Game design has "moved on"

[Jhaelen]

The fact is, there was no such thing as a "grid" or a "battlemat"...There were hexes.

I'm not sure what kind of 'fact' you are talking about. Before hexes, there was tabletop wargaming and it didn't have squares of hexes, it relied on using measuring tape. And that's precisely the background Gary Gygax had, so he naturally expected that other players would have it, too.

I'm not an expert by any means, but from what I've heard, for Gary D&D was simply an extension of small-scale, squad-based wargaming. Dave Arneson was the one injecting a healthy dose of roleplaying to turn it into what we think of today, when we talk about RPGs.

Back when we played AD&D 1e and BECMI D&D, we quickly turned to using graph paper and tokens or minis to represent combat situations, because without any kind of representation, combat encounters quickly turned into heated arguments.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

(snip) Sadly, Gary's dead. Can't ask him now. I doubt he intended to FORCE miniature use onto people. But it was fairly clearly part of the mindset to use them by nature of blatant accomodations to them. Heck, when I started, reading the AD&D rules and seeing stuff measured in inches was "WTF" until I realized they were talking about on a grid or battlemat or some such.

You could ask Old Geezer over at RPG.net. He played in Gary and Dave's games for a couple of years and was there for a lot of the things that we still puzzle over nearly 40 years later.

He's also planning to release a book next year talking about those days. The title is quite interesting - We Might Up Some Stuff We Thought Would Be Fun (the word is not Stuff, of course) - but it sounds like it could be easily subtitled something like So, You Want To Understand OD&D?

This is a great supposition based from today's standards. The fact is, there was no such thing as a "grid" or a "battlemat"...There were hexes. I remember those...and the graph paper we were encouraged to map on...but I am [fairly close to 100%] sure no one, no creature, no spell effect, traps, no thing was thought of in terms of a 5' square. Nada. My understanding is that was something brought in by 4e [could be wrong, maybe it was 3e, I don't actually know]. But in BECM or 1e terms, 5' square wasn't part of the game. Wasn't part of the consciousness playing the game.

Anywho, there's that. I agree, Gary [I doubt] thought that anyone would be forced to use minis.

I think the first use of the 5' squares in a D&D sense was in 2.5E Skills & Powers: Combat & Tactics. At least, that's where I first noticed it and I remembered thinking about how to adapt my traditional 10' square maps to this new regime (short answer: I never played 2.5E ).

 

[GreyLord]

This is a great supposition based from today's standards. The fact is, there was no such thing as a "grid" or a "battlemat"...There were hexes. I remember those...and the graph paper we were encouraged to map on...but I am [fairly close to 100%] sure no one, no creature, no spell effect, traps, no thing was thought of in terms of a 5' square. Nada. My understanding is that was something brought in by 4e [could be wrong, maybe it was 3e, I don't actually know]. But in BECM or 1e terms, 5' square wasn't part of the game. Wasn't part of the consciousness playing the game.

Anywho, there's that. I agree, Gary [I doubt] thought that anyone would be forced to use minis.

It was 3e that started this entire square deal. (they may have been introduce by a book in 2.5, but 3e was what made it standard). Older gamers used hexes or inches.

What are inches?

They are a unit of measurement. You can utilize them by using a tape measure. Warhammer and other tabletop wargamers use them regularly. Just for any who were still wondering.

THE FOLLOWING IS MY OPINION.

In my opinion, Gary was pushing his game system, Chainmail, onto D&D. D&D originally was utilizing Arneson's system. However OD&D had chainmail as it's primary combat system as Gary was the one who was basically publishing it. Arenson's rules were alternate rules.

Of course everyone ended up using the alternate rules, so within a few months time, those were the primary rules...and everything else is history in regards to that dang AC and roll to hit!

 

[MJS]

Do you have a source/reference for this? I can't see how it would have worked, given that the combat system for the original D&D was the original "Chainmail" wargame rules with its fantasy supplement. The wargames rules were, well, a wargame - they used figures/miniatures. Until a whole new combat system was developed, how did they play "mini-less"?

I naturally can't find the page now. Late night reading. It was Rob Kuntz stating they used the "alternative" combat system from the get-go, and no minis, for playtesting, and the Chainmail references were woo the wargaming crowd.

From what I've read over the last few years though, this seems a nearly unanimous aspect og Gary's games as well as the others. Such references can be found in q&A's and interviews.

I think the general claim is quite true - early D&D is mostly no minis, theater of the mind.

if I do find that particular DK quote I'll post it -

 

[Neonchameleon]

I naturally can't find the page now. Late night reading. It was Rob Kuntz stating they used the "alternative" combat system from the get-go, and no minis, for playtesting, and the Chainmail references were woo the wargaming crowd.

From what I've read over the last few years though, this seems a nearly unanimous aspect og Gary's games as well as the others. Such references can be found in q&A's and interviews.

