Do B/Xers have a beef with 1E?

[Falconer]

Yeah, if you get into a discussion of editions with the average comic book store denizen, it emerges that to most people, when you say AD&D First Edition they think of the entire 13 hardcovers that were in existence by the end of the 80s. That is an ugly mess of an edition that, I think, none of us identify with, and in comparison to which the bland RC actually may be a more attractive option!

So I think it’s important to keep that in mind, that not everyone automatically understands “1e” to mean the same thing we do. Maybe we need a new, unambiguous acronym. I believe Axe Mental has for a while now been saying “Early 1E”, sometimes including 0E. I think of myself as a fan of “1970s Gygaxian D&D” which I think clearly limits it to the actual white box, supplements, and three core hardcovers, plus most of the best modules. And then of course if there’s a good 80s or modern product that fits in with that ethos, that’s okay too, but at least you know what page we’re on. On the other hand, “1970s Gygaxian D&D” is not a perfect identifier, because it might seem from some peoples’ perspective to exclude AD&D.

[James Maliszewski]

led to more of a groupthink do-what-everyone-else-is-doing-not-what-you-would-do-on-your-own approach (exemplified by the RPGA and Dragon magazine)

Again, this rings very true to me. Around 1983-1984, there was a big shift not just in the presentation of the game, but also in the "culture" that surrounded it, especially as exemplified through organs of TSR, such as Dragon and the RPGA.

"if I had it to do over I'd have just stuck with this version and never fallen for the AD&D line." Which is pretty much pure emotional nostalgia and grass-is-greener revisionism, but what can you do?

Because the D&D line was never as popular as the AD&D one, it didn't suffer quite as badly at the hands of TSR's whimsical business decisions, so I can understand this sentiment. I mean, if you were to look at AD&D in 1990 and compare it to the D&D line at the same time, there is a certain "purity" to the latter that's very attractive, especially if you'd been brought into the hobby through the Mentzer boxed sets and viewed it as the best statement of the game to date.

[T. Foster]

Because the D&D line was never as popular as the AD&D one, it didn't suffer quite as badly at the hands of TSR's whimsical business decisions, so I can understand this sentiment. I mean, if you were to look at AD&D in 1990 and compare it to the D&D line at the same time, there is a certain "purity" to the latter that's very attractive, especially if you'd been brought into the hobby through the Mentzer boxed sets and viewed it as the best statement of the game to date.

It's ironic that in some sense by the late 80s-early 90s the D&D and AD&D lines had sort of switched places from their original intent (as outlined in those old Dragon editorials) -- AD&D was aimed at the mass-market, was deliberately genericized and modularized (with the notion of each GM creating their own specialty priests and assembling their own binder of "canonical" monsters and such), and had so many mutually-incompatible settings and supplements so no two AD&D games were likely to have much in common (is it Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Realms, Ravenloft, Dark Sun or Spelljammer? Is it using the optional rules from the books (NWPs, etc.)? How about the "Complete" handbooks and if so which ones? what has the GM home-brewed (classes, specialties, etc.)?), while the D&D line, because it apparently (as corroborated by Mike Breault on this board) was a marginal enough seller to fall mostly under the radar of TSR management and be left pretty much entirely in the hands of Bruce Heard and his team of freelancers, developed into a more specific and singular game, much more strongly tied to a single setting, with a more specific tone and authorial voice (the Gazetteers were written by many different authors, but all under Bruce Heard's purview) and a more unified ruleset, both in terms of the core game and its supplementary additions (a GM could pick and choose which elements he wanted to use from the various GAZ and PC series without anything like the sort of balance issues that afflicted attempts to mix and match between the 2E complete splats). If you were playing in a D&D game c. 1990 you'd have a much better idea of what to expect as far as both the rules and the setting than in an AD&D game.

Which is all well and good except that I didn't actually like most of what Bruce Heard did with the game, either ruleswise or setting-wise, and especially flavor-wise (the "Voyages of the Princess Ark" series in Dragon magazine seemed like a perfect exhibit of exactly what I didn't want out of D&D) so while theoretically a better choice than AD&D it still wasn't a choice that I found at all appealing, so instead I played other games (like WFRP, Stormbringer, RQ, and non-fantasy games), delved ever-deeper into the back-catalogue from Before the Fall (this was the period when I did a lot of re-reading of the Gygax-era modules and Dragon issues, and when I discovered OD&D and Judges Guild), and vainly tried to mine material out of Gygax's post TSR efforts to "fix" the game with (there is, or at least was, a website somewhere of somebody who went through Gygax's Gord books and pulled out every bit of setting detail, which was funny to me when I first saw it because I had done exactly the same thing (only in a notebook, not online) c. 1990 while trying to get something salvageable out of the City of Greyhawk boxed set and "Falconmaster" trilogy modules, before eventually giving up in disgust). That was a very bleak period for those of us who actually liked AD&D as it had been c. 1979-84 (and it didn't get much better -- Mythus provided a brief but fleeting glimpse of sunlight c. 1992-93, Lejendary Adventures another, dimmer, one c. 1999, but it wasn't until we all came together at dragonsfoot and Gene Weigel's Dungeon in 2002-03 that I really felt for the first time like I wasn't all alone and that there really were other people who saw things the same way I did -- that there was so much good about OD&D and Early 1E and that it all drifted so far off-course after that).

