Resource Optimization vs. Creative Problem Solving. I’m wondering if I am off base here in thinking that the early D&D versions rely upon player skills and abilities in coming up with solutions to puzzles or problems where the later versions (and here I may be thinking more 3.5 than 4e) rely upon character skills and abilities. Obviously the players still have to use their characters’ skills and abilities.

I don’t see them as being opposite ends on a spectrum, rather noticeable differences between the two games. I think that in general most 4e encounters are more balanced than B/X D&D. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t disregard the point system and make an easier or harder than average encounter in 4e.

“If every encounter gives the players a perfectly balanced challenge, the game can get stale. Once in a while, characters need an encounter that doesn’t significantly tax their resources, or an encounter that makes them seriously scared for their characters’ survival — or even makes them flee.”

While the earliest versions of D&D developed from miniature wargames, the Basic game that found mainstream popularity in the early 80s has a very abstracted system for combat.

I get the feeling you’re trying to debate some point I wasn’t making in this article. Please stay on topic, and perhaps a future post will be the topic you’re looking for.  

OD&D/Holmes/AD&D 1E were aimed at a teen-adult audience; Moldvay and Mentzer very explicitly tried to adapt the game to a child-teen audience. Evaluating the simplified children’s version of the game isn’t terribly useful, you won’t learn anything about the intent of the original game. It’s like reading Encyclopedia Brown, deciding that mysteries were about child detectives solving logic puzzles, instead of reading Dashiell Hammett.

“Here then are some of the differences I’ve noticed between early 80s “Basic” D&D and the newest 4th Edition D&D”

Thanks all the same.

OD&D, Holmes Basic, and First Fantasy Campaign all clearly presented non-human, even monstrous, characters as perfectly acceptable. You didn’t have any special rules for each kind, they were just 1st level characters with whatever powers & limits the GM thought appropriate, but plenty of my games had dryads, centaurs, and satyrs, and in “monster campaigns” ogres, balrogs, trolls, and young dragons.

Dave Arneson created the Cleric to put a brake on Sir Fang the Vampire, run by another player.

Obviously Tunnels & Trolls, Arduin, and Palladium Fantasy made that more explicit, with no clear delineation between “PC race” and “monster race”, but it was present in OD&D.

In the old days (until ’82, ’83?), monster characters were not unusual in D&D games I played in. After AD&D really took over, they almost completely vanished, even from D&D.

AD&D is the dividing line where it became a racist Humans and Demi-Humans Only club, with that diatribe by Gary Gygax in the DMG. 4E is in this way, unusually, a throwback to the original game.