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

[Ralif Redhammer]

One other thing.

Whenever I remember something from my childhood, I can't help but ask myself: "source please!"

Memory is a funny thing. When some aging grognard talks about how they played in back in the day, you have to account for selective memory and memory affected by discussions and reading since then.

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.

I generally have a very good memory, but even then, memories can be deceptive. I can remember very clearly walking through Montgomery Ward to go pick up the Red Box at another shop in the mall (whether it was KB Toys or Waldenbooks, that part I don't remember). But I certainly don't remember that it was on such-and-such a day in 1986. The only way I can come up with the exact date I started gaming is by cross-referencing when my family moved to that town with certain Dragon magazines, when I got the Dungeon and Wilderness Survival Guides (which meant we had switched to AD&D by then), the fixed point of when 2e came out, and working back from that.

 

[Kichwas]

Back in my day you went into a dungeon with a hireling that carried a 10 foot pole. And we liked it

We'd strap a halfling rogue to the end of that pole, and push it through any floating black circles, dark doorways, or whatever.

OP wasn't there. Some of us were. It really was "that bad" back then.

"Roleplay" didn't really start until the early to mid 80s. For most people it started after the Dragonlance novels came out and folks started realizing characters could have names. (OK they always had names, but now they got personalities too).

Remember the hobby started because some guy wanted to run a simulation of French resistance fighters in a German occupied town and needed rules to handle individual soldiers and not units. Then his players showed up, probably stoned, and having just read Lord of the Rings... and somebody asked if his French Commando could be like Gandalf.

And here we are. But it was a long road between there and here.

Back when I started, the local shop still had a few copies of "Chainmail"...

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.

This is relevant to my note about Dragonlance.

That was around the time that Dragon Magazine started talking about story rather than publishing yet another 'random wench' table or something to that effect.

The hobby started getting pretentious about story, plot, and being an [insert worst possible British accent] 'Actor'...

 

[kronovan]

I started playing AD&D 1e campaigns in 1980 at my College's D&D club - a subsidiary under the Wargamers Club. At the time, none of the handful or 2 of LGS in my city had tables for playing TTRPGs. Maybe because it was AD&D instead of the original versions, random dungeons were very rare as was the whole send in the hirelings dynamic - personally only experienced the latter decades later when playing original D&D at gaming CONS.

At one point our club had a large number of students from the Fine Arts-Creative Writing faculty join, who were attracted to the collaborative story telling aspect/potential. That significantly contributed to and in some ways changed the way adventures and campaigns were run for the club. Later on a number of women students that described themselves as feminists joined. A group of those launched 2 campaigns where only female characters could wield magic. I played in one of those and it was a great deal of fun and had the result of encouraging some men to play their 1st female PCs.

Our principal wargamers club wasn't too impressed with a lot of this development and encouraged (it was probably insisted, but I wasn't privy to actual discussions) some DMs to run campaigns that would appeal to students wanting to play a more traditional style. At the time I didn't even understand what the meant, but the response was for some DMs to run elaborate hex crawls across the World of Greyhawk, or some other popular Fantasy or homebrewed world. Those were impressive too, with some teriffic map making and a lot of creative world or location building, a reasonable amount of which was contributed by players.

Point I'm making, is that my early 1980s D&D experiences rarely match what I've read from written accounts. I've wondered at times if mine and my club players' experiences were unique, but from reading a number of threads like this over the years, I've come to the conclusion that they probably weren't.

 

[Kichwas]

At one point our club had a large number of students from the Fine Arts-Creative Writing faculty join, who were attracted to the collaborative story telling aspect/potential. That significantly contributed to and in some ways changed the way adventures and campaigns were run for the club. Later on a number of women students that described themselves as feminists joined. A group of those launched 2 campaigns where only female characters could wield magic. I played in one of those and it was a great deal of fun and had the result of encouraging some men to play their 1st female PCs.

Sounds like they were Witch World readers. That was a popular fantasy series from Andre Norton (I think) in the... I think 1970s? It was among some of the first fantasy fiction I'd ever read. I was exposed to both that and Lord of the Rings around the same time. In one women are major characters with a lot of depth alongside equally well written male characters. In the other women are cardboard boxes that only sometimes had names, and the men are barely any better. Yet both authors had great world building.

For me it had the side-effect of insisting on only reading books by women authors for about a decade (I was a teenager... my choices back then were always over-dramatic and kinda dumb) - until I realized there were men who could make characters and women who couldn't by finally giving in and trying to read some guy named Robert Jordan (who was a bit thick on Soap Opera, but he was amazing when I first discovered him) and watching as one female author I was reading started to just rewrite the same characters in all of her books that were essentially obsessed with being women watching gay men go at it... (yeah... it was really bad...)

