BECMI series and Rules Cyclopedia made some minor changes and expansions, but they were largely just reworkings of B/X.
Man +1 means you hit on 5-6 instead of six. If you want to learn more about chainmail I recommend the channel: Bandit’s keep.
That's what I guessed. But what's off to me is that some levels say "Hero -1" or "Superhero -1". And there is no mass combat table in Chainmail where a Hero/Superhero can hit on anything less than a 6. So from needing 6 on a die to needing a... 7? Does Bandit's Keep address that?
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Of any one I've seen, Daniel from Bandit's Keep would probably know. Daddy Rolls a 1 might as well. He also does deep dives into game history.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Hero and Superhero were almost treated like a different character where you had better saves and rolls in the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement. For combat Hero rolled as 4 men, Super hero as 8.
The Bandits Keep actual play channel (second channel) has a long running solo OD&D campaign called Song of the Mapper, I’m a big fan! Starts with discovering the dungeons via Outdoor Survival game, in the rules, then eventually rolling up various dungeon parties to take them on. Still dying like flies at 40 episodes and no magic items to hand, interspersed with Chainmail sessions with human armies vs Goblins and Orks. Only a smattering of level 2 characters after all this time, seat-of the pants adventure delivered weekly, highly recommend.
if they had magic weapons or a bonus to the roll it would make sense to possibly want another chance to kill.@@TheRulesLawyerRPG
Great topic! Though I do have a couple of thoughts.
As far as monsters being playable races, that dropped away after some play I assume. Later, Gygax recommends against it because it makes the fantastic and wondrous mundane. A point I actually agree with. If you can play a dragon, the terror and majesty of dragons is drained out of the game. It's similar to having too much magic in the game. When 10 out of 13 classes have magical spells, does magic feel mysterious and filled with wonder, or does it feel more like the character has access to the latest, greatest smart phone? Just a few things to think about.
What's amazing about this period of D&D history is how well they managed to capture lightning in a bottle, and yet they were still making this up by playing the game more and more. The were starting with a war game and Braunstein as the overall basis for the game and nothing else.
Alignment languages were always pretty weird. First, alignment truly meant who you would be aligned with on a battlefield game, much like War Hammer skirmish games. You play an army from a certain faction, and this carried over into the dungeon delving portion of the game. Only later do we get the nine alignments with good and evil thrown into the mix. But I have an educated guess as to what they were basing alignment language on: holy languages like Latin for Catholicism, Arabic for Muslims, and Hebrew for Jews. In the middle ages Christian Catholics, Muslims, and Jews spoke all different kinds of local languages, be it English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Flemish, or Farsi, Turkish, Moroccan Berber, etc. I think this is what they were sort of going for, and that intelligent creatures of the same alignment would speak or at least understand the same holy language. This gets harder to work into a game with nine alignments and multiple pantheons instead of three basic alignments. But this does seem to fit with some of the thinking in those early days. This is only a guess however.
Wonderful topic, again. Best and cheers!
Yes, I recall Gygax having an about-face on some things by the time he writes for Dragon and writes the AD&D DMG 5 years later. He is very much a stickler about magic items. Also, the amount of XP earned for killing monsters goes down drastically in a few years. (EDIT: one year later with the Greyhawk aupplement.) I'm equally interested in how the game evolves, as to how it originated!
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG I think part of it was that the war games weren't doing as well as the dungeon exploration aspects of the game, which was catching like wildfire. The funny thing is while in the DMG he complains about monty haul campaigns, when you read and go through his published modules, they have lots of magic items and loot. The goal was clear--one module would get a party one level for the most part. He understood players went into dungeons for gold, glory, and magic items. Heavily inspired by Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser adventures--it was all about living a short and merry life.
As far as xp for monsters, I'm running a strange home brew amalgam of a first/second--skills and powers, campaign, but it leans in tone and style toward the 1st edition. So I'm using the exp from the original DMG. It's about a 50%/50%, monsters to gold exp. I rolled my first set of dice back in 82 at a Boy Scout summer camp when I was 12. It was BX B-2 Keep on the Boderlands, and my character almost had his head taken off by the owlbear. I've been hooked on the game ever since.
As for the lethality of the game, we've only had one fatality in four levels so far, but I do have the players keep a back up character in reserve in case the one they are playing dies. If you play smart, and you have a little luck, you'll make it in general. You just have to respect your character's limits. And sure death can come quickly, but that only increases the stakes. Tracy Hickman says in his X-DM Extreme Dungeon Mastery (excellent book regardless of the system you're using. It would definitely apply to Pathfinder too.) that nothing is more boring than grinding through experience points just to reach the next level--death makes the risks meaningful.
The point about monsters as PCs is absurd, because the idea that you should have to GM to be able to RP the badassery of a dragon is wrong on a lot of levels. That said, there’s nothing wrong with making the fantastic mundane in your game - it depends on the aesthetic you want. Designing that out of your system is counterproductive to the versatility D&D is so anxious to advertise, and I lost all respect for Gary when I read that pig vomit of a passage.
That depends on what you mean by versatility. If versatility means having a whole bunch of abilities on your character sheet that allow you to solve problems (passive perception for instance) then you're right. Older styles of play aren't all that versatile.
If versatility means using commonsense in situations to find solutions, thinking beyond the character sheet, actively checking for traps, etc. Where advantage is to be found in the environment and not in a die roll---where the GM is encouraged to make decisions on the spot--I'd argue that older styles of play emphasize versatility much more.
