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

[Sacrosanct]

You RICH A!@#$%^&()!@#$%^& We were so poor we didn't even basements. We had play outside in sand pile.!

You joke, but from 1981-1983 I lived in a small trailer park (think Munson's home in ST) in Ketchikan Alaska, and we did literally play D&D outside right next to a big pile of dirt lol

 

[Maxperson]

You RICH A!@#$%^&()!@#$%^& We were so poor we didn't even basements. We had play outside in sand pile.!

Old Timer: "And that boys and girls is the origin of Sandbox games."

 

[jasper]

Old Timer: "And that boys and girls is the origin of Sandbox games."

Turds, and all.

 

[Oofta]

You RICH A!@#$%^&()!@#$%^& We were so poor we didn't even basements. We had play outside in sand pile.!

You had sand?

 

[Thomas Shey]

How can we expect a youtuber to describe old school play when we can't seem to come to a consensus on it?

Is it wrong to use the books to learn how the game works?

It isn't, but I think its really easy with early D&D to throw a massive amount of false-positives if you're using it to draw conclusions about how things actually worked in the field, as it were.

 

[Brotton Goodfellow]

Just want to say to all the grognards out there: Thank you for your service.

 

[Charlaquin]

That's just it. Old school play was so varied from table to table as we old timers have been saying that it sure as hell couldn't have been, "Everyone played with this one obscure rule." like the guy describes.

No, but it is wrong to say that we all used a specific obscure rule when all he had to do is ask a few people or use Google.

I think it’s pretty obvious he didn’t literally mean everyone.

 

[pemerton]

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.

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

<snip>

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).

Obviously you were there and I wasn't - but this sounds broadly consistent with the idea of "setting as backdrop" rather than "setting as focus" with an Appendix B-esque degree of attention to tracking events in the setting, have the PCs interact with or at least learn of them, etc.

In my case, it was stuff on world design from the mid to late 80s that gave me the idea that setting in that fuller sense should be prioritised. I then had to unlearn that in the mid to late 90s!

 

[pemerton]

Is it wrong to use the books to learn how the game works?

I think it needs to be acknowledged that Gygax's rulebooks - especially the DMG - contain a lot of material that was written to deal with particular debates that were current at the time (eg defending D&D's hit points against hit location and critical combat systems), or that was an attempt to reduce to writing an idea or an aspiration, where Gygax himself didn't necessarily follow the process or approach that he wrote down.

In the PHB, for instance, the early pages talk about players becoming thespians, but the actually rules text and advice towards the end on procedures of play makes it clear that this is not something on which the game is going to bring about if you go along with them.

And those rules and advice also rest on assumptions about dungeon design and GM methods which Gygax himself contradicts to a degree in his advice to GMs in his DMG, which has a greater focus on "living, breathing" setting elements.

Even Moldvay Basic, which has super-clear procedures, has a misleading foreword!

 

[Smackpixi]

With all due respect to anyone who played in the 70s and early 80s and still plays today, you guys are huge outliers. Adding the additional selector that you’re still so engaged with D&D that you spend considerable time on EnWorld talking about it makes you very exceptional people, but not at all representative of the common casual D&Ders of yesteryear who ran epic dungeons for anyone in the neighborhood who they could wrangle for a couple years and then didn’t anymore cause life and got a giggle seeing it on stranger things 40 years later. Would love to know how that guy played.

I don’t know how people played 40 years ago, but given the general tendency to half ass things, the obtuseness of the original rule books, and the enthusiasm of youth, and lack of internet reference, I can only imagine it was so hugely varied that if you can imagine it, someone was playing that way.

Outside the fact YOU didn’t play that way, was a pretty interesting take On play styles. Wasn’t it?