AD&D Player's Handbook (1st edition)

Well here we are at last - the Player's Handbook.  I've been waiting for this for quite some time.  Herein are so many elements that were but legends to me growing up - monks, assassins, named character levels, and so on.  I'm also eager to see the bridge between the original D&D rules and the 2nd edition rules I knew and loved.  I've remarked before how shocked I was that most all the rules I was familiar with were there from the very beginning in the original rules, if perhaps in a primitive and embryonic form, and I'm fascinated to see what progress was made in this midpoint between them.

Enough talk, let's dive in:

• D&D has often been referred to as "the granddaddy of roleplaying games", but I was amused to see Mike Carr use this very phrase in the introduction - in 1978.
• In reading the preface by Gary Gygax I was struck by a couple of the names in the acknowledgements.  It's of course a list of well-known names from D&D history, like Brian Blume, Rob Kuntz, Jim Ward, and so forth.  One person listed though is Dennis Sustare.  I chuckled because my first thought was, "So that's where the Chariot of Sustare spell came from!"  But I really paused when I saw another name - Skip Williams.  Like, Skip Williams who co-created the 3rd edition rules?  Yep, one and the same.  I had no idea he had such a history with the game.  Can you imagine being an integral part of the game's history over a span of 25 years?
• While most of the details were not new to this book, I was reminded again when reading the section on character attributes how the rules very much had a "the rich get richer" design to them - i.e., characters with exceptional attributes became exponentially better than characters with average attributes.  You got a 10% bonus to experience for having a prime requisite of 16 or better, fighters who rolled an 18 strength got to roll for exceptional strength, priests with high wisdom could cast a lot more spells, etc.  It's such a foreign concept to modern game sensibilities.
• Again this rule is not new, but I can't help but laugh at the conversion between gold pieces and weight.  There are 10 gold pieces per pound.  That means that a gold piece in this fantasy world weighs 1.6 ounces.  That is one heck of a heavy coin.  To put things in perspective, a quarter weighs just about 0.2 ounces.  Not only is that really heavy for a coin, it represents a ludicrous amount of value.  As I write this, one gold piece would be worth close to $2,000, and when you consider that the average character is going to eventually collect hundreds or thousands of gold pieces...
• I've never been a fan of the Bend Bars/Lift Gates mechanic for the strength score.  It leads to ridiculous scenarios like this.
• Speaking of things I don't like, I really have never been a fan of the duality of the class rules between humans and demi-humans.  By that I mean the fact that humans can dual class, have unlimited level advancement, and have access to the "special" classes like paladin, whereas demi-humans have special racial abilities, can multi-class, and have level limits.  It's all so artificial, unrealistic, and poorly motivated to me.  Of course I'm far from the first person to complain about this aspect of D&D rules.
• I was unaware that certain race and class combinations were limited to NPCs only!  For instance, there apparently can be halfling druids, but only as NPCs.
• Being a child of 2nd edition, half-orcs were also an unknown phenomenon to me.  I've never really heard why they were dropped for 2E.  I'll be interested to see if it comes up in Dragon issues around that time.  Indeed, I'll be interested to see to what extent at all 2nd edition changes were discussed in Dragon.  Nowadays gamers just naturally expect to be part of the feedback loop of game design.  When a game has a new version or expansion in the works, we expect to hear details on what's changing, hear justifications as to why those changes are happening, and voice our opinion on those changes.  I'm not sure to what extent these kinds of sensibilities existed in the 80s when 2nd edition came out.  After all, Gary Gygax didn't discuss these 1st edition changes in the pages of The Dragon before it came out.
• Rangers getting magic-user spells at higher levels is also an unknown thing to me, and one I had not heard of before.  And by the way, I'm really getting tired of the term "magic-user" that has been around since the original boxed set.  Was "wizard" really undesirable for some reason?
• Wow, just wow.  So in reading the section on multi-classing, it seems that 1st edition took the opposite tack from 2nd - class restrictions are eliminated instead of combined!  That is, a fighter/cleric can use edged weapons, while a fighter/mage can use armor.  I had never heard of this before, and I can only imagine how much fanboy rage the 2nd edition rules must have generated over this issue when they first came out.
• I appreciate the discussion of hit points and the explanation that a character with 60 hit points cannot literally take ten times as many wounds as a character with 6.  It more represents the ability of higher level characters to mitigate incoming damage that would outright kill a less experienced character.  It still leaves a bit to be desired from a realism standpoint, but the rationalization helps with suspension of disbelief.  2nd edition never bothered to explain this, and indeed hit points have become so ingrained and fundamental a concept to gaming that we no longer even think about or question them, even when modern games stretch the concept to the absurd, where a high level character might literally have thousands of times as many hit points as a low level character.
