TOP 10 things in 1974's Original D&D that SHOCK modern players!

when I've done videos covering DN D I've sometimes gotten comments like this saying stay in your lane to which I say no just because my focus on my channel so far has been Pathfinder second edition doesn't mean that I'm not going to talk about d and d and its history and future Direction because I'm interested and in this video I'll talk about the top 10 things actually 20 things that shocked me as a player of modern tabletop role playing games looking at the original Dungeons and Dragons and people who follow my channel know that I can't keep myself short I couldn't limit myself to 10 so 20 it is I've always been fascinated by The Creation The Evolution the birth of Dungeons and Dragons which not only birth a type of gaming but also arguably the entire idea of fighting Fantastical monsters and a lot of the mechanics like leveling up that come from Dungeons and Dragons that now are the norm in a whole variety of game modes and as we can see from the cover of the original DND D the name role playing game didn't exist it was called rules for fantastic medieval war games campaigns playable with paper and pencil and miniature figures that's a mouthful as I now recover from my coverage of the Pathfinder 2E remaster I decided to look at original D and D partly for leisure but also because I thought viewers of not only my channel but people who enjoy DN generally might enjoy my musings and thoughts on the birth of the Hobby and also what I see in older additions of D and D that are the precursors of what we now see in current DND and Pathfinder I'm indebted to and I refer people who are interested in this overall topic to check out John Peterson's Opus playing at the world where he talks about antecedants to Dungeons and Dragons in the world of gaming and also fantasy and science fiction literature and also I am inspired by the channel DM itall which has excellent videos covering the history of the first few Decades of Dungeons and Dragons I think I can offer a unique perspective being a lawyer in real life as opposed to Fantasy Life a lot of people who would look at the text of original DND might bring modern-day assumptions to it and assume things that are not there and my training allows me to look at the words for what they say and also look at it not in the abstract but as a historian I have a curiosity as to what those words meant being uttered by Gary GX and Dave arneson in 1974 and what it meant to the readers and what exactly was so new about this game to people then and what connected it to what existed in the past first to introduce myself I am Ronald the rules lawyer I am a lawyer who has come to tabletop RPGs late in my life relatively I was born in 1977 and I grew up enthusing over the menser beckme series The Red Box basic d and d and the original core ad and Rule books but I never got to play in person it was only in 20 2010 that I started to actually play Pathfinder first edition I go over this in my bio rap on my channel 2 years later I started running an after school middle school role playing game class my actual play experience has been with what you would call Modern role playing games such as Pathfinder first and second edition starfinder and d and d fifth edition and still I have a huge curiosity I've only played a little of and want to play more of what we would call old school games older editions of DnD rules light games and Indie RPGs if you enjoy what you see join my Discord which is currently Pathfinder second edition Focus but I love talking about other games I hang out there a lot and also support my patreon I don't earn money as a lawyer and the patreon allows me to continue making videos you also get exclusive access to videos and early access to many of my videos okay so the first thing that shocks a modern reader is that Dungeons and Dragons was a war game it was the birth of something else but it still had connective tissue to war gaming of course it called itself a war game on its title also the people who ran the first dungeon campaigns first Dave arneson and then Gary gak ran them as part of consistent worlds it was in addition to fantasy-based war game campaigns with strongholds Waring Thoms and the like in the midst of establishing medieval castles and having Mass battles they would also dungeon delve in Blackmore or Castle greyhawk the rules for DN are not even in DND D itself D and was meant to be an expansion on the chain mail war game and d and d came in a box that was designed to be large enough to hold the chain mail book as well dndd said nothing about initiative morale the structure of a turn even the rules here are for Mass combat where a figure represents 20 people and so in D and D itself we see in the encounter tables that men or humans appear in numbers of 30 to 300 goblins and Cobalts and even larger numbers also a campaign consists of one referee and from four to 50 players that can be handled in any single campaign campaign meant not a single consistent group but rather a consistent world that different play groups could assemble to play part of the story within on a map the recommended referee to player ratio is 1 to 20 and it says that as the campaign goes into full swing it is probable that there will be various groups going every which way and all at different time periods and therefore it was important to keep strict time and to track when different groups went on their adventures in relation to each other original