Kicking Dungeons and Dragon Old School

[Lago_AM3P]

So I've been playing a lot of the older D&D-style games lately like Wizardry, Shining in the Darkness, Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Realms of Arkania, Eye of the Beholder, soforth.

And I'm just wondering--just what sort of ratio of dungeon to everything else (town encounters, diplomacy, town building, investigation, etc.) was D&D expected to have in 2nd and 1st edition?

I mean, while I know it's easier for a game to just be nothing but dungeon and fighting, a lot of the above stuff appeals to players. But in contempary D&D games, the standard dungeon crawl seems to have fallen out of favor with a lot of groups. Complaints are various, but I have been in games where there hasn't been one dungeon (or psuedo-dungeon such as a forest without having flight) to traverse in.

What do you think?

Also, while we're on the subject, what were the best classes to be in every game prior to 2nd edition? I know we went over this in 2nd, but I want to know if things changed back in the olden days. Were monks any good?

[RandomCasualty]

Backing judgments about 1E and 2E is tough, mainly because there were so many things out of the PC's control, like collecting magical items, and learnng spells for wizards. Getting a belt of giant strength made fighter types very powerful in 2nd edition, but there was no guarantee you'd ever get one.

I'm not sure if it's even possible to have actual balance debates for 2nd edition, because we were never even sure how many magic items a PC party was supposed to have.

[power_word_wedgie]

Honestly, even in first edition, I don't think that there was much town encounters to dungeon ratios. Usually, you didn't know of a dungeon unless you went to a town to similar situation t know where they were. Sometimes it meant going to the local sage or library to know of a old dungeon to just going to the tavern to learn of a new one. Really, for that respect there isn't much difference. The change was to add mechanics to diplomacy. In the old edition, you were pretty dependant on asking the right question to find the answer. In the new edition, you just roll a high enough score.

RC is right in general about power - there was no real guideline to magic item distribution or creation. Sometimes, the fighter got lucky because all of the magic items found would be geared for a fighter. In the old edition, having a scroll was a much bigger deal than the new edition. Furthermore, since there wasn't really any concrete magic item creation rules per se, many DMs would run it that you couldn't count on running across a particular magic item that you were searching for. Thus, you couldn't always count on one class to be "overly powerful" versus the next.

However, there was some classes that seemed to jam more than others. To start off, the ranger rocked because you got to start with 2d8 hit dice. Also, paladins weren't too bad as well. However, there were minimum attribute requirements to qualify and the experience points bonus ability requirements were really steep for those two classes. Conversely, the wizard somewhat sucked starting because you couldn't count on maximum hit points at first level - if you rolled a "1" on a d4 and didn't have an extremely high constitution, you only had 1 hit point. Hope that rat in the corner doesn't take you out. However, at high level (10th level and beyond, to me it seemed that the game belongs to the wizard. (or I should be saying magic-user ... sorry))

Also, the game counted on the fact that different classes required different XP requirements to go up a level. So, though the thief and fighter were a little weak versus the other classes, (a) they required much less XP to level and (b) their XP bonus ability requirement were pretty low.

Thus, I really can't tell you overall which was the "best" class in first edition.

[dbb]

The "standard" game in early 1st edition (and pre-1st edition) essentially revolved around a dungeon. And not even a series of dungeons -- one big dungeon. You'd have a town somewhere nearby that the PCs could use as a base, and occasionally this town would have some minor subplots relating to it, e.g., spies or assassins who worked for some group of campaign villains, a rivalry between two merchants, etc. Town was a place where you could heal, learn rumors, pick up (mundane) equipment, sometimes trade spells with the local wizard, and so on -- it was rarely (almost never) the center of action in the game, and on those occasions when it was, typically this was in a castle or other single large dungeon-like building.

And then there would be a ruined castle or something off somewhere, with n-many subterranean dungeon levels, that the DM would map out and stock with monsters and treasure, and PCs would go in and kill things and come back out and try again. People would routinely spend their entire adventuring careers trying to clean out just one single dungeon complex. It was generally expected that a large group of players would be involved in the same campaign, and that different combinations of them would show up at different sessions -- so it was totally normal that you might locate a particularly rich treasure somewhere and have to rush through the planning to get there and loot it, just in case another group of players found it in the meantime.

"Investigation" adventures were basically nonexistent in the early days -- if you couldn't kill it, disarm it, or rescue it, it wasn't likely to show up in the dungeon at all. Sometimes you might run into people or things who weren't what they appeared to be, but it still basically boiled down to kill, disarm, or rescue, once you figured out which was which. The closest you'd get to an "investigation" adventure was if some rich person hired you to go off and find out whether there was something cool on a mysterious island or in an abandoned city. Almost inevitably there was, and almost inevitably it turned out to be something that needed killing.

