And yeah, the girdles didn't work for anyone but fighters, either! :)
Actually, clerics and thieves could make use of them too. Same with gauntlets of ogre power.
But it's also true that those classes would do most of their damage via melee attacks as well as the fighters so they needed the boost in good equipment as well.
Why draw fights out? Combat in AD&D tended to be resolved a lot quicker, especially since characters generally had a lot fewer options for what they could do in combat. Armor as DR wouldn't really be in keeping with old-school either... there was no DR in AD&D, as far as I can recall; something was either immune to your attack or took full damage.Give everyone and everything max hit points and then use the armor as DR rule...
Thatll draw fights out a bit and with every thing hitting every other thing its feels a lot more clashy.
I don't know which AD&D you were playing but I found the opposite to be true. Pathfinder fights are over in 3 rounds or less. That never happened to us in AD&D. I cant count the number of forums that have that 'we dont play above level 8 because every fight lasts one round' kind of flavor. No fight feels gritty if punching something with 400 hit points in the face makes it curl up into a fetal position in one blow.
I feel like the trouble with pathfinder losing that gritty feel is that at higher levels fights are over in 3 rounds. That was never true in AD&D. In pathfinder damage numbers are through the roof 20d6 this 20d6 that... Hit points went up but not nearly as high as they should have to accomodate these monster swings you see from the optimizer builds.
So, max hit points does 2 things. One it makes fights last longer because everything can take twice as many hits so even if you are an optimizer you still got to hit it twice as much to kill it and it'll have twice as many chances to hit you back. Two it means twice as many chances to hit you back means your healing magic feels sort of nerfed by 50% so you've got a tighter budget on staying alive the more prolonged a fight is.
Armor as DR does 2 things. It makes the sturdy stuff 'feel' sturdier because yeah, you're hitting that bulette as if it was a schoolbus parked in the middle of the road, but its like beating a buffalo with a baseball bat. Three swings isnt gonna get the job done. Dexxie McDex still feel like 'I never get hit because i'm quick on my feet', still never getting hit but when your highdex monk eventually does get hit with a claymore he's got no DR from armor so he gets to see exactly what it feels like to take a claymore to his bare chest.
If a half dozen peasants with longswords charge a paladin in full plate mail the odds that he's even going to feel anything at all is next to zero... Full plate mail feels like full plate mail again.
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I played first edition back in junior high and high school in the 80s. My RPGing fell off in the late 80s and early 90s. I played about one a year with one friend. We became increasingly frustrated with the rules bits that made no sense or were completely unclear. (What were weapon speed factors for, anyway?) When I started gaming again, I moved on toother systems that made much more sense, and that also allowed other genres. It was 3e that eventually brought me back to D&D. (I still play other things too.)
What does 3e (now Pathfinder) have? Classes and levels. Magic users, fighters, thieves, and clerics (slightly renamed). +1 swords. Orcs, drow, mind flayers, colored dragons, miscellaneous magic items, ....
This IS old school gaming! Only, the rules set has been put together to make sense, to be coherent, and to work better than a house of cards cobbled together on top of miniatures wargaming to support roleplaying (in the process making a mess out of both), which frankly is what AD&D was.
It sounds like what you are after is play style, not rules changes. Yeah,perhaps limit crafting. But, don't to change the rules (which will only end in tears- the current set make sense, and trying to emulate the old set will just make a mess to rival the mess of the old set). Instead, before you start, have a talk with your gaming group about play style. Talk about roleplaying searches and diplomatic encounters. Talk about making interesting characters that aren't min-maxed and optimized purely for combat effectiveness. Talk about how you want the game to run and the world to develop.
But don't try to emulate AD&D rules. We have a modern, coherent rule set for playing games of the AD&D type. It's called Pathfinder. Just use it.
For stats, I'd put in a hard limit of 18 for humans, and 20 for demi-humans in their best racial stat
If you're going to cap ability scores, Str for everyone without Str penalties should cap at 22, the rough equivalent of 18/00 Strength.
