I began in 1980 through 1990 and as a teenager it was a horribly confusing period. Things kept coming out and we didn't really know what was changing and we generally ignored them, doing either whatever first Basic version we had or played AD&D and ignored most supplements, focusing on modules. It was like a lot of background noise to us.
I definitely understand that with regard to all the different non-Advanced versions that were coming out (B/X, then BECMI, Easy-to-Master, Rules Cyclopedia, Classic D&D...). I had the Basic Box & the Expert Rulebook from the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh edition and pretty ignored all the later printings as it seemed like they weren't really changing all that much. Thanks for watching and commenting! I appreciate it!
I started in 1990, age 11. I definitely ran 1E and 2E together without understanding that they were two separate, if very similar, games. It caused a lot of confusion. Not to mention all the basic modules
@@asafoetidajones8181 My group was the same in the early 80's with Basic vs Advanced, but we didn't realize we were confused! We just mixed them together and ignored the inconsistencies!
That could be a good topic. It'd probably have to be broken into a few different videos but it's something I can add to my list of potential topics. Thanks for the idea!
@@daddyrolleda1 I'd also find a longer version interesting. It was good to keep this video relatively short and factually neutral but I'd also like to see a version with some explanations what people liked/disliked about the editions, why the OSR focuses on some and not on others, why Pathfinder was forked off, etc. Those topics would me more controversial but interesting to someone like me who has some history with TTRPG but outside of D&D.
@@daddyrolleda1 Hi, did you get around to having a go at changes between the editions? I am getting into D&D now for the first time through the 2024 edition, and I’m super curious to learn about the road that led here.
In the early 80's , my favorite thing was going to the mall and seeing which new D&D supplements and books were out. that and the Hildebrandt Tolkien Calendars were my childhood.
I bought my first set (the White box) in 1976 (19 years old) when I found a copy in a small shop called Games Centre just off Oxford Street in London. I spent several weeks slowly working out how to play this weird game. I bought the four supplements (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry and GD&H) over the next year and that made things clear. I played games on an irregular basis for a number of years and gradually collected the books for 1st edition AD&D. I didn't start running a campaign until 1984 with a group of friends and relatives. This started with 1st edition but I converted to 2nd edition as soon as I could. I never used the 2.5 edition but I did play the BECMI version from time to time. My campaign came to an end in 2001, mostly due to various life events that happened to the players. I've never played since and never had the opportunity to start anew. But it's good to see the game still going.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting, and sharing your RPG "journey." I love hearing about how other people got into the game and their campaigns over the years. What prompted you to buy the White Box when you saw it? Did you go to the shop specifically looking for that game, or did you pick it up only after you saw it on the shelf? I started playing in 1981 with Moldvay Basic but didn't really start DM'ing a campaign until 2001 with 3E (which is still going to this day, in addition to the campaign I run for my daughter and her friends, for which I'm back to using Moldvay Basic). I'm sorry you haven't had a chance to play since. Maybe things will change and you can start up again. Here's hoping!
@@daddyrolleda1 I picked up a magazine called 'Games & Puzzles' to read on the train home from work. It had an article on D&D and where to buy it. So I went there specifically to get the game. Well done for keeping your campaign going!😊😊
Even as someone who started playing AD&D in 1981 I found this video interesting and informative. People who came to the hobby later on, especially those who grew up with Google always at their fingertips, might be surprised to learn that the hodge podge of early editions was just as confusing to most players who lived through that era as it is to them. Little if anything was published explaining the rationale behind all the different sets and even game shop staff were often confused about just how they related to one another. At least where I grew up, the big increase in the game's popularity seemed to coincide with the release of the AD&D PHB and DMG, so that's what most of us played. Kids who had started with one of the boxed sets usually switched when they joined a school D&D club or similar group for the sake of compatibility. I get the impression that the boxed sets were more popular in less populous areas where small groups of geeky kids had to figure the game out without the benefit of a local gaming community but I could be wrong about that.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! That's an interesting theory! I myself started with Moldvay Basic in a smaller town (a suburb in Salt Lake City) but we quickly added in stuff from the Advanced D&D books we found at our local library, as at the time we didn't understand they were technically two separate games! So, that does coincide with how even the folks playing the games (and the store staff) didn't know the differences!
@@RichBensen Ha! I know, right?! My dad got transferred there for his work (we came from the Bay Area, then Reno, then SLC so it was quite the culture shock!). Some kids saw me reading some books about King Arthur mythology and asked if I'd read the Hobbit (I had) or Conan (I had not) and that started a conversation that led to them telling me about D&D. And to your point, looking back, it is surprising how open they were about it! A friend's mom gave me an issue of Dragon magazine for my birthday and other friends bought me some 1E hardbacks!
As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), I only ever met one adult who was anti-FRP. The Satanic Panic was not really a thing for Mormons because of our beliefs (in that a thing is neither good nor evil, it is how it is used. Blame the GM, not the rules set.) I myself grew up in a small rural community and didn't come across any game books till 1981 when I was in a book store and found a display of TSR books. It wasn't long before I was introduced to other games, like The Fantasy Trip; and by 1986 I had traveled around the world and played a dozen different games that were not published by TSR, though everyone also played AD&D everywhere I went.
@@brennonr What an awesome gift that was! I got mine because my mom went to our local game store in the early 2000's. I'd been shopping there for a while and they knew my name. She popped in and asked them what a good gift would be for my birthday, and they had just gotten one of these boxed sets in and she bought it for me. It was missing Monsters & Treasure, but had a copy of Chainmail included. Years later, they found a copy of Monsters and Treasure they gave me, but it's a different printing from the other 2 books in my set. I believe the trade refers to that as a "Frankenstein" box, but I still love it.
My friends and I never really got into the D&D side of things, but we got every book of (1st Edition) AD&D. It would be interesting to mention the cover prices of those hardcovers and convert to the current equivalent cost...for high school teens in the US, these were not cheap!
Good idea! I can cover that in a future video. I have all the AD&D hardbacks except one (Manual of the Planes) so I could go through them in a video. Thanks for the idea!
Played 3.5 with the neighbourhood kids in the late 2000's/early 2010's. My mom ended up getting me 4th edition and it seemed so strange to us that we just kept playing 3.5! This help put my timeline in perspective. Love the content
I'm glad it helped, and I really appreciate you watching and commenting! Yes, the transition from 3.5 to 4E is probably the most drastic in the history of edition changes for the game.
It was definitely a "wild west" time. The way most folks handled it, as I recall from the time, was either via Dragon magazine, or to just ignore it completely and mix-and-match stuff as we wanted! Thank you for watching and commenting!
Great to hear from you, Chris! Thanks! I have long regretted not having given the Rules Cyclopedia a more thorough look when it came out. At the time, we had moved on from D&D and were playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but I was using 2E to build my campaign world I planned to run. The RC just seemed like "more of the same" and I wasn't playing any Basic D&D at the time. Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@daddyrolleda1 I totally get that, Martin. The Cyclopedia dropped right at the height of my and my new gaming group's deep dive into all of the great games of the late 80s and early 90s. We were nowhere near having a desire to play D&D, certainly not Basic. ("Race as class? Eww!") I'm thankful I had the good sense to pick it up at the time, though. When my best friend and I decided in 96 to "go back to Basic(s)," we opted for this book. And that's when I realized what a beautiful, complete, and well-oiled machine it was! Even though Moldvay B/X was my entry to the game and my first RPG love, I can't help but keep getting drawn back to the Cyclopedia. ☺️
80s BECMI/1e AD&D kid here - have love 'Basic D&D' for so long. Can't get enough of the Rules Cyclopedia (even mine is only a PoD H/C). I also love 2e AD&D - this history is great. I've seen so many online but this one doesn't linger too long. I like hearing yours (others)experiences with older editions of the game pre-WOTC 3.0/3.5 ed.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I really appreciate it! I was really trying to get through the whole history in 20 minutes or less and I just about made it! I do feel it was a bit rushed at the end, but as you said, I was trying not to linger too long. I'm so glad you appreciate my approach. I started with Moldvay, so just slightly before you, and we immediately mixed it with 1E because we didn't know we weren't supposed to. But I've played a *ton* of 3E/3.5 and am still running a campaign for that system that I started back in May 2001. Thanks again!
Thank you so much for watching and commenting, and for your praise! I really appreciate it. I know there are other channels out there that cover D&D history, so I'm glad you found this video and that you enjoyed it. I appreciate the feedback!
I'm sorry for the loss of your dad, but what a great gift he left you with. Yes, if you're only used to modern versions of D&D (post-2000), I suspect it would seem very wild! I'm actually running that same edition your dad gifted you (1981 Basic) for my 15yo daughter and her friends (started when they were 11) and we are having a blast!
Hi there! I love that you are putting this info out there so simply and so concisely! I am fortunate enough to have almost literally every single book and box set that you mentioned, including the obscure ones like the Black Box! To hear someone actually talk about all of this stuff that I’ve spent thousands of dollars on has really put a smile on my face! Excellent video, you have a new follower!
Thank you so much for watching, commenting, and subscribing! I really appreciate it. That's so cool that you have all the different editions! I started with B/X and immediately began incorporating stuff from AD&D but after that, I was pretty careful with my purchases because I didn't have a ton of money. I skipped the BECMI line because I didn't think I needed it since it seemed so similar to Moldvay. I contemplated getting the Companion Set since B/X stops at Level 14, but then decided I could just get by with AD&D. So that's why those are missing from my collection. By the time 2E came out, the gaming group I found had switched to playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay so while I got the PHB & Monstrous Manual, I didn't get any other 2E stuff. Thanks again!
I have the tan box. I found out The Denning text/black box text is where the weird contradicting "you can't move and attack" rules text in the Rules Cyclopedia comes form.
I've been playing since 76 and the white boxes. We were totally fans of the game, but like most players back then, didn't know that Chainmail was the ruleset and the white box the supplements. So, we were trying to play the white box as a ruleset with not much success and that prevented us from having a really good gaming experience. When the Holmes version came out, that was when we really discovered the game and I was hooked from then on. I've played every edition ever since (and still own all the core books from every edition, sans the Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements, alas), but my favourite is 2e, with 5e a close second and 4e coming in a close third. Basic will always hold a special place for me, though.
Thanks for watching, and for sharing your D&D history! I started with Moldvay Basic and only discovered Holmes & OD&D after the fact. Sadly, I didn't pay Holmes much time, and I only looked at OD&D as an oddity/relic. My friend had a copy of the Greyhawk Supplement he didn't want any more, and I found a pretty clean copy of Blackmoor (the one you see in the video) on a shelf at my shop back around 1983 for only $5.00. But I didn't get a White Box until around 1999 or so (a gift from my mom). I collected a bunch of 2E stuff and created a bunch of NPCs and scenarios for it, but never got a chance to play, as we moved around the time it came out and I lost my group. By the time I found a new one, they were playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, so that's what I played for a while until 3E came out.
My brothers and I attempted to play the white box set, created characters and a dungeon, but quickly found out combat was missing. I only recently found out chainmail was the missing part.
@@edtcrandall Yeah, there was the Chainmail system, requiring another book, or the very poorly explained alternate system (which ended up being the default!).
More like Daddy rolled a natural 20! I'm commenting here, but I'm four videos into your history series. I thank the UA-cam algorithm Gods for putting a video of yours in my feed. After seeing the topics you covered, I immediately subscribed and will happily be watching all of your videos. I played my first game of AD&D in 1982 and have been hooked ever since. You and I seem to be in a similar situation, as my son discovered my role-playing games collection a couple of years ago, so I dusted off my dungeon master chops and started running a game for him solo which has now grown to him and four of his friends. In fact, I'll be running my first game of Top Secret in 30 years for them soon. Anyway, I'm loving your content, and I hope you have the best of luck with your channel. Keep the great videos coming.
This is such a great comment - I appreciate it so much! Thank you for your support in subscribing, and I'm also very glad my content got recommended to you! I have no idea how that works and why certain videos get recommended more than others. So very cool you're playing D&D and other TTRPGs with your son and his friends! I've found it's a fun way to stay connected and do stuff with my daughter as she grows older and we have fewer things in common. And, while she's not expressed this thought directly, I do think she appreciates that I take time to make this game for her and coordinate a time for her to play with her friends, and then they get to all hang out after the game as well. Thanks again! I look forward to chatting with you more in the comments in the future!
I've always been fascinated by the avalanche of rules for AD&D, while most groups adapted their own rules. But, tournament play required a unified ruleset, hence this evolution. Thanks for the video.
Zeb Cook wrote the “X” in B/X, as well as The Isle of Dread. Mentzer made almost zero changes for his edition of Expert because he thought it was so well done.
Yes! I recorded so many versions of this video and in a few of them, I went into details on the authors on the various editions and what else they had written (Zeb also wrote Oriental Adventures for 1E, etc.) but it was getting way too long and not really adding to the narrative of describing the different editions. Thanks for watching and commenting! I really appreciate it!
@@mirtos39 I started with Moldvay/Cook also, but by the time they got around to the Mentzer Companion, my friends had already moved to AD&D, so I never explored the Mentzer version other than through the Gazetteers.
Got in with 3.5, but have always looked back on Older Editions Longingly (Except 2e AD&D for the most part...I love the new and imaginative settings, but Lorraine Williams "No Playtesting" Policy leaves a bad taste in my mouth). Favorite would probably be BECMI (although probably using the Rules Cyclopedia-era Wrath of the Immortals rules for that level of play...), but have always been a bit confused as to the difference between B/X and BECMI mechanics-wise...most I've gotten so far were some very opinionated comments from the B/X crowd about stretching B/X Thief Skills over the 36 levels of BECMI instead of creating new ones for the Companion and Master Supplements.
I had not realized until now that there were 3 different versions of "Basic" floating around over the 10+ year period! Good information on that! Also it is quite humorous to me to hear people talk about 1e AD&D as being 'easy to understand' or 'rules-light' / lmao!!! After 40 years of DM'ing it I still find stuff out that I don't know (or, more recently, have forgotten!). Keep up the good work, this helps our kids & grandkids understand a little better how the hobby developed/grew in our old 'real time' selves' lives! One topic folks (even my age) are shakey on is what collections of magazines there are which are now archived, free to use (providing you're not making money off them), and where they're available at! Dragon, Dungeon, "And" magazine, and others are all excellent resources that can be used for ALL editions, and SHOULD be used for years to come! You might want to do a shortie on those resources & where to find them . J
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I definitely think Advanced D&D is pretty complicated. It doesn't have feats and skills (unless you use Non-Weapon Proficiencies from later-era 1E) but it compensates with obscure rules like Weapon Speed Factors and Weapons vs AC tables. We *never* used that stuff back in the day! Too complicated! I love Dragon magazine and began subscribing with issue #90 and kept that subscription up until the last print issue, #359. And I have maybe 30-40 issues prior to #90 that I purchased off the shelf. I'll definitely cover Dragon in a future video. And yes, there were a ton of other magazines and zines at the dawn of the hobby. I'll look into putting that all together. Thanks!
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I'm really glad you enjoyed the video. I was trying really hard not to make it too long but to cover all the broad strokes of the different editions. I thought it might help when I mentioned on social media that I'm running B/X D&D for my 13yo daughter and her friends, as I've found many folks have no idea what I'm talking about.
@@daddyrolleda1 I first started playing back in the early 80s, with B/X but never really paid attention to the different editions, mostly because I had discovered Palladium Fantasy by the mid-eighties and soon we were mixing and matching rules into a hybrid. Even today, with my home brew rules, I run D&D based mechanics in a Palladium setting. Old habits die hard. 🙂
@@edwardromero3580 That sounds like a ton of fun! I remember the old Palladium ads in Dragon Magazine and thinking Chivalry & Sorcery looked really interesting. I always wished I'd seen it at my local game store. Back then so much stuff was available by mail order but I was too young to order stuff and my mom was, let's say, a little skeptical of ordering from a company she'd not heard of. It's so different than today!
@@daddyrolleda1 I was really fortunate to work at our local bookstore when I was in high school. They put me in charge of ordering for their rpg section. I was encouraged to "test-play" anything I ordered to help sell it. Pretty sweet gig, really.
I first saw some guys playing D&D, probably in 1977 or 78, using the white box set. They had a huge map on a dining room table and it seemed like they were fighting a huge battle. I just had to play this game! Later some friends of mine got me playing with the Basic set and the Keep on the Borderlands module. I later was playing with those same guys I had first watched playing D&D and they were still using the White Box set but it wasn't long before they were using the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books. Few of us could afford these books and we shared them. Letting players read them here and there meant that hardly any of us really knew the rules. You mostly knew the rules for the character classes that you played. For me it was the Thief and I studied those rules. Others like playing mages and knew those rules backwards and forwards. It was those few that had started with the original box set that knew most of the rules and those ended up being our Dungeon Masters. When 2nd edition came around, most of us weren't too thrilled with it. Some stuff we liked but most we didn't. So we kept the best and threw out the rest. We never did really stop using AD&D. We just added stuff we liked into our games, just like we did in the past with all the cool stuff that came out in magazines. We kept what we liked and dumped the rest.
Thank you for watching and commenting, and sharing your history with the game! I love reading stories like this. Your experiences are very similar to mine except that I started with B/X. But as far as not reading all the rules because we were sharing books, and also using bits and pieces we liked from Dragon, etc. - we totally did that!
