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Younger Players Telling Us how Old School Gamers Played
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<blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 8830400" data-attributes="member: 50987"><p>Here's what <em>this one Gen-X</em> gamer remembers about the old way of playing:</p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Adventure modules cost about as much as a comic book, and you could read the whole thing in an hour and be ready to play it. They were packed with content, too: most were only 30-something pages long, and still managed to include maps, NPCs, and new monsters.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rules existed only to settle outcomes...they didn't mandate what was possible or allowable (that was the DM's job.) You didn't consult a checklist of What Is Possible every time your turn came around; you just described what you were trying to do and the DM maybe asked you to roll something.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The best artwork. I'm talking Easley. Elmore. Caldwell.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If you had access to a ditto machine or Xerox, you were <em>a literal <strong>god</strong> among your peers. </em>I worked in the school library, so all of my friends had the snazziest-looking character sheets and staple-bound copies of the Player's Handbook.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Action economy, bounded accuracy, damage-per-round? Pfffff. If these things even existed back then, absolutely no person I played with ever cared about them. "I attack the orc with my sword" was mechanically identical to "I do a backflip, brandish my sword in midair, slash at the orc's head, and then stick a three-point landing on the other side of the room like a superhero" and nobody cared.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The bar of entry was incredibly low. Someone who had never even heard of D&D could be ready to play in 20 minutes, and be playing like a seasoned veteran 2 hours later. All the books and dice you needed were sold in a boxed set for $19 at the mall.</li> </ul><p>Ah, memories...</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="CleverNickName, post: 8830400, member: 50987"] Here's what [I]this one Gen-X[/I] gamer remembers about the old way of playing: [LIST] [*]Adventure modules cost about as much as a comic book, and you could read the whole thing in an hour and be ready to play it. They were packed with content, too: most were only 30-something pages long, and still managed to include maps, NPCs, and new monsters. [*]Rules existed only to settle outcomes...they didn't mandate what was possible or allowable (that was the DM's job.) You didn't consult a checklist of What Is Possible every time your turn came around; you just described what you were trying to do and the DM maybe asked you to roll something. [*]The best artwork. I'm talking Easley. Elmore. Caldwell. [*]If you had access to a ditto machine or Xerox, you were [I]a literal [B]god[/B] among your peers. [/I]I worked in the school library, so all of my friends had the snazziest-looking character sheets and staple-bound copies of the Player's Handbook. [*]Action economy, bounded accuracy, damage-per-round? Pfffff. If these things even existed back then, absolutely no person I played with ever cared about them. "I attack the orc with my sword" was mechanically identical to "I do a backflip, brandish my sword in midair, slash at the orc's head, and then stick a three-point landing on the other side of the room like a superhero" and nobody cared. [*]The bar of entry was incredibly low. Someone who had never even heard of D&D could be ready to play in 20 minutes, and be playing like a seasoned veteran 2 hours later. All the books and dice you needed were sold in a boxed set for $19 at the mall. [/LIST] Ah, memories... [/QUOTE]
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