DN was a mishmash of a war game played out on a map with mass battles and smaller parties delving deep into Dungeons and facing the perils within to grab treasure and get more powerful number two monstrous character Rec core this came as a surprise to me when I read it but it says right after describing character classes and the races you could play it said there is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top I.E a player wishing to be a dragon would have to begin as let us say a young one and progress upwards in the usual manner steps being predetermined by the campaign referee and on the opposite facing page it gives us this big chart depending on what kind of creature you are where you would fall on the alignment axis and as you can see men elves dwarves and halflings are only a few of a huge number of possibilities players could be this is further confirmed in The Reincarnation spell it says to use this very same table and the reincarnated character must play as that creature the original authors of DN said be what you want no limitations I imagine this didn't catch on because there wasn't a lot of rule support to make this fun to have you start weaker and then have cool powers to look forward to that was already provided by the core class system next is Magic weapons were accidentally nerfed it seems remember the core combat rules for DND were not contained in DND D you were supposed to refer to chain mail and chain mail had a combat system that had different variants to it and the rules for one-on-one combat had you roll 2d6 to Det tournament success if you attacked with a dagger and attacked someone with no armor you rolled two D6 and you had to get a six or higher against plate armor had to be a 12 so very unlikely there was additionally a chart for attacking Fantastical creatures use the same system 2d6 regular men could not participate in this combat you had to be a hero superhero or wizard but as you can guess a plus one from a magical weapon is very powerful when you're rolling 2 D6 as a as opposed to Rolling just a flat D20 the probability of 2d6 is on a bell curve and getting a plus one on that bell curve is a huge Boon anything above a plus one is a truly legendary weapon that's the likes of Xcalibur and other super swords and accordingly in dnd's Magic tables plus two swords are exceedingly rare plus three even more so there's only a 7% chance that any particular magic sword is higher than plus one however D and D also introduced the alternative combat system the system that actually caught on with referees and players this is what we are familiar with you roll a 20-sided die and it becoming more difficult the better the armor class of the target however a plus1 magic sword in this context is much less powerful and impactful and exciting so when people say oh a plus one weapon me not that exciting nowadays it's partly because its effect has been much reduced from the very powerful effect in the days of dn's Origins when tables played with either one of these systems and as an aside as a kid in the 80s I grew up with a dungeon board game which actually was a precursor to DN D I just thought it was really cool to see that its combat system which involved rolling a 2d6 and hitting a target number and that being dependent on your class had its origins in chain mail also in that game similarly plus two magic swords were exceedingly rare so it's effectively the prezero edition of DnD D the minus one edition the dungeon board game dungeon with an exclamation point still exists today for people who want to enjoy this uh piece of History the number four thing that is shocking to the modern player is that you were literally an average person at first level in DN when you determine your six ability scores you roll them in order and you roll 3d6 so as you can tell from this example you're just as likely to be below average in things as you were to be above average a level one fighting man which was the name of the fighter class then had the fighting capability of man plus one while magic users and clerics were one man at first level this makes sense within the chain mail combat system when you did Mass combat if you had 20 men go against 10 Orcs you would chuck 20 d6s for the the men and 10 d6s for the Orcs And you would score kills based on the number of sixes you rolled normally now what this man plus one means mechanically in the chain mail system I actually kind of don't know like if it meant an extra die why didn't you just say two men me just one of many things that were not really clear in chain mail and original DND but it's clear at level one you are just a regular person in combat and in fact when you leveled up as a fighter you pretty much double in your fighting Power which is a big boost by the way in case you're wondering Heroes refer to special characters that count as four men in the chain mail fighting rules and the opposite side would need to score four hits in order to take down the hero which many referees probably extrapolated to Two Men and three men at second and third level fighter okay number five fall damage was Lethal then now original D and D you died at zero hit points unlike modern editions I'm talking about the scale of damage compared to hit points it's interesting to me because the formula for calculating fall damage is unchanged from 50 years ago you take 1d6 damage for every 10 ft you fall however in original DND D and this is extrapolated from a couple of places in the rule books