D&D General Younger Players Telling Us how Old School Gamers Played

Charlaquin

Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
So, rather than just lambasting this guy for being wrong about “how it was really played,” anyone want to like… Point out what specifically he got wrong, and set the record straight? I understand y’all are pretty well-informed on the matter, I’d be more interested in hearing your perspectives than… whatever this thread has been so far.
 

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Lanefan

Victoria Rules
The problem (aside from the impracticality, of course) is that there really isn’t one universal old-school D&D experience. Certainly I think there’s value in being exposed to different ways of playing - be that different editions, different game systems, or even just different DMs with very different approaches than they’re used to. But I don’t think an “old-school D&D boot camp” would really teach new players much about “how people really played back then” because again people have always played and will always play in all sorts of ways.
It wouldn't be to teach them "how people really played" because, as we've seen, the definition of that varied from town to town and maybe even table to table, never mind state to state or province to province.

But it would show them how one of the key systems work (that being whichever one was being used for that group) and how different the expectations are, along with the differences in actual play.
 

Charlaquin

Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
It wouldn't be to teach them "how people really played" because, as we've seen, the definition of that varied from town to town and maybe even table to table, never mind state to state or province to province.

But it would show them how one of the key systems work (that being whichever one was being used for that group) and how different the expectations are, along with the differences in actual play.
Yeah, experience with different systems is never a bad thing.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
So, rather than just lambasting this guy for being wrong about “how it was really played,” anyone want to like… Point out what specifically he got wrong, and set the record straight? I understand y’all are pretty well-informed on the matter, I’d be more interested in hearing your perspectives than… whatever this thread has been so far.
I haven't watched the video and don't want to support it by clicking on it.

But, upthread someone gave a list of specific points made in the video...I'll have a look and get back to ya.
 


Lanefan

Victoria Rules
OK, @Charlaquin - here's the points list. Here's what he gets wrong, IME:
2:15 “Most people didn’t know about. They literally didn’t see it. They missed it in the books.”
Wrong. Most people - DMs at least - knew about it, but intentionally chose to ignore it.
2:48: “The early DMs didn’t build worlds, they built dungeons”
They did both; most commonly starting with a dungeon or two and then expanding from there as needed until suddenly it's a world - or enough of one to support a long and diverse campaign, anyway.
2:58: “The assumption was that all D&D games took place in a shared world. You focused a dungeon.”
Wrong. In the DMG Gygax points out how cool it can be if DMs connect their worlds such that characters can jump from one to another; and this was fairly common among groups where some players overlapped. But all D&D games taking place in one shared world? Hell no!
3:15 “Progress was made by how many rooms you explored.”
This one's true sometimes, but doesn't square with the one at 4:55.
4:08 “You didn’t play with one group of players.”
Players came and went, sure, but IME there would usually be a core of two or three who stuck with a given DM.
4:55 “Games would end when you got back to town.”
Completely wrong; and doesn't agree with the point at 3:15. Weekend-warrior games existed, no question there, but they were far from universal. Most games already worked as they do today, where you pick up next session right where you left off this one - same in-game time, place, etc. - even if the players were a bit of a rotating cast (the PCs of no-shows became party NPCs for that session)
7:55 “They all played in one world where anyone could play with anyone else.”
This is almost a repeat of the point at 2:58, just phrased differently. It's still wrong.
 

no it isn't... he brought up a rule most of us have never heard of and gave 3 options... they either did it, ignored it or chose not to... BUT it was a rule and style choice...

now instead of ignore I would have said house ruled, but that isn't that big a deal. He found a rule and is extrapolating how it interacts with the game

look I doubt you are much older then me, just cause I joined the game in 2e over 1e isn't that big a difference
I think it is considerably different, given that I played LBB white box D&D, Holmes, and 1e, etc. That is, by 1989 when 2e came out, the whole sense of what D&D is and how it is played felt fairly different. In the REALLY early days, it was different. People treated the LBBs pretty much like a bunch of notes for doing an FRPG. The IDEA of an FRPG, along with some of the basic mechanics (classes, hit points, etc.) were fairly established as 'this is part of D&D', but the REST of it? Not really. However, I knew all the rules, I read those books through 10x over. I just didn't use a lot of it, or tweaked it.
 

