Re: Parties vs. Individual Heroes
Endur said:
Gary,
A lot of the Fantasy novels focused on a single hero (Conan, Tarzan, etc.) or perhaps a hero and a sidekick.
How did you come up with the idea of a whole party of characters adventuring in a dungeon?
Especially since D&D grew out of tabletop wargames, and tabletop wargames tended to be 1 on 1, or 3 vs. 3 types of scenarios. Most tabletop wargames (unless they involved hidden movement) don't have a referee.
Tom
Hi Tom
Fortunately I read in a lot of genres other than fantasy, including the historical war fiction one. Even there, though, crafting a story around a large cast of characters is difficult, and from such a number one or two main protagonists, and possibly an antagonist or two emerge.
In tabletop games, the LGTSA would have teams of players, sometimes as many as six on a side. There was usually one person as unpire or referee, the one who set up the game to be played, although that individual would sometimes play as well. When I ran my later games they were usually the "Man-to-Man" medieval ones, and as pretty common on the tabletop, each player had a command figure. A team of several defenders would plan and cooperate to try and defeat a like team of attackers.
It wasn't much of a leap from that to single "command figures" operating as an adventuring group. Do keep in mind that original D&D had provision for and pretty well assumed that each PC would hire a few men-at-arms--the old tabletop force of soldiery
In another thread someone was wondering how 1st level PCs in the original game survived. Some responses mentioned the "run away" tactic--the one we commonly used. None I read, though, considered the hiring of mercenaries to assist in the encounters. All the early play groups I knew of, those in 1972 and on through 1974 surely did that so as to give their low-level PCs a better survival chance. It worked very well. Yrag and Mordenkainen both began as 1st level, and Rob Kuntz, the main DM for their adventures, was not prone to cutting slack for anyone.
Cheers,
Gary