The Gaming Den

Hicks wrote:I would not wish any man's name be associated with that book. I believe that if Gygax stole it from Arneson, and he did, Arneson was blessed by fate to not have his name be on that book, such is the utter FAIL of 1e.

1e AD&D was not written as much by Arneson because the version that was written by Arneson was OD&D which predates even that. By a long time, even.

My father used to say over the 1e AD&D DMG that it was by itself a crime against humanity and the hobby that he would never ever forgive Gary Gygax for because it was something that could not be forgiven. (Interesting note: now that they are both dead it can be seen as truth that he in fact stuck to his guns and never forgave Gygax for that). His contention was that back in the late 1960s and early 70s his friends would play D&D but that the game was extremely haphazardly written being essentially just a pile of fanzines full of unedited rantings. So with the announcement a few years later that TSR was going to compile all the rules for D&D, edit them, and put out a complete game in hardback form - the entire community was in a lather of anticipation. Finally a chance to get everyone on the same page playing the same game. Characters would be transferable from campaign to campaign and all would be right with the world.

Well fuck that. And fuck you too for reading this piece of shit, was apparently Gygax's answer to everyone. From the beginning of the book where Gygax has an editorial about how anyone who wants to play a monster is an incorrigible power gamer trying to ruin the game for everyone, so if someone wants to play something less human than a dwarf you should let them play an adult gold fucking dragon at first level and then send impossible challenges against the party to kill their character and then repeat until the players use their psychic powers to figure out that if they make weakling humans and elves that you will stop TPKing the party; All the way to the end of the book where it hands out psychic powers on a random chart where a first level fighting man can seriously start with a version of disintegrate that apparently allows no saving throw, and then encourages you to repeatedly TPK any party with psionic characters in it by dumping psychic monsters way above their level into the action until the players are relieved when none of their characters can move spoons with their mind. It's basically a fuck you to the hobby and a fuck you to all the players of the game.

AD&D broke the hobby. The hobby used to be called "D&D." Now it's called "Roleplaying." And the 1e AD&D DMG was bad enough by itself to cause the entire hobby to distance itself from its own name.

-Username17

I came into the hobby too late to catch anything more than the tail-end of 1st Edition. By the time I arrived on the scene, all the people I was playing with - who were a few years older than me - were basically using a massive set of their own house rules to make some sense of the massive set of house rules that was 1st Edition, and that's how I knew it. I don't think I even laid eyes on a 1st Edition rulebook until I'd been playing for a year or more; the older guys said it'd only confuse me because they "didn't play it like that".

When 2nd Edition came along, it seemed to use many of the rules we'd always used and as such wasn't a terribly painful transition. Years later, when I read the 1E rules properly, I recall being rather surprised that anyone stuck with D&D long enough for 2nd Edition to come about, it was that bad. From Frank's rant, I gather I wasn't the only one

Yeah, my introduction to RPGs was a hugely homebrewed 1e AD&D.

Seriously, we had feats, spontaneous divine casting, max hp at first level, and a large number of other 3.0 innovations long before it was published.

Frank wrote:My father used to say over the 1e AD&D DMG that it was by itself a crime against humanity and the hobby that he would never ever forgive Gary Gygax for because it was something that could not be forgiven. (Interesting note: now that they are both dead it can be seen as truth that he in fact stuck to his guns and never forgave Gygax for that). His contention was that back in the late 1960s and early 70s his friends would play D&D but that the game was extremely haphazardly written being essentially just a pile of fanzines full of unedited rantings. So with the announcement a few years later that TSR was going to compile all the rules for D&D, edit them, and put out a complete game in hardback form - the entire community was in a lather of anticipation. Finally a chance to get everyone on the same page playing the same game. Characters would be transferable from campaign to campaign and all would be right with the world.

Wow, they were really selling everybody a bill of goods back then. Of course, now we know that AD&D was supposed to be as different from OD&D and Red Box as possible, since the goal was to cut Arneson out of the royalties.

So, are we going to get into the spots of D&D where Gygax's dirty old man desires accidentally got out onto the page?

