D&D 1E 5e encounters vs. 1e encounters

[Warpiglet]

Big fan of 1e and 5e in particular. But had a question about encounter building and deadliness.

I am unsure if I am confabulating this...but in the old days we often "winged" encounters. I do not remember a ton about building certain threat levels. I surely can pore through my old tomes but does anyone remember off hand?

Part of the reason I ask this is that we only occasionally lost characters back then. A few times we called it ourselves when we did something stupid (i.e. kindly asked the DM to let the dice lie where they fall vs. finding a hook to get us back...if it seemed too cheap). But I digress.

There are two themes that made me ask: One, people say the new system is really "forgiving" when encounter building rules are used. Second, I just remember having an intuitive feel as a player and DM for AD&D...

Were there specific rules for encounter building? Did more characters die then compared to now?

 

[Jester David]

Big fan of 1e and 5e in particular. But had a question about encounter building and deadliness.

I am unsure if I am confabulating this...but in the old days we often "winged" encounters. I do not remember a ton about building certain threat levels. I surely can pore through my old tomes but does anyone remember off hand?

Part of the reason I ask this is that we only occasionally lost characters back then. A few times we called it ourselves when we did something stupid (i.e. kindly asked the DM to let the dice lie where they fall vs. finding a hook to get us back...if it seemed too cheap). But I digress.

There are two themes that made me ask: One, people say the new system is really "forgiving" when encounter building rules are used. Second, I just remember having an intuitive feel as a player and DM for AD&D...

Were there specific rules for encounter building? Did more characters die then compared to now?

There weren't rules for encounter building in 1e or 2e. Those came with 3e.

I love having guidelines for building encounters. Knowing how tough fights will be by "winging" encounters really requires some idea of how tough PCs are. Some system mastery. But that comes with experience and play. I've tried a few other systems since then without encounter guidelines, and it's always tricky the first few sessions and as you have no idea what's going to be a challenging encounter and what's going to be a cakewalk.
But the encounter building guidelines aren't hard rules that must be obeyed. They're mostly a benchmark for the published adventures. I mostly eyeball encounters in my homegame.

 

[Croesus]

Yes, 1E had encounter building guidelines, though they were basically "Based on the level of the dungeon, roll on this table, put that monster in the room."

As for winging it, it takes time to become comfortable enough with a system to build encounters on the fly. For me, I'd say it took about a year of solid GMing before I reached that point. Which seems about right, as the same thing happened in 1E - my first attempts were lousy, but got better over time.

One thing to consider is that 5E is very swingy, which can make it seem like encounters are grossly unbalanced (either too weak or too strong). Just this past weekend my players explored an old tomb and had only three encounters. Each fight was well within their level range, but my dice were hot and they had trouble in all three fights. In the last fight, in a single round, the mummy whiffed, but its five supporting skeletons all hit, one with a crit. One character was down, the other two were left with single digit hit points (they were all 4th level). Fortunately they had just enough power left to eventually take down the mummy, which ended the fight. They pulled it out by the skin of their teeth, but for a couple rounds, I thought I had a TPK on my hands.

So it's not just about being able to eyeball encounters, it's about recognizing that luck can play an outsized role. All the guidelines in the world won't guarantee an encounter is easy or tough.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Istbor]

Big fan of 1e and 5e in particular. But had a question about encounter building and deadliness.

I am unsure if I am confabulating this...but in the old days we often "winged" encounters. I do not remember a ton about building certain threat levels. I surely can pore through my old tomes but does anyone remember off hand?

Part of the reason I ask this is that we only occasionally lost characters back then. A few times we called it ourselves when we did something stupid (i.e. kindly asked the DM to let the dice lie where they fall vs. finding a hook to get us back...if it seemed too cheap). But I digress.

There are two themes that made me ask: One, people say the new system is really "forgiving" when encounter building rules are used. Second, I just remember having an intuitive feel as a player and DM for AD&D...

Were there specific rules for encounter building? Did more characters die then compared to now?

Unfortunately I have never played 1e. Fortunately, I have never read the encounter building guidelines for 5e as well. I just put what would make sense, into an encounter to challenge the players. Some times, that means a safe, easy fight. Some times, a hard won fight. And a third option is something unexpected.

I kind of live for that. "Let's throw this stuff at these guys and see what happens."