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Well, as someone who actually played the original edition of D&D I probably qualify as a seasoned veteran. First off, the older editions were not good games, the the earlier the edition the worse the rules. I ditched D&D after just a few sessions (back around 1978). Secondly, I'd say if you want old school feel, then grab one of the retro-clones already out there (mostly free) or buy AD&D itself (new or used). But my real advice is to avoid trying to reinvent the square wheel--play Pathfinder. The old school games sucked and we're in the 21st Century now. Chariots are quaint and old-timey, but you wouldn't want to rely on one to get around every day, especially if had square wheels.
I've been at these games since 1980 (that's right; i'm THAT old). Here's one thing I've noticed - retro gaming, for ME anyway, is never fulfilling.
In 2E I tried going back and "recapturing" my misspent youth with games of the basic/expert sets. I found it boring and frustrating. I resisted 3E for a while since the changes seemed so daunting, but once I converted over a buddy of mine ran a 2e game for nostolgia. I found the old system restrictive and inflexible by comparison.
Each new edition has improved the equality and flexibility of the PCs and the monsters. You can easily snap on elements of fluff from older editions, convert modules or run from your fave setting, but for me PF is a nicely polished version of the game I've always loved but wanted more from.
And there it is for me. In 2e I was ALWAYS houseruling situations I use feats and skills for now. I spent lots of time as I recall adjudicating exactly where and how stinking clouds and entangle spells affected both the victims and the environment; now I have conditions and simplified squares in area of effect.
2E and before I found myself wanting for something; with each passing edition there was less, but I was always wanting. Even in 3e I craved balance. Now in PF I have a game where any single character build, with a few exceptions, stands a good chance of making it to the top of the heap and I've got millions of permutations to reskin any monster, PC or NPC to whatever I need it to be.
Nowadays, when I want the old school feel, I still use PF. I just break out the old Dungeon mags, perhaps a Saltmarsh module or 2, and layout my Greyhawk map. I tell my dwarf girls they have beards, I tell my halflings they have pot-bellies and hairy feet, and then I send my PCs to a dungeon and we're off to the races.
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I think an important element of pre-3rd ed is that the game system left more uncertainty.
3.x/PF have rules to do a lot of important things:
* Challenge Rating: it carries the inherent assumption that the monsters you fight are a "fair" fight. That's very different than wandering around in an area, knowing that if certain things show up, you Run, Just Run!
* Curative magic: all nasty conditions in 3.x can be remedied somehow, and everything that's broken can be repaired. The ways to do this are spelled out very clearly. If a PC gets cursed, there's a list of things you can try that will almost certainly deal with it.
* Ability Damage: 3x/PF made much more regular rules for monsters that did some sort of ability damage or drain, and then made lots more monsters that used them. In PF, it seems that Lesser Restoration is an "always prepare" the way the Cure spells were in previous editions, because about a quarter of all monsters seem to do ability damage.
* Magic item creation: 2x had no clear rules for this, much more quest-driven. Now you just take the feats and spend time and money. If you really want some item, you can get it, and there's a known upper bound on how much its going to cost you.
* WBL: 2e didn't have clearly spelled out assumptions about how much and how powerful stuff a party would have. Players didn't know if they were "behind". Were monsters balanced with a certain amount of player gear in mind? Nobody knows, there's no CR in 2e. As a corollary to this, 2e didn't do a whole lot with rules for town size economics and what sort of magic items you might expect to have available.
* No feat chains: this may look a bit out of place, but 2e didn't have lots of abilities that must be gained in a specific order. In 3e, you need to plan ahead in order to bring all the pieces of a build together. A character is "engineered" when you think of all the things he should be learning at a given level, together with what magic items to acquire.
* No clearly-structured creatures, creature types, and powers. Many creatures had weird powers with ad-hoc rules. Spell types weren't regularized either. The consequence is that you can't say "oh, this is an Elemental type creature, forget about sneak attack" or "it's an animal, it'll have good Reflex, so try the Will save spell". 3e has powers very neatly pidgeonholed, so it's also more doable to determine which abilities should be used against them.
* There's a way to do almost anything. If you want to make a magical trap, there's rules for that. If you want to key a door to a magical riddle, there's a way to do that. But knowing the mechanics behind it also has downsides. If you know just how insanely expensive that trap was, you wonder who in his right mind put it there. What's the purpose of this dungeon anyway? The clearly defined mechanics pull dungeon design into the realm of sanity and common sense, which makes it harder to justify random puzzles and mysteries.
