Why All Modern Fantasy TTRPGs Ride AD&D’s Coat Tails
Most people credit Dungeons & Dragons with launching the RPG hobby, and that’s fairly accurate. But it wasn’t until Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition hit the shelves that the hobby really took a solid shape. OD&D was more of an outline of suggestions for gaming than a game itself; AD&D turned it into something you could actually run, share, and build a campaign around. It gave us structure, depth, and a sense of permanence which I believe came from the years of table experience Gary Gygax had in his basement. The rulebooks weren’t just rulebooks; they were toolkits, libraries, and blueprints for an entirely new kind of face to face storytelling.
Let me repeat that: the AD&D “rulebooks” were not rulebooks. They are references that expanded on and solidified the tabletop RPG experience Gary handed the world.
If you’re playing any RPG today, whether it’s crunchy, narrative, or somewhere in between, you’re walking a street that AD&D 1E paved. Here's ten reasons to illustrate my viewpoint.
AD&D 1E was the first RPG to lock down a full, consistent ruleset. OD&D was a toolkit; AD&D was a system. It brought order to chaos and made the game playable outside your friend’s basement.
It introduced full-blown subsystems for nearly everything. Grappling, aerial combat, psionics, weapon speed… love them or not, they set the tone for what a “complete” RPG looked like.
The books treated rules like reference material. Instead of conversational prose, you got charts, tables, indexes… all designed to be used mid-session, not read cover to cover.
Class design got deeper and more specialized. Rangers, Illusionists, Monks, Assassins… each with their own quirks and rules. Later additions to AD&D, such as the UA, took that point even further. That idea of mechanical identity still drives class design today.
Alignment became a hard-coded mechanic. Nine-point alignment wasn’t just flavor...it shaped class restrictions, spell effects, and party dynamics. Modern morality systems owe it a debt, whether they know it or not.
AD&D tied gods and the planes directly into the rules. Divine intervention, planar travel, alignment-based cosmology… it wasn't just backdrop. The game mechanics expected you to deal with it.
It made setting and rules two sides of the same coin. Greyhawk wasn’t just a map; it was baked into the class abilities, spells, and monsters. That model of lore-meets-rules still defines most major RPGs. Even if Greyhawk isn’t the favored campaign setting today for modern editions of the game, the names of Greyhawk characters still dominate the spell and magic item lists.
Monsters got the full treatment. Not just stats, but habits, lairs, and motivations. The Monster Manual turned creatures into world-building tools, not just hit point bags to be slain for the XP.
It built the first real RPG publishing model. Books, modules, splatbooks are how AD&D created the release pattern that every other company now copies. It was even the first RPG to go hardback… a practical standard in the industry today.
It showed that a game could be both crunchy and wildly imaginative. AD&D didn’t make you choose between tactics and imagination. It gave you both by incorporating elements from mythology and literature which kept the players guessing.
AD&D 1st Edition wasn’t just the next step after OD&D… it was the moment the RPG hobby found its shape. The structure, the depth, the way games are written, sold, and played today all trace back to this product. Every modern RPG owes it something. It wasn’t flawless, but it set the standard and we’re still building on that foundation.
If this kind of deep-dive into the roots of the hobby speaks to you, there’s more where it came from. Subscribe to get essays, lore, design notes, and old-school insights delivered straight to your inbox—crafted for those who still believe the best adventures come with hex maps, random tables, and a little chaos behind the screen.