A Different Way to Look at the AD&D Hardcovers

Yesterday on my YouTube Channel, I published a video about the "Mid-1980s Shift" in Advanced D&D 1st Edition. Its received a lot of great and insightful comments, and it's very telling that the differences in opinion largely are grouped around people who were playing AD&D before those books were published, players who started at the time those four books hit the shelves, and players who began playing with Advanced D&D 2nd Edition.

As I was working on the video, I slowly began to realize that where before I used to talk about AD&D (1E) as two broadly and vaguely defined categories of pre-UA and post-UA (sometimes calling the latter "1.5" which seems to be a fairly common term among the old school community), there were actually more nuances across the product line that illustrate what I'm now going to call the Four Phases of Advanced D&D (again, limited to 1st Edition). 

I don't claim to have invented anything novel here and it's possible that others have discussed the game in this manner, although I haven't seen anything online to match this. What I found is that past the original three books, early hardcovers expanded the game in a very different way from the later hardcovers, so if one were to use all of the published material, then AD&D in the late 1980s was a very different game from that of the late 1970s, even before 2nd Edition arrived. 

For me, these Four Phases became a useful model to think about the evolution of AD&D from 1977 to 1988. 

PHASE 1: BUILDING THE GAME ENGINE

This phase consists only of the original three AD&D books: 1977's Monster Manual, 1978's Players Handbook, and 1979's Dungeon Masters Guide. It's here where the procedures, core assumptions about the campaign, play structure, and the "engine" that runs that game are established. 

Rather than being concerned with defining highly specialized and individualized characters, this phase focuses on things like: 

• Campaign procedures
• Exploration 
• Logistics
• Combat
• Resource management
• Rulings
• Open-ended play

There is a lot of material dedicated to explaining concepts like dungeon turns, wandering monsters, reaction rolls, time tracking, training and leveling costs, hirelings, the use of treasure for managing experience points, and also on player ingenuity over codified abilities. 

Ultimately, these three books are about "How does an Advanced D&D campaign actually function?" instead of "How does each character mechanically express the goals of the player in the campaign?"

PHASE 2: EXPANDING THE WORLD

Phase 2 consists of Deities & Demigods, the Fiend Folio, and the Monster Manual II. These books expanded Advanced D&D outward, but did not fundamentally change how the game rules actually worked. The "engine" stayed the same. 

These three books expanded AD&D instead by adding new: 

• Monsters
• Lore
• Mythology
• Encounter possibilities
• Content
• Campaign material

There were some limited rules, yes, such as the expanded ability scores (from 19 to 25, with the associated bonuses for each) but that was just an extrapolation from the 3-18 range we'd seen, and mostly did not really apply to player characters (although I'm sure a lot of folks tried to figure out a way for their characters to attain ability scores that high). Some of the monsters had new powers we hadn't seen before, but those were again just building off of material that had already been presented. Overall, these books presented more things to use, not new changes to the game rules.

Even the Fiend Folio, the "strangest" of the early AD&D books, is strange only via its tone. It stills operates on the same rules assumptions established in the earlier core three rulebooks. 

PHASE 3: EXPANDING PLAYER OPTIONS AND RULES 

This is where we see the game change pretty dramatically. The four books included in Phase 3 - Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures, the Dungeoneers Survival Guide, and the Wilderness Survival Guide - all add increasing complexity and changes.

It's in Phase 3 where we see rules for codifying interactions, specialized character types, additional mechanical subsystems, using mechanics to define character expertise, and expanding the types of in-game situations that the rules are expected to handle. 

Unearthed Arcana adds things like weapon specialization, characters based on in-setting social classes (the Cavalier and Barbarian), expanded races and class options for the races, cantrips, an entirely new ability score (Comeliness) and overall a stronger character differentiation. The Thief-Acrobat split class involves creating new rules for things like tight-rope walking, jumping, and tumbling; all things that prior to this would have been handled by DM adjudication. 

The classes in this book are much more mechanically complex and involve whole suites of level-based abilities beyond just better hit points, saves, and attack progression. Someone mentioned to me after watching the video that the description for the Cavalier class in Unearthed Arcana uses up more page count than the Fighter, Paladin, and Ranger from the Players Handbook combined. That might be a bit of a stretch, but not by much.  

Oriental Adventures debuts concepts like tracking honor and family/ancestry, new martial arts rules, social mechanics, differentiation of characters based on setting and background, and codified expertise via the introduction of non-weapon proficiencies. While most of these were optional and/or supplemental, many of these ideas, particularly non-weapon proficiencies, are going to become a fundamental core part of the game from this point forward. 

The two Survival Guides start shifting AD&D from "just a game" to the more simulationist school of game design. While articles had been written in Dragon magazine from fans demanding more "realism" in the game, it was these two books that really set the tone for needing to have specific and detailed rules for things like environmental systems, underground movement, survival procedures, terrain mechanics, and specialized interactions for all different kinds of environments. 

The rules in these two books specifically attempt to model specific situations and situations with game mechanics versus allowing DM rulings. 

 With Phase 3, we begin seeing the focus of the game shifting from "What do you want to do?" to "What abilities and powers does your character have to deal with this situation?" 

PHASE 4: SETTING AND IDENTITY

In Phase 4, consisting of Manual of the Planes, Dragonlance Adventures, and Greyhawk Adventures, we see the late 1E era increasingly tying mechanics and character identity to the setting and world structure, and idea that was originally explored briefly in Oriental Adventures. The focus is more and more about the campaign setting's identity, world-specific assumptions, lore-driven mechanics, cosmology, and game rules and play defined by the setting itself. 

Manual of the Planes almost acts like an extension of the two Survival Guides... in fact, one could refer to it partially as a Planer Survival Guide. In Dragonlance Adventures, new mechanics are presented that are closely tied to the setting's overall narrative, whereas in Greyhawk Adventures, the book is more about presenting lore, factions, and deities instead of a broad rules expansion. 

These three books really seem to presage the eventual shift we'll see in 2nd Edition Advanced D&D with settings-driven play and more and more specialized campaign experiences.  

CONCLUSION

 I found this framework to be useful when crafting the outline for my video to explain the changes that occurred in AD&D, little by little, but when added up created a very big difference at the end of the edition's life. It's a way to understand why AD&D from different years can feel, perhaps surprisingly, very different despite technically being the same edition. 

It's a gradual change through supplements and hardcover releases, not a single abrupt change announced from TSR. But, many of these changes very much impact later game assumptions that are still around even with the current (2024) edition of D&D. 

What do you all think of this framework? Does it hold up? Do you find it useful? Let me know in the comments!

• Hanging: Home office (laptop)
• Drinking: Coffee (black, no sugar)
• Listening: "Rollins in Holland" by Sonny Rollins (RIP to the saxophone great, who passed away at the age of 95 two days ago on May 25th). I'm listening to the 2020 Record Store Day release on vinyl, but you can stream it on Spotify here)