[James Maliszewski]

Which is all well and good except that I didn't actually like most of what Bruce Heard did with the game, either ruleswise or setting-wise, and especially flavor-wise (the "Voyages of the Princess Ark" series in Dragon magazine seemed like a perfect exhibit of exactly what I didn't want out of D&D) so while theoretically a better choice than AD&D it still wasn't a choice that I found at all appealing

Oh, absolutely. I have a fair bit more tolerance for what the D&D line was offering at this time -- I think some of the Gazetteers were quite good, actually -- but there's no question that even the best stuff from this period was quite unlike the best stuff from the 1979-1993/4 period when I was playing AD&D most intensely. Amusingly, at the time, I turned me nose up at the Gazetteer stuff, because it struck me as too closely associated with the Mentzer boxes I so disliked and it's only been over the last few years that I came to appreciate what virtues it did have.

But, again, I suspect that a great many of the "B/Xers" who are down on AD&D are in fact kids who came into the hobby through Mentzer/Known World/Mystara, during a time when, by most measures, AD&D was in a very bad place. Most of these people never knew AD&D during its Golden Age, let alone OD&D, so it's hard for me to be too hard on them, even if I wish they'd make a bit of effort to understand why it is many older gamers look on the later era as, at best, a pale shadow of what had once been.

[AxeMental]

Once 1E settings becames standard (and module series) the game paradigm switched to DM's imagination to writers imagination (too sell product). Plot also became dominant over player driven action. You couldn't truely adventure as a player stuck in some idiotic story which was constantly directing you (even if you did fool yourself into liking it). Not only were settings incompatible, but style of play was as well.

[Joe Mac]

But the thing is, for AD&D it was sort of kept a secret -- the books looked and felt like they were targeted towards adults and, as a kid reading them, you imagined that this was a game mostly played by adults (or at least high-school to college age kids) and that you were special and precocious for being able to understand and play it at age 11 or whatever. Therefore AD&D seemed cool. The Basic Sets, OTOH, at least the Moldvay and Mentzer versions, felt like they were targeted to kids -- the Moldvay set to kids about age 12, the Mentzer set to kids about age 10 -- including bigger print, smaller words, more family-friendly art, mildly bowdlerized content (no "evil" alignment, no demons, no named deities, etc.). And while this made them a lot easier to understand, it also made them a lot less cool. Yeah, everybody had started with those sets and learned the rules from them (to the extent of still following most of those rules even after they switched over) but it wasn't something you really talked about because everyone knew Basic D&D was the kiddie game and AD&D was the real, adult game. Somebody who showed up to a game with a Basic Set in hand would probably be made fun of, and almost certainly told they needed to "move up to the big leagues" of AD&D.

Yep, this mirrors my experience, although I'd moved from Holmes to AD&D shortly before the Moldvay set was released. My closest gaming pal bought the Moldvay set and Cook/Marsh Expert; we perused them occasionally, and I don't think we had a particularly negative opinion of them, but I don't recall us ever referring to the B/X rules during play - because we had graduated to the big leagues, and there was no going back.

I do recall us blasting the Mentzer set with much derision, not for the rules content, but for the presentation - which was clearly, to our minds, 'kiddie D&D'. We were in 9th grade by that point, and anyone bringing the new Basic set to school would have been mocked without mercy and advised to grow a pair...

[Matthew]

I suppose much like some of us have enjoyed a "voyage back" by re-engaging with AD&D in the last ten years or so, there must be plenty of people enjoying a similar re-engagement with the classic line, and who never really had much experience with AD&D or else had a bad experience with it. Until recently it had been about fifteen to twenty years since I had seen a copy of Basic Dungeons & Dragons, though I remember distinctly going through it with a friend looking to see how the classes matched up with the cartoon characters! We were mightily puzzled over the acrobat, I recall, our best guess was that she might correspond to the cleric class, possibly influenced by depictions of Goldmoon in Dragonlance. Now that I think about it, it was this friend's older brother who not only had a copy of BD&D, but also WHFRP, in each case my first exposure to the game in question. The local games club was where I was first introduced to AD&D, though, the club had quite a collection of books and gaming paraphernalia and lent me a copy of the second edition PHB. I must have gone out and bought my own copy the next week (no idea where the money came from, must have been "Christmas" or "Birthday" cash) and started using it to create a character for the D&D game we were playing at school during break times. Shortly after that we must have jumped ship from D&D to AD&D as more and more of us picked up various "interesting" looking books that the others did not have or copies of Dragon.

[ThirstyStirge]

Yeah, $12 each for the PH and MM and $15 for the DMG was serious frickin' money for a 10-year-old kid earning $1-2 a week in allowance, which is why the Expert rulebook -- which was available stand-alone book for $5.50 and worked with the Basic Set you'd already gotten as an Xmas present from Nanna -- looked like an attractive option. That or a paper route (or shoplifting...).

