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Younger Players Telling Us how Old School Gamers Played
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8831625" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>I think the problem is that he's not likely to be describing ANY one example of actual 1970s D&D play. For example in the 1977-1980 time frame I played a lot at a game club that had, probably 200 regulars. A lot of what went on there was wargaming, but there was also a lot of RPG play. When it came to D&D there were campaigns, which were generally fairly regular weekly affairs with a fixed DM and MOSTLY consistent set of players. In those games the DM normally kept the character sheets between sessions! How they accounted time was up to them, and if they ran multiple parties within their campaign they might have used some of the Page 35 (or later DMG) guidelines on how to manage time, or not! I know a couple games there did have co-DMs, I don't know how they handled things, but those were people that were showing up at the club most days of the week, hardcore D&D geeks with (the one I recall anyway, a thin guy named 'Bill') a propensity to not shower often enough, lol! Again, not sure how they handled it, but the games Bill ran for us didn't overtly stress this kind of stuff.</p><p></p><p>The same goes for his other statements. Sure, my first campaign consisted of some ruins and a dungeon (just geomorphs that came with Holmes Basic mostly). Even then I made a map of the region, and that map quickly evolved all the way out to a whole world, which the PCs started to wander across pretty quickly. So I don't really recognize the whole "its just a dungeon" thing that much. It is probably true that a lot of early '80s play was just jumping from one TSR module to the next with some thin perfunctory "you meet in a bar" scenes and such thrown in. I guess maybe that qualifies as what the video is discussing, but that was hardly a campaign at all, we didn't call them such! Certainly those lacked all measure of time or interest in timekeeping whatsoever.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8831625, member: 82106"] I think the problem is that he's not likely to be describing ANY one example of actual 1970s D&D play. For example in the 1977-1980 time frame I played a lot at a game club that had, probably 200 regulars. A lot of what went on there was wargaming, but there was also a lot of RPG play. When it came to D&D there were campaigns, which were generally fairly regular weekly affairs with a fixed DM and MOSTLY consistent set of players. In those games the DM normally kept the character sheets between sessions! How they accounted time was up to them, and if they ran multiple parties within their campaign they might have used some of the Page 35 (or later DMG) guidelines on how to manage time, or not! I know a couple games there did have co-DMs, I don't know how they handled things, but those were people that were showing up at the club most days of the week, hardcore D&D geeks with (the one I recall anyway, a thin guy named 'Bill') a propensity to not shower often enough, lol! Again, not sure how they handled it, but the games Bill ran for us didn't overtly stress this kind of stuff. The same goes for his other statements. Sure, my first campaign consisted of some ruins and a dungeon (just geomorphs that came with Holmes Basic mostly). Even then I made a map of the region, and that map quickly evolved all the way out to a whole world, which the PCs started to wander across pretty quickly. So I don't really recognize the whole "its just a dungeon" thing that much. It is probably true that a lot of early '80s play was just jumping from one TSR module to the next with some thin perfunctory "you meet in a bar" scenes and such thrown in. I guess maybe that qualifies as what the video is discussing, but that was hardly a campaign at all, we didn't call them such! Certainly those lacked all measure of time or interest in timekeeping whatsoever. [/QUOTE]
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