I’m pretty sure I heard from somewhere that his group usually did try to break the game regularly not sure if that’s true or not but it would make sense. I mean he probably wouldn’t write about the things players would try to do to break the game if he didn’t witness it first hand.
I like how Gygax talks about "we can't mutilate or kill players every session because players love their characters." Also Gygax: "here's 360 ways to kill players with magic items and traps they can't possibly foresee unless they sneak a look at the manual."
Also, if your players try to circumnavigate your random punishments by giving items to NPCs for a measure of safety, have those NPCs run away with the item. Thanks Gary.
The time records thing makes more sense when you realize that Gygax was running his own campaign several times a week for a rotating roster of 50 or so players.
The man was dedicated tk making a semi believable campaign where didferent groups could see each other's after math or even meet and maybe fight. He was bathed in the blood of wargamerpowergamer sweaty maidenless edgelords. There were no guidelines back then so you can think of the original DMG as his notes to remind himself.
a shame it wouldn't work well when people have things to do. a good/decent compromise would be allowing DMs to force a wasted day between each session. that way, the limitation of a lengthy campaign exists but real life obligations won't be a detriment.
this made me remember hearing about a dnd campaign where the dm made EVERY item they find cursed, and with near deadly curses that made things way worse than if they didn't take the items. But then the dm got mad because the group just stopped taking things because they already knew it'd be cursed.
I did something like this, a set of Accessories that give you +3 and -1 to a skill, the curse is always "bad" but the positive outweighs the curse (unless you are aiming for a specific build)
@@WhiteFyreLeo I once played a rogue character who had a compulsion to steal once a day. One day the DM gives us all special items. Mine was a bag I could reach inside and grab a random thing in the world from items, to enemies, and even active spells. Our Cleric got a power to give any dice roll plus 1 or minus 1 after it's been rolled. And she could do this once a day. But she actively fought my rogue on stealing, often reporting me to guards and such. The GM showed us a table of all the things we could get from the bag based on a d100 roll, but there was never an instance of 3 bad things in a row. So I convinced the cleric I wasn't 'stealing' anything with the bag, and she, and the party, agreed that with our powers combined we could get amazing loot. my favorite was that we pulled a key (quest item) that belonged to the BBEG and so he was locked out of his treasure vault while we were trying to use it on every single lock we came across to see where it went XD
Like... Duh. Maybe just dole out magical crap much more rarely. And that's the kind of GMs I hate a lot. Wanna punish and kill the playercharacters for no reason.
"Why would an aristocrat go on an adventure?" _looks at real historical monarchs pissing off to the middle of nowhere for a decade, getting captured multiple times and costing their country tons of money in bribes_ _looks at wandering knights_
Yeah but that sort of adventure usually meant bringing all sorts of underlings and resources with them, where the king mostly focused on directing those underlings rather than "adventuring" himself, whereas this sort of adventure talked about here is much more hands-on and more of a solo with a few likeminded tagalongs sort of deal. Knight-errants on the other hand were: 1. Basically fiction 2. Basically what Gygax meant for you to play as
@@abdulmasaiev9024 Not referring to the literature trope of the knight errant but rather to groups like the Normans in the 1000s and 1100s. They of course brought along their retinue, but some were serving as mercenaries on both sides of wars between the Turks and Byzantines in the middle east, not at home seeing to the estate in Normandy.
Gygax literally encouraged it. XP was largely from loot and anything could be stolen for more XP. Steal it all, murder those who get in your way, level up, then move on.
The cursed item and artifact rules become SO much more villainous when you realize exactly how much of a pain it was to cast Identify in 1st edition AD&D. I guaran-damn-tee you that most DMs house-ruled the hell out of that spell because Rules As Written, it's the most dangerous, complex, and infuriating spell in the game. Read onwards if you need some ranting insight into how wizards did it in 'the old days.' All right, so let's say you found a big shiny sword after killing a bunch of spiders in a dungeon. It must be pretty awesome magically, right? So you gotta ask the wizard to identify it. Hold on right there, mister fighting man, we gotta take some steps first. Before anything, we gotta make sure your wizard even knows the spell, which doesn't happen automatically. If they didn't receive it from their mentor as one of their randomly determined first level spells, they gotta find either a wizard who knows it or a scroll of identify, and then pass a percentile roll based on their intelligence, which is far from guaranteed. But let's say your wizard's lucky, has the spell, and has it prepared. We can cast it now, right? Sure, as long as you have the material components on hand, which are: a pearl (of at least 100g.p. value) and an owl feather steeped in wine, with the infusion drunk and a live miniature carp swallowed whole prior to spell casting. What, you didn't have a 100g worth pearl or carry a live miniature carp with you while adventuring? How can you call yourself a wizard? Okay, let's say you have the material components on hand and you're all set to cast it. Well, naturally, you can't just tell what it is by looking, you gotta hold the item to examine it. Or, if it's armor or clothing, you have to wear it. I guess you better hope it's not cursed, cuz that's exactly what triggers most curses. But of course, with all this preparation, cost and risk involved for a first level spell, you've got to be absolutely certain what the magic item does now, right? I mean...yeah, you're pretty sure: "For each segment the spell is in force, it is 15% + 5% per level of the magic-user probable that 1 property of the object touched can become known - possibly that the item has no properties and is merely a ruse." 20%'s not bad, right? I mean, as long as you pass the DM's secret magic saving throw roll, which if you fail it by just one point, you get a false positive. And even if you know it gets plusses to hit, "The item will never reveal its exact plusses to hit or its damage bonuses, although the fact that it has few or many such plusses can be discovered. If it has charges, the object will never reveal the exact number, but it will give information which is +/-25% of actual." Now I know what you're thinking, "That kinda sucks, but if we don't get it right the first time, we can try again later, right?" That's where you're wrong, kiddo: "The item to be identified must be examined by the magic-user within 1 hour per level of experience of the examiner after it has been discovered, or all readable impressions will have been blended into those of the characters who have possessed it since." Better hope your wizard had that spell memorized, had all the material components on hand, fed their miniature carp and kept it watered for its very short lifespan, and didn't get their face chewed off by the potentially cursed helmet, or that the nearest court wizard is less than an hour away from you, or you're shit out of luck. At this point, your fighter friend is probably willing to grab the sword and just run off into combat, trying to figure out what the sword does with some field research. He's welcome to, but if the wizard cast that spell, he's in no condition to be fighting anytime that month: "After casting the spell and determining what can be learned from it, the magic-user loses 8 points of constitution. He or she must rest for 6 turns per 1 point in order to regain them. If the 8 point loss drops the spell caster below a constitution of 3, he or she will fall unconscious, and consciousness will not be regained until full constitution is restored 24 hours later." Oh what, your wizard didn't invest at least 11 points into constitution? Get good, you whiny scrub! And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason why fireball and magic missile are such popular spells, because it wasn't the first level spell that actively tried to murder your wizard for trying to learn like some nerd.
@@AvenueStudios 1st edition AD&D is chock full of those weirdly specific rules and regulations that seem explicitly designed to get back at one hyper-specific situation that ends up making the whole game horrifically unbalanced. What's especially hilarious is that by comparison, FALSIFYING an item's magical aura to make it look like it's a magic item is ridiculously easy, last just long enough to skip town, and only requires a piece of woolen cloth to cast (because D&D spells are based off wordplay). It really seems like the game's outright handing you the tools to run a bootleg magic item traveling sales racket, which I would love to structure a campaign around someday.
@@Iamafishproductions haha omg I knew about the word play in spells and it is so enjoyable 😂 This is hilarious! I wish I could have seen how a lot of these rules developed from what I assume are some form of Gygax and friends all passive-aggresively fighting each other over the games lol. Love the fake magic items idea that's brilliant 🤣 -Dan
Yeah the second time I find a magic item cursed the next one I'm putting in a burlap sack and giving to the nearest Nobles. I don't care if it's a staff of magi I have enough pattern recognition to never touch a magic item with the intent to use it.
Gary Gygax ran multiple groups in the same world at the same time. So it was possible for one group to find a treasure vault only to discover another group had already been there and looted it. That's why tracking time was so critical for his campaigns.
This type of campaign is called a West March campaign, they are incredibly fun but difficult to pull off usually requiring multiple groups and multiple DMs and the DMs sharing notes
@@qixaqyx Yes, although it didn't require multiple DMs. One DM, multiple players/groups usually. The more you played the better your PC did because of the one day to one day thing. It got people to play more often to keep their PCs as strong as the others. There was still some competition that went on between players/groups.
From what I've read online, Gary Gygax was a smart man, with little to no care for an actual enjoyable experience (not to say he never/couldn't craft one, but that it was never his aim) I respect the guy, but criticism where it's due, a lot of these rules feel like something an over-eager noob DM would come up with, or a scared-of-players-winning DM would. idk, it was definitely designed in a time where we couldn't just play Rust/"HARD CORE MMO RPGS" if we wanted to feel like we've been flogged and caned by our own families
It's not surprising that Gygax did the DMG the way he did. He was literally inventing an open world game, and nobody knew any tricks, standards, mores, or exploits yet. Having some guidelines and protips for the people trying something completely new and novel who have no anecdotes or stories to inspire, instruct, or guide them was probably a godsend.
That’s a really good point actually. The game (and the hobby as a whole) has been around for so long now that most people coming into it already have some idea of how it works. And hearing tips and war stories from veteran players is an important part of the TTRPG experience. We take it for granted that, at some point, most people came into the game completely blind.
Not all of Gygax's ideas were good ones. The 1500 gp/level/week (1 to 4 weeks) to level up rule on DMG1e pg 86 was insane especially as coins back then were said to be 1/10 lb. That meant assuming .900 fineness *a single AD&D1 gold piece* has about 1.31 (.900*700/480) troy ounces of gold in it or about $178.10 in 1977 when the players handbook came out and $297.68 in 1979 when the DMG came out. That meant as *1st level* _a single character_ was expected to pony up the equivalent of $446,520 in 1979 money *minimum* just to get to 2nd level! Average party of six? That is *$2,679,120* dumped on the local guilds in a week! And people wonder why so many D&D campaign went Monty Haul - there, friend, is why.
@@Maximara A lot of economics like that where why most of us chucked rules freely. His obsession with time was the first to go. Even as children with lots of free time that was unwieldy. So *poof* bye strict time rules. Even as teens we had enough understanding economics to know that a fairly large town of the age with 15K people and a full set of guilds would go through massive inflationary spirals from training PCs alone. And as you mentioned a mages guild could crush a medium sized city should a couple of traveling wizards go on a spell acquisition spree and his tax systems made spree spending a must. So the taxes were lightened as adventuring groups would invariably become tax avoidance mercenary guilds. Having no nobles made perfect sense but no one from the lower classes? With the kind of coin an adventurer could pull in there would be no way to keep them out of it., travel restriction be damned. At any rate should these former peasants survive long enough to go over 6 level or so any liege lord is going to find it quite difficult to catch and hold them anywhere as the kinds of guys that can hunt them down become very rare and even more expensive. Better to just hire their erstwhile peasants as men at arms. If they weren't major bastards as the peasants former lord the new man at arms might even feel a little nostalgia and loyalty towards him. We freely folded, spindled, and mutilated the rules to fit our wants and needs or sometimes even whims. The "rule of cool" was even stronger back then. That is if it sounded fun, funny , cool, or even just a lot of fun rules would be fudged on the fly to give it a chance to work. We didn't throw the whole framework out we just bent the rules quite a bit. Such as allowing the players to raise a water elemental out of milk to combat a spreading fire at a large dairy. I don't really play these days but it sounds like most people stick a lot harder to the rules as written. That's probably needed for things like adventurers league but there is a lot to be said for seat of the pants improvisation.
My favorite "kind of sensible but also wtf" rule from AD&D is Potion Miscibility. Say your character is shot by a poisoned dart. Poisons in AD&D were insanely deadly because reasons, so it's common for an AD&D character to pack an emergency potion of healing and a potion that cures poison while also helping you resist poison for a while. But if you didn't read the DMG and unknowingly gambled your life by daring to drink the potion of healing while the anti-poison is still in effect, you can: Suddenly gain one of the two potion's effects permanently! Now you are permanently resistant to poison. This has a 1% chance of happening. Suddenly heal more or become more resistant to poison during the anti-poison's duration! 9% chance. Have nothing special happen. 55% chance. Discover one potion just fails to take effect entirely! The other one stopped it somehow. 10% chance. Discover both potions weaken in your gut, making them have half their normal effect! 10% chance. Discover both potions FIZZLE OUT COMPLETELY, wasting both of them! 7% chance. One potion weakens and the other turns into a new minor poison! Lose a point of STR and DEX for a while. 5% chance. Die! The potions combined to become a potent poison. No saves. To quote the book, "The imbiber is dead." 2% chance. DETONATE! Terrifyingly, this does not instantly kill the imbiber. You take anywhere from 6 to 60 HP in damage and everything nearby takes 1-10 HP in damage. 1% chance. And every new potion you drink while a potion is effecting you means another roll on the table. So you can encounter a lucky NPC that is now permanently invisible or immune to some element thanks to careless drinking, or a player can randomly detonate and seriously wound the party. Also note that the odds of just wasting one or both potions is significantly higher than the odds that something good happens, and the odds that the potions work normally is only slightly better than a coin flip.
Oh, but at least you CAN take an antidote. I think that in the original, poison meant INSTANT DEATH, NO SAVES. Which was absolutely brutal and made NO SENSE. Sure, there are SOME instant death poisons in real life, but most take some time, and CAN be countered. But he said, "NOPE! All poisons are instantaneous and cannot be countered, at all." At least, that's what I remember, which I thought was ridiculous. Homebrew rules, for the win! Poisons can be countered! Hooray!
Of the few times that we had the potion miscibility table come into play, I get a permanent potion of invulnerability out of it after a character drank it and a potion of healing.. The DM rarely broke that table out every again after that. I would not recommend trying that, because it was an extremely lucky event... but dang that was worth it just because of the looks that were had around the table. The first comment that broke the silence was "Well that's unfortunate... for the monsters"
I've always felt that D&D's wargaming origins are really apparent compared to some other systems that were built for storytelling from the ground up. But it's interesting to see how much more of an influence wargaming had the further you go back through the editions.
I would say the reason it survives beyond other systems is BECAUSE of its wargaming origins. When other systems come out focusing on role playing, there's too much subjectivity, and it becomes either too "rule of cool" or improv acting. It survives because it was originally rules heavy and has a stronger structure to hold up the "role playing" aspect.
The most important thing to understand when reading the 1e DMG is just how many players that Gygax had and how much of the notes in the DMG are about Gygax trying to handle the player load. Gygax is running 3 games a week for 10-12 players at a time. And when you've tried to run tables at that scale, Gygax's advice in the 1e DMG starts making a lot more sense. Like for example, his advice on keeping time has to do with having 36 players with 80 different PC's doing down time is chaos unless you have good time keeping records. And keeping track of 1 real day = 1 game day makes running different groups on different days where you don't know who is going to show up simplifies things a lot, and also pay attention to how PC's spend time and how he can keep control of a group using in game time incentives.
Seems very specific and not a good way to make a ruleset. Very bias style when most people never will have that many players. I do see some of the charm but honestly this sounds just tedious and annoying and not fun at all.
@@matthewcharles9813 It's the 'Delve' format which to this day is a very popular format and is a ton of fun if you've never played it. The 1e AD&D DMG is despite the fact that it roams around topics seemingly aimlessly still one of the best gaming supplements ever written. It's an amazing gold mine of treasures, and I don't just mean in game treasures. What I'm trying to say is that critics of certain sections of the work seldom understand what they are criticizing. The parts that don't make sense often make sense in context. And when Gygax wrote the book, he really had no way of knowing what a typical group would look like.
There were also other rules in these early campaigns, like the idea that parties weren't allowed to end the session IN the dungeon or in the wilderness. All sessions had to end with the party retreating back to town. This can seem weird, until you realize it's to make downtime as easy as possible. You don't need to worry about what a PC was doing for a week while on the eighth floor of a dungeon. The PC wouldn't still be down there, because they needed to retreat. So long as the PC hasn't died, they can be assumed to be back in town when a new session starts.
@@Bluecho4 That's the 'Haven/Delve' format. This structure means that the game can be played even if that one player doesn't show up, which is a really nice feature in general and increasingly important the larger the group is. The other thing about it is that it really easily supported introducing new characters at level 1 rather than having some new 8th level character appear out of nowhere just so a new player could be in the group. The play that Gygax was supporting in some ways looked more like a modern MMORPG with one or more guilds than what we think of as typical tabletops.
I have also heard it was the norm to run a "campaign" more as what we would not call a "Setting" That is, your campaign is a world that players interact with, not as much a series of stories an individual party goes through. In this respect, multiple parties occupying the same world was relatively common, the PCs building up hirelings and followers in ways that we might consider disruptive now was common (hence why Fighters used to just get a castle at a certain level,) and timekeeping between multiple parties was a lot more required so that these parties can interact and the world can move
If looked at through that lens, a lot of stuff starts making sense. A good example is the Heal Rates, which seem built up to give you a good amount of healing if a given party plays about once a week, or how 3.5's craft, profession, etc, rules are all divided into weekly gaps of advancement, when most modern campaigns I've been a part of make the timeskips way too erratic to make this seem practical.
...Honestly, Gygax was pretty on point on how some players would treat the NPC Hirelings, I'd say. I mean, we've all heard of that one guy that treats a corpse as a Rod of Detect Traps, but instead of charges, it's chunks left for the Barbarian to throw, right? Same energy, basically.
Back in 3.5, my friend got a hireling to carry all of his stuff... bad things happened to Timmy. Also, he would pay extra to each new hireling to address them as Timmy. And all of this was just to make a joke from the old TV show Dinosaurs: "Looks like we're gonna need a new Timmy!"
In my 5e game, our Rune Knight fighter used his Cloud Giant rune to escape being dropped to zero, by transferring the hit to their hireling. The hireling, unsurprisingly, was instantly put on death's door. (Hireling is fine, for the record. I had the DMPC Bard run over and perform first aid. And he probably doesn't know what happened, so the Fighter won't be punished.)
@@davidcopplestone6266 That's because in 1978 you didn't have to worry about the GM or other players getting offended when you treated NPCs as NPCs instead of real people whose feelings should always take precedence over the players.
The "Spells Resolve After Melee", in my interpretation, was to give Melee characters a chance to prevent a big spell from going off. To allow players that option. Doesn't mean that the DM will always give you that chance, nor will the monsters always get a chance to take a swing at the mage... But its more or less an opportunity for a melee/martial character to stop a cast. Example: The party is settled around 10 HP after a hard battle, and here comes the last wave. There are two mages in it, plus seven melee. The enemy mages are going to cast Call Lightning and Finger of Death. Your Rogue and Ranger hit the mages, and it prevents them from killing anyone. This also means that, due to AD&D's magic system, they've wasted the components for those spells, making it that much harder and punishing for Spellcasters. This is due to AD&D's Spellcasters being LEAGUES stronger than 5e Spellcasters. AD&D Spellcasters are only weak from Levels 1-5. After that, they start snowballing, and snowballing HARD. So, this is a balancing decision to allow for Martials and Melee-focused classes to interrupt spellcasting that would otherwise turn them into colored rain.
Later, they changed it to spells being balanced around how long it took to cast, with some spells worsening your initiative, some resolving at the end of the turn, and some taking more than one turn to cast. A _magic missile_ was basically instant-cast, a _fireball_ had an initiative penalty, and so on. And, in some versions, you also had to make a save to cast a spell if you'd been hit earlier that turn, even if you technically hadn't started casting yet. I'd also contend that, in 1st ed especially, fighters and the like didn't get much from leveling besides more HP and better THAC0, while magic-users were already moving from _magic missile_ to _fireball_ to _prismatic ray_ and _wish._
It's how real combat would stack. Spellcasters would have to prepare their spell then perform the speech or what have you then the spell would go off. Like Goku setting off a kamehameha blast. (God this makes me feel silly) Goku stops fighting. does his hand gestures, and speaks the words, then 50 episodes later, his "spell" goes off, and in the meantime, Goku isn't really able to stop or change direction. Now, unlike anime villains who wait their turn, Gary was TOTALLY into hitting someone before they finished their move. Today's version, for simplification's sake, works more like Final Fantasy's original active battle system, with each person doing their damage per turn, and in a relatively random order.
From what I understand, GG ran an open table where there wasn't a set group, but a pool of players that would schedule games. And so he ran his world more like a simulation, and so timekeeping was very important so that player X couldn't "skip ahead".
The bit about aristocrats having other responsibilities hits home for me. I have a player in my campaign who plays a noble. He somewhat usurped the title and deserves it, but it's hard for me to justify him KEEPING his position when he's off adventuring all the time. I allowed him to be related to nobility, but only as a worthless backwater nobody would care about.
Does their character have older sibling's? That could make them a "landed Noble" which gives them a title(they can still put Lord in their name, but have to deal with folk saying "Young" in front of it)...
@@johnnysizemore5797 His situation's a bit weird. He THOUGHT he had siblings. At least 15 of them, all of the royal bloodline (he was meant to be a disowned bastard) but his actual heritage in the plot turned out to be from a shadow puppetmaster king who doesn't actually care about his existence one way or another. Basically the only reason he was given power over one of his legitimate siblings was that his adventuring had given him enough wealth and supporters to force the king's hand. The compromise that was ultimately settled on (with a dispute with the legitimate brother) was that he was technically the ruler and had executive power, but his brother would be doing the accounting and have executive power in his absence. Of course, this is all going on while the country is gripped by armageddon so nobody's really pushing too hard for societal norms at the moment. It'll come to a head later but by that point he'll probably start a civil war or a coup d'etat. His situation is weird, but I love it.
That's what the rest of the household is for. The point of a feudal aristocracy is threefold: 1. actually be the entity which legally possesses property (putting them into the feudal structure) 2. to fulfill their feudal responsibilities by ensuring their vassals do their jobs 3. to fulfill their feudal responsibilities by doing what they, as vassals, are asked to do by their lords. but #2 is basically a thing that is often best handled not by individual lords micromanaging shit but by having seneschals, stewards, chamberlains etc etc etc doing it for you. this is *part of the system* because #3 often is going out on campaign or mustering to defend against someone else going on campaign. Note that word: campaign. It's no accident that that's what we call them in RPGs. Many nobles, historically, are actually pretty close to the much-derided 'murder hobo' cliche. Plenty of them *never* visited all their holdings (see: angevin empire etc), and the feudal structure meant that generally speaking you're supposed to have someone running the place for an absentee landlord anyway. Instead, they're off trying to get *new* lands or fighting for a feudal higher up who is fighting for new lands or whatever. The entire feudal structure exists to equip and sustain the existence of heavily-armed killers who can go on campaigns. So a random noble off on the other side of the world doing whatever the fuck they want and getting into trouble is actually *extremely realistic and historically accurate*.