If you're wanting both kinds of versatility, GURPS has ANY version of D&D beat hands down. I've only done GURPS cyberpunk a few times, but I have good memories from the experience. But I do know there is also a GURPS fantasy supplement.
As far as making the fantastic mundane... that's up to you and your table, sure. There aren't D&D police that are going to come knocking on your door.
From my own viewpoint, in really high magic campaign, of which I've played in many, the game resembles more of a Star Trek TNG vibe, but instead of phasers you have lightning bolt and fireball. But it's basically the same. Middle East peace gets resolved in 45 minutes with commercial breaks, and every race you encounter is just another human with pointy ears, or a funny looking head and strange feet.
That being the case, I'd rather just hang D&D up and play a Star Trek based game that really knows what it wants to be. I've played quite a few of those, mostly at conventions and they can be lots of fun.
For me, the whole point of playing D&D is to place yourself in a mythical world, where the gods are real and are to be feared and revered. It's the stuff of mythical and heroic literature like Beowulf, the Iliad, classic mythology, sword and sorcery, Tolkien's middle Earth, the Arthurian legends, Sinbad the Sailor and the other tales in 1000 and one Nights, the Three Musketeers. This was D&D's beating heart back when it was a game that knew what it wanted to be.
As to the pig vomit, I'm not quite sure what you're referring to.
Its also worth noting that the ALIGNMENT concept itself, hailed not just from the Wargame but was Heavily inspired by the "Elric of Melbourne books".
Said books are what created the Law, Chaos and Neutrality systems. They didnt have good or evil, because a person could be aligned with Civilisation and still be a dick and another person could be an adherent of Chaos and magic and be the nicest dude ever, he'll just have little issue if your all your countrymen gets their skin turned inside out by an errant magic spell.
Elric of Melbourne is also what gave us the concept of Sentient swords and specifically BlackRazor.
Fun video!
What I think is particularly interesting is that a lot of folks look at OD&D (and AD&D) as these kind of super hard-core simulationist games... BUT... if you look at the Saving Throw tables you see that for all classes as they gained more levels their chance of saving against a spell, poison, dragon breath, or other attack increased significantly. But of course there was no "DC" concept a 13th level Cleric needed only a 3+ on a d20 to make a successful save vs. Death or Poison regardless of what that poison was or what monster it was from.
This is -in effect- plot armor! A narrative concept!
Your reward for getting higher level (which took quite a bit of work) was that you had a significant amount of protection and something simple like a little poison or petrification wasn't likely to take you out.
A lot of folks such as? Calling OD&D simulationist is nonsense. If OD&D is simulationist then I can say so is Thousand Year Old Vampire, because you're simulating a vampire losing their mind over hundreds of years. We're not talking about GURPS here.
A cool topic for this would be the evolution of classes, such as how does the original Barbarian differ from modern.
Knights of Last Call has some fun streams where Derik goes through the history of individual classes
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Wow thanks for letting me know
barb didn't exist until 3E .... but a few fighter variants were in 2E supplemental materials
@@zarthemad8386 yeah ,exactly, Barbarian was a subclass of fighter in 2e. In the original Baldur's Gate you could select it as a starter, but when was the Rage ability introduced, and who came first the Berserker or Barbarian. I know the answer to these questions but that is what I mean by the evolution of the class.
@@zarthemad8386 Barbarian was one of the classes included in the 1E Unearthed Arcana, along with the Cavalier and Thief-Acrobat back in 1985!
A barbarian must have strength and constitution scores of
no less than 15 each, a dexterity score of 14 or better, and a wisdom
score of no greater than 16.
Barbarians in general detest magic and those who use it. They will, at
low levels of experience, refuse to employ any sort of magic item if
they recognize it as such. They will often seek to destroy magic items,
and if successful they receive an experience-point award as if they
possessed the destroyed items.
Level Actions and Abilities
2 May associate freely with clerics
3 May use magic potions
4 May use magic weapons
May strike creatures hit only by + 1 weapons
Gains + 1 on saving throws versus spell
5 May use magic Armor
6 May associate with magic-users - if necessary!
May strike creatures hit only by + 2 weapons
7 May use weapon-like miscellaneous magic items
8 May associate with magic-users - occasionally
May strike creatures hit only by + 3 weapons
Gains + 2 on saving throws versus spell
May summon a Barbarian Horde
9 May use protection scrolls
10 May use most magic items available to fighters
May strike creatures hit only by + 4 weapons
12 Gains + 3 on saving throws versus spell
May strike creatures hit only by + 5 weapons
I've been playing D&D since the mid-70s. In answer to your question about magic items being core to power-progression, the answer was definitely yes. Magic weapons and armor, wands, staves, were a huge bump in power. Much more so than just leveling up.
I got the white box set about a year before the red box basic was released. I didn't have chainmail and the original box set was fairly difficult to translate into a game unless you had the luxury of having seen it played. For me, D&D really didn't start until red box basic arrived.
I got mine just a little before that. I was in high school. I lived in a mining town, and it so happened we had a group of engineers who played it and invited me to play when my Mom told them I had gottent the "game."
My sister and I had the Dungeon board game. Loved it! We then got into D&D (Basic red box set) with a couple of brothers who lived up the street from us.
We used to equip our characters expecting to be able to collect gear from the 3 or 4 parties of dead characters we lost a couple hundred feet into the dungeon before.
