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Following up on my previous post in the locked thread (in which I put forth that IMO "1st edition feel" is the interpersonal dynamic that comes from a friendly competitive game in an atmosphere of mutual trust -- i.e. the players are 'competing' against the DM and vice versa, but both sides have agreed to 'play fair' and trust the other side to do the same) I suppose it's worth pointing out that this feel need not be limited to any particular ruleset, and thus there's no reason why a discussion of "1st edition feel" must necessarily turn into a discussion of the pros and cons of the 1st edition rules. A game in which the participants are operating under this sort of 'social contract' will have the "1st edition feel" even if the rules being used are 3rd edition (or GURPS or HARP or whatever else); likewise a game in which the DM abuses his power in order to punish the players, or in which the players are munchkins and rules-lawyers who are constantly arguing the DM's rulings, or for that matter a game in which there is no sense of competition and the DM and players are simply engaging in a collaborative storytelling effort, won't have the "1st edition feel" even if the 1E rules are being used.

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One thing for sure: 1e was a game. It wasn't an excuse to put on some black turtlenecks and berets, while smoking cigarettes in a holder, while creating the avant-garde. If "1e feel" is low brow "beer and pretzels" for the unwashed masses, then I'm glad to be counted with the luddites and terminally retrograde, whether I'm playing 1e or 3e.

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Anyhow, the salient points of 1st Edition feel:
- No funky races for PC's. Standard PHB races, which is to say, Tolkien races plus gnomes, and gnomes are pretty much ignored. MAYBE in far extremes of funkyness, a lizard man or centaur or selkie or evil drow assassin in disguise -- some old school monster preferable with real mythology (instead of a game book) behind it. Definitely no half-dragons.

- Greyhawk/Tolkien meanings of races. Halflings are hobbits, not kender. Gnomes are ignored, not steampunk little tinkers.

- Most classes are normal, not prestige. Archetypal warriors and spellcasters, not blood magus of the yadda-yadda order.

- No Forgotten Realms stuff. Rangers are not Drizzt, they are Aragorn. Drow are not seen. Players are supposed to pretend they don't know Drow exist. PC elves know, but it's not something they talk about at parties. Merchants are delivering wine, not magical bunny rabbits. No magical street lamps -- no street lamps at all, since we're talking medieval here, but if there were street lamps, they'd burn oil -- which you can throw at folks to 1d6 damage! FPRIVATE

- The stuff banned in Second Edition is back. Demons are demons and devils are devils, not whatever the euphemisms were. Assassins and half-orcs are a normal part of the game, not secret adult-swim stuff. (Thus, in some ways, 3rd Edition is more 1st Edition than 2nd Edition was.)

- No spikey armor. Armor looks like armor. (A pet peeve for me with the 3e PHB is the silly bondage-spiked plate mail. Yeah, neato.)

- Classic storylines. Meet in the tavern, loot the dungeon, steal the McGuffin, save the kingdom from the lizard men, that sort of things. Not a bunch of kender droppings about the outer planes, clockwork monsters from the ancient wars, or whatever new nonsense them young kids are up to these days.

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First edition feel (and what it’s not), for me:

1. External influences: I believe that D&D reflects overall trends in fantasy fiction.

First edition drew much of its inspiration from classical and medieval mythology, of course, but more contemporary writers like Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Poul Anderson exerted a strong presence as well – with the exception of the Professor, this was a swords-and-sorcery heavy group, and the early adventures and general style of play faithfully reproduced this genre.

As fantasy fiction changed, the game evolved as well – the external influences on both gamers and designers were writers like Terry Brooks, Terry Pratchett, David Eddings, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin. The game also began to ‘feed on itself’ by creating the genre of “D&D fiction” – Dragonlance and later the Realms novels – making the game more ‘literary’ and inspiring plot-heavy adventures and ‘deep’ campaign settings in which the implications of a world with magic became almost as important as the existence of magic itself.

The most obvious recent influences – and by influences I mean stuff the designers rip liberally from the fantasy genre (swarm shifter? The Mummy?) – are derived from steampunk and anime/manga.

Fantasy literature wasn’t the only source inspiration of course – movies also shaped the style of play. First edition gamers drew from the films of Ray Harryhausen and classics like Robin Hood and Ivanhoe – now gamers and designers look to Ang Lee and John Woo as the cutting edge of the genre.

For me, “first edition feel” is adventures and settings that reflect heroes and exploits like those of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, of Conan, of Sinbad.