@@johnnysizemore5797 in most scenarios, I feel like a variation of this is the answer. Though there are certainly characters that it wouldn't apply to. Whenever I've played a noble or an aristocrat, from the beginning, in a setting, I just hand the GM the reason why-even if they would have a legitimate claim to a throne, the wealth, and other resources of an entire nation-why they aren't in that position right now. Anything that strips that power away is going to be fair game anyway, in order to prevent most scenarios from becoming a mess. So everything from a cultural right of passage, where they have to make it in the real world without amenities, to exile for any number of reasons, to a complex political or bureaucratic scenario that makes using that power impossible have been justifications I've passed on to the person running the game. It also has the added benetit of creating some intrigue and drama. Whenever I've become someone who unexpectely landed status of any kind, I generally played into the fact that I can't meet the responsibilities of that station while holding it, and look for a good way to get that power and responsibility into trustworthy hands. I mean, I've got to go save the world, kill god, or whatever.
@@chuth2768 I think a good example is King Richard 1 the Lion Heart, because after he was crowned King only spent like 6 months of his entire reign in England. The rest of his time was in France or fighting Saladin in one of the Crusades.
The spell fizzle rule is amazing in play and really adds dimension to party dynamics. Spells were a bit more powerful because of it and when an enemy wizard starts up a spell there's an immediate pressure to intercept him before he unleashed hell.
I'm not familiar with the system so I just wanna ask this, Were there effective ways for a party to defend the wizard or a wizard to defend themselves? Because this seems really cool on the enemy side like you described but I really don't see any reason why the monsters wouldn't just hit the wizard every round so they never got to cast anything. If I'm wrong about this please tell me because I'm interested to see how this would actually play out on a table. I feel like it might make playing spellcasters suck but I've never played this before so I don't know.
@@superkobold54 Who does a bear attack? The Dogs nipping at it or the hunter who is 200 feet away with the rifle? Intelligent enemies, Humans, Orcs, Hobgoblins, Giants, and a few other things are smart and go after casters first. Everything else deals with whatever is close and hurting them. A rust monster runs right past the mage and jumps on the fighter in full plate! lmao
@@superkobold54 Mechanically there was no specific way to pull aggro, but outside of 4th edition that's not really a DnD thing. There were several complimentary design choices and play styles that prevented every combat from being attack the mage. 1. Marching order: Always put the squishy ones in the middle. This way front line classes took the brunt of the attacks. 2. Unbalanced attack ability. Fighting classes not only gained extra attacks but much higher proficiency bonuses to hit. This made them the highest threat in many encounter designs as their average DPR could greatly out pace everyone else. 3. Spells were more situational in design and wizards had fewer of them. This was back when cantrip was a first level spell that expressly could not do damage. A lot of times as a wizard you were firing off a crossbow as you didn't want to waste a spell until it was optimal to do so. 4. Hitting after the spell was cast had no additonal effect. There was no beeaking Concentration rule for ongoing effects. 5. No refocusing your action. If everyone attacks the same target and the first person drops that target or that target teleports away that's potentially several wasted actions. I have fond memories of running games this way, but I will say they are memories. It's been decades so factor some nostalgia in there.
this reminds me of a old videogame i played for a while, if i remember, it was simply called Shaya. ANY physical attack would make ANY spell fizzle! which made any spell with a casting time more than ONE SECOND nearly useless!
If there is one thing that should be included in all DMGs in the future is math literacy, dice stats, and probabilities. Not just cause it's important to the game, but it also gives the DM the knowledge to more appropriately balance challenges, and checks; which tends to be a problem new DMs have if they don't already have that knowledge.
its really interesting because it shows how D&D NOW is just a different beast however I do think that some of those sections like the one explaining why we use certain dice would actually be kind of beneficial in modern books.
My go at d20 vs 2d10 vs 3d6 as base check: d20 is the quickest to do. Adding numbers isn't exactly hard, but if you have to do it all the time, it becomes a drag. Pretty much the only viable alternative is pool based, like Shadowrun and WoD do it.
@@Ksorkrax also the more dice you use to get the same total the closer to average you will get on every roll. A big part of the fun in DnD in my opinion are those random crits and crit fails (crit fails are also impossible with more then 1 dice because you literally cannot roll a 1 total) and the odds of high rolling or low rolling severely diminish with each added dice.
@@Ksorkrax not really just because you can't rely on rolls staying close to the bell curve doesn't mean you can't be tactical. What it means is sometimes plans will go wrong and you have to rethink your tactics mid encounter.
Getting your spells interrupted IS really cool. I remember having to work together as a team to keep spellcasters safe from hits (their d4 hit points also helped). Successful parties were well oiled machines.
It really isn't, though. It's an attempt at balance that doesn't necessarily make sense and can just easily lead to cheap DMs wrecking casters then going down the party list
@@InfernosReaper Sounds like it's a good idea if the whole group is in with it, but no so much if you're playing with strangers, inexperienced DMs, etc, so it really has no place being a standard rule
@@Homiloko2 probably why 3.x introduced the "attack of opportunity" system and a way to avoid that for casting. also, it kinda seems weird that reach out and touch spells would be interruptible because they are a made to be used in those situations
@@InfernosReaper After you cast touch spells, they stay charged and ready for 10 rounds, or until you used it or cast something else. --But at that point the spell was already cast, so you couldn't be interrupted anymore.
Gygax: "Alignments have languages." Also Gygax: "And fuck you if you use them." Gygax: "Players can't be nobles at game start because that forces the GM to have to have established noble familes." Also Gygax: "Everyone knows their Alignment Language because it's tied to something relating to religion. GMs have to create that and work it in."
It wasn't so much "fuck you for using them." It was more like code switching, to use a contemporary example. A person may change their mannerisms and speech patterns based on who they are talking to. Someone might use more "proper English" while speaking to their employer but keep things informal with friends. Alignment language is all that slang, meme-speak, shorthand and manners that come with being part of a culture. It's what sets an adult linguistically apart from a group of teens and why many adults often sound so uncool when they try to speak to teens using teen slang. Imagine a bunch of conservative Christians talking to each other. Then an androgynous liberal with dyed hair spouting the latest woke slogans. How do you think the Christians would react?
@@mr.pavone9719 The problem with that is that you can be an alignment without being part of a culture. You can be CE, raised and surrounded by nothing but LG. It doesn't make sense as a concept, because in Gygax's vision, there's no internet or internet analog (for obvious reasons) that could even allow someone to learn another alignment language. Its a silly concept to put in game, and even sillier to punish someone for using it in public per the example in this DMG. Like, if it were as simple as you put it (and maybe your home games ran it differently than how Gygax meant it), then the example in the DMG wouldn't really make sense. The conservative would turn their nose up, but they wouldn't mark the liberal as an enemy for death just because they dropped some newer slang
It's worth remembering that the DMG was released a year after the PHB, and so it sort of reads like an errata, as well as being a sourcebook for DM rulings about things. It's also not very well organized, as not only are the topics largely in alphabetical order, but Gygax does tend to ramble with his explanations, making it a pretty dense book. The other thing about early D&D and 1st Edition AD&D in particular is that you can see how much of a wargame Gygax initially created it to be. He expected characters to eventually own land or towers, and how the hirelings and henchmen aren't really people as they are soldier units to be commanded on a battlefield. And then there are all the arbitrary tables. 1st Edition was definitely an incredible game, as Gygax and his friends were making a system that really had little in the way of precedent, but it certainly wasn't perfect from the start. The later revisions have had their ups and downs, but it's clear that a lot of wrinkles have since been ironed out. I imagine trying to play 1st Edition RAW with modern players would only frustrated them, due to all the strange rules and limitations. Great video, though. I always find it interesting to see folks dig into the past and see how much the game has changed. I know I have plenty of my own gaps when it comes to this.
We first started playing with the Red Box Dungeons & Dragons set - very basic, no extra anything & a lot of the game telling you what you can & can't do, no exceptions. AD&D was a breath of fresh air when we started a new campaign & all the following additions helped to shape what we have today.
Yeah, and certain aspects of the game were straight up changed in the DMG. I believe the PHB claims that the Monk fights on the Thief THAC0 table, but the DMG changed that to the Monk fighting on the Cleric table. Still didn't stop the AD&D PHB Monk from being one of the worst player classes in D&D history though.
You hit a big part right there. AD&D was supposed to be a adventure based war game and not so much role playing. Your goals were to gain treasure, land and fame so you could become a ruler and do things which affect and change the world. You wanted to become "somebody" and have power and influence. When you know that was what EGG thought the game was about, you can see how so many of the rules make sense. Charisma was important so you could have more hirelings and they would be more loyal so you could have them go on missions for you or help run your lands and armies when you got there. It is why time is so important as well since multiple groups would be adventuring in the same campaign at the same time so you needed to know which dungeons had been plundered and who was doing what to whom.
i can't help but think of all those 'murder-hobo' horror stories that are posted throughout the internet when i think of first edition because it sounds like such players would love to play something like that since they're already just killing everything that moves anyways.
21:47 That always makes sense to me. Back then you didn't had cantrips and first level spells were way more powerful. The Light spell, for example, was akin a blidness spell with a mininum duration of 1 hour, Charm Person could last for months and Magic Missile was enough to kill a 1st level or even a really unlucky seventh level wizard. You DON'T want a to give these things for free, and if you ever played as or with a wizard in your party, you known why.
Average hp of a commoner was 4. Average damage of a long sword was 4. One soldier could kill a dozed commoners. A knight could kill a dozen soldiers. A dragon could kill a dozen knights. A wizard could kill a dozen dragons.
Okay let me explain segments turns and rounds: A turn is 10 minutes A round is 1 minute A segment is a 1/10 of a round (you'll see why I didn't say 6 seconds in a moment) Combat is abstracted to where the roll of the dice represents an opening where you can make a decisive blow. The purpose of segments was to factor in WHEN stuff happened in combat. For example, if I'm casting a spell that has a cast time of 2 segments, but the enemy is acting on the first segment, they have the ability to stop my spell from casting. The same is true for my go, if the gnoll shaman is chanting and grabbing a component bag, I know I need to stab him or I'm toast. Your weapons also Have a speed factor that determine WHEN in the round you swing. Daggers are very fast while battle axes are very slow, meaning the dagger can get potentially multiple stabs in before I can swing my axe. So if the party rolls a 4 during initiative, and your weapon has a speed of 1, your attack will land in segment 5, which means so long as an enemy spellcaster's spell is resolving AFTER segment 5, you can cancel the spell. The cool thing is that reach is also a factor, so like if you have a dagger and you're going to be hitting me on segment 4 but I have a Halberd and won't be swinging until segment 7, I will get a free jab at you as you try to close in on me during segment 4. If I had a pike for some reason, I could try to jab you twice before my stab resolves. It's actually a very clever way of breaking down combat because you're always counting up for effects. These time measurements are important because it gives you an easy way to understand when certain effects wear off, when torches burn out, how much oil has burned up etc. It is completely possible to have your torch burn out mid combat and then you have to use the segment of the DMG for blind fighting or attacking invisible enemies. I personally think it's really cool and clever
I do like the idea of weapons having different speeds. It kinda reminds me of how weapons work in Dark Souls, where for example if an enemy is swinging at you with a big unweildy axe, you have a few seconds to do something while they're winding up the attack, but if someone attacks you with a dagger you have to react immediately.
@MrSuperjosh3 I think that's the best way to describe how segments work, it's basically a "wind-up" like in a souls game or a souls-like. I did the math on this and it's theoretically possible for a dagger to stab 4 times in a combat round before somebody with a zweihander can swing if the dagger is hasted or on initiative 1 and the zweihander is on initiative 8 or later. This really changes the dynamic of how certain classes work in the game because fighters can be an absolute powerhouse with heavy weapons and it doesn't even matter if they square up with a thief or assassin that's hasted or rolls well for initiative because they're potentially taking upwards of 12-14 damage before they can land a single blow. It'd even worse if these attacks are backstabs because those hit on +4 and deal double damage, so we are talking about a potential of 28 damage before the beefy fighter can swing for a measly potential 10 (it's like dark souls, backstabs are devastating) I really enjoy Ad&d and run it to this day As a matter of fact I ran a game just a few hours ago
To be fair back in the day almost all the focus was on beating dungeons. I started playing in 1984 and never experienced any serious attempts to craft a story-focused campaign from any DM until I started doing so myself. For most players it really was all about winning and some serious breaks from reality were required to stop them from exploiting the campaign world for their benefit. I think Gygax just wanted to warn DMs what players might get upto and to give them tools to stop their shenanigans. It's out of place now but back then it was highly relevant
No it's out of place now because you have point buy and standard array which in my opinion suck if I wanted a cookie cutter I'd just play WoW. All stat blocks are standardized and homogenous if a player tells you that he's playing x you know his stats will be y unless you're one of the few that still let players roll their stats.
I disagree. As someone who does min/max, I actually find a variety of stat arrays I can go for with each class. Sure 5E doesn't give as many options as 3E or 3.5E, but there are still some choice as you level up. Rolling can also just end up with some characters being useless compared to others and cause inter party imbalance.
@@timbroski7517 Honestly I don't have a problem with point buy as an option (As a DM I usually give the group the option of rolled 4d6 drop the lowest or Point buy) But Standard Array needs to be kicked to the Kerb. It's so miserable and bland
@@timbroski7517 I give an option point buy or 3d6 in order. Every player that talks how you do are the ones that get most pissed when they roll badly even when you use the 4d6 pick method.
@@ArchetypeLuna I have experienced the unbalanced party and it results in people not having fun. People should be able to play the character they want or you will have players trying to kill their characters so they can re-roll. It has actually broke up gaming groups. Point buy is better, it’s a game not real life and there will be plenty of difference between characters it’s just that those differences are chosen by the players not random
So as someone who actually plays AD&D, talking about the spellcasters declaring spells multiple segments before resolution here, spellcasters were a lot more powerful in 1st edition, mostly because unlike in 5e, AD&D casters are actually a lot rarer than other classes like fighter and especially thief. In AD&D, fireball deals 1d6 damage per level in wizard, which really starts to stack up if the player reaches higher levels. This makes it so classes like ranged fighters actually need to target the wizard as soon as they can in order to disable him from casting his 1-shot destruction spell that kills the entire opposing party. A lot of people don't seem to like this combat system since they're usually used to all the classes being powerhouses in slightly varying ways, but in AD&D the classes do actually have their own set roles to play, wizards being a very difficult class to pull off. With this system there actually is a whole lot of tactical strategy you need to put into combat in order to succeed, and that's what Gygax was trying to do. In my opinion, he succeeded.
7:54 Holy shit that's the motivation of my first character. He's the youngest son of a noble, and so decides it would be faster to get land by adventuring than by waiting for everyone in his family to die.
I personally think a great Campaign idea is an all-hirelings game. You start out as 0-level folk being hired by an NPC "Adventuring Company", experiencing everything from the other perspective. They could even have Adventures away from the main "Party", stuff that would just be "minor issues" to a Usual group would be big deals to them. Example: a usual party of Heroes wipes out about 90 percent of a Goblin Horde(killing the Tribal leader), Easy-peasy. The Hireling, however, are back in town having to deal with a group of no-nothing Thieves trying to make off with the Party supplies...
You get a little bit of this with Dungeon Crawl Classics, with the idea of the Level 0 Funnel. You still play PCs, but crappy lvl 0 peasants and tradesmen. Many of them, in fact, because the Funnel is a meat-grinder. A harrowing challenge that many _potential_ PCs will not survive. The ones that make it through the other end level up to 1 and become the characters players run with for the campaign. (At least until they die some other way, of course).
@@Bluecho4 that sounds similar to what they do in Warhammer 40k: Only War (I know a little of it from listening to "The All-Guardsmen Party"). Is it any good(from either perspective)?
@@johnnysizemore5797 - Dungeon Crawl Classics is awesome. You don't HAVE to do the level-0 funnel (each player with usually 4 randomly generated zeros) but a lot of people enjoy it. Don't know if I'd start a new group out with it, however, since at level-0 you don't get to see all the really cool mechanics in DCC which start being used at level 1. The spellcasting is basically a skill roll with the results increasing the better you do, and possibly being able to recast it that day. Plus each spell for each character can have some smaller side effect (randomly rolled when gained). It's also dangerous magic, so an exceptionally bad roll can do weird things or even give you a mutation in extreme cases. On the other side of things an extra Deed Die is rolled in combat for Fighter types which can allow extra results such as knockback, disarm, or whatever else is okay'd via 'rule of cool'. Also has a Luck stat for some dice manipulation in time of need, and the Thief/Rogue-types have advantages there. It's a D&D derived d20 system, but uses some extra dice (such as d5s, d16s, etc) for a few purposes. It's probably the largest mechanical divergence I've seen from D&D (that includes stuff like Pathfinder) but the core of it is still that and is very much in the same tone as the oldest editions, overall.
When considering that spells could be interrupted during casting in AD&D you have to remember that back then concentration spells didn't really exist. Sure, there were a couple of spells that would only last as long as you concentrated, but they were very different from 5e concentration spells because there were hardly any of them, and you literally couldn't do anything else while concentrating. Instead, a spellcaster could cast as many spells with long durations as they wanted to (assuming they had them memorized, anyway), and once cast they would all last for their entire duration, regardless of what happened to the spellcaster after casting. So you can kind of think of interrupting spells during casting as the AD&D version of 5e concentration spells and concentration checks: it's a mechanic that prevents a spellcaster from being able to have a ridiculous number of spells active in combat, even if the opponents don't have any kind of anti-magic.
Yeah. And there were some long lasting spells back then. I don't have an AD&D book at hand right now, but using the B/X D&D Charm Person Spell(which should be pretty close to the rules for AD&D) As an example. The spell Lasted for as long as the target kept failing their save to end the spell. How often they got a save was dependent on their INT. If they had 8 or less INT they could only attempt to break the charm on themselves once every month. 9-12 they got a save each week, and 13-18 Was every day. So at WORST for you if you charmed someone and they failed their initial save against the spell, they would be charmed for 24 hours. But could be charmed...Forever... This was a 1st level spell. A 1st level magic user could find a village of idiots and charm 1 of them every day until the entire village considered them their best friend and ally, and will follow the Magic Users Commands as long as they aren't suicidal or obviously harmful.
@@Entaris Although as an aside, a spell that can functionally lock less intelligent creatures into functional magical slavery for years WOULD explain why a villain's retinue is full of monsters that have no business being on the same side. The villain had one level in Magic User and charmed a bunch of dumb monsters.
Hence the invention of "Melf's Acid Arrow" (created by Gary's son) which would not only interrupt spell casting but the acid lasted more than 1 round essentially taking that spellcaster out of combat for as long as the acid worked. It's been ages since I've cracked an AD&D book so some of the details might be slightly off in my explanation but that's its essence! Very cool idea!
It's also worth noting that casting time was measured in segments. It made the mechanics of a magical duel worth considering. A fast, low-level spell like Magic Missile might be better than one of those shiny "save vs. death or die" numbers like Finger of Death.
I played AD&D and 1E growing up and I’m really excited to see you engaging with it!!! I remember the first time I played 5E, being thrown off that my bard couldn’t “speak Chaotic Good!”
The alignment language thing reminds me of negative charisma in a ttrpg my dad played called Tunnels and Trolls. Basically, negative charisma characters are good at interacting with negative charisma characters, and positive charisma characters are good at interacting with positive charisma characters, but you wouldn't have much luck trying to persuade a negative charisma character with a positive charisma score. Negative charisma is meant for more "underground" people, like thieves and orcs, while most others would have positive charisma.
As interesting as this was, every time I read "negative charisma" it reminds me of my nerdy gobbo with a charisma score of -1 trying to seduce big burly men by shouting awkwardly at them. Still cool concept though, might suggest that to my dm, could homebrew something like that, being less or more persuasive and trusted based on your and the npc's background.
I love reading through old D&D books, it's fun to see the change in design philosophy. One of the biggest changes was human dominance in D&D. I believe it was Matt Colville who mentioned that the Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and Half-orcs having level (and class) restrictions was Gygax's way of showing that these races were basically on their way out (at least culturally). Nowadays the only piece of human dominance that remains in D&D is the fact that the human language is the common tongue.
Uh he can say whatever he wants, it was a balance issue. Non human races got all kinds of bonuses in earlier versions of DND like Elves downright being immune to sleep effects, Humans got..... you can actually reach level 20. Of course you also need to understand that leveling past 10 gave far lower rewards in earlier versions of DND than it does in say 3rd on.
@@DKarkarov Most of the demihuman races can't reach the necessary levels in order to actually get a stronghold (except for thieves who have no racial restrictions except for half-orcs). The only demihumans who can get a stronghold are Dwarven fighters (only if you roll an 18 in strength) who just hit the threshold maxing out at level 9 and Half-orc fighters who max out at level 10. Dwarven clerics can reach level 8, meaning that they could theoretically get a cleric stronghold but 1e RAW states that only NPC Dwarfs can be clerics. Edit: Ok, I forgot, Half-elves have no level restrictions on the Druid subclass meaning they can reach the level (level 12) where they gain followers, but looking at the PHB they don't seem to get any kind of stronghold.
As a player of primarily older systems I think this was a great overview of some of the quirks of AD&D and best of all he explained the logic behind it and how it fit into the play style of the time AND did so respectfully. Sure, some things are a bit silly but others are things that have been forgotten and might actually be a breath of fresh air for modern players and GMs. Great Job Puffin.
AD&D was full of rules that almost everyone ignored. - Strict Time-keeping - Real Time = Game Time - Weapon Speeds (Not sure if 1st edition had this, but 2nd edition did) - Alignment Languages - Spells resolve at the end of the round
One of the big things, for me, about the old Gygax D&D and AD&D is that they were less about the role-playing and more about the dungeon survival. The focus was intensely on resource management and combat. Makes sense, the game he develeoped first was "Chainmail", which was a tabletop war-game, like Warhammer. In that sense, D&D was basically just a war-game where you only controlled 1 character each, versus the DM who had an army.
well, 1 character each and their mini-armies of hirelings (combat hirelings were a thing, you were expected to have so many "meatshields" as a wizard for example). AD&D, combat in particular, was extremely similar to Warhammer 40k's system.
