Quote:
Originally Posted by Rob Doupe
But at the time TSR published the Monster Manual, dungeon bashing was not a subset of roleplaying - it was the default style for the great majority of players. It's the other styles that were subsets, and small ones at that. This is why we're seeing such strong criticism of Lev's reviews; not because he dares to give AD&D a bad review, but because he refuses to recognize that the style of play he prefers was not supported by TSR's D&D material on purpose, not because of incompetence. He judges AD&D a failure because it wasn't the sort of game he wanted it to be. As others have noted, that's poor criticism.
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Not only that, but AD&D 1e becomes much more the game he wanted it to be, as long as you look at the totality. The description of most monsters in the MM is bare bones with little setting-specific detail, allowing DMs to write their own settings and scenarios where the rules remain the same (so players and their characters can move from one game to another) while the published modules, and later, fully worked settings, provided all the roleplaying information for that product.
Lev liked the Demons and Devils and I think that's revealing - because TSR envisaged those creatures as being common to all the settings. The Abyss or the Nine Hells would be the same in Greyhawk as in Forgotten Realms. In fact these other planes would allow characters to travel between worlds to provide a rationale for moving between campaign settings (or different homebrew games).
If you look at early Dragon magazines you also see that quite a few of the readers letters were about conflicts arising from taking "My 7th level ranger" from one game to another. They were envisaging a kind of gaming multiverse where you built your character up across a variety of adventures with different DMs but the bare bones of the game remained consistent. That gets increasingly compromised with AD&D2 and nowadays I imagine few people play like that.
But it is worth remembering that AD&D 1e was able to support Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance and if you were to fork out for the core books, a setting and a run of modules from that setting you would have most of the things that that Lev seems to be demanding of the core rulebooks. In the meantime, where other games often concentrated monsters, magic, setting, player and DM rules in a single book, AD&D split this all up among several books, making it more expensive but at the same time much broader in its range. No other game at the time had as many spells and monsters to choose from, or such a wide range of detailed magic items, etc etc.
Incidentally to people saying "Why don't you review it if you disagree so strongly?" the answer is - yes, good idea. But to do a proper playtest review I would need to put a group together for the purpose. In the meantime why should people take a vow of silence?