How we experienced the game, in totally different and incompatible ways

[crazy_monkey1956]

Blame the internet. Specifically, gamers in older editions didn't have a means of communicating on a regular basis with other games, except at conventions or other organizations. For those of us who never went to conventions or belonged to organizations, the style of play developed completely independently from every single other group that played the game and also didn't do conventions or organizations.

3rd edition and 3.5 are the "internet" editions. People who play this edition have a much greater capacity to communicate with other players from everywhere. Thus, rules intepretations can be discussed and play styles compared.

So, during 1st editions day, poster a) had access to himself, his group, and maybe a few other players around town. Poster b) likewise had access to a limited group of players. If they were across the country, they never met, played together, compared playing styles, or in any other way communicated until the internet came along, some 15 to 20 years later.

 

[JDJblatherings]

I'm pretty sure that someone had written out rules manuals prior to Chainmail and OD&D. The PGA would beg to differ with you, for starters, as would Little League, Major League Baseball and Parker Brothers.

They don't even vaguely compare. The PGA didn't have to worry how well orcs and gnolls got along with each other, how fast they mined or how many exp a horn of plenty was worth.

Funny you should mention the rules of golf, they are constantly evolving and under debate. There are national and inernational bodies in place to go over this time and again...you'd think an explicit well thought out and presented manual would render such things unneeded.


I'm not saying the DMG wasn't a mess by modern standrards but when it was written there were no standards .

 

[JDJblatherings]

Blame the internet. Specifically, gamers in older editions didn't have a means of communicating on a regular basis with other games...If they were across the country, they never met, played together, compared playing styles, or in any other way communicated until the internet came along, some 15 to 20 years later.

We had conventions, magazines, fanzines and newsletters back in the old days. they still exposed us to a more limited gorup of players but there were lots of ways for folks who wanted to learn more about the games they played to learn more.

Back in the old days it was funny how some thigns could become canon for an area and other things were skipped.

 

[crazy_monkey1956]

We had conventions, magazines, fanzines and newsletters back in the old days. they still exposed us to a more limited gorup of players but there were lots of ways for folks who wanted to learn more about the games they played to learn more.

Some of us didn't even have those though. I got the red box as a gift and later picked up the Rules Cyclopedia. I didn't discover Dragon magazine or the existence of things like the RPGA until much later.

 

[RFisher]

I think I have gone through at least three phases in my approaches to D&D. I've come close to having completely different experiences than myself! (^_^) & yet there are still people whose experiences seem quite different than any of my own.

I still think one of the many factors is how much your "gaming heritage" can be traced only to books or to Lake Geneva. The books could never communicate the game in the way actual play could. I think those of us who learned it only from books (or from people who learned it from the books, or people who learned it from people who learned it from the books, &c.) generally had a very different understanding of the game than those who learned it firsthard (or secondhand or thirdhard &c.) & used the books more as reference.

 

[Calithena]

Great question in the original post.

One partial answer is that a lot of people kept playing AD&D1 as OD&D with some extra rules and new options - in other words, they used play-procedures derived locally from the simpler OD&D rules-texts, but with options, spells, etc. as written up in AD&D.

While a lot of other people did the best they could to read the AD&D hardbacks and actually try to follow the rules there as written.

These by themselves produce very different styles of game.

-------------

Those of you debating other rules should know that the official rules of baseball are about the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica - they are a huge, multi-volume affair that would take some considerable time to actually learn. Nothing is as simple as it looks from the outside.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

They don't even vaguely compare. The PGA didn't have to worry how well orcs and gnolls got along with each other, how fast they mined or how many exp a horn of plenty was worth.

You're right, the rules of golf and baseball are vastly more complex than that.

Funny you should mention the rules of golf, they are constantly evolving and under debate. There are national and inernational bodies in place to go over this time and again...you'd think an explicit well thought out and presented manual would render such things unneeded.

You'd think that, unless you were totally unaware that written laws have been debated since the time of Hamurabbi and that even the most detailed and best-codified systems of rules have debate over their rules as a central aspect of the system. Talk to a lawyer about the notion that well-defined rules would render debate and revision unneeded.

I'm not saying the DMG wasn't a mess by modern standrards but when it was written there were no standards .

There absolutely were standards, but he didn't worry about them (and he was hardly alone in the first few generations of RPGs).

There are many great things about 1E and earlier versions of the game, but let's not pretend organization is one of them, or that it's unfair to say so.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I will blame Tom The Dungeon Master. He introduced many of us in my town to the game. As we grew older and introduced others, his style influenced ours. We gamed at our local hobby store, there was probably about 30-40 regulars who came and went. We ended up with very similar rules and styles because we all ended up playing together and coming up with an agreed upon sense of fun. Honestly, most of my gaming up until the past year or so was still with some of those hometown people. Even when I went to college 400 miles away, a few ended up there as well and we gamed together. We had others in our gamng group, but which gamers did we gravitate to? The ones with similar tastes and styles to our own.

The statements that someone "never knew anyone who X" is possibly a matter of selective memory. They may have met someone who used such a rule, but didn't like their game, left it and promptly forgot all about that time. The other possibility is that they never really got out of that smaller circle of gamers who had all been taught similar rules and styles like I had in my hometown.

 

[JDJblatherings]

You're right, the rules of golf and baseball are vastly more complex than that.

Baldedash...the basic rules for golf are less then 2 dozen pages.

There absolutely were standards, but he didn't worry about them (and he was hardly alone in the first few generations of RPGs).

There are many great things about 1E and earlier versions of the game, but let's not pretend organization is one of them, or that it's unfair to say so.

Organization was a foreign thing to the first gheneration of rpg games. The wargames "industry" it grew out of was still maturing and had few if any hobby wide standards. Few companies even mantained company-wide standards. There was no correct way to put together the DMG when it was first written.

 

[JDJblatherings]

I will blame Tom The Dungeon Master. He introduced many of us in my town to the game. As we grew older and introduced others, his style influenced ours...

I;m in agreement with this. Few people ever sat down and actually read the rules without havign played before lot's of us were exposed to the game thanks to "Tom". I was "Tom the DM" for a good 20 or 30 players and during that time we went from holmes to holmes & ODD supplements to holmes & PHB, then actual AD&D (but things still hanging on from the old days). And we added stuff from other games which certainly influenced our play style. I think I played for 3 years beofre someone else DM'd and hadn't played with me as DM before that.