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

[Arilyn]

Who is making this argument? Is that in the video?

The video is not at all controversial. He stumbled across the rule, thought it might be interesting to try in some games, and made a comment that this obscure rule might explain some perceived oddities about the original rule set. I'm baffled at all the ire towards this poor guy. He certainly is not pushing some purist agenda!

My husband started playing in 1976. He liked the video and said that they used the real time rule. It was a club so made more sense as a weekly activity with many players. Of course everyone played differently. Don't think video is arguing otherwise.

 

[Charlaquin]

Unless he said something along the lines of, "and this was one obscure thing that most people didn't use," if it gets mentioned in such a video, the effect is to imply it was commonplace.

I do believe that was what he was suggesting, yes.

 

[pemerton]

My husband started playing in 1976. He liked the video and said that they used the real time rule. It was a club so made more sense as a weekly activity with many players. Of course everyone played differently. Don't think video is arguing otherwise.

I remember reading the rule around 1984. At the time I didn't understand it and didn't use it. We'd been playing B/X for a couple of years, and it didn't have a version of the rule - it just had the tracking of days spent in wilderness travel. (We didn't do town play back then.)

I also found the advice section of the PHB - about planning for dungeon expeditions - hard to make sense of, because it is oriented towards megadungeon exploration rather than the more focused scenarios that Moldvay Basic suggests.

Only in retrospect have I been able to make more sense of these things, and what sort of logic of play they support. Though as I posted upthread, I like Torchbearer's phases of play better!

 

[UngainlyTitan]

The self-labeled "BrOSR" folks (not the Brazilian OSR folks who originated that label, but the absolute idiots who co-opted it to mean "Bro" + "OSR" as, in "we One True Alpha Fans of D&D" folks). I assumed that the video maker is amongst their ranks (or at least sympathetic) because these folks are singularly obsessed with the rule in question to a pathological degree. This may have been unfair of me, but in point of fact, I've never seen anybody outside of that sphere claim that the "game time equals real-time" rule was ever popular, influential, or a cornerstone of common D&D play. This is pretty much the main pillar of the BrOSR folks, with the arguments I mention in the quoted post (i.e. One True Way, etc, etc) being extensions of that.

[Edit: Yeah, he doesn't seem to be one of the dyed in the wool BrOSR guys yet, but he's definitely on the path re: attributing this rule as a once common, influential, and popular cornerstone of D&D play, it seems.]

I have not watched the video in question but have watched others by the same bloke and he is a Critter and I really doubt he is pushing an agenda here. I think I am going to have to watch the video.

 

[Reynard]

My kid’s head nearly popped off and went walkabout after we watched Pump Up the Volume and I explained how it was my grandparents’ generation selling my generation rebellion against my parents’ generation.

The people in charge of commercializing pop culture are 2 generations behind you, by and large (there's always exceptions and the internet is disrupting that a little like it does everything else). Crawford, Feige, Waititi, the Duffer Brothers, they are all GenXers.

 

[S'mon]

Ugh.

That's sums up what I think about this. Videos like this: There are...a lot of false assumptions here.

First is that we were unaware of this rule that time in the game world matches real world time. We were aware. Heck, because there was no internet or cable TV to occupy our time, we spent more time reading and rereading books cover to cover. We all knew the rules. But we also all knew how many of them conflicted each other and we ignored what we didn't want to play with.

Second, an assumption that you either ignored real life time (like modern game) or that you followed real life time no matter what. No. While most everyone I played with back then ran a living world where time did move on outside of the game, it didn't follow real life time. That's a clear distinction.

The third assumption was that all players played in a shared world. No. The DM's game was their world, but that didn't extend from DM to DM. Good lord, that would be impossible to even try to manage.

I gotta tell ya, it's starting to get old constantly hearing from people who weren't even born yet telling us all how old school gaming was back in the day. How about just asking us? We're not all dead yet. The premise of this argument is false. What lent to old school gaming was not that we followed the passage of real life time between sessions into the game itself, but that the game was a living world where time in that world kept going regardless of what the players were doing, but the passage of that time was up the DM for what made the most sense for the adventure and not a real world calendar.

*Yes, I know there might have been some people who played like this, but I've never met one in real life and I'm confident they were the exception rather than the rule.

What time period are you talking about? The video seems to be talking about Arneson & Gygax's play assumptions, which I think were likely prevalent among their circle of Midwestern gamers in the early to mid 1970s, say a couple years either side of 1974. They certainly were no longer common to D&D mass market players of the late 1970s, and especially not the peak years of the early 1980s.

Personally I started playing RPGs ca 1983, but I only went over to strict real time = game time less than a year ago*. It definitely has major advantages, especially for maintaining multiple parrallel campaigns and multiple groups in the same campaign world. We certainly didn't do it in the '80s, when I had the typical single play group, single campaign.

*Possibly influenced by Jeffro, despite the obnoxious one-true-wayism of much BrOSR preaching. I'd already been trending that way though, eg when my Wilderlands & Primeval Thule campaign settings went on long term hiatus I'd been doing one real year = one game year for their 'downtime'.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Haven't had time to watch the video or read through the thread, but FWIW my experience (beginning in 1978) was NEVER real time = game time in ANY D&D group I have EVER played in or run. It is an absolute silly concept IMO.

You, as DM, simply decide how much time has lapsed. You don't need real time = game time to do it IME.

 

[S'mon]

My approach is to do what works at the table now, and occasionally go back to see if you threw any babies out with the bathwater over the years. The video in the OP seems like that sort of an approach where he is finding utility in a rule that is a little obscure today

Yes, me too. A good approach I think.

 

[FrozenNorth]

IMO - as a guy that has played D&D for 47 years the game is better than it ever has been. We had a lot of great games and campaigns, but I think there is a lot of rose-colored glasses views. What was definitely true is we played a lot more D&D back then. There was a lot less quality competition for leisure time.

Also, we were younger. There was a lot more leisure time period!

 

[FrozenNorth]

I honestly didn't even know about those sorts of proclamations coming through until relatively recently.

You should definitely make a Youtube video about it !