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

[Ralif Redhammer]

I honestly didn't even know about those sorts of proclamations coming through until relatively recently.

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.

Indeed, people's gaming experiences were so variable back then. For me, living in rural Upstate NY in the 80s, that sort of a giant group would've been amazing and almost unbelievable. I'm sure there were some gaming clubs at the local colleges, but I was certainly too young to be a part of them.

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.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

 

[GMforPowergamers]

so some people who were there in the 70's agree with him...

maybe who ever he talked to did too

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think that is true, and I almost universally reject what @Yora is saying.

It's not that old gamers refuse to share campaign stories; rather, that for most of us, old campaigns are like dreams. It might mean a lot, but telling the story of it almost never means a lot to the person to whom you're telling it.

Seriously- go up to someone and watch their expression when you say, "Hey, let me tell you about this dream I had ..." Most people don't want to hear about your past dreams, how your fantasy football team "pulled one out" over the weekend, or this really cool campaign you were part of in the '70s.

If asked, we share. Sometimes .... we OVERSHARE. It's profoundly easy to get people to talk about themselves- but most of us don't ask. Because, in fairness, most of us don't care. The reason I reject what @Yora is saying (and the general approach in the thread, but that's my next post) is because there is plenty of information out there. There are people to ask. There are people talking about it. There are histories in written form. There are documentary movies. If you don't know, it's because you don't want to know ... which is fine! You don't have to care about the history of the game to play. But don't blame others for your lack of curiosity. "Gatekeeping" isn't stopping you from buying a book, or watching a documentary, or asking people.

Well, its pretty dream-like in another sense too. That is, how much do we remember? I mean, I'm 59 years old, there's only so much I can recall about 12 yr old me's early D&D sessions. Like, I THINK the first character I played was a cleric, but I am not even 100% sure. lol. I sure as heck do not have any real recollection of how stuff was handled in play, had no idea how a campaign worked, and could not tell you even one single event from that entire game. I couldn't even tell you exactly how many times we played or how it ended. I just do not know! I remember the books we had at the table, the minis, dice rolling, and more-or-less who the players were.

I mean, I could say MORE about the stuff I was running a year or so later when I finally had enough of the rules to really run a game. It was Holmes Basic, and I had photocopies, or actual hand-drawn copies, of parts of the rules from the LBBs that dealt with higher levels (Holmes goes up to level 3). It came with dice, a 'monster and treasure assortment' booklet, and some sheets of geomorphs (I guess some copies came with B1). We did pretty much follow the dungeon exploration rules as-written, give or take. I cannot recall too much about what happened outside of that. I know the campaign went on for a few years, my brother and sister played (a dwarf and a fighter). I'm pretty sure my Dad played too, so he'd have been an Elf fighter/M.U. (though we pretty soon grafted in the PHB1 character rules, so it was probably built with those and not the weird D&D elf rules). I can recall various incidents from play: my sister's dwarf (3 WIS, 4 INT) stuck his hand in a chest and got it chopped off by a trap. After that he had a hook, and then at some point the hook got replaced by the Soul Sword, a magical sword grafted to his arm that glowed with his life force. The other fighter, Grog, just did various dumb things as he was pretty stupid too. The party mule was smarter than those two PCs, and was named 'Mule Go Bang', which was the command to get the mule to kick in a door. That campaign pretty much wound down around 1980. I recall that the end part involved the PCs fighting a red dragon. I think they reached a stalemate with the dragon and got some treasure out of it.

So, there's not actually a ton to tell! I don't recall every really caring about time. There were not too many instances of multiple groups operating at once, though the players often had several PCs, and there was some rough calculation of "well, that guy is off doing X" or whatnot, but nothing like Gygax's insistence on exact time keeping or whatever. Now and then we agreed that certain characters 'hung out' for a while doing nothing. That was just basically lamp shading some obvious discrepancy in when one PC might be able to join a party vs another (often because some of the wizards needed to spend weeks penning scrolls or whatever).

