What about when AD&D was the new-fangled thing?

[geoffrey]

I didn't start playing D&D until 1980, so I have no first-hand knowledge of the sort of thing I'm looking for.

Surely in 1977-79, there were some long-time D&D players who HATED the AD&D game. To them, only the 1974 rules + supplements was "old school". To them, AD&D was the commercialized, munchkinized, jacked-up, etc. version of the game.

The thing is, I've never read any such articles or reviews from the late 1970s expressing those thoughts. Can anyone point me to any?

[scogle]

I'm not sure if there really were a lot of people like that; I gather that most players bought at least a couple supplements, and with Greyhawk and Blackmoor you've got a game that's already very similar to AD&D. By the time Holmes Basic came out in '77 OD&D was pretty bloated imo (not that I was around back then), though Basic streamlined it somewhat at least for lower-level play. Of course lots of players would ignore some of the rules and make their own as was encouraged, but still AD&D and OD&D aren't as different as you might think.

AD&D is, to me, OD&D + Supplements only streamlined, organized, and with some new stuff + the rejection of some old. I think most people made the switch to AD&D or continued playing Basic with Moldvay/Cook, graduating to Mentzer etc. etc. I think some DMs got sick of AD&D thinking and playing after a while and started going back to the older stuff, but then I bet lots of people played it all along.

Idk I wasn't there. These are just my impressions from reading blogs and such

[Deleted]

I was around then, but I'm not certain my gaming group was typical. Many of the issues which plagued other gamer groups of the time never really cropped up for us. That being said, I remember AD&D being highly anticipated and well received.

[James Maliszewski]

I entered the hobby shortly after the release of the DMG in August 1979, so I'm a post-AD&D gamer. However, I had a lot of contact with guys who had played OD&D since the beginning and my recollection is that they all welcomed the arrival of AD&D, which they saw not so much as a break with the little brown books as an expansion and codification of them. That is, they didn't really see it as a different game so much as a new presentation of the same game they'd been playing for years anyway, thanks to all the supplements and articles in ST and Dragon.

[Finarvyn]

Our group played well before AD&D and I have no idea how "typical" we are, but I thought I'd share my own story.

As has been suggested earlier in this thread, AD&D was highly anticipated and we went to GenCon to get the rulebooks faster than we could get them through mail order. My friends and I had been reading Strategic Review and Dragon and were aware of the types of changes that were coming, and we were all pumped up to play these revised rules.

The Monster Manual came out first and we rushed to get copies. We all found the idea of a hardback D&D book really cool. (Keep in mind that we didn't really seperate OD&D from AD&D much at the time. It was all Dungeons & Dragons.) There were a few AC tweaks, but otherwise pretty much everything in the book was so neat that we just slipped it into our existing games.

When the PH and DMG came out, we rushed out to buy them as well. My friends bought and played the Giants modules and the Drow modules and we played everything else that Gygax could crank out. I was more into the Judges Guild style of module with Dave's First Fantasy Campaign and the Wilderlands campaign. Excited, we all decided that AD&D was the game to play. For a while. Then we began to fragment.

Two of our other GM's converted and stayed with AD&D. (Not entirely true, since one of the two eventually found RuneQuest and ended up with a homebrew blend of AD&D and RQ.) I switched back to OD&D and stayed there. We agreed early on that whoever ran the game picked the rules, so we never really argued about which rules to play by.

The styles of the game were remarkably similar yet different. The AD&D people ran a tighter and more detail-oriented game and would often pause to look up a rule during play. (I guess I witnessed the invention of the "rules lawyer" in our basement when they would argue over an interpretation.) I continued to run a loose game and did the old "just roll some dice and tell me what you get" kind of on-the-fly campaign. We all enjoyed playing, but the games were clearly run differently. At no point was there any sort of Edition War or anything like that, our game choices were simply based on GM style.

I continued to buy new rulebooks, including 2E and 3E and even 4E but never really ran those editions. The only fantasy games I really ever run anymore are OD&D variants and C&C. My new game group is a blend of newer and older players (mostly newer) and we still agree that if you run a game you pick the rules.

