D&D 1E Common House Rules for AD&D?

[Lanefan]

Two things. One related to the thread and another semi-unrelated.

1. You wouldn't happen to have run one continuous game for 30+ years and made the news a few times in recent years, would you?

Nope, not me. Right country, but wrong person.

2. In other threads about old-school gaming you've mentioned not liking player skill as a thing. So how do you handle things that games like AD&D would put under player skill? Ability checks? Non-weapon proficiencies? Something else?

Roll-under ability checks for knowledge stuff, a lot of the time. Puzzle or riddle solving I generally leave up to the players to sort out. Other than that, I do my best to not give players info their characters wouldn't have (and, flip side, try to ensure they get the info their characters would have) and just take it from there.

 

[Emirikol]

Death at negative CON

Bonus spells for wizard intelligence (same as cleric)

We didn't use weapon speed, length, but did oftentimes use AC modifiers by weapon.

20 Critical (double damage), 1 (drop weapon out of reach or can break the weapon to do a critical).

Hero Points (From dragon #118)

Initiative was per side

We never used the Grapple or complex pummeling stuff--in reality this was also an issue with the TOP SECRET hth combat that really got bogged down in terrible game design (even for then!)

Not used: Training

Wildcard wizard/Ill spells: you could do one per level.

Weapon proficiencies weren't really ever use as with most of the stuff from Unearthed ARcana (except spells).

Monk from Dragon magazine

Just prior to the release of 2e, there were a lot of things happening..then with 2e, it all changed again--especially with all those splat books!

 

[Voadam]

Weapon proficiencies weren't really ever use as with most of the stuff from Unearthed ARcana (except spells).

Weapon proficiencies were in the 1e PH.

 

[Emirikol]

Weapon proficiencies were in the 1e PH.

Yea, we just never limited ourselves to just the few weapons.
My sentence needed a period in there. Stupid phone

 

[David Howery]

from what I remember:
max hp at 1st level
ignoring level limits for demi-humans
simplifying initiative to 'both sides roll a D6, highest number means that side goes first'
ignoring all those % chances to write a spell in your spellbook
Actually, when I look at it, a lot of what we did was not so much house rules as just ignoring a lot of things that we didn't want to use...

 

[Mannahnin]

• Max HP at first level.
• Roll three sets (of 4d6 drop lowest) for ability scores.
• Death at -10hp, and no being incapacitated for weeks after being healed. You got to be functional immediately and didn't forget your spells if dropped to zero.
• Crits for double damage on a 20.
• Ignore weapon vs. armor TH adjustments (though we played a lot more 2E than 1E, so this was mostly RAW)
• A flanking/outnumbering rule. We normally used a hex battle mat for combat; every additional adjacent attacker after the first got +1 more TH.
• Eventually, during 2E, we abandoned regular classes almost entirely, in favor of the design your own class rules from the 2E DMG. Our main DM would also substantially expand the options, offering new powers, abilities, or magic items specific to the given campaign or world he was running.
• Around the same time as that last one, we stopped counting XP in the thousands, and started just using the multiplier from the create your own class rules. So you'd need somewhere between 10-20 xp per level.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Custom Initiative - Don't play 1E without it. I sure won't and only tried ONCE.
Custom crit tables - Used to be in a group that was really big on this and I kept making new and different charts for us. I don't use them at all anymore for my own games.
No armor adjustment by weapon - Tried a time or two decades ago, never since.
Custom Monk class - Not that many players/DM's I've gamed with were ever super keen about monks, but I've tinkered with them endlessly for my own 1E/2E games, and everyone's always gone along with it without a strong opinion either way (other than that the original 1E PH class was weaksauce as-written).

Other house rules for AD&D? I've had enough to create their own noticeable gravitational pull. These days I keep my house rules to the barest minimum I can stand as a DM. I now tend to take the attitude that much of 1E may be unsexy in design and WILDLY uneven in execution - but people want 1E "feel" for a reason. That desirable 1E "feel" is rooted fairly inseparably in the very organic and handmade origins of it. You change what you really want to change, of course, but otherwise 1E is the sort of game that everyone takes as it is - warts and all - because that's part of the game experience people are after. If it weren't - they wouldn't want to play AD&D AT ALL.

 

[Mannahnin]

Custom Initiative - Don't play 1E without it. I sure won't and only tried ONCE.

Initiative in 1E is kind of a white whale for me. The system as explained is incoherent, incomplete, and over-complex, but what I can see of it has lots of good bits in it. I've been tinkering off and on with simplifying it/cleaning it up, because I think there's potential in it for the best D&D initiative system yet.

I really like the core of d6 side-based, with ties coming down to speed factors or simultaneous resolution. I really like longest reach getting first strike when closing to melee. I really like the potential for missile attacks or quicker spells to interrupt slower, more powerful spells.

Right now in my 5TD / B/X mashup I go a bit simpler. D6 side-based, with the players able to coordinate and choose their own order on their turn, EXCEPT on a tied initiative, when it's forced descending Dex order. I like this system quite a bit, but at some point I'd like to run a game with a couple more of the 1E elements mixed in.

 

[Reynard]

mixing up dual-classing and multi-classing

I always though dual classing made tons more sense for the long lived demi-human races than humans. "Versatile" humans should have been able to multiclass.

 

[glass]

We ditched level limits, and instead gave humans +1 to any one ability score and the ability to multiclass (with a fairly generous list of allowed combinations). We added dex bonus to initiative (or subtracted - lower was better, right?), and did max hp at first level. Probably some other stuff I am forgetting, it is over 20 years since I last played AD&D.

That was for 2e (with bits and pieces of BECMI brought across from time to time - mostly monsters). I never played 1e.

We also did "dead at -10 hp" ("hovering at death's door"), but I cannot remember if that was a house rule or an official variant we switched on. 2e had a lot of those.

_
glass.