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

[Bill Zebub]

I started playing in '81, and my main observation is that 80% of the time when somebody says, "Back in the day, the game was played like X", I think, "That's not how we played."

One observation I'll make is that a lot of us weren't exactly known for our athletic prowess, and we tended to get our self-validation by trying to be smarter than everybody else. We began a lot of sentences with "actually." As in, "Actually, centrifugal force is an illusion; you are describing centripetal force..."

It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of my friends didn't grow up to lurk on the Internet, trying to out-expert other grognards on the early days of D&D. "Well, I started playing 3 months earlier than you, so...."

 

[francisca]

I started playing in '81, and my main observation is that 80% of the time when somebody says, "Back in the day, the game was played like X", I think, "That's not how we played."

Started around 1980, though I had been hanging around my older cousins' basement, watching them play a lot in the late 70s. I have the same reaction as you do, fairly often. I also have the "you're full of it, you weren't playing back then" or "playing the goldbox games from SSI in your basement, isn't the same as playing face to face D&D/AD&D in the late 70's and early 80s" reaction, in addition.

Anecdotal, so grab a grain of salt: There were a LOT of different styles of play back in the day. In my own experience, about half the people I knew who played back then, played more or less like I did (let's say within one standard deviation....maybe they had some different houserules, but their game was very much "D&D/AD&D" as I understood it). The other half: a handful of "to the letter zealots" and the rest were "what the hell game is that??", because it was so different from my own experiences. Not judging, just trying to illustrate the point that anybody who "one true ways" about back in the day is probably full of crap.

And going back to the original post: I don't think I ever played in a randomly generated on-the-fly dungeon until well into the 2000s, when that was the flavor of the week amongst the OSR crowd on Google Plus. Myself and others I knew always put the time in, drawing maps, and stocking the dungeon.

EDIT: Holy crap, I just realized my account here is 20+ years old..... git off muh lawn, you d**n kids!

 

[Bill Zebub]

I'll add that a lot of our "house rules" were really us just not understanding the rules.

 

[Autumnal]

I'll add that a lot of our "house rules" were really us just not understanding the rules.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/029/191/cover6.jpg

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'll add that a lot of our "house rules" were really us just not understanding the rules.

This can probably be added to the observation I've made that in the majority of cases when someone claims they played AD&D1e "by the book", when pressed on it, it turns out that they played so long ago or just so long, that they don't realize they'd used house rules, even if it was just in terms of ignoring some extent rules.

I mean, I can have some sympathy; it wasn't until some months ago when I was looking up something regarding OD&D that I realized that the official take on character generation was that the GM rolled the dice for them. That one was so obscure I don't think I ever saw anyone do it, and even on the couple cases where I heard about it, it appeared the GM doing it thought it was a house rule.

 

[francisca]

I'll add that a lot of our "house rules" were really us just not understanding the rules.

Yup. I've seen that. The D&D games that I was hard pressed to recognize as the same game I played, for example.

 

[bloodtide]

Though, back in the Time Before Time, all the Game Rules were New. Even the basic concepts of the game rules were new. No one knew what "hit points" were or what NPC stands for, before opening a rule book. And if you looked looked in the book, and still did not really grasp what they were talking about...well, you were mostly out of luck.

So, sure, you might know some other people that played RPGs. But there was only a 50/50 chance they might know the answer. And maybe more that they could even explain it to you. Sure you could write a letter to a place like (the) Dragon via Snail Mail...you know send a letter on paper on a stamp(and this was way before they invented the sticker type stamps...you had to lick ye olden stamps, or get them wet another way) and then send it off. It could take weeks to get there, weeks before it was even read, and then IF it was answered it would be months down the line. So you would need to check every month.

Though, for the most part, if you did not understand or "get" something your only choices were ignore it...or do your best and make up whatever sounded right.

To compare to today...the typical kid understands the "basics", and sure the vocabulary of RPGs in general. If not from some RPG they have played, then from video games that use the same vocabulary. Just last summer, just a chair over at the pool from me, two girls(about 9) were yelling about "avatars"(for Pokemon) and such on their smartphones. Of course, in the 21st century we also have the Internet too.....

 

[Blackmoor_Film]

It depends on how old the gamers were in a group.

My first group were teens, I was oldest at 14, and they only wanted to go to the dungeon. As the one who got bullied into being the DM I lasted maybe a year doing that. I had to abandon that group and find slightly older gamers who wanted to do more complex adventures.

Yet, as DM for the Mega Dungeon group, I got down to 9 levels of dungeon in my first one. The concept of creating situations that were more complex than simply 'kill the thing and take the stuff' was always foremost in my mind. Yet, most DMs would use short hand when creating things, so an old dungeon will ony have a note saying: Wizard and his warrior girlfriend, lvl 10 23 hp ac 9 and lvl 9 hp 37 Ac 2. Most of the detals were in the DMs head, as most DMs knew their own dungeon like that back of their hand.

The rules we had were not well written and left a lot of gaps. There was no way to create meaningful adventures without the Game Referee designing them. I actually never used random tables since I intuited that even Zenopus Dungeon was not random.

Even today, it is hard to peel my players away from the big pay-out of dungeon dives. If they are on an adventure and stumble on an underworld they'll get fixated on the exploration of the unknown for many sessions.

I do recall eventually finding Judges Guild and their wilderness and city which was something I really wanted to do. Perhaps, the most influential game out there for doing more than the cookie cutter campaign is Empire of the Petal Throne. My second group went crazy over that world setting and we dumped D&D in favor of home brewed TFT: Melee and Wizard around '78.

I consider E.P.T. to be essential reading for any Game Master rgeardless of what system they use.

Perhaps what was the biggest driving force for early D&D play being focused on dungeons is the rules themselves. Wilderness adventuring was just too brutal if played according to what was in the system for D&D. None of us realized that even the creators of the games didn't use their own rules they published.

It may be hard to understand that without internet or even email, the resources we had for learning from each other were very limited. You had to wait a month for your favorite magazine to come out. Then again, the internet has created what I call tiny pearls of useful knowledge that are buried in a sea of manure.

 

[nevin]

tiny pearls of useful knowledge that are buried in a sea of manure.

most accurate description of the internet I've ever read.

 

[Tony Vargas]

One thing that amused me at the time, as I went to conventions and pick-up games (1e AD&D), I'd ask the DM "do you use any variants?" and they'd be like "nah, by the book" (or, "yeah, we use a mana system...") ...
... then, like d10 initiative, critical hits, possibly even fumbles....