But yeah - Witch World on the other hand was really fascinating. But I'd have never dared put a restriction like that on a gaming group where players want to play the things they want to explore.

Witch World was also one of those Fantasy novels from that era where the fantasy had sci fi in it. I forget exactly but there was one 'we have space ships and laser guns' power somewhere in that world.

Pathfinder's Golarian setting does an interesting job of using that old tactic of having Sci-Fi insert itself into the Fantasy.

 

[MNblockhead]

Point I'm making, is that my early 1980s D&D experiences rarely match what I've read from written accounts. I've wondered at times if mine and my club players' experiences were unique, but from reading a number of threads like this over the years, I've come to the conclusion that they probably weren't.

It really depends on who you talk to. About the only blanket statement I can make about that era is that gaming groups tended to islands with their own cultures. A relativity small percentage of players traveled to even local conventions and an even smaller number were on the Internet, or even had computers, at that time. That led to gaming culture being very local and could differ greatly from one community to the next.

 

[David Howery]

I started in 1980 in college at a smalllish town in MT. Surprisingly, gaming stuff wasn't that hard to come by, as the toy store in the mall had a big RPG section. Still, back in those early days, there weren't a lot of modules on hand yet, and we tended to run through what there was pretty fast. I don't remember any real 'random generated' dungeons, but there were a lot of home brewed nonsensical ones that committed all the classical mistakes... big monsters in rooms that could barely turn around in, no ways for monsters to feed themselves, lots of unrelated critters in rooms right next to each other, etc. This was all pretty new back then, and the whole ideas of long term campaigns and logical dungeons weren't really in place yet. There was a lot of one shot/mixed parties adventures as players hopped around into and out of different groups. After I'd been in the game for about a year, our groups settled down a lot more, and we actually did start regular long term campaigns.....

 

[JohnSnow]

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.

I had the Moldvay Basic Set, the Moldvay Expert Set, and a Red Box Basic Set.

My Moldvay Basic Set came with pale blue dice that you had to fill in with a crayon. I believe I still have all of them, although they're kinda scattered around the house. My Expert set came with a mix of brown and purple dice that you also had to fill in with a crayon. I still have most of those, other than my lost d4.

I got "Keep on the Borderlands" with my first Basic set, and "The Isle of Dread" with my Expert set. Of all the modules I had, "Keep" and "The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh" were my two favorites. Although "Under Illefarn" was pretty neat too. Although I have a weird soft spot for "The Forest Oracle" (which most people HATE) because it was the first time I got my parents to play with us.

Ahhh, memories.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Back in my day you went into a dungeon with a hireling that carried a 10 foot pole. And we liked it

We had to make an axe so that we could cut our own poles to carry...

 

[GuyBoy]

And we had to carry our miniatures round in fishing tackle boxes, with torn-off sheets of kitchen roll or toilet roll to protect them from scratching. And used dungeon geomorphs. And stole graph paper from the Maths Department at school.

 

[Saracenus]

It was the summer of 1979 and my 12 year-old self had been shipped off to a science camp in the Eastern Oregon desert. We lived in A-frame cabins with no doors and built-in bunk beds that we put our sleeping bags in.

I had the luck of living in the A-frame that hosted a nearly nightly AD&D game involving the camp counselors. The DM was British and his game (there was no table in this cabin) was a combination of the AD&D PH and MM (The DMG had not be published yet) with bit of Chivalry & Sorcery and a helping of Arduin Grimoire (There was a Techno Dwarf in the party that would never use his hand grenade).

The kids of that cabin had a front row seat to the most amazing story unfolding before us. It was all theater of the mind and we were enthralled by DM's descriptions and the heroic and not so heroic actions of the players. It. Blew. Our. Minds.

Cut to the Fall and the start of my 7th grade year. My friends and I by hook and by crook acquired our own copies of the game from our local hobby store (at the time named Military Corner, 1/2 was scale model store and the other 1/2 was board games and this new thing called RPGs). The chess club dried up as we all started playing D&D.

This was the before times. No internet. Dragon magazine was a thing and if you were lucky White Dwarf was available too. All in all we read the books and tried to make sense of a game that assumed you had a wargaming background (we did not). We figured it out and tried to make something resembling the fantasy books and the few movies we had. Adventure modules were another window on how to play or at least design an adventure. How my group played and how groups I encountered later, there was no one true way. There were an overwhelming amount of tinkering and house rules.

We also played Traveller, Space Opera, Bushido, Rune Quest, Tunnels & Trolls... but mostly we played D&D. Each game we tried gave us a new window into what an RPG could be. Anyone that tells you there was an only one true way to play D&D back then is either a straight up liar or wasn't there.