Given that Pathfinder itself split off from D&D and drew heavily from it, in a sense the history of D&D is also the history of Pathfinder.
Of course. I doubt somebody would seriously deny that.
Great point! I'll remember it!
Beyond pathfinder, if you have played any game, including video games, in which you explore, defeat monsters, find treasure, and gain experience to increase in power, that all stems from dungeons and dragons.
Most people arent aware, but technically the RPG genre of videogames, and all its split off forms: Action RPG, JRPG, Fantasy games e.t.c.
Anything with so much as a leveling system is a direct descendant of Dungeons and Dragons, from Final Fantasy to the Elder Scrolls.
Pathfinder split off from the WotC bastardization of TSRs DnD (3rd edition, which is no longer DnD to me) which is a direct product of the garbage OGL era. so a loud and resounding no to Pathfinder being connected to DnDs real history.
I just want to say that it feels like the community is in a really reflective., considering both of the major fantasy TTRPGs are currently undergoing pretty confusing incremental edition changes. I'm not surprised that there is an increased interest in learning about the history of both of these games, especially considering both games now have numbered additions but also incremental additions
AD&D and D&D always had incremental and after 2e incremental editions.
Unearthed Arcana bumped the incremental for AD&D. Different printings of D&D boxes did for D&D.
Just before 2e, Dungeoneer Survival Guide and Wilderness Survival Guide incrementally increased AD&D. As did Oriental Adventures and Dragon Lance Setting Guide.
All around Dragon Magazine played errata and beta tested future iterations.
With Gygax pointedly noting that every DM and player group would modify and play their own homebrewed versions of the rules, modification of the game was a given from the get-go. I still scratch my head at players, especially older ones, who complain about newer editions of D&D and should know better. With all the OG books and alternate publishers who have versions of them, anyone can play any version they want. I started in 1979, had Holmes basic, the white box set, all the 1E AD&D hardcovers, and the core of 2E and 3E...and if I play today, it's still a mishmash of rules from all the books I own. The point of a game is to have fun, and I love reading about the history of D&D.
@@rikk319 yes! A good point I've heard was that the 2e remaster is basically still fewer changes than the *average* homebrewed game makes anyway. Everyone makes it their own :')
@@Pathsfound This is true. 2E was really more like 1.5E. 3E really was a departure from 1E.
Fantastic video! Thank you for your enjoyable perspectives. It was like Ken Burns does D&D. One thing struck home for me (I'm an original Chainmail/D&D player): The notion that "dice" was considered d6 unless otherwise noted is accurate. During those days, people were freaked out by the polyhedrons. One friend's parents wouldn't let him keep the non-d6 dice because they were clearly instruments of satan. We also didn't know how to properly read a d4 for years. We would toss the die and pick it up to see which number was missing from the bottom face. (Yes, we deserve all the things you just thought about us) lol.
The thing that shocked me as someone who started at the very tail end of ADnD and start of 3.0, AC was positive! The fact that the d20 variant rules for armor are not that different from what 5e uses (each armor having a set AC, granted with no Dex bonus) and the fact that they then ended up taking a detour to the THACO/inverse AC system is just really funny. It was so counter intuitive that I had assumed it must have been some weird holdover from first edition or even chainmail, but clearly not.
ThAC0 really wasn't that bad. Yes, it was _weird_ but even as a kid, we picked it up pretty quick. People comfortable with subtraction usually got it by the end of their first fight, and people that weren't usually wrote a quick ThAC0 chart on the margin of the character sheet (if it didn't have an integrated one, some did) and then it literally took a glance to resolve.
In practice, it was _puzzling_ more than _bad_ in that it didn't slow down combat or confuse players beyond "wait, _lower_ AC is _better?"_ their first session.
@@velinion1 yeah it worked (although I think many people needing a chart to sort out one of the most common actions in the game is an issue), it just feels weird that that was the way they decided to do it. The main issue I ran into was from spells and magic items that boosted your armor. I feel like they were not consistent about it and often enough you had to know that "+1 to your AC" meant to reduce your AC by 1, but if it actually said "get -1 to your AC" that sounds like a debuff.
@@porgy29at least it made some sense as a number. 1st rate armor is pretty much top-notch, as opposed to 3rd rate or 7th rate. The number itself means something. In modern games AC of 15 or 22 does not inform you what that supposed to mean. ThAC0 has meaning - it's a literal accuracy stat against really great armor. You actually can know what your chance to hit is, if you have an idea what armor your enemies wear, and even if you don't - ThAC0 shows you a basically worst case scenario, since in practice most enemies will have worse AC than 0. Meanwhile in PF2 you don't have accuracy stat, you have a +7 modifier or +9 as a fighter/gunslinger. What percent to hit does that results in? Who fucking knows, better substract it from monsters ACs. Hope you are able to substruct.
@@StanNotSoSaintThat’s actually a really interesting way to look at it, and now suddenly THAC0 makes a ton of sense to me. I think I might actually try to run a game with THAC0! :D
@@Sanguivore if you do, then make people roll d20, then ADD monster' AC, then compare it to PC's ThAC0. Bam, it works completely the same ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd definitely be interested in more videos on the history of the game and the hobby overall from your perspective.
The observation that progression was via items is interesting to me... In the boardgame Kingdom Death: Monster, most of your progress is also via the items, the characters tend to die or go insane relatively easily
the difference between 74 dnd and even 1979 dnd is MASSIVE.