@@darkflame9410 that evolution from wargames to RPGs kinda reminds me of the way MOBAs came from RTS reducing army management games to single characters and molding the inherited systems to better suit the tighter focus
What instantly jumped out at me with the whole 'taking money away from the players' aspect of time is the fact that anything that'd be suitably painful to the players would be extortionately extreme to the non-players, meaning any society with such a brutal system of taxes and prices would be overthrown in a week due to no one being able to survive.
that not true .. is like you are a turist and the npcs is in their hometown sort of thing .. they dont have to play for inn they sometimes hunt for food . the players in outside have to pay to inn fees .. pay to enter the city ... things the npcs dont have too because the have a little home where his and his family lives they never go outside of town why wound they? they work to early little money. But the player just work on adventure with make their down time like a vacation sort of thing. if you think like that the taxes system work and is realist
Yes, North Korea only tolerated the Kim regine for, what, like 2 weeks? *holds finger to ear* Nevermind, this checks out perfectly against actual reality :D
Well presumably those other people have their own jobs and their own way of making money. Adventuring is just one way of trying to survive it sounds like
Unless we're dealing with a system designed to extort those that come into wealth while leaving the peasantry relatively unharmed. Did Gygax assume we'd run a communist game?
its a game, not an economic simulation. the reason its made that way is because early editions used gold for xp, so even low level adventures got ridiculous amounts of money if they didn’t have expenses. this could seriously trivialize parts of the game, especially with how useful hired retainers can be.
It kinda does still exist in the Druid's wildshape rules What it says is "what happens to your gear depends. If your new form can wear your gear, it continues to wear it and reaps the benefits. Otherwise it either falls off your body or melds into your new form" And I always read this and thought "why not have us have to manually take stuff off to do this? Does it make sense that gear just magically falls off?" Also melding into your new form? Like just absorbed into your flesh? Huh? That always sounded weird to me, like really weird. I don't like doing it. But it's the closest thing we have
Every time I first see a page of the AD&D DMG on the screen, after awhile, my brain instantly registers the smell of the pages from when I regularly read or referenced it way back in the '80s as a kid. I literally smell the pages in that moment, and for a few seconds afterward. Crazy how memory works sometimes. Have also got that from a couple other old RPG books from that time, when I see them in videos. The different RPGs each had it's own distinct paper smell when they were new. They do, today, also but due to how much ink is used for the art and background flourishes in modern RPGs, that's usually the smell you get. Not nearly as pleasant as some of these oldies and their tree pulp were.
The flying rules were lifted straight out the WW I air combat game Fight in the Skies (FITS) which was a Gygax design (1975 - TSR). TSR used to mean Tactical Studies Rules.
Also a commentary on flying. Most small things in Ad&d had good turn radius which mimics reality. the larger something gets the more ponderously it will turn in flight even doing a 180 requires a creature to come to almost a complete stop(hover) reposition then accelerate. Watch a bird in flight they don't normally just do a 180 it's a gradual turn it's just fast. A gryphon or dragon due to mass wouldn't be able to do what a bird does without plummeting out of the sky so yes I believe his aerial stuff if not perfect is more accurate than 5e. Btw Ben a ghost is a non corporeal being with 0 mass so why would you not expect it to move exactly like that as it flies it's not constrained by gravity as it's totally not there hence the need for magic or magic weapons.
It's seems odd to me that he was so surprised that there would be rules for flying. Flying is such a completely different form of movement than being on the ground that it makes sense you'd need different rules for how it works and that different creatures would be able to fly in different ways. All the stuff for firing into a melee is much worse and less necessary.
That's only a faux pas if you're not a gangster among gangsters. They're one of the ways that people recognize each other. That's the point, that Gygax is explicitly saying they're not used for.
I believe his idea for Alignment Language came from Catholics speaking Latin. So like, the only use the language for their rites and speaking known phrases to others 'aligned' with them.
@@elf-lordsfriarofthemeadowl2039 But they also used Latin for all kinds of official correspondence, or when speaking to people from different places, or in scholastic works... it was hardly a closed, secret language that was never actually spoken. Honestly Common is the more apt analogy to Latin.
They basically never made any sense. Their roots probably come from the Michael Moorcock conceptions of Law and Chaos as these sort of cosmic competing forces. Where it was more than just a sort of code of conduct or philosophy that your character lived by, but rather an actual sort of allegiance to a particular camp in that cosmic battle between law and chaos. It was why when you changed alignment, you actually forgot your old alignment language and learned your new one, as if by magic.
Love this book, one of the best I've ever read. The Gyagxisms are part and parcel for the game without a doubt. It can certainly be confusing but it reads like a conversation with Gary
You need more context. In Original AD&D games (Gary's in particular) - Characters were disposable. - Chances are your character was going to die. - You got used to your characters dying (seriously), so it wasn't the end of the world when one died, even high level (see below) - Players MAKE a lot of characters that they play at different times. (Hence important to know who is doing what as they can overlap, TIMELINES etc.) - High level characters would 10-12+ They wouldn't be played that much anymore. They'd be dusted off once and a while and if they died it's ok, you barely played them anyway. (Plus you knew it was really dangerous for them.) - Players would use the resources (reasonably) of their other characters to help jumpstart things. You could be the apprentice to your fighter looking to prove himself. etc. - Part of the FUN was having crossovers with groups and characters. Those ones that made it playing with the old school gang made it fun. Plus those who didn't make game nights could be swapped out easier.
Please do more of these or look up some OSR books. The alignment languages are sort of a holdover from the works of Michael Moorcock whose literary cannon discussed a constant cosmic struggle between Order & Chaos played out as a massive series of proxy wars across reality and this was a huge influence on D&D and Chainmail it's mentioned in the DMG under Appendix N along with a wealth of other books that were deemed useful or impacted development of the game.
To elaborate on your point, alignment languages were also somewhat lifted from the real life occurrence of religious languages, For example in certain periods of the middle age, if one were to be catholic, one was to have at least a modicum of understanding of Latin, meaning that two people of a similar religious bent would be able to communicate
@@wizzlewazzle9202 It would have been mainly the clergy, and the nobility, who received an education in Latin, and even then a large portion, if not the majority, during the medieval era barely got even that.
@@armannschelander2725 yes I agree, English is not my first language, what I meant by to be catholic, was to be part of the Catholic structure, not simply one of the flock, apologies :-)
@@wizzlewazzle9202 That's fine, and you're correct that's what Gygax the idea on, but the reality is that at least in the medieval era, Latin wasn't really spoken well or consistently enough for most of the low level clergy to work as a common spoken language
@@armannschelander2725 With regards to Latin, my mother, raised catholic and went to a catholic school, still remembers a bunch of latin phrases. I kind of think of alignment languages like that. It is not a different language but you drop words or phrases in which others wouldn't understand.
Oh boy, that brings back memories. Been about 40 years but maybe I could shed some light on things.... Early on in the book, I believe Gygax says that everything in the book should be considered suggestions and that DMs should tailor their game play that fits their group. Just keep that in mind. Please remember that the books you're quoting from is one of the earliest forms of a RPG guide so..... Artifacts and Relics: you forget the part where those are supposed to be unique so only ONE per universe, if you will. The slots for the additional powers would be rolled on a separate chart and would make it more interesting and different for each group that played. Action: it gets even more bizarre as (if I recall correctly) there was segments, rounds, and turns. I think the round was the basic bit of combat--usually supposed to be five seconds--while segments were parts of a round like you said, and turns would be something like pauses in combat. So a turn would a grouping of several rounds, there'd be a pause (possibly) which would start the next turn, etc. It was needlessly complicated. I can't believe you didn't cover the armor class rules versus hitting someone. I laughed a little when I learned what the new rules are. (Haven't played D&D in decades) You glossed over the "fun" part of how magic reacts to other magic and somehow a DM was supposed to keep track of that. Only thing I remember from that time was DO NOT put a Bag of Holding inside another Bag of Holding. Social Class: Again, DM's Guide was early--he later incorporated social class so as to include cavaliers. I think paladins were also supposed to have a high social class as well. Taxation and whatnot: yeah, he was big proponent of "Keep the party poor." Otherwise, what was the point of adventuring? I'm reminded of the Conan the Barbarian scene where Conan rakes in a bunch of cash, then the next scene is showing him wasting it all on beer and women. I usually just made everyone subtract 15% off what they had from before and called that "general upkeep" and they had to spend the rest on actual stuff. Time: I never knew any DM or player that actually followed those guidelines. Flight: Yeah, he wanted to make flight kind of complicated. However, your hamster in a small hamster plane may be an A class flyer, which meant he could turn on a dime. I think the hexes on that map were supposed to be five or ten feet across. Dragons took forever turning around. And finally, honestly the original D&D focused more on what I'd call "Roll-Playing" so that might explain a lot. Again, it was charting out new territory. Plus, why would he want to explain to DMs how to set up an adventure? He had all those modules that he wanted to sell. :D Man, I think I still have my core books sitting around somewhere. I might need to dig them up.
a couple replies on this. . 1. Gary says that the final word on the game is that your rules should be what you need to keep the game exciting and maintain interest. If you're finding rules to be a burden that you should cut as needed. He actually says it very clearly. That you as the dm (since it's the dm guide) should read the rules, understand how they fit together and produce a unified and balanced whole and you should cut and remove what you feel is detracting from the excitement and interest. 2. Artifacts and relics are unique period. Not just one peruniverse. There is one Codex of the Infinite planes in all the realms of existence ... just one. 3. Segments are 6 seconds. 10 segments make a round of 1 minute... a round of combat is the basic unit of combat. Attacks are per round (1 minute) of combat. Turns are 10 rounds. so 1 turn is 10 minutes. Hours are 6 turns (60 minutes) you get the idea. 4. No you're thinking don't put a bag of holding into a portable hole or vice versa. Those two cause black hole like effects. As for time... every dm I knew from 1979 on always kept track of time in the dungeon or outside but generally not the 1 day for every real day thing... AD&D and D&D then was time oriented game because everything took time to do. Travel was slow, training took time. etc. I'd take issue with characterizing AD&D as roll playing. Sure maybe when you were 9-13 years old and you thought that it was fun to attack everything that could be attacked and loot everything you ran into. But after that it became about role playing and outsmarting the dm and the bad guys through superior planning and problem, solving.
@@Slash0mega because back in Ye Olde Days, "the lower the number the better," but in 5e (I believe) "the higher the number the better." Yes, it makes more sense, I imagine, but could imagine gaming with old players and new mixed together? "So that -5, is that good or bad?" "I'm not sure. What rules are we using?"
Being able to interrupt spellcasting was boss back then. Yeah it meant one of the party fighters usually needed to protect the wizard in combat but the wizard was squishy and needed the protection anyways. What it ALSO meant was that ANYONE in the party could essentially counterspell enemy spellcasters with tools no more complex than a sling: see someone casting on the enemy side, just sling a stone their way and force the enemy caster to lose whatever spell they were trying to throw at you.
As someone who still plays a weird mix of Ad&D and 2cd edition as a wizard it's annoying when my spells get messed up, but it makes things like magic missile be even better
On the strict time keeping, something that was missed was that there were multiple groups playing in the same world. For example if one party finished a dungeon on Tuesday, and then a different party when to the same dungeon on Thursday, all the loot would be gone. So the players had another game they were playing trying to get to the dungeon before any other parties made it there.
And not only there were multiple groups playing in the same world, but a single player was also expected to run multiple characters. When one of your characters was booked for a few months, you played your second or third, or fourth character - each of them usually in a different time in the adventure. This also meant that player death was not a big deal, and that running a campaign that made ANY sense, was near impossible without strict timekeeping. Gygax was basically singlehandedly running a pen and paper MMO with perma death (and ways to resurrect dead characters)
Your videos had such a calming effect on me. Like a streak of light in a horrible dark storm. I hope we see you come back. Good luck in whatever you're doing right now!
AD&D initiative always struck me as something that would be more fun in a video game, automating all the really weird caveats and rolls. It's way way WAY too wordy and nuanced for a pen-n-paper game. I do like that everyone declares their actions before initiative is rolled however, I've kept that as a house rule for many games in later editions. It really forces people to commit to their actions at the start of the round instead of reacting to what everyone else is doing on a turn-by-turn basis.
That was apparently what they were trying to do with 4e. It was supposed to come with a computer program to help keep track of all the one round status effects/buffs in combat, but development on the software fell through and they just had the players and DMs do it by hand.
Look like a leftover of the older war games the original DnD was built upon. Those where much more competitive. It made sense for everybody to declare their actions at the same time so one player doesn't get unfair advantage by being able to immediately react to their oponent's actions.
That comes from AD&D at the time still sharing a lot of design choices with its ancestor/cousin, wargames (like its predecessor Chainmail, or Warhammer 40k). the combat system is very similar to how many wargames operate even to this day (40k being again a big example).
@@Torlik11 Quite possibly, it's an interesting tactical wrinkle as it means that your actions can be interrupted or rendered ineffective somehow. It really changes the entire feel of planning a combat round. Definitely feels more war-gamey, probably why I like it.
In the optional rules of the 5e dmg theres actually a set of rules that use that, making inititive round by round and having each action have its own inititive + or -
Ben from Questing Beast had good insight on keeping time records. Multiple groups would be playing the same dungeon with the same DM so you had to know where groups A, B, C and D were at all times to see who got what loot. Also, loot was XP, so that make it super important.
One thing I like about it is that there is there there is a sense that there is a real cohesive self perpetuating world outside of the pcs. that there is a sense of fulfillment that things arent formed around you, but you make something with the stuff that is already there. there is restrictions so that things have the due impact and scale. magic items are terrifying and great because you have a really hard time telling their effect. there is an essential tension rather then a circumstantial one. Its making a simulated world that the players are just a part of rather then a world that revolves around players. there is something fullfilling in that sort of play. idk, i find a lot of this stuff fun. I think a degree of restriction actually promotes a more dynamic game. necessity is the mother of invention. I think its also interesting to note that the players are not necissaily implied to be aware of a lot of things from a meta sense like even an improve actor might. YOU might die at any time by an innocuous item. The world isnt meant four you, you are meant to figure out a way to get through the world.
having a campaign with basically no narrative sounds weird but it’s how i started DMing and it’s a lot of fun. just have a world with stuff to interact with and watch the players explore
I really like how swords and wizardry explained alignment languages. It's treated as a kinda mutual understanding, not a true language, and you could only express basic things.
Gary himself goes into that in the DMG, stating that they can only express some very basic concepts and little to no detail. I've always (well at least since I've been old enough to think about them critically) looked at them as something like TNG's 'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,' online slang, or modern memes, where they convey information that only the intended audience understands, and which clearly shows you as part of an in-group. If you used them in different company everyone looks at you like either a moron or an outcast. They made a little more sense in OD&D and b/x where the law/chaos axis was based on the cosmic level Moorcockian concepts rather than society/individualism.
When I start seeing all kinds of taxes and tolls like that in games I get suspicious. I get investigating weather they actually represent the government. A couple times I have found bandit groups just setting up official looking tolls to take money. But either way I get kind of murder-y. Dungeon delving is so outside of the regular economy, I never felt it matched well with taxes. I think a better tax is just to say there is a sales tax on the magic items the party is buying with their gold.
Tbh, after a fruitful campaign this might actually be part of the epilogue. A band of adventurers funding a local business and sorting out their licences and taxes.
You joke, but when I give my players millions of credits after salvaging a battleship, you can be damn sure there's going to be a session where they evade taxes and the space police as they move to liquidate their capital. I also do have them spend like D6 hundred currency after a major haul or major session to represent cost of living, perosnal expenditure, and other minutia to remind the players that they have the gold to spend and should do so.
I actually kinda like the declare first resolve last spellcasting. It would help balance casters with melee focused characters, which is something later editions have consistently failed to do.
This really took me back. I bought got my 1st Ad&D set of books in 1980. I didn't seriously start playing again until 5e and was amazed at all the homebrew rules we came up with actually are now common place in 5e.
In older additions it really was just about going from dungeon to dungeon, that WAS the game. You could even take your character from game to game to game. It has evolved to be much more narratively focused over the years as it moves away from it's war-gaming roots. AD&D was in many ways more like 40k.
My dad told me about playing D&D when he was younger, everyone would bring their character who had the weapon of a god which there was only one in the world. And the party would have 6.
@@sqoody7invegas625 "So, our friend was tasked with going on a snack run before our session last weekend. As per our, a-hem, _NORMAL TRADITION_ [draws one person _glaring_ at another person who is sweating nervously and tapping their index fingers together] they were supposed to write each snack request down along with one or two alternatives just in case someone's first choice wasn't available at the store. ONE HOUR LATER, they come back. As they rushed through the door they immediately started apologizing profusely. [In a higher pitched fast paced voice] 'So, um, heh, they were out of Slim Jim's and, um, heh heh, they were out and when I realized I hadn't actually written anything down, I, uh, I grabbed what I thought was a good substitute and and, um......it was this...' My friend then pulls a large pouch of loose meat sandwich seasoning mix out of the bag and slowly sets it on the table...." [To be continued] 😉
Something that really helps put this all in perspective for me is that the reason Gary came up with this rule set is that he wanted something a little more personal than wargaming. A system where people played a single character instead of an army. It's like a first draft of what we see as tabletop gaming today.
I really like the spell fizzling thing because it means there's never a point where you have to ask "why play a fighter"? like you have to in 5e. It gives fighters a chance to fight evil sorcerers, and if a player handles their preparation and positioning well, then they can still cast a spell just fine, but they can cast more spells in more situations if the party has a good fighter to hold the line. It makes an all-caster party a really bad idea in a way that 5e really can't replicate, but then also an all-non-caster party is bad because holy shit you're really giving up a lot.
This talking point about time tracking has been popping up more and more recently. Gygax is describing variable time, which was common in wargaming at the time. Modern readers are missing out on the cultural context of his statements. He does not mean that all time outside sessions pass 1 to 1 with our time. But for downtime between sessions, and characters outside the dungeon, that time can pass quickly because nothing is happening. You can see this expressed in combat round vs exploration turns. Overland travel can have turns expressed in days, downtime can be weeks months or years.
He actually did mean that it should pass 1 for 1, for one very important reason: Gygax assumes that the average DM is actually a game store employee or gaming club officer running two or three simultaneous games set in the same place. So if your character goes into the dungeon and gets a magic amulet on Monday, if I go to the same dungeon on Tuesday the monsters are dead and the treasure chest is empty. Bubbling off overland travel and downtime into instances was how he suggests you handle that. "Your wizard will require one month of uninterrupted research to learn this ritual. You're not allowed to play him for the next four game sessions."
No, you're entirely wrong. You are missing out on the cultural context of his statements. He does in fact mean that at his table time outside of sessions passed 1 to 1 with our time. He is in fact saying that if your PC spends 2 weeks training to gain a new level, that that PC won't be available to you for 2 weeks real time. He is in fact saying that if your PC starts making a magic item whose construction takes 6 weeks, that that PC is unavailable for 6 weeks real time. This is very unintuitive for modern groups, but to understand why Gygax is recommending that you have to understand the cultural context of his statements - what games and gaming communities for Gygax were like circa 1979.
@@celebrim1 DnD was very communal in that respect. Every player in that group - which could number dozens of players - was part of a single campaign. Keeping communal time not only kept the order of events straight and avoided confusion, it made it seem like they were all contributing to a shared world.
One thing you have to keep in mind about OD&D, BX, & 1st edition is that they are based in the old pulp fantasy stories. So the dungeons were a place of death & only a crazy person would ever go in one. Also as far as the segment thing, most players that play or played didn’t use them.
I'll second that about AD&D initiative. We always used some kind of house rule to determine who went when in a round. A d6 + Dex to hit bonus was popular.
We used straight d6 doing party initiative. I.e. one roll for the party, one roll for the monsters. Then went clockwise around the table for the party's turn.
You skipped my favorite chart! The Potion Miscability table... this gem would tell you what happens when you mix two potions (usually by swallowing one while still under the effects of another one). It's random, so it might be good, might be bad, might cause an explosion. My GM was pretty savvy when it came to game balance so when our party got a wish apiece, he was ready. So I asked for something (seemingly) innocuous: the ability to sense what would happen when I mixed two potions together. He agreed. This was probably a mistake. My character immediately 'mixed' all the potions he could find with his ability. Now that chart says there's a one percent chance the effects of one of the two potions is permanent. The true magic comes when you consider the combination possible. Let's say you have 20 different potions (not hard if you are trying to get more unique potions, even weak ones). That means you have 190 combinations of two potions. That gives you a GREATER than 85% chance one of those potions will become permanent! With 30 potions it's about 99%. Let's just say in a relatively high-level campaign, I could acquire more than 30 potions. In the end, my character was as strong as a Frost Giant (+6000 weight allowance, +9 damage(!), etc.), could find treasures, and also fly. Now there's a wish well worth it!
Did you know a version of this table exists in the 5e DMG? Under the section about magic items and the subsection on potions there is an optional rule about mixing potions that uses a near exact copy of the table. Turns out very few people noticed this. Look into it if you want. As a DM I personally allow players to mix potions and use the table to decide what happens it is still amazingly fun and chaotic
This is fascinating! I am far from a math guy, my brain just has a very hard time comprehending it, but I think I understand how this works and I love it!
Looking forward to seeing vids going forward in the timeline. I feel like over time the basic "assumptions" of why adventurers exist has changed somewhat.
The "why adventurers exist" is so important! As a DM, one of the first questions I ask players about their characters is what went so horribly wrong in the character's life that they wound up becoming an adventurer. Because that's not a normal thing a person does.
@@jeffw991 That's quite a negative outlook on the PCs. I mean if you start out with the assumption, that your PCs must somehow be broken or wrong to even start out as the quint-essential protagonists of the game, you will run into issues. Well, yeah, some characters may have such reasons for adventuring instead of, say, have a steady job and stuff. But not all of them. Imagine, every explorer or conqueror in history was basically an adventurer (the ones, we hear stories of, most likely pretty high level, though). True, not everyone of those brave souls murdered monsters left and right, but they still took high risks for fame, fortune or even just to broaden the worlds horizon - without beeing deranged people, forced into adventuring by some misfortune.
@@robertnett9793 this is for a ragtag squad of people( versus trained large group of people), often going on their own previously, in a world where you can randomly run into a dragon capable of breaking cities. You have to have some sort of death wish for that
@@orionar2461 Well - it highly depends on the game you actually play. in D&D even a Lvl 1 character is more powerful and capable than the average person, just scaling up in power as they go. So even being a 'ragtag squad of people' they are in fact a ragtag squad of highly capable people. And yeah, dragons and stuff - but imagine one Alexander von Humboldt - a young academic of his age, rowing up the Amazon river - stuffed full of deadly disease, ravenous animals, canibals and those little fish that nest in your private parts.... And he wasn't even a fighter in any capacity. People can be driven by a lot of reasons for 'adventuring' - likely the search of riches and fame. But I see it more as an unconvencional way of achieving this goal. Pretty much like modern treasure divers or famous survivalists.
