Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is still the go-to
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| To get started, the PHB is the only one you really need |
So what makes AD&D the right one, four decades and five editions later?
People know it.
This might seem silly---why does it matter what other people know, if they maybe aren't even playing? Turns out it actually helps a lot. If I, or my kids, want to talk about this cool thing that happened in their last adventure, and we're playing Call of Cthulu or something like that, we're likely to end up talking about what the game is, or explaining what Cthulu is, or at least what a role-playing game is---and at that point, we're going to drop Dungeons & Dragons' name because it lets people understand what we're talking about. And we don't want to have to spend 5 to 20 minutes getting to that understanding; we just want to talk about whatever the funny story was.Similarly, if you want to invite a new friend into the game, you want to invite him or her to do something they recognize, not something
On a related note, Dungeons & Dragons is cool today, at least to 4th through 8th graders. Which is very odd, given my own childhood when it definitely wasn't, but everything old is new again, right? Still to be cool, everyone has to at least know what it is; playing some unknown title is... well, unknown.
It isn't too much math.
Don't get me wrong; I like the point-based games that let you design exactly the character abilities and skills that you want. And it was annoying that early editions of AD&D didn't even let a wizard carry a sword---after all, Galdalf had Glamdring, so why not?---or let a cleric shed blood, yes. And the statistician in me doesn't love a d20 scale of linear 5% probability increments, no.But really, none of that matters.
The bookkeeping needed to make a character in a point-based system like GURPS or, even more so, all the fraction-multiplication for Hero System is a serious drag to getting started, and that's exactly when you want no drag whatsoever. By contrast, it's really easy to talk about "an elven wizard" or "a dwarf priest of the god of war and beer" or whatever and people immediately know roughly what they're in for, what the character can do, and have an idea of a personality they might expect of that character. And it's quicker, once a new player decides on such a brief description, to get to a playable character sheet with all the statistics filled in than if you had to agonize over how to spend the last 3 of their 100 character points.
Mind you, I still like those buy-exactly-what-you-want games, and I hope to talk about them and sell them to my kids and their friends. But honestly? You can get close enough with AD&D, and you can get there quicker and easier.
As long as you want the fantasy genre, of course. More on that elsewhere, some other time.
Turns out reading an encyclopedia is fun.
Who knew, right? I mostly mean the Monster Manual and the like, packed full of hundreds of fabulous creatures, whereas the other games have only a few, or focus on "human" (whatever that means in the game) opponents instead of monsters. AD&D's adversaries are just more exciting, and more more, than any other system's.But beyond the monsters, the Dungeon Master's Guide's list of magic items are a close second, and even the Player's Handbook spell list is okay for its own kind of inspirational reading. And the non-core books mix it all together: new monsters, new magic, and great anthropological stories about the beasties... my younger son will re-read those for weeks on end, foregoing any books with, y'know, actual stories and plots and all that stuff your English teachers said was important.
At the end of the day, it's a game, and the point to a game is to have fun. AD&D is by no means perfect, but it's a pretty compelling mixture of easier to start, easier to explain, and more varied in some important ways than the other systems I've tried. Those all have their virtues too, but it's AD&D that's the basic go-to for across-the-board excellence.
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