TL;DR - basically, 3e put rules and structure on a whole lot of ad-hoc stuff from 2e. In a way, that makes the game more "fair". It also added a huge amount of options and flexibility, and I think that's good. But the downside of the more "rational" and structured 3e rules is that things are a lot less uncertain. 3e is like adventuring in a well-lit maze, while 2e is poorly-lit. The well-lit maze is convenient, the poorly lit maze is sometimes clumsy and annoying, but also can be a lot scarier. 3e makes more sense, 2e has more mystery.
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RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16
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There has been a ton of good advice in this thread. For my money I'd keep the rules changes simple:
7) You could move and get all your attacks. There were no iteratives. And unless you were TWF, only Melee types got multiple attacks.Being able to move and get all of your attacks is a very common misconception with 1e/2e. You really couldn't. If you were more than 1" from your opponent, you could close and gain one attack but not your iterative (which did exist). You had to start within that 1" in order to get multiple attacks. The way that scale worked, however, was quirky and based on old, arcane wargaming roots. Indoors, 1" = 10 feet (only 5 feet more than the 5 foot step). Outdoors, however, it was 10 yards. However, since the scale was preserved the net effect was negligible on a tabletop with miniatures.
Iterative attacks differed from 3e/PF style iteratives. If you got multiple attacks because you were a fighter class (including rangers, barbarians, paladins, cavaliers) you got multiple attacks. These iteratives were at the same modifier but weren't generally taken all at once. You alternated with other characters who had iteratives. Natural multiple attack routines (like a claw/claw/bite) were still taken all at once though.
I'm not sure where you are getting that 1e/2e fighters couldn't move and make multiple melee attacks. You were limited to one charge per turn but AFAIK there wasn't any rule against move and multiple strikes.
You could definitely do stuff like move forward half speed + first iterative strike, then wait for any return attacks, then make you iterative strike.
Another option would be attack then move, wait for any counterattacks, then take you iterative strike.
Considering rounds are much shorter in 3.x and for the most part your actions aren't split over multiple segments I really don't see a problem with move and strike in a 2e style PF game.
Giving everything max hit points isn't changing the system, it just implies everyone and everything is as healthy as they could possibly be when they march into battle... and armor as Damage Reduction is an optional rule thats printed right there in the CRB...
Technically you're not even changing the game at all. You're using an optional rule that the publisher handed you on a silver platter.
Don't knock it till ya try it ;) Iz good.
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There's a notable difference between house rules for "retro" D&D vs house rules for d20 D&D, in my experience. House rules for the pre-d20 systems generally exist to detail how something that the rules didn't cover worked. House rules for 3.X/PFRPG generally exist to fix a mechanic that the group finds broken and unusable in the existing system.
If you really want an old school feel go to this website. It is free and is pretty much the old AD&D rules.
http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/osric/
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Running a game where there's some insane CRs out there will keep things old school. I played 1e as a kid and there were times when "run away!" was by far the best option.
Since I'm writing a sandbox module right now, this is also true of my PF game. It definitely feels more like the games I played in then in comparison to the APs.
The other key is reign in magic item availability and wealth by level. These things need to be earned or sought out, rather than be automatic. Interesting and powerful items are themselves the objects of quests, or are found on an irregular basis in hoards, rather than in shops.
Both these changes up the danger level in a game a fair amount. It's something you have to be comfortable with, but my players kinda like the feeling of desperation and doing stuff creatively, because the magic item fix or the spell the wizard wants to buy and inscribe in their spell book isn't easily available.
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I believe many of the "better game" comments should simply be "better gamefor me" comments, as is appropriate.
These come from a desire to play a more nostalgic game.
Many of them started with that style of game, and those style of rules.
They are not "better", they are just more enjoyable for some.
I did not start with 2nd edition, and when I played it, I had no emotional ties, and ultimately found it not my style.
Seriously, I would just play that 2E, instead of forcing Pathfinder to be 2E.
To me "old school" is not about the rules set, but about the game play.
