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

[Oofta]

All I recall from my very first game of D&D was we faced zombies

Nah, that was just the shuffling, old, and dried out husks groaning above our head as we played in the basement. Also known as our parents that were younger than I am now.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

As @Umbran said, communication channels weren't what they were today. And as you mention, it didn't help that there was definitely some mixed messaging. You could read one passage or editorial from Gary Gygax in Dragon saying that you should make the game your own and another saying that unless you played AD&D precisely as it was written, you weren't playing AD&D.

Different groups were anarchic, sure, but I'm not sure the disorganization of the DMG was that big a factor.

Far bigger, I think, was Gygax telling DMs to "make the game their own" and DMs running with that idea; and thus was born the Kitbashers' Guild. (that Gygax went back on this almost as soon as he wrote it is irrelevant)

1e was the Age of Houserules.

WotC editions in general have been far more closed-system than anything TSR did, and also harder (though not impossible) to kitbash.

Absolutely. That was one of the bad things about the old days - we frequently existed in relative isolation. Other than when players in my group wanted to run games themselves and the kid that introduced me to gaming in the first place, I don't think I sat down at another DM's table until 1990 or 1991, at a gaming convention.

Certainly I think there’s value in being exposed to different ways of playing - be that different editions, different game systems, or even just different DMs with very different approaches than they’re used to.

My brother and I got in so much trouble when Gary showed up. Sure, he brought a nice Bordeaux with him, but he didn't take his shoes off and he smoked indoors.

Not so Umbran. I was there. Gary used to come to our homes and make sure we were playing in the approved manner.

 

[Mad_Jack]

The rules were just a starting point and some things, like having time pass in game like the real world, were just looked at as oddities and ignored.

Honestly, it wasn't really til the end of the 2nd Ed. era and the start of 3rd that, for myself and most of the people I personally played with, the official rules became more than just a basic framework to support "Roll dice and make **** up". During the 1st Ed. days, if there wasn't an actual chart in the book for a particular rule I probably wasn't using that rule, and I routinely ignored weapon speeds, damage vs. armor types, class level limits by race, and at least a couple other things that seemed like they were getting in the way of just having fun playing the game.

As someone still in my forties (barely, lol) I'm just fascinated that there are people with graying hair like this YouTuber who were not alive when I was playing 1E and Basic D&D, lol.

I'm 50 years old. I learned to play when I was eight. I used to tell people I played with, "I have dice older than you."
Now I talk to the teenagers playing 5E and tell them, "I have dice older than your parents."

 

[payn]

Honestly, it wasn't really til the end of the 2nd Ed. era and the start of 3rd that, for myself and most of the people I personally played with, the official rules became more than just a basic framework to support "Roll dice and make **** up". During the 1st Ed. days, if there wasn't an actual chart in the book for a particular rule I probably wasn't using that rule, and I routinely ignored weapon speeds, damage vs. armor types, class level limits by race, and at least a couple other things that seemed like they were getting in the way of just having fun playing the game.




I'm 50 years old. I learned to play when I was eight. I used to tell people I played with, "I have dice older than you."
Now I talk to the teenagers playing 5E and tell them, "I have dice older than your parents."

Sounds about right for rise of the RPGA and importance of consistent play.

 

[Charlaquin]

OK, but the premise RIGHT AT THE START, like 0:00 of the video is that there's some 'unknown rule' that "explains the old school style of play."

I mean, it was unknown to him and probably most of his audience. Maybe it’s old hat to you, but a lot of newer players have no idea such a rule ever existed.

It isn't posited like "there's this particular rule in D&D that you can abide by which does X" instead it is posited as some sort of rosetta stone to explain it. The first issue is, as one of my posts in this thread already explains, his interpretation of the 'rule' (Volume 3, Page 35) is inaccurate and overgeneralized, let alone likely to have even worked, let alone be rigorously adhered to, in actual practice. Yes, if your character is COMPLETELY IDLE, Gary is suggesting that time flow for that PC as it would in the real world. Now, D&D doesn't say too much else about time, but AD&D speaks about tracking it systematically and precisely. So in that game (which many people don't call old school at all) yes, there might be an implication as to which PCs are present at a certain place and time (say to form a party).

Obviously old school play isn’t just one thing. Different people play in different ways, so no, this rule or guideline or whatever you want to call it is not some Rosetta Stone to old-school play. But it is pretty much completely incompatible with modern play. So, discovering this rule may be huge in helping a new player understand that the game was not always played as it is now. Did this guy jump to a few incorrect conclusions? Sure. I still don’t think it sounds like the way he described “old school play” was really wrong, just far less prevalent than he assumed. We can’t simultaneously say both that old school play was diverse and that the style of play he describes isn’t old-school play.