My father constantly berated me for "wasting time" creating D&D campaigns in the early 80s. Little did he know, being a DM was the best possible training for my future as a lawyer! The most important lesson from being a DM was: balancing rules (law) with outcomes (equity). Also learning how to research tomes and how complex rules-based systems work. Extemporaneous speech, being prepared for contingencies, etc. etc.
I got the wood-grain box in the spring of '75 and was utterly confused. Having no background in (table-top) wargaming, there wasn't much I understood and I had no access to Chainmail. Eventually I purchased Greyhawk and two twentysided dice and we got to play in earnest in the autumn of '75. There was still a whole lot of things to misunderstand. Like magic-users being able to spam the same spell over and over. We had no idea that the spell was supposed to erase itself from the M-U:s mind after being cast. There was also the bit about "% Liar" (an actual misprint) that caused some strange interactions.
After playing for a year we started house-ruling the crap out of the game. It wasn't until ten years later I decided to leave the (massive) house-rules and play D&D as written.
% Liar? That's hilarious!
Yeah, I should've covered the aspect that most people who purchased D&D didn't have Chainmail, and how that would've affected things
This is how it went for our group. We had D&D but not Chainmail (though someone did eventually get it). It was when we got Greyhawk that we had a playable game. We stumbled very confusingly, interpreted without evidence, and inferred wildly until that point. (Some in the group had some table-top/sand-table wargaming in their past.)
1976 here. Took over the entire chess club.
3book+Greyhawk when I started.
Dungeon! was created by Dave Megarry, who was a player in Dave Arneson's group. The idea was to have means for Arneson, who had been running the campaigns, a chance to be a player.
This was really cool! I love your Pathfinder content but a deeper dive into D&D's history is a rare sight for me and I'd love to see more of these kinds of videos from you. :3
If you like this type of content, I highly recommend Daddy Rolled a 1 here on RUclips! Highly insightful historical tabletop content.
Great video, enjoyed it a lot! Your rundown of Advanced D&D rules, and stepping thru each edition (possibly with some comparisons aling the way) would be really interesting.
Having cut my teeth playing 1st Ed and Basic, I can say the number one thing that shocks players of later editions is the lethality, which you touched on. Alot of poisons killed you outright on a failed save, there was no ability danage. HPs were LOW at at starting levels. Ressurection was posssible but VERY expensive and would weaken your character each time.
HP was too low and so were the stats, rolling dice to make your character page was a great way to create someone you weren't trying to play. So there was no way for my to make a wizard, when theyd die a apprentice or something
I can't remember a single game that didn't end right away because the dmg die was always too heavy and everything else was a botched 1. I started playing Vampire the Masquerade, much easy not to die and thusly more fun.
I think the whole of D&D needs to get rewritten, kinda like they did for my Vampire the Masquerade, except for me, they made it too 12 year old emo goth and it lost its coolness
The first editions of the core D&D books still referred to "hobbits" and "ents," IIRC, and were only changed to Halflings and Treants after cease-and-desist letters from the Tolkien estate lawyers arrived.
This was fantastic! Thank you for taking the time to point out all the fascinating details encapsulated in the old edition.
I know I'm 4 months late, but was also a White Box player. My best friend's brother came home from college and taught us. As he ran things, we didn't need the books and only played with his interpretations. We'd reroll HP at every level but could never have less. Sometimes, we didn't gain hp.
The next summer, he returned with Greyhawk and Blackmore, and we started buying the books. By that time, we "knew" how to interpret the rules.
It was horrible enough to gain only one hit point after gaining a level, back when I played. To gain none at all would have been pretty brutal! But I guess your way you still had hope that you'd have many more hp's after the next level-up re-roll (if you survived 'till then!).
Please do more of these history videos. :-) Personally, I love this topic and will happily watch more.
Thanks for the video! I appreciate all of your upfront qualifiers. I was a wargamer in the early 1970s who adopted D&D when the original game was introduced then migrating to 1EAD&D when it was published. I have since played all edition and incarnations (including PF and many other RPGs) and DMed all but 4E D&D. It's weird for me to look back on (O)D&D even though I still run a 1E AD&D campaign to this day.
There is something fantastic, pun intended, about playing D&D with Chainmail, and having mass battles to simply secure the entrance to the dungeon to then take your PCs and Henchmen on the delve shifting between the combat resolution methods depending on the situation.
Had fun back in the day with the observation that the original rules regularly misspelled 'lightning' as 'lightening'. Our group briefly considered taking it literally, and using the spell to bleach color out of things.
One thing about OD&D magic items was that most of them were unique. There was only one Staff of Striking, for instance, or only one Wand of Fireballs, unlike current editions where there could be 47 of them in a campaign. This made possessing magic items even more crucial to "winning" the campaign. Magic weapons were no exception, except that there may be many +1 swords, but only one +1 longsword, Flame Tongue, for example.
I played in a homebrewed OD&D game in 1980 as my second foray into RPGs, and that format is still my favourite.
Alignment makes much more sense in the context of a war game. It's not "who is this character as a person?" It's quite literally "which side are you on?"
Also worth noting that the raise dead spell didn't work on halflings. Only on men, dwarves and elves.
What?! I hate halflings, and even I’m not that petty! Was there any particular reason behind that rule?
@@Crusader820 No clue, but it could be the origin of the 'halflings don't have souls' joke in my gaming group.