One thing to note about the timekeeping section, Gygax's writings about the passing of time IRL assumes one GM is running multiple games concurrently in the same gameworld. Whether it's real or not, it's this kind of play style that allowed the Head of Vecna story to exist: One group of players lay down rumors and even setup a fake dungeon to hide a fake artifact in the game world just to mess with the other groups playing in it. As for spells fizzling, remember that magic, especially offensive magic, was MUCH stronger in older editions. We didn't have this namby-pamby +con bonus to hp. Neither did monsters. Most monsters simply had raw d8's for HP, and the numbers didn't go too high. Comparing 2 monsters HP for a moment, let's go with a Barbed Devil. In 1st ed, it's a 8HD monster which means it only had about 36hp. Compare this with the damage output of a 5d6 Lightning Bolt that does, on average, 17 damage and you start seeing why interrupting the caster was something both the monsters AND the PCs wanted to do: even on a successful save, they've lost nearly a quarter of their HP and are looking pretty worse off on a failed save. Compare this to a CR5 5e Barbed Devil who has 110HP vs that same 5th level wizard's 5d6 Lightning Bolt and the damage scales much, MUCH less comparatively, even on a successful save they've lost maybe a sixth of their HP. This is why "gank the mage" was super important back in the day: damaging spells HURT back in the day. Alignment was very much a code of sorts you had to follow-ish. It's only in more recent editions that they laxed up on it, but in Ye Olden Days changing alignment usually had huge penalties attached to it since it involved since it was considered a somewhat mentally traumatic event as you are changing your worldview and attitude. Another thing of note, Law (and the other alignments), in the alignment sense, is also less of a theological or moral/ethical question but something akin to an actual physical properly objects could have. You could have lawfully aligned weapons. Word of Law could kill or seriously hurt people who weren't lawfully aligned. There are entire planes of existence made up of raw lawfulness and creatures that eat and breath law just as we drink water and breath oxygen. Also: yeah alignment languages were dumb. No argument from me here. One more thing to note: the current focus "muh narrative" or "muh story" is a relatively new thing in the TTRPG sphere. that's not to say it was never there, White Wolf's stuff has been around for ages, but the larger focus on narrative and crafting a story in a general sense has only been adopted by the greater mass of RPG players i'd say in the last 10 years or so. You didn't go out to craft a villain or write out a campaign. Those would, at best, grow naturally from the player's interactions with game elements: a goblin manages to run away and comes back with a new, bigger warband for revenge. In the old days, you adventured because there was adventure to be had. That was your villain. You didn't need any more motivation then "there is a dungeon, it has treasure and I am the sort of person that would relieve the dungeon of it's treasure". Sometimes there was a strange happening going on: Farmer John saw a spooky ghost in the fields, well we're Good-aligned folks and as such we help people in trouble, so off to go ghost hunting! Does the ghost have anything to do with the nearby dungeon? Is it a dead adventurer tilting at windmills trying to slay imagined ogres and giants, unaware of it's death by the very ogre it tried to slay ages ago? sure if the DM decides to link the 2, but sometimes a dungeon is just a dungeon with an ogre at the end and sometimes a ghost is just a dead guy being a jerk. Old D&D really just cared about "Adventurers Adventuring". Anything more was up to the group.
Oxybe, solid use of tilting at windmills, I don't get to read that expression in such an appropriate context often. Tom, point to a specific subjective thing he said that wasn't already framed as an opinion.
Its kinda weird to look back on this cause the meaning of the word RPG has changed a lot. We modern players see D&D and think it's what Final Fantasy wishes it were, and I love that, but I figure Gygax and the likes would much rather it be Diablo
"One more thing to note: the current focus "muh narrative" or "muh story" is a relatively new thing in the TTRPG sphere." D&D modules with a strong focus on telling a story have been around since at least AD&D 2e, where popular modules like Dead Gods and The Great Modron March were super-railroady. Dead Gods came out in 1997, so that's 25 years, not 10.
@@kaleidoslug7777 not to be rude, but did you play FF1 ever? Or Diablo 1? I’m actually trying to know which games you’ve played so as to engage you in rhetoric. For funsies. I will now offer the information I requested. I started on FF8, had to work my way backwards to play FF1, and on D2, but the battle chest with D1 and whatnot, so I’ve had a decent amount of time in that space in the 90’s-00’s. FF was pretty fringe before 7, and Diablo has stayed pretty consistent over the three so far, so it would be normal to not really get that they were both literally based on D&D, except Diablo was a step removed. Diablo was based on a game by Avalon Hill, competitor and eventual subsidiary to, Wizards of the Coast. That game was developed as an indie D&D game that got licensed for a reskin to become a “new IP.” It was real-time computer-game D&D. If we carry the discussion my next move is to convince you that both first games in those series not only wished to be D&D like you said FF did, both of them actually are Gygaxian campaign formats, like you said Diablo is. The West March and the Delve.
After all I've learned about DnD lore over the years, alignment languages remain the strangest thing. Thanks for going through all this! Very fun stuff. The restrictions on how you discover what items do reminds me strongly of roguelikes, where you have to test unknown potions or magic items carefully to avoid hurting yourself in the process. That's definitely something I'd consider using in a campaign.
I am frankly not sure why do people find alignment languages confusing. But I believe I can easily explain it by giving you an example from Lord of The Rings. Sauron and his forces would be able to use the black speech. A language is so vile and terrifying that even Gandalf, who could technically read it, wouldn't dare do so in Shire. On the other hand we have the elven language, the language of good, the mere sound of which would make evil creatures shudder. In fact, they were so confident about that, that they trusted that anyone who can say the world "friend" in an elvish language can safely enter Moria, as clearly they are not of the evil alignment.
@@RancorSnp Yeah but here's the thing with alignment languages. They're not languages of factions. They're just languages that everyone of a given alignment auto-magically knows and if you ever change your alignment you automatically forget the old one and learn the new one. They're not learned knowledge like a regular language, they're something cosmic that you are literally only capable of using and understanding if you are that alignment. It likely comes from the writings of Michael Moorcock, where Law and Chaos are actual cosmic metaphysical forces fighting for control over the universe, and were actually allegiances people could have. So whether you're a lawful evil beholder, a devil from Avernus, a lawful evil drow elf or a thief that just shifted alignment to lawful evil, you can all communicate with the special lawful evil language and understand each other.
The AD&D rules have this old charm to them. Like the cursed items, combat, and even the idea of taxes are so odd but do ad a cool dynamic to the game. Outside of certain things, I rarely see anyone worry about time or why the lord of a country is off in a dungeon for 4 months not ruling their land. The amount of effort put in is astounding. Say what you will about older systems being rough, but Gygax really did make something amazing.
Two things: 1. The DMG doesn't have much to say about campaign/world building, because Gygax published a the Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds series of books on just that. 2. Castles & Crusades is what Gygax wrote after splitting up with D&D, you should read it if you want his later opinion on tabletop RPG. It's still my favorite.
@@ThemildmanneredgamerBlogspot none of the rulebooks as far as I know. He was in an advisory role at the company though. He did write a campaign book or something for it, at least
I'm actually going to be running some 2nd Edition AD&D with my nieces and nephew today (hopefully). 2nd Edition cut out a lot of the weirdness that Gygax put in (but not all of it), and put more of an emphasis on role playing (though it was still very combat/adventure oriented). So how am I starting them out? With a dungeon crawl, of course! (They're kids, and they're just getting started. They'll get there.)
I like that take on combat, with spells being so powerful now, it actually makes sense to have martial characters later into the campaign to protect spell casters and interrupt enemy ones. Otherwise beyond lvl 3 it’s better to have magic then a dedicated martial class. I might try this….
I started playing the game in 1979, and the AD&D DMG was one of the first books that I owned. I poured over that thing as a kid and a teenager, and one point I might’ve had the book memorized. Despite its quirks, despite its flaws, despite the fact that I’m still playing today and I prefer 5e and modern editions, I believe it is one of the best RPG books ever written.
It is interesting to see the rules being more or less written with the thought that the players are playing a game to win and not that they are roleplaying a character and how that just dramatically shifts the tone of everything. Its honestly kinda cool, and i can sorta dig the bit of gritty dungeon diving that hes going for here.
I've had the pleasure of playing 1st edition with my Dad and Grandfather, and I got to delve into some of how DMs used to handle stuff. I feel that much like modern games, DMs would choose whether or not to include rules based on their player base. A lot of games have rules that just don't work for certain groups, and sometimes a DM may need to make new rules or redesign elements of the game to help make their game fun for everyone. My biggest issue with the AD&D rule books was a lack of organization. Charts and descriptions for things would be scattered throughout the book, and my Dad's copy didn't even have an Index at the back; he had a separate page he had typed up that listed pages for different commonly used rules.
This was a fascionating look into the book that started it all. The bit on the taxes was especially interesting. In the few campaigns I've played we ended up acquiring so much wealth that purchasing something as mostly up to the DM if it was available to buy, price was not an issue. This is also a reality that enfeebles many video games I've played over the years, all too often money loses it's value because you accumulate so much of it. The tax concept is an interesting concept that's hampered by how complex it can get. It really hits home how big of a nerd Gygax was that he created an entire tax code in his ground-breaking fantasy role-playing game.
It's fundamentally flawed in my opinion. How is everyone else in this society coping with these ridiculous taxes? Presumably, the adventurers are gaining more wealth than they would gain from a normal profession because adventuring is dangerous, and if the reward wasn't worth the risk no one would be an adventurer. But then you're saying the taxes are so high that adventurers are always at risk of starving to death. Therefore, how do normal people whose safe occupation earns them less money not end up sucked dry by these same fees that they presumably would also have to pay? And the whole thing about tying your character's lifestyle expenses and adventuring opportunities to the progression of real-life time is just insane. Oh, you need to work overtime for the next couple weeks because of the nature of your job and can't play? Take comfort in knowing that when things get back to normal and you're eager to start playing again, your character will be destitute and starving instead of just, I don't know, autonomously taking odd jobs around town to pay for their lifestyle expenses so that your character is in the same state you left it.
@@trogdor8764 It's really simple if you stop and think about it. Taxes from dungeon crawls were recommended to be 50%. You loot 10,000 coins and 5,000 are taxed, leaving you 5,000. The average person (commoner, peasant, serf, etc.) lives in a world of copper and sometimes silver coins, rarely sees gold coins. They work 10-14 hour days, 7 days a week. There is no mass production lines, nor refrigeration to keep food cool to last more than a few days after being harvested. It isn't that taxes are so high that adventurers are starving, it's adventurers have to pay for food & lodging. After all, they're nomads without a place to stay and rarely find their own food, so they're paying for inns and food. Your whining about time is just short-sighted. If you can't attend to play a game for 2-4 weeks, but everyone else plays during that time, why should you just be allowed to keep all your money? Do you keep all of your money from paycheck to paycheck? No. Because even if you live at home and don't go out, you still have bills to pay. And if you're like most people (and you seem like it), then you're living paycheck to paycheck and must work (or for PCs, go on an adventure) to maintain your lifestyle.
Matt Colville did an explanation of why the that edition of DnD is the way that it is. Most of the reason is that DnD is based on a war game, but Gygax didn't want it to be a war game. Which is why thrown/ranged weapons are called missiles (terminology that was familiar), why there is aerial combat, why he didn't like hit location, and why combat is the way it is.
The biggest motivator may be poverty, but Gary would have their biggest enemy be the IRS. Just like in Ghostbusters, their biggest enemy was actually the EPA. So... government! Throw all the dragons and liches and beholders you want at the players, the only enemy they will never actually defeat no matter what they do is government.
@@legomaniac213 irs to vecna: we see you got your self a new super weapon and an army. But your tax records shows us you don't have this kind of money. Did you ...lie about your earnings? Vecna: oh fuck ho shit
Ya gotta love the early days of D&D. The 1st ed book was published in 1978. Four or five years (depending on when you start counting) from the first publications of the game. AD&D is, at this point very close to the origins of taking Chainmail heroes into the tunnels below a fortress and playing them as individuals instead of running entire warbands and companies as a commander. Lots of assumptions we make now in what is a tabletop role-playing game weren't even considered as a part of the game back then. There's a lot in the DMG devoted to managing a campaign with the presumption that players run their characters almost as a "stable" rather than as personalities. The idea that you went over to Gary's house and played your Ranger exploring the woodlands on Wednesday meant that character probably wasn't going to be available when the gang got together to explore the ruined keep on Friday Night. So you had multiple backup characters to use. Ranger Bill is off exploring the Murkey Forest, and the party really needs a Thief on Friday, so I'll play my Halfling Thief Janice. Stories from that era abound of players from around the Lake Geneva WI area sneaking over to Gary's house on off-game nights to take a few hirelings and explore or loot a few rooms under Castle Greyhawk while no one else was around. All of those time-management rules were evolved from trying to keep a handle on those shennanigans.
Ah nostalgia. I used to read this book when I was 10 and almost had the whole thing memorized. Too bad I only ended up playing a few one-shots using this system.
Sameish; I got the book D&D Rules cyclopedia when I was a kid, and read it up and down so much that I still always name my main desktop computer encyclopedia ~30 years later. (Yes, the name has apparently warped a little over the years)
I like 2e a lot. For me 5e is too "same-y". I mean, every class have an ability to hit for at least a d6 or d8, you don't have that much skills, stats matter a lot more so playing as average Joe is not really possible and overall 2e have more options. Also - crit tables and cool fighting styles.
@@GrimmerPl 2e is probably the edition of D&D I think has the design I like best. Thought I don't really play D&D anymore. Dungeon Crawl Classics lured me in and sunk its teeth in too deep for me to ever go back. Lol
Going back is super important because DnD has evolved so much. Honestly, when old school fans say "Modern DnD isnt DnD" they're kinda right, what was played back then is DRASTICALLY different than modern styles. A big part of understanding that is the context, which I feel is only partially represented here To answer a question left in the video, yes, that was the story. Going into the dungeon The story is whatever comes out of play. It's a fun style, if that's your bag. So, it makes sense why you wouldnt have advice on narrative structure
I think it’s important to remember that dnd was just a more involved war game. The game was the combat and crawl. The role playing was an assumed secondary. Combat was the main focus and the immersive life sim out of combat was a minigame to keep it going. The ideas around dnd have changed so much over the last decade. Using the constricted and harsh rules of ad&d with a modern mindset is an amazing experience if you have the time and the want to struggle through a second life in game.
Really love the time rules. Not only does it keep the players coming back every week so their character doesn't starve off screen, but it means your group will really try to clear the dungeon in one session. No hanging around a goblin infested cave for a week!
By my understanding, the assumption was that the group would head back to town at the end of each session. Otherwise, it would be possible for other groups run by other players, to stumble upon the player-less PCs, slaughter them, and take all of their stuff.
The most interesting aspect of ad&d 1st and 2nd was the initiative system, it's less intuitive at first but in practice it's meant to let everyone participate toghether. The rotative initiative that systems use today wastes a lot of the groups time focusing on one character at a time. THAC0 also had a reason of why it was like that, it wasn't just ramblings of crazy people.
Really, it's just a DC to hit. It actually makes bonuses a lot easier to keep track of because it's applied to THAC0 before any dice are rolled. You just add the roll to the target's AC. If you beat your THAC0, you hit. If you didn't, you didn't. I never got why so many people seem confused by it.
@@daviddaugherty2816 Well, it always confused me because whenever I tried to look up the rules for it, I couldn't find them. Took me literal years to find out that in 1e, only monsters have THAC0. PCs just have attack matrices in the DMG.
AD&D 1st edition did not use THAC0. Books might mention it, but fundamentally the system was chart based, you rolled and compared to a chart, with modifiers added in.
@@japanimationman4442 It's like this, in 3.5 or later you have an Attack Bonus, you roll the dice add the bonus and compare to the enemy's AC, if the result is larger you hit. Now imagine you're fighting the same monster for several rounds, what you do instead of rolling and adding everytime, you take the AC substract you Attack Bonus and you get the number you have to roll to hit. You do the math once and before rolling anything. THAC0 is just the same thing, take your THAC0 substract the AC you get the number to hit. You have to do it only once and you don't have to add anything to the rolls.
I think one really important point to draw from this is the inspiration from wargaming. Especially the combat order. In a lot of older wargamers (and still Warhammer because gw hates us) have one side move all of their units in phases. In Warhammer, it's command, movement, magic, shooting, melee, morale. The focus on starting as a regular foot solder moving to being a lord commanding an army essentially turns it into a wargame. You can see it everywhere in these early editions.
I'm surprised Puffin didn't mention that gold = xp. That underlying factor explains a lot of the design elements and assumptions about play. It's why dungeons were central to the experience. Also, it was very common to have multiple characters that one played on different days, so the loss of any one character wasn't as impactful as with today's style of play. Thus, meatgrinder dungeons were very similar experiences to today's roguelike games.
As it relates to interrupted spells, i'd recommend trying playing with it. It's actually a pretty awesome rule, as it gives the fighters/melee combatants a reason to protect spellcasters (in addition to spells just generally being super powerful). Basically, because a spell can be interrupted by damaging attacks, you have to prevent the spellcaster from being hit or else the party loses the powerful advantage having a caster gives. The barbarian can't just rush in headlong and do whatever--there are serious tactical disadvantages to doing that. Etc. Plus, it gives initiative a lot more impact. That said, initiative in AD&D is very complex and many disagree on exactly what the rules mean in how it runs. So the interpretation put forth here, while not wrong, is also not exactly right. It isn't clear whether spellcasters begin at segment 0 and cast on the casting time segment, or if they begin on their initiative roll segment etc.
My first experience with D&D was joining a 2nd edition game at the tail end (around 1999), and game balance did not seem to matter much. I was a paladin and another player was a ranger and we were consistently 2 levels behind everyone else because our xp totals for each level were skewed. When 3rd edition came out, it felt like like a completely different game.
Игры
When Gygax writes rules, he seems to assume that all players are power gamers that will try to break them immediately.
As a DM I 100% agree.
He knew what was up even back then.
As was the style at the time
I mean it's always best to plan for the worst outcome, namely *that player*
I’m pretty sure I heard from somewhere that his group usually did try to break the game regularly not sure if that’s true or not but it would make sense. I mean he probably wouldn’t write about the things players would try to do to break the game if he didn’t witness it first hand.
I like how Gygax talks about "we can't mutilate or kill players every session because players love their characters." Also Gygax: "here's 360 ways to kill players with magic items and traps they can't possibly foresee unless they sneak a look at the manual."
It's about having diverse options, not the amount of opportunities for this to happen
Also, if your players try to circumnavigate your random punishments by giving items to NPCs for a measure of safety, have those NPCs run away with the item. Thanks Gary.
Never mutilate a player. Only mutilate their characters. 👍
What of cursed items ?
Literally just check for traps more
The time records thing makes more sense when you realize that Gygax was running his own campaign several times a week for a rotating roster of 50 or so players.
The man was dedicated tk making a semi believable campaign where didferent groups could see each other's after math or even meet and maybe fight. He was bathed in the blood of wargamerpowergamer sweaty maidenless edgelords. There were no guidelines back then so you can think of the original DMG as his notes to remind himself.
a shame it wouldn't work well when people have things to do. a good/decent compromise would be allowing DMs to force a wasted day between each session. that way, the limitation of a lengthy campaign exists but real life obligations won't be a detriment.
H⁶😂😂ky66k😂6hgyhggni,tj5t4t4@@Taterzz
this made me remember hearing about a dnd campaign where the dm made EVERY item they find cursed, and with near deadly curses that made things way worse than if they didn't take the items. But then the dm got mad because the group just stopped taking things because they already knew it'd be cursed.
That's what happens when a DM thinks they're being brilliant but are actually just being a twit
Yeah I remember hearing that one too
I did something like this, a set of Accessories that give you +3 and -1 to a skill, the curse is always "bad" but the positive outweighs the curse (unless you are aiming for a specific build)
@@WhiteFyreLeo I once played a rogue character who had a compulsion to steal once a day. One day the DM gives us all special items. Mine was a bag I could reach inside and grab a random thing in the world from items, to enemies, and even active spells.
Our Cleric got a power to give any dice roll plus 1 or minus 1 after it's been rolled. And she could do this once a day. But she actively fought my rogue on stealing, often reporting me to guards and such.
The GM showed us a table of all the things we could get from the bag based on a d100 roll, but there was never an instance of 3 bad things in a row. So I convinced the cleric I wasn't 'stealing' anything with the bag, and she, and the party, agreed that with our powers combined we could get amazing loot.
my favorite was that we pulled a key (quest item) that belonged to the BBEG and so he was locked out of his treasure vault while we were trying to use it on every single lock we came across to see where it went XD
Like... Duh. Maybe just dole out magical crap much more rarely. And that's the kind of GMs I hate a lot. Wanna punish and kill the playercharacters for no reason.
"Why would an aristocrat go on an adventure?"
_looks at real historical monarchs pissing off to the middle of nowhere for a decade, getting captured multiple times and costing their country tons of money in bribes_
_looks at wandering knights_
The emperor of brazil: hehe yeah who would do something like that.
Yeah but that sort of adventure usually meant bringing all sorts of underlings and resources with them, where the king mostly focused on directing those underlings rather than "adventuring" himself, whereas this sort of adventure talked about here is much more hands-on and more of a solo with a few likeminded tagalongs sort of deal. Knight-errants on the other hand were:
1. Basically fiction
2. Basically what Gygax meant for you to play as
I'll do you one better, the King of Mali sailed off into the Atlantic with an entire expeditionary fleet and none were seen again.
Premodern Aristocrats used to as well, like Teddy Roosevelt
@@abdulmasaiev9024 Not referring to the literature trope of the knight errant but rather to groups like the Normans in the 1000s and 1100s. They of course brought along their retinue, but some were serving as mercenaries on both sides of wars between the Turks and Byzantines in the middle east, not at home seeing to the estate in Normandy.
ADND Handbook: Tax your players who have excess gold.
Players: I tax the collectors that have excess life.
🤣😂 LMAO! Holy crap
Murderhobos are going to murderhobo.
^^^ found the rogue!!
@@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself But who *doesn't* want to murder tax collectors? In this case it's perfectly justified.
Gygax literally encouraged it. XP was largely from loot and anything could be stolen for more XP. Steal it all, murder those who get in your way, level up, then move on.
I love how 83% of Gary's notes seem to either be about how to adversarial DM or how not to adversarially DM TOO much.
