Why AD&D is More Dangerous Than 5th Edition
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- Опубліковано 11 кві 2020
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#dungeonsanddragons #dandd #rpg - Ігри
That is why I like deadlier games in general. Heroic things become more heroic when there is a real sense of danger. Pendragon, Cthulhu, Traveller, old school D&D...
Couldn't agree more! Heroic things are more heroic when they're dangerous. I couldn't have said it better!
Presumably there is a balance to this. If everything comes effortlessly to the PCs then that's not heroic. If every time the PCs step out the front door they catch a cold and die, that's not heroic either. Somewhere on the spectrum between 'no possibility of failure' and 'no possibility of survival' lies heroism. Personally I'd argue that's not a specific point, but a decent sized range. The deadliest game isn't automatically the most heroic.
@@irrevenant3 The whole concept of character balance is foreign to DND. It has only come about because of societal conditioning. "Balance" of DND is entirely provided by a complimentary party dynamic (it's why classes were so rigid and multi-classing was hard) and the skill of the players and DM actually mattered. A good party mix balances the game play specifically because balance isn't supposed to exist unless working together. This is in large part why all modern DND versions are terrible.
It's this very reason, because things are hard that the players become heroic. It's the job of the DM to reasonably adjust to find a balancing point to maximize enjoyment for the party. But that also means it's easy for players to over reach and create catastrophe.
Absolutely. I restarted a AnD campaign I started with my Jr High School friends in1979. Stopped in 85 restart it in 89 stopped in 93…restarted it in 2010 with my god sons stopped in 2016 when they went to college. Restarted it in 2019 with a young coworker still playing today at one time we had 8 co workers in my group. One of them was a bit of a malcontent started a 5e and claims 5th is better. To date nobody has died in his group…. I have a book of death…..i don’t play to kill I play for the story line….if you die you die ! The characters are 9th to 14th level and everyone knows they earned them. That’s the pay out.
Totally agree. D&D 5th Edition characters can solve any problem by violence or intimidation because they are so powerful. That doesn't make for better roleplaying.
A really good point. A focus on violence and intimidation does not set a table for good role playing.
And I disagree. My players much more often than not avoid combat through shenanigans. Maybe it's just your group?
@@natedog2014 Nope just yours.
5e is far closer to AD&D in the "anyone can kill you" sphere than 3.x or 4e were.
@@Febkunai I've had it go different ways depending on the group and the game I'm running as to whether the game focuses on combat or not. I lean a bit more towards non-combat encounters, but not too heavily. I let the players decide if it's going to be solved with violence or not. I will say this, though, in 5e the players are far less likely to ignore the threat of the town guards than in 3.x, 4e, or the Pathfinder games.
There's an interesting feedback loop in 5E. The roleplaying paradigm for the last however many years has been to move away from a campaign structure--several characters per player, characters at different levels from each other, high stakes with character mortality, etc.--toward a highly DM-curated experience where players pour all of their creativity into a single character. That character will last pretty much forever unless the player wants to explore the drama of character mortality. The modern approach to roleplaying is supported by 5E and also encouraged by it. Instead of starting as fledgling adventurers surviving on wits, teamwork, and luck who may grow to become full-on heroes, 5E characters begin as heroes and only grow from there. It's a different type of fantasy that has different objectives.
For what it's worth I enjoy 5E, but by far the most fun times that I have had with D&D have been with homebrewed AD&D campaigns.
I love the underlying play style of AD&D -- which I grew up on -- where players explored ruins in search of treasure. That style of play had its place and time and lives on in countless video game incarnations (the early AD&D video games like Pool of Radiance, Eye of the Beholder, and even Baldur's Gate were quite lethal). I've DM'd since 1979 and have found that most of my players prefer greater survivability rather than having to restart a new character (or lose levels or XP when being raised). They know I don't pull punches; they know that characters can die (and have died) in my 5e games. One thing newer DMs may not know is that AD&D required the DM to come up with rules for many situations, often on the fly, because players were free to try anything. A lot of that play style has been lost over the years -- players tend to restrict themselves more and more to just what's on their character sheet instead of imagining themselves in the situation. I often have to remind my players they can do more than just what's on their character sheet.
The 5th edition game uses bounded accuracy -- that is, characters are set up to hit more often, but everything has higher hit points. The rationale, after play testing, is that players (especially newbies) have more fun when they successfully hit than whiff a die roll. They also found out most groups have only 3-4 players, so the PCs are individually stronger, and initiative is more granular, to support smaller parties. No more parties with lots of NPC hirelings. Granular initiative means players wait longer to take their turn. By being successful on their turn, it speeds combat back up and makes the payoff for waiting more fun. Also, 5th edition still emphasizes heroic level play, which is the power level 4th edition had, while ditching all the system changes and restrictions to play-style that 4th edition's system forced onto the gameplay.
In 4th edition, your characters are all X-Men style superheroes. All the exploration was in defeating linear, set-piece encounters in elaborate miniatures battles. Encounter prep took so much time, DMs were encouraged to railroad players into always having the big encounters, with little play or prep time left over to design adventures that let players freely explore or roleplay in sandbox mode. So, 4th edition runs like a series of superhero battles in a comic book, rather than the flexible exploration that you'd find in a module like Jacquays "Dark Tower/Caverns of Thracia" or Gygax's "Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth".
5th edition is a compromise, that tries to be more like old school D&D, while retaining some of the 4e heroic power levels. This is also why 5e doesn't give experience points for treasure (or really have much use for treasure) or have well-developed exploration pillar rules. The characters are assumed to be heroes doing heroic things, rapidly rising in power, with a low chance of being killed off in the story. They are not murder-hoboes, or gritty swords n' sorcery characters struggling to survive in a harsh world, like Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. 5e can support this play, but not well. They want you to be Frodo, not Elric. At least the system is easy to mod.
I think a lot of the differences between old school dnd and 5th ed come from the attempt to appeal to the way the fantasy genre itself has changed over the years. In the early editions, a lot of it boiled down to emulating fantasy novels and short stories since that’s essentially what the genre as a whole was back then. Nowadays the writers try to appeal to the much wider swath of fantasy media that exists (due in no small part ironically to those older versions of DnD.)
Things like anime, video games, and the like have a lot more influence than novels over the way that the fantasy genre is percieved. So to appeal to that conglomerized perception of what fantasy is, the game developers try to match that, which leads to power creep and all that sort of stuff.
I also think that the tastes of players themselves have changed over the years in terms of how cool people are with PC lethality in games. We’ve all had a PC die a somewhat unceremonious death, which never feels great, especially when you did a lot of creative work on the back-end to develop them into being the sort of character you’d want to play. And so I think part of that power creep that we see in 5th ed is designed in part to mitigate that, since a bad experience can do a lot to drive someone away from the hobby.
I don’t say all of this as a defense of 5e, but just as an attempt to rationalize where I think a lot of these changes come from. I enjoyed the video, thanks guys!
I think you pretty much nailed it. My opinion is that the video game feel is the primary driver behind the differences but, as you point out, it's a bit more complex than just that. Great comment! Thanks!
We played 5e for 6 months and promptly went back to AD&D. It just wasn't for us. Who cares about ghosts that don't steal levels? The druid in our group got turned into a vampire 3 times without any real lasting effects. That said, it's all D&D. As long as everyone is having fun, it's all good.
I agree. Players who have never faced level stealing undead have never truly felt fear in the game. Investigate haunted places only when absolutely necessary and protect the cleric! Glad to hear you came “home” after 6 months!
These are the things that actually make previous editions more dangerous... the fact that you can lose progress... If you had a group where a druid got turned into a vampire 3 times without any real lasting effects, though, that's the DM, that's not 5e D&D.
@@robertmasengale9366 No, it was almost always our own decisions that got us into trouble. After a while we just became reckless because we very quickly realized how tough 5e characters are (or were, as I haven't played it in years). Consequences were minimal. It was a new edition, so we played it rules as written. The challenge rating on monsters was very imbalanced in favour of the pc's. Like I said in my original comment, it's still D&D. It just wasn't the edition for us. I also want to stress that we did have fun for a while.
