Tell Lago a story! On the history of D&D

[Lago PARANOIA]

Anyone in the mood for telling me a ridiculously long story about how the game got started in its earliest, earliest days, the major differences between editions, and fans' reactions to 'em?

[Crissa]

A long time ago, they had these things called books. We collected them into places called libraries, in which you could check out a story without someone else's help.

Roleplaying as a passtime has always been around. Putting rules to it is a modern invention of the 70s, where fantasy novels collided with fantasy wargames where someone said 'hey, wouldn't it be fun if my hero did...' and they were off in the running.

Boardgame clubs became roleplaying game clubs. This sounds like something out of the blue, but it's not - back before the internet or tv, people had clubs, they went to them for entertainment which was cheap. So some clubs played chess and some played games derived from war, and others played monopoly... And eventually, waves of D&D came forth.

The first waves were Chainmail, Dungeons and Dragons, Tékumel :: The World of the Petal Throne, and Traveller.

-Crissa

[Josh_Kablack]

Saying roleplaying originated with Gygax and Arenson is like saying comics originated with "The Yellow Kid". And if you don't know what's wrong with that, you need to go read Scout McCloud right now. Seriously, this post isn't going anywhere.

I'm sure you can find older instances, but the scene Shakespeare's Henry the IVth part II, Prince Hal impersonates Falstaff in front of a group of young dandies struck me as very much what we think of as ROLEplaying today.

In the 1800s, Kreigspeil emerged from older root games (we're talking back to at least Sun-Tzu) as a part of military training for European commanders. In the early 20th century, HG Wells (of War of the Worlds fame) wrote Little Wars the first wargame to be published in book form and a major milestone in hobby wargaming.

[Lago PARANOIA]

In the early 20th century, HG Wells (of War of the Worlds fame) wrote Little Wars the first wargame to be published in book form and a major milestone in hobby wargaming.

Why don't we start there, then?

[TavishArtair]

Jeez. The man asked for a history of D&D, he didn't ask for a history of RPGs. If he wants a history of D&D, let him have a history of D&D.

The first D&D was... well, D&D.

But now we call it OD&D. It was essentially a set of roleplaying rules, and very, very simple and straightforward. You chose race, class, and had levels. You had stats but no one gave a damn about them... they had no effect aside from an EXP bonus. This means that there were very few inherent modifiers that you had to anything. Weapons all did a d6 of damage. HD were there so your Fighting Man could be literally worth five dudes at 5th level. Everything was highly abstracted, and you only attacked once a minute (each round being that) not because you only swung once a minute, but you could only get in a good hit once a minute while you danced around on footing. This strong layer of abstraction would be carried into all later editions until 3rd Edition.

The first classes were Fighting Man, Magic User, and Cleric. It also was compatible, more or less, with a lot of Chainmail rules, such that you basically could use the games together after a fashion. The first supplement, Greyhawk, made it a lot more like AD&D, introducing thieves, a few (small) bonuses for stats, varied weapon damage and Hit Dice, and multiclassing.

But OD&D forked in development, afterwards. There are two entities, the first of which I will cover now because its lifetime was much shorter, "only" a decade and change. The Holmes Basic set was essentially the reduced version of OD&D, narrowing it down to just the first 3 levels, and has a small few-page expansion for another 3 levels floating around somewhere. There were racial class restrictions that basically made almost all members of a race as a single class setup, with either fighters or thieves.

This was the root of development for the Basic/Expert D&D release, which is when we have "Basic" D&D come into being. At this point the level of abstraction remains high, and race and class are collapsed into a single entity. The Basic D&D release was written by Tom Moldvay and the Expert by David Cook, thus leading to the Moldvay/Cook title.

Then the BECMI edition or Mentzer edition was released. Basic, Expert, Masters, and Immortal. These each covered increasingly high levels. Also, as I recall, there were increasingly goofy character selections, like goddamn Treants and stuff like that.

This was summarized and errata'd into the Rules Cyclopedia, which was the first and apparently last appearance of D&D as a one-book game. This is more or less the end of Basic D&D's fork.

The AD&D fork is what we all really hear about, though. AD&D 1st edition had races, classes, druids, rangers, paladins, psionics, the works. It gained more as time went on, in an increasingly confused jumble of rules, including Unearthed Arcana, which added a bunch more stuff. There were a number of multiclassing options as before, but now dual-classing, a strange system wherein a human player is allowed to stop advancing in one class and pick up another one, like a bizarre version of 3e D&D multiclassing, except also with different EXP tables, for maximum confusion.

In AD&D 2e, we gained a major rules revision. This game is part of why a number of mistakes with 3e were made. For one, saving throws, as they had in 1e, just got easier and easier to make, so that heroes of high level were rarely killed by dishonorable means, or, say, ones requiring a saving throw. It required a truly bad stroke of luck, the natural 1, to fell most characters around 20th level due to petrification or whatever. Instead, it was preferable to actually unload your highest damage effects and grind away at someone's hit points. Also, warrior-types in general had an improved attack rate, dealing out several attacks in a minute, with single-class fighters getting even more with specialization. A fighter with improved haste was really one of the most lethal things in the game.