Frankly I am one of those whose nostalgia about playing back in the late 70s, early 80s is not so much about the rules as it was about being a college kid who could stay up all night without worrying about ticking off the wife, keeping up the kids or being too wasted to work.
It was also about a more literary and descriptive style of play with a lot less emphasis on battle grids and miniatures, although I was sort of a pioneer in that regard since I did map out all significant combat with grids and miniatures even back then. Even 3D battles. It just did so much to avoid arguments.
The main difference in my recollection of play back then and play today was all about the lethality of the game and the preparation necessary to survive a campaign. When I compare the incredible lengths that my groups used to go to in preparation for adventuring, the exhaustive scouting we used to do, the careful buffing and tactical maneuvering... that's what I miss, really. Most groups I play with these days just assume the party is going to kick ass and their character is going to do massive damage, or whatever their role is. Preparation is mostly "grab some CLW wands and a donkey to carry all our stuff". Buffing seems to be a lost art. Scouting is a "waste of time".
I do seem to recall that back then people took their character role playing a bit more seriously, but that might just be the haze of aging memory. My group still does a decent job of role playing anyway.
^^^ Very true. Having so much more of the mechanics handled by a die roll (perception i'm looking at you) definitely gives the game less of a dungeons and dragons feel and more like a dice and dice game. Generally people at my table have gotten lazy about things like this... I look for traps. I search the room. Rolle die.. Done.
When we played 2e we never used the grid... It forced you to do a better job of describing the battle and the environment and also left all of what was going on strictly in your head. One of my big criticisms of the 'mat' is that once i've got a figure on a grid I notice people stop thinking about the world and start playing a wierd game of chess. Suddenly its a board game again instead of a world with limiteless possibilities... Not that you can't avoid it, just a habit I notice at the table...
As far as that raw nostalgia 'feel' I'll admit that while 2e definitely makes me feel more of a tolkeen hearty hardy rustic musty spellbooks, rich mahoganies and pipesmoke feel to it, pathfinder sort of feels like going to a renaissance festival, but you've got so much more flavor material for 2e... There's no elminster in pathfinder. Theres no harpers. There's no drizzt. Thats not to say that things like the kaijitsu clan don't have nice flavor, but it'll be tough for pathfinder characters to have the sort of gravitas that a game thats been around since the 70's has... At least in your head.
My two cents:
I'm in the same situation as LazarX -- I started in 1980 and I have no desire to return to that time. But if you really want to capture the "old school" feeling, my suggestion is to grab a game system that no one is really familiar with and every time you come across a situation where you don't know what to do next, let the GM make something up.
As noted by Adamantine Dragon, "old school" has little to do with the rules system; instead I think it's more about not knowing what will happen next and making stuff up as you go along (IMO).
I find Pathfinder has tons of flavor, just not the same that many experienced when they were younger.
To say that Pathfinder lacks flavor is a complete falsehood.
Right. I'm not saying it lacks flavor. It just has a different flavor. It feels lighter to me. It feels lighter to a lot of people who make forums like 'how do I make pathfinder grittier' and the forum we're in now.
To reiterate one of my main points, it is hard to overstate the importance of the level of lethality in the game back then. In fact the mortality of my main characters was so much of a concern to me back then that it more or less colors every aspect of the game play.
Back then I usually played casters. My two most memorable characters from that period were a wizard and (after "Unearthed Arcana" came out) an Illusionist. Both had a 4 sided hit die, we did not have extra hit points per level, we did not start with max hit points at level 1 and we rolled our stats and played what we rolled, so neither of them had any constitution bonus.
My wizard was so fragile that he actually wore leather armor most of the time. At low levels he only had a few spells anyway, and after casting those spells it didn't matter if he wore armor or not. So he just ate the spell failure chance and hoped for the best. He died a couple of times, but luckily not until we were high enough level to raise him. Of course back then dying and being raised had serious consequences, so even with the possibility of being raised, the prospect of dying was a sufficient motivation for him to cower behind the party and turn invisible at the drop of a hat.
My Illusionist benefitted from being created quite some time after the wizard so I had learned a lot about survival by then, plus he was quite fortunate on his early hit point rolls. Plus illusion spells were particularly good at avoiding damage. But still, one good blow from an enemy two-handed sword, and it would be bye-bye Illusionist.
