Yes, it does. I do beleive some erata or later edition confirrmed that before they came to their senses.

Ah. I feel so good seeing so many sharing pains and gains of good old AD&D.

I think balance as well as common sense is needed to enjoy any game. Thus I do take aim at cRPG's allowing all sorts of caring abilities when in real world it just wouldn't make any sense. Thus as brought up the caring of 3 or 4 full plate mail armor and being able to jump rope like being in nothing but tarzan briefs. But that's me. Within logic and fun I think pen & paper roll playing has an advantage for more fun factor.

I've been really lazy on getting the some of the Gold Box AD&D games here. I really should and go back through my adventures again. The only problem I see is the one with Pool of Radiance going into Curse of the Azure Bonds. PoR only has the 4 major classes while CotAB has more. Thus I like playing Rangers. But no Ranger class in PoR. So if I decide to play my character from PoR I have to wait until I leveled up to the same level before being awarded any of the previous class bonus.
IE: If one played a fighter in PoR and was at, lets say lvl 10, then when changing to the class you wanted in CotAB that same character must reach lvl 10 in order for the fighter bonuses to be awarded. Needless to say I had to go back and forth a lot to Hills Far in order to do so. To some it's no big deal but to those who remember the exp needed to lvl up no my pain.

But still I had a blast on the C64 playing back in the days. But I truly miss the table top days of playing. When I can, Ill post pics of my lead characters I have.

Donkey+Cart... A cheap form of bag of holding... Sorta... Next up is the Handy Haversack. But meh...

By default since you start off level 1 with like 80g, you have to think of 'everything that would fit in your backpack' and that mentality never leaves.

Unless you're going hardcore realistic, yeah it's easy enough to fudge.

Although i know of someone who had a special sack given to everyone got for 'free', which included basically 10 of everything in the equipment section (minus weapons/armor). While it simplifies things, explaining how you are pulling out 100ft of rope from a weightless bag that every adventurer has... doesn't make sense.

Course this is the same player who played a sorceress (who grew up on a farm, had no shoes and was 'dirt poor' as she described, yet had a donkey and cart and like 100g of other equipment) then told us she could make shoes out of some bark...

Thaco... To Hit AC 0... and -10 was a godly AC... :)

Ahh the good old days. When my momma sang us to sleep when i was stressed out...

Actually, what you described is not a good idea for a couple reasons:
1. At the start of CotAB, you are sent into a situation in which you will not be able to train for a while. This means that, if you dual class right away, you will be stuck at level 1 for a while; furthermore, when you do get to level up, the rule that you can't level up more than once is implemented (which I consider to be a bad game design decision in this case), resulting in you losing a lot of XP. This can be extremely frustrating, and I consider it to be bad game design.
2. From what I have read, there is a bug that will prevent you from getting the final half attack when you do reach level 15 in your new class.

A much better option is to retire that character and create a new one on starting CotAB; this avoids both the waste of XP and the bug.I mentioned. Also, it means you have more room to grow in CotAB. You can give the character the same name and stats if you want.

Incidentally, if I do ever getting around to playing these games, I intend to start with SotSB, and I intend to hack my characters to get around the sexist rule about female strength. (Did *any* sane person think that was a good idea?)

I have played computer games where low AC is better, but where -10 AC isn't even that good. Specifically, Bard's Tale 3 and Elminage Gothic come to mind here.

Well those aren't D&D 1&2. The stats of some of the gods are like -8, and normally with a LOT of work you can get to -2. Specific gods might be even lower. So....

I tend to agree. To anchor a person to their character/s, they need to be aware of the PC limits (e.g., their height, their gait, their tolerance for alcohol, etc.), and I have always played with encumbrance. As you said, it is usually enough for the gamer to put the task into their own words — like a Wish spell.
Yes and Yes.

I used to give all players a bag of holding to start an adventure. I also resisted any urge to use rations. Neither added anything to the adventure for me or for the players (or so I believed). One moment battling orcs for our lives, the next sorting out who has to skill roll to light a fire to make sure my iron rations are warm so my encumbrance will drop tomorrow so I can grab an extra gold piece. How exciting!

