Being a mostly 5e gamer, it can be rather cool experiencing other forms of dnd, along with other tabletop games, sure, but this vid is about ADnD. Like n' Subscribe :D
The monk leveling thing actually sounds awesome. Characters hitting a plateau until they take on a class-specific quest could make for some interesting campaigns
For normal levels you have to pay 1000?gp x the level you want to level up to, to a teacher and spend a week learning as well 😅Probably would have been worth mentioning in the vid. But I do agree, specific quests to level up would be a really cool, probably would want to save that for higher levels though or the game would just become these quests.
They have to beat the grandmasters starting at level 7 and then every few levels or so to level up! If you fail the attempt to beat the grandmaster, which is VERY likely in our game, you lose all your xp for that level and have to start all over from scratch. It’s brutal.
I heard that druids do something similar. Who'd have thought that the tree huggers would battle it out in life and death combat to figure out how is top dog. Literally in some cases.
@@Avatarbee in our group we have a bunch of Druids now. I just wait for the day that two players will have to fight it out in one on one gladiatorial combat to see who can take the reins of the name class Druid or whatever.
Yep. 1e was a totally different experience, as was Basic, where I actually started. But, there were things from those editions, as well as 2&3 that I still use today in 5e. As for that expensive book you put back on the shelf, keep it. It will make good kindling for fires, in the event of societal collapse. 🤠👍
Part of the charm in the older editions is, by it's nature, was more into emergent storytelling. I come from having started with 2e D&D. You generally didn't emotionally invest in a new character. It doesn't take too long to make a character: no backgrounds or feats or builds to worry about, and depending on the edition and optional rules in play, you may not even have to worry about spell selection (I believe picking your starting spell/s was the optional rule in 1st or 2e, with getting a random one being the default, another optional being picking from a selection curated by whoever taught you magic) or things like non-weapon proficiencies (which were the 2e D&D proto-skills/feats). You just pick your man/elf/dwarf/halfling and if you want to punch, pray, prowl or pewpew and went on your way. Stats in older editions had both more and less weight to them. they affected a lot more stuff in more granular ways (which was again later wrapped up in stuff like skills. 2e's "Bend Bars/Lift Gates" Strength sub-stat would simply be rolled up into an Athletics Check in 5e), but also didn't have as huge an impact (the difference in combat between a 9Str and a 15Str in 2e would determine far more how many different weapons you can carry by virtue of your carrying capacity then your accuracy or damage with those weapons). Because of these things, like the simpler character building, less worry about having "good" stats, and the increased lethality, you generally didn't get invested in your new meat puppet. Yeah it's a shame when Mortesque the Necromancer gets goblin'd but he knew the risks. But after a while, because you've been interacting with this meat puppet for so long, you know it's quirks, you know how it handles. You give it a nickname. A personality. Like an old car you've been maintaining for a while, you know the journey it's been on and experienced it firsthand. It didn't come into this world with a personality, but one was shaped after interacting with the world. And I think that's neat.
Yeah, with old-school D&D, you are sort of still creating your character for a while as you play. ;-) You just sort of go with the flow and it all works itself out.
Honestly, I've found myself looking into the character creation options for 2e and have been quite enjoying the idea of using them for 5e games to lower the power of the game and make some of the lower-level gameplay much more enjoyable. Edit: enjoyable isnt actually the right word... It would actually make it a challenge... But... I guess satisfying would be better. Using the low level games to get players used to smaller jaunts into places that they could try out their abilities on. It would make smaller encounters matter more and actually give characters weaknesses that need to be covered by other classes.
AD&D 1e is also the haven of "the DM does whatever the hell they want." lol So they can wave any rules they want and add any they want. It's hardcore homebrewable. If level caps and stuff like that are making people bum out, the DM can always opt to allow whatever they feel makes sense in their game. Personally, I don't know ANYONE who played 1e 100% by the rules. Heck, the game I play in today is pretty old-school... and is basically an amalgam of AD&D 1e and B/X. The DM even pulls in stuff he liked from 5e. It's way homebrewed and is a blast. It is doing something right if we are still playing that way after 40+ years. ;-)
If you use a henchman as a meat shield, they will abandon you and that is the max you can have... Your reputation will preceed you.... You get a reputation as someone who kills sidekicks...
Yeah, I was around in the good old AD&D days. Almost nobody had skills so it was up to the DM to decide what you could do (often based on your background roll and any history you made up) and how good you could do it. (Usually a roll under an attribute that seemed to apply). Could my fighter ride a horse ? Swim ? Sail a boat ? Make beer ? Brew poisons ? Craft Weapons ? Who knew - it only came up if the player came up with a plan for a situation that required an answer. My fighter did eventually get a small Keep near the mountains in the Duchy of Geoff after we finished the Giants trio of adventures as I recall.