2. NOT “Beer-and-pretzels” gaming: What some posters describe as the first-edition “fun house” style of gaming – orcs in room 1, a dragon in room 2, a water elemental in the fountain in room 3, &c. – lasted roughly two years for me, if that.

By the time I was 13 I enjoyed creating dungeons and wildernesses that “made sense,” within the generous boundaries of fantasy of course, and apparently the other gamers in our group did too, since I ended up being the most frequent GM in our group.

Did I have long elaborate story arcs? No, just enough to get the players from one adventure setting to another in most cases, but there were recurring villains and the adventurers often became involved in local politics (as tends to happen when you’re the richest bad-arses in the land), so the net result was they created their own story arcs by their actions. Did I have pages and pages of cultural notes? No, but the different lands and races were distinct from one another and their economies reflected their geography enough that life in a port town was quite different from life in a desert oasis caravan stop.

The idea that “first edition feel” is mindless collections of monsters and puzzles in improbable or implausible settings doesn’t reflect that game that I played from about 1978 on.

3a. NOT Edition-specific: I picked up 3e after not gaming from more than decade and immediately created what would probably be considered a “1e feel” campaign-setting and adventures for my gaming group. Stripped down or bulked up, the rules are less of a factor for me than the setting and the adventures.

I never carried the baggage of 2e, the Realms, Planescape, and so on, so perhaps it was easier for me to jump right into playing the game I knew so well using the newer ruleset. In any case, “first edition feel” isn’t rules-specific for me, with one significant exception…

3b. GM style: The first-edition GM carried the responsibility of being much more than the arbiter of the game – the GM created many of the rules of the game, often on-the-fly.

Someone else mentioned ‘thieving skills’ in an earlier post – that only thieves could climb sheer surfaces, hear noises, move silently and so on in the 1e RAW. As GM I houseruled how other characters could perform similar tasks – for example, a fighter, paladin, ranger, or monk could climb, hide, or move silently at one-half the ability of a thief of the same level, and not in armor heavier than leather, while clerics, druids, magic-users, and illusionists could do the same at one-quarter the thief’s percentage. Is it done “better” in 3e? IMO, yes it is, but it worked in the context of the game we were playing – the absence of an “official” rule was not a constraint, and it was more-or-less universally accepted by the gamers around the table. Such was the role of the GM and the way in which the flow of the game was preserved.

I still make these sorts of calls all the time – I had a situation in my Modern game that would’ve been pretty much instant death for the PCs if I followed the RAW (twelve skill checks, failure of any one of them resulting in as much as 13d6 damage to 2nd–level characters), so I tweaked it until I got the feel I wanted for the encounter.

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CSW wrote:

I like it.

My only reservations about 1st Edition was that sense of: orc room #1, etc. That palled for me quickly. Also the idea that Carol Burnett would come by right after the party and clean everything up. Actions rarely seemed to have any impact on the world around us.

And who can forget the monster patiently waiting in their soundproofed room for the party to open the door?

I'm a little more story centered, but like what the author of this 2nd post referred to as distinct cultures, etc. in different areas, rather than creating richly-detaield cultures for every possible contingency,

Also, the notion that party actions created the story arc. That still gives me the "story" I enjoy, without bogging down in Storytellesque heaviness of story.

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The "1e feel" of the thread title goes back to a time when RPG's were very Darwinian. It wasn't quite "survival of the fittest" - at low level, it was often "survival of the luckiest" (because a few high rolls on those 3d6 certainly enhanced your character's chance of survival, and because a few good "to hit" rolls in the right places were often the make or break of the group's success.)

Once you'd got past that early stage and reached higher levels, 1e AD&D was a case of "Survival of the least stupid." Adventures like S1: Tomb of Horrors showed this perfectly, being stuffed full of traps that caused death with no save. Either you were able to think laterally and use spells creatively to solve the unique challenges posed by the dungeon, or your character died.

S1: Tomb of Horrors, incidentally, is an adventure which contains only one or two combat encounters in the entire area. There are to the best of my knowledge no published "Storytelling" style adventures which are as cerebral, or as light on dice-rolling, as S1 which was published in the 1970's.

Anyway, what I'm coming to is this: Stupidity deserves to be punished.

I mean, you wouldn't reward your players for weakness, or greed, or clumsiness, or ineptness, would you? Stupidity is not a survival trait and its wages should be punishment rather than reward.

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Equally, clever play should generally be rewarded with success, wealth, experience and so forth.

