There are things in AD&D I never played with, and simply discarded from the start. Weapon vs. Armor Type, for example, and Weapon Speed.
There are things I played with a bit, but not too much or too long, like the aging rules and training costs. Enough to drop them but not really very long.
And there are things I played with for at least a whole campaign . . . and didn't love.
Psionics is one of those.
Unfrozen Caveman Dice Chucker put up a post about how to roll for psionics in AD&D.
Back in junior high school, I ran a campaing for three friends. They ran a fighter (a samurai, pre-Oriental Adventures), a monk, and a thief-acrobat who eventualy dual-classed to magic-users. The samurai and the thief both rolled successfully for psionics. They rolled up their abilities, and used them a bit. We never got to have any psionic vs. psionic combat, though. They fought a bunch of bullywugs in U2 Danger at Dunwater and massacred the whole bunch with a few Mind Blasts. And promptly stopped using their psionic powers after that.
This was a substantial drop in their combat ability. Having two guys with the ability to toss out Mind Blasts plus use other psionic abilities could have been huge. But they just didn't like them. They didn't use them ever again.
I think that's sufficient for me. No matter how the system looks on paper, the actual players I have that had them didn't find them actually fun. They set them aside rather than use them even when, in later sessions, they were struggling to get by. If I ever do get to run AD&D as a regular thing, psionics won't be part of it for PCs. It's just not worth the complication and they didn't prove enjoyable when we actually had them in play.
Apparently even Gygax himself never bothered with the whole Weapons Vs Armour and Weapon Speed systems.
ReplyDeleteI certainly never encountered it in the wild back in the day, and I played with a lot of different groups.
AD&D was full of awkwardly bolted on subsystems that dramatically affected power/utility (% Str, skills, weapon mastery, weapon/spell speed, multi-attacks vs. scrubs, weapon vs armor, most of Unearthed Arcana) and it was really a cultural crapshoot group to group about which ones were in use.
ReplyDeletePsi, however, was such a huge randomized power jump that most groups refused to use it. It might have been a fun system in an all-psi campaign, but I only ever saw it in the "someone rolled lucky and got a huge weird power boost and it made everyone but the utter munchkins uncomfortable" sense.
I say this as a fan of AD&D - 1st edition didn't really have subsystems bolted on so much as it was almost entirely comprised of subsystems that varied from each other a great deal. It's why even "by the book" games have to make some compromises.
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