falling 1 in they use the scale of a typical war game to denote 10 ft every 1 in meant you rolled one six-sided di for damage and because the number of hit points you had was determined by Rolling a number of dice in accord with what you your class advancement chart said a fourth level fighting man or hero would have four dice to determine their not hit points but accumulative hits as it was called then and so falling 40 ft could be incredibly fatal anyway this is just interesting in retrospect and the fact and to me and the fact that this formula just hasn't changed uh for some reason over many years okay number six stats were not very important your strength dexterity intelligence Constitution Charisma and wisdom did not have much effect in game terms this is the list of effects given in od and D having a high strength did not make it more likely you would hit your target it did not mean you would do more damage having a high dexterity did not mean you would be harder to hit the main effect of a high ability score was that it allowed you to recruit experience points more quickly or less quickly this meant that your character success depends depended Less on their rolled scores and more on player skill which calls for a different approach to the game and kind of a different kind of game period than what many modern tabletop role playing games call for and expect now more importance is given to these scores in the first supplement to Dungeons and Dragons called greyhawk which is about a year later but this is the original game in contrast your charisma was perhaps your most important ability score charisma allowed you to potentially recruit a large number of hirelings to serve and follow your character and to be clear we're not talking about hiring mercenaries anyone with a low Charisma can purchase those we're talking about having followers who are also fighting men magic users and clerics given how fast and deadly combat at this time was using the mass combat system the number of hits the enemy scored was the number of deaths you had given that having the ability to have followers was very important and we'll remember the encounter table from earlier having you encountering possibly hundreds of enemies as you can see from number one this was a war game as well as a dungeon game and because morale was a thing your charisma also made it much less likely for them to refuse to follow orders in combat I hope I made my case that Charisma was the most important stat in the original game number eight everyone was a rogue the Rogue class did not exist yet you only had three classes in original D and D derived from these entries from chain mail you had the heroes superheroes and wizards which later became the fighting men magic users and then the addition of cleric the cleric was some of fighting men and some of magic users they couldn't even cast spells until second level they had a different spell list that was more limited than the magic users list but they had healing spells so they had a role to fill clerics also had the crucial turn un dead ability but non-existent here was what modern players would call a rogue then called a thief which came in the first supplement greyhawk one year later the thief class would codify the likelihood you would have of listening to doors climbing walls finding traps disabling traps but in the original game these were all things you talked through with your referee and it didn't matter whether you had the skills or not number nine all classes had the same hit points and did the same damage the whole variety of dice that D and D players nowadays are used to of D4 through D20 was not the norm it did list the different kinds of dice but you had many more six-sided dice which was the only type of D you needed in chain mail if I'm not mistaken of course it's not a surprise that six-sided dice were probably much easier to get in 1974 than these other kinds but yes no matter what your class was you had a number of dice that you you rolled and in the books it did not even specify six-sided dice here because it was just assumed dice by default had six sides but no matter what your class was you rolled six-sided dice to determine your hit points now you had a little Advantage as a fighting man at level one and you Advanced more quickly so my statement's not 100% true but compared to the modern game it's a huge shock also very interesting I can see people reading this language at the time as calling for you to roll your hit points every time you level up I wonder how many actually did that that had to be clarified later on meanwhile all weapons did a die of damage a dagger did a just as much damage as a two-handed sword by default and it was up for the referee to come up with how to adjudicate the advantages of two-handed sword over other weapons now of course the book is assuming you have chain mail and chain mail does have a man-to-man melee table giving different chances to hit different types of armor however this was to determine whether you you scored a hit or a kill not to inflict damage conversely every monster did a die of damage with some exceptions like the Giants being able to score two dice of damage and other very powerful Fantastical creatures and of course if you're using the mass combat rules in chain mail you'll just be chucking a number of d6s depending on your character's combat power scoring hits on a six with exceptions as we can see here when you have two different classes of human or