So my memory of those days is all about the steps we would take to stay alive. We ran away a lot. A LOT. Running away these days is treated like some sort of humiliating admission of incompetence. Back then it was option 2. Option 1 was usually to see if we could provoke the enemy into chasing us so we could set traps. We rarely, if ever, went into combat without an agreed upon retreat plan.
And we left party members behind. Not because we wanted to, but because losing one party member was bad, but losing the whole party was horrible to contemplate. By the time my wizard was level 7 or so, I had so much time and emotion invested in his survival that I would literally tense up and get adrenaline flowing as we entered dark and musty rooms. When we encountered a ghost, wight, mummy or vampire, we would literally sweat. Not our characters, the PLAYERS.
Pathfinder, for all its enjoyment, simply does not engender that sort of complete and utter mortal fear that caused us to sweat blood every time we encountered a major boss.
That's probably what I miss most.
I would suggest that you download OSRIC; it is a free PDF that brings back a lot of that old school feeling. Just like 2nd edition, there are no monks, and the game itself is cleaned up and streamlined.
MA
As far as I can figure, there are two elements to the old school AD&D feel.
The first is adventure design. Dungeon Crawl Classics does a great job of recreating the feel of old school modules like Keep on the Borderlands. This might not be everyone's notion of 'old school' adventures, but it certainly is mine.
The second, and here is where I disagree with some posters, is in the rule set. Pathfinder, with its rules for a vast array of situations which AD&D didn't have (or only had through supplements, which, when taken together made a more robust - but less 'old school' - system), is a modern, rules intensive system. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, but it does represent a significant break with AD&D. A good exercise is to look up old iterations of monsters and spells and see the difference in how they are described. AD&D monsters had few special abilities which were usually written in natural language accompanying large blocks of text on the habits of the monster; Pathfinder gives few details on the monster's non-combat habits and gives a much more complex stat block for combat use.
Oh - there is also the 'dungeon punk' legacy leftover from 3.5; admit it, a lot of the fun of AD&D was the Tolkien/Classic Fantasy influence.
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My opinion on one thing that was lost from 2e to 3.0. Traps, make them terrifying and dangerous again. Don't build traps apprproate to party level, build them to be moments of panic when they activate. Also, don't just put them on important things, pit them in random locations. If your party feels safe just walking forward through a completely empty hallway without having the rogue check first, or sending a decoy, you're not using enough traps.
As for ways to give more 2e feel, most right from the 2e Players guide:
Hard code some class skills. Only the rogue gets and can put ranks into stealth, and disable device. Only the rogue can use perception to locate traps.
The total list of specialist wizard requirements:
Abjurer Human 15 Wis
Conjurer Human or Half Elf 15 Con
Diviner Human, Half Elf, Elf 16 Wis
Enchanter Human, Half Elf, Elf 16 Cha
Illusionist Human, Gnome 16 Dex
Invoker Human 16 Con
Necromancer Human 16 Wis
Transmuter Human or Half Elf 15 Dex
Druids must, in order to level at 12, find one of the other regional Druids (a small group), and challenge and defeat them at hand to hand combat, or magic combat. At 13, the must challenge and overcome an Archdruid (a very small group). At 14, a High Druid (one per region). At 15, the Grand Druid (one worldwide).
Rangers must be good, and lose their abilities like a Paladin if they willingly commit an evil act, until they make the situation right. They cannot own more than they can carry. (Although strangely able to build fotresses and strongholds)
Make Haste age the target by one year. No big deal for the Elf, costly for a Human.
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To reiterate one of my main points, it is hard to overstate the importance of the level of lethality in the game back then. In fact the mortality of my main characters was so much of a concern to me back then that it more or less colors every aspect of the game play.
And to reiterate my response: I don't find that any different today. Our playstyle back then was not all that different from now, at least as far as lethality goes. Maybe the GMs fudged more. Maybe just set up easier encounters.
And you can play hardcore now, if you like. You've got more hp, but enemies can just deal more damage to compensate.
It's a playstyle issue, not an edition issue.