Try lamentations of the flame princess, old school essentials, or OSRIC- or really any OSR game.
@@MyNameHousefly Thanks. I own all of those. Except Lamentations. Been playing D&D since I got the red box for Christmas way back in the olden golden days. The newer stuff I'm really into is the new wave of solo games. Have you ever tried Ironsworn or Stars Without Number? Great stuff.
I think it has to do greatly with evolution of fantasy genre and pop-culture as a whole. Characters becomes masters in something literally during a training montage. Price of success is pretty low. Everyone are just charismatic heroes who either are unrealistcally skillful or unbelievably lucky and they bruteforce their adversities with relative ease. Of course people nowadays won't expect their adventure to be actually perilous. Not to mention that many settings and characters are just reskinned modern urban life nowadays. You seldom see really different setting that has its own rules and relationships - they just like ours but with a 'fantasy' paintjob.
This is true and what a loss it represents from my perspective. If I were new to the hobby today, and the current edition is my introduction, it would hold little appeal to me and I very much doubt that I would stick with the hobby for very long.
I started playing D&D in 1977 and still enjoy the game I started with.
Absolutely, 5E is rather made for "player-convenience" than for evoking a feeling of being constantly in danger of being killed by some random fluke. AD&D is about some random blokes with swords robbing dungeons and tombs (grimdark, sword & sorcery), while 5E is about marvel superheroes saving the world each weak.
Well stated. For us, anyway, the random blokes with sword robbing tombs has always been what appeals in the game. Thanks XX!
I remember AD&D and played it for years. Much fun was had, but there are many different things that you don't see today.
1. AD&D forced players to sneak or negotiate to avoid combats they couldn't easily win. I agree with you that this was actually a good thing. When I've DMed 5e, I couldn't have a scene where I could expect the party to back off from a villian that had them overpowered (for the moment), they charged into TPKs rather than retreat.
2. In the AD&D inititive system, surprise was overpowered and spell casting was harder to run (more realistic, but less playable). Initive was "side" based, one roll for the party and one for the monsters; and it rerolled every round. Spells casting time was usually expressed in 10ths of a round. So with surprise the entire party attacked and any quick spells from the 2nd round also hit before the monsters could do anything. Reverse that if the party was surprised; so many TPKs.
3. Psionics were god level fast with an entire psionic vs psionic battle concluding in less than a round. Imagine the magic user starts a spell, the fighters begin to advance; meanwhile the mind flayer and our weird druid both fall to the ground, one dead and the other bleeding from the ears, before anyone else could act.
4. You had to keep track of facing. The armor class changed depending on which side an attack came from and a thief's sneak attack had to be a literal back-stab. This made sense for wargames, but increased the workload on the DM.
5. Race, alignment and stat limitations for classes. Everyone remembers how annoying the "awful good" paladin could be, but forget you had to get an odds-defying set of rolls to even qualify to be a paladin. You want to play a James Bond type thief on the side of good? Sorry, thief has to be non-good, non-lawful. Want to run a half-orc? You have to choose fighter or thief and never reach 10th level in either. You want to play a wizard with 10 INT? Impossible in AD&D but in 5e, no problem; a dum wizard might be an interesting story.
6. If roleplaying was to happen, all the players had to be good storytellers. There was no background/bond/ideal/flaw system to help them. You'd run into a player with a 10-page backstory from time to time. But, most players just played themselves instead of putting on a persona. There wasn't much middle ground.
7. Nerd rage. Playing themselves rather than a different persona led to so, so, many nerd-power-fantasy players. These guys were nerds in real life (like me), so their only outlet to feel powerful was D&D. Either the players would kill everything in sight or spend an hour rollplaying having sex with the barmaid. Or, if their power-fantasy wasn't fulfilled, literal table flipping and storming out wasn't unheard of. This is the one thing I don't miss from the good old days. I have buddies from the old days who still haven't outgrown that; they refuse to play anything but "epic" characters and get pouty when they have to problem-solve rather than blast their way through. I can still see their looks of horror when the king's guards turned out to be just as tough as they were. I dont' care how heroic you are, you can't just slay the king and take his place; he's king for a reason.
Great comment. You hit on a lot of the problems inherent in playing early D&D strictly by the rules. Numbers six and seven were very true and it was only over time that those problems mellowed out with the groups I played in. (Nerd Rage becoming Nerd Discontent then just Nerd Existence) Much of what you point out seems to have been a problem for many players. I think that's why there are so many ignored rules, house rules, etc. that have sprung up over the years. I've seen interesting patterns in the comments and e-mails we get that reflect what did and did not work for people in the early versions, and how DMs changed their play to accommodate it. Thanks again!
yes you are on the money me too....
I remember finally having a thief survive to 2nd level in BECMI. I thought it was great because just about all of my previous thieves died due to not finding a trap, especially poison needles(back then Poison was save or die about 99% of the time).
I remember we played a campaign of 3.5. We were meant to go into this labyrinth, but the guardian was a hydra. We were low level too, so the only thing we could do is run. One of the players was an idiot and engaged the hydra. I was just gonna let him die, but I threw a flask of something at the hydra...well the hydra didn't take too kindly to that and ate me with 8 of 9 heads. Died in the first half hour of playing. Players and characters should have enough sense to run away from things that are clearly too hard. I learned to never try to save an idiot ever again. LOL
That's just bad DMing. Yeah, we lost a lot of 1st level PCs back then, but not like that.
I started playing 2nd with my group. It was a weird transition but we ended up just implementing alot of 2nd edition rules because 5th is just too easy for experienced players unless the DM heavily modifies the stats of the creatures.
Hey I been DMing since 1978 learned to play sitting off the Iran coast during the hostage crisis and I tried other edtions but to me 1st edtion is the best thanks for the video
Great story about how you got into the game!!! We agree, it's definitely the best way to play the game. KYSAF!
Thank you for the response as a Marine deployed on a ship you have a Lot of time on your hands it kept us entertained and some what sane I have played around the world through both gulf wars and back home finally still playing I even have the original paper back books my frist 20 side dice is a ball laughing I liked the game as it let you use fire team tactics squad tactics and when I started playing with cilvains it made it very hard for them as they did not grasp the concept of maneuver cover but my players are starting to learn. But again thank you for the response as it was very unexpected
@@terryh7894 Semper Fi brother- its funny how many Marines, vets in general, are into RPGs' and like you I enjoy a tactics game with mini's for the combat.
Younger gamers seem to conflate having rules for social encounters with having roleplaying be prevalent. No codified rules for social encounters? You are assumed to not roleplay. Lots of rules for combat? You are assumed to have only combat. The rules assumed a lot of roleplay but with an assumption you would act it out. The rules were only there to adjudicate the portions you could not act out like listening at doors and fighting.
I think you're right. When we first started playing, there wasn't much in the way of any rules for social interaction - you just acted through it based on an example or two you read in the basic set book. I think it took just a few hours in the first session before that became second nature and there's never been any need for a mechanic for it since. Thanks for the comment!
Awesome commentary. I love AD&D 2e. It certainly is the edition I would play and run for that gritty, more loose, “life is cheap” sword & sorcery type of game. I currently run and play 4e and am having a lot of fun with it. (Yeah, a dirty 4e player… *hiss*) I ditched 5e in favor of it. I got tired of 5e’s wonky power imbalance; players unable to die, unafraid of even the most “terrifying” of creatures because 5e neutered them all in effects turning them mostly into bags of hit points. At least in 4e, the monster and villain power levels matched the player’s power levels (for the most part) and things could still be deadly and intense because they all still possessed some semblance of their former powers… Although I do admit, I miss XP/level loss. That was a very cruel, but somewhat satisfying effect to impose.
i love this video and your guys commentary especially at the end. my brother and i got into D&D during 4e (insert bad 4e joke here) and while we liked it, because it felt video gamey from us coming from WoW, and that was the problem because it felt video gamey that he and i were like, is it me or are we spamming moves? it got boring and he wanted to ROLE PLAY and do skill checks more. then i looked backwards, 3.5 was out of print but found Pathfinder and everyone was saying it 3.75 of D&D so i made the dive and my brother and friends had so much fun! near deaths, fun multiclassing, characters becoming unique and while at 10th level it came to a grind with combat, the role play was awesome, so now presently i run skill based games more than combat focused games, and i am currently part of a Planescape AD&D 2e group and i am have a blast!