The cursed item and artifact rules become SO much more villainous when you realize exactly how much of a pain it was to cast Identify in 1st edition AD&D. I guaran-damn-tee you that most DMs house-ruled the hell out of that spell because Rules As Written, it's the most dangerous, complex, and infuriating spell in the game.
Read onwards if you need some ranting insight into how wizards did it in 'the old days.'
All right, so let's say you found a big shiny sword after killing a bunch of spiders in a dungeon. It must be pretty awesome magically, right? So you gotta ask the wizard to identify it. Hold on right there, mister fighting man, we gotta take some steps first. Before anything, we gotta make sure your wizard even knows the spell, which doesn't happen automatically. If they didn't receive it from their mentor as one of their randomly determined first level spells, they gotta find either a wizard who knows it or a scroll of identify, and then pass a percentile roll based on their intelligence, which is far from guaranteed.
But let's say your wizard's lucky, has the spell, and has it prepared. We can cast it now, right? Sure, as long as you have the material components on hand, which are: a pearl (of at least 100g.p. value) and an owl feather steeped in wine, with the infusion drunk and a live miniature carp swallowed whole prior to spell casting. What, you didn't have a 100g worth pearl or carry a live miniature carp with you while adventuring? How can you call yourself a wizard?
Okay, let's say you have the material components on hand and you're all set to cast it. Well, naturally, you can't just tell what it is by looking, you gotta hold the item to examine it. Or, if it's armor or clothing, you have to wear it. I guess you better hope it's not cursed, cuz that's exactly what triggers most curses.
But of course, with all this preparation, cost and risk involved for a first level spell, you've got to be absolutely certain what the magic item does now, right? I mean...yeah, you're pretty sure: "For each segment the spell is in force, it is 15% + 5% per level of the magic-user probable that 1 property of the object touched can become known - possibly that the item has no properties and is merely a ruse." 20%'s not bad, right? I mean, as long as you pass the DM's secret magic saving throw roll, which if you fail it by just one point, you get a false positive. And even if you know it gets plusses to hit, "The item will never reveal its exact plusses to hit or its damage bonuses, although the fact that it has few or many such plusses can be discovered. If it has charges, the object will never reveal the exact number, but it will give information which is +/-25% of actual."
Now I know what you're thinking, "That kinda sucks, but if we don't get it right the first time, we can try again later, right?" That's where you're wrong, kiddo: "The item to be identified must be examined by the magic-user within 1 hour per level of experience of the examiner after it has been discovered, or all readable impressions will have been blended into those of the characters who have possessed it since." Better hope your wizard had that spell memorized, had all the material components on hand, fed their miniature carp and kept it watered for its very short lifespan, and didn't get their face chewed off by the potentially cursed helmet, or that the nearest court wizard is less than an hour away from you, or you're shit out of luck.
At this point, your fighter friend is probably willing to grab the sword and just run off into combat, trying to figure out what the sword does with some field research. He's welcome to, but if the wizard cast that spell, he's in no condition to be fighting anytime that month: "After casting the spell and determining what can be learned from it, the magic-user loses 8 points of constitution. He or she must rest for 6 turns per 1 point in order to regain them. If the 8 point loss drops the spell caster below a constitution of 3, he or she will fall unconscious, and consciousness will not be regained until full constitution is restored 24 hours later." Oh what, your wizard didn't invest at least 11 points into constitution? Get good, you whiny scrub!
And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason why fireball and magic missile are such popular spells, because it wasn't the first level spell that actively tried to murder your wizard for trying to learn like some nerd.
I kinda like how wizard spells are randomly generated it adds an interesting variety to wizard builds
This is hilarious 🤣 I had no idea it was that detailed! Why was there so much desire in hiding an.items abilities I wonder?
-Dan
@@AvenueStudios 1st edition AD&D is chock full of those weirdly specific rules and regulations that seem explicitly designed to get back at one hyper-specific situation that ends up making the whole game horrifically unbalanced.
What's especially hilarious is that by comparison, FALSIFYING an item's magical aura to make it look like it's a magic item is ridiculously easy, last just long enough to skip town, and only requires a piece of woolen cloth to cast (because D&D spells are based off wordplay). It really seems like the game's outright handing you the tools to run a bootleg magic item traveling sales racket, which I would love to structure a campaign around someday.
@@Iamafishproductions haha omg I knew about the word play in spells and it is so enjoyable 😂 This is hilarious! I wish I could have seen how a lot of these rules developed from what I assume are some form of Gygax and friends all passive-aggresively fighting each other over the games lol.
Love the fake magic items idea that's brilliant 🤣
-Dan
Yeah the second time I find a magic item cursed the next one I'm putting in a burlap sack and giving to the nearest Nobles. I don't care if it's a staff of magi I have enough pattern recognition to never touch a magic item with the intent to use it.
Gary Gygax ran multiple groups in the same world at the same time. So it was possible for one group to find a treasure vault only to discover another group had already been there and looted it. That's why tracking time was so critical for his campaigns.
This is very based.
This type of campaign is called a West March campaign, they are incredibly fun but difficult to pull off usually requiring multiple groups and multiple DMs and the DMs sharing notes
@@qixaqyx reminds me of itsmeJPs west march campaigns
@@qixaqyx Yes, although it didn't require multiple DMs. One DM, multiple players/groups usually. The more you played the better your PC did because of the one day to one day thing. It got people to play more often to keep their PCs as strong as the others. There was still some competition that went on between players/groups.
From what I've read online, Gary Gygax was a smart man, with little to no care for an actual enjoyable experience (not to say he never/couldn't craft one, but that it was never his aim)
I respect the guy, but criticism where it's due, a lot of these rules feel like something an over-eager noob DM would come up with, or a scared-of-players-winning DM would.
idk, it was definitely designed in a time where we couldn't just play Rust/"HARD CORE MMO RPGS" if we wanted to feel like we've been flogged and caned by our own families
It's not surprising that Gygax did the DMG the way he did. He was literally inventing an open world game, and nobody knew any tricks, standards, mores, or exploits yet. Having some guidelines and protips for the people trying something completely new and novel who have no anecdotes or stories to inspire, instruct, or guide them was probably a godsend.
This is the AD&D DMG. D&D has been out for a a couple years by now.
DUDE! if you look at the AD&D players handbook, its so confusing?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!
That’s a really good point actually. The game (and the hobby as a whole) has been around for so long now that most people coming into it already have some idea of how it works. And hearing tips and war stories from veteran players is an important part of the TTRPG experience. We take it for granted that, at some point, most people came into the game completely blind.
Not all of Gygax's ideas were good ones. The 1500 gp/level/week (1 to 4 weeks) to level up rule on DMG1e pg 86 was insane especially as coins back then were said to be 1/10 lb. That meant assuming .900 fineness *a single AD&D1 gold piece* has about 1.31 (.900*700/480) troy ounces of gold in it or about $178.10 in 1977 when the players handbook came out and $297.68 in 1979 when the DMG came out. That meant as *1st level* _a single character_ was expected to pony up the equivalent of $446,520 in 1979 money *minimum* just to get to 2nd level! Average party of six? That is *$2,679,120* dumped on the local guilds in a week! And people wonder why so many D&D campaign went Monty Haul - there, friend, is why.
@@Maximara A lot of economics like that where why most of us chucked rules freely. His obsession with time was the first to go. Even as children with lots of free time that was unwieldy. So *poof* bye strict time rules. Even as teens we had enough understanding economics to know that a fairly large town of the age with 15K people and a full set of guilds would go through massive inflationary spirals from training PCs alone. And as you mentioned a mages guild could crush a medium sized city should a couple of traveling wizards go on a spell acquisition spree and his tax systems made spree spending a must. So the taxes were lightened as adventuring groups would invariably become tax avoidance mercenary guilds.
Having no nobles made perfect sense but no one from the lower classes? With the kind of coin an adventurer could pull in there would be no way to keep them out of it., travel restriction be damned. At any rate should these former peasants survive long enough to go over 6 level or so any liege lord is going to find it quite difficult to catch and hold them anywhere as the kinds of guys that can hunt them down become very rare and even more expensive. Better to just hire their erstwhile peasants as men at arms. If they weren't major bastards as the peasants former lord the new man at arms might even feel a little nostalgia and loyalty towards him.
We freely folded, spindled, and mutilated the rules to fit our wants and needs or sometimes even whims. The "rule of cool" was even stronger back then. That is if it sounded fun, funny , cool, or even just a lot of fun rules would be fudged on the fly to give it a chance to work. We didn't throw the whole framework out we just bent the rules quite a bit. Such as allowing the players to raise a water elemental out of milk to combat a spreading fire at a large dairy. I don't really play these days but it sounds like most people stick a lot harder to the rules as written. That's probably needed for things like adventurers league but there is a lot to be said for seat of the pants improvisation.
My favorite "kind of sensible but also wtf" rule from AD&D is Potion Miscibility. Say your character is shot by a poisoned dart. Poisons in AD&D were insanely deadly because reasons, so it's common for an AD&D character to pack an emergency potion of healing and a potion that cures poison while also helping you resist poison for a while.
But if you didn't read the DMG and unknowingly gambled your life by daring to drink the potion of healing while the anti-poison is still in effect, you can:
Suddenly gain one of the two potion's effects permanently! Now you are permanently resistant to poison. This has a 1% chance of happening.
Suddenly heal more or become more resistant to poison during the anti-poison's duration! 9% chance.
Have nothing special happen. 55% chance.
Discover one potion just fails to take effect entirely! The other one stopped it somehow. 10% chance.
Discover both potions weaken in your gut, making them have half their normal effect! 10% chance.
Discover both potions FIZZLE OUT COMPLETELY, wasting both of them! 7% chance.
One potion weakens and the other turns into a new minor poison! Lose a point of STR and DEX for a while. 5% chance.
Die! The potions combined to become a potent poison. No saves. To quote the book, "The imbiber is dead." 2% chance.
DETONATE! Terrifyingly, this does not instantly kill the imbiber. You take anywhere from 6 to 60 HP in damage and everything nearby takes 1-10 HP in damage. 1% chance.
And every new potion you drink while a potion is effecting you means another roll on the table. So you can encounter a lucky NPC that is now permanently invisible or immune to some element thanks to careless drinking, or a player can randomly detonate and seriously wound the party.
Also note that the odds of just wasting one or both potions is significantly higher than the odds that something good happens, and the odds that the potions work normally is only slightly better than a coin flip.
This is also a variant rule in the 5e DMG. It's a pretty interesting system.
There was a table for just about anything. You just had to find it. Thus tons of bookmarks.
Oh, but at least you CAN take an antidote. I think that in the original, poison meant INSTANT DEATH, NO SAVES.
Which was absolutely brutal and made NO SENSE. Sure, there are SOME instant death poisons in real life, but most take some time, and CAN be countered. But he said, "NOPE! All poisons are instantaneous and cannot be countered, at all."
At least, that's what I remember, which I thought was ridiculous. Homebrew rules, for the win! Poisons can be countered! Hooray!
@@AuntLoopy123 So, does that means that poisonner PCs were "the meta"? ;)
Of the few times that we had the potion miscibility table come into play, I get a permanent potion of invulnerability out of it after a character drank it and a potion of healing.. The DM rarely broke that table out every again after that. I would not recommend trying that, because it was an extremely lucky event... but dang that was worth it just because of the looks that were had around the table. The first comment that broke the silence was "Well that's unfortunate... for the monsters"
I've always felt that D&D's wargaming origins are really apparent compared to some other systems that were built for storytelling from the ground up. But it's interesting to see how much more of an influence wargaming had the further you go back through the editions.
I would say the reason it survives beyond other systems is BECAUSE of its wargaming origins.
When other systems come out focusing on role playing, there's too much subjectivity, and it becomes either too "rule of cool" or improv acting. It survives because it was originally rules heavy and has a stronger structure to hold up the "role playing" aspect.
@@SerifSansSerif Agreed. I prefer the wargaming as a foundation. My imagination will fill in the voids between the math!
@@AF-tv6ufWill you imagine dragons between the math
The most important thing to understand when reading the 1e DMG is just how many players that Gygax had and how much of the notes in the DMG are about Gygax trying to handle the player load. Gygax is running 3 games a week for 10-12 players at a time. And when you've tried to run tables at that scale, Gygax's advice in the 1e DMG starts making a lot more sense. Like for example, his advice on keeping time has to do with having 36 players with 80 different PC's doing down time is chaos unless you have good time keeping records. And keeping track of 1 real day = 1 game day makes running different groups on different days where you don't know who is going to show up simplifies things a lot, and also pay attention to how PC's spend time and how he can keep control of a group using in game time incentives.
Seems very specific and not a good way to make a ruleset. Very bias style when most people never will have that many players.
I do see some of the charm but honestly this sounds just tedious and annoying and not fun at all.
@@matthewcharles9813 It's the 'Delve' format which to this day is a very popular format and is a ton of fun if you've never played it.
The 1e AD&D DMG is despite the fact that it roams around topics seemingly aimlessly still one of the best gaming supplements ever written. It's an amazing gold mine of treasures, and I don't just mean in game treasures.
What I'm trying to say is that critics of certain sections of the work seldom understand what they are criticizing. The parts that don't make sense often make sense in context.
And when Gygax wrote the book, he really had no way of knowing what a typical group would look like.
There were also other rules in these early campaigns, like the idea that parties weren't allowed to end the session IN the dungeon or in the wilderness. All sessions had to end with the party retreating back to town.
This can seem weird, until you realize it's to make downtime as easy as possible. You don't need to worry about what a PC was doing for a week while on the eighth floor of a dungeon. The PC wouldn't still be down there, because they needed to retreat. So long as the PC hasn't died, they can be assumed to be back in town when a new session starts.
@@Bluecho4 That's the 'Haven/Delve' format.
This structure means that the game can be played even if that one player doesn't show up, which is a really nice feature in general and increasingly important the larger the group is.
The other thing about it is that it really easily supported introducing new characters at level 1 rather than having some new 8th level character appear out of nowhere just so a new player could be in the group.
The play that Gygax was supporting in some ways looked more like a modern MMORPG with one or more guilds than what we think of as typical tabletops.
I have also heard it was the norm to run a "campaign" more as what we would not call a "Setting"
That is, your campaign is a world that players interact with, not as much a series of stories an individual party goes through. In this respect, multiple parties occupying the same world was relatively common, the PCs building up hirelings and followers in ways that we might consider disruptive now was common (hence why Fighters used to just get a castle at a certain level,) and timekeeping between multiple parties was a lot more required so that these parties can interact and the world can move
If looked at through that lens, a lot of stuff starts making sense. A good example is the Heal Rates, which seem built up to give you a good amount of healing if a given party plays about once a week, or how 3.5's craft, profession, etc, rules are all divided into weekly gaps of advancement, when most modern campaigns I've been a part of make the timeskips way too erratic to make this seem practical.
...Honestly, Gygax was pretty on point on how some players would treat the NPC Hirelings, I'd say.
I mean, we've all heard of that one guy that treats a corpse as a Rod of Detect Traps, but instead of charges, it's chunks left for the Barbarian to throw, right? Same energy, basically.
Having played this system back in 1978 I can verify that there were players who used hirelings as guinea pigs.
Back in 3.5, my friend got a hireling to carry all of his stuff... bad things happened to Timmy.
Also, he would pay extra to each new hireling to address them as Timmy. And all of this was just to make a joke from the old TV show Dinosaurs: "Looks like we're gonna need a new Timmy!"
I always heard of people using the Bag of Tricks to throw a random animal into traps
In my 5e game, our Rune Knight fighter used his Cloud Giant rune to escape being dropped to zero, by transferring the hit to their hireling. The hireling, unsurprisingly, was instantly put on death's door.
(Hireling is fine, for the record. I had the DMPC Bard run over and perform first aid. And he probably doesn't know what happened, so the Fighter won't be punished.)
@@davidcopplestone6266 That's because in 1978 you didn't have to worry about the GM or other players getting offended when you treated NPCs as NPCs instead of real people whose feelings should always take precedence over the players.
We miss our puff daddy. Please grace our eye balls with stories aplenty!
Did something happen to him? I can’t find information anywhere on what happened and why he stopped uploading.
@Grimwolf not sure but It's likely burnout. It happens to the best of us and puff puts a lot of effort into his animations. That would take a toll.
@@grimwolf9988 He is in therapy.
Yes, grace our balls, Daddy.
Wait he disappeared for a bit?
The "Spells Resolve After Melee", in my interpretation, was to give Melee characters a chance to prevent a big spell from going off. To allow players that option. Doesn't mean that the DM will always give you that chance, nor will the monsters always get a chance to take a swing at the mage... But its more or less an opportunity for a melee/martial character to stop a cast.
Example: The party is settled around 10 HP after a hard battle, and here comes the last wave. There are two mages in it, plus seven melee. The enemy mages are going to cast Call Lightning and Finger of Death. Your Rogue and Ranger hit the mages, and it prevents them from killing anyone. This also means that, due to AD&D's magic system, they've wasted the components for those spells, making it that much harder and punishing for Spellcasters.
This is due to AD&D's Spellcasters being LEAGUES stronger than 5e Spellcasters. AD&D Spellcasters are only weak from Levels 1-5. After that, they start snowballing, and snowballing HARD. So, this is a balancing decision to allow for Martials and Melee-focused classes to interrupt spellcasting that would otherwise turn them into colored rain.
Later, they changed it to spells being balanced around how long it took to cast, with some spells worsening your initiative, some resolving at the end of the turn, and some taking more than one turn to cast. A _magic missile_ was basically instant-cast, a _fireball_ had an initiative penalty, and so on. And, in some versions, you also had to make a save to cast a spell if you'd been hit earlier that turn, even if you technically hadn't started casting yet.
I'd also contend that, in 1st ed especially, fighters and the like didn't get much from leveling besides more HP and better THAC0, while magic-users were already moving from _magic missile_ to _fireball_ to _prismatic ray_ and _wish._
@@boobah5643 I definitely remember some spells in 2nd edition taking multiple rounds to cast.
It's how real combat would stack. Spellcasters would have to prepare their spell then perform the speech or what have you then the spell would go off.
Like Goku setting off a kamehameha blast. (God this makes me feel silly) Goku stops fighting. does his hand gestures, and speaks the words, then 50 episodes later, his "spell" goes off, and in the meantime, Goku isn't really able to stop or change direction.
Now, unlike anime villains who wait their turn, Gary was TOTALLY into hitting someone before they finished their move.
Today's version, for simplification's sake, works more like Final Fantasy's original active battle system, with each person doing their damage per turn, and in a relatively random order.
Tl;Dr: You attack Raven from Teen Titans while she chants and before she says “Zinthos” and unleashes her attack
One thing to add regarding your example: a fizzled spell doesn't just expend components. It expends the spell slots for the day.
From what I understand, GG ran an open table where there wasn't a set group, but a pool of players that would schedule games. And so he ran his world more like a simulation, and so timekeeping was very important so that player X couldn't "skip ahead".
The bit about aristocrats having other responsibilities hits home for me. I have a player in my campaign who plays a noble. He somewhat usurped the title and deserves it, but it's hard for me to justify him KEEPING his position when he's off adventuring all the time. I allowed him to be related to nobility, but only as a worthless backwater nobody would care about.
Does their character have older sibling's? That could make them a "landed Noble" which gives them a title(they can still put Lord in their name, but have to deal with folk saying "Young" in front of it)...
@@johnnysizemore5797 His situation's a bit weird. He THOUGHT he had siblings. At least 15 of them, all of the royal bloodline (he was meant to be a disowned bastard) but his actual heritage in the plot turned out to be from a shadow puppetmaster king who doesn't actually care about his existence one way or another.
Basically the only reason he was given power over one of his legitimate siblings was that his adventuring had given him enough wealth and supporters to force the king's hand.
The compromise that was ultimately settled on (with a dispute with the legitimate brother) was that he was technically the ruler and had executive power, but his brother would be doing the accounting and have executive power in his absence.
Of course, this is all going on while the country is gripped by armageddon so nobody's really pushing too hard for societal norms at the moment. It'll come to a head later but by that point he'll probably start a civil war or a coup d'etat.
His situation is weird, but I love it.
That's what the rest of the household is for. The point of a feudal aristocracy is threefold:
1. actually be the entity which legally possesses property (putting them into the feudal structure)
2. to fulfill their feudal responsibilities by ensuring their vassals do their jobs
3. to fulfill their feudal responsibilities by doing what they, as vassals, are asked to do by their lords.
but #2 is basically a thing that is often best handled not by individual lords micromanaging shit but by having seneschals, stewards, chamberlains etc etc etc doing it for you. this is *part of the system* because #3 often is going out on campaign or mustering to defend against someone else going on campaign. Note that word: campaign. It's no accident that that's what we call them in RPGs.
Many nobles, historically, are actually pretty close to the much-derided 'murder hobo' cliche. Plenty of them *never* visited all their holdings (see: angevin empire etc), and the feudal structure meant that generally speaking you're supposed to have someone running the place for an absentee landlord anyway. Instead, they're off trying to get *new* lands or fighting for a feudal higher up who is fighting for new lands or whatever. The entire feudal structure exists to equip and sustain the existence of heavily-armed killers who can go on campaigns.
So a random noble off on the other side of the world doing whatever the fuck they want and getting into trouble is actually *extremely realistic and historically accurate*.
@@johnnysizemore5797 in most scenarios, I feel like a variation of this is the answer. Though there are certainly characters that it wouldn't apply to.
Whenever I've played a noble or an aristocrat, from the beginning, in a setting, I just hand the GM the reason why-even if they would have a legitimate claim to a throne, the wealth, and other resources of an entire nation-why they aren't in that position right now. Anything that strips that power away is going to be fair game anyway, in order to prevent most scenarios from becoming a mess. So everything from a cultural right of passage, where they have to make it in the real world without amenities, to exile for any number of reasons, to a complex political or bureaucratic scenario that makes using that power impossible have been justifications I've passed on to the person running the game. It also has the added benetit of creating some intrigue and drama.
Whenever I've become someone who unexpectely landed status of any kind, I generally played into the fact that I can't meet the responsibilities of that station while holding it, and look for a good way to get that power and responsibility into trustworthy hands. I mean, I've got to go save the world, kill god, or whatever.
@@chuth2768 I think a good example is King Richard 1 the Lion Heart, because after he was crowned King only spent like 6 months of his entire reign in England. The rest of his time was in France or fighting Saladin in one of the Crusades.
16:00 I like that Gygax writes it's "easily handled", and the explanation is 265 words long.