I heard about the courtesean chart, but surely there must be others.

And while we're on the subject of dirty old men, I heard way back when on the WotC that Mr. Greenwood once wrote a story where someone used Evard's Black Tentacles on one of Elminster's female companions and Elminster was like 'err durrrr huhhh'.

For a while, Gygax's dirty-old-man tendencies had a legacy all their own. In the blue box rules (BD&D from Level 4-14? IIRC), they had a list of the kind of amenities the DM would want to put in a typical town. A brothel was among the services listed. In a game labeled for ages 10 and up.

I wonder if we can ever get Hicks to rant about the 1E DMG again sometime.

Because that, my friend, was distilled nasty. Case close.

FrankTrollman wrote:AD&D broke the hobby. The hobby used to be called "D&D." Now it's called "Roleplaying." And the 1e AD&D DMG was bad enough by itself to cause the entire hobby to distance itself from its own name.

By itself? Surely you could elaborate on the other causes.

Speaking of which, what was up with that Girdle of Feminity/Masculinity?

With no exaggeration on my part, that seems like an item that would be directly lifted out of FATAL. Not so much the gender-bending part, which is a valid fantasy trope, but the part where the item goes into excessive wanky detail trying to trick you and be irreversible and all that as a prank.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Speaking of which, what was up with that Girdle of Feminity/Masculinity?

With no exaggeration on my part, that seems like an item that would be directly lifted out of FATAL. Not so much the gender-bending part, which is a valid fantasy trope, but the part where the item goes into excessive wanky detail trying to trick you and be irreversible and all that as a prank.

The entire edition does that. That's just it blending in.

I remember rolling up a "Slovenly Trull" or something in the old DMG, when I was a kid.

Wasn't until YEARS later I knew what that was, best I guessed from reading the dictionary (I was very young), was a female.

Had to search Google for Slovenly Trull...
http://www.toplessrobot.com/2008/06/the ... m_harl.php

1) Slovenly Trull

A trull is just another synonym for prostitute, so we have to focus on the “slovenly” here. Frankly, there a lot of adjectives they could have picked to describe this breed of whore—dirty, messy, filthy even—but slovenly indicates this whore has an utter contempt for her own appearance and well-being, and is likely covered in filth. There is absolutely no way the Slovenly Trull does not have some kind of venereal disease. Should your character drink too much mead and decide to pay up the two coppers and insert his wang into the Slovenly Trull, only a critical success on a Saving Throw will prevent his penis turning black and falling off in 1d4 days

Damn, I've so lost my innocence, I know what all the words mean now.

Hicks wrote:There is nothing nice to say about the 1e DMG.

Page 230 - Succubus titties.

Josh_Kablack wrote:

Hicks wrote:There is nothing nice to say about the 1e DMG.

Page 230 - Succubus titties.

Win.

What were the major campaign settings of 1E and 2E D&D, and how good were they in your opinion?

Aside from Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, I'm vaguely aware of Mystara since that's what the D&D arcade games use--and is also somehow apparently the biggest influence on fantasy anime. I can't prove that, I've only heard it on the grapevine.

Of the top of my head, there were also:

• Dragonlance
  Dark Sun (desert setting with higher attribute range)
  Ravenloft (demiplane of scary stuff inspired by classic module)
  Birthright (the PCs rule their own countries)
  Planescape
  Spelljammer (space-based setting)

Now, I never actually got to play anything but FR and Greyhawk, so I have no idea about the quality of the settings.

Oh, and except for Dragonlance, all of these were 2e settings that weren't around in 1e.

Neither have I, but I've looked into some of them and their 3e conversions.

Dark Sun has a hell of a lot of psionics in it, magic is mostly evil and the world is ruled by ancient dragon Sorcerer Kings. The world was converted into a desert by the actions of Corrupters, wizards who draw power by draining the land.

Planescape is set on the Great Wheel. There are a whole bunch of different ways to play, ranging from philosophical debates in Sigil to running around the Nine Hells killing Pit Fiends.

