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.
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...
Allow me to wonder why such folk would “grind your gears”. Who cares what people say about “how D&D was played in the olden days” and that “that is how the game should be played”? Let them speak, steer the conversation to some of their actual sessions and then sit back and enjoy the ride, I say.
On the subject of “everybody back in the day doing random dungeons only”, I can only say that I rarely played in them. Back in the day, a mate at school handed me the AD&D PHB and told me to read it because “you will like it.” Flipped through the thing when I got home, couldn’t make heads nor tails of it – tables upon tables upon tables – and hated the art. Told my friend I had read the thing when I gave it back to him two days later, mumbled something along the lines of “yeah…. no… lamp… are they acrobats”, and hoped I’d never hear of it again.
But it was not to be, for next Saturday said friend called me and ordered me to get to somebody’s home “now” to do D&D. He kept on insisting and so I couldn’t say no. Got to the house and found two people sitting behind some screen with more bad art (yup, that one) and my friend on the other side, all paging furiously through some books. Told me to roll numbers of dice to make two “characters” – and to make one of them a Ranger or Paladin because “wow! that’s very good scores!” – and then the two guys behind the screen also started rolling dice and paging through more books (more bad art) to make a random dungeon on the flaming fly.
[interlude]Fifteen minutes later I was hooked. One hour later, I was already treating my Druid and Ranger as actual characters each with their own personality and making them behave accordingly.[/interlude]
My second experience with random dungeons was a couple of months later after I had illegally bought the DMG and MM myself – we weren’t allowed to as players because we were players – and I rolled up some characters for some solo-random-dungeoning and let them “happen on” many, many, magic items by rather generously interpreting certain die-rolls.
[interlude]Tired of that after a week or so.[/interlude]
Meanwhile, we’d been playing through anything the DM’s could get their hands on in Holland at the time, which was
very little indeed (U1 and
Best of White Dwarf Scenarios), as well as through many homegrown “dungeons” part of continuing, albeit primitive, story lines. We’d also met the five other people who played D&D in the lowlands at the time and then we even started going to conventions of old men who pretended to be Napoleon and Blucher and moved huge numbers of tin soldiers across large tables, some of whom had also heard of D&D and even dabbled in it, rather without willingly admitting to it.
At two of these conventions, these men pressured one of their number into “seeing to the nippers over there” and do some D&D with them. The first time, this man reluctantly did so without using any books whatsoever, presenting us with parts of a randomly generated dungeon he remembered from earlier sessions with some other old men.
My fourth experience with random dungeons, after years and years of many, many, story-fueled campaigns of memorable proportions, came a couple of years ago when I decided it would be fun to create one and had the time to do so because COVID lock-downs.
When it was finished [smug warning the second](all 14 levels and 193 pages of it)[/end smug warning the second] and I told my current players of it – most of whom are as
old experienced as I’ve noticed many folks in this thread are but I am not – everybody loved the idea and so we did just under 30 sessions in it until circumstances brought things to a premature end, which I rue to this day because they only got to the 6th level, give or take.
Random dungeons rule.
And they probably did for a lot of people back in the day.
P.S.: Interestingly, making this dungeon has taught me that rolling random dungeons in the 1E DMG only gets you as far as the 14th level at most, for then the tables stop providing you with encounters you haven’t had before.