The problem with the "Storytelling" style is that it doesn't reward (or punish) either kind of play. Because the outcome is fixed in advance, it really doesn't matter what the players do. No matter whether they charge in and attack at the first opportunity, or try to negotiate, or avoid the encounter, or set up a clever ambush, or in fact whether they stop paying attention to the adventure entirely and sit around drawing up plans for a new world order, they are always going to end up in the showdown with the evil necromancer which takes place on the narrow and inexplicably handrail-less bridge which swings precariously over the lava pit.

So why should they bother to play intelligently? In my experience, with the storytelling style, few players do bother.

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For me first edition feel is about an attention to asthetics, wonder, and environment that is lacking from most modules nowadays. 3.x edition is more about mechanics and a lot of the modules feel like some bad Playstation episode where you mindless hack up a bunch of monsters and then defeat the boss at the end. Instead of having a personality every fighter is wandering around with a spiked chain or two handed long sword with power attack and cleave. Try to run Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Pharoah, or the Assassin's Knot and tell me why exactly they aren't plausible. With first edition feel every module series had a unique feel and environment, whereas with third edition most modules come of as generic. Modules which have been able to capture that sense of asthetics and environment in third edition are the Witchfire trilogy, a lot of recent Dungeon adventures, and the Freeport module series. For many third edition modules it feels like people are just dropping monsters into yet another stereotype.

Here is my summary of each editions focus...

1st edition - Location-based Environment and Wonder
2nd edition - Story and Railroading
3rd edition - Mechanics

I'd also say that if character and monster power were spice for a some fine cuisine, that third edition tends to overdose on it to the point where the meal just doesn't taste good anymore, whereas first first edition had a more balanced approach.

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True 'first edition' feel is fun. It's not everything and everyone's definition on this thread, it's just fun. If you are having fun playing whatever you play, then you have caught the feel of the first edition.

Real fun, that's what it is all about. That's why first edition feel really doesn't have one solid definition among everyone. To capture the feel of first edition, you have to know when to break the rules, and know what to do. Your players have to have faith in your game master, never obsess about the rules, and have a rip roaring time playing.

First edition feel is having and feeling fun. That's all it is.

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To me, 1st edition feel is a lot of things.

Its the feeling that the rules are loose and I can do what I want. Every little skill and feature doesnt have a list of 7 modifiers that players can pull out and whine about

Its the feeling of archetypical high fantasy, the stuff I read about when I was a kid, instead of superheroes in some odd fantasy-punk setting.

Its the feeling that every rule is modular and can be used or discarded, instead of everything being integrated in a "ruleslight" 300 page package.

Its the feeling of having to work for power and status, instead of being drowned in special classes, magic feats and other dung.

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my version of 1e feeling:

-I read something like a module or a campaign setting and it creates cool pictures in me brain.
-It is so interesting that I actually re-read it.
-I dont fall asleep when reading through it
-There is actually some humour in the books/modules/whatever
-The art is inspiring
-When the story/plot is more important than the stat-blocks
-The ratio between the two is not 30:70 but more like 90:10
-I read the back cover text and I just HAVE to have that book
-You dont have to be a philosopher to understand a villains background
-You dont spend 2 hours to create just one NPC
-Players try things that are not written in a rulebook...and it still works
-DMs dont have to look in a rulebook every 5 minutes
-You do not really need miniatures for combat..but they are cool to have anyway
-What's a battlemat?
-You dont need CR to understand how powerfull something is
-Funny dungeon crawls with odd monsters in odd locations

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1st Edition feel is playing for 14 hours straight fueled by Mountain Dew and only stopping because you were about to fall unconsious, 3rd Edition feel is playing for 4 hours and realizing that it wasn't fun and if one more player told you that they were going to "take a 5 foot step" you were going to punch them in the face.

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For most people 1E feel is just a simpler time when everything fantastical was new, you had no idea how many hit-dice the dragon had, you had never heard of drow, and you were afraid of skeletons. SKELETONS! And if they had a bony tube in them, you had hit the motherlode!

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More seriously, I think 1 ed feeling is a game centered more around having fun with whatever you are doing than about filling out your world with filler text. Who cares if the Tomb of Horror made little sense - as long as you have fun playng it. Who cares about the social interactions in drow society - as long as the drow are sexy and hard to kill? And you've got to love those Erol-Otis-style high boots.

It might also be a reaction to all the Ed Greenwoodesque things of the Forgotten Realms - Elminster above all.