I don't see how that is very significant, and I would bet my life's savings that such a rule was fundamentally retrospective. That is if your PC went to his house at the end of last session, so this rule might apply, then assuming you DIDN'T at today's session state that you rejoined the other PCs (who, say, adventured on Tuesday and thus are just now arriving at the town gate) then sure, "a week passes for him" (and presumably you've elected to play some other character). Should the player choose to state that the character got up on Tuesday and met the other PCs at the gate, well, then he obviously didn't sit at home! LOL. I mean, I can't literally tell you this is how Gary and Co played at any given point in time, but I can tell you that, from a 1975 D&Der's perspective, that would be how it pretty much always played out.

Maybe. I can’t really comment on that. I can say that there’s a certain contingent of OSR play today to which such timekeeping is actually important. Perhaps part of this guy’s mistake is conflating modern OSR play with actual old-school play.

The video then, at around 3:00 starts telling us HOW PEOPLE PLAYED in the 1970s. Again, I cannot say who did what with any authority, but I played a LOT of D&D back then with various people. Were there games that had nothing but a dungeon and some thin backdrop? Yeah, I guess so, but note that the very book the guy quotes is titled "The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures" and interestingly the rule on page 35 actually has 2 separate categories, Dungeon and Underworld (though I am unsure as to what the distinction is intended to be). While 'Town Adventures' are not really discussed as a possibility in D&D that I recall, they certainly were a significant type as well. Heck, I need not go further than pointing out that the JG product "City State of the Invincible Overlord" and its sister product "Wilderlands of High Fantasy" are specifically designed to provide ready made material for non-dungeon adventuring, and they sold really well (for 1970s RPG supplements at least). What I'm saying is, the guy in the video IS saying people played a certain way in the 1970s, and the way he describes is, at best, a distorted view of the actual situation that I can attest to. Beyond that, its entirely inaccurate of him to say we didn't know about the "rule" on Page 35, or the contents of the (much debated I may add) section on time keeping in the 1e DMG. People knew all about it, certainly the competent DMs I was around knew the 1e DMG inside and out! Heck I can probably still quote sections from memory 40 years later. We really didn't care what EGG said about anything.

I think people are objecting pretty hard to his phrasing of “people didn’t build worlds, they built dungeons” when I think what he was trying (perhaps clumsily) to express was, as @pemerton so eloquently put it earlier, that in some old-school modes of play, “the setting exists as a vehicle for (or underpinning of) location-based adventuring. The setting is not an end in itself, or an object of exploration.”

I will say, there were quite a few Holmes or later Red Box players who were kids who might have played sort of like what the video is talking about. We had a club for instance where you could just bring a character sheet and join a party, usually. Mostly that was just playing TSR modules, and I'm sure many kids that had Basic played that sort of game. I'm unconvinced there's much theoretically to say about that sort of play, as "rocks fall, you're dead!" was also probably a pretty frequent refrain at that level play if you get my drift. Anyone that was really playing a campaign, like what is depicted in Stranger Things, they were not playing something resembling what the video is hypothesizing. At best its conclusions must thus be considered rather dubious! It seems to mix several styles and views about play incoherently, AT BEST.

I won’t argue with that. He does seem to conflate different elements of different styles of play into one nebulous idea of “old-school play” that doesn’t accurately describe how many people played at all, let alone most. But I don’t get the impression that the point of the video was ever to educate people on how the game was played in “ye olden dayes.” Rather, he was sharing excitement about this type of location-focused exploratory play that this rule had made him consider for the first time, and in doing so may have jumped to some dubious conclusions.

 

[Charlaquin]

So, when you look at it that way, you see that PART of what video guy is saying KINDA makes sense. However, it makes a LOT more sense from the standpoint of a single DM running many groups on different days, with PCs potentially exchanging between parties, going off on their own, etc. In point of fact, as I understand it, Gary and a couple of the other participants in his group DID 'co-DM' to a degree, so that different people DMed for various people on different days in the same campaign world. I assume they had to assiduously exchange notes somehow if the potential arose for cross over between these sessions, but I also suspect they almost always were present as players in the sessions they didn't run. I just think that there's a pretty large amount of subtle difference between the way the video puts it and how the game was designed to play.