As for running, my experience has usually been that it just gets you cut down from behind instead of in front. At least running once you're in the fight.
I simply cannot disagree more. For so many reasons that I seriously have to wonder if you actually PLAYED back then.
My wizard had ONE HIT POINT at level 1 and DEATH OCCURRED IMMEDIATELY at zero hit points. He literally could have been killed outright by a RAT BITE. There was no "unconscious", not even "unconscious until -10 hit points". You hit zero, you were dead, dead, dead.
And if you DID die, and you were raised, you lost XP, you lost treasure and you lost constitution points, which cost you permanent hit points if you happened to drop to a new con bonus tier.
And "running away" did not mean "panic!" It meant you had TACTICS for running away, which usually involved spells or items that slowed down your pursuers, like caltrops or marbles.
Sorry, I just don't agree with you.
At. All.
When my gaming group first tried the move from 2E to 3rd, the thing that gave me the most heartburn was initiative. I argued at length to keep the rule of rolling initiative every round. I found it gave combat a frantic, random element that could win you the day...or spell doom for the party.
There have been many excellent ideas given here, to capture the feel of "old-school" gaming; and many reasons on both sides as to why or why not. If this is your path, then I would suggest rolling initiative every combat round, in addition to whatever rules and styles you choose to implement.
Heh, even in our oldest old school playing, we only rolled initiative once. It was just too much of a pain to reroll every round.
When my gaming group first tried the move from 2E to 3rd, the thing that gave me the most heartburn was initiative. I argued at length to keep the rule of rolling initiative every round. I found it gave combat a frantic, random element that could win you the day...or spell doom for the party.
There have been many excellent ideas given here, to capture the feel of "old-school" gaming; and many reasons on both sides as to why or why not. If this is your path, then I would suggest rolling initiative every combat round, in addition to whatever rules and styles you choose to implement.
IMHO, unless the DM is assisted by a program to track and roll initiative automatically or you simplify (speed up) combat dramatically, this would be too much of a pain in PF.
I love this thread, and I would like to state that the majority of you have helped me to get the pot boiling on a stew of ideas to emulate AD&D without compromising what I feel is "smoothness" that is the Pathfinder ruleset. Now, I see the sparks of an edition battle beginning here. That was not my intent. Please remember that this thread was posted to help fulfill my little fantasy, not to start a fight.
As others mentioned there are a number of new games out designed to give an "old school" feel but not have the clunky rules of the earliest editions of the game. Pathfinder is a good game, but I would encourage you to check out others systems and see what grabs you the most.
A few that come to mind are:
Hackmaster
Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG
Myth and Magic
Castles and Crusades
All these games are designed to offer a modern gaming experience with an old school feel. You can find them available for purchase as pdfs on sites like drivethrurpg.com, and the books I'm sure can be ordered off of sites like this one and amazon.
I'm a grognard that played since '81 with a long stop in the 90's.
I really think you do NOT want to try and emulate very many of the rules in the old gaming. Most of them were frankly very clunky. What you want is the feel of risk in a dangerous world and the wonder of magic. What I would suggest is:
Abilities, 15 (or even 10) point buy. Or roll 3d6 reroll 1’s.
Slow experience point progression (or even slower than that).
Use CRB only. That has plenty of options to compare to all of 1st and 2nd ed.
Raise dead is very hard to get. Resurrection is nearly impossible. Reincarnation is not quite as difficult to get (but still not easy).
Magic items - Do not allow crafting feats and there are no magic item shops. If the players want something specific that have to investigate and search for that in particular or convince someone to make it for them (and people are difficult to convince) and then they have to retrieve the ingredients to make it work. Mostly the party had to make do with what items they recovered (which were not all that many).
Set up the world so it makes sense not so that it is appropriate for X level of characters. Often we had to run from random monsters or we went to the wrong part of the island and the dinosaurs were killers (anyone remember that?). Party has to know when to run away. Or not go forward in the first place. Total party kills were not uncommon if the party made bad choices.
Make it possible to run away. One of my few big peeves with the current rule sets is that it is almost impossible to evade anything dangerous enough that you would want to evade.