Yeah, the older systems were pretty brutal, but they definately set up a lot of roleplay and campaign quest elements within the rules themselves. I have a love/hate relationship with everything 2nd ed and prior (mostly hate, but there's some great stuff there too)
I personally love the challenge of these editions, especially AD&D. Once you have a character that actually survives, it feels like you actually accomplished an amazing achievement!
5:10 Invisible familiars have been the bane of the long running game. We didn't realize the invisibility rules in their entirety, so any time we found some major foe who is mortal and needs to die? Invisible IMP familiar of the evil cleric makes an assassination with a casting of SILENCE and/or Darkness. Extremely dangerous.
What are you talking about with that “recharge a spell every hour”? That must have been a homebrew rule because that is not how it normally is. Preparing spells takes 4 hours plus 15 minutes per level of spell you prepare. So preparing a magic missile and a sleep and a phantasmal force would take 5 hours (4 hours + 15 min + 15 min + 30 min).
The thing I miss about AD&D is dungeon crawling being less of a thing. Our DM had a stack of modules he could bring out to challenge us, and many of them had little story beyond "survive" or "beat the bad guys." The 5th edition modules are mostly about telling a story. I like story, but sometimes I just want to trek through man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.
I started using the 1E MM before the 1E PHB came out. It was weird trying to use the MM with white box rules and the 4 Expansions (The original Deities and Demigods was expansion IV to the White Box. Used Arduin rules, too.
My player who is a necromancer has a different 2nd level spell that let him have a chance to roll a devil or demon and he got a quasit... He regenerates 1hp/rd and has 25% magic resistance and got infravision as a human and can telepathically communicate and use all his senses (so he can see thru his eyes).
You should try AD&D 2e, it is essentially the same game as 1e, but wth a lot of stuff cleaned up and some better features. 2e is essentially the peak of AD&D. I havent found any reason at all to prefer 1e over 2e. Some will say "oh 2e had demons and devils and a few classes censored" that isnt a reason, just add them back in, the books between 1e and 2e are so similar they are compatible with each other. 2e is defintely the way to go to experience AD&D. Also.. AD&D is definitely better than 5e, less video gamey and super heroey.
I think our dm said if we ever continued the game we might port into 2e so they probably came to the same conclusion. But I do agree that Ad&d is the better system for a more crunchy dungeon crawl type games
@@CapnCheeki I actually don't find AD&D crunchy. I mean, it depends where you are coming from. If you are coming from original or basic D&D or something similar then yeah AD&D probably seems crunchy. However if you compare AD&D to D&D5e or pathfinder1e/2e then I would say AD&D is quite a bit less crunchy.
My advice is run 2e ad&d with 1e dmg and 1e unearthed arcana that gives you a very robust list of rules and flavor to pick from while also using thac0 vs atk matrix etc.
I really wish I played way more often with the group in the video, because I would love to do RnD-DnD with them a lot more to explore all these older editions and the strange hybrids people had.
4e had something that approximately reproduced the AD&D fighter vs 1hd creature mechanic. They were called Minions. They were normal enemies except they had 1 HP. Good for padding an encounter with a bunch of mooks that were dangerous but didn't require bookkeeping. It's something I really don't understand why they didn't port into 5e.
1:33 well, it wouldn't be really balanced if multiclass demi-humans started out with 3x the HP of human single classes at game start, would it? Different games have different rules as to how the leveling up goes. Barring someone pointing out a glaring problem, I'm likely going to let my MCers roll those HD seperately, and add them, no average required. Might not though.
The monk leveling thing actually sounds awesome. Characters hitting a plateau until they take on a class-specific quest could make for some interesting campaigns
For normal levels you have to pay 1000?gp x the level you want to level up to, to a teacher and spend a week learning as well 😅Probably would have been worth mentioning in the vid.
But I do agree, specific quests to level up would be a really cool, probably would want to save that for higher levels though or the game would just become these quests.
I think the same also happened with the druid, if i am not mistaken.
They have to beat the grandmasters starting at level 7 and then every few levels or so to level up! If you fail the attempt to beat the grandmaster, which is VERY likely in our game, you lose all your xp for that level and have to start all over from scratch. It’s brutal.
I heard that druids do something similar. Who'd have thought that the tree huggers would battle it out in life and death combat to figure out how is top dog. Literally in some cases.