Glad you found the system you needed to play. Sounds like a journey. Couldn't agree more about skill based as opposed to combat based. I mean, combat is fun and all but it gets tiresome pretty quickly. And I've been meaning to make a journey to Sigil at some point. You've sparked my interest again so maybe this time I'll do it. Thanks!
Old school energy drain would make the mightiest heroes sweat.
Great video guys! I was introduced to AD&D back in 1983 when I joined the Dungeons & Dragons Club at my local High School up her in Canada. I do agree, that the likelihood that you may not live beyond 1st level caused you to really cherish and emotionally invest in those characters that became something. As a person who loved the Magic User class...you had to get to level 12 to use the most powerful spells. Something that could literally take years of play (depending on the frequency and length of game sessions). As far as the latest and greatest Edition phenomenon. I learned after the 3rd Edition that...it all comes down to Money. For myself, it's impractical to buy into yet another edition of D&D, when the old AD&D or a hybrid type of game is still enjoyable. I feel some of the problem of "dumbing down" D&D was to attract the computer gamer crowd into role playing games. Just my opinion, but that's how I feel. Take care guys!
Thanks for your comments! I’m starting to believe most late 70s early 80s players see things the same way we do. I’m jealous you had a high school D&D club clear back in 1983. Such a thing was unheard of in our area until probably the late 80s. It often seems like Canada is a bit ahead of their friends to the south, though.
@@theoldwarlock You're welcome. I'm thankful for that D&D club because it introduced me to other great RPG's all the way up to Grade 11 and then in Grade 12 some friends and I ran some AD&D games in the Cafeteria during spares. Oh wow, I remember that one player who convinced me to let him play a Cavalier...all those attack dice when he charged with his lance...lol!! Good times however! :)
When I hear "roleplaying centric" ...I hear, keep the PC alive and dumb down the game to expand the sales
Were I to have 1000 accounts I would up vote this 1000 xs
We wish we could disagree with you, but we really can't.
Thanks RJD!
5e is not Roleplaying centric though. Cyberpunk is Role Playing Cintric, and that's one of the most lethal games on the market... 5e is Power Fantasy centric. It's actually the worst edition bar 4e for roleplaying. OSR games are probably the best for Role Playing overall.
Wdym?
I also prefer the older editions of D&D because they’re the ones I own. I see no reason to spend more money buying newer editions when I have some editions of D&D already.
You know, that's actually a really good point. Why buy new editions if something is working fine?
This is one of the reasons I still play 2nd ed AD&D. I think the urgency of death, especially when you are invested in your character, has to feel real. In AD&D, players have to be more clever at low levels and think through the task. I think it’s just more fun and you have great memories to talk about, like the time the 2 level Ranger with 5 hps, dragged the 0 hp Cleric and 2 hp Mage out of the catacombs before they are overwhelmed by undead. Good times!
Me and my friends bought 5e and we still prefer ad&d. I personally love how easy it is for characters to die in ad&d makes every fight interesting plus always funny watching someone's character die to a dumb mistake.
I understand that and love older editions. But there has been so many great revolutions in indie roleplaying games
@@theoldwarlock Because maybe you own fourth edition XD
I find 1E/2E AD&D to have been one of the best systems to generate story telling, and creativity for players and DM's, in that because it lacked rules for a lot of things, you and your group had to come up with things to fill the wholes the system had. Our best years were during our amalgamation of 1E/2E AD&D, and are the basis of all our greatest adventures, which have inspired all the novel trilogies I've been working on over the las 25 years. They definitely had a fear factor that is lacking in the later versions.
Totally agree! Thanks for the comment, Jim!
Running a 1E game. During session 2 had an ordinary orc knock the party's cleric unconscious with a critical hit for max double damage. On the cleric's turn, he bled out and died. The tone has been set.
And what a tone it is! Love this kind of start.
Is "critical hit" a thing in 1e? I think there may have been non canonical charts for nat 20 hits in Dragon magazine, but I'm not sure if it's in the core rules. If you can tell me where The rules in 1e is for that, if appreciate it! We don't use the Unearthed Arcana, so maybe it's in there?
Lost Mines of Phandelver, the starter set for 5e, was noted for opening with an ambush of 4 goblins (assuming a 4 party group). It was also noted that full party wipes were common as a result of this first encounter in the game. Ambushes are VICIOUS in 5e.
Ah, yes… I reckon when I play D&D again, I’ll be minimising the risk of my low level characters dying by using certain tactics, e.g, sneaking around (to surprise monsters or sneak past them) and using missile weapons and preparing the group to surround and kill whatever comes through a door (perhaps including a slack rope on the floor, held by an adventurer at each end, ready to pull it taut to trip an enemy), and then opening the door. Mages out of spells will often use flaming oil Molotov cocktails or throw darts (if it doesn’t endanger fellow adventurers)… or open doors and hide behind them.
what I admire most about d&d is what you brought up towards the end. and that is that as a DM, the rule books are primarily guidelines for how to run you're game. its up to you to decide what to actually use. its your game. run it the way you want to
I got back into gaming over the pandemic after a 30 year break. I still LOVE it :) I tried 5e and it just didn't feel right. As you say too superhero. Thanks to cheap "print on demand" I got myself a facsimile 1e AD&D PH, DMG and MM + a Fiend Folio and it feels glorious. Amazing how much I could still remember. :)
Glad you found a way to get all those books back. It is amazing how much I retain from decades back. Must be a pretty good game that left an impression back in the day. :)
Surprise rounds and slow, natural healing level the playing field. You can get into trouble quickly and spend a long time in the hospital post game.
I played 4th Edition and Jesus Christ, what a horrible experience. My problem with with 4th and 5th is they are transforming every class in some kind of mage. Everybody has something special, some magic thing happening. I find this detrimental to the mage. I remember having 4HP and staying the fuck behind fearing a mosquito bigger than usual could kill, as I thought, wait until I get my fireball and you will see... You said it all about the perspective of fearing the world in contrast to being a superhero.
Thanks, Leonardo. I agree. I think the proliferation of magic to everyone really takes away from what should be an extremely special skill that there has to be a struggle to obtain (hiding from large mosquitos for a start). What's the saying, "if everyone is special, no one is special." In many ways, that seems to fit the later versions of the game.
And in 5e magic users are king from day one just about and fighters are okay at low lv and weak af hiher. Adnd magic users were weak af at 1st doson lv even hiher lv they were strong but more glass cannon and fighters still could deal the damage and take out many things.
10,000% correct on all points. AD&D is much more rp orientated than 5th ed. You didn't roll for persuasion, you had to come up with something good and convince the DM. Death was much more common because you where in more danger. You didn't have all these special abilities of fifth edition classes have, nor did you get bonus attacks or secondary attacks that are common today. You're right on the point of character attachments. When the game is harder and it takes more thinking rather than just dice rolling to get through whatever the encounter is be a combat or otherwise the reward of feelings of accomplishment is much greater when you get through the other side. Fifth edition with so many bonuses players get that I've seen people roll a five on a d20 and end up with the result of 15. To me that's just crazy. With all the additional skills you get and the automatic stat boosts you get at certain levels 5th edition dungeons & dragons is more like a video game or watching anime than it is actually role play.
Thanks, Wayne. I think your comment on not rolling for persuasion but actually having to convince the DM really sums things up. And a lot of people commenting have seen 5th as being an extension of video games. Definitely a very different style and purpose of play.
