Listening to old-timers describe RP in the 70s and 80s

[johndesmarais]

The dungeon was always generated randomly.

Even back in the early days, I don't think I ever played a real game (a couple of goofy one-shots, but nothing real) that used a randomly generated dungeon. We liked our dungeons, but they were always the product of intentional design, and (in our stupid adolescent ways) tried to have some logic to them.

 

[bloodtide]

I'd also add that it was a very different world back in the Time Before Time, depending on where you were:

West Salem 1986. The town has a post office, gas station and hardware store. Back in these ancient days that gas station only had a couple shelves of junk food(chips and twinkies), glass bottles of coke in large ice filled coolers(bottled water had not been invented yet) and cigarettes not anything like the modern food mart. There was no Dollar General. The closest grocery store was a good 12 miles away. The closest bookstore was the Village Booksmith, some 32 miles away. After that you had to go to 40 miles, where there was a Waldenbooks in a shopping center.

So as a kid, the bookstore is far out of reach. You hear about D&D, but have to wait to go buy it. You save up some money, and wait for a family member to go some place close, roughly a mile or so, to the Village Booksmith. They would stop just long enough at a spot you picked and let you get out. Under no circimstances were they going out of their way to take you to a bookstore. You agreed to meet them back at that spot in "a couple hours". Then you'd have to walk, follow a couple roads, but mostly just cut through fields, farms and backyards to get to the Village Booksmith.

The Village Booksmith is simply a former house converted into a store. So it's a bit small with narrow isles. They had a good selection of books though. And they had a whole RPG shelf. A mix of games, but mostly D&D. They have one 1E DMG, but no PHB. They might have as many ten modules, almost always only one of each. And often they are missing pages, inserts or maps (shrinking wrapping modules was not invented yet). They would have no dice. They did have the Basic Red Box basic D&D(that came with dice!), so you bought that. Then you had to walk back to the pick up spot. Chances are your ride was done doing whatever they were doing quickly. Remember this is a lifetime before cell phones, let alone smart phones. So then they would just randomly drive up and down the roads in the direction you went looking for you. Sure the "knew" you were going to the bookstore, but they did not know where that was anyway. After some time they would spot you and you would get picked up and head home.

Then you'd have the Basic Red Boxed Set. You'd read it over and get some friends to come over and get a game started. You don't have a module or an adventure. All you have are the random dungeon creation rules in the Basic set: so you use them.

As time passes, you can make it back to the Village Booksmith and buy everything they have....but it's not all D&D. So you get the Keep on the Borderlands, The Shady Dragon Inn, The Horror on the Hill, Ravenloft, FASA Doctor Who game, and Creeks and Crawdads! So not a pile of adventures. So you can play through each module over and over, or make your own adventures.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Started playing in '82. I wouldn't say dungeons were anywhere close to "always" generated randomly, but some definitely were. Those rules and tables were there for a reason, right? In both Basic and the 1e AD&D DMG.

We also need to distinguish between "entire dungeon generated randomly, including the existence and location and orientation of all corridors and rooms" (which the 1e DMG had tables for) vs. "map with (some) blank rooms that the DM populates with random monsters/traps/treasure."

The module B4 The Lost City has an extensive example of the latter, with advice to the DM on how to make sense of seemingly nonsensical random rolls.

 

[billd91]

For example, I was certain that I started with "Red Box" D&D. That box art is so iconic and so much of D&D culture discussion and songs reference Red Box D&D. But then I read that Red Box didn't come with a module. And if there is one thing I am sure about is that my first box set came with Keep on the Borderlands. Because I kept playing it over and over when I first got the game, because that is what I thought the game was.

But then...the only gaming artifact I still have from those days is a single dog-chewn d10. It is pale blue with the white-crayon filled numbers. But when I look on-line, I see blue dice with the Mentzer box and Yellow dice with the Moldvay box. I'm certain that Keep on the Borderlands was in my boxed set and I highly doubt my parents would have thought to buy the module separately. But who knows. I can't trust my memory and my parents don't remember. Maybe different printings had different colored dice.

I talk to friends of my mine that I played with back in the 80s and they'll remember games and adventures that I have no recollection of.

So, while I cherish my memories of gaming in the 80s, I certainly don't trust them entirely.

In this case, your memory is probably better than you think. The Moldvay set did come with Keep on the Borderlands, and its books, at least, were the iconic red color. As far as the dice, it's my understanding that those had the potential to vary from production run to production run. I'd be very surprised if anyone could reliably tell which version it was by the color of the dice alone.

