I believe the general idea with 1e was that "official is official." But we just ignored that and went with what we liked.

Personally, my core 1e is the PH and the DMG. I take what I like from the monster books. I don't exclude D&DG, but I also don't get much use out of it. I cherry pick from UA: with the exception of spells, most of my cherry picks are from the DM section, rather than the players' section. I pretty much ignore WSG and DSG and the setting hardcovers. I also pretty much ignore Manual of the Planes, preferring to do my own take on that.

Yeah, one purpose of 1e was to have a "tournament standard" official rule set which appealed to the wargamer crowd/purpose they thought was important. Personally I think that was limiting but that is where they came from and I have the benefit of hindsight and it shaped their view of gaming.

1e was a game that worked- but I ignored half the DMG even to make it work in a way I could understand- no psionic, no weapon vs armour- we were kids & didn't have time for that stuff. We played the PHB as canon, added what we could from the DMG (for the first few years we had no idea what the hell an attack matrix from the back of the book was, we were just winging it & assumed you needed 18 str & +4 weapons by the time you got to name level). We added in stuff from basic & expert that worked too.

The gaming public had different expectations from game system in those days.

Anyway to OP, I tend to think the '80s had a flowering of badly designed and over complicated simulationist rulesets, but the '90s was more the era of adventure design nadir, with terrible railroading, metaplot, and PCs-as-bystanders commonplace.

There's plenty of complexity for complexity's sake in 1e, Champions, and GURPS. So that whole issue was in full swing by 1980.

Quote from: S'mon;1011159Anyway to OP, I tend to think the '80s had a flowering of badly designed and over complicated simulationist rulesets, but the '90s was more the era of adventure design nadir, with terrible railroading, metaplot, and PCs-as-bystanders commonplace.

Well remembered. Coincidently, I think this dark age of adventure design covered the exact period I mentioned in the OP, from mid/late 80s to late 90s. I remember some Dragonlance and Shadowrun advice where the GM is instructed to not let players deviate from the plot, and if the players insist, then "stop the game and ha e a conversation" with them.

About D&D3e and 4e, they also don't do anything for me because I don't like the goals they set out to reach. But the fact they have clear goals and do reach them effectively, is something lots of games from 80s/90s can't say about em.

Quote from: Itachi;1011169But the fact they have clear goals and do reach them effectively, is something lots of games from 80s/90s can't say about em.

There were a ton of games that were basically just character generation + combat + task resolution (maybe!), with no answer to "so what do we do?" I rem buying the d20 Fading Suns conversion and it made no attempt at all to advise what the PCs were supposed to be doing.

Justin Alexander's discussion of 'incomplete game structures' was dead on, IMO.

Dungeons & Dragons originally didn't have much more than mechanical resolution systems, and tables of statistics and measures needed for same.  Somehow many of us figured out all sorts of answers to "so what do we do?", dungeon crawling being just one of them.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1011178Dungeons & Dragons originally didn't have much more than mechanical resolution systems, and tables of statistics and measures needed for same.  Somehow many of us figured out all sorts of answers to "so what do we do?", dungeon crawling being just one of them.

Bollocks. Old D&D is the poster child for a well directed game, with its explicit structures esp dungeon adventures - go in dungeon, get treasure, get XP, repeat. Conversely it lacked a task resolution system!

And yet we did so much more with it than just endless dungeon crawls.  Many of the things we did were not even hinted at in the rules.  Bollocks indeed!

As for the worst rules the hobby has ver produced, just look at the absolute drek the current decade has produced and continues to produce.

Quote from: S'mon;1011170There were a ton of games that were basically just character generation + combat + task resolution (maybe!), with no answer to "so what do we do?" I rem buying the d20 Fading Suns conversion and it made no attempt at all to advise what the PCs were supposed to be doing.

But D&D3/4 are combat-oriented games, no? At least that's the impression I had from the couple games I played and by reading the corebooks. 4e is even explicit about it. Contrast that with, say, Shadowrun, which in theory is a mission/heist game, but in practice the rules make combat more than 50% of it (my god, I remember the endless combat turns with dread).

And that's the problem of those late 80s/90s games in my view. Whatever the central themes or premises supposedly were, combat made up more than half the rules and intended play experience. And this combat was usually envisioned through a physics simulation lens that most of times had nothing to do with those initial premises. You had some exceptions like Over the Edge and Everway, sure, but those were exceptions.

QuoteJustin Alexander's discussion of 'incomplete game structures' was dead on, IMO

Thanks for pointing this. Just read it, and yeah, it's a superb analysis.

Guy plays some trendy wrong games in his youth. Foolishly blames an entire decade of the game industry for his mistake. Later he finds other trendy games he likes better in a different decade and praises entire industry in response. Waste of time YouTube video at eleven.

Quote from: Bren;1011190Guy plays some trendy wrong games in his youth. Foolishly blames an entire decade of the game industry for his mistake. Later he finds other trendy games he likes better in a different decade and praises entire industry in response. Waste of time YouTube video at eleven.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1995[/ATTACH]

Quote from: Itachi;1010937AD&D 2nd edition. Twilight 2000. Rifts. Ars Magica. Shadowrun. Kult. Deadlands. World of Synnibar, Cyborg Commando, etc.

