subtoot re 80s nostalgia, RPG blather
You know, I was initially gonna make a joke about missing all the good things we had in the 80s, where it'd be just a list of stuff connected with roleplaying games of the era.
But honestly? About the only RPG things the 80s had that we don't have now, that I wish we had back, were analog/print format magazines you could just get monthly at the game shop.
(And to be fair any magazine is going to be a mix; White Dwarf wasn't even available to me as a kid, and it started its slide to being a glossy miniature advertisement around issue 100, Wormy was brilliant and also abruptly disappeared with Trampier, Snarfquest was consistently good but that's also reliant on one dude, and probably more problematic than I think.)
And y'want heresy? 5e is a way better game than AD&D.
re: subtoot re 80s nostalgia, RPG blather
@Leucrotta Let's have a talk about THAC0.
re: subtoot re 80s nostalgia, RPG blather
@PaulFerence Not even! The acronym was a 2e innovation.
For the entire Reagan regime (and longer, if you were too poor to immediately ditch your AD&D books and get brand new 2e stuff) not *only* did we have an ass-backward way of figuring out if attacks hit, not *only* were the to-hit tables in the DMG instead of the PHB (remnant of Gary's "well the players don't need to fucking know if they hit"), but no nice mnemonic to remember what we were trying to do.
re: subtoot re 80s nostalgia, RPG blather
@Leucrotta Oh! That is... so terrible.
re: subtoot re 80s nostalgia, RPG blather
@Leucrotta That is terrible. Holy smokes.
re: subtoot re 80s nostalgia, RPG blather
@PaulFerence There's even more. Non-humans were initially envisioned as multiclassing PCs only, so for everything except Thief (Assassin for half-orcs, and drow women had no cap on being Clerics) there was a level cap on their advancement.
Mostly just weird; as an offshoot of PCs being the character models in Chainmail games, you got a stronghold and followers of some sort or another when you were high enough level. Oriental Adventures added a partial armor system, but the main system never had that. If you started with 2e you've seen the "+1/2/3 or better to hit" thing, but newer players who're used to damage reduction have never seen that; Monte Cook's comment was "you can drop the moon on Demogorgon, but since it isn't a +3 moon it won't do anything."
Seriously we all fell in love with this thing despite the clunky rules.
re: subtoot re 80s nostalgia, RPG blather
@PaulFerence AD&D was *seriously* clunky.
Women of all species technically had a cap on strength scores in the rules, and EVERYONE house ruled that nope, male and female PCs had equal strength limits. The rules came with a relatively arbitrary table for how well different weapons did against different armor classes and everyone ALSO ignored those (good in theory, but even if the advantages of say mace rather than broadsword vs. armor types isn't kinda arbitrary, who's to say that orc with the 2 AC is an orc in plate mail rather an orc with really good dexterity?).
Everyone house ruled attribute generation, and there were weird little articles in Dragon about different dice rolling strategies (rather than actually implementing a points buy system).
Before Unearthed Arcana/Dungeoneer's Survival Guide/Wilderness Survival Guide there were no skills that didn't default to class skills or attributes, though afterwards you had an arcane number of slowly gained non-weapon proficiencies as in 2e.
And if you know 2e at all, you know that AD&D was similar in having experience points to level up which were inconsistent between classes. That one thing drove me buggy.