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

[Keefe the Thief]

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

Well, he could have used the rules that all the other books on the market which weren´t RPGs utilized? I mean, the golden laws of organization, indexing, layout and knowledge management have not sprung out of the earth fully formed after the 80s.
Mind, i quite like the AD&D manuals, their organization lends them a certain charm not found in current RPGs. (It´s easiert to feel like that, of course, without using them in play. )

 

[el-remmen]

These can't both be true, can they?

Not only can they both be true.

It is because they are both true that I love D&D so much.

As I am fond of saying, from OD&D to the basic/expert/etc boxed set to crazy patchwork houserules with crit tables from rolemaster stapled on to 3.5e - It is ALL D&D.

 

[howandwhy99]

Not only can they both be true.

It is because they are both true that I love D&D so much.

As I am fond of saying, from OD&D to the basic/expert/etc boxed set to crazy patchwork houserules with crit tables from rolemaster stapled on to 3.5e - It is ALL D&D.

qft
It's a make believe game. You can start playing around the time you learn to talk.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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.

The English language and basic ideas of organization were not invented in the last few decades and didn't need to be invented from scratch for the RPG industry. Related topics being grouped with related topics is hardly something EGG and his peers wouldn't have heard of.

 

[Ourph]

These pervasive, diametrically different experiences just amaze me. How does it happen?

At least part of it has to do with the breadth of time in which AD&D was played and the multiple avenues for entering the hobby that occured throughout that time period. People getting into the hobby in 1979 had a much different experience awaiting them than those who got into the hobby in 1989. 1e was still played by a lot of gamers well into the 90's so it's entirely possible that someone might have years of experience playing AD&D 1e but didn't start until the late 80s. In my experience, people who started with OD&D, AD&D or to a lesser extent the Holmes set (or learned from people who had) in the late 70s to early 80s went btb when using the AD&D rules much more often than people who started or learned from people who started with the Moldvay/Cook or Mentzer (and variations thereof) Basic sets.

The Basic set rules were just so playable that many people who eventually migrated to AD&D (or played both) went with the Basic D&D baseline and just added in parts of the AD&D rules (like races, classes, spells) that didn't have a lot to do with all the fiddly bits (training rules, weapon type vs. armor, the "helmet" rule and complex initiative for example).
Knowing the initiative rules for Basic led a lot of people to glance over the Initiative section in the AD&D DMG and just say "Ah, I already know these rules, I don't need to read this again." As a result, lots of details got overlooked by a large swath of the AD&D playing community.

 

[Lanefan]

In my own experience it's because we all learned from one DM, and branched off from there. The 1e-based system we've built is still evolving today; it works, but anyone coming in from any edition played as written is in for a learning curve.

And it goes beyond just simple rules; whether ExP-for-treasure was used or not, for example, into broader things like play style and expectations of the game. The game I cut my teeth on was long and very slow advancing, so that became normal for me, and that's how I run games now. It was also very chaotic...lots of party-vs.-party arguments and occasional bloodshed...so I now just see these as part of the game. Others don't.

Greater modern communication also tends to give more voice to those who would enforce standards rather than change them, at least in my view.

Lanefan

 

[Wik]

I think part of it has to do with cultural upbringings, too. Really, every region has it's own cultural values and perspectives, and I think a bit of that translates into the game.

As an example, when I lived in Toronto (I was pretty young, but I saw a lot of my dad gaming with groups) miniatures play was a big thing. The three different GMs my dad gamed with all used Minis... it may have been because they were in a military group, so that the tactical side of the game would have been appreciated more, or it might have been the fact that housing in this area was paid for by the military, so some of the gamers had more of a disposable income to spend on minis.

Whatever the case, minis were pretty popular.

Now, over here, I see gamers use minis, but not on the same scale that I saw in Toronto. We use them in every fight for my group, but we use a lot of "penny-monsters" because we just don't have the time, money, or inclination to buy 500 orcs.

That's just a small example, but I think if you look at surrounding situations, you can start to see how certain gaming trends emerge, even in completely isolated groups.

Look at all the groups playing over in Iraq. How many of them have contact with each other? Maybe a few, but I bet there are a lot of groups who only play amongst themselves, and have no contact with other Iraq gamers.

What conditions would be forced upon these groups?

1) Limited access to gaming materials (whatever you can bring with you, and I bet it's not a whole lot)
2) an "in and out" rotation of players (due to players moving within the unit, for example)
3) Irregular playing schedule
4) Cramped gaming conditions.

BTW, I'm guessing at conditions, here... I'm no expert on RPGs in Iraq, or anything like that.