The spell fizzle rule is amazing in play and really adds dimension to party dynamics. Spells were a bit more powerful because of it and when an enemy wizard starts up a spell there's an immediate pressure to intercept him before he unleashed hell.
Geek the MAGE!
I'm not familiar with the system so I just wanna ask this, Were there effective ways for a party to defend the wizard or a wizard to defend themselves? Because this seems really cool on the enemy side like you described but I really don't see any reason why the monsters wouldn't just hit the wizard every round so they never got to cast anything. If I'm wrong about this please tell me because I'm interested to see how this would actually play out on a table. I feel like it might make playing spellcasters suck but I've never played this before so I don't know.
@@superkobold54 Who does a bear attack? The Dogs nipping at it or the hunter who is 200 feet away with the rifle?
Intelligent enemies, Humans, Orcs, Hobgoblins, Giants, and a few other things are smart and go after casters first. Everything else deals with whatever is close and hurting them.
A rust monster runs right past the mage and jumps on the fighter in full plate! lmao
@@superkobold54 Mechanically there was no specific way to pull aggro, but outside of 4th edition that's not really a DnD thing. There were several complimentary design choices and play styles that prevented every combat from being attack the mage.
1. Marching order: Always put the squishy ones in the middle. This way front line classes took the brunt of the attacks.
2. Unbalanced attack ability. Fighting classes not only gained extra attacks but much higher proficiency bonuses to hit. This made them the highest threat in many encounter designs as their average DPR could greatly out pace everyone else.
3. Spells were more situational in design and wizards had fewer of them. This was back when cantrip was a first level spell that expressly could not do damage. A lot of times as a wizard you were firing off a crossbow as you didn't want to waste a spell until it was optimal to do so.
4. Hitting after the spell was cast had no additonal effect. There was no beeaking Concentration rule for ongoing effects.
5. No refocusing your action. If everyone attacks the same target and the first person drops that target or that target teleports away that's potentially several wasted actions.
I have fond memories of running games this way, but I will say they are memories. It's been decades so factor some nostalgia in there.
this reminds me of a old videogame i played for a while, if i remember, it was simply called Shaya.
ANY physical attack would make ANY spell fizzle!
which made any spell with a casting time more than ONE SECOND nearly useless!
If there is one thing that should be included in all DMGs in the future is math literacy, dice stats, and probabilities. Not just cause it's important to the game, but it also gives the DM the knowledge to more appropriately balance challenges, and checks; which tends to be a problem new DMs have if they don't already have that knowledge.
Honestly I think that should go into the PHB since it is so important for the basic game.
And one mandatory paragraph titled "Here's why your homebrew critical fumble table IS NOT a good idea," with the associated probabilities.
@@suedenim Whatever do you mean, in my groups the homebrew critical fumble table was a source of great mirth
@@gelu_4499 no, that's definitely more of thing for the people running the game or trying to develop material for it
its really interesting because it shows how D&D NOW is just a different beast however I do think that some of those sections like the one explaining why we use certain dice would actually be kind of beneficial in modern books.
I'd like to see someone to clean it up for 5e and add things in the same vein.
My go at d20 vs 2d10 vs 3d6 as base check: d20 is the quickest to do.
Adding numbers isn't exactly hard, but if you have to do it all the time, it becomes a drag.
Pretty much the only viable alternative is pool based, like Shadowrun and WoD do it.
@@Ksorkrax also the more dice you use to get the same total the closer to average you will get on every roll. A big part of the fun in DnD in my opinion are those random crits and crit fails (crit fails are also impossible with more then 1 dice because you literally cannot roll a 1 total) and the odds of high rolling or low rolling severely diminish with each added dice.
@@caelcdye9575 Know what you mean. Am quite torn about this. Is fun but takes out tactics.
@@Ksorkrax not really just because you can't rely on rolls staying close to the bell curve doesn't mean you can't be tactical. What it means is sometimes plans will go wrong and you have to rethink your tactics mid encounter.
Getting your spells interrupted IS really cool. I remember having to work together as a team to keep spellcasters safe from hits (their d4 hit points also helped). Successful parties were well oiled machines.
It really isn't, though. It's an attempt at balance that doesn't necessarily make sense and can just easily lead to cheap DMs wrecking casters then going down the party list
@@InfernosReaper Sounds like it's a good idea if the whole group is in with it, but no so much if you're playing with strangers, inexperienced DMs, etc, so it really has no place being a standard rule
@@Homiloko2 probably why 3.x introduced the "attack of opportunity" system and a way to avoid that for casting.
also, it kinda seems weird that reach out and touch spells would be interruptible because they are a made to be used in those situations
@@InfernosReaper After you cast touch spells, they stay charged and ready for 10 rounds, or until you used it or cast something else. --But at that point the spell was already cast, so you couldn't be interrupted anymore.
@@Taricus rather abysmal in terms of usability, to be honest.
Gygax: "Alignments have languages."
Also Gygax: "And fuck you if you use them."
Gygax: "Players can't be nobles at game start because that forces the GM to have to have established noble familes."
Also Gygax: "Everyone knows their Alignment Language because it's tied to something relating to religion. GMs have to create that and work it in."
Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman.
It wasn't so much "fuck you for using them." It was more like code switching, to use a contemporary example. A person may change their mannerisms and speech patterns based on who they are talking to. Someone might use more "proper English" while speaking to their employer but keep things informal with friends. Alignment language is all that slang, meme-speak, shorthand and manners that come with being part of a culture. It's what sets an adult linguistically apart from a group of teens and why many adults often sound so uncool when they try to speak to teens using teen slang.
Imagine a bunch of conservative Christians talking to each other. Then an androgynous liberal with dyed hair spouting the latest woke slogans. How do you think the Christians would react?
@@mr.pavone9719 The problem with that is that you can be an alignment without being part of a culture. You can be CE, raised and surrounded by nothing but LG. It doesn't make sense as a concept, because in Gygax's vision, there's no internet or internet analog (for obvious reasons) that could even allow someone to learn another alignment language. Its a silly concept to put in game, and even sillier to punish someone for using it in public per the example in this DMG.
Like, if it were as simple as you put it (and maybe your home games ran it differently than how Gygax meant it), then the example in the DMG wouldn't really make sense. The conservative would turn their nose up, but they wouldn't mark the liberal as an enemy for death just because they dropped some newer slang
It's worth remembering that the DMG was released a year after the PHB, and so it sort of reads like an errata, as well as being a sourcebook for DM rulings about things. It's also not very well organized, as not only are the topics largely in alphabetical order, but Gygax does tend to ramble with his explanations, making it a pretty dense book.
The other thing about early D&D and 1st Edition AD&D in particular is that you can see how much of a wargame Gygax initially created it to be. He expected characters to eventually own land or towers, and how the hirelings and henchmen aren't really people as they are soldier units to be commanded on a battlefield. And then there are all the arbitrary tables.
1st Edition was definitely an incredible game, as Gygax and his friends were making a system that really had little in the way of precedent, but it certainly wasn't perfect from the start. The later revisions have had their ups and downs, but it's clear that a lot of wrinkles have since been ironed out. I imagine trying to play 1st Edition RAW with modern players would only frustrated them, due to all the strange rules and limitations.
Great video, though. I always find it interesting to see folks dig into the past and see how much the game has changed. I know I have plenty of my own gaps when it comes to this.
We first started playing with the Red Box Dungeons & Dragons set - very basic, no extra anything & a lot of the game telling you what you can & can't do, no exceptions. AD&D was a breath of fresh air when we started a new campaign & all the following additions helped to shape what we have today.
Yeah, and certain aspects of the game were straight up changed in the DMG. I believe the PHB claims that the Monk fights on the Thief THAC0 table, but the DMG changed that to the Monk fighting on the Cleric table. Still didn't stop the AD&D PHB Monk from being one of the worst player classes in D&D history though.
Imo that was one of the fun thing about it was acquiring the land and clearing it then the building according to class and then trying to keep it
You hit a big part right there. AD&D was supposed to be a adventure based war game and not so much role playing. Your goals were to gain treasure, land and fame so you could become a ruler and do things which affect and change the world. You wanted to become "somebody" and have power and influence. When you know that was what EGG thought the game was about, you can see how so many of the rules make sense. Charisma was important so you could have more hirelings and they would be more loyal so you could have them go on missions for you or help run your lands and armies when you got there. It is why time is so important as well since multiple groups would be adventuring in the same campaign at the same time so you needed to know which dungeons had been plundered and who was doing what to whom.
i can't help but think of all those 'murder-hobo' horror stories that are posted throughout the internet when i think of first edition because it sounds like such players would love to play something like that since they're already just killing everything that moves anyways.
“Why did you post a massive pile of meaningless words on twitter?”
Literally applies to like 90% of Twitter posts.
Merely 90%? Feeling generous, are we?
The 10/90 rule in full effect.
I think you're being overly charitable
99.999% would be generous.
21:47 That always makes sense to me. Back then you didn't had cantrips and first level spells were way more powerful. The Light spell, for example, was akin a blidness spell with a mininum duration of 1 hour, Charm Person could last for months and Magic Missile was enough to kill a 1st level or even a really unlucky seventh level wizard. You DON'T want a to give these things for free, and if you ever played as or with a wizard in your party, you known why.
Average hp of a commoner was 4. Average damage of a long sword was 4. One soldier could kill a dozed commoners. A knight could kill a dozen soldiers. A dragon could kill a dozen knights. A wizard could kill a dozen dragons.
Okay let me explain segments turns and rounds:
A turn is 10 minutes
A round is 1 minute
A segment is a 1/10 of a round (you'll see why I didn't say 6 seconds in a moment)
Combat is abstracted to where the roll of the dice represents an opening where you can make a decisive blow.
The purpose of segments was to factor in WHEN stuff happened in combat. For example, if I'm casting a spell that has a cast time of 2 segments, but the enemy is acting on the first segment, they have the ability to stop my spell from casting.
The same is true for my go, if the gnoll shaman is chanting and grabbing a component bag, I know I need to stab him or I'm toast.
Your weapons also Have a speed factor that determine WHEN in the round you swing.
Daggers are very fast while battle axes are very slow, meaning the dagger can get potentially multiple stabs in before I can swing my axe.
So if the party rolls a 4 during initiative, and your weapon has a speed of 1, your attack will land in segment 5, which means so long as an enemy spellcaster's spell is resolving AFTER segment 5, you can cancel the spell.
The cool thing is that reach is also a factor, so like if you have a dagger and you're going to be hitting me on segment 4 but I have a Halberd and won't be swinging until segment 7, I will get a free jab at you as you try to close in on me during segment 4. If I had a pike for some reason, I could try to jab you twice before my stab resolves.
It's actually a very clever way of breaking down combat because you're always counting up for effects.
These time measurements are important because it gives you an easy way to understand when certain effects wear off, when torches burn out, how much oil has burned up etc.
It is completely possible to have your torch burn out mid combat and then you have to use the segment of the DMG for blind fighting or attacking invisible enemies.
I personally think it's really cool and clever
I do like the idea of weapons having different speeds. It kinda reminds me of how weapons work in Dark Souls, where for example if an enemy is swinging at you with a big unweildy axe, you have a few seconds to do something while they're winding up the attack, but if someone attacks you with a dagger you have to react immediately.
@MrSuperjosh3 I think that's the best way to describe how segments work, it's basically a "wind-up" like in a souls game or a souls-like.
I did the math on this and it's theoretically possible for a dagger to stab 4 times in a combat round before somebody with a zweihander can swing if the dagger is hasted or on initiative 1 and the zweihander is on initiative 8 or later.
This really changes the dynamic of how certain classes work in the game because fighters can be an absolute powerhouse with heavy weapons and it doesn't even matter if they square up with a thief or assassin that's hasted or rolls well for initiative because they're potentially taking upwards of 12-14 damage before they can land a single blow.
It'd even worse if these attacks are backstabs because those hit on +4 and deal double damage, so we are talking about a potential of 28 damage before the beefy fighter can swing for a measly potential 10 (it's like dark souls, backstabs are devastating)
I really enjoy Ad&d and run it to this day
As a matter of fact I ran a game just a few hours ago
To be fair back in the day almost all the focus was on beating dungeons. I started playing in 1984 and never experienced any serious attempts to craft a story-focused campaign from any DM until I started doing so myself. For most players it really was all about winning and some serious breaks from reality were required to stop them from exploiting the campaign world for their benefit. I think Gygax just wanted to warn DMs what players might get upto and to give them tools to stop their shenanigans.
It's out of place now but back then it was highly relevant
No it's out of place now because you have point buy and standard array which in my opinion suck if I wanted a cookie cutter I'd just play WoW. All stat blocks are standardized and homogenous if a player tells you that he's playing x you know his stats will be y unless you're one of the few that still let players roll their stats.
I disagree. As someone who does min/max, I actually find a variety of stat arrays I can go for with each class. Sure 5E doesn't give as many options as 3E or 3.5E, but there are still some choice as you level up.
Rolling can also just end up with some characters being useless compared to others and cause inter party imbalance.
@@timbroski7517 Honestly I don't have a problem with point buy as an option (As a DM I usually give the group the option of rolled 4d6 drop the lowest or Point buy)
But Standard Array needs to be kicked to the Kerb. It's so miserable and bland
@@timbroski7517 I give an option point buy or 3d6 in order. Every player that talks how you do are the ones that get most pissed when they roll badly even when you use the 4d6 pick method.
@@ArchetypeLuna I have experienced the unbalanced party and it results in people not having fun. People should be able to play the character they want or you will have players trying to kill their characters so they can re-roll. It has actually broke up gaming groups. Point buy is better, it’s a game not real life and there will be plenty of difference between characters it’s just that those differences are chosen by the players not random
In the PHB, assassins can learn additional alignment languages at higher levels. The better to help them go undercover for their missions.
Yeah, that’s how I remembered it.
So as someone who actually plays AD&D, talking about the spellcasters declaring spells multiple segments before resolution here, spellcasters were a lot more powerful in 1st edition, mostly because unlike in 5e, AD&D casters are actually a lot rarer than other classes like fighter and especially thief. In AD&D, fireball deals 1d6 damage per level in wizard, which really starts to stack up if the player reaches higher levels. This makes it so classes like ranged fighters actually need to target the wizard as soon as they can in order to disable him from casting his 1-shot destruction spell that kills the entire opposing party. A lot of people don't seem to like this combat system since they're usually used to all the classes being powerhouses in slightly varying ways, but in AD&D the classes do actually have their own set roles to play, wizards being a very difficult class to pull off. With this system there actually is a whole lot of tactical strategy you need to put into combat in order to succeed, and that's what Gygax was trying to do. In my opinion, he succeeded.
7:54 Holy shit that's the motivation of my first character. He's the youngest son of a noble, and so decides it would be faster to get land by adventuring than by waiting for everyone in his family to die.
I personally think a great Campaign idea is an all-hirelings game. You start out as 0-level folk being hired by an NPC "Adventuring Company", experiencing everything from the other perspective. They could even have Adventures away from the main "Party", stuff that would just be "minor issues" to a Usual group would be big deals to them. Example: a usual party of Heroes wipes out about 90 percent of a Goblin Horde(killing the Tribal leader), Easy-peasy. The Hireling, however, are back in town having to deal with a group of no-nothing Thieves trying to make off with the Party supplies...
You get a little bit of this with Dungeon Crawl Classics, with the idea of the Level 0 Funnel. You still play PCs, but crappy lvl 0 peasants and tradesmen. Many of them, in fact, because the Funnel is a meat-grinder. A harrowing challenge that many _potential_ PCs will not survive. The ones that make it through the other end level up to 1 and become the characters players run with for the campaign. (At least until they die some other way, of course).
@@Bluecho4 that sounds similar to what they do in Warhammer 40k: Only War (I know a little of it from listening to "The All-Guardsmen Party"). Is it any good(from either perspective)?
@@johnnysizemore5797 I haven't played Dungeon Crawl Classics. I just know about the Funnel.
@@Bluecho4 ah, ok.Still sound's neat though...
@@johnnysizemore5797 - Dungeon Crawl Classics is awesome. You don't HAVE to do the level-0 funnel (each player with usually 4 randomly generated zeros) but a lot of people enjoy it. Don't know if I'd start a new group out with it, however, since at level-0 you don't get to see all the really cool mechanics in DCC which start being used at level 1. The spellcasting is basically a skill roll with the results increasing the better you do, and possibly being able to recast it that day. Plus each spell for each character can have some smaller side effect (randomly rolled when gained). It's also dangerous magic, so an exceptionally bad roll can do weird things or even give you a mutation in extreme cases. On the other side of things an extra Deed Die is rolled in combat for Fighter types which can allow extra results such as knockback, disarm, or whatever else is okay'd via 'rule of cool'. Also has a Luck stat for some dice manipulation in time of need, and the Thief/Rogue-types have advantages there. It's a D&D derived d20 system, but uses some extra dice (such as d5s, d16s, etc) for a few purposes.
It's probably the largest mechanical divergence I've seen from D&D (that includes stuff like Pathfinder) but the core of it is still that and is very much in the same tone as the oldest editions, overall.
When considering that spells could be interrupted during casting in AD&D you have to remember that back then concentration spells didn't really exist. Sure, there were a couple of spells that would only last as long as you concentrated, but they were very different from 5e concentration spells because there were hardly any of them, and you literally couldn't do anything else while concentrating. Instead, a spellcaster could cast as many spells with long durations as they wanted to (assuming they had them memorized, anyway), and once cast they would all last for their entire duration, regardless of what happened to the spellcaster after casting. So you can kind of think of interrupting spells during casting as the AD&D version of 5e concentration spells and concentration checks: it's a mechanic that prevents a spellcaster from being able to have a ridiculous number of spells active in combat, even if the opponents don't have any kind of anti-magic.
Yeah. And there were some long lasting spells back then. I don't have an AD&D book at hand right now, but using the B/X D&D Charm Person Spell(which should be pretty close to the rules for AD&D) As an example. The spell Lasted for as long as the target kept failing their save to end the spell. How often they got a save was dependent on their INT. If they had 8 or less INT they could only attempt to break the charm on themselves once every month. 9-12 they got a save each week, and 13-18 Was every day. So at WORST for you if you charmed someone and they failed their initial save against the spell, they would be charmed for 24 hours. But could be charmed...Forever... This was a 1st level spell. A 1st level magic user could find a village of idiots and charm 1 of them every day until the entire village considered them their best friend and ally, and will follow the Magic Users Commands as long as they aren't suicidal or obviously harmful.
@@Entaris Although as an aside, a spell that can functionally lock less intelligent creatures into functional magical slavery for years WOULD explain why a villain's retinue is full of monsters that have no business being on the same side. The villain had one level in Magic User and charmed a bunch of dumb monsters.
What if I told you spell interruptions/failure chances were just the original way to roll for Wild Magic? That means EVERYONE was a wild mage!
Hence the invention of "Melf's Acid Arrow" (created by Gary's son) which would not only interrupt spell casting but the acid lasted more than 1 round essentially taking that spellcaster out of combat for as long as the acid worked. It's been ages since I've cracked an AD&D book so some of the details might be slightly off in my explanation but that's its essence! Very cool idea!
It's also worth noting that casting time was measured in segments. It made the mechanics of a magical duel worth considering. A fast, low-level spell like Magic Missile might be better than one of those shiny "save vs. death or die" numbers like Finger of Death.
I remember when I finally made the jump from 2.0 to 5.0. I remember flipping through the book and saying “hey where’s the THAC0 chart”.
I played AD&D and 1E growing up and I’m really excited to see you engaging with it!!! I remember the first time I played 5E, being thrown off that my bard couldn’t “speak Chaotic Good!”
Technically they didn't go away, they just got renamed. The old Lawful Good tongue is just called Celestial now, Chaotic Evil tongue is Abyssal, etc.
@@joshuarichardson6529 Technically, those are just the languages of the inhabitants of the alignment-driven Outer Planes. Not really the same thing.
The alignment language thing reminds me of negative charisma in a ttrpg my dad played called Tunnels and Trolls. Basically, negative charisma characters are good at interacting with negative charisma characters, and positive charisma characters are good at interacting with positive charisma characters, but you wouldn't have much luck trying to persuade a negative charisma character with a positive charisma score. Negative charisma is meant for more "underground" people, like thieves and orcs, while most others would have positive charisma.
As interesting as this was, every time I read "negative charisma" it reminds me of my nerdy gobbo with a charisma score of -1 trying to seduce big burly men by shouting awkwardly at them.
Still cool concept though, might suggest that to my dm, could homebrew something like that, being less or more persuasive and trusted based on your and the npc's background.
I love reading through old D&D books, it's fun to see the change in design philosophy. One of the biggest changes was human dominance in D&D. I believe it was Matt Colville who mentioned that the Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and Half-orcs having level (and class) restrictions was Gygax's way of showing that these races were basically on their way out (at least culturally). Nowadays the only piece of human dominance that remains in D&D is the fact that the human language is the common tongue.
You are correct; that was indeed Matt Colville.
Uh he can say whatever he wants, it was a balance issue. Non human races got all kinds of bonuses in earlier versions of DND like Elves downright being immune to sleep effects, Humans got..... you can actually reach level 20. Of course you also need to understand that leveling past 10 gave far lower rewards in earlier versions of DND than it does in say 3rd on.
@@DKarkarov but they got free castles and s***
@@BigFootTheRealOne based on class lol, all you had to do was hit the requisite level and have the right connections.
@@DKarkarov Most of the demihuman races can't reach the necessary levels in order to actually get a stronghold (except for thieves who have no racial restrictions except for half-orcs). The only demihumans who can get a stronghold are Dwarven fighters (only if you roll an 18 in strength) who just hit the threshold maxing out at level 9 and Half-orc fighters who max out at level 10. Dwarven clerics can reach level 8, meaning that they could theoretically get a cleric stronghold but 1e RAW states that only NPC Dwarfs can be clerics.
Edit: Ok, I forgot, Half-elves have no level restrictions on the Druid subclass meaning they can reach the level (level 12) where they gain followers, but looking at the PHB they don't seem to get any kind of stronghold.
As a player of primarily older systems I think this was a great overview of some of the quirks of AD&D and best of all he explained the logic behind it and how it fit into the play style of the time AND did so respectfully. Sure, some things are a bit silly but others are things that have been forgotten and might actually be a breath of fresh air for modern players and GMs. Great Job Puffin.
AD&D was full of rules that almost everyone ignored.