humanoid fighting each other so I found this completely fascinating because it gives context and an explanation for the term hit dice to measure the strength of a creature in later versions of DnD it was literally the number of dice you rolled to hit enemies in an overall measure of your power and durability now Grayhawk again the first supplement a year later would change these things one could actually say original D and was still in development and greyhawk was the first full iteration of original DND there's a good argument for that but I'm only looking at the original books right now okay number 10 elves swung both ways now some people may think in original D and D your race could be your class you could be the dwarf class that actually comes later in a different evolutionary Branch with basic Dungeons and Dragons here being a dwarf you had to be a fighting man same thing with halflings which were called Hobbits in the original printings for the token estat told TSR to stop doing that elves meanwhile could swing both ways they could be a fighting man or a magic user but not both at the same time they got to choose from Adventure to Adventure so they'll wake up that morning and say ah today I'm going to be a fighting man or a magic user that day and while a magic user they did have the benefit of wearing while it says magic armor but I'm assuming readers then assumed any kind of armor not just magic magical armor this is also the origin of multiclassing the very first instance and there are no rules here for splitting your experience points between the two classes it was just another instance of elves being better than everyone else in every way number 11 dungeons discriminated against you in Dungeons and Dragons there are these weird rules contained in the third book it says that doors generally cannot be opened easily you must force them open and score a one or a two on a six-sided die in order to do so and you could have multiple people attempt to do so meanwhile this disallows you from being ready to fight when you reveal what's on the other side meanwhile these doors will automatically close despite the difficulty in opening them apparently they've been waited to do so in this dungeon and they will also automatically open for Monsters who don't have to go through the same physics Works differently for Monsters basically even if characters want to wedge them open with a spike so that they don't have to open it again there's a one- third chance that that Spike will slip and the door will shut so doors become another enemy you deal with in the dungeon similarly it says that parties must have light sources if they don't have infra Vision this of course will give you away to monsters however monsters all of them all of them are assumed to have permanent infr Vision as long as they are not serving some character so every monster including those you would not expect to have infra Vision or dark vision will get it and the moment they serve a character maybe with a charm spell they stop getting that ability um it's clear that the game is defying Symmetry and making the rules of the world change uh in order to force characters to Fumble around in the dark I can see the design choice but I thought it was hilarious number 12 there was time pressure pressure when exploring a dungeon this is also on the same lines of creating a certain tension and experience that the designers wanted you to have when delving through the dungeon There are codified rules for movement every 10 minutes you make two moves for a fully armored character which has a speed of 60 ft you travel 120 ft every 10 minutes which is quite slow and this is assuming of course you are being very careful searching for traps and every hour you must spend one turn motionless resting and to actually look for secret doors in a wall every 10t section of wall takes a full turn the spike in the punch is the fact that wandering monsters are rolled every turn this is more time pressure than we see even in later old school editions that have you roll every half hour or every hour this is every 10 minutes and a roll of six indicates a Wandering monster appears these rules combine to to make delving into the dungeon perilous time is against you and delving deeper into the dungeon also extends the time you will encounter Danger on your way out a dynamic that I remember from many 1980s computer role playing games kind of cool in my opinion okay number 13 magic users accessed all spells many later editions of DnD limit the magic user to to what spells they can find inscribe in their spell book but there's no language about spell books in this game here's the language on Scrolls again no mention here of copying a scroll to your Spellbook it's merely a consumable item the writing disappears when you cast it so a magic user at first level has access to spells like sleep and charm person which are quite powerful in this game now Gary GX would start laying down the law in greyhawk a year later and limit the number of spells that you can learn per spell level and also make it quite likely that you will not be able to learn the spell that you want I'm guessing that there was some early Marshall Caster debates in 1974 and a desire to re in Magic users with greyhawk and also give some Buffs to Fighters with the strength table anyway that's my uh somewhat uninformed uh opinion number 14 languages were weird there is the common language that we are used to uh in the original game that most humans it says