D&D General Younger Players Telling Us how Old School Gamers Played

[Vaalingrade]

shhhhh us Gen Xers like it that way

Nope.

If I'm going to be blames for killing paper towels and canned tuna, you're getting something too.

 

[Willie the Duck]

*Yes, I know there might have been some people who played like this, but I've never met one in real life and I'm confident they were the exception rather than the rule.

Like many things in TSR-era D&D/AD&D, I've seen plenty of individual groups try it. Many-to-most giving up quickly*, mostly because of convenience challenges tended to dwarf the benefits.
*I've probably seen more name-level keep&army play than real-time worlds.

As to the assumption that this was the standard playstyle-- I seem to recall one guy on Dragonsfoot (years ago) who insisted that anyone who was anyone bitd did this rigorously, and that anything else wasn't playing D&D -- but even there it seemed pretty obviously trolling. Otherwise, my impression is that it was widely seen as a curiosity akin to callers and oar breaking rules and so on.

Personally I find D&D-tube to be insufferable, even for modern games. Its all either click-baity video-game style lists or memes and sketch comedy. Or Actual Plays, but that's a different beast entirely.

This is true, but I feel kinda an issue with Youtube in general. I'm told that the viewership dropoff on older material is huge, so quick, constant content made to keep a recent video up in peoples' feeds is optimal compared to thoughtful, well-researched videos which one only puts out when one has something new and insightful to say. Likewise, comments and views count regardless of whether they are positive or not, so saying something wrong and getting people to do what we're doing (sharing the video amongst ourselves to comment on how it is wrong), and perhaps leaving a comment below it to the same effect benefits the creator. I'm not saying all creators play into this, but there's an incentive to do so, and you are more likely to see the ones who do on your feed.

The place where I've found a rule like this useful is when running a single world with multiple groups of players. You can also run them as parallel universes but in terms of tracking information, if you do something approaching real world time, it gets around a lot of issues that can come up (not every issue though).

There are definitely potential uses for the rule. Potentially why it was there in the first place.

Don't blame the younger people; blame the old dudes screaming at the younger people about how they're not doing it right and then telling them how their table did things as if that was the One True Way.

There's plenty enough blame to go around (along with the point others have made that it's a vocal minority in each group that are problematic). Also blame the general tendency of people trying to create subgroups within fandom and then fight verbal turf wars; and/or trying to seem smart or knowledgeable on the internet as a social cachet.

It should also be mentioned that young people are often parroting what they've been told by people who were there bitd. And amongst those, there is a subset who want to treat a specific subset of how things were played (oftentimes, but not always, focusing on aspects that haven't carried through to more recently produced incarnations of the game) as most common/primary/intended/optimal/etc.

this is what i think you took wrong... I don't think he meant people all over the world I think he meant gary and his friends (and by extension any group of friends)

The certainly did. Or at least there was travel between worlds. Chirine Ba Kal (MAR Barker archivist) has a great story of people buying up iron from Blackmoor and Greyhawk and selling it for gold in iron-poor Tekumel and crashing all 3 economies.

Arguably, it was more diverse than today, in terms of D&D, for a few reasons- (1. ; 2. )

I'd add 3. even though it's still a pain to find people playing not-D&D, there are more options out there.

You know... Gen X actually seems to have gotten away scot-free in the Aging Wars. You don't see anyone hating on them or blaming them for anything.

That would require anyone noticing we exist at all.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think the OSR community would be better off if we embraced our styles of play with much less emphasis on discovery of a forgotten path. It frankly does not matter how things used to be done. We have a cohesive set of principles and fabulous games like Into The Odd and Old School Essentials. No reading of tea leaves are necessary.

My approach is to do what works at the table now, and occasionally go back to see if you threw any babies out with the bathwater over the years. The video in the OP seems like that sort of an approach where he is finding utility in a rule that is a little obscure today

 

[Bedrockgames]

Nope.

If I'm going to be blames for killing paper towels and canned tuna, you're getting something too.

Now I'm curious; what happened to paper towels and canned tuna?

 

[CleverNickName]

Here's what this one Gen-X gamer remembers about the old way of playing:

• Adventure modules cost about as much as a comic book, and you could read the whole thing in an hour and be ready to play it. They were packed with content, too: most were only 30-something pages long, and still managed to include maps, NPCs, and new monsters.
• Rules existed only to settle outcomes...they didn't mandate what was possible or allowable (that was the DM's job.) You didn't consult a checklist of What Is Possible every time your turn came around; you just described what you were trying to do and the DM maybe asked you to roll something.
• The best artwork. I'm talking Easley. Elmore. Caldwell.
• If you had access to a ditto machine or Xerox, you were a literal god among your peers. I worked in the school library, so all of my friends had the snazziest-looking character sheets and staple-bound copies of the Player's Handbook.
• Action economy, bounded accuracy, damage-per-round? Pfffff. If these things even existed back then, absolutely no person I played with ever cared about them. "I attack the orc with my sword" was mechanically identical to "I do a backflip, brandish my sword in midair, slash at the orc's head, and then stick a three-point landing on the other side of the room like a superhero" and nobody cared.
• The bar of entry was incredibly low. Someone who had never even heard of D&D could be ready to play in 20 minutes, and be playing like a seasoned veteran 2 hours later. All the books and dice you needed were sold in a boxed set for $19 at the mall.

Ah, memories...

 

[darjr]

Now I'm curious; what happened to paper towels and canned tuna?

Yea! Nobody told me to hoard em! What ami gonna do?!

I’m fascinated by how the game was played back in the day. Frankly delving into it answers many questions about the early history of the game and why it’s the way it is.

I’m also fascinated with the fact that early in they left out certain things that I think were important for their style of play (I mean almost every one who wrote down an rpg or published one back then). There seems to be an unnoticed assumption about what their audience would have already known, so things didn’t get written down cause they didn’t see it as necessary.

Quickly TSRs D&D audience outgrew the audience they knew or understood or assumed and those other folks had to invent the missing pieces.

Often in winder full completely different ways.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

• The bar of entry was incredibly low. Someone who had never even heard of D&D could be ready to play in 20 minutes, and be playing like a seasoned veteran 2 hours later. All the books and dice you needed were sold in a boxed set for $19 at the mall.

Ah, memories...

The chargen "minigame"* that exists now?

HA! You could create a character in 5 minutes flat.

Do you need a backstory? How's this- "Krag has a sword. Krag likes adventure."

Done and done.



*Minigame is a misnomer- more of a maxigame.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Now I'm curious; what happened to paper towels and canned tuna?

Millennials and/or Gen Z are 'killing' them by not buying them. I've seen the same vague suggestion about ironing boards, canned vegetables (and any canned food combo like fruit cocktail or three-bean salad), mayonnaise, home ownership, and any hobby not screen-related (the recent housing boom and Covid-related resurgence in maker-arts kinda took the wind out of the sails of the last two points).

Pretty much a sub-genre of it being some young person's fault it isn't still 1980, you don't recognize most of top-40 music lists, and no one wants your grandpa's model train set when you move your parents into assisted living.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Millennials and/or Gen Z are 'killing' them by not buying them. I've seen the same vague suggestion about ironing boards, canned vegetables (and any canned food combo like fruit cocktail or three-bean salad), home ownership, and any hobby not screen-related (the recent housing boom and Covid-related resurgence in maker-arts kinda took the wind out of the sails of the last two points).

For all the canned tuna doubters, try tuna canned with olive oil, it will change how you think about canned tuna.

 

[payn]

For all the canned tuna doubters, try tuna canned with olive oil, it will change how you think about canned tuna.

No thanks, just all white albacore in water for me.