Original text of Raise Dead:The Cleric simply points his finger, utters the incantation, and the
dead person is raised. This spell works with men, elves, and dwarves only. For each
level the Cleric has progressed beyond the 8th, the time limit for resurrection extends
another four days. Thus, an 8th-level Cleric can raise a body dead up to four days,
a 9th-level Cleric can raise a body dead up to eight days, and so on. Naturally, if
the character’s Constitution was weak, the spell will not bring him back to life. In
any event raised characters must spend two game weeks’ time recuperating from
the ordeal.
Halflings didn't need it. I played a halflings in a classic campaign a couple of years ago, he eventually became the tank as he strutted around in full-plate kicking in the doors.
OD&D hated halflings. Even before Tolkien sued or threatened to sue.
@@psybertaoI've played Labyrinth Lords a pretty faithful AD&D retroclone and yeah halflings are quite good
I think I once got to play in a game at a small convention in Lake Geneva Wis. Back in the early to mid 80's. I didn't recognize him at the time we were playing but the friend I had brought with me informed me later that we had just played a game with the man himself. And when I say small convention read that as a bunch of (manly guys) in a school gym.
So one of the more interesting takes on how the game used to be played, is that timekeeping was done by advancing time at the speed of regular time. So if you haven't played in a week, the time had elapsed one week in game. So one DM would be running for multiple groups who would go out and try and achieve their goals. If another party got to the dungeon before you did, you would miss out on loot. Questing Beast on youtube has a really great video on this!, called "Early DND was a open world table top MMORPG!"
Sounds interesting, but dang those RUclipsrs and their video titles.
The re-roll your hp every level debate was an interesting one. I played with groups that did and didn't re-roll. A popular compromise was to re-roll every level but only take the result if it was higher, allowing characters new chances if they rolled poorly on a given level.
The biggest reveal for me is the suggested setting. A mix of King Arthur and Post Apocalypse. Civilization is sparse and it is a wild land. Your fighter better be able to joust. Because the party will be challenged to break lances.
I rolled my 1st D&D PC on 18 October 1975 and still have my original Little Brown Books and the follow on supplements. I also have that silver cover 3rd edition of Chainmail.
When I play these days, still use my mashup of OD&D, AD&D1E and the Arduin Grimoire books. I have all editions, plus Pathfinder, Castles and Crusades and a few other D&D based variants.
I've also played (more Old School) The Fantasy Trip, Tunnels & Trolls, Monsters Monsters, Chivalry & Sorcery, the Palladium RPG and Rolemaster from Iron Crown.
I appreciate your insights, had forgotten some of those difficulties.
Can also add in Traveller and Space Opera.
Rolling for an encounter seems rough, but if I remember correctly, you only got an encounter 1 in 6 chances when you checked, and you made a reaction roll to see if the monster was hostile. You got an orc looking for a nice place to bed down more often a hungry mimic.
Alignment languages were like Latin; English peasants knew a little Latin because church services were done in Latin, so it was a langua fanca in Gary's head, as I understand it. Ie, a French peasant could speak to an Italian peasant via basic understanding of Latin. Not how it historically worked, but it was based on this.
Like many others, I was baffled by the reasoning behind alignment languages. So one day, I asked Gary Gygax: "alignment languages? What were you thinking?!" He sighed, nodded, and said, "yeah, I was probably high or something." And that was that, no more wondering.
Haha any of his old posts on Dragonsfoot maybe, or a more verifiable source? Thanks for the anecdote!
I'm watching a bunch of Matt Colvilles stuff, who also loves getting into the history of the DnD and other ttrpgs. Would be super cool to see a convo between you two on how the state of these games have evolved over time.
Something important about those huge early groups... Not everyone was expected to be playing at the same time. It was more of a "If you can make it you can play" thing.
It still confuses and annoys me when people cancel a game just because one or two people can't make it. Like, dude, I could have made plans.
@@druthvlodovic WEll in my case it's a case of when one person doesn't show that's a quarter of the PCs down. Only usually 5 or so in my own group. 4 players and a DM.
My first introduction to D&D was the oversize Blue book. (Aka: Basic D&D). Experience was based on gold point or gold point value 1 gp/gpv =1 exp. Side note my first DM was the printed author/ creator of the D&D vampire. As players we generally created 2 or 3 characters as at least one or more would die including my 1st PC.
Mate I was born Jan 1977 and grew up with B/X and First Edition as well. It's where I learned my royal styles and all about exotic polearms.
I did recall reading somewhere that gygax's inspiration for alignment languages was the roman Catholic church. Catholics preformed most of there services in latin for a very long time even long after latin stopped being used as a language anywhere else. Now latin is distinctive so if you heard someone else talking in latin you could probably understand it but if you were not one of the initiated you were unlikely to ever learn it.
With that context alignment languages are at least to me an interesting idea, modern class features that occupy a similar role are things like druidic or thieves cant. The main difference between alignment languages and those ones were that alignment languages were more widely spoken and only 1/5 people spoke common in nonhuman settlements.
This functionally ment that alignment languages were more universal with some risk while common was safer but with less risk and i can see a game where that is an interesting choice
Interesting but little-known fact-it wasn't the "Tolkien Estate" who filed suit over the use of "hobbit" (as well as "dwarf, elf, goblin, orc, and some others too") ... it was Saul Zaentz, who had purchased the "film, stage and merchandising rights" from United Artists through his company "Tolkien Enterprises", now known as "Middle-earth Enterprises" (though notably *NOT* game rights, but IP law was much more muddled back then and no one understood the differences).