 

[fjw70]

Yes we winged it in 1e. I never DMed 3.x but when I started playing 4e I appreciated the encounter building rules there. They were quick and easy and encounters could be built in your head on the fly. Not all encounters had to be level appropriate but it was nice to know the relative difficulty of the encounters.

For 5e the encounter building system isn't as quick and easy as 4e so I don't use it. I do use the CRs for a rough measurement of difficulty and just wing it. I have been using mostly 1e and BX modules for 5e so most of the encounters are from those adventures. Winging it works fine.

 

[cmad1977]

I don't remember any guidelines really in 1e.
I use the ones for 5e as a good baseline. They aren't perfect but it sure seems like when the PCs hit a 'deadly' fight or two the results are in line with the expectations. Often times either someone's down and the party is in a bit of a desperate situation, or the party has used a ton of resources to beat the scenario.



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[FormerlyHemlock]

There weren't rules for encounter building in 1e or 2e. Those came with 3e.

Sure there were! For example, in 2nd edition, the rules for Troll encounters were contained in the Troll entry of the Monstrous Manual (or equivalent MC):

Terrain: Any land
Frequency: Uncommon
Organization: Group
Activity cycle: Night
Diet: Carnivore
Treasure: Q(D)
Number Appearing: 1-12

You use this data to decide where troll encounters are appropriate (pretty much anywhere uncivilized), what strength they come in (1-12 of them), what objectives they probably have (satisfying ravenous hunger), and what's left over after you kill them (probably a bit of cheap treasure and some mostly-eaten humanoid corpses).

Unfortunately, 5E's MM doesn't have any of this encounter-building data at all so the DM has to either cadge it from AD&D or make it up. 5E does have a different kind of encounter-building rules for using the party's makeup to decide how many trolls there should be, but those rules aren't very good and are ignored by many good DMs including the guy on CriticalRole and apparently even Mike Mearls, the guy who invented them. He just included them in the DMG to satisfy people who insist that they need them.

But the better approach is the old-school approach of just creating the world as it is, and letting the players be the ones who tailor their actions to the situation as appropriate. Having the world tailor itself to the PCs' expected actions is weird and backward.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

As for winging it, it takes time to become comfortable enough with a system to build encounters on the fly. For me, I'd say it took about a year of solid GMing before I reached that point. Which seems about right, as the same thing happened in 1E - my first attempts were lousy, but got better over time.

Note: there's no harm in winging it before then though. My first exposure to 5E was a DM who had no grasp of 5E's encounter-building rules at all--when I got my hands on a copy of the DMG I found that all the fights we were having were ridiculously out of our league even before you add in the custom stuff like permanent HP drain from every necrotic energy attack, some of which went through dungeon walls. (One PC got reduced down to having only 8 HP, maximum, permanently.) We probably never had an encounter that wasn't double-Deadly even before counting custom rules. That didn't stop it from being fun.

It did make vanilla 5E seem pretty weak and anodyne though. That early experience is one of the major reasons why I can't stand to play 5E at low difficulty levels.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Big fan of 1e and 5e in particular. But had a question about encounter building and deadliness.

I am unsure if I am confabulating this...but in the old days we often "winged" encounters. I do not remember a ton about building certain threat levels. I surely can pore through my old tomes but does anyone remember off hand?

Monsters didn't have CR, there were some implications that they had 'levels' but nothing solid. Monster Summoning spells seemed to assign monsters levels 1-9, HD seemed to be equivalent to levels on some er level(npi), and there were encounter tables in the back of the DMG by 'level' (but it wasn't perfectly clear, IDT, whether that was party-level, monster level, or dungeon level - hmm... IIRC it was the last).

But there was nothing resembling the 5e encounter-building guidelines with CR and exp targets and 6-8 encounters per day, and certainly no multiplier for not outnumbering the enemy by enough.

One, people say the new system is really "forgiving" when encounter building rules are used.

Meh. At low level, especially 1st, it can turn as deadly as ever, quite unintentionally. Much beyond that, yeah, it can seem 'too easy,' between PCs getting more powerful and players getting used to making more 'optimal' build, spell, and tactical choices.

Second, I just remember having an intuitive feel as a player and DM for AD&D...

That's how I remember it. I find it works in 5e, too.

Were there specific rules for encounter building? Did more characters die then compared to now?

Definitely not. And, totally depended on the DM.