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

[occam]

I think people are reading him very uncharitably. I’m 100% sure he knows that not everyone did it. He probably overestimated how common it was, maybe by a lot. I think that’s a far cry from “telling old-school gamers how they played.”

I appreciate your desire to interpret SupergeekMike's arguments charitably. And I don't have a problem with a lot of the video. If he had kept it to, "Hey, I found this rule that existed in old versions of D&D which don't appear in later editions, but I think it'd be interesting to explore the consequences of using such a rule", I don't think there would've been any pushback. But that's not what he did.

First of all, the YouTube video is entitled "How A Forgotten D&D Rule Shaped the Entire Old-School Gaming Culture" (emphasis mine). He's clearly expressing the notion, before one even watches the video, that this one rule defined all old-school gaming. He then goes on to describe what sounds like a universal play style, lacking any qualifiers such as "some", "perhaps", etc.

Obviously old school play isn’t just one thing. Different people play in different ways, so no, this rule or guideline or whatever you want to call it is not some Rosetta Stone to old-school play.

Around 8:39, he literally says "This is like the Rosetta Stone for early D&D games."

But it is pretty much completely incompatible with modern play.

A little aside the topic, but I don't think this is necessarily the case. At least, given how rarely this rule was followed IME and in the experience of other older gamers who've posted to this thread, I don't think it's qualitatively more unwieldy or irrelevant now than it was then.

He does seem to conflate different elements of different styles of play into one nebulous idea of “old-school play” that doesn’t accurately describe how many people played at all, let alone most. But I don’t get the impression that the point of the video was ever to educate people on how the game was played in “ye olden dayes.” Rather, he was sharing excitement about this type of location-focused exploratory play that this rule had made him consider for the first time, and in doing so may have jumped to some dubious conclusions.

Let's say that I posted something in which I claimed that after watching a TikTok video or two, I suddenly realized that GenZ-ers were mining Bitcoin to pay for online concerts featuring their favorite K-pop groups, and that this fundamentally changes our understanding of future political and economic trends due to Bitcoin-funded K-pop shaping the entire youth culture. Would you say that people annoyed by my observation with claims that I was grossly over-generalizing should just take into account that I was excited by finding out about Bitcoin and the popularity of Korean music in western youth culture? Wouldn't it have been better if I had just said, "Hey, did you know a lot of teens and twenty-somethings like K-pop these days? Let's talk about K-pop!"

 

[S'mon]

First of all, the YouTube video is entitled "How A Forgotten D&D Rule Shaped the Entire Old-School Gaming Culture" (emphasis mine).

You do know that successful Youtubers routinely use this clickbait technique to drive traffic? I guess I'm just inured to it by now, to the extent I didn't even notice.

 

[Yora]

I did permit the players to "freeze time"/stop a session mid-adventure when they were on side quests to locations the other group wouldn't reasonably be able to get to, and now that I'm down to one steady group, and they're high enough level to have a good amount of adventuring stamina, most of the time we do play that they can pause mid adventure and pick up without time elapsing.

And this is why "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT!"

 

[FrozenNorth]

You do know that successful Youtubers routinely use this clickbait technique to drive traffic? I guess I'm just inured to it by now, to the extent I didn't even notice.

True, I am a big fan of TLDR news, they do a reasonably objective and thorough analysis of world events. You wouldn’t know that from the titles of their videos though, that tend towards clickbaity.

 

[Bedrockgames]

You do know that successful Youtubers routinely use this clickbait technique to drive traffic? I guess I'm just inured to it by now, to the extent I didn't even notice.

This might also be an important part of what is going on. YouTube video titles are often clickbait in a tongue in cheek way. I’ve seen videos on music where the title us something like “I own and so with FACTS!!!!!!” abd it just ends up being a cordial conversation where so and so says ‘you make a good point there’ at some point in the discussion. YouTube titles tend to also use stark broad generalizations about a topic or provocative statements to grab attention. Many videos will be more nuanced but those titles are basically just playing to the algorithm. And even some of the content I am sure is as well.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Maybe there should have been?