I started in 1992 with my dad and his friends. They played a hybrid of 1st and 2nd edition, but it was all the same to me. I played in that game for years and then jumped into 3rd edition in my teenage years, playing with just my friends. 3.5 dropped around the time I graduated high school and started college, so that seems to be my sweet spot for nostalgia because I feel like I had the best times playing that edition and being really into the tabletop gaming scene. 4th edition came out the year my daughter was born. My wife and I, along with our friends, embraced the new changes that were made to the game, and to this day it’s my favorite edition of D&D. We really love tactical combat on a grid with miniatures so this edition was perfect for my group. Then 5th edition came along and we played that for awhile but quickly went back to playing older editions because we didn’t really enjoy it all that much. Since then I’ve retroactively played B/X and the retro clones that were inspired by it. I really love Old School Essentials for when I need that B/X fix, but my group and I are currently playing a 4th edition campaign that we started in the spring of 2022.
Thank you so much for watching, and also for sharing your TTRPG story! I love hearing about peoples' D&D journey! Your daughter was born around the same time as mine! (Although I'm quite a bit older than you based on 3.5 coming out when you were in high school!). I'm happy to hear of your love for 4E. I tried it a few times for one-shots and enjoyed it, but I was deep into a 3.X game that began in 2001 (still running! We're using a mix of 3.5 & Pathfinder 1E now) and didn't really want to change my game. I'm also *not* much of a tactical minis/map based combat guy. I prefer theater-of-the-mind. But I get tired of people bashing 4E. I'm running B/X (using Old School Essentials) for my daughter and her friends now (just had a game this past Saturday!) and having a blast!
You're welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed that edition to the video. None of those, aside from 3.5, were "official" but folks use the terms in the community and I thought it would help everyone to know exactly what's being discussed. Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@daddyrolleda1 I personally loved the 1.5 books, although there were a lot of hate for them. I liked Tasha's at first, but eventually it led us down a road to abandoning 5e for other games like LotFP, Blueholme, Labyrinth Lord, FAST RPG, and DCC.
@@VhaidraSaga Lots of great games on your list! I don't play 5E currently but I would play if someone else were to run it. I just wouldn't prefer to run that system myself. I'm currently playing B/X using Old School Essentials, but I incorporate a lot of ideas from LotFP, DCC, Index Card RPG, and even some stuff from 5E and 1E/2E.
I am so glad you enjoyed the video. I had a ton of fun putting this video together. Interestingly enough, I made this video mainly because when I chat with folks on Twitter about the B/X game I run for my daughter, I learned that a lot of them didn't have any idea what I was talking about and some were ignoring my posts because they didn't think it was "real" D&D or whatever. So I made this video mainly so I could point folks to it and say, "This is what I'm talking about!" But, it took off and became (at the time) my highest-viewed video, and that led me to create more history videos, which are a lot of fun. Thank you for watching and commenting!
One nugget to add is the Ranger class was added in 1975 from an issue of The Strategic Review vol. 1 no. 2 newsletter. That was then printed in the AD&D 1e Player's Handbook. There were a lot of fringe rules that came out that way or in Dragon magazine first, but the real-deal rule books is where it really counted. :-) I just wanted to add that, since I am a junkie for the old Ranger class... my favorite still. ;-)
Dave Arneson won in the end and Gygax and him resolved it out of court with Gygax/TSR paying Arneson 2.5% Royalties crediting Gygax and Arneson as "co-creators". When TSR was acquired by WoTC, they actually had to go to Arneson and pay him an "Undisclosed amount" for his share. It is sad though in some ways. Arneson really loved TSR. After Gygax was forced out and before their Acquisition by WoTC they were floundering and Arneson wrote several letters saying he would love to come back and fox the company. Thanks for this comprehensive video!
Thank you so much for watching and commenting. I really appreciate it! I had read that about how Dave Arneson wrote to Peter Adkison at WotC in 1997 about coming back to fix D&D. It's sad that he never got to work on it again, but from what else I have read, I get the impression Dave was more of a creator and not a business person (the same could probably be said of Gary, although Gary had at least some business sense, it seems). At least WotC made efforts to put Arneson's name back in the books as a co-creator of the original version of the game. Thanks again! I'm glad you enjoyed the video!
I'm back to running a 1981 B/X game for my 13yo daughter & her friends, but I incorporate stuff from 1E & 2E as well. Thank you so much for watching & commenting!
I am missing gods and heroes. Also from 77 I have volume 1-3 of the Arduin Grimoire by David Hargrave and the book of monsters by Phil Edgren. Thanks for the video, forgot I had these.
That's so cool you have the old Arduin Grimoire stuff. I remember see ads for those in Dragon Magazine but I never saw them at any shop I had near me, and to this day I've never read them. Thanks so much for watching and commenting!
I know I am not being accurate when I say this, but to me, there are 7 stages of D&D. 5e, 4e, 3e, 2e, 1e, Mentzer Basic (where I started)/BECMI, and "What came before me".
Ha! Yeah, I think that's a common way of looking at it. It's definitely muddied and there really aren't clear definitions to a lot of these things. For example, "1E" is a name that was never used. There was Advanced D&D, and then Advanced D&D 2nd Edition, and then D&D 3rd Edition. And the non-Advanced line didn't have any numbers. Every time, it was just called "Dungeons & Dragons" even through retroactively, we distinguish them as Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, Black Box, Rules Cyclopedia, Classic D&D... But technically those are all the same game. From what I've seen online, BECMI seems to have been the gateway for far more folks than the edition I began with (Moldvay or "B/X") even though the old-school community tends to prefer tinkering around with B/X more as a game chasis for whatever reason.
I finally understand what the Rulescyclopedia is. As someone who has always been a fan of the boxed sets but never quite had understood the finer chronology this was incredibly helpful!!
I am so glad to hear that it helped you, and that you found it interesting! Thanks for watching and commenting! I'm working on the next video right now and it will be released later this week.
Really good overview of the editions. :-) Keep the D&D history vids coming! Maybe cover the adventure modules, magazines, and even 3rd party stuff from back in the day. :-)
Thank you very much - I really appreciate you watching and commenting and offering suggestions! I can definitely cover modules and magazines (mostly Dragon). Thanks again!
@@KabukiKid Fantastic! Thank you so much! I'll work on some more vintage stuff soon. It is pouring here again so I've lost all my natural light and, frankly, it's too loud to record a video right now! I have a VERY cheap set-up!
Wonderful. Thank you so much I would love to hear you speak about all of the little details with the rules between each editions. I know, that would be quite the undertaking. But generally speaking, you know, the big stuff. Maybe not even all in one video but moving from edition to edition. Anyway, loved hearing what you had to say 😊
Thank you so much for watching and commenting, and for your support of the channel! I will definitely add this to a "potential future topics" video - you're not the first to ask!
@@daddyrolleda1 haha glad I am not the only one. Definitely enjoying all of what you have done thus far. Will be supporting you from here on out. Thank you for your work!
A really interesting video, with much that explained my confusion when I first started playing D&D. I started playing D&D in the mid eighties and I can honestly say I've no idea which version I played first. There were multiple people running many different games and D&D was just one of the multitude I played, in a relatively short period of time. MERP, GURPS, Rolemaster, Toon and Nephilim to name a few. Keep up the good work.
I really appreciate that! And thank you so much for watching and commenting and sharing some of your history. You've played quite a bunch of fun games! I always wanted to play MERP - you couldn't escape the ads for the game on either the back cover or inside front cover of Dragon magazine each month! It looked like so much fun!
@@daddyrolleda1 MERP was a great deal of fun, but its critical hit mechanic was deadly. One bad roll meant instant death, a good roll might mean limb loss, or similar debilitating injury. It gave everything a level of danger, which in so many ways felt like the Lord of the Rings books. It's the one game I wish I'd kept, as I'd love to play it again, but when I had a long TTRPG hiatus, I gave them to friends with children who were getting into the hobby, and they in turn have used them to play with their kids. A game is better played than left on a shelf gathering dust.
I was really into advanced D&D back in 1985-1987. But my oldest cousin who acted as "DM" began to play fewer and fewer campaigns as were getting into high school, and then we just stopped :( At the peak of our playing I really enjoyed reading the modules we'd get at The Rusty Scabbard (store in Lexington, KY) and learning about what I could possibly get on my adventure, lol. There was even a 2-day period (over a weekend) where my youngest cousin and I stayed up for almost TWO DAY STRAIGHT playing D&D and trying to make our own "monster manual" :D EDIT: The last character I ever had was a 31st level Fighter/Magic User/Thief combo.
31st level?!?!?! Impressive! I never really played high-level games with my DMs back in the day, and even currently the highest I've gone is 20th. I never played Epic Level, etc. Thank you so much for sharing your early memories of playing the game. I always love hearing other peoples' stories!
The 3.0 Edition PHB was written by Johnathan Tweet who co-authored the Ars Magica game with Mark Rein*Hagen (the later creator of Vampire the Masquerade). The core Mechanic of 3.0 and all future editions is the Ars Magica mechanic, except using a Characteristic + Ability + 1d10 roll against an Ease Factor set by the Storyguide. Characteristics are the Ability Scores of Ars Magica and ranged from -5 to +5 (instead of 3 to 18). The abilities (Skills) for 3.0 were a mixture of 2nd Edition and Ars Magica lists, some of which were lifted word for word from AM 3rd Edition. And the "iconic" Rage ability of Barbarian (which did not exist in Unearthed Arcana/Oriental Adventures) was a +1 Physical Virtue called "Berserk" in which you gained a "+2 on Damage, Soak, and Fatigue scores, but suffer a -2 penalty on Defense." And the Reputation system inspired the same system in Star Wars d20/Modern d20. I have argued with OSR people before because tI've heard a few people say that the ability bonus feature came from D&D, which I will admit would have been an inspiration to make 1st/2nd AD&D bonus more accessible, but that ultimately Tweet chose his AM system instead.
Hi, Thanks for this. Using the DnD ruleset to prototype a video game I'm working on. Figured a good place to start was checking edition differences. This video has been very informative. Thanks again for taking the time to put it together. Take care & have a good one
I'm so glad to hear you found it helpful! Thank you so much for watching, and for letting me know you enjoyed it. I really appreciate it. Good luck on your video game!
This is awesome. Highly informative. A cool sequel video to this would be the retroclones (those that attempt to most closely match a version) that now exist out there and which version they are most closely trying to mimic.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I really appreciate it! I can definitely make a video on retroclones and what edition each one is trying to emulate! Great idea - thanks! I will add it to the queue. Cheers!
@@daddyrolleda1 I have been following the OSR and there are a huge number of home brew rule sets available, very few are what I would call a clone of a specific edition. Old School Essentials being the only one I would truly call a clone. The rest I would say are "inspired by" certain editions. Such as OSRIC being inspired by 1st edition and Gold & Glory being inspired by 2nd edition.
This is by-and-large true. The only "exact" clone that I'm aware of, as you point out, is Old School Essentials for B/X. But the term "retro-clone" has been used long enough in the OSR Community that most folks have at least a vague idea that if you use that term a game like OSRIC is a retro-clone of AD&D 1E, Labyrinth Lord is a retro-clone of B/X, and Swords & Wizardry (at least, *some* of its iterations - they are a lot!) is a retro-clone of OD&D White Box. Then you've got games that are inspired by some of those editions but are a step or two removed, such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess being inspired by, and sharing a lot of mechanics with, B/X, but going in its own direction (most notably with the Specialist class replacing the Thief and the X-in-6 skills, but that's just one example).
I started on the red box basic D&D, had the rules cyclopedia (still regret selling that) and still have my 2nd edition books. Looking to get back in, I think i'll grab me an updated set of rulebooks. Exciting.
GREAT VIDEO! Small addition but in 1992 there was an revised edition of the Immortals Box to be used with the Rules Cyclopedia (iirc) called "Wrath of the Immortals" 😃
Oh, that's right! One day I might re-make this video and I'll make sure to include that! I'm glad you enjoyed the video, and thank you very much for watching and commenting!
Thanks for laying that out for me. I was in my early teens, back in the early 90s when I was introduced to D&D, and I never really understood what the different versions where. It also wasn't that important really. The dad of my best friend at the time ran the game for us, and he had a shelf full of these D&D books! Now, seeing this, I'm pretty sure that we used B/X. Seeing that cover gave me some serious flashbacks to making my first few characters! I clearly remember the red box cover and that AD&D player handbook cover from that time as well. I can't remember if we used those at some point, if they where on the shelves or if we used them later. We eventually would transition to running games for our own friends and I think we did a lot with that AD&D 2e edition book at that time, but like I said, we used everything we found on those shelves without really understanding about editions. It turned into a real hodgepodge. We must have used it a lot though (it's been a while) because I remember being quite familiar with the system when BG1 was released for the PC. The first edition I bought for myself and ran for my friends was 3rd edition. That friend who had all those games at his house had moved away at that time, and basically ended the gaming until I encountered the, then new release, of D&D in a shop while visiting my grandparents.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting, and for sharing this story with me! I love reading about peoples' history with the game. I started with B/X back in 1981 but we *also* mixed and matched stuff from it and Advanced D&D, and when 2E came along, we didn't really look at it as a separate game from 1E and we combined a lot of stuff from those editions as well. I'm glad you found the video helpful. Thanks for letting me know!
Just recently "unearthed" some of the older D&D stuff that I was given. Was looking for information on some of it. This helped clear up the timeline of where they sit. Have them shown in a video if you or someone have time to add insight on some of the older items.
I'm so glad to hear that you enjoyed the video! It's one of my favorites. Thank you for watching and commenting. A discussion about the various modules is on the list of potential future videos. Thanks!
I remember starting out and trying in 78 with the player book and getting the dog in 79 but never had the MM which was fine as we had the critters in the DMG Trying to keep up back in the day was crazy, till We realized how the edition were different, but of course we were playing and running everything Traveller, C&S, Gamma world, Aftermath, Morrow Project, Rq By the time the dust cleared well we all found our niche Thanks for the momoriws
Thank you for watching and commenting! Gamma World was the second RPG I ever played after D&D (if you count D&D and AD&D as one game!). I love the post-apocalyptic genre and was always really interested in Aftermath and Morrow Project from seeing ads of them in Dragon magazine, but I never got a chance to play them. Thanks again!
I started with Moldvay 1981or 1982 . Then played AD&D. I have been collecting different editions and books. It is a lot of fun. Depending on when you started will be the same or different edition,but as long as you have fun that is what really counts .
BECMI is my favorite, so clean, so good. Although first edition was my childhood and steeped with such nostalgia, I own every single book and love them all. Even Unearthed Arcana. LOL
Ah, Unearthed Arcana! There is pretty much no middle ground on that book. You love it or hate it (or as I said in my video review of it: "Cheer or Jeer")! Thank you for watching and commenting!
First printing (Wood box) = January 1974. Fourth printing (White box) = November 1975. D&D Basic set first printing = July 1977 with lizard logo and code in the upper right is F115-R.
This is a good explanation of the editions. The only thing missing is a mention of "The White Box Set" having room for the Chainmail rules book for those that had it and alternative rules for playing without Chainmail. Thus even at the start there was a split in the D&D community.
I was very lucky to get my White Box. I can't remember if I mentioned it in the video, but I first discovered Original D&D at a friend's house about 2-3 years after I was introduced to Moldvay B/X. He had a really janky beat up copy of Greyhawk: Supplement I that he didn't want any more, so he gave it to me. And then a few weeks later, I saw a near-mint copy of Blackmoor: Supplement II at my local hobby store, for cover price of $5.00. I had those for nearly 15 years before my mom gave me a White Box as a Birthday Gift. She'd gone to my local game store, and asked them what a good gift idea would be for me. They had just got this copy of the White Box in and they knew I'd like it. Years later, I got Eldritch Wizardry and Gods, Demigods, and Heroes, just to complete the set. I'm not sure if my mom hadn't bought it for me way back then if I'd ever had gotten a copy.
I started with AD&D in '81. The boxed BECMI sets came out as I was growing up. We used to mix and match editions. We figured it was all the same game because it was Dungeons & Dragons. Going through an AD&D module with BX rules? Check. Mechanical similarities aside, Mentzer Expert was eye-opening. There was so much about the wider world that was implied through the text and art. It influences my campaigns to this day. Cook's Expert set didn't inspire me the same way. To my mind, it was the best boxed set released for BECMI.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! My group did the exact same thing, mixing-and-matching between B/X and AD&D, as we, too, saw it was just "all D&D." I never collected BECMI, as by the time it came out, we (incorrectly) felt it that any non-Advanced D&D stuff was "for kids." But I've seen a lot of the art and it's so great. I do have the Rules Cyclopedia (PDF) based on BECMI which is a great version of D&D.
I guess I was one of the lucky kids back then. Me and my friends had already been playing otther TSR wargames when I picked this up at the hobbyshop with my paper route money. We took to DnD pretty naturally. I still have my basic rule book. My ADnD books are prized possessions. ❤
That's great! I didn't come to it from a wargames background but I loved it immediately. So, I guess I was part of that second-wave who discovered the game through a love of fantasy literature instead of from wargames. Thanks for watching and commenting!
So glad to hear that! That's a few years before I got started playing, but at this point, it's close enough! Thank you for watching and commenting. I'm really glad you enjoyed the video.
Thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed it, and stay tuned for more. I think I'll perhaps do a deeper-dive into the different editions I personally own in my collection.
I've played every version in some form or another since 1981. I was playing "High Fantasy" in 1980, and was invited to a homebrew OD&D game. With my Brother and other family, played both B and X, and AD&D, of which 1st Ed is my favorite to this day. I was sorely disappointed with 2nd Edition when Monks were dropped. Played that on occasion while I was enlisted in the Marine Corps. I started my own kids with 3rd Edition, 3.5, and 4e. I've also played and collected many other TTRPGs over the years, but return to D&D. Likely going back to 1st Edition AD&D since I really don't like 5e very much. Thanks for this video.
