D&D General What did you think of the Stranger Things D&D game?

jgsugden said:

There were a number of flubs from a mechanics perspective in that scene indicating the writers were modern players, not players with experience in the 1980s.

• Level 1 Dwarf?
• Rogue?
• Kukri?
• Vecna missing an arm?
• A rogue rolling percentile dice in AD&D - in combat? Maybe...
• But someone rolling a d4, a d8 and a d10 (percentile) all at once? And then a d4, d6 and d10 at the same time?
• How do the players know how many hps Venca has? Or that a powerful spellcaster in AD&D is going to be hurt, much less killed, by a weapon attack?
• Odds of success are 20 to 1 - and the PCs are rolling one attack roll each, with no need for a damage roll on the 'critical hit' (assuming they're using alternate rules for critical hits from Dragon or another source)? That makes no sense unless Dustin's attack was irrelevant.
• Most of the terrain and figures were time appropriate - but not quite all. And some of those dice did not look like 80s dice.

I'd love for someone to really get it right.

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I assume the "level 1 dwarf" meant a level 1 character (any class) who was also a dwarf (referring to her small physical size). Although he could also be implying she was only playing Basic, in which dwarf was actually a class. (He is using the AD&D DM's screen, thus they group is playing AD&D).

Rogue is wrong - should be thief (or, given the poison knife, assassin). And given that some of the moral panic against D&D was driven by thief & assassin being player classes, it's an odd mistake to have made - having her openly play a thief or assassin would better feed into that season's theme.

Kukri wasn't introduced until 1993 (in Dragon) but I can accept it as a re-skin of a dagger or even short sword.

In the AD&D lore (from the DMG relics listings), Vecna was totally destroyed, leaving nothing behind but a hand and an eye - hence, missing everything. So I just presume that whatever process recreated his body was incomplete or unfinished. Or the DM used a figure that was already missing an arm rather than damage a perfectly good figurine.

As noted by others, the percentile dice were probably related to her trying to be sneaky enough to get in a backstab for extra damage. (Hide in Shadows or Move Silently).

There is no justification for those weird 3-die combos. We already know they have d20 on hand and they are passing it around so they don't have to do the d10/d6 (or d4) "fix" for lacking a d20. This was just sloppy. There were plenty of ways to have a real roll of 3 dice, such as some weapon damages (vs. large targets, 3d4 or 3d6) or you could roll the d20 to hit plus 2d4 or 2d6 of some normal weapon damages. (We always rolled to-hit first, then damage, but perhaps this group came up with the time-saving trick of rolling both at once).

It was not unknown for the DM to let the players know how many HP a monster had, or had left, especially in a critical final battle. Some DMs didn't make any attempt to hide/obscure a monster's stats.

I assume they needed a 20 to hit (would go with AC -6, such as a lich with ring, cloak, and bracers of protection +2 each). Dustin missed so no damage roll was required; Erica hit and if it was a backstab (quintuple damage at level 14) with a +2 or better weapon it would be enough to do 15 hp even with a damage roll of 1, or maybe it was because of her poison (which undead were not immune to in AD&D). Hence there is no need to assume they were using a critical hit system.

I was about the age of the ST kids at that time and played D&D continually from 1980 to the early 90s; I don't recall percentile dice with a 00-90 and 0-9 dice (we just had two 0-9 dice) but they may well have existed as premium dice for convenience. (When we put cash into premium dice, we went with attractive "crystal" clear dice of the normal configurations).

I didn't recognize any of the particular figures but there were a very large variety available from many sources; terrain could also be gotten not only from RPG sources but also from wargaming or diorama sources, the latter possibly re-purposed from a parent's model railroad hobby.

So the only definite flubs were the use of the term "rogue" (which would describe a PC's personality, not their character class) and the weird 3-die roll combinations. Since neither of these changes improved the narrative, I would have preferred that they had gotten them right, although I still enjoyed that episode immensely.

Erich the Fuzzy said:

They could even use the modern practise of rolling your d20 to hit and your damage dice (let's say 2d4 or 2d6) at the same time in case you hit, which would give you 3 dice of 2 different types. I don't recall anyone doing that back then but who can say they didn't?

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I specifically do remember people doing it back then. I think I first encountered people recommending it at convention games around 1983-1984 when I attended Gen Con.

billd91 said:

I specifically do remember people doing it back then. I think I first encountered people recommending it at convention games around 1983-1984 when I attended Gen Con.

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Ah, I didn't catch that when I was there but it makes sense, so I can see people having started it by then. All the more reason they could have achieved their 3-dice-rolling shots on ST with an actual functional dice roll, i.e. a d20 to-hit and 2d4 or 2d6 for damage all rolled together.

Erich the Fuzzy said:

even small town game or hobby stores carried dice set tubes plus premium "crystal" clear dice.

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That certainly wasn't the case in the UK. It was still necessary to travel to a city to get dice well into the 90s, and even then knowing where to go was harder before Google.

Obviously Hawkins isn't in the UK, but it's still a pretty small isolated place. Would they really have had access to dice in 86 without a long trip to a city? Especially when their modern shopping mall was blown up?

Paul Farquhar said:

That certainly wasn't the case in the UK. It was still necessary to travel to a city to get dice well into the 90s, and even then knowing where to go was harder before Google.

Obviously Hawkins isn't in the UK, but it's still a pretty small isolated place. Would they really have had access to dice in 86 without a long trip to a city? Especially when their modern shopping mall was blown up?

