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

[GMforPowergamers]

It's an important thing to keep in mind, that the vast majority of gamers right now are younger. Totaling up all the players in my gaming groups, other than the one guy that started gaming before I did, and my brother who started at the same time, every single player got their start with 3e or later. Heck, when I include the other groups those players are in, that statistic remains the same.

in my tight group we have 3 'old timers' all from the late 80's early 90s. we then have a few 3e but also some 4e and 5e newibie players that ONLY have been playing 6+ years...

outside of my tight group my experience at gaming store and cons is that I am old enough to be the father of several players and dms
(useing the fact that my sister has children older then many I have met in last few months who play shows this to be very easy to see)

It also bears mentioning that without a cleric, and sometimes even with, healing back to full HP at higher levels could potentially take weeks or months of in-game time, if you wanted to be a stickler about HP. With a large group of rotating players AND probably rotating characters as well, saying "well, it's been two weeks of real time since Ranulf came back from the dungeon, so you've recovered 14 HP," is a fairly elegant solution to the problem of tracking recovery. It's either that or keeping an in-game calendar. And as someone that once did that in 2e, I can say that I would prefer not to.

yup... we tried to run a game once without a healer... pre 4e I would never do that again.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Seeing that there are so many younger players is an encouraging thing. I remember one convention, one of the players' kids was the DM. We actually had the same set of players for all three games throughout the con (it was an Adventurers League three-parter) and those three games were a stand-out. At that age (17), I could not have done as good a job.

in my tight group we have 3 'old timers' all from the late 80's early 90s. we then have a few 3e but also some 4e and 5e newibie players that ONLY have been playing 6+ years...

outside of my tight group my experience at gaming store and cons is that I am old enough to be the father of several players and dms
(useing the fact that my sister has children older then many I have met in last few months who play shows this to be very easy to see)

There's something to the charm of that old style of play, but it also gets rough accruing that HP debt going into adventure after adventure without the proverbial full tank.

yup... we tried to run a game once without a healer... pre 4e I would never do that again.

 

[teitan]

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.

You might want to recheck Twitter lol

 

[Vaalingrade]

You might want to recheck Twitter lol

Why would you suggest something so hurtful? ;_;

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Why would you suggest something so hurtful? ;_;

I understand for less tehn $10 you can make a @realWotC account and announce all sorts of things... then go to your regular twitter and quote it... then go to face book and qoute your own twitter retweet, then come here and show proof it's real "just look at this face book retweet and orginal tweet as 3 sources" I bet you could get articles and youtube videos made about it...

 

[Vaalingrade]

Welp.

Time to make feats mandatory and ban any monster that has either a spell list or no abilities besides an attack roll.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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?

Fair enough... HOWEVER, maybe not completely accurate! (I mean, maybe it is too, I'm not picking a fight). Lets see... Of the people I played with in, say 1981, I know that my sister still players (and is @Gilladian on EnWorld), my mother is 86 and has played within the last 2-3 years although she doesn't anymore. My brother, he was the least into it, though he probably would join a game given time and opportunity for a one-off at least. David, still plays AFAIK now and then. Mike, haven't talked to him in a few years, but I'm 100% sure he still runs games, its in his blood. Darcy, married Mike, so yup. Lisa, yup. Krystal was in my 4e campaign a few years ago and her husband plays a lot of RPGs. Kir, same thing. Rick, married Kir. My brother-in-law, yup still playing 3.5 and some 5e. Cannot say about my college friends, or people I played with before 1981 as I've lost touch with them. Meh, I may be somewhat of an outlier, but not that much. Most of the people I played with in Vermont in the early '80s actually still DO play RPGs, and/or have played them in the last 5 years and probably would do so again. Now, they don't hang out on EnWorld, pretty much, but some of them do hold forth in other places, watch podcasts, play in games that are online, etc.

I think there was actually kind of a core of us that were just so amazed and thrilled by the whole RPG thing that it never stopped being fun and entertaining for us. I admit there was a time in the mid to late '90s when I played very little myself, but once a gamer, always a gamer! hahaha.

 

[ECMO3]

Ugh.

That's sums up what I think about this. Videos like this: There are...a lot of false assumptions here.

First is that we were unaware of this rule that time in the game world matches real world time. We were aware.

I really hated this one. You decide to end your weekly session in the middle of a combat with Goblins and come back a week later to a TPK because they got 20000 rounds of combat while you were out.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I really hated this one. You decide to end your weekly session in the middle of a combat with Goblins and come back a week later to a TPK because they got 20000 rounds of combat while you were out.

Yeah, I don't understand why any DM would need or want to do this. I mean, sure, its possible it might be hard to get the exact same players at the table next week, but there's always ways to deal with that. AFAIK Gygax et al just did some switcheroo with who was or was not a PC vs a henchman. So the rogue's player is not around, but the guy that normally plays the fighter is. Guess who happened to be hiring himself out? The rogue gets treated as an NPC for the session, and one of the men-at-arms turns out to be the dwarf. Or someone starts one of the hirelings as a new level 1 PC, or just plays a henchman, etc.

Yeah, there could be an issue where later in the week some other PCs would like to go hit the same dungeon, but its in a 'quantum state' because actions haven't been dealt with that happened yesterday. Well, again, how hard is it REALLY to handle that? Most of the time not a biggy. The other party goes somewhere else, runs into trouble, explores a different level, etc.

 

[Smackpixi]

I really hated this one. You decide to end your weekly session in the middle of a combat with Goblins and come back a week later to a TPK because they got 20000 rounds of combat while you were out.

But I mean really, there’s no reason to be weird and dramatic about it. It was and is a useful rule to add drama, immediacy, and “reality” to a game. Just cause Todd’s mom said everyone has to go home at 9:00 cause it’s a school night, doesn’t mean everyone dies cause it was mid Goblin battle. But it might be fun way to say cause you guys went to see Howard The Duck rather than play D&D the Orcs took Thunderguard, now marching on Highrock, if we can play before Wednesday, still time to intervene. I presume DMs used rule to create fun back then like now, not like a Computer, no exception, sorry book says.