@@Avatarbee in our group we have a bunch of Druids now. I just wait for the day that two players will have to fight it out in one on one gladiatorial combat to see who can take the reins of the name class Druid or whatever.
Yep. 1e was a totally different experience, as was Basic, where I actually started. But, there were things from those editions, as well as 2&3 that I still use today in 5e. As for that expensive book you put back on the shelf, keep it. It will make good kindling for fires, in the event of societal collapse. 🤠👍
Part of the charm in the older editions is, by it's nature, was more into emergent storytelling.
I come from having started with 2e D&D.
You generally didn't emotionally invest in a new character. It doesn't take too long to make a character: no backgrounds or feats or builds to worry about, and depending on the edition and optional rules in play, you may not even have to worry about spell selection (I believe picking your starting spell/s was the optional rule in 1st or 2e, with getting a random one being the default, another optional being picking from a selection curated by whoever taught you magic) or things like non-weapon proficiencies (which were the 2e D&D proto-skills/feats). You just pick your man/elf/dwarf/halfling and if you want to punch, pray, prowl or pewpew and went on your way.
Stats in older editions had both more and less weight to them. they affected a lot more stuff in more granular ways (which was again later wrapped up in stuff like skills. 2e's "Bend Bars/Lift Gates" Strength sub-stat would simply be rolled up into an Athletics Check in 5e), but also didn't have as huge an impact (the difference in combat between a 9Str and a 15Str in 2e would determine far more how many different weapons you can carry by virtue of your carrying capacity then your accuracy or damage with those weapons).
Because of these things, like the simpler character building, less worry about having "good" stats, and the increased lethality, you generally didn't get invested in your new meat puppet. Yeah it's a shame when Mortesque the Necromancer gets goblin'd but he knew the risks.
But after a while, because you've been interacting with this meat puppet for so long, you know it's quirks, you know how it handles. You give it a nickname. A personality. Like an old car you've been maintaining for a while, you know the journey it's been on and experienced it firsthand. It didn't come into this world with a personality, but one was shaped after interacting with the world.
And I think that's neat.
Yeah, with old-school D&D, you are sort of still creating your character for a while as you play. ;-) You just sort of go with the flow and it all works itself out.
Honestly, I've found myself looking into the character creation options for 2e and have been quite enjoying the idea of using them for 5e games to lower the power of the game and make some of the lower-level gameplay much more enjoyable.
Edit: enjoyable isnt actually the right word... It would actually make it a challenge... But... I guess satisfying would be better. Using the low level games to get players used to smaller jaunts into places that they could try out their abilities on. It would make smaller encounters matter more and actually give characters weaknesses that need to be covered by other classes.
The assassin and druid had the same upper limit as the Monk. I believe that the top assassin was called the godfather.
Interesting story and I liked the drawings, like your elf character and Gizmo are pretty cool!
There is a running joke in the game that no one knows my characters actual gender, even themselves
@@CapnCheeki lol
AD&D 1e is also the haven of "the DM does whatever the hell they want." lol So they can wave any rules they want and add any they want. It's hardcore homebrewable. If level caps and stuff like that are making people bum out, the DM can always opt to allow whatever they feel makes sense in their game. Personally, I don't know ANYONE who played 1e 100% by the rules. Heck, the game I play in today is pretty old-school... and is basically an amalgam of AD&D 1e and B/X. The DM even pulls in stuff he liked from 5e. It's way homebrewed and is a blast. It is doing something right if we are still playing that way after 40+ years. ;-)
If you use a henchman as a meat shield, they will abandon you and that is the max you can have... Your reputation will preceed you.... You get a reputation as someone who kills sidekicks...
Yeah, I was around in the good old AD&D days. Almost nobody had skills so it was up to the DM to decide what you could do (often based on your background roll and any history you made up) and how good you could do it. (Usually a roll under an attribute that seemed to apply). Could my fighter ride a horse ? Swim ? Sail a boat ? Make beer ? Brew poisons ? Craft Weapons ? Who knew - it only came up if the player came up with a plan for a situation that required an answer. My fighter did eventually get a small Keep near the mountains in the Duchy of Geoff after we finished the Giants trio of adventures as I recall.
It was less about rules and more about rulings.
I love ad&d so much. it was brutal in a way that makes me love my characters so much more as they survive and level up
Yeah, the older systems were pretty brutal, but they definately set up a lot of roleplay and campaign quest elements within the rules themselves. I have a love/hate relationship with everything 2nd ed and prior (mostly hate, but there's some great stuff there too)
I feel like we can learn a lot from experiencing the earlier editions, can't say they'd ever become my go-to but they are neat.
