| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It was assassins who did not retire, but got retired. And certainly, if you wanted the post, you had to defeat the High Druid, but most of the time (after Unearthed Arcana came out), druids became hierophants and left the High Druid post for one of their 13th level assistants.
Ow... no, that is WAY WAY later, at the tail end of SECOND edition.
Ooooh, the 1/2 transition was the Highly Efficient and Sanitized one. Most notably, Half-orcs (because rape), assassins (because killing and stuff), and monks (because reasons, possibly religion) were suddenly gone. Demons and devils were too, now those monsters were called tanar'ri and baatezu instead (because satanism).
|
The Black cover PH, DMG, and MM, could actually be taken as 2.5 edition
I would disagree with that one - unless you are confusing the black covered skills and options books into the mix? The black covered core books were just text clean up and errata - the most minimal of changes if any, the additional books that came out right after - the black covered spell options, skills and powers series - that was not even 2.5, but more like a 2.9 or even an alt/proto-version of 3rd, since there were the most radical changes/addition to the rules since the game was first published (more than 1st to 2nd changes, and only beaten by the actual rules for 3.0).
The bigchanges were not in the rules, but the policies of TSR at the time. The infamous policy on depicting evil is probably one of the biggest ones. She who must not be named destroyed much,and guess what, the fanatic minority never liked D&D better for it. The fact that someone ever thought they would is astonishing.
I started playing 1e when I was 8 with some older kids. I remember being aghast when they told me how in Basic D&D, elves and dwarves were classes (already nerdraging). My next instant of young nerdrage was the removal of half-orcs from AD&D when 2nd edition came out. My longest running 1e character was a half-orc fighter (already min-maxing to get that strength bonus).
A later 1e book, but one of my favorites, was the Dragonlance Adventures book. That book really wove the characters from the novels into the campaign setting in a way that I don't see done much anymore. While there's a lot of great 3pp Pathfinder campaign settings, many of them aren't supported with novels that interweve together. It's neither good or bad, but the way it was done back then made for a campaign type book that was a good read. Though one thing I never understood about the Dragonlance Adventures book-
Raistlin
17 Int could cast 8th level spells in 1st edition.
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
|
If anything was 1.5e it was Unearthed Arcana. Heck I still think of those as the "new" 1e rules.
PHB druids were capped at 14 forever and had to fight to earn levels 12+. So your max level druid had to constantly be on the lookout for a young upstart who might challenge you - and the challenge could be something like "wild shaped forms, fight to first blood, no spells."
In UA it was "revealed" that each continent/major region had it own 14th level druid, but there only one 15th level guy in the entire world. If your 15th level druid earned a stupidly obscene amount of XP without being deposed(really, it was something like 3 million xp), he could advance to 16th level where all the limited number in the world stuff went away. Presumably astute 14th level guys were steering Mr Grand Druid into dangerous adventures so that he would either a. advance a level quicker or b. die, freeing up the slot to a new guy.
Assassins and monks also had to fight for their top levels. Monks had to start fighting to advance at level 8(3 level 8s in the world, 1 each level above that to max of 17). There was a pregen 16 monk in a high level adventure whose backstory stated that he had earned enough xp to challenge the 17th level guy but respected him too much to steal his position.
Assassins were encouraged to have their rivals and superiors "mysteriously disappear." As long as they were gone you were all good to advance. No formal combat or even warning were necessary.