Advanced musings

 I've always been a Classic D&D guy. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that my first exposure to any form of the game was the Moldvay Basic set. I wasn't aware AD&D was its own separate thing until I got a copy of the Player's Handbook. Since that day, I've harbored a deep fascination for the game, with all its baroque design, its dense and often unnecessarily verbose prose, its inelegant asymmetry, and its plethora of heavily footnoted charts and tables, but I've played in maybe one or two sessions and have never run the game myself. 

I know many gamers see AD&D 1e as the pinnacle of D&D, sometimes with a corresponding disdain for the classic Moldvay and Mentzer iterations ("kiddie D&D" is the term used by those who have no interest in veiling their elitism). One prominent blogger in particular, who was once the foremost champion of B/X, now only extolls the perfect virtues of AD&D 1e. Much of this change of heart seems to be based upon the claim that only 1e fully supports late game elements such as rulership and domain management, and further, that the idea of adding such elements to the Classic rules chassis is pointless because one can simply play AD&D 1e as written instead. I can't speak much to the completeness of support for play beyond the dungeon, having never owned a hard copy of the DMG, but I think his argument that one ought simply to go with AD&D 1e ignores the multitude of elements in the more central systems of the game that are not to everyone's taste, or are outright poorly designed. Contrary to this individual's apparent belief, AD&D 1e is NOT, and has never been, a perfect game. Nor, for that matter, are B/X or BECMI, but that's quite beside my point here. 

My purpose in this post is not to bash AD&D 1e, or to say those who enjoy it over Classic are wrong, but to offer my honest analysis of the charms and flaws of the parts of it I know best, which also, I believe, are its most fundamental parts; to wit, the rules for the creation and functioning of player characters, plus a few other bits, though those I treat with much less depth.

Firstly, we have the ability scores. The complexity of ability score adjustments in comparison to Classic D&D is, to me, not in itself a flaw or a poor design choice. More nuanced mechanical effects are absolutely congruent with an "advanced" version of the game. I am intrigued, in principle, by the idea that a given ability score need not grant a single, unified modifier to every action it affects, let alone that every ability use the same scale of modifiers. The choice to make Prime Requisite abilities more relevant to their respective classes, such as by having Intelligence affect spell acquisition for magic-users or Dexterity modify thief skill percentages, is in principle a good one, even if I have some quibbles with its implementation. 

Where AD&D is clearly inferior to Basic, though, is its distribution of adjustments, cramming them all into the extremes of the 3-18 range, with a huge dead zone in the middle, and then declaring that a character is unplayable without at least two scores greater than 15. The lack of a unified scale of modifiers mentioned above could have been leveraged to spread out the gains and losses, allowing scores in the middle range to offer meaningful differences without resorting to bonus inflation. For instance, Strength might have given a bonus of +1 to opening doors at a score of 13, +1 to melee damage at 14, +1 to hit at 15, and then repeat the cycle over the next three ability points, thus ending up with +2 across the board at a score of 18. Easy-peasy, right? Well, apparently not in Gygax World. Multiple methods of ability score generation are proffered to produce the very high scores deemed indispensable to creating viable characters. This is, quite frankly, terrible design: needlessly creating a problem and then a sloppy kludge to "fix" it, when it would never have been an issue at all with the above scheme, or simply by starting bonuses at a lower threshold. Likewise the supposed unplayability of low scores could easily have been mitigated by reducing the penalties; after all, unlike in Classic, there is no adherence to symmetry, and no reason why penalties must correspond to bonuses in their magnitudes. The notations in the ability tables indicating "Here or lower the character can only be Class X" at the threshold of 5 is just pointless fiddliness for the sake of fiddliness. 

Perhaps the greatest sin in the entire ability score scheme, though, is Exceptional Strength. It seems, perhaps, to be based on a recognition that the standard Strength bonuses are rather paltry, and that fighters could use a bit of a boost, but its actual effect is to render any fighter with less than an 18 in Strength greatly inferior. Anything below a score of 16 earns nothing at all in terms of melee attack and damage modifiers, and even a 17 merits only a +1 to each. A fighter with 18 Strength, though, gets to roll percentile dice, boosting attack and damage bonuses to a minimum of +1/+3 and a maximum of +3/+6! It would have been far more sensible to provide better modifiers for the standard scale of scores, and to limit the highest bonuses to fighter classes, as was done with Constitution.