Old school DM here, the combat and tactics book would give you a more accurate idea on number of attacks per round. it's not only the level of the pc but the number of weapon proficiency points spent, any type of weapon. That being said you are correct
Me and my group in high school started with ad&d 1e. I remember the day 5e was announced because we were actually walking to a meeting at the local library to play our first true session of a rise with the mouth(our/my first adventure.) Which I was dming. To this day the people that played that game with us still say it's their favorite and most fun campaign yet. I had so much fun with it especially with some of the weird ad&d rules like one dude became a Litch and the main plot was about a weird artifact that was teeth that replaced your teeth and gave you power.
That's the main reason I decided to use 5e to introduce my child to D&D. A 8yo is terrible at dealing with loss and learning a lot of rules. She wants to feel powerful and win all the times. I can't wait for her to be older so that we can play the better edition (AD&D 2nd ed, in my opinion).
Hey Davide, thanks for your comment! We love to hear about kids being introduced to the game. Keep your sword arm free!
My wife wants me to start up a campaign and I am going to subject my 8 year old daughter to AD&D. I will make sure my wife and kids all roll up two characters.
@@trevorclapham5571 I started with AD&D when I was 14. Beside the huge amount of modifiers that as a DM I had to memorize, and the math required to calculate a successful dice roll, I loved that system. I felt it pushed the player to strategically use the environment of the battlefield and gave more importance to the quality of the equipment and the character's stats.
High level character felt more powerful than the 5th edition and the balance was much better than the 3rd edition. Even though the successive editions allowed for a wider personalization of the character, I felt classes where more unique and better defined in AD&D.
@@Ghaladh I think the most important thing is the DM regardless of what edition you’re playing.
My brother and I started playing when our babysitter introduced us to the game. We were young like your daughter and mine.
I just found your channel and I certainly enjoyed the dicussion.
The point made about having such powerful characters to start with really resonated with me, my AD&D games even with complete newbies ended up with more of the dungeon, the details I mentioned, or just plain objects like barrels and doors being optimized for survival, we always said that doors were your best friend because they provide the means of retreat and turn the flow around in an otherwise no-win scenario.
With 5th edition everyone is so loaded, getting dropped is scarily easy to quickly bounce back from, cantrips provide unlimited magic attacks... why even bother coming up with a pragmatic solution or learning the value of anything that isn't strictly made to improve your ability to just have victory with very little question.
Also I beleive treating the sandbox with respect and not having CR or monsters in a dungeon who can't be bothered to exercise the advantages they should logically have is the real X factor I beleive.
Old School D&D made me believe I was a living breathing entity in a world where danger must be respected and stakes are crystal clear. 5th makes me the main character with free plot armor just for existing
Wow, I really liked the the second to last sentence of your comment. Thanks for sending it. Glad you agree with us. Our style of play is not for everyone, but I can't see playing it any other way. Thanks again.
It's kinda wild how despite low level characters being less combat capable in AD&D, the proficiency system lets AD&D characters have things they are actually competent in while a 5e character will be hard pressed to appraise a gem or sail a boat until they've become a beast of murder.
On page 25 of the AD&D Players Handbook, fighters get 1 attack per level against less than 1HD creatures (less than d8 hit points). The 5th level fighter gets 5 attacks per round against commoners in AD&D.
I’m new to D&D. I’ve collected D&D books and modules for quite a while. Wanting to learn to DM for a weekly campaign and always felt more drawn to ad&d 1e or 2e. This video has helped clarify my choice. Can’t wait to start
Glad we could help with your choice, Grim. Hopefully, some of our future videos can help as well.
7 worst designs in D&D 5e.
About me: I played a Cleric to level 17 in Adventures League, I played 3 complete published campaigns, I have also DM'd tons of games including 5 published campaigns, with over 30 different players.
1. Hit dice / Long rests, too easy to heal up, there is little to no attrition.
2. Plate Armor is badly designed, get the best AC, dump stat DEX, swim like Michael Phelps, climb with ease, move as fast as someone with no armor. Many spells have to defeat your armor class, why does ray of enfeeblement or the incorporeal touch attack of a Shadow have to get through your armor?
3. Gold becomes meaningless
4. If you don't use Intelligence as a class it’s a dump stat, tons of players just dump stat Intelligence, and why wouldn’t they? It doesn't help your skills or languages.
5. Spells either suck real bad and no one ever uses them, or it’s a spell everyone takes, e.g. Healing word, bless, polymorph, etc. I keep seeing the same spells used over and over again. There are many spells, that I have never witnessed used.
6. There is no touch armor class, This design flaw is kind of connected with problem #2, it includes strange interactions like heavy plate mail making it less likely that you get hit with a net, which is actually the opposite effect you want to see in this style of combat mechanics, now to be fair I would have been ok with them not including a TAC (touch AC), as long as they replaced it with another mechanic, for example all they had to do is use Dex saves for touch attacks.
7. In conclusion, my most loathed D&D 5ed rule is about what happens to characters at 0 hit points. The death and dying rules are the worst in any version of D&D since its origin, players bounce up and down with healing, as the monsters play wacka-a-mole.
Thanks, Henry K. Excellent observations.
Touch AC is bad. It's better integrated in the desctiption and save.
Reading this felt like listening to myself. I feel exactly the same way.
I agree with almost everything here except touch AC. In 5e, proficiency bonus jacks up your odds of hitting. A sorcerer has the same chance of hitting as a fighter of the same level because Int mod + Proficiency Bonus + base of 8 = magic attack bonus.
"In conclusion, my most loathed D&D 5ed rule is about what happens to characters at 0 hit points. The death and dying rules are the worst in any version of D&D since its origin, players bounce up and down with healing, as the monsters play wacka-a-mole."
Just have the monsters keep attacking an unconscious character and they're dead in a round or two. if your monsters stop attacking a character when they go down and they have high INT, that's on you.
God damn, people need to read the rules.
I play 5e. Playerd 2 for year and 3e for years.
I'll not say older editions are better but 5e you really approach danger with other perspective, you are a hero at 5th level. The approach I have is to make encounter waaaay more difficult to the PCs and for the players also because otherwise they just steamroll everything you throw at them.
One thing that help me from OSR is the random encounters "vibe". The world is not ajusting to the PCs level so yeah, you will encounter everything that is out there if you go out enought. By applying this, our group suddenlly became more carefull and they approach danger by other pespective because they really don't know what is in there.
I think we're really on the same page. For us, it's just about having things be difficult so players have to think more about what they're getting themselves into. Makes the game much more of a great mental excercise if there's danger around the corner and I think that can be done in any system with the right DM. Thanks for the comment.
If you want a difficult game, skip 1e and play 2e without optional rules instead. It makes 1e look like "kiddie mode" it is so deadly.
It kinda really is.
Even w optional combat and death rules character mortality was pretty high.
You had to choose your combats wisely !
Just found your channel, enjoyed this video immensely! I've been a fan of 1e for a long time and this was a good comparison of the two in combat. If I can say so, I think this video would have benefited from some graphics overlayed of what the stats were and the combat rolls, help explain the math a bit. Just my two coppers.
Thanks so much Matthew!
Multiple attacks in AD&D went to "3 attacks per 2 rounds" for 7th level fighters, paladins, and 2nd edition rangers (8th level for 1st edition rangers), and "2 attacks per round" for 13th level fighters, paladins, and 2nd edition rangers (15th level for 1st edition rangers).
This is, of course, separate from the "heroic fray" ability enjoyed by fighter-types in 0th and 1st editions (one attack per experience level when attacking 1 HD or weaker enemies in 0th, and when attacking enemies *weaker than* 1 HD in AD&D 1st edition; 2nd edition only granted this ability to fighters who took it as a high-level proficiency in the DM Option: High Level Campaigns rules).
0th edition D&D was also very different from 1st & 2nd editions in how it handled fighter multiple attacks: the white box (1974) didn't give fighters multiple attacks at all, the 1982 Expert Set gave very high-level fighters multiple attacks (2 per round at 15th level, 3 per round at 20th level, and 4 per round at 25th level); and then in the 1984 Companion Set, this was revised to become 2 per round at 12th level, 3 at 24th level, and 4 at 36th level, but with the caveat that fighters only got multiple attacks against targets that they could hit on a natural 2+ attack roll.