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Reading a story or an adventure and the personae come alive. Having an image of the scene in my head. Feeling the hairs on my neck stand up. Enjoying the adrenaline rushing through my veins when I charge to the help of my friends with my rage slowly saying goodbye and my hitpoints closing to zero...

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1e ment location based adventuring. How the players got to the location was up to the DM. This was and is my style of DMing, so I can releate to it. How and why did the group travel from Reme to Faihill and then to Bard's Gate? Leave that part to me, and give me the locations along the way that I can use for them to encounter. That doesn't mean location based adventures don't have a story element, they don't emphisize it as much.

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Plot and story was provided by the DM then, and so could be dispensed with in the modules. Adventures of recent years have often been overwritten, spoon-feeding plot and story to the players and DM alike. 1e was more about individualization. That's what 1e "feel" is, not lack of logic or an element of goofiness. Those old modules, with their lack of fluff text, invited everyone to think for themselves, which often resulted in some completely memorable experiences as the imaginations of the gaming group was given free rein. Heavily plotted modules of more recent times seemed more confining, less adaptable to individual whim, less open to spontaneity - in short, less like 1e.

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1st edition feel is this to me. It's getting together with your friends on a friday night (because none of you have dates :-). You play a game that you don't worry about character background. You're just there to have fun, and by fun I mean, slaying monsters, getting the treasure and going up in levels. In an old Dragon magazine in Dragonmirth there was a cartoon of a man running into an inn shouting something like, "Run for your lives. There's a fighter who needs just one more experience point to reach next level." That was us!!! You could stay up all night playing D&D. Drunk tons of pop, eat alot of junk food and crash all day saturday. Ah the good times. To me, that's first edition feel. And 1st edition feel was simple classes uncomplicated by unnecessary rules.

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"1st-edition feel" means "leaders" and "mappers."
It means "declaring your actions" before rolling initiative.
It means looking at that funny "AC vs. Weapon Type" table and ignoring it.
It means wishing you were that thief trying to pry the demon-eye out of that big statue.
It means wondering why those dead lizard-things were draped across that altar.
It means flipping through Deities and Demigods and deciding which goddesses you wanted to do.
It means staring at the "Disease and Parasitic Infestation Table" and wondering when you could use it next.
It means TEMPLE OF ELEMENTAL EVIL!!!
It means AGAINST THE GIANTS!!
It means DESCENT INTO THE DEPTHS OF THE EARTH!! (and, yes, the corridors all bended at exactly 30-degree angles, to conform to the hex paper...)
It means VAULT OF THE DROW!!!
It means getting polymorphed into a pig, and then losing your character because the DM ruled that you now had the mind of a pig and didn't want to change back.
It means thinking that 400 hit points was an awful lot of hit points.
It means advancing to 6th level and becoming a "Myrmidon" (whatever that is...)
It means being thrilled because your Armor Class was zero.
It means thinking "50 feet of rope," a "ten-foot pole," and "12 iron spikes" were things an adventurer simply couldn't do without.
It means making a "Bend Bars/Lift Gates" roll.
It means hoping that maybe, one day, you can be a "Grand Master of Flowers."
It means wandering the land in search of an Archdruid to fight, because you couldn't get to 12th level without fighting him.
It means carefully considering the subtle differences between a bec-de-corbin, mancatcher, ranseur, partisan, lucern hammer, guisarme, bill, bill-hook, bill-hook-guisarme, fauchard, fauchard-fork, awl pike, and fauchard-fork-guisarme-bill-hook-hammer, and finally deciding to buy a longsword.
It means reading the description of the cacodemon spell and losing sanity points.
It means staring blankly at the new "Non-Weapon Proficiency" rules, and promptly ignoring them.
It means being deathly afraid of "poison needles."

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It was for the feeling of adventure and danger and the wonder of magic and demons and the rest. I never looked at the map of Oerth and thought, "this isn't logical, the migration patterns should have put people here...", or questioned why the ancient builders of the Tomb we were exploring had so many crazy tunnels. 1e AD&D was an adventure game, not a sociatial and geopolitical simulator with perfectly accurate and logical dungeon construction. It was about fun and adventure, and that does not preclude roleplaying or having a history for a particular place or person.

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anticipation. worry. excitement. thrills. chills.

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An RPG can involve story, and yet still capture the "feel" of the 1st Edition.

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-When the story/plot is more important than the stat-blocks

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1) Emphasis on evocativeness and wonder, rather than crunch engineering
2) Simplicity of rules and adaptability of rule-set (not like 3E)
3) Site-based adventures, and giving players freedom (not like 2E)

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