D&D General Gen X D&D

[Bedrockgames]

Thomas Lennon is usually the gamemaster for our Gen X D&D campaigns

 

[Seramus]

Troll one person, get red ink.

Troll a generation

Married with Children, Rosanne, early Simpsons, Daria? I was raised on trolling. It's basically my love language.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Also Vampire might be a contender for Gen X D&D

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Also Vampire might be a contender for Gen X D&D

Vampire never sparked for me. I did love Mage the Ascension, though.

 

[Sacrosanct]

You can tell by reading the responses how most of us grew up in the 70s and 80s. It's the Cure, Rush, Iron Maiden, and the Clash.

But we don't represent all of GenX, or even most of it. If you have a Gen X game and want give fair representation, you'd have Members Only jackets, Ocean Pacific shirts, pastels, big hair, Valley girls, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Wham, and Culture Club. Jocks and preppies would outnumber punks and nerds.

The only singular trait amongst almost all of us were absentee parents and a society that glamourized the rich and wealthy lifestyle while getting laid off or losing the farm.

 

[Mallus]

Sample adventure: two unpopular teenagers perform a ritual with loincloths on their heads and summon a wise sexy genie who teaches them life lessons. She turns one teens' brother into an otyugh.

 

[cranberry]

GenX D&D looks mostly like 1E and 2E.

 

[Zardnaar]

GenX D&D looks mostly like 1E and 2E.

I thought it was 3E myself.

Maybe 2E

 

[cranberry]

I thought it was 3E myself.

Maybe 2E

I was 12 or 13 in 1979 when I first started playing 1E, so I guess it depends on when you were born between 1965 and 1980.

 

[AmerginLiath]

A “Gen X” D&D would just be the style of the game in its initial years. We joke about kids in our era wandering out on our bikes until all hours — either being home for dinner or establishing whose home we’d be at for dinner, but that also matches a style of campaign design from around 1974-1984. Think of the era of classic megadungeons and hexcrawls, going out from town to clear a level for treasure and coming back without a grand design to save the world (consider Keep on the Borderlands or Village of Homlett/ToEE as premade examples, although we hear of the old Castle Greyhawk dungeon campaigns from the start of the game). There would usually be open tables but definitely an open story.

As the hobby developed and childhoods grew more curated, we moved on to adventure paths and long campaign arcs designed around set groups of characters like the set sports team that children were being ferried around as part of. Not any sort of judgement on the campaign styles (I’ve enjoyed playing in all sorts), but clearly a progression that pairs up with other trends.

Designing a game for a Gen X style would mean opening up the storyline and world foremost, building a hexcrawl and leaning on random encounters and dungeon encounter generators instead of necessarily having a plot target. In essence, it’s the old Man vs. World/Nature story instead of Man vs. Man. In the modern game, maybe you build it around a thieves guild or something, or tailor a metastory of clearing a frontier since assumptions now presume longer-term use of the same characters growing in the game?