D&D General Introduction in the 1978 1st Edition AD&D Player's Handbook

[Parmandur]

I was 12.

I wouldn't want to accuse peak TSR of possessing too much marketing savvy, but there was a leak sometime back of WotC marketing strategy going into 3E: and the gist was "make it seem like something hip college kids are into so more 12 year olds will buy it".

 

[Remathilis]

So Basic D&D (the B/X later BECMI) was D&D geared toward children. "Advanced" D&D was geared towards adults. The assumption was you would play Basic when you're younger (due to the simpler chargen, less rules, and less planar influences) and then graduate to "adult" D&D when you sought greater nuance and more sophisticated mechanics.

Of course, the grand irony is that AD&D became the entry-point of D&D for most people anyway, and the OS movement has a far greater love for B/X simplicity over AD&D's convolution if the retro-clones have anything to say.

But yes, you were supposed to graduate from kiddie/basic to adult/advanced, hence Gygax addressing adults in the PHB...

 

[Micah Sweet]

I was rereading the 1978 1st Edition of the AD&D Player's Handbook today and some things in the introduction stood out to me:


"The game is ideally for three or more adult players".

"You interact with your fellow role players, not as Jim and Bob and Mary that work at the office together, but as Falstaff the fighter, Agnore the cleric and Filmar the mistress of magic".

"It is strongly urged that players do not purchase or read the Dungeon Master's Guide".


It's interesting how they weren't aiming at teens or college students as a primary market (obviously that changed in subsequent years). And actively urging people not to buy a product your company sells is also unusual.

They seem to be aiming even younger now. I liked the assumption it was a game for adults. Not only would the text approach the material from a higher reading level, making that clear would actually encourage teens to check it out (IME teens are interested in things they are told are for adults).

 

[Micah Sweet]

I can't speak to whom AD&D was aimed at. Who was expected to play it, and who was considered not the target audience. I'll defer to those who are in a better position to know.

As for the DMG, however, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that Gygax & others very much desired for the game to have "secret rules", and to cement the Dungeon Master's place as the final authority on all things. Gary's tone is sometimes very unfriendly when it comes to the players of the game, and at times comes across as antagonistic towards them. Those who played at his games, however, paint a different picture of the man. The author of the DMG seems to be a rules-obsessed autocrat, the kind of person who would make an ultra-lethal dungeon out of sheer spite (see Tomb of Horrors), but the people who knew him describe a man who had a much more laissez-faire approach to the rules of the game, and seemingly wanted everyone to have fun.

I can't explain the dichotomy, after all, there is this infamous quote in the DMG:

View attachment 384731

Here we have a quote that would seem to be made by someone who feels that daring to learn the secrets of the DMG is obviously a person who seeks to gain an unfair advantage in the game, or even cheat!

Why is the DMG advocating for hamstringing Wizard spell choices, to the point that NPC's will refuse to share spells for anything resembling a fair deal? Why is it keeping an important class feature of the Assassin not only secret, but even if a player asks the DM if they can acquire it, advises you to make them spend time and money in research that will automatically fail if you're not the correct level?

Or why the DMG makes it very clear that allowing someone to play a monster character is a bad idea- an explanation that takes six whole paragraphs that one could boil down to "I think humans should be the focus of D&D because it makes the most sense to me"?

I don't want to uncharitable- I don't know what was going on in Gary's mind at the time. Maybe he'd had to deal with an abusive player, and wanted to give prospective DM's the benefit of his wisdom. Maybe it was a joke that didn't quite land. I didn't know him, and I can't ask him.

I will say that I know people who learned the wrong lessons from the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, and to this day, run very antagonistic games of D&D where player characters have very little agency or hope of success. Is that the book's fault? It's hard to say. But having had these sorts of individuals justify themselves by quoting the book directly, I think something went awry.

The thing that bothers me the most about the AD&D DMG, a book I value and treasure, is that it really doesn't discuss how one becomes a Dungeon Master.

What is the process by which this occurs? If players can't read the book, or even look at it, without deserving a "less than honorable death", where does one begin? And as wonderful a resource as the DMG is, it really doesn't teach one how to DM. It can help someone be a better DM, to be sure, but it's written with the idea that the read knows the basics already.

And perhaps that's the point, after all, it is called "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons". Maybe you were meant to learn by playing D&D? Or maybe nobody was that forward-thinking at the time?

It's one of the most frustrating things about the hobby that this difficult and vital task, of being the Dungeon Master, has often had a very shoddy on-ramp. I know I got started because I had a story I wanted to tell, and to this day, I'm still learning new lessons about it.

But I digress. "Is D&D for everyone?" is a question for the ages. Different people think different things about that, and perhaps, in the 70's, it wasn't intended for everyone. Thankfully, regardless of whether it was or wasn't, many people learned to play and love the game.

Basic D&D was by no means a shoddy on ramp IMO. I learned on the Mentzer red box at around age 9 or 10, and I still feel it's one of if not the best starter product ever made for fantasy gaming. By the time I graduated to the 1e DMG I was ready to devour that book whole, and was able to make good use of it because I started with a good starter set.

 

[Parmandur]

So Basic D&D (the B/X later BECMI) was D&D geared toward children. "Advanced" D&D was geared towards adults. The assumption was you would play Basic when you're younger (due to the simpler chargen, less rules, and less planar influences) and then graduate to "adult" D&D when you sought greater nuance and more sophisticated mechanics.

Of course, the grand irony is that AD&D became the entry-point of D&D for most people anyway, and the OS movement has a far greater love for B/X simplicity over AD&D's convolution if the retro-clones have anything to say.

But yes, you were supposed to graduate from kiddie/basic to adult/advanced, hence Gygax addressing adults in the PHB...

I mean, rhe real idea was to stiff Dabe Arneson on royalties so thst Gygax would have more fun time money...

 

[sevenbastard]

IME teens are interested in things they are told are for adults

Yeah, As a teen I wanted to play adult games, read adult books, and watch adult movies. Show how mature and not a child I was.

Wouldn't touch kid stuff with a 10 foot pole.

 

[Remathilis]

I mean, rhe real idea was to stiff Dabe Arneson on royalties so thst Gygax would have more fun time money...

I mean, that was part of it.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

I was 12.

I was 18 - and the DMG wasn't out yet, just the PHB and MM.

I got a late start because I didn't do mail order back then, and it was only when I started college that I found a brick-and-mortar hobby store that sold the games. (I do remember seeing Metagaming ads before I went to college - and I was tempted, just not enough to break my "no mail order" custom.)

So my earliest experiences were with pre-1e D&D.

As for players not reading the DMG, the standard I imprinted on was "Most players are DMs of their own games, and players who aren't should be treated as if they were."

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

(IME teens are interested in things they are told are for adults).

IME it goes beyond that. One of my pet peeves is how parents, teachers, librarians, authors, and publishers all seem convinced that kids want to read about kids their own age - not about older kids and certainly not about adults. And kids mostly have to take what they're given; they're not in a good position to protest, or even to know that protest is possible. But "kids books" that manage to sidestep this often turn out to be unexpectedly popular. Consider that book about a 50 year old pipe-smoking bachelor...

Or as Terry Pratchett put it more pithily than I ever could, about the assumption of childrens' books = child protagonists: "... For similar reasons, Moby Dick is very popular among whales."

 

[Clint_L]

Just pointing out that Gygax's very first players were pre-teens.

However, anyone looking at art from that era could tell you that, by the time AD&D rolled around, they were assuming a more adult audience. Of course, you know what they say about assumptions...