All games from late 80s to mid 90s. All games where complexity for complexity's sake, slow gameplay, and opaque goals were the norm. Could we argue this was the period with the biggest amount of poorly designed games? Specially in contrast to the periods that came immediately before (70s-80s) and after (2000s-now) ? Can someone positively constrast those rules to the kinds of, say... Runequest and OD&D, or the recent entries of OSR and PbtA?

I am going to start by addressing the premise that I think underlies this, rather than any specifics. That is 'when was the Golden Age/Dark Age of ____ (rpgs/comics/music/movies/etc.)?'

This is not unlike a discussion I've seen a dozen or more times related to music. Usually with the 70s being considered the dark ages and the 60s considered the golden era. This usually involves references to Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys, or the likes for the 60s and disco for the 70s. It conveniently ignores all sorts of amazing work in prog rock, new wave, hard rock, or even good old fashioned general rock (of the Tom Petty ilk) from the 70s, or that the 60s have some amazingly bad/bland hits (ex. of the top 5 longest running #1 songs of 1969, two of them--the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar" and the 5th Dimension's "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In"-- are novelty gimmicks/hits from a musical).

This is really just the same thing. You are selectively remembering the bad stuff that occurred in the late-80s-through-90s, and not the stuff that happened at other times.

Mind you, there are functional distinctions between the eras. The 2000s saw a whole bunch of the 'I want to become a game publisher' energy that otherwise would have gone into bad games and expressed it in the 3rd-party D20 supplement market and into the retroclone/OSR project market (the truly bad/forgettable parts of which are, well, forgotten). The 70s to early 80s was the beginning of the movement, and like the beginning of the movie industry or rock and roll, we really never even heard of much of the bad first attempts at entering the market, because it never found distribution. Sure, we've all heard the story of Ken St. Andre saying 'I can do the same thing, but my way,' putting his Tunnels and Trolls booth up at conventions, and making it work, but we haven't heard of Joe Schmoe and his Caverns and Catoblepas game that he tried to sell during the same era. That said, that era did have it's fair share of abject failures, overly complex games (anyone ever play Aftermath? Whew!), and so on that we do know about.

Likewise, no I don't think the arbitrary complexity is specifically bad about that era. Like I mentioned, Aftermath is from before then and has truly pointless complexity (I remember skills based on character starting age, which is determined with a X+2D3 roll, I believe). But frankly, so are Runequest, Palladium, MERP, and 1e AD&D (which absolutely has arbitrary complexity, we just generally like the complexity it has).  

So my general point is no, there is nothing specifically special about that era, either in terms of its' failures or in their nature. Only in your memory thereof.  

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1010981I don't remember things being the way the OP described. I think there was some wonky GM advice floating around at the time, but the mechanics of the games themselves were fine. Some games were complex but some were fairly straight forward (and 2E was pretty much the same core system as 1E---and the expansion stuff was all optional and more GM centered than the later 3E expansions). And you had some unusual games like TORG. I think in terms of mechanics at least the late 80s and 90s had variety. The early 2000s was the d20 boom. There was other stuff going on, but the shelves were filled with d20 games (which could get pretty complex at times).

2e is not the same as 1e, but there isn't anything about it that is specifically... anything really. Both are could be seen as attempts to make OD&D more fleshed out, for good or ill. But honestly, if the ruleset that is 2e was actually the first one and the ruleset that is 1e had actually come out second and was called second edition, I think everything would be roughly the same (with lots of people fondly remembering the 1e of that universe). 2e, I feel gets a bunch of grief mostly because 1) it was an attempt to "fix" 1e, which a lot of people feel emotional ownership of and resent someone suggesting it needing fixing (despite it being an attempt to "fix" oD&D), and 2) despite 1e listing everything as official and marketing it as required and 2e saying that everything is optional, for some reason all of 1e's bad supplements 'don't count' while 2e as a whole has to take the blame for bad things in Complete Book of Elves or Player's Options books, etc.

As to the wonky GM advice floating around at the time, what specifically are you thinking of?

Quote from: Willie the Duck;10112042e is not the same as 1e, but there isn't anything about it that is specifically... anything really. Both are could be seen as attempts to make OD&D more fleshed out, for good or ill. But honestly, if the ruleset that is 2e was actually the first one and the ruleset that is 1e had actually come out second and was called second edition, I think everything would be roughly the same (with lots of people fondly remembering the 1e of that universe). 2e, I feel gets a bunch of grief mostly because 1) it was an attempt to "fix" 1e, which a lot of people feel emotional ownership of and resent someone suggesting it needing fixing (despite it being an attempt to "fix" oD&D), and 2) despite 1e listing everything as official and marketing it as required and 2e saying that everything is optional, for some reason all of 1e's bad supplements 'don't count' while 2e as a whole has to take the blame for bad things in Complete Book of Elves or Player's Options books, etc.

As to the wonky GM advice floating around at the time, what specifically are you thinking of?

I'd say mechanically, 2E and 1E were pretty close together, particularly compared the difference between those two editions and later editions of the game. Not saying they are identical. There are important differences. But you could easily run a 1E module with 2E (which we did all the time) and you could easily port in things like the Monk to 1E (which again, we did).