The Tolkein Estate actually sued Middle-Earth Enterprises in 2012 for irreparable harm to the Tolkein name, and forced the re-definition of the rights.
It should be noted on the topic of reigning in wizards, Gary Gygax apparently didn't like and didn't understand why anyone would want to play a wizard. Gary thought everyone wanted to be Conan instead of Merlin. He also knew that if you don't keep wizards in check they get too powerful and then what's the point of playing other classes. Also just in general low magic I find more interesting than the insane high magic of modern systems (5E cough cough).
When Gygax was playing himself (Rob Kuntz as the GM) his favorite - and one of his earliest - characters was the wizard.Mordenkainen.
@@aqrxv I think he probably changed his mind as more editions came out but initially that was his feelings. There is an interview with Tim Kask where he talks about it and how he had to argue for weeks to have the spell magic missile automatically hit because Gary Gygax wanted to limit Wizards.
@@BX-advocate No, during the start of OD&D period Gygax loved to play wizards and they were his favorite PCs -- see the detailed accounts of early Greyhawk campaign play prior to circa 1976.. But that also showed him how powerful they could be. It is certainly true that Gygax became increasingly concerned with game balance (especially in tournament play) and wanted to correct perceived power issues when OD&D was replaced by the Basic Sets and AD&D. Ultimately instead of nerfing spells the solution chosen in AD&D 1st edition was mostly to emphasize casting times (with the segment systems), difficulty of acquiring new spells, and material components, but in practice were widely ignored....
Yes! I spent countless hours on The Bard's Tale 1,2,3, Ultima, Zork and the D&D Goldbox games, Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Champions of Krynn, Death Knights of Krynn, Dark Queen of Krynn, Secret of the Silver Blades, Hillsfar, Pools of Darkness.
Alignment languages survived into 1st edition AD&D, with its nine alignments. In fact, one advantage of the assassin class was that they were able to learn other alignment languages for disguise and infiltration. Alignment languages didn't seem unrealistic to me. We have Latin, which is mostly just the language of Catholic clergy these days. Languages like Sumerian and Chaldean survived as priestly languages long after people stopped speaking them at home. And in fiction you have the black speech of Mordor, which was a (mostly unsuccessful) attempt by Sauron to create a standardized language for all his minions. You could say the Druidic language or even's thieves cant are similar to alignment languages.
Trained as a language teacher, I view “alignment” tongues, “Druidic” language, and “Thieves” cant very broadly. Notice that we use a variety of slang, metaphors, idiomatic & allegorical phrases, and alternative definitions in all our languages every day. To me, it is such linguistic elements that would cause rpg languages to diverge. For example, Druids & Thieves don’t have languages with unique grammar & syntax, but it is allegory, metaphor, and alternative definitions that make communication meaningful to Druids & Thieves - who learn these things as symbols within their particular context. Unlike Druids, Thieves should also use slang words & phrases, which can also vary slightly from place to place. Alignment tongues & secret society communication (such as among Harpers & Drow) should operate in this same way, but can also incorporate many metaphors, so that those not familiar will have severe difficulty interpreting any of it. Secret societies will also strenuously guard their metaphors & alternative words, in order to protect themselves by keeping the uninitiated ignorant of their language.
I think thieves cant would be like street slang.
In part, we have to remember that in a D&D world, the gods walk the realm. There are no atheists in a world where Clerics call on divine power to heal and such.
Originally, the Alignment Language was a set of passwords, signals, gestures to be able to identify Chaos, Neutral, and Good.
AD&D expanded the alignment to 9 types, and while he erroneously uses Latin as an example in the DMG, the source of Alignment Languages is more akin to the 'language of the gods'.
Alignment is something hard coded I to the characters fabric, which is why changing alignments is no easy thing and is often punishable by whatever deity you are going against (everyone has a God they worship... everyone).
I've still got all of those books. We started with Greyhawk. Loved it. And yes, you couldn't cast sleep against a few enemies or you could go down, too. I had forgotten many of the things, but the shear deadliness is exactly right. And thanks for the little bits; the doors, destroyable magic items, etc. I remember a trap in a published adventure was: 1) Thief fails roll 2) Water fills room 3) Party dies. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. THACO forever!
I love how simple the combat system is here; it reminds me of warhammer 40k. And seeing the evolution to d20 based gameplay is pretty reasonable, once dnd became a bit more individual character focused.
It’s been forty years since I played D&D. Listening to your video brought back a lot of memories. “I remember doing that.”
Well, I definitely didn't realize how closely the "Dungeon!" board game was related to "Chainmail", it never occurred to me to look at the "Chainmail" rules when I started (and didn't finish) a project a few years ago to home-brew a light-duty open-ended kid-friendly RPG out of the board game. I spent a couple months trying to reverse-engineer the "Dungeon!" monster stats to figure out how those numbers would have been derived from the various flavors of Basic and Advanced D&D I was looking at then!
I had no real experience with Chainmail at al, and hearing the details here, just about everything that confused me about the relationship of D&D to "Dungeon!" seems to just about all "click" into its proper place now - there's so many of those details from "Chainmail" that are familiar to me from "Dungeon!", it's kind of a big game-changing revelation! It's almost like a stripped-down version of "Chainmail" would have been the light-duty RPG I was originally looking for at the time.