But, using those four conditions, we can assume that many of the games will adopt certain characteristics:

1) Due to a lack of gamebooks (unless the players have pirated PDFs, which is another story), the games might wind up having a lot of home-brewed stuff available.
2) Lack of minis could result in a less tactical feel, or a more "role-playing" environment (although I'm not one of those people who think that minis always get in the play of RP).
3) Use of game rules that allow for odd-mixed groups (Gestalt, maybe).
4) Shorter adventures that could almost be considered one-shots that are loosely connected.

Not to mention the fact that, given a shared military background, there might just be a general preference for certain character classes (I've always found that the military folk I know have an unusual fondness for the ranger and paladin classes).

Anyways, the point I'm getting at here is if you were to take 1,000 gamers from a military background in a war zone, and compared them to 1,000 gamers from a university campus, you would notice that each group as a whole adopts certain play styles, even if they are completely independant of each other, due to the prevailing conditions around them.

 

[Rothe]

Counterintuitive organization of the DMG and PHB, leading to important rules being hidden away in random places.

Plus, the training rules and some of the others just plain sucked, so a lot of people skipped them even if they did find them.

So true. I didn't even know there was a parry rule in AD&D until about 2 years ago, although I read the PHB several times back in the day. Either missed or dismissed it.

Yep, and in my case we came from OD&D so we stuck with many of the rule interpretations, or even whole constructions, we had from that. The "seed" idea also applies as finding some of the books in our town in 1976-77 was near impossible, e.g., Chainmail.

Another thing to remember, is AD& came out in stages. The MM, then about a year later IIRC the PHB, then "much" later, maybe 2 years IIRC (and it was late) the DMG. I can tell you we were not going to wait around 3 years to start bringing in the AD&D material and then change all our rulings and characters based on interpretations in the DMG, when what we had chosen were reasonable and had been working for years.

On xp for gold, didn't give it, so it made dropping the training rules no big deal as a gp sink. We just replaced kill=xp with "overcoming the challenge"=xp to encourage not killing everything. But that went back to how we played OD&D inspired by REH. So in the end we leveled slower than others, but we didn't care.

I'm also amazed at some of the differences in interpretation of the spells.

I'm probably one of the few (although everyone I played with in the day was the same) who didn't take AD&D to be the way Gary Gygax played it. D&D was an invention of several folks, Gary being a key one but not the only one. The intros in the PHB and DMG were also very encouraging to DMs to run things their way. It was the three books MM, PHB, DMG by TSR that defined the game for us. Editorials, follow on stuff was "after market" optional stuff and treated as such. I don't think I even heard the term "gygaxian" in the context of a way to play until 1980, 1981. That was way too late for a dyed in the wool OD&D and friends to change the way they played.

 

[Rothe]

Nobody had done anything lke it before it couldn't have been counterintuitive as the one who was intuiting it was Mr. Gygax.

Regarding organization, not so. Wargames had been around for many years before hand. Look at Avalon Hill, SPI, etc. games from the period. En Garde is also well organized as well as Traveller, not much later than OD&D and prior to PHB and DMG IIRC.

But again to add to the contradictory recollections. Squad Leader was a pinnacle of organization, but dense. The disorganized nature of D&D added some charm and set it apart from the hard core follow-the-rules mentality of wargames, at least we thought so. Heck if you want us to be rule monkeys then lay it out like Squad Leader.

I'm also willing to give organization a bit of a pass in the age where all documents were generated by typewriter. Having had to produce 40+ page papers on a typewriter, reorganizing was a major, major undertaking, and not done lightly. Sure TSR was a flush company with typesetters, but it was a young one.

 

[Glyfair]

Others have touched on some elements. Before I started playing (about '78) D&D was mostly spread by word of mouth. I wouldn't be surprised if more players played with mimeographs or photocopies of the D&D rules than actual copies of the rules.

One of my friends who was playing before I started said he learned in college in Florida. He had never read the rules until after he had been playing for a while (and had published his own RPG, IIRC). He came to this area and got involved with gaming in this area.

I first was aware of him from an article in the paper about this new game D&D, and how it was played locally. That got me into the game, and a year or so later that group he was part of started Delaware's first gaming convention, D-Con. That's where I met him. A year or two later I went to college and that became part of my social circle.

With that sort of close knit community, it's no surprise that there were regional variations with D&D. In my case, as my gaming circle expanded, the less I played D&D (especially after that group got together and opend Delaware's second, and most succesful, dedicated gaming store). So, when I found myself going to Origins yearly (and Atlanticon when Origins wasn't in the area), I didn't really see a lot of D&D as other's played it. I expect if I had, then I would have had a different POV of the early days of the game.