[rick krebs]

Between 1977 and 1985, I can not remember a single instance of hearing a player or DM refer to either "we play advanced D&D" or we play "original D&D". We played Dungeon & Dragons. If you wanted to play D&D, you found a DM who had room for you and you played. If you wanted to play RQ, you found someone to GM it.

[kenmeister]

Jun 7, 2009 18:17:12 GMT -6 rick krebs said:

Between 1977 and 1985, I can not remember a single instance of hearing a player or DM refer to either "we play advanced D&D" or we play "original D&D". We played Dungeon & Dragons. If you wanted to play D&D, you found a DM who had room for you and you played. If you wanted to play RQ, you found someone to GM it.

I went to a summer camp in '84 where they had D&D "courses". Since I was new, I signed up for D&D Basic instead of D&D Advanced. The "teacher" told us the first day that Basic was beneath us and he taught us Advanced instead. Okay, that's not a distinction between OD&D and AD&D, but still a distinction between versions.

[Grognard]

I started gaming in 1981, so I'm post-OD&D.

That being said, I can say that no one I ever gamed with ever talked about "OD&D vs. AD&D" or "OD&D vs. Moldvay" or whatever. In my experience, everyone back then pretty much considered it all to be D&D, regardless of the rule set they had at the table. Certainly, folks had their set of rules that they chose to use at the table, but all of the other rule sets (as well as modules and supplements for all of the different rule sets) were considered supplemental material and mined extensively. The mechanical differences between the various editions were completely glossed over.

Pretty much the vibe was "its still rock-n-roll to me."

The breaking point between D&D gaming groups, frankly, was 2nd edition AD&D. Certainly there were those who left D&D to play RQ or whatever, but those weren't D&D edition wars. 2nd edition marked the point IMO where the D&D dynamic seriously fractured. Maybe not at first, as 2nd edition in its core books (PHB. DMG, Monstrous Manual) were still mostly compatible mechanically, but the splat books and the general feel of gaming in the 2e era really brought about the distinction not just between rules, but also between flavor and play style.

Certainly some of this began with "late 1e," with UA and the dungeon/wilderness guides that were precursors to 2e, as well as with Dragonlance and I6 Ravenloft, but I'd say most D&Ders will still mostly on the same page even then, because UA and the rest of it was still looked on as optional crap by most folks from what I saw. 2e was the definitive break IMO that led to the fracture of the D&D player base.

The only thing I can remotely point to as some type of "edition war" back then was when EGG started making pronouncements about how the game must be played. For average Joe gamer, who owned a set of rules and a few modules, this didn't mean much, because they didn't read Dragon, or if they did, they didn't care. The more serious or hard core crowd didn't really like EGG's attitude, but still, everyone pretty much played the game the way they wanted and paid him no mind.

This is why I think all of the talk about how AD&D became a straight jacket is mostly nonsense, because nobody looked at it like that back then in my experience. Reading EGG in The Dragon and in the DMG or whatever might give the impression today that "official" AD&D meant something, but frankly if it did, in my experience it was a serious minority of gamers who bought that line.

[calithena]

My anecdotal experience agrees with the posters in this thread. But an interesting corollary of that is that almost no-one I knew played BtB AD&D1. What we played was a game that had (usually) the AD&D hardbacks as the default rules and play-procedures culled from OD&D, Holmes, and later Moldvay as well as those books. Which suited me just fine.

There wasn't a backlash like there was with later editions. The two games were basically compatible and both recognized as D&D in my neck of the woods.

[geoffrey]

This Gygax quote (from Dragon #26, June 1979) was in the back of my mind when I started this thread:

"The ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS rules comprise a different game. Readers, please take note! It is neither an expansion nor a revision of the old game: It is a new game. A number of letters have come to me, the writers expressing their surprise at or voicing their disapproval of this fact. John Mansfield, in his newsletter Signal, cautions his readers to be aware that an ongoing D&D campaign cannot be switched to AD&D rules without major work or actual scrapping the old game and beginning a fresh effort."

[James Maliszewski]

That Gygax quote has always bugged me, because it seems, in retrospect, to be so cynical, arising out of a desire to sell more AD&D books and/or as a consequence to the Arneson lawsuits against TSR. I don't know that this was the case, but I find it hard to square it with the reality on the ground as most gamers experienced it, namely, that OD&D and AD&D were in fact largely compatible. Far from being different games, they appeared to be two different versions of the same game, each with a slightly different flavor and focus but nevertheless easily usable with one another.