Thank you for watching, and commenting, and sharing you story! I started with B/X in 1981 and we quickly incorporated many ideas from AD&D without realizing at the time that they were technically two separate games with mechanics that don't always match. I collected some 2E stuff but never really played it, and I, too, was disappointed by the stuff they removed, such as Monks, but also the new classes that had debuted in Unearthed Arcana like Barbarians, Cavaliers, and Thief-Acrobats. I was hoping for *more* classes in 2E, not fewer. I got back into D&D with 3E and I still run a 3.X/Pathfinder1E campaign to this day that began back in May 2001. But once that's done, I don't see myself ever running that system again. I played a bit of 4E and 5E but my main games these days are spent with Savage Worlds as a player and back to my roots running a 1981 B/X game for my 13 year-old daughter and her friends (we have a session planned for tomorrow - they're going through the Keep on the Borderlands and are planning to investigate Cave K!). Thanks again - I hope you stick around and find other videos you enjoy. Cheers!
First d&d my friends and i played, roughly 25 years ago, was based off a 1st edition ad&d players handbook (late 80s i think?) And a 2nd edition dungeon master guide . We found both at a yardsale and nome of us had played before. So we used a weird hodgepodge of rules into 3.0 came out haha
We all played a hodge-podge, too! I started with Moldvay Basic in 1981 and very quickly thereafter discovered AD&D through friends. We mixed and matched the two systems, as we didn't realize at the time that Basic was not supposed to lead into Advanced, but rather it was a different game. When 2E came out, I was working on a campaign and I shifting to the 2E rules.. "kind of." I kept using Cavaliers, Barbarians, Assassins, and Half-Orcs, all of which had been removed from 2E (at least the initial core book) but I updated them with Non-Weapon Proficiencies, etc. That style of play was very common until 3E came out, as that edition was so different mechanically that trying to mix and match stuff became a chore. Thanks for watching and commenting!
Yes, I think $10 sounds about right. I know the original Boxed Set of the three little brown books was also $10.00. I started a little after you with the Moldvay Basic set, but I was lucky to have other kids teach me the game. Of course years later, I discovered we weren't playing it correctly!
@@daddyrolleda1 Some comparison of the rule systems in hindsight would be interesting, even if subjective. It seems to me that B/X is favored by many in the OSR and it would be interesting to learn why that is (or is it?).
That's really interesting - and yes, I would agree that, broadly speaking, B/X is one of the most used/modified rules sets in the OSR. I think there are a few reasons, but my main thoughts are: 1) If you're talking "old school D&D," the *main* (not only, not best, but *main*) three rules sets that usually first come to mind are: Original D&D (1974), B/X (1981) and Advanced D&D (1977). Yes, you've got Holmes Basic, BECMI, Rules Cyclopedia, 2nd Edition, but those are what I would call the "Big 3". 1a) Of those "Big 3", Original D&D is VERY rules light and much of it is honestly not explained all that well. It's written assuming the player has knowledge of wargames and other items (e.g., Outdoor Survival by Avalon Hill) and it doesn't explain things well; as modern gamers, we tend to "read past" the omissions because "we know what it means" but that can create problems when different people have different gaming backgrounds but assume they "know" what Gary meant. Making a usable OD&D clone that adheres to the spirit of the rules is a difficult task because it would require codifying and explaining rules that were left unexplained in the original text, so it would be difficult to be faithful while still making something that's easy to use. Swords & Wizardry does a good job but it's not 100% faithful to the original rules but more an homage that's compatible with the rules. 1b) Advanced D&D is overly complex with rules. While many people a fondness for the game (I'm one of them), there are *SO MANY RULES* that are unnecessary and make to difficult comprehension, and may people just ignored or avoided those rules back in the day. I've met so many people here even just on UA-cam who are roughly my age, and none of us played AD&D "the same." Many of us used the B/X rules engine and just incorporated the new races, classes, spells, weapons, and treasure from AD&D. But that changes a lot of things, mechanically. AD&D has weapon speed factors, weapons vs AC, and "rounds" in AD&D are one minute, versus 10 seconds in Moldvay, and the Base AC in AD&D is 10 vs 9 in Moldvay, etc. OSRIC is a fun system that seeks to replicate all the arcane rules stuff from AD&D but if 90% of folks aren't going to use certain rules (again, such as weapon speed factors or weapon vs AC, just to name two), then it becomes difficult to develop a clone that replicates AD&D in a coherent and easy-to-use fashion for gamers to actually *use* all the rules contained therein. I probably didn't explain that well because it's late and I'm tired. But basically I think AD&D strictly RAW is way to rules heavy and those increased rules do not add to better or more fun playability. 1c) Moldvay B/X hits that sweet spot. It clarifies language from OD&D, but keeps things lighters than the more cumbersome Advanced D&D. It has very clear exploration and combat procedures, which are difficult to find and use in either OD&D or AD&D. Through limiting options it actually increases creativity, but it's also very easily hackable to add new options. 2) There have been a lot of retroclones for B/X but one that really stands out is Old School Essentials (OSE). Through a combination of fantastic layout, clever marketing, and getting top-tier talent to provide adventures and illustrations, it's become one of the, if not single, most popular retroclones on the market today and that popularity has led to many more indie publishers wanting to create content for OSE. So it's kind of a circular thing - OSE became popular because B/X was popular, and now OSE is so popular that more people are creating materials for it, which leads to more increased popularity for B/X and OSE. That was probably really rambling but hopefully it helps!
@@daddyrolleda1 Thank you, that is interesting. Now I also understand why OSE treats "Advanced Fantasy" as a compatible add-on. I have OSE but I did not yet invest in Advanced Fantasy. Compared to the streamlined modern designs I found the mechanics of OSE still surprisingly messy but as you say it is superbly presented and what's nice is that it covers more of adventuring situations than the modern rules-light systems.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I'm so glad you enjoyed it! I made this one primarily because I run a 1981 Basic game for my 13 year-old daughter & her friends, and I was finding on Twitter that nobody had any idea what I was talking about when I said I was running B/X. I'm so glad people are enjoying and learning from it!
Not a bad breakdown. Here's the breakdown of editions over the year that popped into my mind just seeing the title of the video: Chainmail fantasy supplement with man-to-man rules OD&D OD&D w/ Greyhawk and later OD&D supplements. Holmes edit of Basic AD&D Basic/Expert AD&D Surivial Guide Era (Non Weapon Profficiences rules are common) Basic/Expert/Companion/Master& Immortal Second edition. Rules Cyclopedia. Black Box Basic AD&D 2nd edition players option series (2.5) Dragonfist (a lot of people forget this ever existed or never knew about it at all) 3rd edition 3.5 edition 4th edition 5th edition
Thanks - my list matches up pretty closely with yours, although I didn't include Chainmail (I have a copy stuck in my White Box but I was trying to keep strictly to games with "Dungeons & Dragons" as part of the name - but I understand why you included it, although if I included that, I'd probably also include Blackmoor). I *did* forget about Dragonfirst - I stumbled across that one in the 3E era when I saw Chris Pramas share a link to a PDF download in a forum (probably on ENWorld). Nice call that you remembered it! I counted post-UA as "1.5" but yeah, I could see using Non-Weapon Proficiencies as the dividing line (although those appeared in Oriental Adventures, which pre-dated both Survival Guides). I added the Classic D&D Game, 4th Edition Essentials, and post-Tasha's as well, but honestly our lists are very, very close - that's very impressive for doing that off the top of your head! I had to look through my collection and make notes on the editions I don't have. I definitely would have forgotten the Black Box (I barely remember that one) or the Classic D&D game had I not done a bit of research to make sure I wasn't missing anything.
@@daddyrolleda1 oh that makes perfect sense, I just read the title of the video and typed out my list and then watched the video to see if my recollection would mesh.
Black Box D&D preceded the Rules Cyclopedia by about 6 months, so your list isn't ordered correctly. A few different versions of 2e are missing as well.
@@Dave_L I think that was pretty impressive for coming up with that list off the top of his head. How many versions of 2E do you include? I know they revised the covers at one point but I wouldn't include that as a different edition. Besides the initial release, Player's Option, and Dragonfist (which I didn't include in my list since it wasn't released publicly), what else do you think counts as a version of 2e?
Enjoy the video. Thanx for getting so this together. Should you consider releasing an update to the history... 😊 The history of D&D should include reference both magazines which provided "official" material. Today, rules from "The Strategic Review" and "Dragon Magazine" might better be referred to as Beta Rules. The other item missing is the drop in quality in late 1st and 2nd Edition books. This resulted in issues with the books bindings and pages gaming of out. Pathfinder (P1) was created by the individuals (aka Paizo) who took over Dragon and Dungeon magazines during 3.5. The first edition allowed fans of 3.5 to continue using all those 📚 books with P1. I see P1 and P2 as the spiritual successors to AD&D. While 4e & 5e inherit the simplicity of the Dungeons & Dragons box sets. Even today we have an over haul of 5e to D&D-One along with P1 to PFc¹. ￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣ ¹PFc ~ PathFinder Core (aka Remastery editions)
Thank you very much for watching and commenting! For this one, I was specifically trying to *only* focus on published games by the company that published D&D (so, TSR and WotC). That's why I left out a lot of early stuff like Blackmoor, Chainmail, and the magazine stuff. I do, however, mention both The Strategic Review and Dragon in several of my videos (most notably the videos on character classes such as Clerics-Paladins-Rangers-Illusionists-Bards: ua-cam.com/video/PORfiBst6HE/v-deo.htmlsi=FBTGJTJuF2HyA48S). And, I plan to devote specific videos to those magazines in the future! While I didn't mention the binding issues in this video (as it was focused mainly on just labeling and numbering the editions), I have mentioned it a few times including in my video on Unearthed Arcana (ua-cam.com/video/zwU7bsSKQmE/v-deo.htmlsi=qr6ImTLgtozrlMvr). I played a lot of PF1 and agree it's a spiritual successor to 3.5 but, again, I was trying to only focus on games with Dungeons and Dragons in the name and also games by the "official" publisher of D&D. It's also why I didn't include TSR games like the Dragonlance Saga RPG, as that was not branded as a D&D game. Thanks again!
I wouldn't consider Unearthed Arcana 1.5 any more than I would consider material from Dragon Magazine to create a sub edition of the game. As the official house organ of D&D/AD&D, Dragon Magazine had more supplemental rules over #1-#90 than were later published in books. I also refer to the Players Optiojns and DM Options books as munchkin bait and being the end of AD&D as a playable game.
Thanks for watching and commenting. There are definitely people who would agree with your assessment of the Player's Options books for 2E. I never used them myself but I also wasn't actively playing 2E at the time, as my group had decided to switch to playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. 3E is what got me back into playing D&D and I'm still running a 3E campaign to this day that began back in May 2001. I'm also running a 1981 Moldvay Basic game for my 13yo daughter and her friends. We had our 19th session yesterday (we play on average a little less than once a month).
Thank you very much for watching and commenting! I really appreciate it! I'll be making more history videos soon. I was just trying to mix it up a bit with my latest video.
I really liked the way that cantrips worked back in the day, much better than how it works now. Like what is the power source for all of that magical energy that spellcasters use with their endless supply of cantrips? Doesn't make any sense. And those 2.5 books were awesome. Using those rules was how we played for a LONG time.
I, too, really liked the 0-level cantrips with the very minor powers they had. I always imagined most spellcasters in my world only had that level of power, and the average commoner was blown away that someone could do that. And then past there, there were only a handful of really powerful casters. In more modern editions, magic is much more plentiful and common. Nothing wrong with that - it's just a different play style. I never really got a chance to play 2.5 (or even 2E). My group had switched to playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay during college and then I started post-college work and stopped roleplaying for a few years until 3E came out. I've heard a lot of folks really liked the 2.5 books, while others think they were too unbalanced.
My two favorite editions are the two extremely different ones. I live BECMI for its simplicity and exploration and I love 4e for its tactical combat and build crafting. Both are excellent and appeal to different gaming desires/interests that I have.
I like that you can appreciate each edition for what they are and how they work. I think 4E gets a bad rap and also believe it would've performed much better in the market if it had been offered as a tactical war game instead of labeled as "D&D." There's an expectation of what D&D is/does and 4E didn't really deliver that, but what it *did* do, it was good at. Thank you for watching and commenting!
In Gygax's last video interview, he said the rules are not meant to rule. They were only there to give structure. But no rule was unchangeable. As I recall, it says that in the original AD&D DM's Guide.
Thanks for commenting! Yes, that sentiment is found in most of the early editions of the game including OD&D as well as Holmes Basic, AD&D, and Moldvay Basic, just to name a few. Sometimes Gary would write articles in Dragon stating that if you weren't following RAW, then you "weren't playing AD&D" but I think that was mainly "game company executive" Gary speaking, not "gamer Gary."
There are a number of 1rst edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hardcover books that were missed. Deities & Demigods (1979), Fiend Folio (1980), Monster Manuel 2 (1983) and Oriental Adventures (1986)
Thank you for watching and commenting. I covered all of those in a subsequent video on "The History of Advanced D&D Hardbacks": ua-cam.com/video/M3ygZCjLqAk/v-deo.htmlsi=auUg_dWKJdrxvu4s This video wasn't intended to cover every *product* published for each edition, but rather just show a sampling of each. Deities & Demigods was published in 1980, the Fiend Folio in 1981, and Oriental Adventures in 1985. I also didn't talk about the Manual of the Planes (1987), Dragonlance Adventures (1987), or Greyhawk Adventures (1988).
Supplement one Greyhawk was the first D&D book I ever bought.. on sale in a NJ mall hobby store sitting on the clearance shelf. Had to be be in 1980 and I convinced my mom to buy it for me to read.. and there it began, I remember getting the basic Holmes blue box edition shorty after as a gift from a family member and AD&D right after that. I won't touch a WotC D&D product these days and even by the mid 80s I preferred Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay over D&D at least until the early nineties and Dark Sun came around.. Lots of nostalgia, too bad the IP has fallen so far over the last 20 years
Thank you very much for watching and commenting, and also for sharing you story/history with the game. I started playing in 1981, but I remember discovering the existence of the Greyhawk Supplement while at a sleepover at a friend's house. That book was my first exposure to Original D&D. In the mid-80's, we moved and I lost my gaming group. My new group in my new state was playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay so I lost about a decade of playing D&D until I came back to play 3rd Edition. I got really into that edition and am still running a 3E/Pathfinder1E campaign that began in May 2001. But I'm also back to my roots running a 1981 Moldvay Basic game for my 13yo daughter and her friends, and having a blast! That said, I quite like many things with 5E. While I don't play or run that edition, I've borrowed a few ideas from it to include in my other games. 4E had a really good Dungeon Master's Guide in terms of advice for running games, and also had a really good concept in the Monster Manual for running minions for monsters. I try to peruse through each edition to see if there's anything useful, new, or creative I can incorporate into my games.
It's funny to pick out the little nuances in Holmes vs the other editions. There aren't many, but there are a few and they always strike me as funny. Thanks for sharing this little tidbit!
Those original rule books were letter sized paper folded in half. A copier and a stapler let you produce a book. (Not sure if they were copier or print machine produced though). Man, so many of those things I had back in the day - but I let them slip out of my hands over the years as I kept 'up-dating' and moving around.
Ah yes, you're right about the size! I should've been more clear in my description. Thanks! And thanks for watching and commenting! Sorry you lost your books... that's tough.
Thanks for watching and commenting! I played and ran a ton of 3E/3.5 & am still running a campaign for that system that began in May 2001. But, once it wraps, I won't ever run that system again. I'd play it if someone else ran it. But I don't want to change systems this close to the campaign end. I'm also running Old School Essentials for my 13yo daughter and her friends! I have the Advanced Books, but other than the monsters, I haven't included anything else yet. We are having a blast - easily the most fun I've had running a D&D game.
I was very lucky to discovered some of those early supplements back in the early 80's when they were much more readily available and without a huge mark-up. I bought my Blackmoor supplement around 1983 or 1984 right off the shelf at my game store for cover price of $5.00. That copy of Eldritch Wizardry originally belonged to a friend back then who didn't want it any more. Thanks for watching and commenting! I hope you continue to enjoy the channel.
As someone who started with 2nd edition but quickly moved to 3rd edition, I really appreciate insight into the somewhat chaotic origins of D&D. However, I feel the latter half of this video was a bit rushed as there wasn’t as much detail about how editions 3, 4, and 5 were developed nor how they differed from previous editions. Some follow up videos that go into more detail about each specific edition would be great!
Thank you so much for watching and commenting. I really appreciate it! And I think this is a fair criticism. I'm just starting out and trying to find my "sea legs" as it were - this particular video was my very first in my "history" series and I did it primarily because on Twitter, I'm constantly talking about the 1981 Basic D&D game I run for my daughter and her friends, and I get a lot of "blank stares" (figuratively speaking) from newer folks in the hobby who have no idea what I'm talking about. So I made this video with the intent of saying, "Hey, you can check this video out to understand more!" But then the video took off (as you can see, it's far and away the most popular video on my channel) and I was kind of taken aback, as I'd kind of just thrown it together. I filmed it (and all my videos) on my phone and I was watching the amount of space I had left in my phone memory counting down, so I started speaking really quickly at the end to fit it all in. 😀 I think a follow-up video is a great idea! I'm kind of been doing that in a small way by picking specific topics, like the Thief/Rogue Class, Skills, and Ability Scores, and talking about them across each edition, but that said, I have focused a bit more on the earlier years and do tend to be a bit quicker about later editions. I'll work on remedying that in future videos! Thank you again! I really appreciate your support!
I first played AD&D in the fall of 1980 with group of military members in Germany (I was in the Air Force). I continued to play (even DMing) through 3rd edition. I started to feel fatigue when endless supplements were released. I didn't do 4th edition. I recently briefly joined a 5th edition campaign and bought a player's handbook. I prefer 3rd edition.