. . .
With all that out of the way, I have to say… I don't really agree with your analysis of 1st edition vs. 5th edition, for one simple reason: hit points. 5e monsters have huge hit point totals compared to 1st or 2nd edition, and fighters *need* to be able to hit the monsters many times in order to bring them down at all! Even then, as it stands, 5th edition combats just drag on and on and on… they're boring, not because the characters hit frequently, but because the stakes are low (healing is easy, death saves are weighted in favor of player character survival, and healing a character in death saves causes them to spring back up into positive hit points like it's nothing).
So, while you're not wrong about 5th edition combat being awful, you're taking aim at the wrong target. Say instead that 5e combat is slow and boring and lacks tension; not that the player characters hit too often, or that a 5th level 1E fighter is somehow comparable to a 1st level 5E fighter. The comparison doesn't make sense, because the 1E fighter is swinging at goblins that have maybe 3 hit points each, and the 5E fighter is attacking goblins with 15 hp!
You make some really valid points. Thanks for the comment!
When you said you weren't going to get angry, I was hoping for a snap zoom to a table miniature with topped with cups and plates as you flip it with your finger.
This vid was in the side recommend list when I was on a vid reviewing AD&D 1E - Oriental Adventures and talking about the "controversy" surrounding it. Based on the title of this vid, I thought this was going to be a rant about how all the old AD&D books were "dangerous" in the aspect of "offensive racist, sexist, cultural appropriation" and how 5E "fixed" all that. I was rather glad to be mistaken and that you referring to "danger" in the aspect of level of threats to a character.
My first character was a 1st level human fighter using the D&D Basic (red) set, spent 4 hours during class creating him and trying to figure out what equipment to buy with my 20 or so gold pieces. Started my first session at lunch, 15 minutes in, the party is walking in a swamp near town, thunder storm approaches, lighting bolt strikes near the group, 3 of us in metal armor have to roll a saving throw, mine failed, had 12 hit points, took 13 damage, and instead of bringing me back to town to get resurrected, the rest of the party take my gear that I had spent all morning trying to decide on and left my body in the swamp... the bastards. That was 35 years ago and I still remember how my first character died.
Thanks for the comment! Great how that memory stayed with you. A lot of the people watching our videos seem to have very vivid memories of those early sessions - we hear about them from time to time and enjoy it when we do. Especially the deaths. And yeah, those guys were racking up some bad karma. And creating D&D stuff in class?! Yeah, this game made a hit on my grades.
How did you afford metal armour with only 20gp? 😲
@@SimonAshworthWood Can't remember the exact gold amount it may have been more than 20gp, but this was BECMI (Basic "Red Box" D&D) and the prices aren't super-high like for 5E equipment. I do know that after buying my gear I had near-nothing left, a few copper pieces I think.
The items I knew I had for sure were chain mail armor, short bow with a quiver of 20 arrows (for ranged attacks), short sword (for melee), leather boots, a backpack, and a set of rations.
I think I may have also had a lantern and 1 flask of oil for it or a set of torches. Can't remember which exactly, but I knew I needed a light source since I was a human fighter without the infravision that Halflings, Elves, and Dwarves had.
Like I said they took everything off my character; boots, armor, weapons, arrows, rations, ...and the convenient extra backpack they now had to carry it all in.
Fine with me if you like 5E but I will always go back to ADVANCED D&D
We totally agree with you!
AD&D 2E has always been the best version of D&D every since it came out.
LOL
To each your own. Started with 2e.
I love B/X or OD&D, or even 1e waaaay more.
Mages are still completely broken at high level in 2nd edition.
I agree. 2e is the best version. TSR did their best to make a great game back when the founders were still a part of the product.
Still, it has issues. Mages, hit points and magic being one of them.
I disagree 100%. I started playing in 1980 and used the 1977 players handbook and do not use the 1985 Unearthed Arcana, except for the spells. Unearthed Arcana combat and the 2E rule set increased the damage of the fighters through specialization to the point they are "Superheroes". 3/2 attacks at level one ?? pffft. That completely unbalances the game IMO. A 2E elf fighter, takes ambidextrous, tow weapon fighting, dual wielding long swords, adding STR to both hands.... its dumb and overpowered compared to 1e.
I have played every edition. I liked 3rd the best because it had the lions share of different systems to work with. Psionics, incarnum, epic levels, environmental guides, it had probably the most edge cases of any system.
Grats on 200 subs! Just found you guys.
Thanks we're glad you like what you see on our channel!
I would actually argue that D&D 5th is the most error filled version. Having reviewed the actual books of AD&D through 5th I found by far the most typos, missing rules, unaddressed circumstances and limitations on the players within 5th Edition and especially the most mentions of essentially "it's up to the DM". When Pathfinder 1 & 2 came out I was VERY impressed by the polish in these books and the continued support. Pathfinder is still one of the only games where an official 1-20 level game has been released and is by far my favorite system of RP
Hello Tom. Thanks for mentioning Pathfinder. We've been hearing so much about the game in the comments that we've decided to examine it more closely. We were waiting for one more positive mention to force us into it and you're that one more. Any suggestions on a version or starting tome? We really know nothing about it.
@@theoldwarlock Hey Old Warlock, I can give you a few recommendations. The first Pathfinder players handbook distinguished itself among RPGs by ALSO being the DMG 😱 😂 giving all players equal access to all the rules. The Kingmaker Adventure Path is the 1-20 level game I mentioned above and ive had the pleasure to DM many a friend through it. It has a great story that starts off as your average adventuring crew and builds over the games into the party members each being a Lord or Lady of their own lands! By the time they hit level 20 you could say they're Kings. The Monster Manuals are called Beastiaries and the 1st one has everything you need for Kingmaker and then some.
If you're interested in the 2nd edition of Pathfinder I've found it to be more of a linear upgrade to the 1st edition rather than an almost new game. Compared to DnD I'd say it is more like going from 3rd edition to 3.5.
I hope that all helps and thank you for your videos. I enjoy them and they've helped me understand ADnD well enough to feel confident running a game.
@@storqe Thanks, Tom. We're going to take your advice and run with it. We'll let you know how it turns out. There may even be a video involved. Thanks for getting back to us!
Great point, Patrick! May I also add that the physical construction of the books has deteriorated as well? My old AD&D books--used and abused for years--are still in great shape, though with some wear around the spines. My 5E books start falling apart somewhere around the fifth or sixth time I open them. 😑
I gotta disagree only on the basis of 2nd having so many loop holes in the system, but I'm still a 2nd edition player, although I live in a 5e world. The thing I dislike about 5e is all the stupid changes.
I agree. What’s missing in 5E is the element of danger. There’s really no risk involved
Love your guys' take. I was introduced in 5e and from your stance, 100% want to try AD&D.
I played AD&D back in the 1980’s with a group of fellow high school friends and those were some amazing memories! We often played from sun up until sun down during the summer. I was always the DM because I loved telling stories and improvising elements of an adventure on the spot. Now that I look back on what seems like another lifetime ago, I vividly remember that a character, whether he/she was a halfling thief or a human Paladin (for example), was quite susceptible to damage and always had to think on their feet to creatively avoid or fight their way out of trouble, as it was never easy. Even though it’s been many years since I played AD&D, I’ve never forgotten this one adventure that I DM’d; the party I was leading fell into a trap, were captured, stripped of their weapons and tossed into a pit with nothing but the bones of previously less fortunate adventurers to use as weapons to kill the monster (wish I could remember the name of the creature) within the pit. The suspense felt by not only my friends, as well as myself, while they tried to kill this thing with bones, grew more & more with each roll of the dice. I’ll never forget it. What I’ve also never forgotten is how amazing AD&D was and still is, in that it teaches creativity, problem solving, as well as learning to think on one’s feet. In terms of D&D 5th edition, I’ve never played it, but by the sound of it, if I were playing and a DM, I’d definitely make it extra challenging but fun for whomever the party was. Anyway, thanks for the great YT video and even though it looks like I’m 2 years late, you earned a new subscriber.