Personally, I find myself really wanting to like the "old school" games, but then when I actually look at them closely I realize that I prefer Pathfinder and 4E. However, if I were to play one of the games I mentioned above it would probably be Hackmaster or Dungeon Crawl Classics.
Dungeon Crawl Classics features some interesting random spell failure mishaps making magic potentially dangerous to everyone. The encouraged character creation involves "the funnel". Each player rolls about a half dozen or so 0 level characters and the big party goes out on an adventure. Most of them get slaughtered, but the survivors achieve 1st level and become potential PCs.
I think some of the arguments in this thread are due to the fact that different people played differently.
For instance, some people are saying that combat was lethal, and that many encounters were tough, deadly, and meant to make the players retreat.
Back in the mid-80s, my experience was the opposite. I generally threw ridiculously easy monsters at the PCs, so that the players would enjoy winning easily and feeling superior.
Twenty years later, when I was running 3rd edition, one of my players (with whom I had also gamed a lot in the 80s and 90s) complained "You keep throwing such tough and deadly encounters at the party! I want an easier campaign!"
(Indeed, that campaign had far more PC fatalities than any other campaign I ever ran.)
So different people will have very different ideas about what the "old days" of RPGs were like.
So if you want to run a "good ol' days" campaign, you should ask yourself what YOUR experiences were back in the day, and ask your players what THEIR idea of "old school" is.
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Weapon speed factors were there to reward quick weapons over high damage ones. Use a dagger and you've a much better chance of striking before the guy with a great axe. Or, perhaps more importantly, before the mage finishes his spell....
Yeah, I got that, but... how the heck did they work? Nowhere in the rules system did it say how to actually USE those numbers that were listed in the table, nor did it say how it interacted with the intiative system, or with the casting time in segments for all the various spells.
I ended up making my own system in an attempt to make it all make sense. But what we had were three completely different systems (spells with segments in casting time, "weapon speed factors" copied from some wargame system, and initiative rolls to decide which *side* went first) that didn't mesh together at *all*. And, yet, the text didn't even seem to notice the fact that there were different systems that didn't mesh together at all.
This is why AD&D/1e was a terrible game. It was a brilliant concept but in implementation was a horrible mishmash that, when poked at, really didn't make sense. It was *impossible* to play without house rules, because you had to decide what to ignore and what to use in order to try to make it somehow make sense.
I never read much AD&D/2e, so I don't know how much it cleaned the mess up, but I know that at its core it was the same system.
3e is what turned the whole thing into a sensible system. I will never go back.
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The problem with recreating the lethality of AD&D is that so much of it comes from "cheap" encounter design. The infamous Tomb of Horrors is, of course, known for making you arbitrarily choose a door, and then killing you instantly without a save if you choose wrong. But even the fondly- remembered Village of Hommlet is full of monsters that, as written, automatically or almost automatically get surprise, and can easily take out one or more characters (it's a 1st level adventure) before the party can act. Now, I'm not saying that's an entirely bad thing--the life of an adventurer is meant to be perilous. But that's just it: in AD&D you play an adventurer, *not* a hero, epic, super, or otherwise. You have to be ok with that going in, or it can get very frustrating very quickly.
The problem with recreating the lethality of AD&D is that so much of it comes from "cheap" encounter design. The infamous Tomb of Horrors is, of course, known for making you arbitrarily choose a door, and then killing you instantly without a save if you choose wrong. But even the fondly- remembered Village of Hommlet is full of monsters that, as written, automatically or almost automatically get surprise, and can easily take out one or more characters (it's a 1st level adventure) before the party can act. Now, I'm not saying that's an entirely bad thing--the life of an adventurer is meant to be perilous. But that's just it: in AD&D you play an adventurer, *not* a hero, epic, super, or otherwise. You have to be ok with that going in, or it can get very frustrating very quickly.
As Aaron says, this kind of thing is subjective. I don't remember what you describe in 2e, but it sounds like your campaigns were much more severe. Its true the OP should figure out what it was about the older systems that made them feel richer and try to bring that back to the table, whether that means finding ways to make combat feel more like a clash than a steamroller, or something as simple as spending more time focusing on the little details that make a world seem rich and flavorful.
