[ozarker]

My dad played AD&D as a kid like you, and introduced it to us when we were young (like your kids). We got our cousins into it and we spent every summer adventuring. When 5e came out we tried it a couple times and really didn’t like it for the reasons you mentioned.

Coming back to D&D as an adult (coworkers play during lunch once a week) has been strange. The new style of play feels rigid. I can understand the standardization to try and create a uniform experience but it feels like a little of that AD&D magic is lost. Also I’m an adult now haha

[tarsinge]

I don't think the rules have changed in spirit (especially in 5e) but the mindset has. Basic D&D was very ridig if you followed the rules (like a video game, with codified turns, see "Sequence of play" in B/X https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1509982170193.pdf). AD&D already had a rule for everything. But the mindset was DM were loosely following the rules apart from character tables and were making their own house rules for everything. Everybody had a different understanding, sometimes were young, and there was no internet to check if it was correct, as long as it was fun to play.

[jghn]

> Everybody had a different understanding, sometimes were young, and there was no internet to check if it was correct, as long as it was fun to play.

I've been realizing more and more how true this was.

I haven't played either D&D or AD&D since the early 90s. At the time the people I played with would laugh at how encyclopedic I was about the rules, source material, etc. But these days I'll go to r/adnd or something like that and see someone talking about a thing from 1ed AD&D and my reaction is "WTF? I had no idea that existed!".

Or people talking about how of course every group played a certain way, and I never played that way in any group.

Which now leaves me always astounded at how much stuff I had no idea existed. To your age point, that was definitely a part of it. I played from about age 8 to late teens. In retrospect, a lot of this stuff was over my head

[5040]

Comparing different versions of an adventure module that has been released for multiple editions can be instructive. When I did this, it seemed to me that each new edition was more explicit than the last, with more precise and simple language, and less evocative prose.

[kaashif]

What do you guys mean specifically when you say AD&D is less sterile?

[SeanLuke]

There's a famous table in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide where, if you came across a prostitute, you could determine what kind of prostitute it was. AD&D was weird and arbitrary and unbalanced and a mess. It was also... more fun to explore.