Thanks, Kenneth. Great comment. You mentioned amazing memories made from the game and I couldn't agree more. It's interesting how some of those games of now 40+ years ago are still extremely vivid in my mind and the minds of the people I once played with (and still do). At the same time, I find it hard to recall details of most recent movie plots. The game was and is really powerful to imaginative people. Life would be different without it. KYSAF!
One thing to note is that we used to cheat the ability score to make our characters more likely to survive. We would commonly allow every character to have one 18 & one 16. You needed the hit points, and there were no ability score improvements. Some people (including Gygax, IIRC) started characters at 3rd level. 1st and 2nd were for NPCs.
5e is way too generous with healing to be properly dangerous, but the play style is also lacking puzzles & traps, which is why murder hobos are common now. If you aren’t afraid of traps or meeting a rakshasa or dragon you should talk to & negotiate with, you can just slaughter everything in your path.
The real issue is not numerical in 5e, characters have more HP and hit more often, heck they do more damage too. Yet the same is true for the monsters. Most of what you are seeing is the result of more streamlined math. That however can be compensated for. The real issue is how the game treats special abilities like candy. Earlier content works better than stuff added in later as they just keep making classes into increasingly more busted Animu nonsense. A system with more powers and abilities can work, but you have to be more careful in your implementation.
Also the Death System in 5e is the most pansy bullshit ever conceived by man. You literally get back up to full fighting condition on three successful saves or a critical success. That is pure video game logic, and is absurdly forgiving.
I was just about to say that was something they hadn't touched on, that 5e is more about hit points than AC (just compare the ogre from each edition: 5th's minimum health is more than the maximum in 2nd)
But, while the death saves can be forgiving, you are only *stable* on 3 successes, as in no longer actively dying from your wounds. If any old goblin sticks you with their sword once or twice by then, you still die. Just a nat 20 will bring you to your feet (and, as often as attacks hit in 5e, that 1 hp won't last you very long anyway)
Death saves are conceptually just like the death's door variant rule that was included in the 2e DMG, anyway
Hey! What 2E character sheet was that? Looked like the Basic Box Set one but with all the spaces for AD&D stuff.
Hey Jason. It's a sheet I pulled from dragonsfoot.org. If you haven't been there, try it. Loads of good stuff.
A 5e Dragon has 200+ HP with legendary resistance and legendary actions vs an AD&D dragon having like 46. That is kind of where the balance comes in.
The characters are more powerful but so are most monsters.
How do you utilize the thief % of stealth in 2nd vs perception from 5e?
Did you use the weapon adjustment chart for the AD&D 1e character?
Preach on brothers. 1ST edition FOR LIFE... these moden 5 clowns will never know how much you actually had to use ingenuity and strategy to survive in the worlds most difficult RPG.
As a level 2 fighter in 5e with the pole arm master feat I can attack twice per turn and I trigger attacks of opportunity when people enter my weapon reach which is 10 feet. I have +5 to hit and +2 on my damage rolls. I can also heal my self in combat and can take and additional attack once per short rest. So I can effectively attack four times once per round dealing 3 1d10 +2 and 1d4+2. I can easily kill things higher level than me. Additionally once I get my second feat I can stop people moving with my attacks. That’s just in combat. I can also investigate and do medicine fairly well and have bonuses to intimidating people. It can get boring unless the DM really ramps up the difficulty.
Glad you checked out this video. Now go watch the yt channel 'The Dungeon Minister'. You'll enjoy it : )
D&D 3.5 & Pathfinder 1st edition are still close to the old school AD&D. But you're so right. In 5E every character is a superhero. The worse, I guess, is that going by the book, a DM won't be able to make it that difficult for the players. In order to balance the whole thing out and make it in a way where players won't be that spoiled, things really need to be made way harder in terms of progression (less xp at each game) and increased dc on encounters (more creatures rather than variety of creatures, I.e. an encounter of 2 goblins can be made more serious with 4/6 goblins instead vs 1 individual character). Awarding less magical items can be also done, but then all of these changes would defeat the purpose of the adventure/module you might be DMing. For this same reason, I quite often like adapting Basic or AD&D modules for my campaigns. It's more work on my side but absolutely rewarding. 5E is a nice system and it is true that it takes more people to the game. Unfortunately, it is also true that people get bored with it quite easily as it doesn't provide the same thrill older versions were able to generate. Especially for people used to roleplay since classic D&D and AD&D, the differences you highlighted are obvious.
We agree completely. Instead of starting out ordinary (or slightly above) and becoming a hero as is the case with early D&D, with 5th addition you start as a hero and your goal is simply to continue as is. As we said, for us that removes a lot of the intensity of the game. You’re right, things can be made more difficult to accommodate starting with higher abilities, but that seems like a time waste. Thanks for the comment!
Pathfinder and 3.5 have more of the issue than 5e does.
That said, the only thing you have to change to completely return mortality to the old school levels is to make spells become save on first attempt or die again, and change 1st level hit points to be rolled instead of granted at max... MAYBE lower the hit dice of roguish and cloth caster characters by a stage... That's it.
You don't get multiple saves against petrification. You just die... period...
That's as far as a single encounter goes. Things like healing rate are a different issue and would have to be addressed separately.
@@robertmasengale9366 You are incorrect about 3e. Players and monsters use the exact same rules. The stats given in the MM for an orc represent an Orc 1st level warrior. If a 5th level human fighter, meets a 5th level orc fighter in 3e, they have the same HP, attack bonus, saving throws, and abilities. The orc will be slightly stronger, and the human will have an extra feat, that is it for differences. How are the players superheroes then, when the monsters have the same abilities, classes, and spells?
That is what we call a push in Vegas. It keeps the game challenging for as long as your group wants to play. Even at high levels a Balor with 10 levels in Barbarian is way more interesting than its wimpy 5e counterpart, and nobody expects level 17 kobolds, those little baddies will get you.
@@alexandriamason2355 not that it is relevant to my arguments, but CR isn't calculated the same as level. That is the factor that matters. You don't build encounters based on the level of the npcs/monsters the vast majority of the time because they have the Challenge Rating, and that scales differently... a party can still kill the hell out of that same level orc fighter while using very little resources.
That said, players and monsters using the same system is actually a weakness of 3.x, as is the expectation of magic items to a party. Magic item expectations were baked into Challenge Ratings in 3.x and those expectations did hamstring different styles of play. Say what you want about Paladium (as I am not a huge fan of how Paladium games play out), but at least their advancement system isn't relegated to what you have slaughtered for profit.
@@alexandriamason2355 oh, and as for the Push,you can add levels to anything in any edition. It is an easy process...
And don't be shy about house-ruling to make sure the game is fun. :)
Agreed! I think most RPGers who play together for any length of time reach a point of generous house-rules to fit style of play while removing whatever doesn't "feel right." Granted, we've had to revisit many of our HRs from time to time to make sure they don't completely unbalance things. But even making corrections can be fun if properly worked into the campaign's story.
Beautiful part about DND is that not only can you change rules to make encounters more dangerous but also old systems are still around for use and new systems don't invalidate them. As a dm I have different groups, some DND 5e is a much better fit, for other adnd is a better fit. Overall I've personally had much more fun in 5e with some tweaking 🙂
As an old AD&D DM since the days it all began (mid 60's in age) and STILL DMing monthly on Roll20, I appreciate your little stat study and agree with your findings. Comparing rules and characters built from those rules will always perform a bit differently but your point was made. I have played a few 5th edition games, (and huge fan of Critical Role as well), and found the role playing as good as we the players could pour ourselves into it based upon the enthusiasm of an ok game master. I found the mechanics okay but my first love was (and is) AD&D 2nd Ed and just found that is where my passion (and my 9 players) is strongest. But nice to see some hard facts in your comparison. Game on guys and thanks for the video....DMTJ.
I remember vividly my first encounter of a beholder back in the day. It didn't end well for our party. We had so much fun and as players we bonded that day.
Coming through those encounters is great. It does forge some strong bonds among players.