This paragraph here is, I think, exactly what Video Guy is trying (perhaps clumsily) to describe.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Ok. So, would we all agree that there were many different ways people played, whenever “the before times” was? And if so, is it that controversial to say that some people played like he describes? And if so, is it not understandable that his mind would be blown by realizing this? And if so, would it not be forgivable that he might have gotten a little overexcited about this realization and perhaps unwittingly exaggerated its presence in sharing that excitement with his audience of mostly young, relatively inexperienced players?

I think the problem is that he's not likely to be describing ANY one example of actual 1970s D&D play. For example in the 1977-1980 time frame I played a lot at a game club that had, probably 200 regulars. A lot of what went on there was wargaming, but there was also a lot of RPG play. When it came to D&D there were campaigns, which were generally fairly regular weekly affairs with a fixed DM and MOSTLY consistent set of players. In those games the DM normally kept the character sheets between sessions! How they accounted time was up to them, and if they ran multiple parties within their campaign they might have used some of the Page 35 (or later DMG) guidelines on how to manage time, or not! I know a couple games there did have co-DMs, I don't know how they handled things, but those were people that were showing up at the club most days of the week, hardcore D&D geeks with (the one I recall anyway, a thin guy named 'Bill') a propensity to not shower often enough, lol! Again, not sure how they handled it, but the games Bill ran for us didn't overtly stress this kind of stuff.

The same goes for his other statements. Sure, my first campaign consisted of some ruins and a dungeon (just geomorphs that came with Holmes Basic mostly). Even then I made a map of the region, and that map quickly evolved all the way out to a whole world, which the PCs started to wander across pretty quickly. So I don't really recognize the whole "its just a dungeon" thing that much. It is probably true that a lot of early '80s play was just jumping from one TSR module to the next with some thin perfunctory "you meet in a bar" scenes and such thrown in. I guess maybe that qualifies as what the video is discussing, but that was hardly a campaign at all, we didn't call them such! Certainly those lacked all measure of time or interest in timekeeping whatsoever.

 

[Older Beholder]

I went and checked the comments under the video and it seemed to be a lot of people agreeing with him that that’s how they played at the time, or younger people saying that it sounds like a cool idea.

Which I think was the gist of the video, look at this interesting rule from the early days of D&D, what would that mean for play, how can I use that in my game today?

 

[Thomas Shey]

As @Umbran said, communication channels weren't what they were today. And as you mention, it didn't help that there was definitely some mixed messaging. You could read one passage or editorial from Gary Gygax in Dragon saying that you should make the game your own and another saying that unless you played AD&D precisely as it was written, you weren't playing AD&D.

And in places where there were relatively good communication channels, it wasn't too long before a fair number of people started to view a lot of Gygax' pronouncements with more than a bit of an eyeroll. It was nice that he'd written the game and all (at least before the perennial Gygax versus Arneson arguments started to solidly kick in) but telling people, effectively, that the fairly successful games they ran were "doing it wrong" or "weren't D&D" was, shall we say, a hard sell.

Absolutely. That was one of the bad things about the old days - we frequently existed in relative isolation. Other than when players in my group wanted to run games themselves and the kid that introduced me to gaming in the first place, I don't think I sat down at another DM's table until 1990 or 1991, at a gaming convention.

It could go the other way, too, though; if you lived in the Greater Los Angeles area at the time, besides whatever local game clubs might exist, you had pretty massive groups associated with LASFS (the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society), a well known variant based in CalTech, and frankly, a pretty regular schedule of SF and wargaming conventions that always had some D&D associated, and various groups that rotated around one of several game shops. From what I understood at the time, the Bay Area was much the same, and not far off for San Diego. So while it was possible to game in isolation, it was really easy to encounter and move into a much larger local ecosystem of players.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The same goes for his other statements. Sure, my first campaign consisted of some ruins and a dungeon (just geomorphs that came with Holmes Basic mostly). Even then I made a map of the region, and that map quickly evolved all the way out to a whole world, which the PCs started to wander across pretty quickly. So I don't really recognize the whole "its just a dungeon" thing that much. It is probably true that a lot of early '80s play was just jumping from one TSR module to the next with some thin perfunctory "you meet in a bar" scenes and such thrown in. I guess maybe that qualifies as what the video is discussing, but that was hardly a campaign at all, we didn't call them such! Certainly those lacked all measure of time or interest in timekeeping whatsoever.

There were certainly people who spent a large amount of the OD&D era focused on what we'd probably call a single megadungeon these days. Where that started I couldn't say, but I saw multiple examples of it among people who didn't necessarily regularly interact.