I don’t think the 1E DMG is anything like what has developed over time. Information isn’t structured and grouped in that way. It’s very conversational, at times it’s very thinking out loud, and it has strong personality to it. Most DMGs since have been very functional, organized, and a bit dry. The 1E DMG is a bit chaotic in its organization, has useful information throughout it but that is interspersed with stuff that feels like a side note or rough idea. For me it’s the best read of all the DMGs. But it isn’t the best reference book. It’s more useful to mine for ideas in my opinion. I’ve found a lot of useful techniques and ideas in there. But it isn’t something that is unified: you can’t put every concept in there together and have something cohesive. You do have to pick and choose things. At least that has been my experience. It is flawed, but the flaws are one of the elements that make it a far more engaging read than say the 2E or 3E DMG

 

[Doc_Klueless]

Maybe there should have been?

Possibly? But someone had to come first and make "mistakes" for others to learn from.

Myself, I don't particularly like sidebars as they pull me from what I'm reading or I continue to read and forget to go back to the sidebar. But that's just me, which I freely admit.

 

[Maxperson]

@Arilyn and @Smackpixi, it was just a joke. @ECMO3 wasn't seriously suggesting that if you stopped in the middle of a goblin fight you would come back the next week and be dead. If he had, he'd have done the math correctly and had 60 rounds per hour x 24 hours per day x 7 days and come up with 10,080 rounds, not 20000.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Training has worked fine for us for a very long time now, though (of course!) not exactly as EGG wrote it. But yes, finding a trainer can sometimes be a problem particularly for the less-common classes (hello there, Illusionist!); and if you don't train your xp-received eventually slows right down (as opposed to stopping dead like EGG had it).

I think you could make a training rule that would function in the context of 'troupe play', yes. It is not any good for serial party play though, as it just becomes a bunch of hand-wavy book keeping. I mean, if you want training montages and a slower pace of adventure with long hiatus between them, just describe play that way, it doesn't really need mechanics! OTOH the version in the 1e DMG is just borked. I assume it was intended to suck up excessive quantities of cash that PCs were assumed to be accumulating in most games. If you took the 1-4 RP rating seriously and the average was 2.5, then you had to get almost 3x more gold than XP to advance due to training fees, which basically means you'd always be at level+1 -1XP blocked on training at all times and losing 2/3 of your potential XP. It just didn't work at all! Even if you assume all PCs earn an RP rating of 1.0 all the time, you are most often blocked by unavailability of a trainer, and at high level this becomes basically an impossible situation.

Yes, this. If for example we know there's some downtime coming because someone has to train, I'll ask what the rest are doing for that time and if any of it needs DM attention I see to it then and there - or by email during the week if it's long.

Right, but again, why mechanics for it? I'd just say "OK, the fighter and the rogue practice, and the ranger goes off in the woods to study plants for a week." No need to fiddle with gold and such.

 

[Lanefan]

I think you could make a training rule that would function in the context of 'troupe play', yes. It is not any good for serial party play though, as it just becomes a bunch of hand-wavy book keeping. I mean, if you want training montages and a slower pace of adventure with long hiatus between them, just describe play that way, it doesn't really need mechanics!

There's more to it than that. Not everyone bumps at the same time, for one thing, meaning sometimes the party are faced with a tough choice of carrying on without training or stopping and going back to town so some people can train up. Or, sometimes a character stays put to train while the rest go off and do something else (and the training PC's player brings in a replacement or cycles in another pre-existing PC).

OTOH the version in the 1e DMG is just borked. I assume it was intended to suck up excessive quantities of cash that PCs were assumed to be accumulating in most games. If you took the 1-4 RP rating seriously and the average was 2.5, then you had to get almost 3x more gold than XP to advance due to training fees, which basically means you'd always be at level+1 -1XP blocked on training at all times and losing 2/3 of your potential XP. It just didn't work at all!

That rating system was dumb, and I abandoned it before I even started DMing. I use a rough formula for training costs, same for everyone, with a bit of random variability thrown in just for kicks.

Even if you assume all PCs earn an RP rating of 1.0 all the time, you are most often blocked by unavailability of a trainer, and at high level this becomes basically an impossible situation.

After about name level a character doesn't need an outside trainer, as per 1e RAW I think (but I could be wrong on that). Before that, yes, in some cases finding a trainer can be difficult and-or time-consuming e.g. the nearest known trainer is a month's travel away. Fine with me.

Right, but again, why mechanics for it? I'd just say "OK, the fighter and the rogue practice, and the ranger goes off in the woods to study plants for a week." No need to fiddle with gold and such.

Training still costs money. That's not going away.

The meta-advantage of having characters train is that it puts most of the level-up bookkeeping off until they're back in town and doing other downtime stuff anyway e.g. treasury division, and thus are already in bookkeeping mode.