5th edition is D&D for participation ribbon wearers.
Difference is the proficiency bonus.
Stat bonuses also start at 15 in AD&D while they start at 12 in 5E (and 3.5), equalizing at +14 at 18.
Show that stuff digitally so you can put it on as slides in the video.
How many characters did people have in a party back then playing Basic or Advanced? My group played Basic B/X always ran with 10 (or 12 if it was a tougher adventure) characters split up among the different players. Usually: Magic User, Thief, 2 Clerics, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, 2 Fighters, and the 10th character was either a 3rd Fighter or 2nd Dwarf or Halfling.
We did the same thing from time to time. Each player would run two characters. It could be a problem when some players focused too much on coordinating their PCs to the detriment of the group. But when we had people really into playing roles, it could work well.
@@theoldwarlock It wasn't too much trouble coordinating the characters. If anything, the "party" is the main character and the party members are simply one piece of that so its more like a military unit than 10 different characters doing whatever they want.
I just found your channel. I LIKE it. This was a great discussion. As someone who cut his teeth on AD&D, I get where you're coming from. AD&D had/has a lot going for it.
Now maybe I'm one of "Those DMs" you're talking about whose players don't feel that 5e is easier than AD&D to survive. In my games, my players are often put in serious danger, and there have been a few deaths. The thing is that in 5e, it;s actually very easy to kill PCs if a DM goes full bore and doesn't cut them any slack. I guess that even I have been affected by what Gary Gygax basically referred to as the tendency for new DMs to go easy on players.
One thing I'd like to say is that yes, PCs are effectively more powerful than in AD&D, but so are the monsters. The PCs get bonuses to hit that most AD&D PCs don't get, true... so it is often 'easier' to hit an opponent's Armor Class... but the same goes for monsters, who often get much deadlier abilities than their AD&D counterparts. And 5e death can happen very easily IF the DM is actually willing to do it. And one thing I have to say... you talked about a farmer with a pitchfork hitting a character. Short of a Natural 20, most farmers in AD&D are not going to hit AC 0... but in 5e, a Farmer only needs to roll an 18 to hit AC 20, which is a Fighter in Plate with a shield.
As far as RP versus fighting...It has always seemed the same in every edition. It all depends on the DM. Some prefer almost all RP and fighting as a last resort. Some are all hack and slash. Some try to do both (I fall into this category)
I also do have to mention that AD&D had two Drawbacks which every edition since has eliminated. First, they removed level restrictions based on Race, and second, they removed Stat minimums for Classes. This last is huge for me. One thing that really killed ME as a player in AD&D was the fact that unless you rolled well, you would wind up stuck playing a character you really didn't want to play for months or years at a time. If you wanted to play a Ranger it was hard, and Paladins nigh impossible. In all 1e I was only able to roll 3 Paladins. I spent so many years playing Fighters and while I liked playing D&D... almost never playing the Class I wanted was sometimes almost soul crushing. At times I found myself getting PCs killed on purpose just in hopes I could get a class I liked.
I love both versions... and I think they are both just as hard and just as deadly respectively. It really all does rely on the DM in any edition.
Thanks for such a great discussion!
Great points! I would agree that it really comes down to the DM but would also throw in the players at the table as well. If they're all on the same page, so to speak, any edition can be made to work well.
Been enjoying your videos!Keep up the great work!
Thanks, RGG! Glad you commented because it guided us toward your channel. Great content! On several platforms! Looking forward to exploring more of what you have out there!
I come from 1st edition. When I got back into it, 5th was the current edition. I was watching videos about it, and they were talking about optimized characters doing over 100 points of damage in a round. And I'm like "how?!" It's a d8 longsword!
You know guys, based on the popularity of this video, I'm surprised you're not doing more 1st edition / 5th edition comparisons.
I think Experience Point tables would make a good video. I was shocked when I saw the experience point 'table' for 5th edition. I immediately closed the book and stopped reading, having lost any and all interest in anything else they'd want to tell me. I had the same reaction when I first looked at the 3rd edition game too, but that book also got closed cause I thought the overabundance of unnecessary rules was also just silly. Castles & Crusades though... now 'that's' a good roleplaying system : )
Would you guys ever consider recording a combat session or doing a walkthrough of the AD&D combat?- I feel like that's the biggest difference for me trying to pick up the system (from primarily playing/DM'ing 5e myself with a little bit of 4e experience, but that's an entirely different system mechanics-wise anyway)
Hi crestedyeti, thanks for the suggestion! We definitely have been considering doing that as it is definitely a more difficult aspect of the game. Keep your eyes out for it and keep your sword arm free!
AD&D, both 1st and 2nd edition, were more horror survival fantasy. 5e is definitely more vid game. It's clearly about appealing to more people, as the casual player don't want to feel the pressure of a wrong action, or a roll of the dice can kill your PC.
It's all about the experience people want. 5e seems to be more power fantasy, superhero adventures. AD&D's core was 'can your regular joe actually rise to fame', and that required a LOT of care.
And honestly, the defensive capability differences of the Fighters in these two editions at 1st and 5th level are probably more pronounced than the attack capabilities.
Would be interesting to do this same thing with Magic-users/Wizards/Sorcerers. Harder comparison than the Fighter class is, but still it might be interesting to do.
The terms 'D&D 5e', and 'Character Death', should never be used in the same sentence.
Great comment! Made us laugh - thanks!
'5e' should never be used, period.
At 12:25 the point you are asking about is more nuanced, but it is promoted more by older editions; 3.5 and 5th edition suffer from having a smaller pool of skills available to each character. This makes it where rolls are more likely to be called on to have variance in different characters with the same skills.
Just found this channel. Great discussion guys. Keep it up.
Thanks so much for your support! Keep your sword arm free!
How do you bring in perception check into AD&D? Wis ability check roll under ability score?
Generally, I do wisdom plus intelligence divided by two (rounded down). Then you have to roll under the number on a 3d6. Sometimes, I give a perception roll for possibly seeing something out of the corner of your eye. Other times, the player has to describe their actions in detail if they want to have a chance to notice something ("I think something's in that shadowed alley and here's how I'm investigating."), and if those actions warrant a perception roll, I call for one. Those roll requirements can also be altered up or down by me based on PC description of their actions.
@@theoldwarlock I’ve used 3d6. I prefer d20. It gives more chance to fail. I like the two scores /2.
I have never played an edition other than AD&D since I stopped playing in the middle eighties when college got harder. Is there a way to do some simple thing in 5th edition that could kinda make the risk more like AD&D?
Hey Rich - I'm sure there is. I think it really comes down to the DM and what rules they use straight up and what they choose to house rule. The only problem might be that the game could become unbalanced. Even that can be overcome with the players and DM working out the kinks.
The adnd fighter gets 3/2 attacks at 7th level.
In adnd 2e, the fighter can specialize in a specific weapon type(ie longsword) at 1st level. With this weapon that fighter gets +1 to hit, +2 dmg and the faster 3/2 attacks.
This specialization rule is available in adnd 1e unearthed arcana
I played one campaign of AD&D and, while I had a couple of close calls with death, only one character died and it wasn't even really a monster/player number balance issue. I was playing a berserker (fighter) and his rage ability required that he couldn't stop fighting until every enemy was on the ground (weather they where dead, or surrendering) and a group of enemies retreated into their base. Everyone in our party where close to death so we decided to call it a wash, except for me who had to run into the base after them, and promptly died.
From what I've read and seen, 5e seems geared to power gamers. I enjoyed BECMI, AD&D and 2e because you had to be more careful as a lower level character.
The reason that 5E is considered more "role playing" heavy, is because you see actors and improvers "role playing" on UA-cam and Twitch! The AD&D groups i played in from 1990 to 2009 had a lot of role playing! AD&D is ranked 9th in my top 10 RPG's, but mainly because of lack of choice and the fact that i have played every kit worth playing!
