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

[Voadam]

I never found an adequate way to track time in game- combat takes seconds, but searching a room takes 10 rounds?; even trying to track spell durations outside of combat is a huge hassle for me, lol.

Rounds were each a minute involving a bunch of blows going back and forth generally summed up by the single mechanical rolls. Searching took a turn, 10 minutes.

Moldvay B/X had combat round off to a turn (10 minutes) at the end no matter how few rounds it went due to catching your breath, and had most everything done out in terms of turns which made it easier track everything (combat, searching, movement, torch duration, random encounters checks) if you wanted to get to that level of detail.

I have found spell durations a pain in the neck to track in every edition except 4e (instantaneous, one round, save ends, encounter). I generally house rule 1 minute duration spells into just flat out encounter duration ones in my 5e games for ease of play during combat.

 

[Willie the Duck]

There's a lot of weirdness in how Gygax describes what play should be like in 1e that I never saw anywhere, like having one party member designated as a "caller", and all interactions between the other members and the DM go through this individual. Mapping almost always results in confusion, so I stopped asking my players to do it, and I never found an adequate way to track time in game- combat takes seconds, but searching a room takes 10 rounds?; even trying to track spell durations outside of combat is a huge hassle for me, lol.

Callers -- I had always assumed the caller was put in there strictly in case it was needed. Something that you didn't start using until after the first "I didn't say my character was entering the room [the DM just described a trap going off in]"/"I heard a plethora of voices saying the party was entering the room, I'm not going to check with each of you for confirmation at each juncture" argument.

Mapping and careful time tracking -- Even when we started playing as kids, we understood what was being attempted here (but also how it often was 'someone else's idea of fun'). Making the party map meant you had to pay attention and let there be secrets you had be careful to notice (a map which doesn't make sense hinting at slow gradual slopes or teleport traps or moving walls, etc.). Time management, just like the careful tracking of encumbrance, this was supposed to set up a weighing of options. You could search every square for traps, and every corner for treasure, but that costs torches/wandering monster checks/spell duration. Thus you made educated guesses about what was or wasn't important, suspicious, etc. And, just like encumbrance and bags of holding being in the rules, we realized even the developers didn't want to do that all the time.

With regards to the actual lengths of time -- I think it was the glacial walking speed, but either way something clued us in that perhaps the actual units were kinda arbitrary or gamist (meant to make the torches per section of dungeon explored math work, and to contain most combats in a single exploration time-unit). Either in-game feet aren't real feet or minutes aren't minutes or people just move really slowly when exploring dangerous holes in the ground (not entirely unrealistic*) and in-combat movement is net movement not actual steps taken or the like. I remember when AD&D 2nd edition came out, the description of a round included an example scenario where it tried to (rather comically, IMO) justify why a combat round took a full minute. I remember passing it between people I'd gamed with all that time and giggling about (in our minds) confirmation that they'd started with the turns and rounds, and desired distances and worked their way backwards from there.
*oD&D does pay lip-service to this, with doubling the number of moves/turn (with no mapping allowed) when in flight/pursuit situations, indicating that people can move faster, they just aren't.

 

[Dyson Logos]

We still do our mapping the old school way in most of my groups.

And with the advent of online play, the "party caller" has become a thing again that I appreciate. One person handles the group's decisions to the DM, but if any player doesn't want to go along with it, they say so, but it makes travel directions and so on much easier to communicate and handle.

 

[Dyson Logos]

Some more player maps from the last few years:

 

[Mannahnin]

Rounds were each a minute involving a bunch of blows going back and forth generally summed up by the single mechanical rolls. Searching took a turn, 10 minutes.

Moldvay B/X had combat round off to a turn (10 minutes) at the end no matter how few rounds it went due to catching your breath, and had most everything done out in terms of turns which made it easier track everything (combat, searching, movement, torch duration, random encounters checks) if you wanted to get to that level of detail.

To clarify, B/X uses 10 second combat rounds instead of OD&D and AD&D's one minute rounds, but yeah, for time tracking within the adventure a combat is rounded up to 10 minutes to account for recovery, bandaging, adjusting armor, looting bodies, etc.

With regards to the actual lengths of time -- I think it was the glacial walking speed, but either way something clued us in that perhaps the actual units were kinda arbitrary or gamist (meant to make the torches per section of dungeon explored math work, and to contain most combats in a single exploration time-unit). Either in-game feet aren't real feet or minutes aren't minutes or people just move really slowly when exploring dangerous holes in the ground (not entirely unrealistic*) and in-combat movement is net movement not actual steps taken or the like. I remember when AD&D 2nd edition came out, the description of a round included an example scenario where it tried to (rather comically, IMO) justify why a combat round took a full minute. I remember passing it between people I'd gamed with all that time and giggling about (in our minds) confirmation that they'd started with the turns and rounds, and desired distances and worked their way backwards from there.
*oD&D does pay lip-service to this, with doubling the number of moves/turn (with no mapping allowed) when in flight/pursuit situations, indicating that people can move faster, they just aren't.