Spelljammer is a mix of retarded and awesome. If you want to play Star Trek in D&D, it is the setting for you, but it also includes some really dumb shit. Like anthropomorphic hippos and miniature giant space hamsters. If you ignore that stuff, it is apparently possible to have a really fun game there, but every time you mention it, someone will laugh at you for playing a game with miniature giant space hamsters.

I think Absentminded Wizard's list is pretty much complete, though there was also the Maztica, Oriental Adventures, and Al-Qadim. They were Aztecish, Eastern, and Arabian settings, and all of them attached to the Forgotten Realms continent. If you picked up the semi-autonomous mongol themed Horde boxed set you could seriously put the FR maps, Horde maps, and Oriental Maps together and take up an entire floor but have them all fit together quite nicely.

Dragonlance had a couple of sub-settings, the primary continent that everyone hates and a completely separate continent called Taladas that I think was spared from most of the shitty plot of the other. I'd like to say it wasn't bad, but I haven't looked at it since I was 11 and we weren't really using it as written.

Ravenloft was a horror setting where you weren't supposed to make a substantial difference in the setting, just help as much as you could before darkness overwhelmed you. It broke at mid-high levels because no one in the world was really a credible threat. It survived the transition to 3.0 as a third party setting, and I think they did alright with it, though it's been years since I looked at it.

Birthright had a weird mechanic where all of the PCs pretty much had to carry the blood of the gods and had to have countries to power them. It sounded interesting, and a friend had it, but we never actually got around to playing it so I can't say much more on it.

Dark Sun, Spell Jammer, and Planescape were pretty much pegged by zeruslord, though Planescape remains my favorite 2e setting for all of the shades of gray that the setting invites.

I really enjoyed Dark Sun. That setting was a lot of fun.

I can't imagine how someone can trash spell jammer as containing stupid shit (which it does) but in the very same breath call Planescape and The Great Wheel a deep philosophical setting of coolness without mentioning at all any of its vast amount of stupid shit.

Spelljammer at least had coolness. Something Planescape could never aspire to. Planescape also had a massive focus on totally broken cosmology and alignment systems in really stupid ways. And that wanky city with emo girl.

Nitpick:

zeruslord wrote:Dark Sun has a hell of a lot of psionics in it, magic is mostly evil and the world is ruled by ancient dragon Sorcerer Kings. The world was converted into a desert by the actions of Corrupters, wizards who draw power by draining the land.

Defilers.

And there were Preservers (the good wizards), and if you played a human Preserver and leveled to 20 in Preserver, dualled to Psionicist and leveled to 20 again, you could complete an epic quest and transform into an avangion (good counterpart to evil dragons). Srsly. That, in a game that advised to keep a stable of replacement characters on hand and had rules about leveling them offscreen.

And PL, I don't understand what's wrong with Planescape. It takes D&D cosmology, which is admittedly childish, and builds a deep philosophical setting of coolness. So what? Superhero comics have a much longer history of stupidity. I mean, I haven't been exposed to comics as a kid and now I cannot take the characters seriously in a 'mature' story. But if you can stomach D&D, you shouldn't have a problem with Planescape.

Planescape did one thing wrong. It went the way of Paranoia with factions. The modules were written with the assumption that the characters would betray each other in order to complete their respective factions' quests. That was obviously incredibly stupid and very much in line with other examples of TSR idiocy.

And there were Preservers (the good wizards), and if you played a human Preserver and leveled to 20 in Preserver, dualled to Psionicist and leveled to 20 again, you could complete an epic quest and transform into an avangion (good counterpart to evil dragons). Srsly. That, in a game that advised to keep a stable of replacement characters on hand and had rules about leveling them offscreen.

Though I never played Dark Sun, I did look at a copy of somebody's high-level supplement once. IIRC, all the stuff was about how the world really conspired to screw you over beyond 20th level. Basically, no matter what class you were, you were now a threat to somebody who would try to track you down and kill you.

And a lot of what I've heard from other people is that combat wasn't so bad, but you could seriously die of dehydration in the desert.