I started just shortly after you, in 1981, with Moldvay B/X, but in terms of total number of hours of playing, I've spent the most time playing 3E/3.5/Pathfinder1E (I kind of just lump them all together). I played 4E just two times, and it wasn't for me, but, I don't begrudge players for liking it. I've played 5E a handful of times, and while I would choose to not run that system, if someone invited me to a game, I would totally play it. But I also know my PC would be less effective than other PCs because I don't spend time on things like "builds" and figuring out the math to do cool combos, etc. And again, I totally don't begrudge people who do that. It's just not my style of playing. I'm not good at it, and that's partly because my enjoyment of the game does not come from system mastery. But for folks who like that, I think that's awesome!
I was, and am still very much in love with the 2nd edition (AD&D). Tho the system is obtuse and hard to understand with too many small rules that don't add much and complicate the flow of the game sessions, it had the best spells (especially with the Forgotten Reams ones) and the Triple classes were to me an absolute joy to play. The different experience curved and max HP limits really help balance the game. It was FAR more balanced than the 3rd or 3.5ed, not to mention those 5 saving throws so that every class had an edge against something. Sadly, I am the ONLY one at my table that loves it and thus unless I DM it, no one wants to, so I can never play as a player anymore. I modernized it to 3,5ed with skills and replaced Thac0 tables with "To Hit" tables, and converted the 5 saving throws into the same system 3,5 uses. Worked like an absolute charm and my players LOVED it too... again not enough to DM it (arrrrgh !) 3,0 was rough, too much buffing (everyone and their mom used spells to buff themselves and you had so much metagaming with that, made me sick as a DM and bored as a player). Also a level 20 dwarf fighter with 24con (20 +1 each 4 levels) now had 340hps, whereto the same dwarf with 19con in 2nd had like 190hps if not less (comparing maximums). yet the wizard's fireball still only did the same 10d6. It was pure idiocy and messed-up balance. Only 3 saving throws made it easy to get near immunity even with a "weak save number" on your class. 3.5 improved it some and it became my second best edition, I still DM in that system to this day, and enjoy playing it too. We had to smooth the rough edge with house rules that everyone agreed on (6-8ppl all agreeing on house rules? now that's perfect!), such as boosting 1min/level buff spells to 10min/level, and 1round/level summons to 1min/level (except demons/elemental lords and other B/S). No items could boost your saves (except bonus from stats) and caster level is the sum of all your magic classes (allowing for that Cleric/Mage again !). We usually work with a point buy system so nobody gets unlucky and have a crap character, or get lucky and gets a bunch of super high stats. Still the HP issues, it really gets bad after level 10, and I think I will revert to HPs from 2nd edition in my next major campaign to reign that in. 4th edition I hated, with a passion, and every one at my table gave it a try but ultimately ditched it. Had a couple nice ideas, which we poached for some of our house runes ( casting in rituals, minions, some feats, the Eladrin fey-elf... it wasn't all bad, but it felt like a computer game instead of a table-top game). 5th edition is... well... meh. It fixed my power-gaming issues from 3.0/3.5 which is a huge plus. Most spells are very poor and not worth their slot cost (let alone empowering them by using higher slots) and metamagic feats really blows. The melee classes are pretty good for the most part, so is the "Healing Cleric", and the Thief is almost overpowered. Still I can play this all night and still have fun. Not DMing it tho. Not a fan of the weak stats for character generation tho, monsters still have 24str or more for the classic ones like Ogre and Demons, but now getting over 15 is difficult and expensive as eff. But that is more to do with my DMs who are alergic to 18's and above, lol. We started houseruling this (much to my insistance), and with very very slight alterations we got a system with is far more fun (such as reverting to MP instead of slots for casters) and adding feats for extra concentration spells and not having the limit of 2-3 magic items. To each their own, I'd still rather play 3,5ed, or of course 2nd ed. That said, I can't wait to see the 6th edition. I really hope it improves the game and bring back the triple/dual classes in some form... 5th ed is very lacking in that regards, and 3.5 (non-houseruled) kinda blew as well without those endless supplement of prestige class (but we usually play with basic books only). Thanks for the video !
Glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for sharing your thoughts on the game and your history with the various editions! While I started with B/X and am back to running it for my daughter and her friends, I spent the most total hours of time playing 3E/3.5/Pathfinder1 in a campaign that started in May 2001 and which is still on-going. I'm the DM for that one and over the past few years, I've grown disenchanted with that system as a DM. I used to *love* it and have a ton of books and supplements for it but it's become a slog to DM. If someone else wants to run it, I'd play, but once this campaign wraps, I'll never run it again. I am just not someone who enjoys system mastery (mixing-and-matching to find the perfect combination to do things) and that edition really shines for folks who *do* like that. It's just too much work to design encounters and run combats, for me. But like you said, to each their own!
3.5e definitely my favorite edition. When 4e came out, Paizo made Pathfinder, (or D&D 3.75e) which made it even better. I have friends that love 2e though, saying there is too much math in 3e/3.5e/and Pathfinder. I just couldn't stomach the chaos of the earlier editions anymore after experiencing the elegance and depth of 3e+.
Although I started playing back in 1981 with Moldvay Basic, in terms of sheer numbers of hours played, I've played more of 3E/3.5/PF1E than any other edition. I started a 3E campaign in May 2001 that's still running today (using PF) but when it wraps, I don't intend to ever run that system again. I'd play it if someone else ran it, but I find I don't enjoy running high-level 3.x games. I also played in a ~12 year 3E/3.5 game and we also dabbled in D20 Modern (specifically the D20 Cthulhu game). I appreciate that I get *how* the math works in 3.X but as time has gone on, I find that I'm much more nimble and flexible at running a system like B/X, which is what I'm using now for my daughter's campaign. I do have a *TON* of 3.X stuff, both WotC and 3rd Party, and I use a lot of the idea, stripped of the mechanics, in that game as well. Thanks again for watching and commenting! I really appreciate it!
you know, its amazing how little progress there has been for the mechanics of a d20 system. its been add numbers or remove numbers and recently they had the idea of Roll 2 and pick the lowest highest! (which spoiler increases or reduce the average by 66% percent)
Firstly, thank you for commenting! And secondly, my apologies for the very delayed response! I didn't see a notification for your comment so just luckily ran across it today! Yes, 5E introduced Advantage/Disadvantage, which I prefer to 3E/3.5's long list of various plus-and-minus modifiers (and don't get me wrong - I played 3.X for a really long time and am still running a game using that system). As far as the math, what I've seen is that using Advantage/Disadvantage increases or reduces the die roll by an average of 4.5, or 22.5%. Then again, I am really not great at math so I may have misunderstood!
@@daddyrolleda1 the way i heard it is that it increses or reduces it by 3.5, but it doubles the chances to crit miss or hit. the problem with d20s is that there VERY little you can do to them other than increasing the number or adv/disadv.
@@DareToWonder Makes sense. I do like the idea of rolling dice, as it adds a totally random element to the game that can then be narrated as to its effects. I have a very good friend who has min-maxed his character in the game I run for him (been going since May 2001) that his chance of failing any kind of roll/check is very low. He does that on purpose because his personality is that he doesn't want to be surprised, and he also looks at character creation as an exercise in how to "beat the system." My style is that I like (as James Maliszewski put it) the "oracular power of the dice." I *want* there to be surprises I didn't expect, and as a DM, that gives me some real fun, as I have to figure out how to narrate what the dice just indicated. As a player, he really dislikes that. 😀
@@daddyrolleda1 I definitely feel like they are fundamentally similar, but there's a lighter tone to BECMI, more heroic and less grim. I can't really pinpoint how or why that is, but I assume it's in presentation. Less Eldritch and more knight of the realm.
Hello! Nice "meeting" you on @DMTales earlier today. Thanks for watching that video and asking your questions (I remember your Cheese Guild...). And, thank you very much for watching and commenting on this video. Great to have you here. Cheers!
While I'm currently enjoying and running 1981 Moldvay Basic for my daughter and her friends, in terms of sheer total number of hours playing, I've played the most of 3/3.5/Pathfinder1E (I lump them all together).
2.5 Edition was awsome! Edit: I have a ton of experience with it. The biggest things 2.5 did was let you build your own race and class. You picked a regular race and class and had points to select race abilities and points to pick your class abilities. You could take abilities (drawbacks) that were worth negative points to gain more points. Any unspent points could be used to buy or increase proficiencies (which also cost points to buy). By default, if you took the regular version of races and classes, you wouldn't have an extra points. This makes it completely compatible with non-Skills and Powers characters. The big thing is customizing your character. You could buy the ability for the wizard to cast in armor. A Cleric could buy improve weapon proficiencies like swords. You could pay for this by giving up access to certain spell schools / circles or limiting your armor or taking behavioral restrictions like a Paladin. It let you swap out features you didn't want or weren't going to use for features you wanted and were going to use. The other big thing in S&P is sub- ability scores. Each stat had two sub abilities that by default were the same as you primarily ability score. Each sub ability was tied to a part of the ability. Dex had one part tied to Range Attack bonus and another tied to AC bonus. You could raise one by lowering the other up to 2 point. So, instead of Dex 14, you could have Dex 12 for Ranged Attacks and a Dex 16 for AC. This was by far the most broken part of S&P since in practice every character just got +2 to basically every stat by eschewing the other half of the stat's use. Coupled with the custom races and classes, S&P characters were much more optimized and powerful. In my opinion, these easily added a level or more raw power to characters built with the default points expenditures. Needless to say, old skool players often found S&P to be too gamey and too powerful meant for munchkins and power gamers. Like all additional options, you didn't have to power game it. You could simply use it to buy what your concept was going to actually use and be instead of whatever narrow tired trope an author wrote. It was great.
That is probably the edition with which I have the least experience! I collected a lot of the "base" 2E books, but by the time the Player's Option series stuff came out, my group had moved to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and I'd stopped playing for a few years while I finished college and started my career. I came back hard with 3E but, although I was aware of it from articles in Dragon magazine, I basically missed 2.5. Thanks for watching and commenting!
Thanks for all that added detail! That really helps explain the system. I always struggle with drawbacks like the "behavioral restrictions" of a Paladin, as I find more often than not they get ignored or forgotten by the player and the DM, and you end up with a PC that got extra benefits for no drawbacks. Many of the 2E kits were built this way and I recall it's one of the reasons a lot of folks didn't like them.
That's right! I had completely forgotten! My 3E books have been out in the garage since around the time 3.5 came out, as I was out of shelf-space, but I recently brought them back inside due to making all these videos. I just double-checked and my 3E Player's Handbook still has the CD on the inside back cover. I don't think I ever even took it out!
I like to use race as class in AD&D if someone wants to play something off the wall or weird. One time I made up a baboon class as a joke. Someone said that a baboon would be smarter than someone with a 3 Int so I went for it lol. I used it as a NPC. This way you don't have to come up with everything for a creature can it be a thief? Can it be a wizard? just give it set skills and an XP chart and you are good to go
Indeed! Quite risque for the time and the only cover they did like this, as far as I remember. I know there was nudity in the interior art of the Monster Manual but that went away pretty quickly and later books didn't have that. I can't post the image here, but in Appendix N, Gary Gygax mentions "Dwellers in the Mirage" by A. Merritt as an inspirational book. Take a look at this cover: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwellers_in_the_Mirage
I love 4e, it is actually my favorite version of D&D by narrowly edging out the Rules Cyclopedia. Also, in response to the "Pathfinder outsold 4e" comment, yes, it did for a brief window of time when WotC had stopped production of 4e and was working on D&D Next (which evolved into 5e). There are some people who had worked at both WotC and Paizo who have come forward saying that, based on the sales reports they were seeing, at no time while 4e was in active production did Pathfinder outsell 4e (it did do incredibly well, no hate on Pathfinder here since I also love that edition). Pathfinder's entry into the market was also very controversial and they almost got sued for using advertising that very clearly billed itself as just a continuation of 3.5 but they did drop that specific line fairly quickly.
Thanks so much for watching and commenting! I appreciate it. I've had fun playing pretty much all editions of D&D (I have yet to actually play OD&D, Holmes, or 2E) and while I never ran or played in a campaign with 4E, I did play in a few one-shots and had a great time. I think ultimately it was just *too* different and folks weren't ready for that, especially after 3E opened the doors for 3rd party publishers to create content. I have thousands of dollars worth of 3.X stuff that wasn't really usable with 4E and I wasn't ready to let that investment go, so I made the switch to Pathfinder since it was all largely compatible. Thanks for your insider info on sales - it was reported so much in the press that Pathfinder was outselling 4E and I didn't realize that didn't happen until WotC had moved to work on D&D Next and stopped actively promoting 4E. That's really interesting! Cheers!
I thoroughly enjoyed the hell out of 4e, it's probably my most played edition since I got years of weekly games out of it with my brother and High School Friends. Granted, after I discovered Retroclones (Let alone WotC putting up PDFs of older editions, often for cheap) and the world discovered 5e (No hate on 5e, I like it...mostly...it's just difficult to get a group together for BECMI or 1e...), I fear 4e is just going to be a Character-focused miniatures-skirmish game for me...but I still like the edition.
@@SwordlordRoy I think whatever edition one starts with is bound to instill a sense of nostalgia but also, there's no denying it's fun because it's your first! It's a new world of fun to explore. 4E has a lot of ardent fans and I think if it had tried to embrace what it was doing instead of trying to position it as just "another edition of D&D" it could've been a lot more successful.
@@daddyrolleda1 I fear 3.5 was my first edition, with 3.0 being the first I ran...experience was poor for the most part, the edition wasn't conducive to self-teaching, and the only truly experienced player we had was more interested in exploiting the newbie DM than helping.
@@SwordlordRoy Oh no! I'm sorry you had a bad experience at your first outing with the hobby. 3.X is very complex, as you well know by now, and I can see it being difficult to learn especially if you have no familiarity with TTRPGs and are trying to learn solely from reading the book. And, it is also very conducive for players who strive for "system mastery" vs just enjoying the game. I have never played that way, but I know a lot of folks who enjoy being able to exploit loopholes to create characters that are ultra-powerful. I have a player like that in the 3.5 game I'm currently still running (started with 3E back in May 2001 and the campaign is still going). He loves being able to combine race-class-feats-magic in ways I as the DM would never think of, so that few things challenge him. I find it frustrating, but it's how he derives enjoyment from the game.
I began in 1980 through 1990 and as a teenager it was a horribly confusing period. Things kept coming out and we didn't really know what was changing and we generally ignored them, doing either whatever first Basic version we had or played AD&D and ignored most supplements, focusing on modules. It was like a lot of background noise to us.
I definitely understand that with regard to all the different non-Advanced versions that were coming out (B/X, then BECMI, Easy-to-Master, Rules Cyclopedia, Classic D&D...). I had the Basic Box & the Expert Rulebook from the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh edition and pretty ignored all the later printings as it seemed like they weren't really changing all that much.
Thanks for watching and commenting! I appreciate it!
I started in 1990, age 11. I definitely ran 1E and 2E together without understanding that they were two separate, if very similar, games. It caused a lot of confusion. Not to mention all the basic modules
@@asafoetidajones8181 My group was the same in the early 80's with Basic vs Advanced, but we didn't realize we were confused! We just mixed them together and ignored the inconsistencies!
I thought we were the only ones
@@seanfaherty I think it was more common than not to be confused!
I'd love to see a longer version with more about how the rules changed between each
That could be a good topic. It'd probably have to be broken into a few different videos but it's something I can add to my list of potential topics. Thanks for the idea!
@@daddyrolleda1 I'd also find a longer version interesting. It was good to keep this video relatively short and factually neutral but I'd also like to see a version with some explanations what people liked/disliked about the editions, why the OSR focuses on some and not on others, why Pathfinder was forked off, etc. Those topics would me more controversial but interesting to someone like me who has some history with TTRPG but outside of D&D.
@@daddyrolleda1 Hi, did you get around to having a go at changes between the editions? I am getting into D&D now for the first time through the 2024 edition, and I’m super curious to learn about the road that led here.
In the early 80's , my favorite thing was going to the mall and seeing which new D&D supplements and books were out. that and the Hildebrandt Tolkien Calendars were my childhood.
We could've been twins, then! My early 80's were very similar. Those Hildebrandt Calendars were so awesome!
Thanks for watching and commenting!
I bought my first set (the White box) in 1976 (19 years old) when I found a copy in a small shop called Games Centre just off Oxford Street in London. I spent several weeks slowly working out how to play this weird game. I bought the four supplements (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry and GD&H) over the next year and that made things clear. I played games on an irregular basis for a number of years and gradually collected the books for 1st edition AD&D. I didn't start running a campaign until 1984 with a group of friends and relatives. This started with 1st edition but I converted to 2nd edition as soon as I could. I never used the 2.5 edition but I did play the BECMI version from time to time. My campaign came to an end in 2001, mostly due to various life events that happened to the players. I've never played since and never had the opportunity to start anew. But it's good to see the game still going.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting, and sharing your RPG "journey." I love hearing about how other people got into the game and their campaigns over the years.
What prompted you to buy the White Box when you saw it? Did you go to the shop specifically looking for that game, or did you pick it up only after you saw it on the shelf?
I started playing in 1981 with Moldvay Basic but didn't really start DM'ing a campaign until 2001 with 3E (which is still going to this day, in addition to the campaign I run for my daughter and her friends, for which I'm back to using Moldvay Basic).
I'm sorry you haven't had a chance to play since. Maybe things will change and you can start up again. Here's hoping!
@@daddyrolleda1 I picked up a magazine called 'Games & Puzzles' to read on the train home from work. It had an article on D&D and where to buy it. So I went there specifically to get the game.