I wonder if a closer look at "Chainmail" will leave me just as mystified at how the later D&D stats evolved from the same source that "Dungeon!" drew on?
You'll just find a Fantastical Combat table with target numbers on a 2d6, between Heroes and various fantastical monsters against As far as I can tell, isn't much showing the connective tissue between how they are statted the original combat rules and the "Alternative" rules (what eventually became the default in d20). The latter eventually just became a function of Hit Dice (offense) and Armor Class (defense)
I was introduced to D&D in 1974 by a coworker who ran a game at college and was trying to start a new game. After a couple of sessions of just the 2 of us he discovered someone running a game nearby and we drove out in the middle of nowhere to join this game. I created a magic user for the first time, previously I had only played fighting-men. We entered a dungeon and a door popped open and out poured kobalds. I immediately threw my sleep spell, which I didn't fully understand at the time and put our party asleep, except myself They were all slaughtered as I ran and escaped. Your video reminded me how simple the game was back then. The rules were bareboned and the referee had to be the rules-maker. Thank you!
Something similar happened in a game I played around 1979 where we ended up looting a dragons stash and another player picked up and intelligent sword and we treated it as if it was an opposite alignment and each time he took the sword out of his scabbard he had to make a saving throw to prevent the sword from dominating him, once in the middle of a fight he lost the savings roll, the sword rolled a berserk attack and went on a rampage trying to kill everything around it forcing us to make saving rolls against its attacks, it eventually cleared the room of all monsters and 2 party players before he was able to re-dominate the sword and sheath it.
Hmm, ability scores had one and the most important role in the original "White Box" -- it was that sweet XP bonus! Especially for wizards, pardon, magic-users who had the slowest level progress in the party.
Also, yes, that's what was in the White Box. First supplement, called "Greyhawk" (despite there were almost nothing about Greyhawk itself, mabye besides a few original monsters including displacers and the beloved beholders) gave us all-familiar to-hit bonuses, system shock rolls, and even "18/00" STR known from AD&D. Yes, it was there! Not to mention magic missile which never misses.
I started on Basic D&D (2nd version), way back in the early 80s. My Dad was my first DM. Those are good memories.
I thought about Darkest Dungeon and then you mentioned it. I love that game!
Happy to see some non-remaster content!❤🎉
I came into D and D originally with AD&D rules (circa 1979), but all those other books were still in the Hobby Shops and my gang was aware of many of these rules. Ahh, the days of iron spikes and 10' poles.
You were born in '77 ?!?! Wow. Man you look much younger than that! Great job. I will take it as proof that RPGs keep you young xD
If you've seen my recent videos there are hints of another explanation! =D
MAJOR props on the The Bard's Tale callout. Tragically few people remember it. BT1 and 2 (as well as most Sierra adventure games) were among my PC favorite games during the late 80's and early 90's.
It would be really fun to see exploration of other old editions of D&D!
I think he should reveal Cal Tech's Warlock next.
Looking back, you could make the argument that the intermediate transition from wargame to modern RPG is very similar to dungeon crawl tabletop board games. In fact, there were a few tabletop board games from the mid 70s that attempted to capture some of that magic, as well. Later, HeroQuest and some other board games (Battletech, even?) captured a lot of the spirit of the original D&D/chainmail mechanics. Today, I feel that board games like Gloomhaven, Descent, and others (HeroQuest :D) harken back to that same idea of a boardgame sharing elements of wargames and RPGs.
What's shocking is you were born in 77! Thought you were younger than me (born in 84). Cheers!
I used to play the second edition back in the 1980 s. I fell in love with that version. My daughter now plays the most modern version. I don't like it, but I do play along with her. My wife walked off the game, way too much extra little dumb things. My daughter spent over 8 hours putting her game together and our characters. I guess I'll be playing by myself with her.
alignment wasn't just a label you prescribed to different beliefs that occasionally had magic powers in previous editions, it was an actual metaphysical force in the world of DnD like gravity or temperature. It's not relative or a matter of perception, but an objective moral reality governing the universe, even if it seems subjective to the creatures in it. It only really makes sense if that's built into the world of the game itself with things like the Outer Planes.
And this was indeed aped from a bunch of Sword and Sorcery novels Gygax liked reading. Three Hearts and Three Lions, Dreaming City, and I think some other novels by Michael Moorcock.
I interpreted alignment languages as a shared language due to some past or present association or alliance. It still requires one to use Fantasy World logic where civilizations spring forth directly from their aligned god(s).
I agree - don't stay in your lane - you do you. I always enjoy your videos when I can get to them (as a professional yourself I am sure you understand the demands on time of having a job) - cheers :)
Pathfinder and D&D are the same lane anyway. You can't really talk about the history of one without talking about the other.
@@aaronmorder1965 I do treat pf2e like a game for when i wanna play dnd.
Want to get into dnd4e, but that is made harder by raw state of it's release... probably will have to go for essentials line, even tho it lacks some of the character diversity.
Kitty! Destroyer of worlds [we had a few times when a cat run through a game where we were using models and miniatures ... depending on how fast the kitty was captured, there was sometimes much weeping and gnashing of teeth....]