All you need to know about the centrality of dungeons to early D&D is encapsulated in the fact that when the Basic Set came out, it did not cover wilderness adventures at all. You had to buy the "Expert Set" to get the rules for wilderness adventuring at all. (In White Box, they were part of the main set, and also in AD&D -- but they weren't really fooling anyone, and they knew it.)

Later on -- when "Dungeon Modules" became more prevalent -- the "one big dungeon" standard also diminished, because it was damned hard to cram a single huge dungeon into a 32-page booklet. Even then, though, the influence of that style of play was still heavily felt -- things like the Temple of Elemental Evil (basically 10 large interconnected dungeon levels) and Queen of the Spiders (basically 12-14 large interconnected dungeon levels), while they had some connective tissue to them, remained basically one big dungeon that happened to have its levels somewhat scattered.

--d.

[dbb]

About the best classes.

PWW is basically right in that fighters were much better at low level. But wizards ramped up really fast, and if you lived to 3rd level, you were pretty much assured of being at least as kickass as anybody who happened to be swinging a sword. Essentially, it was a short crawl on your tongue until you got 2nd-level spells and more than one spell a day -- then it was all gravy.

It broke down like this:

Wizards were the best class, period, after third level. Damage spells were actually good, so the lack of a lot of what is now the Illusion school didn't hurt nearly as much as you might think. Your hit points sucked, but so did monster damage. However, you needed a really good Intelligence, because this was what governed your ability to learn spells, and if you failed once, you never (almost) got to try again. In 2nd ed, you got to try once a level and most of the Illusionist spell list got folded into the Wizard list, so they were even better.

If you couldn't be a wizard, you probably wanted to be a cleric or a druid. You were some use in a fight, and you still had some decent spells, and most importantly, you were everyone's best buddy because there were no god sticks and very few potion shops, making you pretty much the only source of healing. Being a cleric assured you of cooperation from most of the rest of the party, because you would think nothing of withholding healing from them if they pissed you off; and it also gave you some things to do with the few spell slots not committed to healing magic. Which you had to do, because there was no spontaneous conversion. As with the wizard, you needed a high Wisdom, but in your case 14-15 was enough, as that was the point above which there was no chance of your spells randomly failing every time you cast them.

If you couldn't be a wizard or a cleric, you probably wanted to be a Ranger or a Paladin, because you got a whole bunch of abilities over a regular fighter (Rangers did + their level in damage to basically anything that was Humanoid, Monstrous Humanoid, or Giant) and didn't lose out on much of anything. Both required some really high attribute scores (the Paladin needed a 16 or better in Charisma), so typically what happened here was that characters who rolled well got even better by qualifying for classes that didn't suck.

If you couldn't be a wizard, cleric, ranger, or paladin, you wanted to be a Thief. Thieves had very little control over their abilities (they all just increased like a spell chart, whether you did any lockpicking in play or not), but they got to use swords, and they got damage multiples whenever they hit someone from behind, which was kind of fun.

If you couldn't do any of the above, you'd be a Fighter. It may be hard to imagine, but fighters in 1E were even worse than fighters in 3E. 3E Fighters don't get much in the way of class features; 1E fighters didn't get any class features at all. You got hit dice and saving throws and a good attack chart and that was it. The only vaguely good thing about your class, multiple attacks, was shared by Rangers and Paladins, who had a slightly tougher experience chart but also were generally more use.

Assassins, Illusionists and Monks were weird cases. Assassins got a chance to instantly kill anyone they obtained surprise on, so if your DM felt like letting you play evil characters, you'd probably play that in preference to a thief and possibly in preference to a paladin. Illusionists suffered from the fact that there were no clear rules about how illusions worked at all -- so you'd find out how your DM was going to handle them, and then you'd either want to play one as much as you would a wizard, or you wouldn't play one under any circumstances.

And Monks were terrible at low level and pretty good at high. Unfortunately, two things meant that they were mostly just terrible:

- Most campaigns never got past about level 9, which was just the point when they started to become decent;

- Every time a monk gained a level past 7th, he had to beat up the monk one level higher than himself (there was just one monk, period, of levels 9-17; three at level 8). If you lost, you might die (always a risk, especially if fighting an evil monk) or you might merely lose enough XP to put you back to the bottom of your previous level. If you won, you had to go through the same nonsense again next level, plus your DM could totally screw you by having the lower-level monk come and challenge you whenever he felt like it. So pretty much unless you were playing in a one-shot game that started around 8th level, or you really trusted your DM not to screw you over, or you didn't play with the monkish combat rules at all, or you were really bored -- you didn't play a monk.

--d.

[RandomCasualty]

Honestly I always considered the thief to be the worst class in 1E/2E. Backstab was pretty much total garbage and your hp were awful. I'd really take a fighter over that any day.

