D&D General Matt Colville: "50 years later we're still arguing about what D&D even is!"

[Oofta]

Huh, I'd never thought of the DM (or referee / umpire, this is directly inherited from wargames) being conceived in the early days as a teacher making up problems for Prussian officers in training students to solve, hence the Gygaxian adversarial DM style.

And the benign version was "the problem is hard or deliberately misleading, but for the purpose of making the student better", while the less benign version was "the problem is hard or impossible to solve, and the student doesn't learn anything, so the teacher is bad".

I find this fascinating. To be clear, I don't want it anywhere near me, it's the opposite of my jam (it's a bloody roleplaying game, not homework), but I do understand it, and it's very interesting, and it explains SO MUCH about oldschool DM, err... arrogance.

Most people I knew, even back in the day, didn't do that. The one (extreme) exception only DMed 1 game.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Most people I knew, even back in the day, didn't do that. The one (extreme) exception only DMed 1 game.

When I first stared playing every game group I played with was completely different in their approach. Even if they read the same advice and books, they often had different takes on what it meant.

 

[jasper]

For those of us who don't have an hour to listen, is there a synopsis?

Because as far as I'm concerned ... D&D has always been largely what the group makes it. We have a few different options than we used to, there's been a slow evolution of the rules, but the part that really matters to me is the characters we make and campaigns the DM runs. The rules? Those are just in place to enable all the action and overall those have improved over the years for me.

The little books did not tell you how to play. So fanzines were trying to figure out how to play. Is a wargaming fantasy sim, etc. power gamer vs theatre kid. And some the general well worn topics we discuss here. RAW, RAi, rule of cool

 

[Bedrockgames]

I still remember when 3e came out and a guy I knew in college who was a DM immediately banned it and declared it the stupidest thing ever because it was a wizard without a spell book and in his words, the only way you could harm a wizard was to target his spell book (which he did with alarming regularity). Spell books and familiars were basically targets on your back.

(He was also a big fan of Gods taking away your divine powers, which meant most people ended up fighters in his game. He also didn't keep a regular group of players long, but I digress).

I resisted 3E for about a month or so. It was a losing battle lol. I'm sure I gave reasons that didn't make sense in hindsight (the truth is you really had to play 3E for a long time to understand what changes truly impacted play and made it feel different from prior editions). But the thing that kept calling me to it was the inclusion of half orcs and barbarians (that and the fact that EVERYONE in my gaming circle seemed to make the switch)

 

[jasper]

Most people I knew, even back in the day, didn't do that. The one (extreme) exception only DMed 1 game.

AND that is one of points. Back int the day each table was its own little galaxy in a big universe of d&d and the communication between groups took months.

 

[Bedrockgames]

AND that is one of points. Back int the day each table was its own little galaxy in a big universe of d&d and the communication between groups took months.

The way I look at it is you had big regional differences (I started on the west coast but moved back to the east coast in middle school and the differences were pretty striking), then you had regional differences within each region, and you had the differences from table to table. And the dynamic was totally different. There wasn't the homogeneity you encounter today. There were always guys we called grognards (can't remember when we began using that particular term but old timers were always thing, as I began playin in 86). And the old timers themselves often had very different ideas (one group I played with had a very old school focus on dungeons, another tended to run module and focus on theatrics (and this may be hard to grasp in current RPG culture but the theatrics were done in a very old school way: lots of archaic language, etc). But the most lasting impression of how to play was by the first GM who ran the game for me (and he first ran a campaign of MechWarrior* before D&D). I realize in hindsight I still do a lot of things the way he did


*I am 95% sure this is the game he was running, as everything was out of a binder and he just said it was BattleTech (for all I know it was a home-brew)

 

[Staffan]

The way I look at it is you had big regional differences (I started on the west coast but moved back to the east coast in middle school and the differences were pretty striking), then you had regional differences within each region, and you had the differences from table to table. And the dynamic was totally different. There wasn't the homogeneity you encounter today. There were always guys we called grognards (can't remember when we began using that particular term but old timers were always thing, as I began playin in 86). And the old timers themselves often had very different ideas (one group I played with had a very old school focus on dungeons, another tended to run module and focus on theatrics (and this may be hard to grasp in current RPG culture but the theatrics were done in a very old school way: lots of archaic language, etc). But the most lasting impression of how to play was by the first GM who ran the game for me (and he first ran a campaign of MechWarrior* before D&D). I realize in hindsight I still do a lot of things the way he did

The point of Matt's video is that in the period covered, variation was even larger than that because the D&D books did not tell you how to play the game. And there were no experienced D&D players to tell you how, because the game, such as it was, was brand new.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The point of Matt's video is that in the period covered, variation was even larger than that because the D&D books did not tell you how to play the game. And there were no experienced D&D players to tell you how, because the game, such as it was, was brand new.

I get that. I’ve read the original rules. My point was there was a very long period of wildly different play styles into even when I started in the 80s

 

[Minigiant]

The way I look at it is you had big regional differences (I started on the west coast but moved back to the east coast in middle school and the differences were pretty striking), then you had regional differences within each region, and you had the differences from table to table. And the dynamic was totally different.

I kinda wish there was more coordination back in the day for someone to see how each region played and similarities groups in areas had.

Midwest D&D
East Coast D&D
West Canadian D&D
South English D&D

 

[Oofta]

The point of Matt's video is that in the period covered, variation was even larger than that because the D&D books did not tell you how to play the game. And there were no experienced D&D players to tell you how, because the game, such as it was, was brand new.

We were all Tolkien and fantasy fiction fans, so it never really occured to use to treat it like a wargame. Probably didn't hurt that we rotated DMs so we kind of all agreed that adversarial DMing wasn't a lot of fun for us.