[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft

[Adam J. Thornton]

On Fri, Sep 25, 1998 at 09:54:59PM -0700, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:

[fascinating examples of REALLY major surgery to AD&D snips]

> As another aside (and it may be obvious to people by this point that my
> AD&D campaign literally rewrites the entire rulebook), I have a "classless"
> character available who does not gain levels.

> You do NOT want to know how much of the AD&D rules had to be rewritten to
> accommodate the classless character. Suffice to say it was second only to
> the amount of rewriting necessary to do away with separate to-hit/damage
> rolls and replace them with a single roll.

I'm just a little confused here.

Why are you still playing it as an AD&D game?  You long, long ago passed
the point where the mods to AD&D were far more effort than translating the
characters as best you could into a system that does a lot of what you want
to do "out of the box" and is much easier to modify and keep consistent.
GURPS comes to mind immediately, but Champions or Hero or a variant of
Chaosium BRP would all have been a lot easier to beat into submission than
AD&D.  (Granted, I never played much v2--I understand it's gotten much less
ad-hoc in terms of simple mechanics, and there's no longer an E. Gary Gygax
with the Wandering Hobag Table (honest.  In the back of v1 DMG there's a
table you roll on to see *what kind* of prostitute you've encountered) and
a different type of die roll for any random situation.)

I want to make clear that I'm not criticizing your decision: if you want to
play a heavily-hacked AD&D it's certainly your business.  I'm just trying
to figure out what made the extra effort worth it from your perspective,
when the much lower-effort course would have been to do something else.  If
that payoff is, "my players come over to play AD&D: they want to play
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  If the rules are modified, as long as it's
*called* AD&D, they're happy, but they have no interest in moving to
GURPS," that's the answer I'm looking for.  Or "AD&D works fine for the
majority of my players, and I'm the only person doing really perverse
things (in the sense of 'things AD&D was not designed to do') that make me
have to bend the system." 

This is really a game design issue: what were the decisions that made you
want to stick with AD&D, modifying it greatly to accomodate what you wanted
to do, rather than ditch that set of mechanics and move to a different
system entirely with roughly-converted characters?  More generally, at what
point is it worth it to you to scrap an existing codebase/rule set?

Adam
--
adam at princeton.edu 
"There's a border to somewhere waiting, and a tank full of time." - J. Steinman