Really, honestly, even with games that happened in the 80's I just don't recall a lot of the specific action. I can recall bunches of things that happened, but I could not tell you the detailed sequence of events that happened in any given game/campaign, just maybe an overall outline, certain specific memorable moments, and roughly who played and some of their characters, maybe. The last 2e campaign I ran I have a good bit clearer recollection of most of what took place, but that's about it. Even with that game I am not sure I have enough of the notes left from actual sessions to put together a 100% picture of exactly where the PCs went and every single thing they did. I do have the character sheets from that game, as well as bunches of earlier ones.

Maybe other people have more solid memories of their games than I do, dunno. I have a pretty good grasp on how we played, but I'd be hard pressed to explain in detail what most of the characters actually did, aside from a war story or two.

 

[pemerton]

Gygax's idea made more sense when it was extremely common for people to play more than one character in rotation.

Yes. His advice at the end of his PHB on successful adventuring assumes a "stable of characters" approach. To me, this is consistent with what I posted upthread: it fits with a focus on location-based adventuring rather than setting exploration as an end in itself.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Yes. His advice at the end of his PHB on successful adventuring assumes a "stable of characters" approach. To me, this is consistent with what I posted upthread: it fits with a focus on location-based adventuring rather than setting exploration as an end in itself.

we have run 1 or 2 games that way (we call it character trees and I don't remember where we got the term from) and it can be fun but I would not want it as defualt D&D

 

[Lanefan]

In 1980, the gaming community wasn't as robust as it is now, it was much harder to find players (there was no internet), and that seems to be forgotten. While some players may have went from group to group, I think it was much more common for players to play 90% of the time with the same core players.

Agreed, with one caveat: that group of "core players" could sometimes be pretty big. Take, for example, a college gaming club (common enough in the late 70s-early 80s). You might have 25 people in this club, of whom three or four are DMs and the rest mostly players; and the players would bounce from DM to DM depending on a host of factors including which DMs showed up each weekend.

But - that interweaving group of 25 would tend to be quite insular, and largely isolated from any other group. The only unifying forces were Dragon magazine and a few other publications, and the rulebooks.

Finding another player was hard, especially in towns or smaller areas.

In very small places or rural areas, yes. Anything bigger, you could usually find other RPGers if you looked.

 

[Clint_L]

All this really boils down to is "someone got something wrong on the internet." I say more power to him, because he got me reminiscing about the olden days and I got to read a ton of interesting replies about how things used to be.

If he'd gotten everything right, we probably wouldn't be talking about it. So how can I be mad?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Agreed, with one caveat: that group of "core players" could sometimes be pretty big. Take, for example, a college gaming club (common enough in the late 70s-early 80s). You might have 25 people in this club, of whom three or four are DMs and the rest mostly players; and the players would bounce from DM to DM depending on a host of factors including which DMs showed up each weekend.

But - that interweaving group of 25 would tend to be quite insular, and largely isolated from any other group. The only unifying forces were Dragon magazine and a few other publications, and the rulebooks.

In very small places or rural areas, yes. Anything bigger, you could usually find other RPGers if you looked.

even in the 90's we had a college club that half of us were no longer in the college... and we had any given time 15-30 players. It had a lot of overlap (but not total) with the 40ish players that would play Vampire LARP 3 or 4 towns over. Back then we only had a handful of DMs (Now we all do it, but back then we thought you needed like a special skill to run a game)

 

[Lanefan]

Yes. His advice at the end of his PHB on successful adventuring assumes a "stable of characters" approach. To me, this is consistent with what I posted upthread: it fits with a focus on location-based adventuring rather than setting exploration as an end in itself.

I'm not entirely sure these things have much to do with each other.

We've always used the stable-of-characters approach but a big focus (particularly early in a campaign) is still on setting exploration. Once we know the general setting then sure, site-based adventuring tends to take over until much later when at high levels we start interacting with the greater setting again. (or, in the case of the game I play in, we break the greater setting while trying to fix it!)

And - while gently thumbing our noses at good ol' Mr. G - even with each player having numerous characters and there being multiple parties active side-along in the setting, we've never done the real-world=game-world time thing. Each party or PC is at its own place in the setting's time based on when it was last actively played or updated; and yes this can lead to some real DM-side headaches trying to keep things vaguely in synch, but I figure it's just part of the job.