Beyond all of that, the extreme pressure toward very high ability scores tends to render all characters of the same class nearly identical. Every player character has an 18 in his or her class's Prime Requisite ability, and at least a 16 in the auxiliary ones, with no less than 12-15 in everything else. Low scores, as in actually garnering penalties, are exceedingly rare. This is of course a matter of taste, but I find the resulting uniformity stultifyingly bland. Instead of an interesting bell curve of scores, the "curve" is flattened against the ceiling.

So much for ability scores and modifiers. Moving on now to the character classes...

There's a tremendous amount of wonkiness and asymmetry in the class advancement tables. Where Classic D&D mostly hews to a standardized scheme of one Hit Die per level to 9th, and flat hp gains each level thereafter, AD&D is all over the place. Fighters and clerics use the 9 HD formula, but thieves get 10, and magic-users and illusionists get 11. If that's not weird enough, rangers and monks start with 2 HD, and several of the specialty subclasses (druids, assassins, monks) never switch to flat hp gains, but receive full Hit Dice up to their level limits. This isn't a deal breaker as such, but it does seem to be another case of complexity simply for the sake of complexity rather than serving any useful purpose. 

I can't say I'm a huge fan of the larger Hit Dice. It's not a huge issue, but it is a step down the dismal road to hp bloat, and it leaves the poor magic-user far behind.

Speaking of which, the M-U gets absolutely SCREWED in 1e. It's not that the 1e magic-user is objectively weaker than his Classic counterpart, but that every other class gets a boost relative to their Classic iterations, sometimes a substantial one, while the M-U gets virtually nothing. Besides being the only class with a d4 Hit Die, they're stuck with the base spell progression, which grants but a single 1st-level spell at character level 1. The cleric, meanwhile, gets bonus spells starting at a rather modest (for AD&D) Wisdom score of 14 and can choose spells from the entire list carte blanche, unfettered by the limits of a spell book. The M-U gets no such boon for high Intelligence; in fact, Intelligence serves as a limiting device, both to learning individual spells and to overall spells known. So, while the cleric gets a meaty d8 HD, good attack roll progression, the use of sturdy armor and potent weapons, AND almost certainly two or more spells at 1st level, the M-U is cowering behind him, fragile and impotent in physical combat and armed with only a single spell from a very restricted repertoire. Fork that noise! 

While the magic-user gets no love, I mostly approve of other differences between Classic and Advanced class details, especially that fighters get a few perks to give them more heft in combat. I'm not crazy about the way weapon selections are handled. In Classic, these are usually given as a simple rule, e.g. blunt weapons only for clerics, and any missile weapon plus one-handed melee weapons for the thief. 1e instead provides a list of weapons allowed, which is especially restrictive to thieves. Again, not an absolute deal-breaker, but why?

Compared to Classic D&D, which has very few ability score requirements, AD&D has many. For the four core classes, the requirements are generally a score of 9 in the Prime Requisite, and at least a 6 in most other stats, with a single one that's allowed to be as low as 3 (the "Here or lower the character can only be X" nonsense from above). While not particularly onerous, it does disallow a lot of opportunities for playing against type, should a player or DM wish to run such a PC or NPC. A weak fighter or a clumsy thief might be fun for some to play, and the "Here or lower..." proviso can automatically render a set of scores literally unplayable, not just less desirable, if, for instance, two scores should be below the threshold, or the remaining scores don't qualify for the only option prescribed by the lowest one.

Ability score requirements for the real specialty classes bother me hardly at all, and in fact, with a less inflated ability score generation system would even serve the useful purpose of limiting those very powerful classes. Requiring 17 Charisma for a paladin is hardly much of a hindrance when using most of the suggested rolling schemes. Those specialty classes themselves do tend to be a cut above the Big Four and could use some restrictions with teeth. (The monk as written is just a smoking hot mess, and the less said about it the better.)