I think the general claim is quite true - early D&D is mostly no minis, theater of the mind.

if I do find that particular DK quote I'll post it -

That depends which early D&D. Gygax's games were played without letting the players know the rules for a long time (at least if what I remember of Mike Mornard's stories is correct). On the other hand D&D as published was a hacked tabletop wargame and everyone in any group not taught directly by Gygax would have access to the rules. With wargame measurements in inches and implied minatures.

Or in short:
D&D as played by Gygax: Theatre of the mind
D&D as published by Gygax: Minis

 

[MJS]

That depends which early D&D. Gygax's games were played without letting the players know the rules for a long time (at least if what I remember of Mike Mornard's stories is correct). On the other hand D&D as published was a hacked tabletop wargame and everyone in any group not taught directly by Gygax would have access to the rules. With wargame measurements in inches and implied minatures.

Or in short:
D&D as played by Gygax: Theatre of the mind
D&D as published by Gygax: Minis

Not the one I was looking for, but here is an interesting discussion with Rob Kuntz

http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2011/08/no-borders-or-limits-conversation-with.html

 

[Dungeoneer]

I have never played OD&D (heck, I wasn't alive for much of it) but the topic interests me and I've read quite a bit about it. It seems to me that characterizing a 'correct' way which most groups played in is basically impossible. The rules were a jumbled mess with important pieces left out. Even the designers didn't strictly agree on the rules, as Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax seem to have run substantially different games with their own groups. So to say that people did or didn't play with miniatures is well nigh impossible.

It's hard to believe that since D&D is directly descended from a miniatures wargame that it didn't involve miniatures at some point. However their use may have fallen off quite quickly.

 

[MJS]

Do you have a source/reference for this? I can't see how it would have worked, given that the combat system for the original D&D was the original "Chainmail" wargame rules with its fantasy supplement. The wargames rules were, well, a wargame - they used figures/miniatures. Until a whole new combat system was developed, how did they play "mini-less"?

Managed to find it

Rob Kuntz:
Yeah. Mere verbal positioning by EGG, which I skipped in the matter as such. He wanted to draw in Wargamers and not alienate any who were primed to transition from Chainmail to an obviously different system; same as noting that the rules were useable with miniatures and promoted as such, even though we never used any ourselves in the playtests (these occur in other LG games of D&D, much later thought).
http://odd74.proboards.com/thread/4176

They* used the "alternate" combat on d20 from the getgo, which Rob says was "always the intended system". Arneson's Blackmoor group, prior to this, I think used 2d6 w Chainmail.
* Lake Geneva early TSR peoples

 

[Balesir]

Managed to find it

Thanks for the link! Led me into a fascinating trail of blog posts and discussions.

In general my view would be that Rob was inspired by the totality of what roleplaying games could be and wanted to swallow the whole lot through D&D. Whether such a vast vision could have succeeded in the market we'll maybe never know, but I think the narrower focus selected for the TSR line post-1977 probably had the clearest potential as a business. In a sense, his dream came true in the myriad of games and systems and worlds we now have available - as much toolkit as anyone might wish for, and more coming every day! Not all truly original, of course, but that's the world, for you...

One thing I do find odd is that he speaks of RPGs exclusively as a business of the GM being the "creative" and administering to the players. That is a model that I have become gradually disenchanted with, and moving away from it seems to me to be one of the truly original developments in roleplaying in recent years.

Finally - he really did inherit a writing style from Gary, didn't he!

 

[Ratskinner]

ENworld has the reputation of being the most hostile forum to anyone who plays a form of D&D prior to 3e. ENworld has chased off most of this audience and they go to just about any other forum than ENworld at this point. ENworld has banned, criticized, and put down the older editions to the point that hardly any of that audience comes to ENworld.

Gotta say that I really, really haven't seen this and I've been here almost since the first iteration of the forums started. I prefer 2E and I'm not shy about saying so, and I've never caught any flack for it. AFAICT this is about the friendliest place on the web to talk about RPGs.

I don't see a lot of hostility against editions of AD&D either. Never really have, other than the standard jabs at Gygax, over-powered wizards, over-powered multiclassing, and "bad" RPG design that have always been rife in the RPG community.

I agree with Mishihari and billd91 here. I joined an OSR group a a few years ago and briefly flirted with the OSR online community...but, man. There's just no comparison. IME, they are extremely and openly hostile to anything "new" or even vaguely critical of the old. The almost religious zealotry and dogmatism about what constitutes "true" D&D, and indeed role-playing itself, is quite off-putting, to me. 2e Is my favorite D&D as well, I'm playing in an Old School group, and I feel more welcome and respected here than on any of the OSR sites I visited. (Heck, this site is better that WotC's forums, IMO.) So, kudos to Eric and all the mods for putting together and maintaining such a nice community.