The fighter wasn't terrible in 2E. Granted not nearly as good as a paladin or ranger, but still pretty good. I mean, tanking was pretty useful back then, because the idea of a buff cleric or buff wizard pretty much didn't exist back then. So the only guy that could be a front liner was a fighter. Also there wasn't any clever fighter hosing mechanics like reach. You just rushed in there and started chopping.

Especially in 2E with weapon specialization, fighters were pretty good actually.

Clerics were pretty weak. I mean back then they were just the heavily armored first aid tent, and not good for much else.

Wizards were a crap shoot, they had some awesome spells and they had some spells that were ass, but you had no real guarantee that you'd ever see any of them during the game, since finding spells was a lot like finding magic items. Also, you didn't get bonus spells for int, so wizards ran out of spells quite a bit. You were sittig there with only 1 or 2 of your highest level spell prepared. Still, you could always rest after each fight if you so desired.

1st edition wizards, if you eve rgot to 11th+ were incredibly powerful. 2nd edition magic resistance toned that down a bit. I found that in 2E, fighter types tended to be the strongest, since magic resistance and high saving throws basically rendered wizard spells near useless.

Keep in mind that there was no way to pump your save DCs, so guys would save agaisnt your fingers of death real easy at high level. The best chance was actually throwing volume at the enemy, which was why the most deadly PC killer NPC party was a bunch of 3rd level clerics all throwing hold persons. Seriously, even against high level PCs, this was a nightmare. Hold person was the TPK spell.

[power_word_wedgie]

dbb brings up some good points. The more I think about it, the only thing that was worse than the 1st level magic-user with 1 hit point was the 1st level monk. He's right about needing the DM not to be a jerk at higher level, but really that went with many other classes - fallen paladins and atoning clerics were always in the victims of the jerk DM.

The only other thing that came to mind is to keep in perspective that there was no point buy. If your DM is being a real jerk, it was 3d6 for each ability - if he was being reasonable then it was 4d6 and drop the lowest d6. Even with that rolling scheme, there was a good chance that you would not meet the minimum requirements to even qualify for the ranger or paladin classes. Also, note that the XP bonus was a huge deal in 1st edition since XP were much harder to come by than 3rd edition.

[power_word_wedgie]

1148096250[/unixtime]]Clerics were pretty weak. I mean back then they were just the heavily armored first aid tent, and not good for much else.

Well, clerics still had the ability to turn undead which was cool even back then and you didn't even need to pump your charisma to make it effective. But, yeah, since you couldn't spontaneously change your spells to curing spells, you were pretty much pidgeonholed into making a fair amount of your spells curing spells. Cure Light Wounds wands and scrolls required a little more effort in 1st edition that it did in 3rd edition. Staves of healing rocked as well as rings of regeneration.

Also, as a side note, do yourself a favor and disregard the last 10 pages or so of the 1st edition PHB. The bard class was basically unplayable and psionics were overpowered (maybe that was the reason why you had basically a 1 in 100 chance of having psionics).

[dbb]

Honestly I always considered the thief to be the worst class in 1E/2E.

Not in my experience, but you had to be careful. Toe-to-toe melee would get you killed right quick, but skirmish tactics would work out to your advantage. The best part of being a thief, however, was just that you got abilities. At all.

Clerics were pretty weak. I mean back then they were just the heavily armored first aid tent, and not good for much else.

Well, no. Remember, too, that this was before all that fancy critical threat range and crit multiplier stuff, and also before most of those fancy attack-bonus and damage raising widgets. So getting armor equivalent to a fighter, weapons that were virtually equivalent, and hit points that were only slightly below actually made you a quite decent combatant.

And, like you mentioned, clerics had some pretty sweet save-or-dies. Since there were no Cure spells available at 2nd level, you could afford a lot of Hold Persons, and oh boy would your party love it. Clerics weren't as good fighters as fighters, the way they are now; and they aren't as good spellcasters as wizards, the way they are now; but they were #2 in both, and #2 in spellcasting was still way better than #1 in swording.

Wizards were a crap shoot, they had some awesome spells and they had some spells that were ass, but you had no real guarantee that you'd ever see any of them during the game, since finding spells was a lot like finding magic items.

You got to pick a new spell every time you levelled, so you could rely on getting access to some good spells. You couldn't rely on learning them, of course. But it was a rare wizard who by 7th level didn't either know Fireball or had failed his "learn Fireball" check. Most of them had done that by 5th.

Keep in mind that there was no way to pump your save DCs, so guys would save agaisnt your fingers of death real easy at high level.

Sort of. Remember, while you couldn't make your spells harder to resist, it was also much harder to improve your saves -- and the save charts ended, so the best most monsters could ever do was to save vs. spell on a 6+. That's pretty good, but it's still failing 1 in 4. Not that you'd bother with Finger of Death, anyway -- that counted as "Death Magic", and fighters actually got a better save chart against that. Finger of Death was a chump spell.