will know it is assumed that this is spoken throughout the continent and compared to how languages have developed in Real History this is actually kind of a more liberal uh way to deal with language it breaks down language barriers however it says by most humans and so one could read this as that elves dwarves and halflings fall in this next sentence it says all other creatures can speak their own language although only 20% also know the common one now there is some later language suggesting that humans include elves dwarves and gnomes but many people will miss that and I'm also going to guess that many referees and tables also just ignore this rule I mean that would be pretty impractical but this is what's written but also you're supposed to overcome these language barriers with alignment languages now that's a thing which makes the linguist in me shudder the idea that everyone who is on one side of a metaphysical category uh somehow are able to communicate with each other even neutrality has its own language if you were neutral aligned you would be able to speak with Orcs dads and Giants it even goes so far as saying that creatures can recognize an opposing language and will attack alignment was important in other ways intelligent swords had alignments and artifacts had were either lawful or chaotic no neutral artifacts and if you were of the opposite alignment you likely would die just touching it so as you can see alignment figured very prominently in the fantasy world that they were creating and I imagine this is rooted in some of the sword and sorcery fiction that Gary GX was steeped in but to Modern players it it's plainly just hard to imagine to me for me the problem is that it's hard to imagine how this actually could function and how a society could work this way the idea that different creatures of different species would not even consider aligning with each other because they're on different parts of this alignment scale or be perfectly able to understand others and probably get along even if they were a tribe of murderous Orcs very peculiar okay number 15 lost class features now DN was supposed to be run together with chain mail which had the actual combat rules and among those rules is this fantasy reference table that includes a column of special abilities where each letter denotes special abilities of that creature and here we see that Heroes and superheroes the antecedants to the Fighting Man and wizards are included and they have special abilities we see that superheroes have the ability to detect hidden invisible enemies we get proof of this in volume 2 where it says that Pixies are generally invisible but certain creatures like dragons and highlevel Fighters will be aware of their presence this was the original fighter they're able to see invisible creatures they're that good also we see that elves have the ability to be invisible just like halflings can of course they're not as good as elves halflings are limited to brush or Woods Wizards also have the ability to see in the dark and can raise the morale of troops and force morale checks on the enemy just like like Heroes and superheroes I thought this was just fascinating to see some features that made sense in a mass war game fall away but actually existed and were possibly implemented by some tables because chain mail was the basis for the rules in Dungeons and Dragons next we cover a few spells that were surprising to me uh looking back at uh I grew up with the basic d and d red box and a D and D first edition and I was surprised to see how damn powerful person was basically they come completely under your influence until it's dispelled it lasts forever and this is a first level spell this is akin to the domination spell I would argue that only appears in later books at a much higher level and hold person is not a paralysis spell either it was similar to charm person it has a limited duration but it affects one to four persons similarly the Sleep spell seem to call for a SA saving throw it is later known as the I win spell in later editions old school players may be surprised by this but here's the Sleep description now it doesn't say it calls for no saving throw it says something kind of ambiguous it says this spell always affects up to the number of creatures determined by the dice however I think one reading this in context and having only the original books this gets clarified in greyhawk a year later when Gary gak says no no you can't make a saving throw but looking of these original books every spell allows a saving throw and this would be quite powerful if it didn't allow one and one could read the sentence is simply saying it must affect this number of creatures including possibly members of your party but yeah I thought that was interesting to read in its original form okay number 18 teleport teleport uh presents some obvious challenges for running a campaign it trivializes long distances and the dungeon master needs to be ready to account for the possibility that the players May teleport somewhere to one or more locations well original D and D had a way to handle that and that was death so if you did not have certain knowledge of the destination there was a 75% chance you would die also it's not clear from this spell that you can affect more than one person beside the Caster but even if you had more familiarity with the location there was a chance you would teleport low as an in the ground and probably instantly die or high and we know from earlier