D&D General Roleplaying Origins of Early DnD

[Guest 7037866]

What was roleplaying like for you back in the day?

A lot like you describe in the post. Even when AD&D adopted non-weapon proficiencies, few could be used as substitutes for actual role-playing. It wasn't necessary to "speak in the funny voice" of your character or whatever (although it happened a lot!), but you had to speak as your character: what do they say? How to they react to what NPCs say?

No, of course you had reaction rolls, but that was really the closest thing to a roll to replace any sort of role in the game.

As you say, not necessarily better or worse--just different from the modern game. In some ways, the modern game makes more sense. You aren't there to see how an NPC acts or speaks, etc., so allowing a Wisdom (Insight) check to determine if your PC sees or senses something about the NPC works, and the DM can reveal those things that might feel off or wrong to the PC. Few DMs IME are good enough to role-play the NPCs in the game so the player can make those "insight" calls based on the DM's portrayal of the NPC.

 

[GameDaddy]

Just dropped a blog post about The Origins of Roleplaying in Early D&D and wanted to get your thoughts.

TL;DR: Contrary to what some folks think, roleplaying wasn't an afterthought in early D&D - it was baked right in from the start. Think Keep on the Borderlands, Village of Hommlet, and all those classic modules. No skill checks, just pure player creativity.

What was roleplaying like for you back in the day?

Well... What you speak of in your blog wasn't the origin of roleplaying in D&D. I had already been playing and running games and adventures before any of these modules mentioned except B1 were released. I ran games and played using the original D&D rules written by both Gygax and Arneson, first with the Brown Box, then using White Box D&D which I still run and play to this day.

Starting during Christmas Break of 1977 I started playing D&D. Our GM was a guy from College named Doug who had attended GenCon, and had brought D&D back to us in Colorado Springs. We played several Dungeon Adventures during Christmas Break in 1977.

In my very first game of D&D, my Fighter was killed by a Giant Crab on a beach several days after our party had come upon a sleeping Dragon in a cavern which we slayed @ 1st level. There were five of us, and we had achieved total surprise. We had counted just over 47,000 gold pieces from the Dragons horde, along with some Magic Items (I had found +1 Magical Chainmail) but we didn't have any pack animals to haul the gold out of the dead Dragons Cavern, so we buried most the cache, and were traveling overland to a nearby town to buy horses and a wagon. My character had 600 Gold Pieces in two large sacks that he was carrying along with a full backpack with a few more gold coins, torches, rations, and a flint and tinder kit, along with a shield, and longsword, and two daggers, and we were walking down the beach towards a nearby town when Two Crabs ran out of the Ocean and attacked us. I died cut in half by the pincers of a Giant Crab. The gold was spilled and scattered in the sand on the beach... and I was totally hooked on playing this game.



Prior to that, from about 1972 on I had been playing board war games of various sorts both Avalon Hill, and SPI. From 1977 onward though D&D and Roleplaying Games became an important part of my gaming.

I started running D&D games in the Spring of 1978, and by then had acquired the Blue Book Boxed Basic set, in addition to a Brown Box and White Box set that I had already bought... and along with the B1 Adventure Into the Unknown started running games for my Middle School Friends. The first thing I did was designed my own Dungeon for my players to explore. We all took turns doing so for each other designing fiendish traps and stocking our dungeons with all manner of vile monsters and wondrous treasures.. Then I designed a Fantasy Campaign World set on a distant Star, which was based on our real world and included the human races of Romans, Egyptians, and Europeans from the Middle Ages mostly set in a Mediterranean like setting with lots of Jungles. Think from the time of Charlemagne and King Arthur mixed with everything Fantasy from D&D. The second D&D Campaign World that I ran games in was the Judges Guild Wilderlands of High Fantasy which was the second actual published D&D Game setting after Empire of the Petal Throne. All the rest of the TSR published stuff came later, although the AD&D Monster Manual was available to us from about the time of GenCon in 1978. We eagerly looked forward to the TSR Players Handbook which reached our gaming stores in Colorado SPrings in the late summer of 79, and the Dungeon Masters Guide which hit our local FLGS in the Summer of 1980.

D&D quickly became my favorite game, becuase there were more than one way to win. Roleplaying with Teamwork
allowed us to explore alternative solutions to simply killing monsters, and developed a framework for problem solving in the real world that is still eminently useful for me , some 47 years laters.

 

[Bedrockgames]

What was roleplaying like for you back in the day?

I came in much later, about 1986, but still somewhat early days of the hobby I suppose. For us the roleplay was heavy and in character. People have mentioned GM fait being used to facilitate letting the players explore things in the game and that was my experience. The other thing I remember was in a lot of groups the GM was doing the bulk of rolls and rules management so as a player my focus was almost entirely on just playing my character.

 

[OptionalRule]

Well... What you speak of in your blog wasn't the origin of roleplaying in D&D. I had already been playing and running games and adventures before any of these modules mentioned except B1 were released. ...

I am not saying RP started with those modules. I'm saying it was there from the very start, and I'm listing those modules as evidence that it was assumed for people who weren't around in those days and have bought into the narrative that it didn't exist back then.

Without direclty saying it, I'm also pointing to how the design of those adventures supported it in various ways too to imply we can still do that today.

 

[jayoungr]

Can someone please explain why "theater kids" is a pejorative term in some D&D circles and/or why it is assumed that "theater kids" have only recently taken an interest in D&D?

 

[OptionalRule]

Can someone please explain why "theater kids" is a pejorative term in some D&D circles and/or why it is assumed that "theater kids" have only recently taken an interest in D&D?

It's neither a pejorative or new. It's just a subculture in the gaming space, as much as OSR, wargammer, or sword and sorcery crowds are. What is new is the shift in subculture to be larger with them, in the same way anime fans are a larger portion of the DnD fanbase now. It's neither good or bad, it just is.

Without doubt, some people use it a pejorative. In the same way they use any of those subculture names can be used like a pejorative. Some people just assume it's being used that way at the mention of a subgroup too. They're all wrong.

 

[aco175]

That said, I don't think I'd be willing to play a RPG game that didn't have have a skill system nowadays. I prefer a well-defined layer between what the player is capable of and what their character is capable of.

Anyone else die from an assassin writing a note to the DM telling him how he wanted to kill my PC and the DM just telling me, "You die." I like the newer style of allowing for a check and a save or something.

 

[Stormonu]

Anyone else die from an assassin writing a note to the DM telling him how he wanted to kill my PC and the DM just telling me, "You die." I like the newer style of allowing for a check and a save or something.

I don't think I've ever seen that happen, personally. My only guess was they were using the assassinate tables in the DMG, which were only supposed to be for resolving NPC on NPC attempts to take out a target.

However, I'm not a fan of a single bad die roll taking out a character I've been playing for a long time. But 5E has swung a bit too far in the other direction - characters aren't unkillable (I've both lost and killed plenty), but sometimes their durability makes players a little too bold for my tastes.

 

[jayoungr]

Without doubt, some people use it a pejorative.

That's what I don't get, though. How are the "theater kids" ruining D&D for these people? Not enough action, or are they worried that non-optimized characters will drag the party down, or what?

 

[Shiroiken]

Anyone else die from an assassin writing a note to the DM telling him how he wanted to kill my PC and the DM just telling me, "You die." I like the newer style of allowing for a check and a save or something.

Sort of. I pissed off a player during a game, and he slit my throat in my sleep.