Well done for keeping your campaign going!😊😊
Even as someone who started playing AD&D in 1981 I found this video interesting and informative.
People who came to the hobby later on, especially those who grew up with Google always at their fingertips, might be surprised to learn that the hodge podge of early editions was just as confusing to most players who lived through that era as it is to them. Little if anything was published explaining the rationale behind all the different sets and even game shop staff were often confused about just how they related to one another.
At least where I grew up, the big increase in the game's popularity seemed to coincide with the release of the AD&D PHB and DMG, so that's what most of us played. Kids who had started with one of the boxed sets usually switched when they joined a school D&D club or similar group for the sake of compatibility. I get the impression that the boxed sets were more popular in less populous areas where small groups of geeky kids had to figure the game out without the benefit of a local gaming community but I could be wrong about that.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting!
That's an interesting theory! I myself started with Moldvay Basic in a smaller town (a suburb in Salt Lake City) but we quickly added in stuff from the Advanced D&D books we found at our local library, as at the time we didn't understand they were technically two separate games! So, that does coincide with how even the folks playing the games (and the store staff) didn't know the differences!
@@daddyrolleda1 I'm kinda surprised to learn that D&D was legal in Utah back in the day. 😉
@@RichBensen Ha! I know, right?! My dad got transferred there for his work (we came from the Bay Area, then Reno, then SLC so it was quite the culture shock!).
Some kids saw me reading some books about King Arthur mythology and asked if I'd read the Hobbit (I had) or Conan (I had not) and that started a conversation that led to them telling me about D&D. And to your point, looking back, it is surprising how open they were about it! A friend's mom gave me an issue of Dragon magazine for my birthday and other friends bought me some 1E hardbacks!
As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), I only ever met one adult who was anti-FRP. The Satanic Panic was not really a thing for Mormons because of our beliefs (in that a thing is neither good nor evil, it is how it is used. Blame the GM, not the rules set.)
I myself grew up in a small rural community and didn't come across any game books till 1981 when I was in a book store and found a display of TSR books. It wasn't long before I was introduced to other games, like The Fantasy Trip; and by 1986 I had traveled around the world and played a dozen different games that were not published by TSR, though everyone also played AD&D everywhere I went.
Bought that box set for my friend back in high school for his birthday
Thanks for watching and commenting! Which boxed set? I assume the White Box?
@@daddyrolleda1 that’s the one. He was our dm and collected everything dnd but didn’t have those original books
@@brennonr What an awesome gift that was!
I got mine because my mom went to our local game store in the early 2000's. I'd been shopping there for a while and they knew my name. She popped in and asked them what a good gift would be for my birthday, and they had just gotten one of these boxed sets in and she bought it for me. It was missing Monsters & Treasure, but had a copy of Chainmail included. Years later, they found a copy of Monsters and Treasure they gave me, but it's a different printing from the other 2 books in my set. I believe the trade refers to that as a "Frankenstein" box, but I still love it.
My friends and I never really got into the D&D side of things, but we got every book of (1st Edition) AD&D. It would be interesting to mention the cover prices of those hardcovers and convert to the current equivalent cost...for high school teens in the US, these were not cheap!
Good idea! I can cover that in a future video. I have all the AD&D hardbacks except one (Manual of the Planes) so I could go through them in a video. Thanks for the idea!
Played 3.5 with the neighbourhood kids in the late 2000's/early 2010's. My mom ended up getting me 4th edition and it seemed so strange to us that we just kept playing 3.5! This help put my timeline in perspective. Love the content
I'm glad it helped, and I really appreciate you watching and commenting!
Yes, the transition from 3.5 to 4E is probably the most drastic in the history of edition changes for the game.
This is so amazing to watch. I have been playing since I was a kid, but so much of this knowledge was completely unknown to me. Excellent video!
Thanks for watching and commenting! I'm glad you liked it and that it helped you learn a bit more about the history of the game!
Navigating the utter chaos of early D&D editions without the internet, or with very early internet, must have been a hell of a time. :p
It was definitely a "wild west" time. The way most folks handled it, as I recall from the time, was either via Dragon magazine, or to just ignore it completely and mix-and-match stuff as we wanted!
Thank you for watching and commenting!
Nice, comprehensive walk through. And Desert Island D&D indeed - if I could only have one D&D book for the rest of my life, the Cyclopedia is it!
Great to hear from you, Chris! Thanks! I have long regretted not having given the Rules Cyclopedia a more thorough look when it came out. At the time, we had moved on from D&D and were playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but I was using 2E to build my campaign world I planned to run. The RC just seemed like "more of the same" and I wasn't playing any Basic D&D at the time. Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@daddyrolleda1 I totally get that, Martin. The Cyclopedia dropped right at the height of my and my new gaming group's deep dive into all of the great games of the late 80s and early 90s. We were nowhere near having a desire to play D&D, certainly not Basic. ("Race as class? Eww!") I'm thankful I had the good sense to pick it up at the time, though. When my best friend and I decided in 96 to "go back to Basic(s)," we opted for this book. And that's when I realized what a beautiful, complete, and well-oiled machine it was! Even though Moldvay B/X was my entry to the game and my first RPG love, I can't help but keep getting drawn back to the Cyclopedia. ☺️
80s BECMI/1e AD&D kid here - have love 'Basic D&D' for so long. Can't get enough of the Rules Cyclopedia (even mine is only a PoD H/C). I also love 2e AD&D - this history is great. I've seen so many online but this one doesn't linger too long. I like hearing yours (others)experiences with older editions of the game pre-WOTC 3.0/3.5 ed.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I really appreciate it!
I was really trying to get through the whole history in 20 minutes or less and I just about made it! I do feel it was a bit rushed at the end, but as you said, I was trying not to linger too long. I'm so glad you appreciate my approach.
I started with Moldvay, so just slightly before you, and we immediately mixed it with 1E because we didn't know we weren't supposed to. But I've played a *ton* of 3E/3.5 and am still running a campaign for that system that I started back in May 2001.
Thanks again!
This is easily the most comprehensive video I have seen on this subject.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting, and for your praise! I really appreciate it. I know there are other channels out there that cover D&D history, so I'm glad you found this video and that you enjoyed it. I appreciate the feedback!
My dad passed his 1981 Basic D&D rules after he passed away onto me! It’s wild reading through that compared to modern d&d
I'm sorry for the loss of your dad, but what a great gift he left you with. Yes, if you're only used to modern versions of D&D (post-2000), I suspect it would seem very wild!
I'm actually running that same edition your dad gifted you (1981 Basic) for my 15yo daughter and her friends (started when they were 11) and we are having a blast!
Hi there! I love that you are putting this info out there so simply and so concisely!
I am fortunate enough to have almost literally every single book and box set that you mentioned, including the obscure ones like the Black Box! To hear someone actually talk about all of this stuff that I’ve spent thousands of dollars on has really put a smile on my face!
Excellent video, you have a new follower!
Thank you so much for watching, commenting, and subscribing! I really appreciate it.
That's so cool that you have all the different editions! I started with B/X and immediately began incorporating stuff from AD&D but after that, I was pretty careful with my purchases because I didn't have a ton of money. I skipped the BECMI line because I didn't think I needed it since it seemed so similar to Moldvay. I contemplated getting the Companion Set since B/X stops at Level 14, but then decided I could just get by with AD&D. So that's why those are missing from my collection. By the time 2E came out, the gaming group I found had switched to playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay so while I got the PHB & Monstrous Manual, I didn't get any other 2E stuff.
Thanks again!
I have the tan box. I found out The Denning text/black box text is where the weird contradicting "you can't move and attack" rules text in the Rules Cyclopedia comes form.
I've been playing since 76 and the white boxes. We were totally fans of the game, but like most players back then, didn't know that Chainmail was the ruleset and the white box the supplements. So, we were trying to play the white box as a ruleset with not much success and that prevented us from having a really good gaming experience. When the Holmes version came out, that was when we really discovered the game and I was hooked from then on. I've played every edition ever since (and still own all the core books from every edition, sans the Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements, alas), but my favourite is 2e, with 5e a close second and 4e coming in a close third. Basic will always hold a special place for me, though.
Thanks for watching, and for sharing your D&D history!
I started with Moldvay Basic and only discovered Holmes & OD&D after the fact. Sadly, I didn't pay Holmes much time, and I only looked at OD&D as an oddity/relic. My friend had a copy of the Greyhawk Supplement he didn't want any more, and I found a pretty clean copy of Blackmoor (the one you see in the video) on a shelf at my shop back around 1983 for only $5.00. But I didn't get a White Box until around 1999 or so (a gift from my mom).
I collected a bunch of 2E stuff and created a bunch of NPCs and scenarios for it, but never got a chance to play, as we moved around the time it came out and I lost my group. By the time I found a new one, they were playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, so that's what I played for a while until 3E came out.
My brothers and I attempted to play the white box set, created characters and a dungeon, but quickly found out combat was missing. I only recently found out chainmail was the missing part.
@@edtcrandall Yeah, there was the Chainmail system, requiring another book, or the very poorly explained alternate system (which ended up being the default!).
More like Daddy rolled a natural 20!
I'm commenting here, but I'm four videos into your history series. I thank the UA-cam algorithm Gods for putting a video of yours in my feed. After seeing the topics you covered, I immediately subscribed and will happily be watching all of your videos.
I played my first game of AD&D in 1982 and have been hooked ever since. You and I seem to be in a similar situation, as my son discovered my role-playing games collection a couple of years ago, so I dusted off my dungeon master chops and started running a game for him solo which has now grown to him and four of his friends. In fact, I'll be running my first game of Top Secret in 30 years for them soon.
Anyway, I'm loving your content, and I hope you have the best of luck with your channel. Keep the great videos coming.
This is such a great comment - I appreciate it so much! Thank you for your support in subscribing, and I'm also very glad my content got recommended to you! I have no idea how that works and why certain videos get recommended more than others.
So very cool you're playing D&D and other TTRPGs with your son and his friends! I've found it's a fun way to stay connected and do stuff with my daughter as she grows older and we have fewer things in common. And, while she's not expressed this thought directly, I do think she appreciates that I take time to make this game for her and coordinate a time for her to play with her friends, and then they get to all hang out after the game as well.
Thanks again! I look forward to chatting with you more in the comments in the future!
I've always been fascinated by the avalanche of rules for AD&D, while most groups adapted their own rules. But, tournament play required a unified ruleset, hence this evolution. Thanks for the video.
Zeb Cook wrote the “X” in B/X, as well as The Isle of Dread. Mentzer made almost zero changes for his edition of Expert because he thought it was so well done.
Yes! I recorded so many versions of this video and in a few of them, I went into details on the authors on the various editions and what else they had written (Zeb also wrote Oriental Adventures for 1E, etc.) but it was getting way too long and not really adding to the narrative of describing the different editions.
Thanks for watching and commenting! I really appreciate it!
@@daddyrolleda1 of course!
For me Moldvay/Cook were better than Mentzer. So I actually played "BXMCI". (instead of BECMI)
@@mirtos39 I started with Moldvay/Cook also, but by the time they got around to the Mentzer Companion, my friends had already moved to AD&D, so I never explored the Mentzer version other than through the Gazetteers.
Got in with 3.5, but have always looked back on Older Editions Longingly (Except 2e AD&D for the most part...I love the new and imaginative settings, but Lorraine Williams "No Playtesting" Policy leaves a bad taste in my mouth). Favorite would probably be BECMI (although probably using the Rules Cyclopedia-era Wrath of the Immortals rules for that level of play...), but have always been a bit confused as to the difference between B/X and BECMI mechanics-wise...most I've gotten so far were some very opinionated comments from the B/X crowd about stretching B/X Thief Skills over the 36 levels of BECMI instead of creating new ones for the Companion and Master Supplements.
I had not realized until now that there were 3 different versions of "Basic" floating around over the 10+ year period! Good information on that! Also it is quite humorous to me to hear people talk about 1e AD&D as being 'easy to understand' or 'rules-light' / lmao!!! After 40 years of DM'ing it I still find stuff out that I don't know (or, more recently, have forgotten!). Keep up the good work, this helps our kids & grandkids understand a little better how the hobby developed/grew in our old 'real time' selves' lives! One topic folks (even my age) are shakey on is what collections of magazines there are which are now archived, free to use (providing you're not making money off them), and where they're available at! Dragon, Dungeon, "And" magazine, and others are all excellent resources that can be used for ALL editions, and SHOULD be used for years to come! You might want to do a shortie on those resources & where to find them . J
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I definitely think Advanced D&D is pretty complicated. It doesn't have feats and skills (unless you use Non-Weapon Proficiencies from later-era 1E) but it compensates with obscure rules like Weapon Speed Factors and Weapons vs AC tables. We *never* used that stuff back in the day! Too complicated!
I love Dragon magazine and began subscribing with issue #90 and kept that subscription up until the last print issue, #359. And I have maybe 30-40 issues prior to #90 that I purchased off the shelf. I'll definitely cover Dragon in a future video. And yes, there were a ton of other magazines and zines at the dawn of the hobby. I'll look into putting that all together. Thanks!
This is the most straightforward and concise video. I’ve seen on the subject. Thanks for that.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I'm really glad you enjoyed the video. I was trying really hard not to make it too long but to cover all the broad strokes of the different editions. I thought it might help when I mentioned on social media that I'm running B/X D&D for my 13yo daughter and her friends, as I've found many folks have no idea what I'm talking about.
@@daddyrolleda1 I first started playing back in the early 80s, with B/X but never really paid attention to the different editions, mostly because I had discovered Palladium Fantasy by the mid-eighties and soon we were mixing and matching rules into a hybrid. Even today, with my home brew rules, I run D&D based mechanics in a Palladium setting. Old habits die hard. 🙂
@@edwardromero3580 That sounds like a ton of fun! I remember the old Palladium ads in Dragon Magazine and thinking Chivalry & Sorcery looked really interesting. I always wished I'd seen it at my local game store. Back then so much stuff was available by mail order but I was too young to order stuff and my mom was, let's say, a little skeptical of ordering from a company she'd not heard of. It's so different than today!
@@daddyrolleda1 I was really fortunate to work at our local bookstore when I was in high school. They put me in charge of ordering for their rpg section. I was encouraged to "test-play" anything I ordered to help sell it. Pretty sweet gig, really.
@@edwardromero3580 That's amazing! What an awesome job that would have been!
This is on the same level as "D&D it all", which made amazing videos about the old editions and the history.
Thank you so much for watching and commentary! I will take that as a compliment, as I definitely enjoy DM It All!
I first saw some guys playing D&D, probably in 1977 or 78, using the white box set. They had a huge map on a dining room table and it seemed like they were fighting a huge battle. I just had to play this game!
Later some friends of mine got me playing with the Basic set and the Keep on the Borderlands module. I later was playing with those same guys I had first watched playing D&D and they were still using the White Box set but it wasn't long before they were using the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books.
Few of us could afford these books and we shared them. Letting players read them here and there meant that hardly any of us really knew the rules. You mostly knew the rules for the character classes that you played. For me it was the Thief and I studied those rules. Others like playing mages and knew those rules backwards and forwards. It was those few that had started with the original box set that knew most of the rules and those ended up being our Dungeon Masters.
When 2nd edition came around, most of us weren't too thrilled with it. Some stuff we liked but most we didn't. So we kept the best and threw out the rest.
We never did really stop using AD&D. We just added stuff we liked into our games, just like we did in the past with all the cool stuff that came out in magazines. We kept what we liked and dumped the rest.
Thank you for watching and commenting, and sharing your history with the game! I love reading stories like this.
Your experiences are very similar to mine except that I started with B/X. But as far as not reading all the rules because we were sharing books, and also using bits and pieces we liked from Dragon, etc. - we totally did that!
I started in 1992 with my dad and his friends. They played a hybrid of 1st and 2nd edition, but it was all the same to me. I played in that game for years and then jumped into 3rd edition in my teenage years, playing with just my friends. 3.5 dropped around the time I graduated high school and started college, so that seems to be my sweet spot for nostalgia because I feel like I had the best times playing that edition and being really into the tabletop gaming scene. 4th edition came out the year my daughter was born. My wife and I, along with our friends, embraced the new changes that were made to the game, and to this day it’s my favorite edition of D&D. We really love tactical combat on a grid with miniatures so this edition was perfect for my group. Then 5th edition came along and we played that for awhile but quickly went back to playing older editions because we didn’t really enjoy it all that much. Since then I’ve retroactively played B/X and the retro clones that were inspired by it. I really love Old School Essentials for when I need that B/X fix, but my group and I are currently playing a 4th edition campaign that we started in the spring of 2022.
Thank you so much for watching, and also for sharing your TTRPG story! I love hearing about peoples' D&D journey!
Your daughter was born around the same time as mine! (Although I'm quite a bit older than you based on 3.5 coming out when you were in high school!).
I'm happy to hear of your love for 4E. I tried it a few times for one-shots and enjoyed it, but I was deep into a 3.X game that began in 2001 (still running! We're using a mix of 3.5 & Pathfinder 1E now) and didn't really want to change my game. I'm also *not* much of a tactical minis/map based combat guy. I prefer theater-of-the-mind. But I get tired of people bashing 4E.
I'm running B/X (using Old School Essentials) for my daughter and her friends now (just had a game this past Saturday!) and having a blast!
Thanks for explaining the 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 versions that so many people do not know about.
You're welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed that edition to the video. None of those, aside from 3.5, were "official" but folks use the terms in the community and I thought it would help everyone to know exactly what's being discussed. Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@daddyrolleda1 I personally loved the 1.5 books, although there were a lot of hate for them. I liked Tasha's at first, but eventually it led us down a road to abandoning 5e for other games like LotFP, Blueholme, Labyrinth Lord, FAST RPG, and DCC.