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To the OP:
See, the idea here isn't to actually play 2nd Edition nor first. Play Pathfinder RPG, as that is your intention. The old school feel is something even the publishers of old school materials haven't quite figured out. It's not about the rules.
Consider the following:
- You already know how to play.
- Set the rules aside and run the game spontaneously.
- Don't look things up, or bring up rules during the game.
- Let the story flow. Imagine things and make them happen in-the-moment.
- If you want to make a game decision randomly, such as, "Is there a cleric walking down the street," just estimate the % chance there would be one... say 53%, then roll the percentile dice under that amount, and keep the game moving.
- Keep the pace of game moving. Don't wait for players to make all the decisions i.e. have someone walk into the room, an explosion occurs in a building, a carriage chase occurs in the street.
- Keep introducing many things as they enter your mind and you will stay "in the moment". When this happens, the players stay in-the-moment with you, because there's no time for looking things up, only time to roleplay and flow with the story.
- Understand the illusion you create with free will, and never speak of this secret to the players e.g. you control everything, but you always make it seem like they do.
- Keep players distracted by description, story, NPCs, events, happenings all around them. This sparks their imagination, and your quick responses allow you to rivet them into staying in-character, rather than focusing on rules or books.
- The true "feel" can occur at the table regardless of ruleset. You could be playing AD&D or Pathfinder RPG, or GURPS --- it doesn't matter.
Have a basic story outline with you, about the size of a bar napkin:
For example:
I. A swarthy looking pirate is running on foot through the town street and being chased by a demon. The demon encases the pirate in ice or stone, laughs and provides a clue about why he...
I want this as my signature line in every forum or email ever.
Running a game where there's some insane CRs out there will keep things old school. I played 1e as a kid and there were times when "run away!" was by far the best option.
Since I'm writing a sandbox module right now, this is also true of my PF game. It definitely feels more like the games I played in then in comparison to the APs.
The other key is reign in magic item availability and wealth by level. These things need to be earned or sought out, rather than be automatic. Interesting and powerful items are themselves the objects of quests, or are found on an irregular basis in hoards, rather than in shops.
Both these changes up the danger level in a game a fair amount. It's something you have to be comfortable with, but my players kinda like the feeling of desperation and doing stuff creatively, because the magic item fix or the spell the wizard wants to buy and inscribe in their spell book isn't easily available.
I get the magic item bit, or even adding unusual spells to your spell book, but could you elaborate how you would manage the wealth? Where would be a good place to start...say using slow advancement with the party about to hit level 2. Would you give a hard number by merit and see if the PCs hit that amount, or would you give a broad range?
Imagine if a character from each edition met up and discussed their abilities. That's be a funny thing to see.
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Running a game where there's some insane CRs out there will keep things old school. I played 1e as a kid and there were times when "run away!" was by far the best option.
Since I'm writing a sandbox module right now, this is also true of my PF game. It definitely feels more like the games I played in then in comparison to the APs.
The other key is reign in magic item availability and wealth by level. These things need to be earned or sought out, rather than be automatic. Interesting and powerful items are themselves the objects of quests, or are found on an irregular basis in hoards, rather than in shops.
Both these changes up the danger level in a game a fair amount. It's something you have to be comfortable with, but my players kinda like the feeling of desperation and doing stuff creatively, because the magic item fix or the spell the wizard wants to buy and inscribe in their spell book isn't easily available.I get the magic item bit, or even adding unusual spells to your spell book, but could you elaborate how you would manage the wealth? Where would be a good place to start...say using slow advancement with the party about to hit level 2. Would you give a hard number by merit and see if the PCs hit that amount, or would you give a broad range?
Imagine if a character from each edition met up and discussed their abilities. That's be a funny thing to see.
Well, I started with standard wealth by level because the campaign started at 5th. I then simply put enough treasure in the area to get well beyond the appropriate targets, but made some of it a major headache to acquire; a lot has also been overlooked or not found. There's a dragon lair, for instance. But a lot of the magic items are pre-defined (even if I rolled to generate what they were). Most are appropriate to the local history and adventurers, villains, and rulers who lived in the area over the preceding centuries. There's just one artifact, for instance.
But we're talking a region the size of Rhode Island or Delaware, not a vast expanse.