- Strict Time-keeping
- Real Time = Game Time
- Weapon Speeds (Not sure if 1st edition had this, but 2nd edition did)
- Alignment Languages
- Spells resolve at the end of the round
One of the big things, for me, about the old Gygax D&D and AD&D is that they were less about the role-playing and more about the dungeon survival. The focus was intensely on resource management and combat. Makes sense, the game he develeoped first was "Chainmail", which was a tabletop war-game, like Warhammer. In that sense, D&D was basically just a war-game where you only controlled 1 character each, versus the DM who had an army.
well, 1 character each and their mini-armies of hirelings (combat hirelings were a thing, you were expected to have so many "meatshields" as a wizard for example). AD&D, combat in particular, was extremely similar to Warhammer 40k's system.
@@darkflame9410 that evolution from wargames to RPGs kinda reminds me of the way MOBAs came from RTS reducing army management games to single characters and molding the inherited systems to better suit the tighter focus
The players being broke and on the verge of starvation is probably the most realistic part of AD&D.
What instantly jumped out at me with the whole 'taking money away from the players' aspect of time is the fact that anything that'd be suitably painful to the players would be extortionately extreme to the non-players, meaning any society with such a brutal system of taxes and prices would be overthrown in a week due to no one being able to survive.
that not true .. is like you are a turist and the npcs is in their hometown sort of thing .. they dont have to play for inn they sometimes hunt for food . the players in outside have to pay to inn fees .. pay to enter the city ... things the npcs dont have too because the have a little home where his and his family lives they never go outside of town why wound they? they work to early little money. But the player just work on adventure with make their down time like a vacation sort of thing. if you think like that the taxes system work and is realist
Yes, North Korea only tolerated the Kim regine for, what, like 2 weeks?
*holds finger to ear*
Nevermind, this checks out perfectly against actual reality :D
Well presumably those other people have their own jobs and their own way of making money. Adventuring is just one way of trying to survive it sounds like
Unless we're dealing with a system designed to extort those that come into wealth while leaving the peasantry relatively unharmed.
Did Gygax assume we'd run a communist game?
its a game, not an economic simulation. the reason its made that way is because early editions used gold for xp, so even low level adventures got ridiculous amounts of money if they didn’t have expenses. this could seriously trivialize parts of the game, especially with how useful hired retainers can be.
The idea of characters having to strip before changing form or size is hilarious and should be brought back.
It kinda does still exist in the Druid's wildshape rules
What it says is "what happens to your gear depends. If your new form can wear your gear, it continues to wear it and reaps the benefits. Otherwise it either falls off your body or melds into your new form"
And I always read this and thought "why not have us have to manually take stuff off to do this? Does it make sense that gear just magically falls off?" Also melding into your new form? Like just absorbed into your flesh? Huh? That always sounded weird to me, like really weird. I don't like doing it.
But it's the closest thing we have
Every time I first see a page of the AD&D DMG on the screen, after awhile, my brain instantly registers the smell of the pages from when I regularly read or referenced it way back in the '80s as a kid. I literally smell the pages in that moment, and for a few seconds afterward. Crazy how memory works sometimes.
Have also got that from a couple other old RPG books from that time, when I see them in videos. The different RPGs each had it's own distinct paper smell when they were new. They do, today, also but due to how much ink is used for the art and background flourishes in modern RPGs, that's usually the smell you get. Not nearly as pleasant as some of these oldies and their tree pulp were.
The flying rules were lifted straight out the WW I air combat game Fight in the Skies (FITS) which was a Gygax design (1975 - TSR). TSR used to mean Tactical Studies Rules.
Fight in the Skies (sometimes known as Dawn Patrol) was designed by Mike Carr. Mike was a TSR employee in the late 70s and early 80s.
@@markparagi8190 thanks for the correction! It's been awhile since I had a copy.
Also a commentary on flying. Most small things in Ad&d had good turn radius which mimics reality. the larger something gets the more ponderously it will turn in flight even doing a 180 requires a creature to come to almost a complete stop(hover) reposition then accelerate. Watch a bird in flight they don't normally just do a 180 it's a gradual turn it's just fast. A gryphon or dragon due to mass wouldn't be able to do what a bird does without plummeting out of the sky so yes I believe his aerial stuff if not perfect is more accurate than 5e. Btw Ben a ghost is a non corporeal being with 0 mass so why would you not expect it to move exactly like that as it flies it's not constrained by gravity as it's totally not there hence the need for magic or magic weapons.
Also those rules were in 3rd too, the game was really focused on making a lot of sense back then rather than being baby's first tabletop game
It's seems odd to me that he was so surprised that there would be rules for flying. Flying is such a completely different form of movement than being on the ground that it makes sense you'd need different rules for how it works and that different creatures would be able to fly in different ways. All the stuff for firing into a melee is much worse and less necessary.
When I played AD&D my GM expalined the alignment language thing as being the equivalent to throwing up gang signs as far as the social faux pa thing.
Wow I never knew! Thats smart!
That's only a faux pas if you're not a gangster among gangsters. They're one of the ways that people recognize each other. That's the point, that Gygax is explicitly saying they're not used for.
I believe his idea for Alignment Language came from Catholics speaking Latin. So like, the only use the language for their rites and speaking known phrases to others 'aligned' with them.
@@elf-lordsfriarofthemeadowl2039 But they also used Latin for all kinds of official correspondence, or when speaking to people from different places, or in scholastic works... it was hardly a closed, secret language that was never actually spoken.
Honestly Common is the more apt analogy to Latin.
They basically never made any sense. Their roots probably come from the Michael Moorcock conceptions of Law and Chaos as these sort of cosmic competing forces. Where it was more than just a sort of code of conduct or philosophy that your character lived by, but rather an actual sort of allegiance to a particular camp in that cosmic battle between law and chaos. It was why when you changed alignment, you actually forgot your old alignment language and learned your new one, as if by magic.
Love this book, one of the best I've ever read. The Gyagxisms are part and parcel for the game without a doubt. It can certainly be confusing but it reads like a conversation with Gary
You need more context. In Original AD&D games (Gary's in particular)
- Characters were disposable. - Chances are your character was going to die.
- You got used to your characters dying (seriously), so it wasn't the end of the world when one died, even high level (see below)
- Players MAKE a lot of characters that they play at different times. (Hence important to know who is doing what as they can overlap, TIMELINES etc.)
- High level characters would 10-12+ They wouldn't be played that much anymore. They'd be dusted off once and a while and if they died it's ok, you barely played them anyway. (Plus you knew it was really dangerous for them.)
- Players would use the resources (reasonably) of their other characters to help jumpstart things. You could be the apprentice to your fighter looking to prove himself. etc.
- Part of the FUN was having crossovers with groups and characters. Those ones that made it playing with the old school gang made it fun. Plus those who didn't make game nights could be swapped out easier.
Please do more of these or look up some OSR books. The alignment languages are sort of a holdover from the works of Michael Moorcock whose literary cannon discussed a constant cosmic struggle between Order & Chaos played out as a massive series of proxy wars across reality and this was a huge influence on D&D and Chainmail it's mentioned in the DMG under Appendix N along with a wealth of other books that were deemed useful or impacted development of the game.
To elaborate on your point, alignment languages were also somewhat lifted from the real life occurrence of religious languages,
For example in certain periods of the middle age, if one were to be catholic, one was to have at least a modicum of understanding of Latin, meaning that two people of a similar religious bent would be able to communicate
@@wizzlewazzle9202 It would have been mainly the clergy, and the nobility, who received an education in Latin, and even then a large portion, if not the majority, during the medieval era barely got even that.
@@armannschelander2725 yes I agree, English is not my first language, what I meant by to be catholic, was to be part of the Catholic structure, not simply one of the flock, apologies :-)
@@wizzlewazzle9202 That's fine, and you're correct that's what Gygax the idea on, but the reality is that at least in the medieval era, Latin wasn't really spoken well or consistently enough for most of the low level clergy to work as a common spoken language
@@armannschelander2725 With regards to Latin, my mother, raised catholic and went to a catholic school, still remembers a bunch of latin phrases. I kind of think of alignment languages like that. It is not a different language but you drop words or phrases in which others wouldn't understand.
Oh boy, that brings back memories. Been about 40 years but maybe I could shed some light on things....
Early on in the book, I believe Gygax says that everything in the book should be considered suggestions and that DMs should tailor their game play that fits their group. Just keep that in mind.
Please remember that the books you're quoting from is one of the earliest forms of a RPG guide so.....
Artifacts and Relics: you forget the part where those are supposed to be unique so only ONE per universe, if you will. The slots for the additional powers would be rolled on a separate chart and would make it more interesting and different for each group that played.
Action: it gets even more bizarre as (if I recall correctly) there was segments, rounds, and turns. I think the round was the basic bit of combat--usually supposed to be five seconds--while segments were parts of a round like you said, and turns would be something like pauses in combat. So a turn would a grouping of several rounds, there'd be a pause (possibly) which would start the next turn, etc. It was needlessly complicated.
I can't believe you didn't cover the armor class rules versus hitting someone. I laughed a little when I learned what the new rules are. (Haven't played D&D in decades)
You glossed over the "fun" part of how magic reacts to other magic and somehow a DM was supposed to keep track of that. Only thing I remember from that time was DO NOT put a Bag of Holding inside another Bag of Holding.
Social Class: Again, DM's Guide was early--he later incorporated social class so as to include cavaliers. I think paladins were also supposed to have a high social class as well.
Taxation and whatnot: yeah, he was big proponent of "Keep the party poor." Otherwise, what was the point of adventuring? I'm reminded of the Conan the Barbarian scene where Conan rakes in a bunch of cash, then the next scene is showing him wasting it all on beer and women. I usually just made everyone subtract 15% off what they had from before and called that "general upkeep" and they had to spend the rest on actual stuff.
Time: I never knew any DM or player that actually followed those guidelines.
Flight: Yeah, he wanted to make flight kind of complicated. However, your hamster in a small hamster plane may be an A class flyer, which meant he could turn on a dime. I think the hexes on that map were supposed to be five or ten feet across. Dragons took forever turning around.
And finally, honestly the original D&D focused more on what I'd call "Roll-Playing" so that might explain a lot. Again, it was charting out new territory. Plus, why would he want to explain to DMs how to set up an adventure? He had all those modules that he wanted to sell. :D
Man, I think I still have my core books sitting around somewhere. I might need to dig them up.
a couple replies on this. . 1. Gary says that the final word on the game is that your rules should be what you need to keep the game exciting and maintain interest. If you're finding rules to be a burden that you should cut as needed. He actually says it very clearly. That you as the dm (since it's the dm guide) should read the rules, understand how they fit together and produce a unified and balanced whole and you should cut and remove what you feel is detracting from the excitement and interest. 2. Artifacts and relics are unique period. Not just one peruniverse. There is one Codex of the Infinite planes in all the realms of existence ... just one. 3. Segments are 6 seconds. 10 segments make a round of 1 minute... a round of combat is the basic unit of combat. Attacks are per round (1 minute) of combat. Turns are 10 rounds. so 1 turn is 10 minutes. Hours are 6 turns (60 minutes) you get the idea. 4. No you're thinking don't put a bag of holding into a portable hole or vice versa. Those two cause black hole like effects. As for time... every dm I knew from 1979 on always kept track of time in the dungeon or outside but generally not the 1 day for every real day thing... AD&D and D&D then was time oriented game because everything took time to do. Travel was slow, training took time. etc. I'd take issue with characterizing AD&D as roll playing. Sure maybe when you were 9-13 years old and you thought that it was fun to attack everything that could be attacked and loot everything you ran into. But after that it became about role playing and outsmarting the dm and the bad guys through superior planning and problem, solving.
why did you laugh when reading about new armor class rules?
@@Slash0mega because back in Ye Olde Days, "the lower the number the better," but in 5e (I believe) "the higher the number the better." Yes, it makes more sense, I imagine, but could imagine gaming with old players and new mixed together? "So that -5, is that good or bad?" "I'm not sure. What rules are we using?"
@@thatjeff7550 They're the exact same rules, only the new stuff (3rd edition and newer) counts up from ten and the old stuff counts down from ten.
Being able to interrupt spellcasting was boss back then. Yeah it meant one of the party fighters usually needed to protect the wizard in combat but the wizard was squishy and needed the protection anyways. What it ALSO meant was that ANYONE in the party could essentially counterspell enemy spellcasters with tools no more complex than a sling: see someone casting on the enemy side, just sling a stone their way and force the enemy caster to lose whatever spell they were trying to throw at you.
It also was there because AD&D Spellcasters are RIDICULOUSLY strong from mid-game onwards. It was there to make Martials/Melee more viable.
As someone who still plays a weird mix of Ad&D and 2cd edition as a wizard it's annoying when my spells get messed up, but it makes things like magic missile be even better
On the strict time keeping, something that was missed was that there were multiple groups playing in the same world. For example if one party finished a dungeon on Tuesday, and then a different party when to the same dungeon on Thursday, all the loot would be gone. So the players had another game they were playing trying to get to the dungeon before any other parties made it there.
That sounds like absolute madness. The kind of thing only the stereotypical basement-dwelling no-lifer would be able to achieve and enjoy.
@@trogdor8764 even they wouldn't enjoy it by the 2nd time it came up
And not only there were multiple groups playing in the same world, but a single player was also expected to run multiple characters. When one of your characters was booked for a few months, you played your second or third, or fourth character - each of them usually in a different time in the adventure. This also meant that player death was not a big deal, and that running a campaign that made ANY sense, was near impossible without strict timekeeping. Gygax was basically singlehandedly running a pen and paper MMO with perma death (and ways to resurrect dead characters)
Your videos had such a calming effect on me. Like a streak of light in a horrible dark storm. I hope we see you come back. Good luck in whatever you're doing right now!
AD&D initiative always struck me as something that would be more fun in a video game, automating all the really weird caveats and rolls. It's way way WAY too wordy and nuanced for a pen-n-paper game. I do like that everyone declares their actions before initiative is rolled however, I've kept that as a house rule for many games in later editions. It really forces people to commit to their actions at the start of the round instead of reacting to what everyone else is doing on a turn-by-turn basis.
That was apparently what they were trying to do with 4e. It was supposed to come with a computer program to help keep track of all the one round status effects/buffs in combat, but development on the software fell through and they just had the players and DMs do it by hand.
Look like a leftover of the older war games the original DnD was built upon. Those where much more competitive. It made sense for everybody to declare their actions at the same time so one player doesn't get unfair advantage by being able to immediately react to their oponent's actions.
That comes from AD&D at the time still sharing a lot of design choices with its ancestor/cousin, wargames (like its predecessor Chainmail, or Warhammer 40k). the combat system is very similar to how many wargames operate even to this day (40k being again a big example).
@@Torlik11 Quite possibly, it's an interesting tactical wrinkle as it means that your actions can be interrupted or rendered ineffective somehow. It really changes the entire feel of planning a combat round. Definitely feels more war-gamey, probably why I like it.
In the optional rules of the 5e dmg theres actually a set of rules that use that, making inititive round by round and having each action have its own inititive + or -
Ben from Questing Beast had good insight on keeping time records. Multiple groups would be playing the same dungeon with the same DM so you had to know where groups A, B, C and D were at all times to see who got what loot. Also, loot was XP, so that make it super important.
One thing I like about it is that there is there there is a sense that there is a real cohesive self perpetuating world outside of the pcs. that there is a sense of fulfillment that things arent formed around you, but you make something with the stuff that is already there. there is restrictions so that things have the due impact and scale. magic items are terrifying and great because you have a really hard time telling their effect. there is an essential tension rather then a circumstantial one. Its making a simulated world that the players are just a part of rather then a world that revolves around players. there is something fullfilling in that sort of play.
idk, i find a lot of this stuff fun. I think a degree of restriction actually promotes a more dynamic game. necessity is the mother of invention.
I think its also interesting to note that the players are not necissaily implied to be aware of a lot of things from a meta sense like even an improve actor might. YOU might die at any time by an innocuous item. The world isnt meant four you, you are meant to figure out a way to get through the world.
having a campaign with basically no narrative sounds weird but it’s how i started DMing and it’s a lot of fun. just have a world with stuff to interact with and watch the players explore
I really like how swords and wizardry explained alignment languages. It's treated as a kinda mutual understanding, not a true language, and you could only express basic things.
Gary himself goes into that in the DMG, stating that they can only express some very basic concepts and little to no detail. I've always (well at least since I've been old enough to think about them critically) looked at them as something like TNG's 'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,' online slang, or modern memes, where they convey information that only the intended audience understands, and which clearly shows you as part of an in-group. If you used them in different company everyone looks at you like either a moron or an outcast. They made a little more sense in OD&D and b/x where the law/chaos axis was based on the cosmic level Moorcockian concepts rather than society/individualism.
Yes, paying taxes is definitely why I play dnd. I love paying taxes, it's so much fun.
When I start seeing all kinds of taxes and tolls like that in games I get suspicious. I get investigating weather they actually represent the government. A couple times I have found bandit groups just setting up official looking tolls to take money. But either way I get kind of murder-y. Dungeon delving is so outside of the regular economy, I never felt it matched well with taxes. I think a better tax is just to say there is a sales tax on the magic items the party is buying with their gold.
Tbh, after a fruitful campaign this might actually be part of the epilogue.
A band of adventurers funding a local business and sorting out their licences and taxes.
You joke, but when I give my players millions of credits after salvaging a battleship, you can be damn sure there's going to be a session where they evade taxes and the space police as they move to liquidate their capital.
I also do have them spend like D6 hundred currency after a major haul or major session to represent cost of living, perosnal expenditure, and other minutia to remind the players that they have the gold to spend and should do so.
You've inadvertently illustrated Gary's point perfectly.
Most things in D&D are fun, UNTIL you have to pay taxes.
@@andrewrockwell1282 There's always that meme about the troll who wants a toll to pay for upkeep on the bridge.
I actually kinda like the declare first resolve last spellcasting. It would help balance casters with melee focused characters, which is something later editions have consistently failed to do.
This really took me back. I bought got my 1st Ad&D set of books in 1980. I didn't seriously start playing again until 5e and was amazed at all the homebrew rules we came up with actually are now common place in 5e.
In older additions it really was just about going from dungeon to dungeon, that WAS the game. You could even take your character from game to game to game. It has evolved to be much more narratively focused over the years as it moves away from it's war-gaming roots. AD&D was in many ways more like 40k.
My dad told me about playing D&D when he was younger, everyone would bring their character who had the weapon of a god which there was only one in the world. And the party would have 6.
Ironic, since 1st edition 40K was in many ways more like DnD.
That was a big part yes, but we ravaged towns, villages, and the planes just as much!
Often times the wilderness and the monsters outside the dungeon were more deadly then the dungeons themselves.
So a game called Dungeons And Dragons is mainly about the dungeons?
Unthinkable.
Believe it or not I actually do enjoy all your videos I've been looking forward to your videos every so often I'm waiting for them to appear
Exactly, i could listen to him talking about going to walmart, or walking a dog, i dont care i just want more
@@sqoody7invegas625 Same. I've been checking for a new puffin video weekly. I could listen to him narrate anything.
Me too !!
@@sqoody7invegas625 "So, our friend was tasked with going on a snack run before our session last weekend. As per our, a-hem, _NORMAL TRADITION_ [draws one person _glaring_ at another person who is sweating nervously and tapping their index fingers together] they were supposed to write each snack request down along with one or two alternatives just in case someone's first choice wasn't available at the store. ONE HOUR LATER, they come back. As they rushed through the door they immediately started apologizing profusely. [In a higher pitched fast paced voice] 'So, um, heh, they were out of Slim Jim's and, um, heh heh, they were out and when I realized I hadn't actually written anything down, I, uh, I grabbed what I thought was a good substitute and and, um......it was this...' My friend then pulls a large pouch of loose meat sandwich seasoning mix out of the bag and slowly sets it on the table...."
[To be continued]
😉
@@CybershamanX that was a surprisingly good impression and level of absurdity. Good job!
Something that really helps put this all in perspective for me is that the reason Gary came up with this rule set is that he wanted something a little more personal than wargaming. A system where people played a single character instead of an army. It's like a first draft of what we see as tabletop gaming today.
I really like the spell fizzling thing because it means there's never a point where you have to ask "why play a fighter"? like you have to in 5e. It gives fighters a chance to fight evil sorcerers, and if a player handles their preparation and positioning well, then they can still cast a spell just fine, but they can cast more spells in more situations if the party has a good fighter to hold the line. It makes an all-caster party a really bad idea in a way that 5e really can't replicate, but then also an all-non-caster party is bad because holy shit you're really giving up a lot.
This talking point about time tracking has been popping up more and more recently. Gygax is describing variable time, which was common in wargaming at the time. Modern readers are missing out on the cultural context of his statements.
He does not mean that all time outside sessions pass 1 to 1 with our time. But for downtime between sessions, and characters outside the dungeon, that time can pass quickly because nothing is happening. You can see this expressed in combat round vs exploration turns. Overland travel can have turns expressed in days, downtime can be weeks months or years.
He actually did mean that it should pass 1 for 1, for one very important reason: Gygax assumes that the average DM is actually a game store employee or gaming club officer running two or three simultaneous games set in the same place. So if your character goes into the dungeon and gets a magic amulet on Monday, if I go to the same dungeon on Tuesday the monsters are dead and the treasure chest is empty. Bubbling off overland travel and downtime into instances was how he suggests you handle that.
"Your wizard will require one month of uninterrupted research to learn this ritual. You're not allowed to play him for the next four game sessions."
No, you're entirely wrong. You are missing out on the cultural context of his statements.
He does in fact mean that at his table time outside of sessions passed 1 to 1 with our time. He is in fact saying that if your PC spends 2 weeks training to gain a new level, that that PC won't be available to you for 2 weeks real time. He is in fact saying that if your PC starts making a magic item whose construction takes 6 weeks, that that PC is unavailable for 6 weeks real time.
This is very unintuitive for modern groups, but to understand why Gygax is recommending that you have to understand the cultural context of his statements - what games and gaming communities for Gygax were like circa 1979.
@@celebrim1 DnD was very communal in that respect. Every player in that group - which could number dozens of players - was part of a single campaign. Keeping communal time not only kept the order of events straight and avoided confusion, it made it seem like they were all contributing to a shared world.
One thing you have to keep in mind about OD&D, BX, & 1st edition is that they are based in the old pulp fantasy stories. So the dungeons were a place of death & only a crazy person would ever go in one.
Also as far as the segment thing, most players that play or played didn’t use them.
I'll second that about AD&D initiative. We always used some kind of house rule to determine who went when in a round. A d6 + Dex to hit bonus was popular.
We used straight d6 doing party initiative. I.e. one roll for the party, one roll for the monsters. Then went clockwise around the table for the party's turn.