@@VhaidraSaga Lots of great games on your list! I don't play 5E currently but I would play if someone else were to run it. I just wouldn't prefer to run that system myself.
I'm currently playing B/X using Old School Essentials, but I incorporate a lot of ideas from LotFP, DCC, Index Card RPG, and even some stuff from 5E and 1E/2E.
Excellent presentation of the various changes over the years and it was enjoyable to see the art of the various editions. Thanks for the video.
I am so glad you enjoyed the video. I had a ton of fun putting this video together. Interestingly enough, I made this video mainly because when I chat with folks on Twitter about the B/X game I run for my daughter, I learned that a lot of them didn't have any idea what I was talking about and some were ignoring my posts because they didn't think it was "real" D&D or whatever. So I made this video mainly so I could point folks to it and say, "This is what I'm talking about!" But, it took off and became (at the time) my highest-viewed video, and that led me to create more history videos, which are a lot of fun.
Thank you for watching and commenting!
One nugget to add is the Ranger class was added in 1975 from an issue of The Strategic Review vol. 1 no. 2 newsletter. That was then printed in the AD&D 1e Player's Handbook. There were a lot of fringe rules that came out that way or in Dragon magazine first, but the real-deal rule books is where it really counted. :-) I just wanted to add that, since I am a junkie for the old Ranger class... my favorite still. ;-)
Wait until you see my next video (should be posted tomorrow, March 16th)! I think you'll like it.
@@daddyrolleda1 I'll wait with bated breath! :-D
Dave Arneson won in the end and Gygax and him resolved it out of court with Gygax/TSR paying Arneson 2.5% Royalties crediting Gygax and Arneson as "co-creators". When TSR was acquired by WoTC, they actually had to go to Arneson and pay him an "Undisclosed amount" for his share.
It is sad though in some ways. Arneson really loved TSR. After Gygax was forced out and before their Acquisition by WoTC they were floundering and Arneson wrote several letters saying he would love to come back and fox the company.
Thanks for this comprehensive video!
Thank you so much for watching and commenting. I really appreciate it!
I had read that about how Dave Arneson wrote to Peter Adkison at WotC in 1997 about coming back to fix D&D. It's sad that he never got to work on it again, but from what else I have read, I get the impression Dave was more of a creator and not a business person (the same could probably be said of Gary, although Gary had at least some business sense, it seems). At least WotC made efforts to put Arneson's name back in the books as a co-creator of the original version of the game.
Thanks again! I'm glad you enjoyed the video!
Thank you! Great stuff! I began with Basic D&D in 1978. Nowadays, I prefer using 1e and 2e, and I try to cherry pick. :)
I'm back to running a 1981 B/X game for my 13yo daughter & her friends, but I incorporate stuff from 1E & 2E as well.
Thank you so much for watching & commenting!
I am missing gods and heroes. Also from 77 I have volume 1-3 of the Arduin Grimoire by David Hargrave and the book of monsters by Phil Edgren. Thanks for the video, forgot I had these.
That's so cool you have the old Arduin Grimoire stuff. I remember see ads for those in Dragon Magazine but I never saw them at any shop I had near me, and to this day I've never read them. Thanks so much for watching and commenting!
I know I am not being accurate when I say this, but to me, there are 7 stages of D&D. 5e, 4e, 3e, 2e, 1e, Mentzer Basic (where I started)/BECMI, and "What came before me".
Ha! Yeah, I think that's a common way of looking at it.
It's definitely muddied and there really aren't clear definitions to a lot of these things. For example, "1E" is a name that was never used. There was Advanced D&D, and then Advanced D&D 2nd Edition, and then D&D 3rd Edition. And the non-Advanced line didn't have any numbers. Every time, it was just called "Dungeons & Dragons" even through retroactively, we distinguish them as Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, Black Box, Rules Cyclopedia, Classic D&D... But technically those are all the same game.
From what I've seen online, BECMI seems to have been the gateway for far more folks than the edition I began with (Moldvay or "B/X") even though the old-school community tends to prefer tinkering around with B/X more as a game chasis for whatever reason.
I finally understand what the Rulescyclopedia is. As someone who has always been a fan of the boxed sets but never quite had understood the finer chronology this was incredibly helpful!!
I am so glad to hear that it helped you, and that you found it interesting! Thanks for watching and commenting! I'm working on the next video right now and it will be released later this week.
This is so awesome! Thank you for sharing and making this video. I'm now a subscriber.
I really appreciate you watching and commenting! Thank you so much!
Let me know what other kinds of topics you'd like to see me cover. Cheers!
Great video can’t wait to see more channel content like this. Summoning Salt for D&D is a great niche :)
Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you so much for watching and commenting. Cheers!
Really good overview of the editions. :-) Keep the D&D history vids coming! Maybe cover the adventure modules, magazines, and even 3rd party stuff from back in the day. :-)
Thank you very much - I really appreciate you watching and commenting and offering suggestions! I can definitely cover modules and magazines (mostly Dragon). Thanks again!
@@daddyrolleda1 Count me in for that! :-D I love stuff about the vintage stuff. You got a sub from me. ^_^
@@KabukiKid Fantastic! Thank you so much! I'll work on some more vintage stuff soon. It is pouring here again so I've lost all my natural light and, frankly, it's too loud to record a video right now! I have a VERY cheap set-up!
Wonderful. Thank you so much I would love to hear you speak about all of the little details with the rules between each editions. I know, that would be quite the undertaking. But generally speaking, you know, the big stuff. Maybe not even all in one video but moving from edition to edition.
Anyway, loved hearing what you had to say 😊
Thank you so much for watching and commenting, and for your support of the channel!
I will definitely add this to a "potential future topics" video - you're not the first to ask!
@@daddyrolleda1 haha glad I am not the only one. Definitely enjoying all of what you have done thus far. Will be supporting you from here on out. Thank you for your work!
I really appreciate that!
A really interesting video, with much that explained my confusion when I first started playing D&D. I started playing D&D in the mid eighties and I can honestly say I've no idea which version I played first. There were multiple people running many different games and D&D was just one of the multitude I played, in a relatively short period of time. MERP, GURPS, Rolemaster, Toon and Nephilim to name a few. Keep up the good work.
I really appreciate that! And thank you so much for watching and commenting and sharing some of your history.
You've played quite a bunch of fun games! I always wanted to play MERP - you couldn't escape the ads for the game on either the back cover or inside front cover of Dragon magazine each month! It looked like so much fun!
@@daddyrolleda1 MERP was a great deal of fun, but its critical hit mechanic was deadly. One bad roll meant instant death, a good roll might mean limb loss, or similar debilitating injury. It gave everything a level of danger, which in so many ways felt like the Lord of the Rings books. It's the one game I wish I'd kept, as I'd love to play it again, but when I had a long TTRPG hiatus, I gave them to friends with children who were getting into the hobby, and they in turn have used them to play with their kids. A game is better played than left on a shelf gathering dust.
@@MrChasanDayve I wholeheartedly agree! Good for you for passing on these treasures to be enjoyed by the next generation!
I was really into advanced D&D back in 1985-1987. But my oldest cousin who acted as "DM" began to play fewer and fewer campaigns as were getting into high school, and then we just stopped :( At the peak of our playing I really enjoyed reading the modules we'd get at The Rusty Scabbard (store in Lexington, KY) and learning about what I could possibly get on my adventure, lol. There was even a 2-day period (over a weekend) where my youngest cousin and I stayed up for almost TWO DAY STRAIGHT playing D&D and trying to make our own "monster manual" :D
EDIT: The last character I ever had was a 31st level Fighter/Magic User/Thief combo.
31st level?!?!?! Impressive!
I never really played high-level games with my DMs back in the day, and even currently the highest I've gone is 20th. I never played Epic Level, etc.
Thank you so much for sharing your early memories of playing the game. I always love hearing other peoples' stories!
The 3.0 Edition PHB was written by Johnathan Tweet who co-authored the Ars Magica game with Mark Rein*Hagen (the later creator of Vampire the Masquerade). The core Mechanic of 3.0 and all future editions is the Ars Magica mechanic, except using a Characteristic + Ability + 1d10 roll against an Ease Factor set by the Storyguide. Characteristics are the Ability Scores of Ars Magica and ranged from -5 to +5 (instead of 3 to 18). The abilities (Skills) for 3.0 were a mixture of 2nd Edition and Ars Magica lists, some of which were lifted word for word from AM 3rd Edition. And the "iconic" Rage ability of Barbarian (which did not exist in Unearthed Arcana/Oriental Adventures) was a +1 Physical Virtue called "Berserk" in which you gained a "+2 on Damage, Soak, and Fatigue scores, but suffer a -2 penalty on Defense." And the Reputation system inspired the same system in Star Wars d20/Modern d20. I have argued with OSR people before because tI've heard a few people say that the ability bonus feature came from D&D, which I will admit would have been an inspiration to make 1st/2nd AD&D bonus more accessible, but that ultimately Tweet chose his AM system instead.
Hi,
Thanks for this. Using the DnD ruleset to prototype a video game I'm working on. Figured a good place to start was checking edition differences. This video has been very informative. Thanks again for taking the time to put it together.
Take care & have a good one
I'm so glad to hear you found it helpful! Thank you so much for watching, and for letting me know you enjoyed it. I really appreciate it. Good luck on your video game!
@@daddyrolleda1 You are more than welcome. And thanks for the well wishes.
Take care
This is awesome. Highly informative. A cool sequel video to this would be the retroclones (those that attempt to most closely match a version) that now exist out there and which version they are most closely trying to mimic.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I really appreciate it!
I can definitely make a video on retroclones and what edition each one is trying to emulate! Great idea - thanks! I will add it to the queue. Cheers!
@@daddyrolleda1 I have been following the OSR and there are a huge number of home brew rule sets available, very few are what I would call a clone of a specific edition. Old School Essentials being the only one I would truly call a clone. The rest I would say are "inspired by" certain editions. Such as OSRIC being inspired by 1st edition and Gold & Glory being inspired by 2nd edition.
This is by-and-large true. The only "exact" clone that I'm aware of, as you point out, is Old School Essentials for B/X. But the term "retro-clone" has been used long enough in the OSR Community that most folks have at least a vague idea that if you use that term a game like OSRIC is a retro-clone of AD&D 1E, Labyrinth Lord is a retro-clone of B/X, and Swords & Wizardry (at least, *some* of its iterations - they are a lot!) is a retro-clone of OD&D White Box.
Then you've got games that are inspired by some of those editions but are a step or two removed, such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess being inspired by, and sharing a lot of mechanics with, B/X, but going in its own direction (most notably with the Specialist class replacing the Thief and the X-in-6 skills, but that's just one example).
I started on the red box basic D&D, had the rules cyclopedia (still regret selling that) and still have my 2nd edition books. Looking to get back in, I think i'll grab me an updated set of rulebooks. Exciting.
That's amazing! I hope you do start up a new game, and I look forward to hearing about it here in the comments if you're willing to share. Cheers!
@@daddyrolleda1 thank you! cheers to you as well.
GREAT VIDEO!
Small addition but in 1992 there was an revised edition of the Immortals Box to be used with the Rules Cyclopedia (iirc) called "Wrath of the Immortals" 😃
Oh, that's right! One day I might re-make this video and I'll make sure to include that!
I'm glad you enjoyed the video, and thank you very much for watching and commenting!
Thanks for laying that out for me. I was in my early teens, back in the early 90s when I was introduced to D&D, and I never really understood what the different versions where. It also wasn't that important really. The dad of my best friend at the time ran the game for us, and he had a shelf full of these D&D books! Now, seeing this, I'm pretty sure that we used B/X. Seeing that cover gave me some serious flashbacks to making my first few characters! I clearly remember the red box cover and that AD&D player handbook cover from that time as well. I can't remember if we used those at some point, if they where on the shelves or if we used them later.
We eventually would transition to running games for our own friends and I think we did a lot with that AD&D 2e edition book at that time, but like I said, we used everything we found on those shelves without really understanding about editions. It turned into a real hodgepodge. We must have used it a lot though (it's been a while) because I remember being quite familiar with the system when BG1 was released for the PC. The first edition I bought for myself and ran for my friends was 3rd edition. That friend who had all those games at his house had moved away at that time, and basically ended the gaming until I encountered the, then new release, of D&D in a shop while visiting my grandparents.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting, and for sharing this story with me! I love reading about peoples' history with the game.
I started with B/X back in 1981 but we *also* mixed and matched stuff from it and Advanced D&D, and when 2E came along, we didn't really look at it as a separate game from 1E and we combined a lot of stuff from those editions as well.
I'm glad you found the video helpful. Thanks for letting me know!
I just did a much more basic version of this video. Good to see. much love
I really appreciate that! I wasn't aware of your video, but now I want to go look it up. Thanks for alerting me!
Just recently "unearthed" some of the older D&D stuff that I was given. Was looking for information on some of it. This helped clear up the timeline of where they sit.
Have them shown in a video if you or someone have time to add insight on some of the older items.
I started with Black Box and Zanzer Tem. Love this channel!
Oh wow - that's so cool! I'm so glad you are enjoying the channel. Thank you for watching and commenting!
Mate, this was awesome. Would love a breakdown by you module by module/adventure by adventure.
I'm so glad to hear that you enjoyed the video! It's one of my favorites.
Thank you for watching and commenting. A discussion about the various modules is on the list of potential future videos. Thanks!
I remember starting out and trying in 78 with the player book and getting the dog in 79 but never had the MM which was fine as we had the critters in the DMG
Trying to keep up back in the day was crazy, till We realized how the edition were different, but of course we were playing and running everything Traveller, C&S, Gamma world, Aftermath, Morrow Project, Rq
By the time the dust cleared well we all found our niche
Thanks for the momoriws
Thank you for watching and commenting!
Gamma World was the second RPG I ever played after D&D (if you count D&D and AD&D as one game!). I love the post-apocalyptic genre and was always really interested in Aftermath and Morrow Project from seeing ads of them in Dragon magazine, but I never got a chance to play them.
Thanks again!
Great overview of the editions! Thanks for doing this.
Thank you for watching, and for commenting! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I started with Moldvay 1981or 1982 . Then played AD&D. I have been collecting different editions and books. It is a lot of fun. Depending on when you started will be the same or different edition,but as long as you have fun that is what really counts .
I completely agree! Thank you so much for watching and commenting!
BECMI is my favorite, so clean, so good. Although first edition was my childhood and steeped with such nostalgia, I own every single book and love them all. Even Unearthed Arcana. LOL
Ah, Unearthed Arcana! There is pretty much no middle ground on that book. You love it or hate it (or as I said in my video review of it: "Cheer or Jeer")!
Thank you for watching and commenting!
First printing (Wood box) = January 1974. Fourth printing (White box) = November 1975. D&D Basic set first printing = July 1977 with lizard logo and code in the upper right is F115-R.
This is a good explanation of the editions. The only thing missing is a mention of "The White Box Set" having room for the Chainmail rules book for those that had it and alternative rules for playing without Chainmail. Thus even at the start there was a split in the D&D community.
I’d love to have all those original booklets, supplements, and white box.
I was very lucky to get my White Box. I can't remember if I mentioned it in the video, but I first discovered Original D&D at a friend's house about 2-3 years after I was introduced to Moldvay B/X. He had a really janky beat up copy of Greyhawk: Supplement I that he didn't want any more, so he gave it to me. And then a few weeks later, I saw a near-mint copy of Blackmoor: Supplement II at my local hobby store, for cover price of $5.00. I had those for nearly 15 years before my mom gave me a White Box as a Birthday Gift. She'd gone to my local game store, and asked them what a good gift idea would be for me. They had just got this copy of the White Box in and they knew I'd like it. Years later, I got Eldritch Wizardry and Gods, Demigods, and Heroes, just to complete the set.
I'm not sure if my mom hadn't bought it for me way back then if I'd ever had gotten a copy.
I started with AD&D in '81. The boxed BECMI sets came out as I was growing up. We used to mix and match editions. We figured it was all the same game because it was Dungeons & Dragons. Going through an AD&D module with BX rules? Check. Mechanical similarities aside, Mentzer Expert was eye-opening. There was so much about the wider world that was implied through the text and art. It influences my campaigns to this day. Cook's Expert set didn't inspire me the same way. To my mind, it was the best boxed set released for BECMI.
Thank you so much for watching and commenting!
My group did the exact same thing, mixing-and-matching between B/X and AD&D, as we, too, saw it was just "all D&D."
I never collected BECMI, as by the time it came out, we (incorrectly) felt it that any non-Advanced D&D stuff was "for kids." But I've seen a lot of the art and it's so great. I do have the Rules Cyclopedia (PDF) based on BECMI which is a great version of D&D.
I guess I was one of the lucky kids back then. Me and my friends had already been playing otther TSR wargames when I picked this up at the hobbyshop with my paper route money. We took to DnD pretty naturally. I still have my basic rule book. My ADnD books are prized possessions. ❤
That's great! I didn't come to it from a wargames background but I loved it immediately. So, I guess I was part of that second-wave who discovered the game through a love of fantasy literature instead of from wargames.
Thanks for watching and commenting!
Thanks for the video!
Thanks for watching and commenting, Mark! I really appreciate it! Cheers!
brilliant. Took me back to '77
So glad to hear that! That's a few years before I got started playing, but at this point, it's close enough!
Thank you for watching and commenting. I'm really glad you enjoyed the video.
Loved the trip down memory lane.
Thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed it, and stay tuned for more. I think I'll perhaps do a deeper-dive into the different editions I personally own in my collection.