DnD 2e's Paladin class is human race restricted as well. Dont need any pesky elven or dwarven paladins. 🤣
my best guess would be not wanting multiclassing with paladin. In 2e, anyone not-human could sort of level two classes at once. A lot of elves were fighter-mage and such. And i guess Gygax thought mixing paladin with something else would be the be-all end-all. Of course humans could dual class which could yield the same results but it had some obstacles along the way so
Paladins were race restricted to humans in 1st ed too. It was one of the ways, along with level caps for demi humans, that humans were balanced against vs demi-human races who all got a lot of perks starting out.
Absolutely awesome. I started RPing in '92 with AD&D 2nd Ed. but have played a number of the older variations (AD&D, D&D Basic) as well as many other systems. This was interesting and very good fun to watch.
The original white box D&D and Advanced D&D 1st Edition are the best! Gary expected people to use their brains, not roll a die to figure everything out. He also expected DM’s and referees to create their own worlds and settings.
You mention wondering how many people would re roll their HP every time they level up and while I don't have any info on how widespread the phenomenon was, I do know of a high profile case of it with the first 5 Wizardry games (and by extension a lot of the Japanese games that are either directly based on or heavily inspired by them). To make this not a complete nightmare they have it so if the roll would give you the same or less HP as before they instead give you one extra HP.
We used the rule as written. Rolling the new HP was as stressful as some combats.
Yes, and IIRC your ability scores could go down when you level up!
Older iterations of DnD have VERY VALUABLE attributes we would do well to include today.
I DESPISE the ridiculous ability score boosts implemented in 3rd edition and forward.
I never played the original. I started with Basic DnD boxed set in 1977, then in 1978 for Christmas I got AD&D and we switched to that. I was for the longest time a forever DM.
I find this video interesting because it is the only edition of DnD I have never actually played or read myself.
Progression through Magic (not just Magic Items, additional Spells were a significant factor) made quite a lot of sense, since HP bonuses per level were so minimal: 1d6 only if you were lucky. For some classes, at some levels, you got a measly +1 HP and that was it - no additional die at all. You became more powerful by obtaining Magic Items, and the place to get them was in Dungeons, but you were generally very weak without them, so there was a constant tension between risking getting killed to have the opportunity to become harder to kill.
Magic Users had to be reined in quite heavily - they ended up being the Heavy Artillery - as did Elves because they were also overpowered. When encountering hostile groups, the order in which it was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to kill things was: - "Guy With The Pointy Hat, then Guy With The Pointy Ears, and then Guys With Anything Else Pointy".
Well if you look at modern left, they sort of have a separate language, where words have different meanings. They in fact are capable of communicating with each other, but don't do well, when addressing the general public. That's sort of a irl alignment language.
Also, people are able to recognize their "opposing" language, and extremists of most kind will in fact attack. So that is quite true to real life as well.
26:35 "Original fighters are able to see hidden enemies." - You just read that they are aware of their presence and that those creatures can only be seen with the help of appropriate spells. Being aware, that something is there, is not the same as seeing.
Love the retrospective, I started playing Basic D&D in the early 80's, and yes I remember rerolling all our hit points every level, until we learned better.
I started playing in 1975 and the way we played was quite separate from what was intended - we used the original 3 books plus Greyhawk but while we did have chainmail, we didn't tend to use it because, at least in Calgary where I lived, we had few people interested in large combat, etc, and instead we played small parties of individuals - within a few months we had a number of combat systems that various people created and the ref [DM or whatever you prefer to call them] would state which combat system they used.
We also had two distinct sorts of gamers - the role players and the rule players - I used to play with both sorts, though my preference was role playing. The difference was that role players would deal with things with logic that fit storytelling - so when confronting a problem, you'd look at the skills and equipment you had and figure out a logical way to solve the problem, then the ref would decide the odds of your solution based on applicable characteristics and how good your idea sounded from a storytelling view point. The rule players on the other hand would define which books were being used ion the game and where there was a disagreement between books, which book took precedence. Then everything was argued on the bases of what the rule books literally said whether it made sense or not.
If you're curious what original D&D might look like as a standalone "modern" RPG, you might check out Swords & Wizardry Complete. As someone around the same age as you, I also wasn't around to play OD&D back when it was current. I'm now completely in love with it as present in S&W, though. All the simplicity and hackability of the '80s Basic D&D lines combined with the gritty, eldritch flavor of AD&D. I can't imagine going back to gigantic multi-volume rule libraries when I can have everything I'll ever need in less than 150 pages.
I still run OD&D off and on. It's a lot of fun with a bit of houserules. Got it in early '75, after a couple years of Chainmail.
And yes, as a lawyer myself I fully understand your approach and "our" ways of looking at things, valuating them and draw conclusions from different vantage points.
Being and old school DnD enthusiast, I already knew about these stuff, but came here anyway to check out your impressions. I was curious to see which ones grabbed your attention the most. It's always nice to see different kinds of gamers looking further from their zone of comfort! I wish you good games and good rolls!!
not sure about OG DnD but i remember in ADnD when you use raise dead on some one they also loose 1 constitution point permenantly. for instance: Jock itch the mighty got killed by crab , so the cleric of the party raises him from the dead , prior to dying jock had 16 constitution, well after raising him , he loses 1 constitution point so he is now at constitution 15, which would also affect his total hit points. in theory some one with a 18 con could be raised 18 times ,buuuut each time requires a new constitution check roll or the raise fails , and again you lose a con point permenantly every time you are raised. so the more you die the harder it is to bring you back.
The line “stay in your lane”….” no” made me hit the subscribe button immediately.