 I have no issue in principle with separate character class and race, but 1e's implementation of character races, to put it bluntly, sucks atomic donkey balls. Level limitations are extremely onerous in any campaign expected to last beyond the first few levels, and do nothing meaningful to "balance" play at low levels. Sure, you're technically *allowed* to play a halfling fighter, but why would you, when you hit the wall at level 4? One can certainly argue that a chubby three-foot-tall second-breakfast-eating guy shouldn't be able to outfight a tall, athletic, warlike human, and I have no argument to pose against that point of view, but there are other and better ways to accomplish that purpose -- say, reduced HD size, being limited to smaller weapons, even a slower attack progression. Dwarves and elves aren't much better off, and the slight relaxation of level limits for characters with crazy high Prime Requisite scores only serves as that much more incentive to use ability generation methods that push everything toward the uppermost limits. Sure, you can just be a thief if you want to keep adventuring with your human cohorts into higher levels, but that's a cruel restriction on roleplaying. What if you want to play a heroic dwarf or halfling, not a sneaky pilferer or some other thiefly archetype? Too bad; Gary says be a thief or take early retirement. The reasoning I've seen for unlimited advancement as thieves, contrasted against draconian limits in other classes, is that demihumans should not rise to high positions of political authority and influence, and unlike a career in fighting, wizardry, or the clergy, thievery affords no such opportunities. (I wonder how it could have escaped Gary's notice that virtually every such person in our real world is an utter scoundrel of one stripe or another.) This is not even a game balance issue so much as one of milieu (one of Gary's very favorite words, I gather), and once again, can be accomplished with far less heavy-handed means. It would be utterly trivial, for instance, to declare that the demihuman cultures in one's setting lack the inclination for the political and social structures favored by humanity, and that human societies would be unwilling to accept demihumans within their own political structures, thus disallowing demihuman dukes, barons, popes, and bishops. Boom. Crisis averted. 

Other weird bits, such as the dwarf and halfling saving throw bonuses per 3-1/2 points of Constitution (WTF?) fall into the category of things that wouldn't necessarily keep me from playing the game, but make me wonder why. 

Alignment, in my opinion, is not an essential feature of any edition of the game. The nine-alignment schematic is interesting, but no amount of Gygaxian loquacity has ever managed to dispel its ambiguity. If you have a desired interpretation that you like to use in your games, more power to you, but it isn't inherently superior to the three-point alignment system of Classic D&D or to none at all. 

Equipment lists include a whole lot of stuff for which few players have any use, but at least much of it is evocative and provides opportunities for imaginative players to surprise you. I'm not sure the bulk it adds to the lists is really worth it, but at least it's not a glaring fault. Gary's mania for polearms and for armors of dubious historicity are on full display; again more of a cluttering complaint than a deal-breaker. One thing that does have merit is the damage of weapons being distinguished between small/medium targets and large ones, even if the differences don't fully represent my real world intuitions. It's frankly quite hard to imagine taking down an elephant with a club or dagger, and while the numbers don't fully model the utter futility of the task, it's nice at least to get a nod in that direction.

A great deal of the Player's Handbook is given to spell lists and descriptions, and the sheer variety is one area in which AD&D really shines. It's unfortunate that so many of them have such complex descriptions, riddled with all sorts of conditions and caveats and what-have-you. With that amount of variety, it's probably unavoidable that many of the spells are quite narrow in their applications; a quality which does not mesh well with the RAW procedures for spell memorization and casting. Nonetheless, I find these passages a rich trove in which to dig for custom spells for Classic D&D games, though most require simplification first.

The same applies to monsters, of which AD&D has produced at least three volumes. I find the litany of spell-like abilities attached to some of the creatures, and their widely varying frequencies of use, to be a tedious bother -- the last thing I want to do at the game table is try to remember that Creature A can cast charm person three times per day, fog cloud four times per turn, change self at will, affect normal fires every third round, and half a dozen others besides -- but it's not a difficult task to reduce and simplify such things to a level consistent with Classic D&D standards.

Conclusion

All in all, I find that a lot of what makes Advanced D&D "advanced" is complexity purely for the sake of complexity. It's Gary showing off how smart Gary is (or was.) Most of it, with a few notable exceptions, contributes nothing really interesting or useful to the game; it's just more clutter to commit to memory or waste time looking up at the table. And as far as that goes, High Gygaxian can make for some interesting leisure reading, but as a table reference, it's a Bob-damned nightmare. Even just looking up the profuse and fiddly provisions of a less-used spell would be a monstrous hassle, never mind extremely fertile ground for rules lawyers. 

To be sure, there's a fair bit that's good and admirable about AD&D 1e, and there are even reasons to play it as it is. One of the most compelling is that there's a very large volume of adventure modules and other material published for the system, and one might not wish to do the work of converting them, either in advance or on the fly at the table, in order to enjoy playing them. One might also play it just for the sheer experience of it.

When it comes to designating a primary system to use at my table, though, it leaves a lot to be desired, and in my estimation, it would be far easier and more fun to start with a Classic chassis and adapt the bits of AD&D that appeal to me or that fill a previously unserved niche in the Classic game than to play AD&D straight. It is certainly not an objective fact, nor even an overwhelmingly compelling opinion, that 1e is the single most perfect iteration of Dungeons & Dragons ever to grace a converted basement billiard table surrounded by mismatched chairs. Your mileage may vary, but that is, after all, the point.