I personally love the challenge of these editions, especially AD&D. Once you have a character that actually survives, it feels like you actually accomplished an amazing achievement!
I'm more of a BX girl but old-school DnD is so fun, get a good GM and the OSR headspace and jump in!
5:10 Invisible familiars have been the bane of the long running game. We didn't realize the invisibility rules in their entirety, so any time we found some major foe who is mortal and needs to die? Invisible IMP familiar of the evil cleric makes an assassination with a casting of SILENCE and/or Darkness. Extremely dangerous.
Honestly I'd still take AD&D over 5e any day of the week.
(And twice on weekends)
What are you talking about with that “recharge a spell every hour”? That must have been a homebrew rule because that is not how it normally is. Preparing spells takes 4 hours plus 15 minutes per level of spell you prepare. So preparing a magic missile and a sleep and a phantasmal force would take 5 hours (4 hours + 15 min + 15 min + 30 min).
You may be right- We either just homebrewed that to be simpler as I was the only caster or I just remember having 4 spells take 4 hours 🤔
The thing I miss about AD&D is dungeon crawling being less of a thing. Our DM had a stack of modules he could bring out to challenge us, and many of them had little story beyond "survive" or "beat the bad guys." The 5th edition modules are mostly about telling a story. I like story, but sometimes I just want to trek through man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.
I started using the 1E MM before the 1E PHB came out. It was weird trying to use the MM with white box rules and the 4 Expansions (The original Deities and Demigods was expansion IV to the White Box. Used Arduin rules, too.
My player who is a necromancer has a different 2nd level spell that let him have a chance to roll a devil or demon and he got a quasit... He regenerates 1hp/rd and has 25% magic resistance and got infravision as a human and can telepathically communicate and use all his senses (so he can see thru his eyes).
You should try AD&D 2e, it is essentially the same game as 1e, but wth a lot of stuff cleaned up and some better features. 2e is essentially the peak of AD&D. I havent found any reason at all to prefer 1e over 2e. Some will say "oh 2e had demons and devils and a few classes censored" that isnt a reason, just add them back in, the books between 1e and 2e are so similar they are compatible with each other. 2e is defintely the way to go to experience AD&D. Also.. AD&D is definitely better than 5e, less video gamey and super heroey.
I think our dm said if we ever continued the game we might port into 2e so they probably came to the same conclusion. But I do agree that Ad&d is the better system for a more crunchy dungeon crawl type games
@@CapnCheeki I actually don't find AD&D crunchy. I mean, it depends where you are coming from. If you are coming from original or basic D&D or something similar then yeah AD&D probably seems crunchy. However if you compare AD&D to D&D5e or pathfinder1e/2e then I would say AD&D is quite a bit less crunchy.
My advice is run 2e ad&d with 1e dmg and 1e unearthed arcana that gives you a very robust list of rules and flavor to pick from while also using thac0 vs atk matrix etc.
I really wish I played way more often with the group in the video, because I would love to do RnD-DnD with them a lot more to explore all these older editions and the strange hybrids people had.
I couldn't agree more! 2e is in my opinion the best version out there, with all our house rules.
4e had something that approximately reproduced the AD&D fighter vs 1hd creature mechanic. They were called Minions. They were normal enemies except they had 1 HP. Good for padding an encounter with a bunch of mooks that were dangerous but didn't require bookkeeping. It's something I really don't understand why they didn't port into 5e.
I do hear a lot of people who played 4e took the minion rule and kept it, despite 4e being a pretty big rite off among the community.
1:33 well, it wouldn't be really balanced if multiclass demi-humans started out with 3x the HP of human single classes at game start, would it? Different games have different rules as to how the leveling up goes. Barring someone pointing out a glaring problem, I'm likely going to let my MCers roll those HD seperately, and add them, no average required. Might not though.
Gizmo is amazing
Yeah! Holy crap! A quasit! I've been playing old-school D&D for over 40 years and never saw a player with a quasit familiar! lol
Rogue? Oh, you mean THIEF!
You have to count multiclasses as higher level to make up for their power.... Looking at the xp is a newb thing...
Wouldn't you have been a thief, not a rogue?
Old habits die hard, I think we were "Fighting-men" aswell, not just Fighters 😅
@CapnCheeki AD&D has fighters. The name was changed after Oiginal D&D.
Vídeo love
LESS than one HD, so 1-1 or less....
You don't recharge one thing every hour, you have levels/day.... did you even play AD&D?
ur adventure shouldn't be done in one day, unless it was meant to be super easy