We used to have a DM who was always stingy with the magic items. Fine in principle, but again, magic is a huge part of the fun of the game. Anyway, in place he would always put a cursed item out there just to F with everyone. Especially the guy who really want a long sword but could only have a short sword (ex.) because he was stingy with character setup as well. Guaranteed the first LS drop was a -1 to hit or some such. And Once we learned he was a d1ck about it, we would simply not take it and he would then claim it was something powerful we could never go back for... Needless to say, he drove many a newbie player out of the hobby. And no, I havent a clue why we went back to him, I guess because we all preferred playing and he was a willing DM.

As a DM I only ever enforced all rules of that sort once, but that only because the the camaing started with the players as survivors of a shipwreck, and survival in a very tough winter climate while trying to find some civilisation was pretty much the whole point of the first 1/3 of the campaign. It was also actually really fun, because it had the players dealing with very different challenges than usual, and also it was outright funny because the guy who was supposed to be the survival expert would botch almost every roll, forcing the rest to get really creative. The "worst tracker ever" thing pretty much became a meme for our group since then.

= Orcs having a cookout.

Somewhere out there is a dungeon master physics nerd who insists on knowing dimensions to calculate how much a gold coin REALLY weighed instead of using the standard. My memory is a bit fuzzy as I stopped after second edition, but I think the standard was 100 coins weighed one pound, regardless of what they were made of. And I thought converting copper to silver to electrum to gold to platinum was headache enough.

Copper = penny
Silver = nickle
Electrum = 50 cent piece
Gold = Susan B.
Platinum = 5 dollar bill.

We had a DM who had issues with math and money so we made it easier for him.

What's interesting is that if you google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=d%26d+coinage

Three of the top 10 results are for bag of holding as well as one of the suggested searches at the bottom.

In first edition I recall them being smart and simply using a gold coin as the unit of measure. Like a long sword weighed 1k GP or some such. Am I wrong on that? It has been a loooong time.

Ahh the memories... this reminds me why I first bought the player handbook I thought that Golden idol with the guy prying out the gem eye was fantastically cool. And even more so after I bought it and realized the game didnt need a board (I was and still am a huge board game guy) to play. And the old days before the internet of trading ten thousand times mimeographed character sheets some guy in Idaho had originally created (likely some dude down the street). The endless recreations to refine the sheet in the book. I swear, I spent more time reading, making odds and ends to help organization, and planning campaigns than I ever spent playing. I have my original 1st edition set of manuals in my will (DM and player guide, monster manual).

Anyone ever play "basic" D&D? That was amusing as well. Frankly, its more and more what they are moving toward with each new edition (admittedly the last I read was 3rd - I dont get half the OotS jokes these days...)

In Third Edition, they simplified the relationship between denominations (and I'm pretty sure this hasn't changed since): each larger denomination coin is worth ten of the one below (and they dropped electrum as a standard coin). So, 1,000 cp = 100 sp = 10 gp = 1 pp.
Or, to put it in drmike's format:

Copper = penny
silver = dime
electrum = (not really a thing, but it would presumably still be a half-dollar if it were)
gold = dollar
platinum = 10 dollars

...Except that, if you compare actual purchasing power, one dollar would actually line up better with the silver piece -- maybe even the copper piece! (According to the 3.5 PhB, 1 sp is about what a common laborer earns per day.)

Also, in 3.5 (and again, probably in later editions), 50 of any coin weigh about 1 pound. Ostensibly, this would mean that coins in generic D&D realms are standardized by weight, not size, and therefore the larger the denomination (and thus the heavier the metal), the smaller the coin.

Depends on the value of the money. A penny a hundred years ago USED to actually be worth something, probably closer to what a dollar is today.

Also most DM's i've played with just drop electrum, only seen it used once...

I do recall there being bits on how thief guilds would shave the edges of gold coins, you need the shavings of like 200-300 coins in order to have enough material to mint a new coin though. Course in those books it also commented on things added to coins in order to identify if they are being shaved, like ribbed edges... some interesting stuff.

I'm reminded of a puzzle in a book, how to identify a fake coin vs a real coin with 7 other coins and do it in 6 steps or something, except when i did calculations you could only do that half the time and you needed 7-8 steps...

BTW, this isn't really related to any of the convos in this thread, but I just felt I should share one of the best impromptu two-stage distractions ever employed in a D&D game for those who haven't seen it. :D