Jon Peterson posts Mordenkainen in 1974

Look at those stats, talk about a munchkin!

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Ability check rules appeared as early as the first issues of Dragon magazine. So while not in the official books, they were around from pretty much the start.

Interesting. I don't remember ever using them in BESM or 1E, but different folks definitely had different experiences depending on the group. It's not a huge leap to think of them, of course.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Your right, getting editions mixed up as well as online D&D.

Oh lord, tell me about it. I can't keep the editions straight anymore! I still run a pretty house ruled 2E but have slowly adopted a number of 4E and 5Eisms, particularly for movement rules.

BTW, is your online handle from the great villain Yardiff Bey in Brian Daley's Coramonde duology?

 

[Yardiff]

BTW, is your online handle from the great villain Yardiff Bey in Brian Daley's Coramonde duology?

Yes it is, been awhile since someone realized where it came from.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Yes it is, been awhile since someone realized where it came from.

A while back a friend of mine was getting set to run a Dark Tower game using nWoD rules. I played a version of Gil MacDonald who'd gotten lost in time again and ended up back in our world (or some semblance of it). He was living out of his car in New Orleans, hoping to get back to Coramonde and hold onto the fringes of his sanity in the meantime. One of the other PCs was a Vietnamese boat people refugee who was part of the Vietnamese community in New Orleans, although he got sucked into the Dark Tower world at a different time. The third PC was also a Vietnam vet, but he'd been a mechanic and hated his time in the service, unlike Gil, who was clearly a natural soldier. That character had been working as a roady and things happened to him in New Orleans as well. So the party all had the Vietnam War and New Orleans in common. The game didn't last that long due to RL intruding, but it was one of the best things I ever participated in.

Another Brian Daley novel, A Tapestry of Magics, always struck me as a ready-made RPG setting with amazing possibilities to have characters from tons of different backgrounds show up.

Sadly Brian Daley died very young, in the mid '90s. He'd had a long career as a writer but mostly was doing work for hire not under his own name. He also did a lot of work in the Star Wars universe, including the radio adaptations.

For those of you wondering who we're babbling about, here's a link to the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Daley

 

[Yardiff]

I loved Brian's Han Solo trilogy and had hoped that would have been used for the movie, sadly not. Also loved the Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh books.

Dont remember if I've read A Tapestry of Magic, I'll have to hunt up a copy.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Dont remember if I've read A Tapestry of Magic, I'll have to hunt up a copy.

It's really good. What I like about a lot of that pre-"every aspiring author thinks their D&D campaign makes for interesting story material" is that BD wasn't stuck to the conventions of D&D, even unconsciously. I have no idea if he'd played it---probably tried at least---but both the Coramonde duology and Tapestry have a lot of fantasy tropes but are totally unafraid to violate others. Guns? They show up. They're really powerful. They're also limited by logistics. Spells? Powerful but slow and rooted in the person. There's your namesake, a wizard who's also a seriously badass and dangerous fencer. etc.

I also like the fact that the writing tends to be much leaner and less bloated with tons of PoV characters. I'm not 100% sure where the excessive PoV characters thing started, although by the '90s the Wheel of Time and Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series both had tons.

 

[Minicol]

I think a lot of people are forgetting that stat increases via magical items and magical encounters in adventures were pretty common back then. And seeing as how it took FOREVER to get to level 12 or higher, it stands to reason that all of these PCs had many of their stats increased.


Combine that with the fact that higher statt'd PCs tended to live longer, and it's entirely plausible that no cheating was involved.

It did not take forever back then. Maybe one year

people just cheated on a huge basis, at least the ones I know

 

[Yardiff]

Heading out later today to run a West Marches-esque style game using the Citadel of Thunder from Arduin Grimoire.



To add to OP discussion, in the late 70's our GM had various little additions he would add to a PC at character gen, so hitting 18% wasn't hat hard and higher numbers was the norm. But even with high ability score survival wasnt a given.

We used rolled ability score and rolling was done in front of the GM.

 

[AmerginLiath]

My personal experiences would argue strongly that this was not the case. I started playing sometime in the early 80s and Charisma was regularly dumped. If anything, I would point to larger diverse parties as the key element.

Type of parties and type of campaigns was definitely as X-Factor. I suppose the point I was trying to make is that Charisma wasn’t seen as some sort of global dump-stat until much later in the life of D&D. In campaigns where the party didn’t use aid or didn’t count on reaction adjustment, physical skills of the PCs were (as they are now) far more valuable; while I was I was in games that valued Charisma heavily “back in the day,” I was also in games that didn’t (particularly as someone coming late to 1st edition, he younger brother of an early player who’s more along the age lines of 2nd edition folks).

I do remember the fun of playing a 2nd edition Druid — the character whose name I use for this account, actually — and taking advantage of the legacy Charisma requirements and rules to oddly dominate a lot of encounters with calls for reaction adjustments and hiring of outside help that fellow players who came to the game only a few years later simply never thought of because they didn’t have misspent hours of their youth reading Gygax’s DMG!

 

[Von Ether]

Huh. In a weird way, that makes Savage Worlds use of NPC allies very old school. You are even guided to split the NPC per player, not PC in a fight so every one has something to do if a PC is down.