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In my 1986 experience in small-town Canada, which had more limited retail than the US, gaming supplies were available in some comic shops and hobby shops (selling sports cards and such) and sometimes even book stores (which sold game books) in large towns and small cities, and if you were in a small town, there was always a bigger town or city that you'd have a chance to shop in every few months, at least. Cities had dedicated game stores with all sorts of RPG supplies. The size of the Hawkins mall indicates a medium-sized town. If the local store didn't normally stock them, you could request them by special order. Plus, mail order has always been pretty cheap in the US (the cost of shipping to Canada was much more prohibitive). (The Starcourt mall had a game store, a bookstore and a "chess king", which indicates a pretty strong local gaming community. Local downtown stores are noted to have closed when the mall opened so the game store may have replaced a prior one.) And these kids somehow managed to afford custom small-run multicolour printed T-shirts of their own design for their local Hellfire D&D club, which means they had some spare bucks to put into gaming non-essentials. The DM also has a dice tower, which was a premium mail-order specialty product, although he doesn't seem to use it. (Although it's possible he had the woodworking skills to make it himself).

According to the official series companion, Hawkins is about halfway (hence an hour each way) between the cities of Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, and not very far from Muncie, all of which should have decent gaming supplies.

The TSR shortage that led to chits or coupons being put in Basic sets was long over by this time. Each Basic or Advanced box set came with the full 6 dice. (I still have 5 of my 6 basic dice, and all 6 of my expert, from the early 80s). If you were able to source the AD&D rulebooks or the DM Screen (a more specialized product) or if Dragon Magazine (seen on the table) was in your local stores, then you could source dice the same way, if for some reason you had skipped B/X and gone straight to Advanced.

Of course, the gaming scene depicts, altogether, a near-full set of orange (black-numbered) dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d10 of 10s, d12) that look like they came from a tube or a boxed rules set, plus dark grey or dark brown d4, d10, and d12. And we see at least 3 of the players rolling the same black (red-numbered) d20. Hence there was certainly no need to do the d10 + d4/d6 for even/odd/0/+10 kluge for a missing d20. Even the d6s used are all D&D (numbered), not cribbed from wargames or table games (pips). While I've heard that some gamers started with that kluge (lacking a real d20) and for some reason stuck with it even when they didn't need to anymore, the players at that table are generally too young to have started that way and it would be a very odd quirk to adopt unnecessarily. I'm not aware of standard (B/X) sets coming with the paired d10 set (10s and 1s) before the 90s, so the fact that someone has that specialty 10s version of a d10 indicates extra dice were being acquired. (At some point between when I bought my Moldvay B/X boxes in the early 80s and when I got back in to 5e a few years ago, the standard dice set went from 6 to 7 by including a 2nd d10 to simplify percentile rolling, and now an extra d20 for advantage/disadvantage).

Paul Farquhar said:

That certainly wasn't the case in the UK. It was still necessary to travel to a city to get dice well into the 90s, and even then knowing where to go was harder before Google.

Obviously Hawkins isn't in the UK, but it's still a pretty small isolated place. Would they really have had access to dice in 86 without a long trip to a city? Especially when their modern shopping mall was blown up?

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Even if they couldn’t get them locally, it’s unlikely that none of them would have wrangled some decent dice during a trip to a larger city like Indianapolis or Fort Wayne. Plus, Joyce worked retail. She may have been able to obtain special orders or at least a copy of the Dragon Magazine that would have enabled the kids to order directly from a dice company.

Bottom line - if they’re getting the game and miniatures, dice aren’t any harder to get in 1986.

billd91 said:

Even if they couldn’t get them locally, it’s unlikely that none of them would have wrangled some decent dice during a trip to a larger city like Indianapolis or Fort Wayne. Plus, Joyce worked retail. She may have been able to obtain special orders or at least a copy of the Dragon Magazine that would have enabled the kids to order directly from a dice company.

Bottom line - if they’re getting the game and miniatures, dice aren’t any harder to get in 1986.

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I'm speaking from experience, as someone who was playing D&D in a remote town in 1986, and they were for me. The occasional trip to a city could stock up on books and boxed sets. But those had shared between a large number of people. So you might have one set of dice that had to be shared between eight people. Not ideal. And dice get lost.

Miniatures? Certainly didn't have those, but we played TotM. You could play D&D without minis, and without full copies of rulebooks, but not without dice.

Paul Farquhar said:

Miniatures? Certainly didn't have those, but we played TotM. You could play D&D without minis, and without full copies of rulebooks, but not without dice.

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We had a few minis but no battle maps. So we didn't have "scale" per se. We usually left them in marching order on the table. But after I had 6 thief PC's say "I sneak around and backstab" one monster in a ten foot hallway* I started asking for more specific character locations.



*The rules said 3 PC's could fit side by side in a ten foot hallway. So having 6 PC's "sneak past" a violent and aware monster seemed unlikely to me as DM.

One thing I noticed is that the term Rogue was used in 1e to refer to a 1st level Thief. So the term wasn't entirely unknown, even if its usage is still likely an anachronism.

When I first discovered D&D, I was living in a small town. But being very close to a college town, it was likely an outlier in my access to RPG supplies. Still, by 1986 you could find plenty of D&D and AD&D products in Kay Bee Toys and Waldenbooks, even in small towns.