I am considering getting a new Dungeons & Dragon set, and I am considering getting AD&D, but what really is AD&D? Does it involve more combat compared to 4e? Does it add more classes compared to 4e? Is it more roleplay oriented?
[RPG] What exactly is AD&D?
adnd-1e
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The traditional way of handling PC death in AD&D is for the player to roll up a new, 1st-level character. The bite of death is strong in AD&D, and the intention is that players treat the risks of adventuring very seriously.
However, what is traditional isn't universal—plenty of groups made up their own table rules for how to make a character after an advanced one died. You're well within your rights to say that they start with half their old PC's experience, or one level less than the lowest other party member, or at the average XP of the party minus 1000, or whatever simple or complex variation you can think up.
One of the things to keep in mind while considering how you want to handle this is that mixed-level parties not only work fine in AD&D, but they are expected. The power curve in AD&D is much flatter than in recent editions, making the difference between a 5th-level character and a 1st-level character much less than modern players might assume. With less power divergence, there is less mechanical pressure to ensure that levels are the same—so that should not be something you worry about when deciding how to handle new PCs joining an advanced party. Furthermore, because XP is split evenly among everyone who survives an adventure, any lower-level members of a party will advance slightly faster than normal, since their party will generally be taking on greater challenges—this makes the power difference even less of an issue than it already is.
Basically, history and I give you permission to handle this how you feel is right—there is almost no way you can handle it wrong. If you feel that the organic development of a character from 1st level is important, then you're in agreement with a lot of present and past AD&D gamers, and you should do that.
Try to ignore segments. They're a concept that was mostly introduced to keep track of how long it takes to cast a spell (more on that below), and aren't helpful for the rest of combat.
Instead, concentrate in the actual initiative results. Treat the action of a round as mostly simultaneous, but with the winners of the initiative getting the advantage. So it's not really that the losing side stands still for 30s, it's that they both maneuver, but the side with the initiative simply maneuvered better and got the battle line they wanted.
So in general, just use initiative to decide what order to resolve actions in. You can layer on house rules on this to make it work more how you think it should, but it's not necessary. (One house rule you'll see sometimes is resolving all combatants' movement in initiative order first, and then resolving actions in initiative order, to make the feeling of everyone just standing around go away.)
As for spells, a spellcaster already in mid-spell from an earlier round doesn't act on the initiative number of their side. Segments are counted to find out when the spell finishes, and until it does they are occupied. This often won't matter, as many spells are fast enough to begin and finish before the enemy acts or the round ends, but when the initiative rolls are close, then it matters, and when the spell takes a lot of segments to cast, it matters more. The most important thing segments tell you is: does the magic-user get hit before the spell finishes, disrupting it? and, does the spell take up their next round as well? Segments exist almost entirely as a tool to determine the answer to those two questions.
Best Answer
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is from 1979*. It's not related to Dungeons & Dragons from 2014 (a.k.a D&D 5th edition), except that it's an ancestor of it. Put another way: AD&D is the 1st edition relative to which D&D (2014) is counted as the 5th edition.
The reason it was called “Advanced” back in 1979 is because it was compared to the original game and a simpler version (called “Dungeons & Dragons” and “Basic Dungeons & Dragons”, respectively). The “Advanced” was also tacked onto the front for (ultimately futile) legal reasons having to do with the split between the two creators of the original edition of D&D (now called “OD&D” for clarity, since the naming and numbering of D&D editions is confusing). Relative to those editions from the 70s, yes, AD&D has more options and rules.
How does it compare to current-day D&D? I would say it's roughly the same amount of complexity, actually. Characters are mechanically simpler with fewer moving parts, but the rest of the rules are less unified and therefore somewhat more complicated to learn. In play experience, it's about the same complexity.
Do you want it? Almost certainly not. If you were deliberately looking for an old edition of D&D, then you might be interested in AD&D, but if so you'd already know what AD&D was and you wouldn't be wondering what the “Advanced” in “AD&D” means. For someone looking for “more better” D&D than D&D 5e, AD&D is completely different than what you're assuming its name means.
Why is AD&D still being sold then, if it's ancient? Because lots of people never stopped playing it, or stopped and then returned to that edition. Everyone has a favourite edition of the game (because they're all so different as to be effectively separate games), and WotC clued in a few years ago that they could make decent money by putting AD&D and other previous editions back into print.
* The precise year is debatable actually: the AD&D Monster Manual was 1977, the PHB was 1978, and the DMG was 1979. I'm using 1979 because that's when AD&D was “complete” enough to play as “AD&D”, but a 1977 date would also be perfectly accurate.