I didn't REALLY start playing D&D until 3rd edition just came out in 2000. Through the 90's as a teenager I played a little bit of Advanced D&D, but not to the point where I could run a game or create a character on my own. Part of me kind of romanticizes D&D from the era before I really came into my own as a player/DM, and I'm not sure exactly what it is. The adventures? The simplicity? the Aesthetic?
I love 5th edition, it makes sense to me, its easy to learn and teach, its fun. I'd like to stay with this edition, but what are some things I could do to make it feel more like the older editions/style of play? I have some of the classic adventures redone for 5th edition by Goodman Games and I'm digging those, but havent ran one yet. Thinking of making maps in the old school blue and white grids, I work as an illustrator and would love to try and replicate some of the classic style of character art. I guess I'm just waxing poetic and fishing for ideas. Thanks gang.
The best thing about AD&D were the settings, the lore, the concepts. Nuance is good, but nowadays the need for nuance has taken the edges off of everything. It's like cooking in a child-proofed kitchen: it's great to know your kid isn't going to horribly maim itself once your back is turned, but it'd be a lot more convenient to have your knives in easy reach, your appliances ready on the countertop and your gas stove roaring at the push of a button. It's ok to have stark blacks and whites in all those greys.
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I would say read some of the old school modules all the way through. They are pretty short compared to modern stuff and they are really packed with detail. Also, if you look at how they set up those dungeons... I dunno if people actually tried to just hack their way through but the ones I remember, and the couple I have bought again as PDFs to get ideas for my current campaign -- man, if you tried to just hack your way through, you're going to have a TPK. There are all kinds of really cool interesting elements we would call puzzles now, but they were done with a lot more subtlety. Players had to be super observant and try a lot of different things back then. If they didn't, well... save or die was the least of their problems.
In general, I think the old school guys really knew how to design dungeons... but it's hard to describe how to get the old school feel. I think you need to read, not 5e adaptations of the old stuff, but the actual original old stuff. Yeah, I know... I would have been dismissive too... until I actually tried to adapt one and realized, holy crap, this is the hardest adventure I have ever seen. I'm not sure my players would survive it the way it is written. And I mean that in a good way -- it is super challenging and deceptively complex.
I know I am being kind of coy and vague -- that is on purpose in case one of my players reads this.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
What I miss most about AD&D is the supremacy of homebrew.
Totally create your own setting. Start from scratch. Start locally, where the heroes live, and expand the map beyond, if the heroes go there.
Your only limit is your imagination.
Can... can you not do that with 5e? If I admit that my current campaign is basically that, are the 5e police going to break down my door?
I think if you want to know what 1st or 2nd edition was really like, just play them. Not like permanently, but just for a few sessions. The materials are out there. I played in a 1st edition game a couple years ago.
I played back in AD&D first addition and it did have a different feel. For one it was deadlier. One thing you can try is have players roll for HP even at first level. You could roll for stats (3d6 in order STR, INT, WIS, DEX, CON, CHA. At least that was the order we did it back then) or roll however you want or use point buy or standard array. I don’t think that matters so much but rolling for HP will. Imagine rolling a 1 at first level for your fighter (I did that once and he didn’t last long), not great but that was just how it was. And there were no death saves, you hit zero and you were dead (btw, elves could not be raised by the raise dead spell as far as I remember). This will make your games feel more deadly and, in part, have that feel the older versions had.
What I miss most about AD&D is the supremacy of homebrew.
Totally create your own setting. Start from scratch. Start locally, where the heroes live, and expand the map beyond, if the heroes go there.
Your only limit is your imagination.
Funny, when I played if it wasn’t in a book it wasn’t an option. Toward the end our DM allowed us to make up a class, but if it didn’t meet their approval it was a no go. Basically very little if any homebrew.
We played in Greyhawk, which I thought had good lore (I mean hearing about the rain of colorless fire and the invoked devastation really stoked the imagination back then)
What I miss most about AD&D is the supremacy of homebrew.
Totally create your own setting. Start from scratch. Start locally, where the heroes live, and expand the map beyond, if the heroes go there.
Your only limit is your imagination.
Funny, when I played if it wasn’t in a book it wasn’t an option. Toward the end our DM allowed us to make up a class, but if it didn’t meet their approval it was a no go. Basically very little if any homebrew.
