Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

I've got a copy of the re-release s4 module of this still in the box of D&D stuff I inherited (kinda just took with me.....) from my dad. 1st edition ad&d with the stacks of hand written custom tables and rules they created over the years is still my favourite way to play, when I can find people who'll play it with me.

I remember as a kid just sitting there going through his d&d collection. He's got so many random things scattered in there. I used to love just reading the dungeon modules and the books looking at the maps and artwork and reading through the books.

I'm kind of disappointed with the way the game went after wizards of the coast bought up d&d. I never really liked the 3rd edition rules and the books, though beautiful and colourful, weren't as appealing to me. There was something about those dark gritty black and white line drawings in those older books that still looks better to me.

As far as I can tell now, it's not even really the same game any more. It looks more like a pen and paper version of an mmorpg than d&d these days from what I can tell by the bit i've looked at the latest rules.

It also seems to focus on being a 'hero simulator' rather than being a sword and sorcery adventure simulator than it was before. I've always prefered low fantasy sword and sorcery stories to the long sprawling wheel of time style epic sagas. Stuff like Conan and Michael Moorcock's books. That's what the game used to be more like.

I was very lucky/fortunate enough to be able to play D&D with the Gygax family on the weekends up in WI during high school.

Gary was letting his sons run the campaign and was just playing himself, but so much of the game's immersion came not from the rules but from how an experienced DM knew when to focus on the rules vs. focus on the story. Players can get in the way of this, but "good" gaming groups generally have a collective sense for when to focus on game play and when to shut up and let the DM develop the story further.

The net result is you actually make substantial progress instead of spending the entire session letting someone who thinks they are clever pick fights with random townsfolk that they want to play out in gory detail and otherwise derail the adventure. Yeah there are ways to deal with people like that, but my point is when you have a group where you don't need to, magic happens.

There are of course times when you want to stress rules because they add to the story. Case in point, I have fond memories of Gary walking me through volumetric calculations to help educate me that "no, the fireball does not only hit the kobolds, you also managed to nuke your entire wounded party."

The 'hero simulator' stuff really came in with AD&D 2e, when the writers started trying to wedge in stuff in a way motivated less by the heritage of D&D and more because D&D was the only tabletop system they knew and they wanted to stick to it even when doing so didn't make much sense.

The trend continued into 3e, which got transformed by pieces into a quasi-generic fantasy system with elaborate rules for all kinds of things that were totally incongruent with the original dungeon-crawling tone, like pointlessly elaborate oversimulation of monsters (who cares that a CE aberration has a +3 Craft modifier?) or entire social debate systems.

4e backtracked on that trend somewhat by throwing away most of the superfluous detail about monsters and the unnecessary minutiae of modeling every aspect of a PC's life, but a lot of fans got pointlessly mad about it using condensed formatting for combat abilities and about how spellcasters no longer got to break the game with 3e's take on high level spells (which had all the remaining limitations and balance points from AD&D 2e stripped out in the name of streamlining rules), so we got 5e, which in a lot of ways uses the guts of 4e with a more bounded math (one of its few improvements) and abilities rewritten to be more wordy, plus spellcasters get 9th-level spells again.

My personal favorite in the field at the moment is actually Pathfinder 2e, which despite originating from a mostly-clone of 3.5 (Pathfinder 1e) actually does a lot of interesting stuff by mixing bounded math and more AD&D 1e-like hard limits on safe casting and magical effects with well-defined mechanics, huge amounts of character customization, and character roles both in and out of combat designed to encourage and require teamwork for the best results.

I would like to point out that there is a movement within tabletop games to create new games that are either refined clones of old-school D&D (particular B/X Moldvay-Cook D&D) or capture the spirit of those older games.

It's called OSR and stands for Old School Revival/Renaissance. Titles include: Old School Essentials, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, and many others.

Oh cool. I hadn't heard of any of that. Thanks I'm going to check out some of this old school tabletop revival.

We have a subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/osr.

It's worth pointing out that Lab Lord and Swords & Wizardry have free PDFs, and emulate the Holmes-era/pre AD&D rules, with optional "advanced" rules. Old School Essentials is reputed to be the best organized restatement of the B/X rules. OSRIC is meant to be a restatement of AD&D 1e.

That was more 4th edition. 5th ed is less MMO-centric but it definitely has elements from newer RPGs like inspiration and mechanics like advantage to minimize the need to track lots of small +1's. There are variants in the core rulebook that make 5th ed much more like 1st ed in terms of lethality.

I'd argue that 4e was closer to 'sword and sorcery' than either 3e or 5e, given how it took away campaign-altering 9th-level spell access, flight abilities as a default assumption of combat at high level, easy access to whole piles of miscellaneous magic abilities, etc, from PCs.

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