I've played every version in some form or another since 1981. I was playing "High Fantasy" in 1980, and was invited to a homebrew OD&D game. With my Brother and other family, played both B and X, and AD&D, of which 1st Ed is my favorite to this day. I was sorely disappointed with 2nd Edition when Monks were dropped. Played that on occasion while I was enlisted in the Marine Corps. I started my own kids with 3rd Edition, 3.5, and 4e. I've also played and collected many other TTRPGs over the years, but return to D&D. Likely going back to 1st Edition AD&D since I really don't like 5e very much. Thanks for this video.
Thank you for watching, and commenting, and sharing you story! I started with B/X in 1981 and we quickly incorporated many ideas from AD&D without realizing at the time that they were technically two separate games with mechanics that don't always match. I collected some 2E stuff but never really played it, and I, too, was disappointed by the stuff they removed, such as Monks, but also the new classes that had debuted in Unearthed Arcana like Barbarians, Cavaliers, and Thief-Acrobats. I was hoping for *more* classes in 2E, not fewer. I got back into D&D with 3E and I still run a 3.X/Pathfinder1E campaign to this day that began back in May 2001. But once that's done, I don't see myself ever running that system again. I played a bit of 4E and 5E but my main games these days are spent with Savage Worlds as a player and back to my roots running a 1981 B/X game for my 13 year-old daughter and her friends (we have a session planned for tomorrow - they're going through the Keep on the Borderlands and are planning to investigate Cave K!).
Thanks again - I hope you stick around and find other videos you enjoy. Cheers!
Eldritch Wizardry was the first one I purchased. I chose it because of the nekkid woman on it.
I remember being afraid my mom would see it!
Very thorough, great job!
Thank you! I appreciate you watching and commenting!
I've played 4th a few hours, then went 5th for years. Pulled my 4th PHB to skim. Couldn't comprehend it as D&D...
First d&d my friends and i played, roughly 25 years ago, was based off a 1st edition ad&d players handbook (late 80s i think?) And a 2nd edition dungeon master guide . We found both at a yardsale and nome of us had played before. So we used a weird hodgepodge of rules into 3.0 came out haha
We all played a hodge-podge, too! I started with Moldvay Basic in 1981 and very quickly thereafter discovered AD&D through friends. We mixed and matched the two systems, as we didn't realize at the time that Basic was not supposed to lead into Advanced, but rather it was a different game.
When 2E came out, I was working on a campaign and I shifting to the 2E rules.. "kind of." I kept using Cavaliers, Barbarians, Assassins, and Half-Orcs, all of which had been removed from 2E (at least the initial core book) but I updated them with Non-Weapon Proficiencies, etc. That style of play was very common until 3E came out, as that edition was so different mechanically that trying to mix and match stuff became a chore.
Thanks for watching and commenting!
The first game I played in 1977 used the Homes Basic box set, I think it was $10.00. We tried to learn it playing with way too many people. fun times!
Yes, I think $10 sounds about right. I know the original Boxed Set of the three little brown books was also $10.00.
I started a little after you with the Moldvay Basic set, but I was lucky to have other kids teach me the game. Of course years later, I discovered we weren't playing it correctly!
Thanks for this great summary. The different editions are so confusing if one has not been following D&D from the beginning. What a mess this was!
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I hope this was helpful to you, and if you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to ask!
@@daddyrolleda1 Some comparison of the rule systems in hindsight would be interesting, even if subjective. It seems to me that B/X is favored by many in the OSR and it would be interesting to learn why that is (or is it?).
That's really interesting - and yes, I would agree that, broadly speaking, B/X is one of the most used/modified rules sets in the OSR. I think there are a few reasons, but my main thoughts are:
1) If you're talking "old school D&D," the *main* (not only, not best, but *main*) three rules sets that usually first come to mind are: Original D&D (1974), B/X (1981) and Advanced D&D (1977). Yes, you've got Holmes Basic, BECMI, Rules Cyclopedia, 2nd Edition, but those are what I would call the "Big 3".
1a) Of those "Big 3", Original D&D is VERY rules light and much of it is honestly not explained all that well. It's written assuming the player has knowledge of wargames and other items (e.g., Outdoor Survival by Avalon Hill) and it doesn't explain things well; as modern gamers, we tend to "read past" the omissions because "we know what it means" but that can create problems when different people have different gaming backgrounds but assume they "know" what Gary meant. Making a usable OD&D clone that adheres to the spirit of the rules is a difficult task because it would require codifying and explaining rules that were left unexplained in the original text, so it would be difficult to be faithful while still making something that's easy to use. Swords & Wizardry does a good job but it's not 100% faithful to the original rules but more an homage that's compatible with the rules.
1b) Advanced D&D is overly complex with rules. While many people a fondness for the game (I'm one of them), there are *SO MANY RULES* that are unnecessary and make to difficult comprehension, and may people just ignored or avoided those rules back in the day. I've met so many people here even just on UA-cam who are roughly my age, and none of us played AD&D "the same." Many of us used the B/X rules engine and just incorporated the new races, classes, spells, weapons, and treasure from AD&D. But that changes a lot of things, mechanically. AD&D has weapon speed factors, weapons vs AC, and "rounds" in AD&D are one minute, versus 10 seconds in Moldvay, and the Base AC in AD&D is 10 vs 9 in Moldvay, etc. OSRIC is a fun system that seeks to replicate all the arcane rules stuff from AD&D but if 90% of folks aren't going to use certain rules (again, such as weapon speed factors or weapon vs AC, just to name two), then it becomes difficult to develop a clone that replicates AD&D in a coherent and easy-to-use fashion for gamers to actually *use* all the rules contained therein. I probably didn't explain that well because it's late and I'm tired. But basically I think AD&D strictly RAW is way to rules heavy and those increased rules do not add to better or more fun playability.
1c) Moldvay B/X hits that sweet spot. It clarifies language from OD&D, but keeps things lighters than the more cumbersome Advanced D&D. It has very clear exploration and combat procedures, which are difficult to find and use in either OD&D or AD&D. Through limiting options it actually increases creativity, but it's also very easily hackable to add new options.
2) There have been a lot of retroclones for B/X but one that really stands out is Old School Essentials (OSE). Through a combination of fantastic layout, clever marketing, and getting top-tier talent to provide adventures and illustrations, it's become one of the, if not single, most popular retroclones on the market today and that popularity has led to many more indie publishers wanting to create content for OSE. So it's kind of a circular thing - OSE became popular because B/X was popular, and now OSE is so popular that more people are creating materials for it, which leads to more increased popularity for B/X and OSE.
That was probably really rambling but hopefully it helps!
@@daddyrolleda1 Thank you, that is interesting. Now I also understand why OSE treats "Advanced Fantasy" as a compatible add-on. I have OSE but I did not yet invest in Advanced Fantasy. Compared to the streamlined modern designs I found the mechanics of OSE still surprisingly messy but as you say it is superbly presented and what's nice is that it covers more of adventuring situations than the modern rules-light systems.
This was an excellent video. Thanks so much for sharing!
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! I'm so glad you enjoyed it!
I made this one primarily because I run a 1981 Basic game for my 13 year-old daughter & her friends, and I was finding on Twitter that nobody had any idea what I was talking about when I said I was running B/X.
I'm so glad people are enjoying and learning from it!
Great video! Exactly what I wanted on this topic.
I'm so glad to hear that! Thank you for watching and commenting. I hope you enjoy some of my other videos as well!
Not a bad breakdown. Here's the breakdown of editions over the year that popped into my mind just seeing the title of the video:
Chainmail fantasy supplement with man-to-man rules
OD&D
OD&D w/ Greyhawk and later OD&D supplements.
Holmes edit of Basic
AD&D
Basic/Expert
AD&D Surivial Guide Era (Non Weapon Profficiences rules are common)
Basic/Expert/Companion/Master& Immortal
Second edition.
Rules Cyclopedia.
Black Box Basic
AD&D 2nd edition players option series (2.5)
Dragonfist (a lot of people forget this ever existed or never knew about it at all)
3rd edition
3.5 edition
4th edition
5th edition
Thanks - my list matches up pretty closely with yours, although I didn't include Chainmail (I have a copy stuck in my White Box but I was trying to keep strictly to games with "Dungeons & Dragons" as part of the name - but I understand why you included it, although if I included that, I'd probably also include Blackmoor).
I *did* forget about Dragonfirst - I stumbled across that one in the 3E era when I saw Chris Pramas share a link to a PDF download in a forum (probably on ENWorld). Nice call that you remembered it!
I counted post-UA as "1.5" but yeah, I could see using Non-Weapon Proficiencies as the dividing line (although those appeared in Oriental Adventures, which pre-dated both Survival Guides).
I added the Classic D&D Game, 4th Edition Essentials, and post-Tasha's as well, but honestly our lists are very, very close - that's very impressive for doing that off the top of your head! I had to look through my collection and make notes on the editions I don't have. I definitely would have forgotten the Black Box (I barely remember that one) or the Classic D&D game had I not done a bit of research to make sure I wasn't missing anything.
@@daddyrolleda1 oh that makes perfect sense, I just read the title of the video and typed out my list and then watched the video to see if my recollection would mesh.
@@semajsivraj I just realized that I've been chatting with you on Facebook! 😊I think it's cool that our lists synced up pretty closely. Cheers!
Black Box D&D preceded the Rules Cyclopedia by about 6 months, so your list isn't ordered correctly. A few different versions of 2e are missing as well.
@@Dave_L I think that was pretty impressive for coming up with that list off the top of his head.
How many versions of 2E do you include? I know they revised the covers at one point but I wouldn't include that as a different edition. Besides the initial release, Player's Option, and Dragonfist (which I didn't include in my list since it wasn't released publicly), what else do you think counts as a version of 2e?
Enjoy the video. Thanx for getting so this together. Should you consider releasing an update to the history...
😊
The history of D&D should include reference both magazines which provided "official" material.
Today, rules from "The Strategic Review" and "Dragon Magazine" might better be referred to as Beta Rules.
The other item missing is the drop in quality in late 1st and 2nd Edition books. This resulted in issues with the books bindings and pages gaming of out.
Pathfinder (P1) was created by the individuals (aka Paizo) who took over Dragon and Dungeon magazines during 3.5. The first edition allowed fans of 3.5 to continue using all those 📚 books with P1.
I see P1 and P2 as the spiritual successors to AD&D. While 4e & 5e inherit the simplicity of the Dungeons & Dragons box sets.
Even today we have an over haul of 5e to D&D-One along with P1 to PFc¹.
￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣
¹PFc ~ PathFinder Core
(aka Remastery editions)
Thank you very much for watching and commenting!
For this one, I was specifically trying to *only* focus on published games by the company that published D&D (so, TSR and WotC). That's why I left out a lot of early stuff like Blackmoor, Chainmail, and the magazine stuff. I do, however, mention both The Strategic Review and Dragon in several of my videos (most notably the videos on character classes such as Clerics-Paladins-Rangers-Illusionists-Bards: ua-cam.com/video/PORfiBst6HE/v-deo.htmlsi=FBTGJTJuF2HyA48S). And, I plan to devote specific videos to those magazines in the future!
While I didn't mention the binding issues in this video (as it was focused mainly on just labeling and numbering the editions), I have mentioned it a few times including in my video on Unearthed Arcana (ua-cam.com/video/zwU7bsSKQmE/v-deo.htmlsi=qr6ImTLgtozrlMvr).
I played a lot of PF1 and agree it's a spiritual successor to 3.5 but, again, I was trying to only focus on games with Dungeons and Dragons in the name and also games by the "official" publisher of D&D. It's also why I didn't include TSR games like the Dragonlance Saga RPG, as that was not branded as a D&D game.
Thanks again!
I wouldn't consider Unearthed Arcana 1.5 any more than I would consider material from Dragon Magazine to create a sub edition of the game. As the official house organ of D&D/AD&D, Dragon Magazine had more supplemental rules over #1-#90 than were later published in books. I also refer to the Players Optiojns and DM Options books as munchkin bait and being the end of AD&D as a playable game.
Thanks for watching and commenting. There are definitely people who would agree with your assessment of the Player's Options books for 2E. I never used them myself but I also wasn't actively playing 2E at the time, as my group had decided to switch to playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. 3E is what got me back into playing D&D and I'm still running a 3E campaign to this day that began back in May 2001. I'm also running a 1981 Moldvay Basic game for my 13yo daughter and her friends. We had our 19th session yesterday (we play on average a little less than once a month).
Yeah I had a love hate relationship with those 2.5 books.
Excellent review!
I appreciate that very much! Thank you for watching and commenting!
Love your videos! The historical stuff is so cool, and I can tell you're a D&D nerd, if only based on your collection of books.
Thank you very much for watching and commenting! I really appreciate it!
I'll be making more history videos soon. I was just trying to mix it up a bit with my latest video.
I really liked the way that cantrips worked back in the day, much better than how it works now. Like what is the power source for all of that magical energy that spellcasters use with their endless supply of cantrips? Doesn't make any sense.
And those 2.5 books were awesome. Using those rules was how we played for a LONG time.
I, too, really liked the 0-level cantrips with the very minor powers they had. I always imagined most spellcasters in my world only had that level of power, and the average commoner was blown away that someone could do that. And then past there, there were only a handful of really powerful casters. In more modern editions, magic is much more plentiful and common. Nothing wrong with that - it's just a different play style.
I never really got a chance to play 2.5 (or even 2E). My group had switched to playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay during college and then I started post-college work and stopped roleplaying for a few years until 3E came out. I've heard a lot of folks really liked the 2.5 books, while others think they were too unbalanced.
My two favorite editions are the two extremely different ones. I live BECMI for its simplicity and exploration and I love 4e for its tactical combat and build crafting. Both are excellent and appeal to different gaming desires/interests that I have.
I like that you can appreciate each edition for what they are and how they work. I think 4E gets a bad rap and also believe it would've performed much better in the market if it had been offered as a tactical war game instead of labeled as "D&D." There's an expectation of what D&D is/does and 4E didn't really deliver that, but what it *did* do, it was good at.
Thank you for watching and commenting!
@daddyrolleda1 I agree completely.
In Gygax's last video interview, he said the rules are not meant to rule. They were only there to give structure. But no rule was unchangeable. As I recall, it says that in the original AD&D DM's Guide.
Thanks for commenting! Yes, that sentiment is found in most of the early editions of the game including OD&D as well as Holmes Basic, AD&D, and Moldvay Basic, just to name a few. Sometimes Gary would write articles in Dragon stating that if you weren't following RAW, then you "weren't playing AD&D" but I think that was mainly "game company executive" Gary speaking, not "gamer Gary."
There are a number of 1rst edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hardcover books that were missed. Deities & Demigods (1979), Fiend Folio (1980), Monster Manuel 2 (1983) and Oriental Adventures (1986)
Thank you for watching and commenting.
I covered all of those in a subsequent video on "The History of Advanced D&D Hardbacks": ua-cam.com/video/M3ygZCjLqAk/v-deo.htmlsi=auUg_dWKJdrxvu4s
This video wasn't intended to cover every *product* published for each edition, but rather just show a sampling of each.
Deities & Demigods was published in 1980, the Fiend Folio in 1981, and Oriental Adventures in 1985. I also didn't talk about the Manual of the Planes (1987), Dragonlance Adventures (1987), or Greyhawk Adventures (1988).
@@daddyrolleda1 Thanks for the link. I totally forgot about Manuel of the Planes!
Supplement one Greyhawk was the first D&D book I ever bought.. on sale in a NJ mall hobby store sitting on the clearance shelf. Had to be be in 1980 and I convinced my mom to buy it for me to read.. and there it began, I remember getting the basic Holmes blue box edition shorty after as a gift from a family member and AD&D right after that. I won't touch a WotC D&D product these days and even by the mid 80s I preferred Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay over D&D at least until the early nineties and Dark Sun came around.. Lots of nostalgia, too bad the IP has fallen so far over the last 20 years
Thank you very much for watching and commenting, and also for sharing you story/history with the game.
I started playing in 1981, but I remember discovering the existence of the Greyhawk Supplement while at a sleepover at a friend's house. That book was my first exposure to Original D&D.
In the mid-80's, we moved and I lost my gaming group. My new group in my new state was playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay so I lost about a decade of playing D&D until I came back to play 3rd Edition. I got really into that edition and am still running a 3E/Pathfinder1E campaign that began in May 2001. But I'm also back to my roots running a 1981 Moldvay Basic game for my 13yo daughter and her friends, and having a blast!
That said, I quite like many things with 5E. While I don't play or run that edition, I've borrowed a few ideas from it to include in my other games. 4E had a really good Dungeon Master's Guide in terms of advice for running games, and also had a really good concept in the Monster Manual for running minions for monsters. I try to peruse through each edition to see if there's anything useful, new, or creative I can incorporate into my games.
Dr Holmes version is the hardest to play. Spellcasters have to go all the way home and sleep in their bed to regain spells.
It's funny to pick out the little nuances in Holmes vs the other editions. There aren't many, but there are a few and they always strike me as funny. Thanks for sharing this little tidbit!
Those original rule books were letter sized paper folded in half. A copier and a stapler let you produce a book. (Not sure if they were copier or print machine produced though). Man, so many of those things I had back in the day - but I let them slip out of my hands over the years as I kept 'up-dating' and moving around.
Ah yes, you're right about the size! I should've been more clear in my description. Thanks! And thanks for watching and commenting!
Sorry you lost your books... that's tough.
I can't stomach after 2nd edition. Currently playing Old School Essentials sticking to good ol' fashion B/X with the mix of Advanced.
Thanks for watching and commenting!
I played and ran a ton of 3E/3.5 & am still running a campaign for that system that began in May 2001. But, once it wraps, I won't ever run that system again. I'd play it if someone else ran it. But I don't want to change systems this close to the campaign end.