• I also greatly appreciate the discussion in the money section explaining that the campaign setting is one of hyper-inflation, much like a gold rush era, where gold is super abundant and thus prices are extremely inflated.  It makes the abundance of gold and the ludicrous prices of goods more palatable, whereas again 2nd edition and modern gaming just take this for granted.  Virtually every fantasy game deals in gold pieces, and the ludicrous amounts you collect would make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice in the real world.  It is a testament to the influence of D&D that concepts like hit points and gold pieces are just taken for granted as they are in modern fantasy games, even though they make no sense at first glance without some explanation of the underlying assumptions given here.
• Tenser's Floating Disc first appeared in the Holmes Basic Set, but I appreciate the comment thrown into the spell description here: "[Tenser]...whose ability to locate treasure and his greed to recover every copper found are well known."  Keep in mind that Tenser is an anagram of Ernest, and so Tenser was the character of Gary's son Ernie, who was one of the original playtesters for the game.
• Flame Arrow was introduced in this product, but it is vastly different from the 2nd edition spell that I knew.  Here it is more of an arrow enchantment spell rather than the direct damage spell it was later.  An interesting and rather radical change, considering that the vast majority of spells changed very little over the editions.
• So Spiritwrack...a spell that didn't survive into 2nd edition and thus is new to me, and I think I can see why.  I've always though the purging of demons and devils from 2nd edition was an overreaction to the satanic panic of the 80s, but I can see how content like this might have crossed the line for a few people.
• Mom: "Bobby, is it true that there are demons in this game?"
• Bobby: "Yeah Mom, but they're bad guys that you fight."
• Mom: "Well that's not so bad.  What's this Spiritwrack spell that you cast though?"
• Bobby: "Oh that's just a spell that lets me torture a demon until he submits to my will."
• While Tenser's Floating Disc first appeared in the Holmes Basic Set and introduced Tenser, this product is the one that introduced all of the other Greyhawk personalities we're familiar with in spell names: Bigby, Drawmij, Mordenkainen, Nystul, Otiluke, Otto, and Rary.  These were originally PCs or NPCs of Gary or his friends in their home games (although I'm a little unclear if that's the case for Nystul and Otiluke), and Gary borrowed the names for new spells in this product.  It was only after Gary left that TSR rounded up these names and created the Circle of Eight, so all of the Greyhawk material concerning them has little or nothing to do with the original characters themselves - especially considering Rary was only ever a 3rd level wizard and could never have even cast Rary's Mnemonic Enhancer, let lone be an arch-mage.  He was a character of Brian Blume's, and the joke was that he just wanted to get him to 3rd level so that his title would be "Medium Rary".
• Bards reappear in this book, after having not really been mentioned much since their first appearance in the second-to-last Strategic Review.  They've changed quite a bit since that article, and are a good bit different from the 2nd edition bard I am familiar with.  It seems bards originally learned druidic spells instead of mage spells.  It makes sense, since the original bards were a product of Celtic culture (although long after the age of the druids had ended, however).  Oh, and the whole class is entirely optional at the DM's discretion, since apparently there was some concern about them having too much agency, having the abilities of fighters, thieves, and druids.
• This product is the first to formally give us the full range of nine alignments, introducing neutral good, lawful neutral, chaotic neutral, and neutral evil.  Appendix III consists of nothing but a visual chart showing the various alignments, although I'm not sure why Gygax thought the visual was necessary.  This is immediately followed by a discussion of the known planes, which contains this gem of a sentence: "The parallel universes are not shown, and their existence might or might not be actual."  We get the usual suspects: the prime material, the positive and negative material, the four elemental planes, the ethereal and astral, and finally the outer planes, arranged as follows:
• Seven Heavens (LG)
• Twin Paradises (LNG)
• Elysium (NG)
• Happy Hunting Grounds (CNG)
• Olympus (CG)
• Gladsheim (NCG)
• Limbo (CN)
• Pandemonium (NCE)
• The Abyss (CE)
• Tarterus (CNE)
• Hades (NE)
• Gehenna (LNE)
• The Nine Hells (LE)
• Acheron (NLE)
• Nirvana (LN)
• Arcadia (NLG)
• Note that this ordering is slightly different from the planes Gary first presented in The Dragon #8, and is the ordering they would maintain for the rest of history.  We still don't have a TN plane of Concordant Opposition / Outlands.  Also, the diagram illustrating the outer planes shows each plane having the number of layers below.  I'm recording this for comparison later, to see how much continuity there is in this bit of design:
• Seven Heavens (7)
• Twin Paradises (2)
• Elysium (4)
• Happy Hunting Grounds (3)
• Olympus (3)
• Gladsheim (3)
• Limbo (5)
• Pandemonium (4)
• The Abyss (666)
• Tarterus (6)
• Hades (3)
• Gehenna (4)
• Nine Hells (9)
• Acheron (4)
• Nirvana (1)
• Arcadia (3)

Well that's all.  It took quite a while to get through this book, given how large it is (and given that I'm recording a spell history for D&D, something I don't know that I've mentioned before and which takes a lot of time when reading through the spell lists).  But it was all worth it to read history in context and demystify so many of the game elements I had only heard stories about.  Join me next time as we dive into the very first AD&D module, Tomb of Horrors.