We played in Greyhawk, which I thought had good lore (I mean hearing about the rain of colorless fire and the invoked devastation really stoked the imagination back then)
I learned D&D from a group that continued a homebrew 1e-2e blend. Altho we had the World of Greyhawk map and even the City of Greyhawk map, we never used them, but it inspired things that we did do.
Even tho there were many different published settings for 1e and 2e, we couldnt understand why anyone would use someone elses setting!
We played in our own setting that we invented, and took turns DMing, thus the world itself evolved from all of our input. New characters were normally the children of our high level characters. So there was much investment and immersion.
We tended to use the classes in the 1e Players Handbook fairly straightforwardly. We also imported various adventures, like Vault of the Drow, into our setting.
But the world was our own. And it was impossible to avoid homebrewing rules, because the official rules themselves were such a mess, whether missing information or trying to make sense of redundant or conflictive information.
You CAN create your own homebrew world in 5e. But if you do, other people mostly dont care about your homebrew. Because it isnt official.
In 1e and 2e, you SHOULD homebrew your own world, and other people cared about what you were doing. Officially youre supposed to make your own world.
Second edition had more official worlds than 5th currently has. If any edition pushed the notion of creating your own world it was early 4th's "points of light" being pushed as standard, and 3rd edition's OGL arguably spawned more homebrew (good and bad) than anything else in D&D's near 50 years of history. If I'm honest, most of my AD&D homebrew was about trying to fix a piss-poor mechanical system. I'm not disagreeing with your experiences, but mine were certainly very different. Nobody cared about what I was doing in AD&D other than the people at my table. By 3rd edition however, the internet was a big thing. WotC's own forums connected small communities on a global scale.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I played AD&D almost every week from from 1979 until second edition (1989?), so I have some thoughts:
We mostly homebrewed our setting because we had to. This was not just before Kickstarter, before online stores, before PDFs, and before the Internet, it was before desktop publishing. Publishing anything was a huge chore. Published settings were few and far between. The books were small and typeset, with few pages. For other sources, there was Dragon Magazine. If you were lucky, there was a local D&D group you could join.
Nobody cared about your homebrew because everybody had their own homebrew. That's ok, because the only way you had to circulate your homebrew was to type it up on a typewriter and photocopy it, for about 10 cents a sheet. And I mean every DM had their own homebrew.
AD&D was lethal. You died when you hit 0 hit points. You healed 1 hp per day for the first 30 days, then 5 hp per day thereafter. There were no hit dice and no short rests. You didn't try to recover in a dungeon, you fled to a safe distance so you could spend a week recovering. A first level Cleric could cast one spell a day, so magical healing didn't help much.
There were no ability score increases. No feats. Ability scores were limited by race and ability score bonuses could be limited by class. Some classes didn't get new abilities at higher levels. Some races couldn't get to the highest level of a class.
The rules were vague or unclear. We spent a lot of time arguing. There was no Jeremy Crawford, no Google, no Internet.
Levelling was incredibly slow, unless you played in a Monty Hall campaign. Combine slow levelling with frequent death and many of our campaigns never had a character get past 5th level.
AD&D was special because for so many of us it was our introduction to RPGs. Mechanically, it was a mess, but it's what we had.
That thing you're looking for, the thing the OSR is trying to duplicate, can't be duplicated. It was the discovery of a hobby, the sharing of a new experience with friends. It was wading into the unknown, with no Internet or Critical Role to set our expectations.
When I pick up my AD&D books, I don't remember the rules. I remember the people I played with, the friends I've lost, and the friends I still have. I remember the stories we created together.
That's the romanticism of AD&D. It happened in the past.
In 1e and 2e, you SHOULD homebrew your own world, and other people cared about what you were doing. Officially youre supposed to make your own world.
Nobody actually cared what you were doing, but that never stopped people from cornering you and talking interminably about their homebrew.
"Let me tell you about my world" was the most feared sentence in the hobby.
Nowadays they post it on the Internet and you don't have to read it, but back then people could spend hours blathering on about the average rainfall in the blah blah blah...
I played AD&D almost every week from from 1979 until second edition (1989?), so I have some thoughts:
We mostly homebrewed our setting because we had to. This was not just before Kickstarter, before online stores, before PDFs, and before the Internet, it was before desktop publishing. Publishing anything was a huge chore. Published settings were few and far between. The books were small and typeset, with few pages. For other sources, there was Dragon Magazine. If you were lucky, there was a local D&D group you could join.