that fall damage can be fatal 10 to 100 ft will likely kill a ninth level magic user who had 6 plus one hit dice even a careful study of the location has a 1% chance of catastrophe so it was interesting to me to see this old school approach to limiting what players can do with their spells okay number 19 dead was dead now this may not be a surprise uh many people know that you died at zero hit points and you did not have a lot of hit points it was a very fatal game my point here is that raised dead was a Capstone spell for clerics as you can see it's a fifth level spell in original DND just as it is in current DND however there are only five spell levels it therefore made sense for raised dead to be a fifth level spell one can't imagine a more powerful healing spell than raising someone from the dead and it was appropriately placed at fifth level this is before the D2 system and the expectation that top level was level 20 no the peak of ability you could reach was when you attained fifth level spells which for clerics interestingly enough was attained at seventh level but yeah there's no Breath of Life spell the basically dead was dead by the way something interesting about the rais dead spell you simply had to point your finger it was kind of instantaneous back then however the low Constitution would mean that you might not recover here's a Constitution part of the table from earlier if you had an average Constitution there was a 60 to 90% chance you would survive and it got worse as your Constitution was lower dead was dead number 20 progress was largely via magic items now someone who played at the time I would love to hear from you but this is what I'm gathering from what I'm reading yes of course you could gain much power by leveling up as a fighting man or magic user or cleric however they were going to die and everyone kind of knew it and at the same time your magic items could be passed on to a relative it said the referee may allow this but I imagine most tables did this you would make sure that your magic items would pass on to another character and some of those items were quite powerful WS had 100 charges and a wand of fireballs could do 66 damage on a fireball with a single charge greatly increasing the power of whatever magic user would have it that new character would start at the lowest level of the class they opt for but if they have a wand of fireballs they're golden now people who have played role playing games in the ' 80s may remember a game called BST tale where the game came with a very powerful fireh horn in your inventory of your default party this totally reminded me of that but what struck me about this was that the over the course of the campaign and the course of many Dead characters your progress as a player was kind of via your magic items now there's a very popular Rog light game called darkest dungeon where your characters were kind of disposable and you maintained a stable of characters you decided with each dungeon Expedition which characters you could take along inevitably death would meet one of your characters but you would generally make progress overall because you were always improving the infrastructure of the town that your Ventures are Bas in it just struck me that progression in the game in original DND seemed to be through magic items knowing the power of magic items to imbalance a game they did put a rule in original DND that many magical items will not survive fire or lightning when the bearer was killed they had to make a saving throw to survive and if they were not on this list of specific items the item would automatically be destroyed it was interesting to see this as I think a decision to balance the game and not let magic items imbalance the game and we're going to see in later years Gary gaks trying to push back against characters getting too powerful so that's it I hope you've enjoyed this tour of History if you enjoyed the video or have any uh suggestions of future videos definitely comment I wouldn't mind doing more videos of this nature I'm fascinated by the entire history of DN and the hobby not just the original game and I would love to be able to do some more videos on this but I don't know if there's interest one possible topic is looking at how the Marshall Caster balance was handled in older editions of DnD D another is uh looking at the transition from war game to a role playing game I'm interested in looking at the evolution from a war game to something else both in the details but also stepping back and looking at the overall scope so let me know if any of that interests you and yeah I have been Ronald the rules lawyer if you haven't yet join my Discord where we talk well mostly Pathfinder 2E that's been the main focus of my channel so far but we also talk about other additions and other gaming outside of tabletop role playing games and also support my patreon I don't earn money as a lawyer I am able to make these videos because of the support I get through there you get exclusive access to videos including me gming D and YouTubers through Pathfinder 2E and also Early Access to many videos so that's it I hope you've enjoyed the video I'll see you next time begin [Music] he

Channel: The Rules Lawyer

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Keywords: rules lawyer, rpg, dnd, d&d, pathfinder, pathfinder 2e, pf2, pf2e

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Length: 35min 58sec (2158 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2023