I'm also running Old School Essentials for my 13yo daughter and her friends! I have the Advanced Books, but other than the monsters, I haven't included anything else yet. We are having a blast - easily the most fun I've had running a D&D game.
I am amazed you have the old _Eldritch Wizardry_ volume.
I was very lucky to discovered some of those early supplements back in the early 80's when they were much more readily available and without a huge mark-up. I bought my Blackmoor supplement around 1983 or 1984 right off the shelf at my game store for cover price of $5.00. That copy of Eldritch Wizardry originally belonged to a friend back then who didn't want it any more.
Thanks for watching and commenting! I hope you continue to enjoy the channel.
As someone who started with 2nd edition but quickly moved to 3rd edition, I really appreciate insight into the somewhat chaotic origins of D&D. However, I feel the latter half of this video was a bit rushed as there wasn’t as much detail about how editions 3, 4, and 5 were developed nor how they differed from previous editions. Some follow up videos that go into more detail about each specific edition would be great!
Thank you so much for watching and commenting. I really appreciate it! And I think this is a fair criticism. I'm just starting out and trying to find my "sea legs" as it were - this particular video was my very first in my "history" series and I did it primarily because on Twitter, I'm constantly talking about the 1981 Basic D&D game I run for my daughter and her friends, and I get a lot of "blank stares" (figuratively speaking) from newer folks in the hobby who have no idea what I'm talking about. So I made this video with the intent of saying, "Hey, you can check this video out to understand more!"
But then the video took off (as you can see, it's far and away the most popular video on my channel) and I was kind of taken aback, as I'd kind of just thrown it together. I filmed it (and all my videos) on my phone and I was watching the amount of space I had left in my phone memory counting down, so I started speaking really quickly at the end to fit it all in. 😀
I think a follow-up video is a great idea! I'm kind of been doing that in a small way by picking specific topics, like the Thief/Rogue Class, Skills, and Ability Scores, and talking about them across each edition, but that said, I have focused a bit more on the earlier years and do tend to be a bit quicker about later editions. I'll work on remedying that in future videos!
Thank you again! I really appreciate your support!
I first played AD&D in the fall of 1980 with group of military members in Germany (I was in the Air Force). I continued to play (even DMing) through 3rd edition. I started to feel fatigue when endless supplements were released. I didn't do 4th edition. I recently briefly joined a 5th edition campaign and bought a player's handbook. I prefer 3rd edition.
I started just shortly after you, in 1981, with Moldvay B/X, but in terms of total number of hours of playing, I've spent the most time playing 3E/3.5/Pathfinder1E (I kind of just lump them all together). I played 4E just two times, and it wasn't for me, but, I don't begrudge players for liking it. I've played 5E a handful of times, and while I would choose to not run that system, if someone invited me to a game, I would totally play it. But I also know my PC would be less effective than other PCs because I don't spend time on things like "builds" and figuring out the math to do cool combos, etc. And again, I totally don't begrudge people who do that. It's just not my style of playing. I'm not good at it, and that's partly because my enjoyment of the game does not come from system mastery. But for folks who like that, I think that's awesome!
Fantastic job! Thank you!
Glad you liked it! It's one of my favorite videos I've made. Thanks for watching and commenting!
I was, and am still very much in love with the 2nd edition (AD&D). Tho the system is obtuse and hard to understand with too many small rules that don't add much and complicate the flow of the game sessions, it had the best spells (especially with the Forgotten Reams ones) and the Triple classes were to me an absolute joy to play. The different experience curved and max HP limits really help balance the game. It was FAR more balanced than the 3rd or 3.5ed, not to mention those 5 saving throws so that every class had an edge against something. Sadly, I am the ONLY one at my table that loves it and thus unless I DM it, no one wants to, so I can never play as a player anymore. I modernized it to 3,5ed with skills and replaced Thac0 tables with "To Hit" tables, and converted the 5 saving throws into the same system 3,5 uses. Worked like an absolute charm and my players LOVED it too... again not enough to DM it (arrrrgh !)
3,0 was rough, too much buffing (everyone and their mom used spells to buff themselves and you had so much metagaming with that, made me sick as a DM and bored as a player). Also a level 20 dwarf fighter with 24con (20 +1 each 4 levels) now had 340hps, whereto the same dwarf with 19con in 2nd had like 190hps if not less (comparing maximums). yet the wizard's fireball still only did the same 10d6. It was pure idiocy and messed-up balance. Only 3 saving throws made it easy to get near immunity even with a "weak save number" on your class.
3.5 improved it some and it became my second best edition, I still DM in that system to this day, and enjoy playing it too. We had to smooth the rough edge with house rules that everyone agreed on (6-8ppl all agreeing on house rules? now that's perfect!), such as boosting 1min/level buff spells to 10min/level, and 1round/level summons to 1min/level (except demons/elemental lords and other B/S). No items could boost your saves (except bonus from stats) and caster level is the sum of all your magic classes (allowing for that Cleric/Mage again !). We usually work with a point buy system so nobody gets unlucky and have a crap character, or get lucky and gets a bunch of super high stats. Still the HP issues, it really gets bad after level 10, and I think I will revert to HPs from 2nd edition in my next major campaign to reign that in.
4th edition I hated, with a passion, and every one at my table gave it a try but ultimately ditched it. Had a couple nice ideas, which we poached for some of our house runes ( casting in rituals, minions, some feats, the Eladrin fey-elf... it wasn't all bad, but it felt like a computer game instead of a table-top game).
5th edition is... well... meh. It fixed my power-gaming issues from 3.0/3.5 which is a huge plus. Most spells are very poor and not worth their slot cost (let alone empowering them by using higher slots) and metamagic feats really blows. The melee classes are pretty good for the most part, so is the "Healing Cleric", and the Thief is almost overpowered. Still I can play this all night and still have fun. Not DMing it tho. Not a fan of the weak stats for character generation tho, monsters still have 24str or more for the classic ones like Ogre and Demons, but now getting over 15 is difficult and expensive as eff. But that is more to do with my DMs who are alergic to 18's and above, lol. We started houseruling this (much to my insistance), and with very very slight alterations we got a system with is far more fun (such as reverting to MP instead of slots for casters) and adding feats for extra concentration spells and not having the limit of 2-3 magic items.
To each their own, I'd still rather play 3,5ed, or of course 2nd ed. That said, I can't wait to see the 6th edition. I really hope it improves the game and bring back the triple/dual classes in some form... 5th ed is very lacking in that regards, and 3.5 (non-houseruled) kinda blew as well without those endless supplement of prestige class (but we usually play with basic books only).
Thanks for the video !
Glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for sharing your thoughts on the game and your history with the various editions!
While I started with B/X and am back to running it for my daughter and her friends, I spent the most total hours of time playing 3E/3.5/Pathfinder1 in a campaign that started in May 2001 and which is still on-going. I'm the DM for that one and over the past few years, I've grown disenchanted with that system as a DM. I used to *love* it and have a ton of books and supplements for it but it's become a slog to DM. If someone else wants to run it, I'd play, but once this campaign wraps, I'll never run it again. I am just not someone who enjoys system mastery (mixing-and-matching to find the perfect combination to do things) and that edition really shines for folks who *do* like that. It's just too much work to design encounters and run combats, for me. But like you said, to each their own!
3.5e definitely my favorite edition. When 4e came out, Paizo made Pathfinder, (or D&D 3.75e) which made it even better. I have friends that love 2e though, saying there is too much math in 3e/3.5e/and Pathfinder. I just couldn't stomach the chaos of the earlier editions anymore after experiencing the elegance and depth of 3e+.
Although I started playing back in 1981 with Moldvay Basic, in terms of sheer numbers of hours played, I've played more of 3E/3.5/PF1E than any other edition. I started a 3E campaign in May 2001 that's still running today (using PF) but when it wraps, I don't intend to ever run that system again. I'd play it if someone else ran it, but I find I don't enjoy running high-level 3.x games. I also played in a ~12 year 3E/3.5 game and we also dabbled in D20 Modern (specifically the D20 Cthulhu game).
I appreciate that I get *how* the math works in 3.X but as time has gone on, I find that I'm much more nimble and flexible at running a system like B/X, which is what I'm using now for my daughter's campaign. I do have a *TON* of 3.X stuff, both WotC and 3rd Party, and I use a lot of the idea, stripped of the mechanics, in that game as well.
Thanks again for watching and commenting! I really appreciate it!
you know, its amazing how little progress there has been for the mechanics of a d20 system. its been add numbers or remove numbers and recently they had the idea of Roll 2 and pick the lowest highest! (which spoiler increases or reduce the average by 66% percent)
Firstly, thank you for commenting! And secondly, my apologies for the very delayed response! I didn't see a notification for your comment so just luckily ran across it today!
Yes, 5E introduced Advantage/Disadvantage, which I prefer to 3E/3.5's long list of various plus-and-minus modifiers (and don't get me wrong - I played 3.X for a really long time and am still running a game using that system). As far as the math, what I've seen is that using Advantage/Disadvantage increases or reduces the die roll by an average of 4.5, or 22.5%. Then again, I am really not great at math so I may have misunderstood!
@@daddyrolleda1 the way i heard it is that it increses or reduces it by 3.5, but it doubles the chances to crit miss or hit.
the problem with d20s is that there VERY little you can do to them other than increasing the number or adv/disadv.
@@DareToWonder Makes sense. I do like the idea of rolling dice, as it adds a totally random element to the game that can then be narrated as to its effects. I have a very good friend who has min-maxed his character in the game I run for him (been going since May 2001) that his chance of failing any kind of roll/check is very low. He does that on purpose because his personality is that he doesn't want to be surprised, and he also looks at character creation as an exercise in how to "beat the system."
My style is that I like (as James Maliszewski put it) the "oracular power of the dice." I *want* there to be surprises I didn't expect, and as a DM, that gives me some real fun, as I have to figure out how to narrate what the dice just indicated. As a player, he really dislikes that. 😀
2E still the best.
Yeah, no it wasn't. ADnD was the best. Those books were a portal to a new world. Everything was still new and unknown. 2E, you knew what to expect. 🙃
Red box basic was my first owned, but we were playing B/X a little before in our neighborhood. To this day I still prefer BECMI
Thanks for watching and commenting!
What is it about BECMI that you prefer to B/X? I always found they were pretty compatible.
Cheers!
@@daddyrolleda1 I definitely feel like they are fundamentally similar, but there's a lighter tone to BECMI, more heroic and less grim. I can't really pinpoint how or why that is, but I assume it's in presentation. Less Eldritch and more knight of the realm.
I started in the early 80s with ad&d. I had the MM, FF and deities and demi gods ( cuthulu edition ).
Hello! Nice "meeting" you on @DMTales earlier today. Thanks for watching that video and asking your questions (I remember your Cheese Guild...). And, thank you very much for watching and commenting on this video. Great to have you here. Cheers!
@@daddyrolleda1 thank you. Your subject matter is right up my alley.
Glad to hear it!
3rd edition is definitely my favourite
While I'm currently enjoying and running 1981 Moldvay Basic for my daughter and her friends, in terms of sheer total number of hours playing, I've played the most of 3/3.5/Pathfinder1E (I lump them all together).
2.5 Edition was awsome!
Edit: I have a ton of experience with it. The biggest things 2.5 did was let you build your own race and class. You picked a regular race and class and had points to select race abilities and points to pick your class abilities. You could take abilities (drawbacks) that were worth negative points to gain more points. Any unspent points could be used to buy or increase proficiencies (which also cost points to buy). By default, if you took the regular version of races and classes, you wouldn't have an extra points. This makes it completely compatible with non-Skills and Powers characters.
The big thing is customizing your character. You could buy the ability for the wizard to cast in armor. A Cleric could buy improve weapon proficiencies like swords. You could pay for this by giving up access to certain spell schools / circles or limiting your armor or taking behavioral restrictions like a Paladin. It let you swap out features you didn't want or weren't going to use for features you wanted and were going to use.
The other big thing in S&P is sub- ability scores. Each stat had two sub abilities that by default were the same as you primarily ability score. Each sub ability was tied to a part of the ability. Dex had one part tied to Range Attack bonus and another tied to AC bonus. You could raise one by lowering the other up to 2 point. So, instead of Dex 14, you could have Dex 12 for Ranged Attacks and a Dex 16 for AC. This was by far the most broken part of S&P since in practice every character just got +2 to basically every stat by eschewing the other half of the stat's use.
Coupled with the custom races and classes, S&P characters were much more optimized and powerful. In my opinion, these easily added a level or more raw power to characters built with the default points expenditures. Needless to say, old skool players often found S&P to be too gamey and too powerful meant for munchkins and power gamers. Like all additional options, you didn't have to power game it. You could simply use it to buy what your concept was going to actually use and be instead of whatever narrow tired trope an author wrote. It was great.
That is probably the edition with which I have the least experience! I collected a lot of the "base" 2E books, but by the time the Player's Option series stuff came out, my group had moved to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and I'd stopped playing for a few years while I finished college and started my career. I came back hard with 3E but, although I was aware of it from articles in Dragon magazine, I basically missed 2.5.
Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@daddyrolleda1 I edited my post with more detail.
Thanks for all that added detail! That really helps explain the system.
I always struggle with drawbacks like the "behavioral restrictions" of a Paladin, as I find more often than not they get ignored or forgotten by the player and the DM, and you end up with a PC that got extra benefits for no drawbacks. Many of the 2E kits were built this way and I recall it's one of the reasons a lot of folks didn't like them.
Brilliant and concise
Thank you very much! So glad you enjoyed it!
The first 3e players handbook came with a character builder cd.
That's right! I had completely forgotten! My 3E books have been out in the garage since around the time 3.5 came out, as I was out of shelf-space, but I recently brought them back inside due to making all these videos. I just double-checked and my 3E Player's Handbook still has the CD on the inside back cover. I don't think I ever even took it out!
I like to use race as class in AD&D if someone wants to play something off the wall or weird. One time I made up a baboon class as a joke. Someone said that a baboon would be smarter than someone with a 3 Int so I went for it lol. I used it as a NPC. This way you don't have to come up with everything for a creature can it be a thief? Can it be a wizard? just give it set skills and an XP chart and you are good to go
Such a great idea! I like this approach! Thanks for sharing, and for watching and commenting!
artwork on eldritch wizardry cover is quite metal
Indeed! Quite risque for the time and the only cover they did like this, as far as I remember. I know there was nudity in the interior art of the Monster Manual but that went away pretty quickly and later books didn't have that.
I can't post the image here, but in Appendix N, Gary Gygax mentions "Dwellers in the Mirage" by A. Merritt as an inspirational book. Take a look at this cover: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwellers_in_the_Mirage
Thank you!
I'm glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for watching and commenting. That was a really fun video to put together.
I love 4e, it is actually my favorite version of D&D by narrowly edging out the Rules Cyclopedia. Also, in response to the "Pathfinder outsold 4e" comment, yes, it did for a brief window of time when WotC had stopped production of 4e and was working on D&D Next (which evolved into 5e). There are some people who had worked at both WotC and Paizo who have come forward saying that, based on the sales reports they were seeing, at no time while 4e was in active production did Pathfinder outsell 4e (it did do incredibly well, no hate on Pathfinder here since I also love that edition). Pathfinder's entry into the market was also very controversial and they almost got sued for using advertising that very clearly billed itself as just a continuation of 3.5 but they did drop that specific line fairly quickly.
Thanks so much for watching and commenting! I appreciate it.
I've had fun playing pretty much all editions of D&D (I have yet to actually play OD&D, Holmes, or 2E) and while I never ran or played in a campaign with 4E, I did play in a few one-shots and had a great time. I think ultimately it was just *too* different and folks weren't ready for that, especially after 3E opened the doors for 3rd party publishers to create content. I have thousands of dollars worth of 3.X stuff that wasn't really usable with 4E and I wasn't ready to let that investment go, so I made the switch to Pathfinder since it was all largely compatible.
Thanks for your insider info on sales - it was reported so much in the press that Pathfinder was outselling 4E and I didn't realize that didn't happen until WotC had moved to work on D&D Next and stopped actively promoting 4E. That's really interesting!
Cheers!
I thoroughly enjoyed the hell out of 4e, it's probably my most played edition since I got years of weekly games out of it with my brother and High School Friends. Granted, after I discovered Retroclones (Let alone WotC putting up PDFs of older editions, often for cheap) and the world discovered 5e (No hate on 5e, I like it...mostly...it's just difficult to get a group together for BECMI or 1e...), I fear 4e is just going to be a Character-focused miniatures-skirmish game for me...but I still like the edition.
@@SwordlordRoy I think whatever edition one starts with is bound to instill a sense of nostalgia but also, there's no denying it's fun because it's your first! It's a new world of fun to explore. 4E has a lot of ardent fans and I think if it had tried to embrace what it was doing instead of trying to position it as just "another edition of D&D" it could've been a lot more successful.
@@daddyrolleda1 I fear 3.5 was my first edition, with 3.0 being the first I ran...experience was poor for the most part, the edition wasn't conducive to self-teaching, and the only truly experienced player we had was more interested in exploiting the newbie DM than helping.
@@SwordlordRoy Oh no! I'm sorry you had a bad experience at your first outing with the hobby.
3.X is very complex, as you well know by now, and I can see it being difficult to learn especially if you have no familiarity with TTRPGs and are trying to learn solely from reading the book.
And, it is also very conducive for players who strive for "system mastery" vs just enjoying the game. I have never played that way, but I know a lot of folks who enjoy being able to exploit loopholes to create characters that are ultra-powerful. I have a player like that in the 3.5 game I'm currently still running (started with 3E back in May 2001 and the campaign is still going). He loves being able to combine race-class-feats-magic in ways I as the DM would never think of, so that few things challenge him. I find it frustrating, but it's how he derives enjoyment from the game.