Midway through AD&D, there was a major rules release equivalent in many regards to "3.5" midway through the line. It included a bunch of errata and a new series of "Player's Option" and similar books, that greatly expanded the possible content of the game to the point it was basically impossible to include it all.

Then, 3e D&D, and you probably know the rest.

[Crissa]

Ten years ago you could still buy three editions brand new. Box set (D&D), AD&D, and AD&D 2ed. Then Wizards revamped their purchase...

-Crissa

[cthulhu]

Honestly I think for the better. I mean AD&D 2nd edition was pretty medicore, and players option swung wildly between badly written and badly balanced.

Or both.

3rd edition was an improvement. Sure it got lots of things wrong, but it got lots of things right. Within the commerical constraints they faced, not sure what they could have done to much better (aside from fixing some spells)

[Murtak]

3rd edition was an improvement. Sure it got lots of things wrong, but it got lots of things right. Within the commerical constraints they faced, not sure what they could have done to much better (aside from fixing some spells)

Playtesting farther than level 10.

Seriously though, you are right, 3rd edition was a major improvement in pretty much all regards.

[Koumei]

it was preferable to actually unload your highest damage effects and grind away at someone's hit points.

You know, I've heard of this strategy in a D&D game before, but what was it now...

[bosssmiley]

James Mishler's Chartistry: A History of D&D has commentary on the various editions, and a family tree of pre-3E editions, variants & spin-offs

[Roy]

it was preferable to actually unload your highest damage effects and grind away at someone's hit points.

You know, I've heard of this strategy in a D&D game before, but what was it now...

Wasn't really a grind back then. Gods didn't even break triple digit HP, damage spells did the same damage they did now or more. Auto attacks did less, but you could move and still be relevant, so even something like 1d8+6 became meaningful since you were spamming it several times at your max to hit bonus. Also, stuff like flaming was naturally very good, as 1d6 means a lot more when you only have to auto attack your way through a few dozen HP, and not a few hundred.

[TavishArtair]

I was using the phrase in the sense of putting your enemy into a millstone, not putting your own nose to a grindstone. However, your contention that gods didn't have triple digit HP is... bizarre. Especially given that 2e used the paradigm that gods are untouchable beings and you cannot actually kill them, just their avatars.

[Roy]

I was using the phrase in the sense of putting your enemy into a millstone, not putting your own nose to a grindstone. However, your contention that gods didn't have triple digit HP is... bizarre. Especially given that 2e used the paradigm that gods are untouchable beings and you cannot actually kill them, just their avatars.

Maybe that was 1st edition. Lolth = 66 HP anyone?

[Ganbare Gincun]

3rd edition was an improvement. Sure it got lots of things wrong, but it got lots of things right. Within the commerical constraints they faced, not sure what they could have done to much better (aside from fixing some spells)

Playtesting farther than level 10.

Seriously though, you are right, 3rd edition was a major improvement in pretty much all regards.

I disagree. In 2nd Edition AD&D, the game was set up in such a way that martial characters had both better saving throws and hit points in order to offset the fact that they didn't have godlike powers at higher levels. The SoD and SoS spells that broke 3E weren't a huge problem in 2E because a high level Fighter could make their saves against these spells 90% of the time. Their whole gimmick was being tough and shrugging off spells, and when that got taken away from them in 3rd Edition, they didn't get anything back in return.

Furthermore, the only ability score that you could easily increase was Strength (as there were no Headbands Of Intellect or the like), and there were limits in place regarding how many benefits you could reap from having high ability scores. You could have an INT score of 8,000 and it wouldn't affect the Fighter's Spell Saving Throw DC at all, but it would affect the maximum number of spells that a Wizard could know for a given level of spells. Once Mages gained the ability to start cranking up their Saving Throw DCs with high ability scores, that was the next nail in the coffin of class balance.

Finally, martial characters lost the ability to move and make a full attack, and Wizards gained the ability to move and cast spells. In a game where economy of action and mobility is king, forcing martial characters to have to spend most of their time trying to get "stuck in" really bones them over. And even if you were to make a martial character that was an archer, why bother when you could make a Cleric Archer? But if you really wanted to hack people up, your best bet was to go the Eldritch Knight route to pick up the magical tricks you needed to both achieve competitive mobility on the battlefield and eliminate the hard counters that would blow a typical 3E non-spellcaster away.

3E did do a lot of things right - the introduction of a robust skill system, the removal of restrictions on certain race/class combos and racial level limits, and standardizing the way characters multiclass. But they made a lot of changes that - while looking very organized and neat - ripped out the limiters in the system that established at least a semblance of class balance and a desire to have a mix of multiple classes at higher levels of play.