Charlaquin

Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
OK, @Charlaquin - here's the points list. Here's what he gets wrong, IME:

Wrong. Most people - DMs at least - knew about it, but intentionally chose to ignore it.
I don’t think he was speaking specifically of DMs, and I certainly expect there were plenty of players who weren’t aware of it, especially since a lot of DMs didn’t use it. Moreover, the context of this comment is relevant. He’s talking about how this particular bit of techne was lost over time.
They did both; most commonly starting with a dungeon or two and then expanding from there as needed until suddenly it's a world - or enough of one to support a long and diverse campaign, anyway.
Maybe poor choice of phrasing here, but the broader point is to contrast a play style that was very focused on dungeon exploration to one that’s more focused on serialized storytelling.
Wrong. In the DMG Gygax points out how cool it can be if DMs connect their worlds such that characters can jump from one to another; and this was fairly common among groups where some players overlapped. But all D&D games taking place in one shared world? Hell no!
Obviously he didn’t mean that literally.
This one's true sometimes, but doesn't square with the one at 4:55.
This line is definitely odd, but again, remember that he’s trying to contextualize location-based play to an audience who may never have considered that there might be an alternative to event-based play.
Players came and went, sure, but IME there would usually be a core of two or three who stuck with a given DM.
That doesn’t contradict what he said though. Is it not true both that groups often had consistent cores and that players wouldn’t always play with the same group?
Completely wrong; and doesn't agree with the point at 3:15. Weekend-warrior games existed, no question there, but they were far from universal. Most games already worked as they do today, where you pick up next session right where you left off this one - same in-game time, place, etc. - even if the players were a bit of a rotating cast (the PCs of no-shows became party NPCs for that session)
I think he assumed this because, as he says in the video, he has experience with West Marches play, where this is often the case, and he has conflated that experience with old-school play because of other ways they are similar. At any rate, it’s not untrue that there were games played this way.
This is almost a repeat of the point at 2:58, just phrased differently. It's still wrong.
It certainly overstates the degree to which this was a thing. But is it not true that people would (sometimes) bring the same character to different DMs tables, and that things like XP and items would (sometimes) carry over between different tables? Certainly this was far from universal, but give the guy a break. He’s just recently learned that this was ever a thing at all and excited to talk about it. Can we not forgive him for making the mistake of thinking it was more common than it was? Do we even have data on how common or uncommon it was?
 

Maxperson

Morkus from Orkus
I don’t think he’s making the claims you think he’s making. Yeah, obviously there were people who were aware of the rule. Obviously there were also people who weren’t aware of it. Obviously there were groups who followed it, and groups who ignored it. People always have played and always will play the game in all sorts of different ways. But without a doubt, the rule in question got dropped in later editions, and new players today are mostly unaware of it. There’s a lot about old-school play that can be revelatory to new players, because a lot of them assume the game has always been fundamentally the same, with the rules being gradually refined over time. Discovering rules like this changes the way newer players conceive of the game’s history, making them realize that the way (some) people used to play is very different than the way they do now.

It seems to me like people are talking past each other here. I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that everyone who played old-school D&D played the same way.
He doesn't say, "This is how Gygax and his friends played." He goes out of his way to say, "This is how people played it in the before times and it blows my mind that they did it this way." while getting it completely wrong.
 

James Gasik

We don't talk about Pun-Pun
cf.



That's the issue. It's not a monolith, yet to start with this person is treating this as a "rule," (it's not) and doesn't seem to fully understand how OD&D worked. So it's not a question of people ignoring it or not ignoring it- he doesn't even fully try to understand the context of what he read.

The next thing is that this isn't hidden or constrained to OD&D. Look at the 1e DMG (all together- NO ONE READS THE DMG!). This "rule" is, unsurprisingly, in the AD&D DMG because AD&D is just OD&D with a lot more words.

Pages 37-38. On page 37, Gygax reiterates that "it is best to use 1 actual day = 1 game day when no play is happening." The entire section is an elaboration on what was already provided for in OD&D.
Wait, no one read the 1e DMG? I've read that thing cover to cover a hundred times. Even with Gary's rambling and alternating from "this is your game" to "if you don't play according to these rules, you're not playing D&D", the wealth of content in that book is amazing and I love to refer to it today.

Sure, there's some "screw over your players, they don't deserve class abilities", but there's a random dungeon generator, lists of herbs and gemstones with possible magical abilities, a list of ecclesiastical titles, a dissertation of many different types of government, magic items, artifacts, games of chance...it's a treasury of information, unlike, say, more current versions of the DMG.
 

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