Nobody cared about your homebrew because everybody had their own homebrew. That's ok, because the only way you had to circulate your homebrew was to type it up on a typewriter and photocopy it, for about 10 cents a sheet. And I mean every DM had their own homebrew.
AD&D was lethal. You died when you hit 0 hit points. You healed 1 hp per day for the first 30 days, then 5 hp per day thereafter. There were no hit dice and no short rests. You didn't try to recover in a dungeon, you fled to a safe distance so you could spend a week recovering. A first level Cleric could cast one spell a day, so magical healing didn't help much.
There were no ability score increases. No feats. Ability scores were limited by race and ability score bonuses could be limited by class. Some classes didn't get new abilities at higher levels. Some races couldn't get to the highest level of a class.
The rules were vague or unclear. We spent a lot of time arguing. There was no Jeremy Crawford, no Google, no Internet.
Levelling was incredibly slow, unless you played in a Monty Hall campaign. Combine slow levelling with frequent death and many of our campaigns never had a character get past 5th level.
AD&D was special because for so many of us it was our introduction to RPGs. Mechanically, it was a mess, but it's what we had.
That thing you're looking for, the thing the OSR is trying to duplicate, can't be duplicated. It was the discovery of a hobby, the sharing of a new experience with friends. It was wading into the unknown, with no Internet or Critical Role to set our expectations.
When I pick up my AD&D books, I don't remember the rules. I remember the people I played with, the friends I've lost, and the friends I still have. I remember the stories we created together.
That's the romanticism of AD&D. It happened in the past.
People don't want to play a brutally tough game now. I could go on and on about the correlations of today's society and the difficulty levels between D&D today and classic D&D. I have a friend of mine, a DM of his own game, who is looking to join a campaign I am reconstituting. Told him outright he can ONLY build chars from PHB and XGTE. The next day from him: "Can I play an artificer?", where he knows there is no gun powder in my game, it is low magic, tough, and those two books.
What I miss most about AD&D is the supremacy of homebrew.
I do that in 5e, exactly like I did it in AD&D.
The modern focus on pre-fab adventures is not the result of rules, it's the result of culture.
In the time of AD&D, publishing books was difficult and expensive. My AD&D books are set with actual type and were printed on an actual printing press. No computers. And game stores were rare. Trying to find the AD&D books when they were published was incredibly difficult. It took me months to find copies.
Desktop publishing and the Internet have changed all that. You can drop your text into a website and get documents that look just like official D&D books. And you can order print on demand copies of books. Or download PDFs. Or order from Amazon for same day delivery.
You don't need to homebrew any more because there's so much published material. And it saves time, which appeals to people.
But if homebrew wasn't popular in 5e, you wouldn't see so many people complaining about D&D Beyond's homebrew tools.
I can't say much for 3-4e's but I actually think homebrew worlds was more supported in AD&D than 5e in that The Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guides had significant investment into world building, like how to design a land mass and the attendant Underdark. Crunchy? Yes, but I don't think WotC has produced something as supportive to world building at least for 5e, though I'd be curious about prior edition publications.
I don't think 5e is as "setting pushing" as say 2e (which churned out a lot of setting product). Forgotten Realms is the largely default setting of 5e; but really the settings put out extrapolated from adventures but also the hardbacks aren't as in depth as the old boxed sets in my opinion. I think they speak to probably a large segment of the market that want to play but don't want to build a world (even though the DMG describes/instructs world building in Chapter One, actually it is Chapter One) so the adventures grounded in a pre packaged world take a lot of burden off some DMs and tables. I'd say that's why there are more players today, the entry labor is a lot lower than it used to be. I think that's great. Someone playing through a published campaign could be more confident in building their own after seeing how one's designed. More players know how to play so can adapt at a table that's more established. And people can keep playing with varying degrees of investment in time and or money and all can find enjoyment in it. It's not a utopian system, but I think it's in a better place as a pastime than it's been.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
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I didn't REALLY start playing D&D until 3rd edition just came out in 2000. Through the 90's as a teenager I played a little bit of Advanced D&D, but not to the point where I could run a game or create a character on my own. Part of me kind of romanticizes D&D from the era before I really came into my own as a player/DM, and I'm not sure exactly what it is. The adventures? The simplicity? the Aesthetic?