[calithena]

"Either you're playing the Official Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Roleplaying Game from Wizards of the Coast TSR, or you're playing something else."

Plus ca change and all that.

Gary's Dragon editorials during this period were ridiculous and irritating, of course.

[geoffrey]

The part of the Gygax quote that interests me here is this: "A number of letters have come to me, the writers expressing their surprise at or voicing their disapproval of this fact."

This seems to indicate that at least some D&D players did not like AD&D when it was published.

[chgowiz]

Jun 8, 2009 19:28:08 GMT -6 calithena said:

My anecdotal experience agrees with the posters in this thread. But an interesting corollary of that is that almost no-one I knew played BtB AD&D1. What we played was a game that had (usually) the AD&D hardbacks as the default rules and play-procedures culled from OD&D, Holmes, and later Moldvay as well as those books. Which suited me just fine.

There wasn't a backlash like there was with later editions. The two games were basically compatible and both recognized as D&D in my neck of the woods.

That is my experience as well - we were playing Holmes Basic with AD&D stuff tacked on top (sometimes tacked meaning we used a sledge hammer) but we were kids trying to just play. I also remember using B/X books and modules, but we played pretty much the same as we had early on.

[calithena]

Well, I'm sure there were some, Geoffrey, and EGG had no reason to make that up given everything else. But it does seem that few of us encountered it directly at least.

[Finarvyn]

I'm pretty sure that quote stems from the legal situation. Gary had to declare that BD&D and AD&D were two seperate games legally and I think that his editorials of the era reflected that.

Sadly, this seems to be one of the major events that caused the big rift between Gary and Dave. Dave's products would be supported with D&D while Gary's would be supported with AD&D, and then AD&D got all of the real support from TSR. Imagine how the game might have evolved with both of them on the "same team" rather than on opposite sides of a legal dispute....

[rick krebs]

IMHO, Fin, your dream team was not likely to have ever occurred. There were 3 players in that drama. eGG, DA, and TSR. The Fates were not to be kind.

[Thorulfr]

Jun 9, 2009 11:32:28 GMT -6 geoffrey said:

The part of the Gygax quote that interests me here is this: "A number of letters have come to me, the writers expressing their surprise at or voicing their disapproval of this fact."

This seems to indicate that at least some D&D players did not like AD&D when it was published.

I can't speak for any of the letter-writers, but I, for one was irked by his statement, not because I didn't like AD&D, but simply because I did not like his "my way or the highway" attitude.

I started with Holmes, then received the MM and PHb for Christmas later that year, but had to wait quite some time before the DMG came out. Until then, I and everyone I knew just used the OD&D supplements and made the rest up as we went along. You could say the "Rulings, not Rulebooks" ethic was alive and well in the SoCal gaming community. The DMG was much anticipated, but everyone's game was heavily modified and house-ruled, so Gygax's insistence on uniformity had a very chilly reception out here and was promptly ignored.

Incidentally, no one I gamed with ever referred to the game as "Advanced" D&D, it was just "D&D." Frankly, when I was in my favorite FLGS buying adventures or supplements, I never even bothered to notice whether that extra "A" was there or not.

[ffilz]

While I started my gaming with Holmes Basic and then dabbled in OD&D, I didn't start serious D&D play until the Player's Handbook came out. After the start with Holmes, I quickly moved to Chivalry and Sorcery. In fact, I'm pretty sure I picked up my OD&D after I got the PH.

Obviously until the DMG came out, I played a mix of OD&D and AD&D (though I think pretty much by the time I started running my (A)D&D campaign, the combat tables had been published in the Dragon.

After AD&D took off, the only OD&D game I ever participated in was Glen Blacow's. I'm not sure he even cared about the hit point differences, I ran AD&D characters in his game (and he ran OD&D characters in my game).

The gaming community at MIT was pretty pissed off by Gygax's letters (both the rant about AD&D and playing by the book, but also the rant about APA zines - more so the latter).

Frank