Editing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (section)

==AD&D 1st Edition==
[[Image:AD&D1stprint.jpg|thumb|The original AD&D 1e Players Handbook]]
D&D went all over the place. There were tons of books and finding rules for everything was sometimes a chore. Especially the options that separated race and class, alignments, and finding all the monsters stats [[Old School Roleplaying|could send you through 30 books.]] [[Gary Gygax]] saw fit to begin compiling all of the info into easy to search, themed books. 

===Monster Manual===
He started with the ''Monster Manual'' (1977), going through all of the books he could find and compiling all of the monsters from each into one book that was usable in D&D, alphabetized, with illustrations and in hardback. The book was still usable with D&D so nobody raged at this.

===Player's Handbook===
Next came the ''Players Handbook'' ([[PHB]]) in 1978, which compiled all the races found in Blackmoor and [[Greyhawk]], and all of the classes. It eased up on the default classes for non-humans. It added more options, detail and equipment, and allowed you to create a character that was technically usable in D&D. It was still compatible and there was no [[rage]].

===Armor Class===
The scale went from 10 to -10 on armor class with 10 being the worst and -10 being best, this being a choice made to incorporate the d20 in an approximation of ''Chainmail'''s combat system. Armor class was essentially representative of a bonus to the attacker. Unarmored targets gave a 10 point bonus, Heavily armored targets gave less of a bonus, and super heavily armored (or extremely agile) targets could impose negatives to the attack roll.

===Dungeon Master's Guide===
The meat and potatoes of the game along with all those nifty new rules in the PHB, came in the DMG. Guidelines for creating dungeons, populating them, filling them with treasure, combat matrices for characters and monsters, and wrapped all the stuff that seemed arbitrary in the MM and [[PHB]] up into a solid RPG. 

[[Image:AD&D2ndprint.jpg|thumb|left|A later print with the alternate cover.]]
===Other books, and more===
Soon more books came out for AD&D: ''[[Fiend Folio]]'', ''Deities and Demigods'', ''[[The Manual of the Planes]]'', ''[[Oriental Adventures]]'', ''Unearthed Arcana'', ''Survival Guides'', etc.

===Gameplay===
''Advanced Dungeons & Dragons'' played much like the original D&D game (not to be confused with Basic, which was not fully compatible) which consisted of playing the role of your character, and resolving actions with a chance of failure by using dice. 
Players first create a character using the rules found in the PHB. The Dungeon Master then inserts the characters as appropriate in his campaign, whether homemade or manufactured world or a simple module or one shot adventure.

===History and Longevity===
Depending on how you count, AD&D 1E came out in 1977 or 1979. It lasted to 1989, which means it lived to the ripe old age of 10-12, which is actually pretty old for an RPG (albeit, not one that costs so much, to be fair; other RPGs that offer core in a single volume are usually much cheaper than AD&D, even then). It saw many issues in that time, from being falsely linked to a boy's disappearance in 1979, being linked to a suicide (google Patricia Pulling) and being the centerpiece for the now infamous Chick Tract [[Dark Dungeons]]. Still through it all, TSR saw money come in. When issues arose in the company between Gygax and two other board members, one of the board members sold his stock to an [[Lorraine Williams|ungrateful manager that Gygax had hired]], and rather than ride a ship he thought would sink, Gygax sold his stock to the rapacious she-bitch as well. In 1989, the decision came to publish a new version of AD&D, ostensibly to limit Gygax's royalties.