2e was best setting, by incorporating Spelljammer players can choose from tons more options. I love having new variety of player characters every time . The player who likes to be a healer is a different character entirely , From a Dark Sun preserver to a Dracon shaman/psionics the next tine to a Dragonlance classic Cleric and so forth . Plus nothing beats the monster manual binders.
The beginning of Morrowind in space is Spelljammer and a great start for games 🤣
2e was coherent and fluid in connecting the settings , the character options , the insane amount of stuff for DMs
Did you save these character sheets?
Can you share them?
Also can you share your training dummy's stats or was it merely AC 2/AC 18?
Sorry James, we don't have them anymore - that's one of our older videos. If I remember right, it was just AC 2/18.
Excellent points! Very good examples and comparisons! I am now a subscriber!!!
Thanks Nelson! Hopefully, we make some future content you find interesting!
(My browser glitches out on me so idk if the other comments I was drafting posted or not, hopefully not here’s the slightly more refined one)
First time stumbling on your video I’ll be checking y’all out now, interesting read of some of your commenters as well.
I started about 12 years ago with 3.5, did read up though never played older editions. I like having the high risk of death so 5e felt a bit weird as written but as you both pointed toward that’s very DM / style specific, I run one for the kids that is much harder than most 5e groups play. They at last made it to 9th level as a duo adventuring party, and are always planning an escape route when something pops off because they know a) they don’t get more or less xp for killing everyone, or escaping, b) I’ll throw in creature or characters or numbers that will overwhelm them, Or underwhelm them. Few encounters are actually crafted for balance of their power. C) they learned that careful planning and some luck will always lead to better success than just fighting everything.
I balance the power creep of 5e by using the power creep of 5e! Those goblins you thought were going to be east grab and question targets, are actually around 5th level and used to working together. (Yes I prep their sheets in advance it’s not on the spot like that), that old guy drinking at the tavern all day? 12th level fighter, retired adventure but still keeps a sword on him. That barkeep that keeps humming and singing? This is his bar he retired to open because it’s always been his dream to, and he’s a 4th level bard.
The main gripe I have with your video here is the comparing apples to oranges, AD&D is a different (though similar) mathematical system.
Also, I’ve no issue with people enjoying whatever editions they enjoy, I like rough and gritty games (why we use gritty settings for 5e, takes a whole week to get your spells back so use em carefully!) and older editions have that more written into their mechanics than newer ones, but that’s also why they suggest the optional rules in the dmg.
Tldr: play what you want and enjoy it, don’t shame people based on the edition they prefer
Great explanation guys!! 🍻🍻 Coming from AD&D from late 70’s early 80’s and not playing again until 5e, 5e reminds me of the Oprah show… YOU get a car, and YOU get a car…. EVERYBODY GETS A CAR!!!
I driver OTR, and just got Fantasy Grounds Unity Ultimate VTT platform, and really like the ability to play on the road. However, 5e becomes monotonous regarding combat. There’s no THRILL anymore. The campaign party doesn’t need to work together, when a War Cleric can demolish almost any threat early on, while I enjoy a sandwich. lol
Thanks for a great video!
Thanks Alan! Glad you liked the video. Quick question, can Fantasy Grounds be set up for earlier versions of D&D without a lot of work?
I've played since the late 70's myself and have to agree. I was recently in a campaign with friends from the old days and hands down, when we were deciding what version to play, it was a unanimous vote to play AD&D. Thankfully we all had our books available. Now I'm looking for a group to play online but its hard to come by for someone like me with higher expectations of a group.
Basic Edition called..
It wants you to hold it's beer.
What's funny is that 5e should very much be a game where players feel vulnerable. Bounded accuracy is designed explicitly to make sure that even at later levels weaker foes can and will threaten the players. Except the monsters in 5e are designed in such a loose way that some never provoke a threat whilst others are unpredictably just hyper lethal. It's a weird scenario where the game is both perfectly prepared and completely unprepared to offer that high lethality, high roleplay game.
5E turns characters into super heroes. 2e they are just slightly above average Joes in exceptional circumstances.
I do like the lethality of AD&D, but I think that 5E just figured out that whiffing isn't fun. "Alright, it's your turn in the fight. Oh, you did nothing. OK, next."
I think you make a fair point there.
If your character is dead, you can be involved in what others are doing (thinking less as an individual and more as a team member).
Also, you can create a new character while combat continues.
The way some people handle old school D&D play is with henchmen and/or hired retainers. A player who loses their character can take over one of the party’s henchmen or retainers temporarily or permanently as their new character.
Players can also have multiple characters in the game world and the DM can arrange to have one of the player’s other characters join the group ASAP if the player’s character is killed.
Point of order my good sir's.
On p18 of the UA a 1st level fighter with weapon specialization gets 3 attacks over 2 rounds and having a +1 to hit and +2 to damage.
If doudle specialization is taken then it's +3 to hit and +3 to damage.😁
Hi John. You're definitely right. But we don't use Unearthed Arcana but for cantrips/spells, new classes and magic items. The book came out a number of years after we'd established our style of play and we ignored a lot of the new rules.
I have heard about the D&D 5e characters being to powerful and I do agree .
Jim is too cool. I would love to see your guy's take on Old School Essentials restatement of B/X+AD&D with Advanced Fantasy.
Thanks Huy Tran! We'll see what we can do!
Funny that back in the day AD&D was almost always derided as the "Superhero" system, where players had +5 vorpal swords, could cast thermonuclear level fireballs and a fifth level fighter could stand in front of a cannon and wonder why somebody was shooting nerf darts at them.
Brand new to D&D. DM’ed several games for 20 years. I do have issues also with 5e D&D. Some low level stuff makes the game too easy for low level characters. I use the rules as more of a guide line, but customize the rolls based on the situations. I would of liked to of seen something in regards to materiel strength of armor for example, someone in plate armor, or even padded armor, is not going to be hurt by a whip. Spells that auto hit is a big pain. I still am trying to work on that spell casters need to roll to cast spells, unless the are cantrips.
I liked that you had to be careful ,and getting a character to a level 5or 10 was a long road and quite the challenge.The older rules were less flushed out more gray areas that were both good and bad depending on the situation you found yourself.I have since bought some newer versions of the rules to understand them better.Just play what you play enjoy the ride,and most of all have fun !
Thanks for doing this as a straight side by side comparison. It was really informative.
You're welcome. We're glad you enjoyed it.
@@theoldwarlock Thanks for responding. I've been really frustrated with how forgiving 5e is. After running a game of B/X for a few sessions its become my new favorite system. There is just something about having two players drop in the first combat of the first session that made the experience more interesting and fun for me and the players.
@@BX-advocate What you describe has also been my experience, especially with newer players. Those early character deaths set the tone and, rather than being disheartening as some people claim, makes the game a challenge to overcome. When you have a character that does finally get somewhere, you feel that accomplishment.
@@theoldwarlock Did you include weapon specialization and exceptional strength (not to mention the power of spells like entangle/sleep/hold person)? A typical opponent will be much weaker in ad&d. For example compare a typical orc in AD&D vs typical orc in 5e. I find the exact opposite in power level. Where ad&d becomes more deadly is in healing and encounter balance. A 5e fighter vs a 5e orc is actually an equal or harder battle than a ad&d fighter vs a ad&d orc. Also a 1st level party has a reasonable chance against an ogre in Ad&d, but not so much in 5e.
It was lacking in a real metagame analysis of the actual relationship between to hit rolls, ACs and expected values within the system.
I have an honest question, from AD&D 2nd edition, did you apply anything from Skills & Powers, or Combat and Tactics? There are alot of things there to apply. I personally love playing 2nd edition with those additional books to make tweaks and quirks. {EDIT} I realized later that the topic here is AD&D, not 2e.
Absolutely agree. I find myself adding extra actions and hit points to monsters all the time. But, the system also encourages DM fiat far more now as well, and my players LOVE the unexpected.
Thanks, Kurt. Glad you liked the video.
I’ve been doing since 86. The reason ppl say 5e is rp is bc of the ease of use of the skill checks. It makes it fun throwing dice at something noncombat oriented. You can get that crit cheer or fumble groan off a performance check with the bard