And "save for half" spells were actually worthwhile. If a 20th level wizard rolled average damage on his fireball three times in a row, that would kill most 20th level fighters -- even if they made all of their saves. The average 20th level fighter had only around 85-95 hit points.

--d.

[Hey_I_Can_Chan]

If you couldn't do any of the above, you'd be a Fighter. It may be hard to imagine, but fighters in 1E were even worse than fighters in 3E. 3E Fighters don't get much in the way of class features; 1E fighters didn't get any class features at all. You got hit dice and saving throws and a good attack chart and that was it. The only vaguely good thing about your class, multiple attacks, was shared by Rangers and Paladins, who had a slightly tougher experience chart but also were generally more use.

True, you were largely featureless, but both 2nd and later 1st edition had weapon specialization, which was mostly limited to fighters and improved the only thing they could do anyway, which was… um… fight. Was it the 2nd-edition dart master who got to throw, like, 8 darts a round for 1d2 + his damage modifier, which could be upwards of 4? (You might be laughing at that--don't! Fighters could hit almost anything and being able to dish out 44 points of damage in round killed a friggin' troll in 1E).

Really, what you wanted to be in either edition was an elven fighter/magic-user. You split your XP between two classes, but because advancement essentially stopped at 9th-11th level anyway, this meant your advancement in two classes continued. You could even go fighter/magic-user/thief, but your character sheet looked like hell and everyone resented you.

Also, you were the only one who could cast magic-user spells in armor.

By the way, everyone so far's right: the game ended at 11th because the experience charts descended into madness. In the 2nd-edition game I was in my wizard reached 10th level, starting at 5th, after, like, 5 years of play. I did the math. It would've taken another 3-4 years to hit 11th.

But that also meant you were playing for fun not teh w1n!, so there's something to that, I guess.

[RandomCasualty]

1148103809[/unixtime]]
And, like you mentioned, clerics had some pretty sweet save-or-dies. Since there were no Cure spells available at 2nd level, you could afford a lot of Hold Persons, and oh boy would your party love it. Clerics weren't as good fighters as fighters, the way they are now; and they aren't as good spellcasters as wizards, the way they are now; but they were #2 in both, and #2 in spellcasting was still way better than #1 in swording.

I dunno, I really don't remember many great save or dies for clerics, besides hold person, and HP was somewhat substandard as a PC spell, because it worked only on humanoids. Though it was the ultimate spell against the PCs since all of them were humanoids.

Mostly though cleric magic felt pretty crappy in 2nd, maybe the clerics that I saw were just garbage, I don't know, but I never seem to recall them doing much of anything but resist fire and heal spells, and maybe the occasional silence spell.

Aside from turning undead, clerics didn't realyl seem to have much of a combat role. There was flame strike at 9th level, but by the time you had that the game was getting over with anything, and the wizard's fireballs were actually better anyway because he had more of them.

[dbb]

The main problem with being an elven anything in 1st edition was that if you died, you weren't coming back, because Raise Dead didn't work on elves.

The other problem was that you needed very high stats if you were playing by strict rules; you were limited to a 5th/9th fighter/magic-user unless you had 17s or 18s in Strength or Intelligence. If you could get 18s in both you could manage 7th/11th, which was about as high as the game would ever go.

In 2nd edition elves could be brought back to life and the racial level limits went way up, and being a multiclassed elven fighter/magic-user was indeed the best deal going, except possibly for dual-classed humans. There is a long-standing tradition of D&D designers with a slobbering adoration for elves.

--d.

[dbb]

Clerical Save-or-Die spells in Core 1E:

1st: Command (as back then, it could be any one-word command -- including "Die!", which made you fall to the ground in a helpless cataleptic state)

2nd: Hold Person, Silence 15' R (as this was before Silent Spell, and nearly all spells had verbal components, this was effectively a save-or-die for Magic-Users)

3rd: Cause Blindness (even nastier then, when Blind-Fighting/Blindsense/Tremorsense didn't exist), Bestow Curse (not exactly a Save-or-Die, but certainly a Save-or-Severe-Pain).

4th: Poison (an actual save-or-die in 1st Edition; none of this attribute damage, if you blew the save you were dead).

5th: Plane Shift, Slay Living (if you must)

6th: Harm

7th: Holy Word, Wither (reversed Regenerate), Destruction

If you get into Unearthed Arcana wackiness, or 2nd Edition, the lists improved some -- like with "specialty priests" who could get the use of some wizard spells. But even in core, a cleric had at least one spell at every spell level that would pretty much remove an enemy from combat.

Now, it's true that they had a really poor selection -- in that "at least one per level" would be more accurately described as "usually, one per level". The extreme disparity in saves against different types of spells (Fort/Ref/Will) wasn't present then, though, so that wasn't as big a deal.

--d.