You skipped my favorite chart! The Potion Miscability table... this gem would tell you what happens when you mix two potions (usually by swallowing one while still under the effects of another one). It's random, so it might be good, might be bad, might cause an explosion. My GM was pretty savvy when it came to game balance so when our party got a wish apiece, he was ready. So I asked for something (seemingly) innocuous: the ability to sense what would happen when I mixed two potions together.
He agreed.
This was probably a mistake.
My character immediately 'mixed' all the potions he could find with his ability. Now that chart says there's a one percent chance the effects of one of the two potions is permanent. The true magic comes when you consider the combination possible. Let's say you have 20 different potions (not hard if you are trying to get more unique potions, even weak ones). That means you have 190 combinations of two potions. That gives you a GREATER than 85% chance one of those potions will become permanent! With 30 potions it's about 99%. Let's just say in a relatively high-level campaign, I could acquire more than 30 potions.
In the end, my character was as strong as a Frost Giant (+6000 weight allowance, +9 damage(!), etc.), could find treasures, and also fly. Now there's a wish well worth it!
Did you know a version of this table exists in the 5e DMG?
Under the section about magic items and the subsection on potions there is an optional rule about mixing potions that uses a near exact copy of the table. Turns out very few people noticed this. Look into it if you want. As a DM I personally allow players to mix potions and use the table to decide what happens it is still amazingly fun and chaotic
This is fascinating! I am far from a math guy, my brain just has a very hard time comprehending it, but I think I understand how this works and I love it!
Super interesting to see how much the typical game session, gaming group, and general session focuses have changed. Neat.
Looking forward to seeing vids going forward in the timeline.
I feel like over time the basic "assumptions" of why adventurers exist has changed somewhat.
The "why adventurers exist" is so important! As a DM, one of the first questions I ask players about their characters is what went so horribly wrong in the character's life that they wound up becoming an adventurer. Because that's not a normal thing a person does.
@@jeffw991 Why does something have to go 'Horribly Wrong'? Surely there are many reasons to become an adventurer beyond that?
@@jeffw991 That's quite a negative outlook on the PCs. I mean if you start out with the assumption, that your PCs must somehow be broken or wrong to even start out as the quint-essential protagonists of the game, you will run into issues.
Well, yeah, some characters may have such reasons for adventuring instead of, say, have a steady job and stuff. But not all of them.
Imagine, every explorer or conqueror in history was basically an adventurer (the ones, we hear stories of, most likely pretty high level, though). True, not everyone of those brave souls murdered monsters left and right, but they still took high risks for fame, fortune or even just to broaden the worlds horizon - without beeing deranged people, forced into adventuring by some misfortune.
@@robertnett9793 this is for a ragtag squad of people( versus trained large group of people), often going on their own previously, in a world where you can randomly run into a dragon capable of breaking cities. You have to have some sort of death wish for that
@@orionar2461 Well - it highly depends on the game you actually play. in D&D even a Lvl 1 character is more powerful and capable than the average person, just scaling up in power as they go.
So even being a 'ragtag squad of people' they are in fact a ragtag squad of highly capable people.
And yeah, dragons and stuff - but imagine one Alexander von Humboldt - a young academic of his age, rowing up the Amazon river - stuffed full of deadly disease, ravenous animals, canibals and those little fish that nest in your private parts....
And he wasn't even a fighter in any capacity.
People can be driven by a lot of reasons for 'adventuring' - likely the search of riches and fame. But I see it more as an unconvencional way of achieving this goal. Pretty much like modern treasure divers or famous survivalists.
One thing to note about the timekeeping section, Gygax's writings about the passing of time IRL assumes one GM is running multiple games concurrently in the same gameworld. Whether it's real or not, it's this kind of play style that allowed the Head of Vecna story to exist: One group of players lay down rumors and even setup a fake dungeon to hide a fake artifact in the game world just to mess with the other groups playing in it.
As for spells fizzling, remember that magic, especially offensive magic, was MUCH stronger in older editions. We didn't have this namby-pamby +con bonus to hp. Neither did monsters. Most monsters simply had raw d8's for HP, and the numbers didn't go too high. Comparing 2 monsters HP for a moment, let's go with a Barbed Devil.
In 1st ed, it's a 8HD monster which means it only had about 36hp. Compare this with the damage output of a 5d6 Lightning Bolt that does, on average, 17 damage and you start seeing why interrupting the caster was something both the monsters AND the PCs wanted to do: even on a successful save, they've lost nearly a quarter of their HP and are looking pretty worse off on a failed save. Compare this to a CR5 5e Barbed Devil who has 110HP vs that same 5th level wizard's 5d6 Lightning Bolt and the damage scales much, MUCH less comparatively, even on a successful save they've lost maybe a sixth of their HP.
This is why "gank the mage" was super important back in the day: damaging spells HURT back in the day.
Alignment was very much a code of sorts you had to follow-ish. It's only in more recent editions that they laxed up on it, but in Ye Olden Days changing alignment usually had huge penalties attached to it since it involved since it was considered a somewhat mentally traumatic event as you are changing your worldview and attitude. Another thing of note, Law (and the other alignments), in the alignment sense, is also less of a theological or moral/ethical question but something akin to an actual physical properly objects could have. You could have lawfully aligned weapons. Word of Law could kill or seriously hurt people who weren't lawfully aligned. There are entire planes of existence made up of raw lawfulness and creatures that eat and breath law just as we drink water and breath oxygen. Also: yeah alignment languages were dumb. No argument from me here.
One more thing to note: the current focus "muh narrative" or "muh story" is a relatively new thing in the TTRPG sphere. that's not to say it was never there, White Wolf's stuff has been around for ages, but the larger focus on narrative and crafting a story in a general sense has only been adopted by the greater mass of RPG players i'd say in the last 10 years or so. You didn't go out to craft a villain or write out a campaign. Those would, at best, grow naturally from the player's interactions with game elements: a goblin manages to run away and comes back with a new, bigger warband for revenge. In the old days, you adventured because there was adventure to be had. That was your villain.
You didn't need any more motivation then "there is a dungeon, it has treasure and I am the sort of person that would relieve the dungeon of it's treasure". Sometimes there was a strange happening going on: Farmer John saw a spooky ghost in the fields, well we're Good-aligned folks and as such we help people in trouble, so off to go ghost hunting! Does the ghost have anything to do with the nearby dungeon? Is it a dead adventurer tilting at windmills trying to slay imagined ogres and giants, unaware of it's death by the very ogre it tried to slay ages ago? sure if the DM decides to link the 2, but sometimes a dungeon is just a dungeon with an ogre at the end and sometimes a ghost is just a dead guy being a jerk.
Old D&D really just cared about "Adventurers Adventuring". Anything more was up to the group.
aside from the stat comparing, all of what you said was subjective to your experiences and not the game as a whole.
Oxybe, solid use of tilting at windmills, I don't get to read that expression in such an appropriate context often.
Tom, point to a specific subjective thing he said that wasn't already framed as an opinion.
Its kinda weird to look back on this cause the meaning of the word RPG has changed a lot. We modern players see D&D and think it's what Final Fantasy wishes it were, and I love that, but I figure Gygax and the likes would much rather it be Diablo
"One more thing to note: the current focus "muh narrative" or "muh story" is a relatively new thing in the TTRPG sphere."
D&D modules with a strong focus on telling a story have been around since at least AD&D 2e, where popular modules like Dead Gods and The Great Modron March were super-railroady.
Dead Gods came out in 1997, so that's 25 years, not 10.
@@kaleidoslug7777 not to be rude, but did you play FF1 ever? Or Diablo 1? I’m actually trying to know which games you’ve played so as to engage you in rhetoric. For funsies. I will now offer the information I requested.
I started on FF8, had to work my way backwards to play FF1, and on D2, but the battle chest with D1 and whatnot, so I’ve had a decent amount of time in that space in the 90’s-00’s.
FF was pretty fringe before 7, and Diablo has stayed pretty consistent over the three so far, so it would be normal to not really get that they were both literally based on D&D, except Diablo was a step removed. Diablo was based on a game by Avalon Hill, competitor and eventual subsidiary to, Wizards of the Coast. That game was developed as an indie D&D game that got licensed for a reskin to become a “new IP.” It was real-time computer-game D&D.
If we carry the discussion my next move is to convince you that both first games in those series not only wished to be D&D like you said FF did, both of them actually are Gygaxian campaign formats, like you said Diablo is. The West March and the Delve.
After all I've learned about DnD lore over the years, alignment languages remain the strangest thing. Thanks for going through all this! Very fun stuff.
The restrictions on how you discover what items do reminds me strongly of roguelikes, where you have to test unknown potions or magic items carefully to avoid hurting yourself in the process. That's definitely something I'd consider using in a campaign.
I am frankly not sure why do people find alignment languages confusing. But I believe I can easily explain it by giving you an example from Lord of The Rings.
Sauron and his forces would be able to use the black speech. A language is so vile and terrifying that even Gandalf, who could technically read it, wouldn't dare do so in Shire. On the other hand we have the elven language, the language of good, the mere sound of which would make evil creatures shudder. In fact, they were so confident about that, that they trusted that anyone who can say the world "friend" in an elvish language can safely enter Moria, as clearly they are not of the evil alignment.
@@RancorSnp Yeah but here's the thing with alignment languages. They're not languages of factions. They're just languages that everyone of a given alignment auto-magically knows and if you ever change your alignment you automatically forget the old one and learn the new one. They're not learned knowledge like a regular language, they're something cosmic that you are literally only capable of using and understanding if you are that alignment. It likely comes from the writings of Michael Moorcock, where Law and Chaos are actual cosmic metaphysical forces fighting for control over the universe, and were actually allegiances people could have. So whether you're a lawful evil beholder, a devil from Avernus, a lawful evil drow elf or a thief that just shifted alignment to lawful evil, you can all communicate with the special lawful evil language and understand each other.
The AD&D rules have this old charm to them. Like the cursed items, combat, and even the idea of taxes are so odd but do ad a cool dynamic to the game. Outside of certain things, I rarely see anyone worry about time or why the lord of a country is off in a dungeon for 4 months not ruling their land. The amount of effort put in is astounding. Say what you will about older systems being rough, but Gygax really did make something amazing.
The return of the king. First RUclipsr I watched when I got into dnd
I legit had to change my pants when I saw he had a new video up.
Two things:
1. The DMG doesn't have much to say about campaign/world building, because Gygax published a the Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds series of books on just that.
2. Castles & Crusades is what Gygax wrote after splitting up with D&D, you should read it if you want his later opinion on tabletop RPG. It's still my favorite.
Which book from Castles & Crusades did he write?
@@ThemildmanneredgamerBlogspot none of the rulebooks as far as I know. He was in an advisory role at the company though. He did write a campaign book or something for it, at least
I'm actually going to be running some 2nd Edition AD&D with my nieces and nephew today (hopefully). 2nd Edition cut out a lot of the weirdness that Gygax put in (but not all of it), and put more of an emphasis on role playing (though it was still very combat/adventure oriented). So how am I starting them out? With a dungeon crawl, of course! (They're kids, and they're just getting started. They'll get there.)
I like that take on combat, with spells being so powerful now, it actually makes sense to have martial characters later into the campaign to protect spell casters and interrupt enemy ones. Otherwise beyond lvl 3 it’s better to have magic then a dedicated martial class. I might try this….
"Why did you post a massive pile of meaningless words on Twitter?"
You mean just... using Twitter?
I started playing the game in 1979, and the AD&D DMG was one of the first books that I owned. I poured over that thing as a kid and a teenager, and one point I might’ve had the book memorized. Despite its quirks, despite its flaws, despite the fact that I’m still playing today and I prefer 5e and modern editions, I believe it is one of the best RPG books ever written.
One of the things I like most about the 1st edition DMG was the random dungeon generation tables.
It is interesting to see the rules being more or less written with the thought that the players are playing a game to win and not that they are roleplaying a character and how that just dramatically shifts the tone of everything. Its honestly kinda cool, and i can sorta dig the bit of gritty dungeon diving that hes going for here.
I've had the pleasure of playing 1st edition with my Dad and Grandfather, and I got to delve into some of how DMs used to handle stuff. I feel that much like modern games, DMs would choose whether or not to include rules based on their player base.
A lot of games have rules that just don't work for certain groups, and sometimes a DM may need to make new rules or redesign elements of the game to help make their game fun for everyone.
My biggest issue with the AD&D rule books was a lack of organization. Charts and descriptions for things would be scattered throughout the book, and my Dad's copy didn't even have an Index at the back; he had a separate page he had typed up that listed pages for different commonly used rules.
This was a fascionating look into the book that started it all. The bit on the taxes was especially interesting. In the few campaigns I've played we ended up acquiring so much wealth that purchasing something as mostly up to the DM if it was available to buy, price was not an issue. This is also a reality that enfeebles many video games I've played over the years, all too often money loses it's value because you accumulate so much of it. The tax concept is an interesting concept that's hampered by how complex it can get. It really hits home how big of a nerd Gygax was that he created an entire tax code in his ground-breaking fantasy role-playing game.
PDM has a system of lifestyle upkeep instead of taxes. 1 gp per level per day/week/month as the gm feels best due to relative wealth in their world.
I started playing in 1980. Back then, it was common to duct tape the PHB, DMG and MM together into one great book. Memories...
It's fundamentally flawed in my opinion. How is everyone else in this society coping with these ridiculous taxes?
Presumably, the adventurers are gaining more wealth than they would gain from a normal profession because adventuring is dangerous, and if the reward wasn't worth the risk no one would be an adventurer.
But then you're saying the taxes are so high that adventurers are always at risk of starving to death. Therefore, how do normal people whose safe occupation earns them less money not end up sucked dry by these same fees that they presumably would also have to pay?
And the whole thing about tying your character's lifestyle expenses and adventuring opportunities to the progression of real-life time is just insane. Oh, you need to work overtime for the next couple weeks because of the nature of your job and can't play? Take comfort in knowing that when things get back to normal and you're eager to start playing again, your character will be destitute and starving instead of just, I don't know, autonomously taking odd jobs around town to pay for their lifestyle expenses so that your character is in the same state you left it.
@@trogdor8764 It's really simple if you stop and think about it. Taxes from dungeon crawls were recommended to be 50%. You loot 10,000 coins and 5,000 are taxed, leaving you 5,000. The average person (commoner, peasant, serf, etc.) lives in a world of copper and sometimes silver coins, rarely sees gold coins. They work 10-14 hour days, 7 days a week. There is no mass production lines, nor refrigeration to keep food cool to last more than a few days after being harvested.
It isn't that taxes are so high that adventurers are starving, it's adventurers have to pay for food & lodging. After all, they're nomads without a place to stay and rarely find their own food, so they're paying for inns and food.
Your whining about time is just short-sighted. If you can't attend to play a game for 2-4 weeks, but everyone else plays during that time, why should you just be allowed to keep all your money? Do you keep all of your money from paycheck to paycheck? No. Because even if you live at home and don't go out, you still have bills to pay. And if you're like most people (and you seem like it), then you're living paycheck to paycheck and must work (or for PCs, go on an adventure) to maintain your lifestyle.
I miss your videos man, hope you can get back into it
Matt Colville did an explanation of why the that edition of DnD is the way that it is. Most of the reason is that DnD is based on a war game, but Gygax didn't want it to be a war game. Which is why thrown/ranged weapons are called missiles (terminology that was familiar), why there is aerial combat, why he didn't like hit location, and why combat is the way it is.
The biggest motivator may be poverty, but Gary would have their biggest enemy be the IRS. Just like in Ghostbusters, their biggest enemy was actually the EPA. So... government! Throw all the dragons and liches and beholders you want at the players, the only enemy they will never actually defeat no matter what they do is government.
Players: "I might be crazy enough to take on Vecna, but the IRS?!! No thank you!!!"
Considering Gary’s real life political views, that makes quite a bit of sense.
@@legomaniac213 Vecna became the God of Evil Secrets so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes. That’s it. That’s my next campaign.
Jokes on you, we are going to over throw the establishment
@@legomaniac213 irs to vecna: we see you got your self a new super weapon and an army. But your tax records shows us you don't have this kind of money. Did you ...lie about your earnings?
Vecna: oh fuck ho shit
Ya gotta love the early days of D&D. The 1st ed book was published in 1978. Four or five years (depending on when you start counting) from the first publications of the game. AD&D is, at this point very close to the origins of taking Chainmail heroes into the tunnels below a fortress and playing them as individuals instead of running entire warbands and companies as a commander. Lots of assumptions we make now in what is a tabletop role-playing game weren't even considered as a part of the game back then. There's a lot in the DMG devoted to managing a campaign with the presumption that players run their characters almost as a "stable" rather than as personalities. The idea that you went over to Gary's house and played your Ranger exploring the woodlands on Wednesday meant that character probably wasn't going to be available when the gang got together to explore the ruined keep on Friday Night. So you had multiple backup characters to use. Ranger Bill is off exploring the Murkey Forest, and the party really needs a Thief on Friday, so I'll play my Halfling Thief Janice.
Stories from that era abound of players from around the Lake Geneva WI area sneaking over to Gary's house on off-game nights to take a few hirelings and explore or loot a few rooms under Castle Greyhawk while no one else was around. All of those time-management rules were evolved from trying to keep a handle on those shennanigans.
G.G. and D.A. are masters, that first DM's Guide was amazing it has everything in it. Although 2nd Edition is my choice out of all of them.
Ah nostalgia. I used to read this book when I was 10 and almost had the whole thing memorized.
Too bad I only ended up playing a few one-shots using this system.
Sameish; I got the book D&D Rules cyclopedia when I was a kid, and read it up and down so much that I still always name my main desktop computer encyclopedia ~30 years later. (Yes, the name has apparently warped a little over the years)
I main ADND and its great to see people go back and look at what came before, and what we see nowadays was built on.
I like 2e a lot. For me 5e is too "same-y". I mean, every class have an ability to hit for at least a d6 or d8, you don't have that much skills, stats matter a lot more so playing as average Joe is not really possible and overall 2e have more options. Also - crit tables and cool fighting styles.
@@GrimmerPl 2e is probably the edition of D&D I think has the design I like best. Thought I don't really play D&D anymore. Dungeon Crawl Classics lured me in and sunk its teeth in too deep for me to ever go back. Lol
I think it's really cool to look back on this stuff, but there's definitely a lot of design philosophies in this that I don't agree with.
Going back is super important because DnD has evolved so much. Honestly, when old school fans say "Modern DnD isnt DnD" they're kinda right, what was played back then is DRASTICALLY different than modern styles. A big part of understanding that is the context, which I feel is only partially represented here
To answer a question left in the video, yes, that was the story. Going into the dungeon
The story is whatever comes out of play. It's a fun style, if that's your bag. So, it makes sense why you wouldnt have advice on narrative structure
I think it’s important to remember that dnd was just a more involved war game. The game was the combat and crawl. The role playing was an assumed secondary. Combat was the main focus and the immersive life sim out of combat was a minigame to keep it going.
The ideas around dnd have changed so much over the last decade. Using the constricted and harsh rules of ad&d with a modern mindset is an amazing experience if you have the time and the want to struggle through a second life in game.
Really love the time rules. Not only does it keep the players coming back every week so their character doesn't starve off screen, but it means your group will really try to clear the dungeon in one session. No hanging around a goblin infested cave for a week!
By my understanding, the assumption was that the group would head back to town at the end of each session. Otherwise, it would be possible for other groups run by other players, to stumble upon the player-less PCs, slaughter them, and take all of their stuff.
The most interesting aspect of ad&d 1st and 2nd was the initiative system, it's less intuitive at first but in practice it's meant to let everyone participate toghether. The rotative initiative that systems use today wastes a lot of the groups time focusing on one character at a time.
THAC0 also had a reason of why it was like that, it wasn't just ramblings of crazy people.
I can't believe I had to scroll this far to see someone reference THAC0 tables 😆
Really, it's just a DC to hit. It actually makes bonuses a lot easier to keep track of because it's applied to THAC0 before any dice are rolled.
You just add the roll to the target's AC. If you beat your THAC0, you hit. If you didn't, you didn't. I never got why so many people seem confused by it.
@@daviddaugherty2816 Well, it always confused me because whenever I tried to look up the rules for it, I couldn't find them. Took me literal years to find out that in 1e, only monsters have THAC0. PCs just have attack matrices in the DMG.
AD&D 1st edition did not use THAC0. Books might mention it, but fundamentally the system was chart based, you rolled and compared to a chart, with modifiers added in.
@@japanimationman4442 It's like this, in 3.5 or later you have an Attack Bonus, you roll the dice add the bonus and compare to the enemy's AC, if the result is larger you hit.
Now imagine you're fighting the same monster for several rounds, what you do instead of rolling and adding everytime, you take the AC substract you Attack Bonus and you get the number you have to roll to hit. You do the math once and before rolling anything.
THAC0 is just the same thing, take your THAC0 substract the AC you get the number to hit. You have to do it only once and you don't have to add anything to the rolls.
I think one really important point to draw from this is the inspiration from wargaming. Especially the combat order. In a lot of older wargamers (and still Warhammer because gw hates us) have one side move all of their units in phases. In Warhammer, it's command, movement, magic, shooting, melee, morale. The focus on starting as a regular foot solder moving to being a lord commanding an army essentially turns it into a wargame. You can see it everywhere in these early editions.
I'm surprised Puffin didn't mention that gold = xp. That underlying factor explains a lot of the design elements and assumptions about play. It's why dungeons were central to the experience.
Also, it was very common to have multiple characters that one played on different days, so the loss of any one character wasn't as impactful as with today's style of play. Thus, meatgrinder dungeons were very similar experiences to today's roguelike games.
As it relates to interrupted spells, i'd recommend trying playing with it. It's actually a pretty awesome rule, as it gives the fighters/melee combatants a reason to protect spellcasters (in addition to spells just generally being super powerful). Basically, because a spell can be interrupted by damaging attacks, you have to prevent the spellcaster from being hit or else the party loses the powerful advantage having a caster gives. The barbarian can't just rush in headlong and do whatever--there are serious tactical disadvantages to doing that. Etc.
Plus, it gives initiative a lot more impact.
That said, initiative in AD&D is very complex and many disagree on exactly what the rules mean in how it runs. So the interpretation put forth here, while not wrong, is also not exactly right. It isn't clear whether spellcasters begin at segment 0 and cast on the casting time segment, or if they begin on their initiative roll segment etc.
Thank you puffin for getting me into D&D!
My first experience with D&D was joining a 2nd edition game at the tail end (around 1999), and game balance did not seem to matter much. I was a paladin and another player was a ranger and we were consistently 2 levels behind everyone else because our xp totals for each level were skewed. When 3rd edition came out, it felt like like a completely different game.