B/X also triples movement speed if you're going through already-explored/cleared areas. The glacial baseline speed assumes moving cautiously and quietly (hence the 2 in 6 Surprise chance) through a dark environment and mapping it as you go.

 

[Geekrampage]

The mapping duties in my group fall to the one player who happens to be a professional architect. When we played in person, she drew pretty good maps on graph paper. When we switched to VTT play, she started mapping in her professional CAD tools on her work computer.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Rounds were each a minute involving a bunch of blows going back and forth generally summed up by the single mechanical rolls. Searching took a turn, 10 minutes.

Even modern 6-second rounds need to assume multiple blows per attack roll... I mean, until you get to the action-surging top level fighter or WWAing Ranger.
(as an aside, it's funny how much faster casting got, from casting time expressed six-second segments to just 'an action' or 'a bonus action.' If spells still had their old casting times, with today's 6 second round, that'd be quite the in-combat balancing factor.)

Moldvay B/X had combat round off to a turn (10 minutes) at the end no matter how few rounds it went due to catching your breath,

That was also in 1e, the 10 min turn, and rounding up combats to the full turn with the balance being spent recovering. The OG Short Rest.

 

[Lanefan]

There's a lot of weirdness in how Gygax describes what play should be like in 1e that I never saw anywhere, like having one party member designated as a "caller", and all interactions between the other members and the DM go through this individual.

That came about because Gygax sometimes ran with 10-20 players, meaning there only being one voice he had to pay attention to became essential. I've never seen it used in smaller groups.

Mapping almost always results in confusion, so I stopped asking my players to do it,

Mapping causing confusion is a perfect analogy for the charcters not being expert mappers.

and I never found an adequate way to track time in game- combat takes seconds, but searching a room takes 10 rounds?; even trying to track spell durations outside of combat is a huge hassle for me, lol.

Unless you're trying for perfect accuracy, it's not that hard. If the party are discussing plans, for example, or arguing among themselves or talking to an NPC, that's dirt simple: real time = game time. Travel is also easy - you know their move rate, you know how far they're going, and thus you can quickly calculate how long it'll take.

For searching etc. I often just ask how long they intend to spend at it (unless they find something noteworthy sooner), which very neatly gives me two answers in one: the actual time they intend to spend, plus a pretty good idea as to how thorough their search will be. If for example they tell me they'll spend 5 minutes searching the Duke's chambers, that tells me it'll be a rather perfunctory search; while if they tell me they're going to spend an hour in there unless disturbed, that says "thorough search" every time.

For out-of-combat spell durations, I often kinda wing it; with the passage of time again based on what they're doing and how long it'd reasonably take.

 

[bloodtide]

There's a lot of weirdness in how Gygax describes what play should be like in 1e that I never saw anywhere, like having one party member designated as a "caller", and all interactions between the other members and the DM go through this individual. Mapping almost always results in confusion, so I stopped asking my players to do it, and I never found an adequate way to track time in game- combat takes seconds, but searching a room takes 10 rounds?; even trying to track spell durations outside of combat is a huge hassle for me, lol.

For organized play or tournaments, they often had rules for a Caller and a Mapper. These rules made it into AD&D and Basic D&D. It was not done much in "home" play.

And some AD&D adventures were made for something like 8-10 PCs or more. The classic example is the Companions from Dragonlance during the original trilogy and the Knights of Myth Drannor.

 

[Iosue]

We started with Moldvay Basic, and it said to use a Caller and a Mapper, so we did.

What was great about mapping was that it represented a concrete record of our progress through an adventure. You start with a blank sheet of graph paper, and then little by little it grows and grows. If you're doing a one-shot, it's probably not needed. If dungeons are a small part of your expansive campaign, it's probably more trouble than its worth. But for us, playing exclusively dungeoncrawls through the 3 levels of the Basic Rules, it was great fun.

IMO, the great failing of the Caller was that it was never adequately explained. It always came off as one player being the leader over the other players and/or being the only one to interact with the DM. I would explain it this way.

1. During exploration, players discuss what they want to do amongst each other.
2. Any player can ask the DM anything.
3. Players come to an agreement about group and individual actions.
4. Caller relays that to the DM, essentially acting as a "Commit button".
5. The DM then begins resolving checks, describing the surroundings, etc.

Since our group now plays online (since I'm in Japan), I still use a Caller when we are in a dungeon, even though we play 5e. As others have pointed out, it's extremely useful to reduce cross-talk and misunderstandings during online play.