I love 5th edition, it makes sense to me, its easy to learn and teach, its fun. I'd like to stay with this edition, but what are some things I could do to make it feel more like the older editions/style of play? I have some of the classic adventures redone for 5th edition by Goodman Games and I'm digging those, but havent ran one yet. Thinking of making maps in the old school blue and white grids, I work as an illustrator and would love to try and replicate some of the classic style of character art. I guess I'm just waxing poetic and fishing for ideas. Thanks gang.
The best thing about AD&D were the settings, the lore, the concepts. Nuance is good, but nowadays the need for nuance has taken the edges off of everything. It's like cooking in a child-proofed kitchen: it's great to know your kid isn't going to horribly maim itself once your back is turned, but it'd be a lot more convenient to have your knives in easy reach, your appliances ready on the countertop and your gas stove roaring at the push of a button. It's ok to have stark blacks and whites in all those greys.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
What I miss most about AD&D is the supremacy of homebrew.
Totally create your own setting. Start from scratch. Start locally, where the heroes live, and expand the map beyond, if the heroes go there.
Your only limit is your imagination.
he / him
I would say read some of the old school modules all the way through. They are pretty short compared to modern stuff and they are really packed with detail. Also, if you look at how they set up those dungeons... I dunno if people actually tried to just hack their way through but the ones I remember, and the couple I have bought again as PDFs to get ideas for my current campaign -- man, if you tried to just hack your way through, you're going to have a TPK. There are all kinds of really cool interesting elements we would call puzzles now, but they were done with a lot more subtlety. Players had to be super observant and try a lot of different things back then. If they didn't, well... save or die was the least of their problems.
In general, I think the old school guys really knew how to design dungeons... but it's hard to describe how to get the old school feel. I think you need to read, not 5e adaptations of the old stuff, but the actual original old stuff. Yeah, I know... I would have been dismissive too... until I actually tried to adapt one and realized, holy crap, this is the hardest adventure I have ever seen. I'm not sure my players would survive it the way it is written. And I mean that in a good way -- it is super challenging and deceptively complex.
I know I am being kind of coy and vague -- that is on purpose in case one of my players reads this.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Actually the Goodman Games ones I have, have the original modules in the book as well as the 5e Versions! But I will check those out.
Can... can you not do that with 5e? If I admit that my current campaign is basically that, are the 5e police going to break down my door?
I think if you want to know what 1st or 2nd edition was really like, just play them. Not like permanently, but just for a few sessions. The materials are out there. I played in a 1st edition game a couple years ago.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
I played back in AD&D first addition and it did have a different feel. For one it was deadlier. One thing you can try is have players roll for HP even at first level. You could roll for stats (3d6 in order STR, INT, WIS, DEX, CON, CHA. At least that was the order we did it back then) or roll however you want or use point buy or standard array. I don’t think that matters so much but rolling for HP will. Imagine rolling a 1 at first level for your fighter (I did that once and he didn’t last long), not great but that was just how it was. And there were no death saves, you hit zero and you were dead (btw, elves could not be raised by the raise dead spell as far as I remember).
This will make your games feel more deadly and, in part, have that feel the older versions had.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
Funny, when I played if it wasn’t in a book it wasn’t an option. Toward the end our DM allowed us to make up a class, but if it didn’t meet their approval it was a no go. Basically very little if any homebrew.
We played in Greyhawk, which I thought had good lore (I mean hearing about the rain of colorless fire and the invoked devastation really stoked the imagination back then)
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
You CAN create your own homebrew world in 5e. But if you do, other people mostly dont care about your homebrew. Because it isnt official.
In 1e and 2e, you SHOULD homebrew your own world, and other people cared about what you were doing. Officially youre supposed to make your own world.
I learned D&D from a group that continued a homebrew 1e-2e blend. Altho we had the World of Greyhawk map and even the City of Greyhawk map, we never used them, but it inspired things that we did do.
Even tho there were many different published settings for 1e and 2e, we couldnt understand why anyone would use someone elses setting!
We played in our own setting that we invented, and took turns DMing, thus the world itself evolved from all of our input. New characters were normally the children of our high level characters. So there was much investment and immersion.
