NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 6465041" data-attributes="member: 3192">So it was said that, A blatant mischaracterization or misunderstanding about early D&D and certainly not everyone's memory of that time. 1970s D&D players were mostly adults and part of the wargaming community. They were hard-nosed, very focused, mathematically literate individuals who probably worked as engineers or in similar fields. They broke out the compass and protractor to make movements in the game. The counted and recounted to double check their answers.These were not people who played games so they could hand wave away the rules. They are certainly not the progenitors of the 1-page storygame. They are the kinds of people who would refer to authorities who have the actual state of the game held by a Referee (The Sage column?) to answer fine point questions. And as more and more creative actions were attempted, the rules ballooned too.IMO, these are the kinds of people who make the most famous games in history. Magic: the Gathering was made by a mathematician and it's obvious from design. (Does math have stranglehold on "fun"? No, but neither do the the humanities. A good understanding of narrative theory won't necessarily result in a fun game even with the recent attempt to conflate the two.)Most kids, at least in the Milwaukee area in the early to mid-1980s, knew the DM wasn't supposed to make things up behind the screen. That's why all the rules were there. They were playing a game like a computer RPG before computer games were out of the arcade. And D&D was a massive hit because of this design. Much like PacMan it was highly addictive because it was built on pattern recognition (much like most music). Players may not have known clearly what was going on, but no one is denying their enjoyment.Only later did derogatory statements get said about the game: "You're really pretending to be an elf in your basement", "The DM doesn't need to roll dice or use a screen, it's all made up." and like ideas.Spread far enough those prejudices become common and common knowledge is later confused for common history. I mean, "role playing" was a term used to differentiate from people who were improvising. How reversed is our understanding of that practice now?</blockquote>

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