Hm. I have a memory (perhaps erroneous) that the core HB's were in the $30 range apiece. The exorbitant prices for those books were the secondary reason why I was not allowed to have them as a kid. Even if I were given an allowance I doubt I could have saved up enough to ever afford them.

The above-mentioned comments about Basic being regarded as the "kiddies' game" accords with what I remember. There were a few boys in junior high who constantly bragged that they had the Big Books and could easily fathom that arcane language of the strange wizard only referred to as The Gygax. I was very intimidated by the books' contents and simultaneously thrilled by the strange and wondrous monsters in the MM. However, my friend who had the books, told me that only DM's were allowed to read any of the material, and having perused the lit I was forever forbidden to play the game ever again. This snobbish, secretive behavior by boys of that age-range bolstered the rumours that it was some weird cult.

At times even I still scratch my head over the rules in the DMG, or puzzle over the spell descriptions. When I feel a bit overwhelmed by AD&D I have no problem seeking out the simpler rules of Basic (whether Holmes or Moldvay), or contemplate the even more elementary mechanics hinted at by the FFC.

[francisca]

Hm. I have a memory (perhaps erroneous) that the core HB's were in the $30 range apiece. The exorbitant prices for those books were the secondary reason why I was not allowed to have them as a kid. Even if I were given an allowance I doubt I could have saved up enough to ever afford them.

Foster is correct on the pricing. I saved up all my money for 2 years and bought the MM, PHB, and DMG all at once at Toys'R'Us in merrilleville, IN in 1983.

[MojoBob]

I bought all my own manuals in one glorious hit in February 1982 -- PHB, DMG, MM1, FF, D&D (sans Cthulhu etc.). I guess I must have had a job at the time

I don't remember how much they cost, but I see from the endpaper of a friend's PHB of about the same era that he paid $NZ19.95 for it, and that feels about the right price for mine too. I didn't get the MM2 until 1991, a second-hand copy in as-new condition; it cost me $19.00 then.

I did record the price I paid for the 2e PHB: $45.95 in May '89. I made a special note of it on the endpapers because it seemed shockingly, piratically expensive at the time. I remember at the time thinking that it was a hell of a lot of money to pay for the few bits and pieces I cherry-picked from it, but what the hell, money is for enjoying.

[Clangador]

The first D&D I got was Holmes Basic set. Chits. Took me a year to get a hold of dice. Everybody seemed to be out of them. Then I git the PHB and carried it my backpack for the next half decade. For Christmas every year I got a new hardback. So it took me years to collect all the AD&D books. My friends had them, so it was no worries. I rarely DMed anything in that time period. When I went into the military and had my own money I was able to buy my own stuff.

[T. Foster]

Hm. I have a memory (perhaps erroneous) that the core HB's were in the $30 range apiece. The exorbitant prices for those books were the secondary reason why I was not allowed to have them as a kid. Even if I were given an allowance I doubt I could have saved up enough to ever afford them.

Foster is correct on the pricing. I saved up all my money for 2 years and bought the MM, PHB, and DMG all at once at Toys'R'Us in merrilleville, IN in 1983.

Yep, the first printing or two of the MM was $10 (or so the price-lists in the back of TSR products of that era tell me) but it soon went up to $12, which was the price of all the other hardbacks except for the DMG (which was $15) for a long time. Eventually, sometime around 1986 (with the release of either OA or the Survival Guides -- I can't verify for sure because I no longer have copies of any of those ), the price went up to $15, including for new printings of the older books (and IIRC the DMG went up to $18.00).

FWIW at some point (around late 1981 or early 1982) TSR added a product code (in addition to the ISBN) which includes the price as the last 4 digits. For example, my copy of UA (1st printing, 1985) has in the lower left-hand corner of the back cover "394-54834-5TSR1200" -- that 1200 indicates that the book's MSRP was $12.00. The same code was also on modules and boxed-sets, which is how I know that the various Basic/Expert/etc. boxes were $12.00 (except for Master Set which was $13.50), the standalone 1981 Basic & Expert rulebooks were $6.00 each, and the standard for modules was $5.50 in the "face-logo" era (A series, B3-4, C2, L1, N1, etc.), and went up to $6.00 in the "letter-logo" era (EX1-2, I2-6, UK2-7, etc.), but "deluxe" modules always cost more (S4 and WG6 were $7.50, S3 and I10 were $8.00, B10 and GAZ1 were $10.00, Lankhmar: City of Adventure and REF3 were $12.00, T1-4 was $15.00, and so on).

[stranger]

I still have the hand written $12 price stickers on the inside covers of the phb and MM I bought in 82 as well as a $15 dollar sticker in the DMG. I had to pick a lot of wild blueberries to pay for those and will likely "never" forget the price.

[AxeMental]

I remember it was the modules that seemed way over priced at the time. A one shot adventure you didn't even need to play...come on! (and back then, to us anyway, the concept of replaying a module seemed ludicrous...not when we had so many glorious dungeons of our own design in a world we had ownership of).