We tended to use the classes in the 1e Players Handbook fairly straightforwardly. We also imported various adventures, like Vault of the Drow, into our setting.
But the world was our own. And it was impossible to avoid homebrewing rules, because the official rules themselves were such a mess, whether missing information or trying to make sense of redundant or conflictive information.
We really had the sense of creating worlds.
he / him
Creating our own spells via "spell research" was a big part of my 1e-2e experience.
he / him
Second edition had more official worlds than 5th currently has. If any edition pushed the notion of creating your own world it was early 4th's "points of light" being pushed as standard, and 3rd edition's OGL arguably spawned more homebrew (good and bad) than anything else in D&D's near 50 years of history. If I'm honest, most of my AD&D homebrew was about trying to fix a piss-poor mechanical system. I'm not disagreeing with your experiences, but mine were certainly very different. Nobody cared about what I was doing in AD&D other than the people at my table. By 3rd edition however, the internet was a big thing. WotC's own forums connected small communities on a global scale.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I played AD&D almost every week from from 1979 until second edition (1989?), so I have some thoughts:
AD&D was special because for so many of us it was our introduction to RPGs. Mechanically, it was a mess, but it's what we had.
That thing you're looking for, the thing the OSR is trying to duplicate, can't be duplicated. It was the discovery of a hobby, the sharing of a new experience with friends. It was wading into the unknown, with no Internet or Critical Role to set our expectations.
When I pick up my AD&D books, I don't remember the rules. I remember the people I played with, the friends I've lost, and the friends I still have. I remember the stories we created together.
That's the romanticism of AD&D. It happened in the past.
Nobody actually cared what you were doing, but that never stopped people from cornering you and talking interminably about their homebrew.
"Let me tell you about my world" was the most feared sentence in the hobby.
Nowadays they post it on the Internet and you don't have to read it, but back then people could spend hours blathering on about the average rainfall in the blah blah blah...
People don't want to play a brutally tough game now. I could go on and on about the correlations of today's society and the difficulty levels between D&D today and classic D&D. I have a friend of mine, a DM of his own game, who is looking to join a campaign I am reconstituting. Told him outright he can ONLY build chars from PHB and XGTE. The next day from him: "Can I play an artificer?", where he knows there is no gun powder in my game, it is low magic, tough, and those two books.
I do that in 5e, exactly like I did it in AD&D.
The modern focus on pre-fab adventures is not the result of rules, it's the result of culture.
In the time of AD&D, publishing books was difficult and expensive. My AD&D books are set with actual type and were printed on an actual printing press. No computers. And game stores were rare. Trying to find the AD&D books when they were published was incredibly difficult. It took me months to find copies.
Desktop publishing and the Internet have changed all that. You can drop your text into a website and get documents that look just like official D&D books. And you can order print on demand copies of books. Or download PDFs. Or order from Amazon for same day delivery.
You don't need to homebrew any more because there's so much published material. And it saves time, which appeals to people.
But if homebrew wasn't popular in 5e, you wouldn't see so many people complaining about D&D Beyond's homebrew tools.
I can't say much for 3-4e's but I actually think homebrew worlds was more supported in AD&D than 5e in that The Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guides had significant investment into world building, like how to design a land mass and the attendant Underdark. Crunchy? Yes, but I don't think WotC has produced something as supportive to world building at least for 5e, though I'd be curious about prior edition publications.
I don't think 5e is as "setting pushing" as say 2e (which churned out a lot of setting product). Forgotten Realms is the largely default setting of 5e; but really the settings put out extrapolated from adventures but also the hardbacks aren't as in depth as the old boxed sets in my opinion. I think they speak to probably a large segment of the market that want to play but don't want to build a world (even though the DMG describes/instructs world building in Chapter One, actually it is Chapter One) so the adventures grounded in a pre packaged world take a lot of burden off some DMs and tables. I'd say that's why there are more players today, the entry labor is a lot lower than it used to be. I think that's great. Someone playing through a published campaign could be more confident in building their own after seeing how one's designed. More players know how to play so can adapt at a table that's more established. And people can keep playing with varying degrees of investment in time and or money and all can find enjoyment in it. It's not a utopian system, but I think it's in a better place as a pastime than it's been.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.