 

[gamerprinter]

Though my first game was in 1977, I didn't start playing regularly until 1979. One DM did randomly generated dungeons, while I always have (and still) create the entire dungeon from scratch in game prep prior to the game - never randomly generating anything. I seldom used Random Encounter tables, though that was a common thing during 1e/2e days. I remember 1e as far more brutal. Most of your characters died at 1st level, some made it to 4th before they were killed, 7th was another level that a majority of my characters never got past. I can only remember one 12th character, and one 16th level, that was resurrected once, before he was killed again. High level characters were almost unheard of...

 

[Lanefan]

Though my first game was in 1977, I didn't start playing regularly until 1979. One DM did randomly generated dungeons, while I always have (and still) create the entire dungeon from scratch in game prep prior to the game - never randomly generating anything. I seldom used Random Encounter tables, though that was a common thing during 1e/2e days. I remember 1e as far more brutal. Most of your characters died at 1st level, some made it to 4th before they were killed, 7th was another level that a majority of my characters never got past. I can only remember one 12th character, and one 16th level, that was resurrected once, before he was killed again. High level characters were almost unheard of...

In 1e, 7th IS high level.

 

[James Gasik]

In 1e, 7th IS high level.

True that. I can count the number of characters I've had above that on one hand and not run out of fingers.

 

[MNblockhead]

I'd also add that it was a very different world back in the Time Before Time, depending on where you were:

West Salem 1986.... <SNIP>

Yeah, where you lived made a huge different in the days before Internet commerce. That's why Dragon Magazine and game and book publisher catalogs were such an important lifeline to the hobby back then.

I was lucky to grow up in the Twin Cities, MN, which is arguably ground zero for the hobby. There were multiple hobby and game stores and multiple malls with Walden Books, Toys R Us, KB Toy Store all within a short drive. Also, working a summer job easily allowed me to save up enough to get together with a couple friends and go to Gen Con, which was in Milwaukee at the time, a 5 hour drive away. We'd split gas costs, room costs, and still have money to load up on games.

Yet, even with the relative wealth of access my friends and I enjoyed, it was always a bit of a crap shoot on what any one store would have. Ordering by mail could take weeks. There was a lot of homebrew by necessity.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

It really grinds my gears when people who played [A]D&D in the early days describe their style as if it were the way it was played. I've been listening to people say that the game was, you made a couple characters, started in front of a dungeon and went in. The dungeon was always generated randomly. Brought the loot back to town, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. And I'm like, no, that's the way your group played, it wasn't universal. 1e had dozens if not a hundred or more modules. Several of which didn't involve a dungeon at all.

And that's fair enough as far as that goes, but the fact is that play WAS overwhelmingly just gritty survival and murderhoboing. Some modules were exceptions and don't define the RULE of how the game was played, and even explains why those exception modules might have been popular. But many if not the majority of modules ARE literally just a feather-light roleplaying framework around a classic dungeon-crawl.

Mostly I just hope it's not turning off the new generation to OSR/OSRIC/FG&G et. al. for no merited reason. I am very much a person who embraces the new blood and sees it as necessary and I don't want them coming in with prejudice. That is all...

Better that they should understand that OVERWHELMINGLY the Old School approach wasn't a narrative or story-based approach, which they otherwise incorrectly assume because new editions are handled that way. Tell them the truth of what it originally WAS like, and simply don't inflict that approach on them because it never was what really made the game fun. Tell them it WAS like this - but we found better ways to approach the game WHICH AREN'T DEFINED BY EDITION. Death for PC's is certainly easier in older editions, but that greater danger IS a source of greater fun because PC lives are literally always at risk from a mechanical standpoint, but in mechanical terms newer editions remove a huge amount of that risk and accordingly newer editions suffer for it.

It's great to want newer players to appreciate older editions, but accept the truth of older editions. And if that means that people reject older editions - so be it. Not every edition or every approach to the game is acceptable to everyone. Invite new players in - but don't gaslight them about what they've been missing.

 

[Bedrockgames]

My experience is back when I started (86), was styles and groups were all over the map. There was no internet in the sense we have today (watching someone use the internet was like watching alchemy to me when I first encountered it) so the only things that unified style were rulebooks, magazines, and experiences people had at conventions or game stores. There was also word of mouth. But you could go from group to group in the same town and find wildly different styles (I think in closed communities like high schools and colleges you often found more shared styles in clusters of groups, but those still varied a lot by individual GM). I will say, there seemed to be way more dungeons in the 80s to me, and way less in the 90s. But D&D was also far from the only game in town. I recall other gaming options being more viable and widespread than today (though I would say there also do seem to be a greater volume of different RPGs now due to things like POD and desktop publishing). I will say: very different gaming landscape than today.