The incredible austerity of D&D in 1980

some of my students were asking if i knew what d&d was

they were like "it's a boardgame ... where the board ... is in your mind!"

it was strange

xp there is a company (goodman games) that claimed to be working on a reprint of keep on the borderlands (original art and text) with updated 5e stats

supposedly dec 2017

http://www.phdgames.com/borderlands-goodman-games/

i often don't really trust third-party expansion material but i think the reprint strategy is a good one

i like that they obviously love the cheesy colored-pencils-in-a-high-school-notebook aesthetic of early dungeons and dragons

http://goodman-games.com/store/product/dungeon-crawl-classics-role-playing-game-4th-printing-copy/

but some of their other stuff seems like just a ripoff

http://goodman-games.com/5e/

shakey you can cut out all the rules basically and just do cooperative storytelling on the fly. most DMs ime use the rules to help arbitrate results but aren't wedded to every nuance in the book and are even willing to throw results away if they make the game less fun.

we started a campaign last night - i haven't played in years but it seems like a really good group. all young (early 30s) dads. homebrew campaign tho hopefully w/ lots of plane hopping so many we'll make a stop in forgotten realms / ravenloft / etc.

Yeah the rules are there for tactical gygaxians - go arneson, make that shit up.

+ seriously unless you're planning on playing w/ figurines, grid boards and measuring tape you're going to be applying all the rules kinda arbitrarily anyway. also i've never played in a campaign that calculated encumbrance or forced characters to "eat." all that stuff should be immediately done away with in any campaign.

yeah it's called role-playing not roll-playing maaaaaaan

tbh I'm probably just encumbered by teenage experiences playing w aggro nerd guys that just wanted to flout rules so they could have characters that were all 30th Level Wizard Warriors with vorpal swords and unlimited psionic powers and shit

xp

I feel like there oughta be a comfortable middle ground where you just have to roll for attacks and damage and attempting to do various things

i admit i like to min/max a little but i roleplay sincerely and play my character w/ lots of limitations. i just like knowing i have some mechanical nuke in my back pocket if things get dicey.

i actually got more into using the rules than i used to be, possibly because i play more boardgames than i used to, i'm more into math than i used to be and i'm less good at making funny npc voices (our pcs are getting worse at speaking in character too)

i found it was really fun just to sit around a table and roll dice. i was playing w some dudes i used to roleplay with in high school and i remember we used to put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make everything *grand storytelling* but last time we played it was like three 2nd level characters trying to kill four goblins in a cave and we had a blast. the sort of back-to-basics roleplaying i hadn't done since i was in grade school.

Despite being into fantasy stuff for a long time, I never knew how table top RPGs worked, never knew anyone who played them (except the figurine versions) and got someone to explain it to me last year.

Hmm

Btw I read this on Sunday - it’s pretty good

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/rise-dungeon-master-gary-gygax-birth-dd/

(I mean I read the whole thing Sunday, not that excerpt)

cool

eyo late great dungeon crawl classics is fun but has a couple of things which acknowledge and require a degree of meta-gaming. also they want you to use zocchi dice. probably not ideal for outis's campaign ~~

there are other OSR ( = 'old school renaissance') -aligned products which have a lot less kipple than playing 5e -- if you want the same feel, and to get rid of a lot of the crud, but you're not comfortable doing it on the fly, you can use whitehack (which is 2e-compatible, though you need to adjust for THAC0) which is basically all the d&d rules you need in like thirty pages. it's pretty understandable by anyone who's played d&d of any vintage before without being such an offputting set of tomes for new players.

dungeon world is even simpler, everything is on d6, but a different paradigm -- it's a little more narrativist, a little less simulationist or gamist. i am tempted to give it a go later this year -- i have a handful of people who might crystalise into a group, most of whom want something like the standard d&d experience, and i want to move sideways from that at least a little.

one might also say a word for the mouse guard rpg, or the (unrelated) rpg-lite board game-ish mice and mystics, but this depends on your tolerance for mice and shit

also i wrote a thing about d&d and rpgs a few months ago which is ... better than most things i have read written about d&d and rpgs (low bar):

http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-players-handbook/

i highly recommend shakey does not use a system that includes THAC0

oh, that was poorly phrased -- whitehack doesn't use thac0, but the earlier stuff he posted that he's familiar with does. if you want to use whitehack with earlier material, you need to adjust to whitehack's slightly off-kilter ascending AC system.

i really enjoyed yr essay

ty!

I think i understood 25% of the words in thomp's posts

seconding Mordy, that was a very enjoyable read.

thirded, now I want to track down some of those other books

fourthed, and me too

fifthed!!

6thed. I remember being a kid and checking out books like Gygax's 'Role Playing Mastery' from the library, even though I had never actually played D&D with other humans. It was super serious and dry and really felt like I was reading some dense philosophical tome.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PnPLB5jcOCo/UhqHCX2kpRI/AAAAAAAAPGc/yVxof4eZfFQ/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/IMG_1030.jpg

seventhed. :) i just emailed it to a few of my non-gaming friends (non-video, non tabletop) with anthropological/social sciences academic backgrounds because i'm always trying to subtly show them how games can be interesting in surprising ways

thomp, thank you for writing that great piece which has now led me to Playing at the World, which I started this morning.

Wasn't feeling the graphic novel excerpt at all. The scripting is awful and the visual choices pure autopilot.

did you guys ever play those choose your own adventure style books as a kid that required you to roll dice and track your inventory etc?

yeah i did one of those in the early 80s somewhere. I think it was a Steve Jackson joint?

Sorcery! is on PC, not played it.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/411000/Sorcery_Parts_1_and_2/

i'm not sure! i was hoping you'd tell me. :p xp

i'm really excited bc tnite is our new group's first real dnd sesh.

my best guess is it was Sorcery! (which I think exists on ios now too xposts)

http://www.fightingfantasy.com/

played these a lot

Sorcery! was an offshoot of them

IIRC, CRPGAddict's series on Tunnels and Trolls, and the one-and-done posts on Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom had some good material on "gamebooks," both in the entries and the comments. (Obviously he's evaluating them from the POV of a computer game player.)

All the Sorcery!s are on IoS now - you can buy them as a bundle and save

https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/inkle/id576695514

Oh man, the illustrations in the Sorcery! books by John Blanche were so amazing, I remember those fondly:

https://www.pinterest.com/MVPPinterest/sorcery-illustrations/

I feel like there oughta be a comfortable middle ground where you just have to roll for attacks and damage and attempting to do various things

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, October 31, 2017 10:26 PM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i have said this before but the most fun i ever had playing d&d was with a very mellow, run-n-gun DM who used percentile dice for pretty much everything. any time you wanted to do something, or something attacked you, he'd do a quick probability on success/failure, taking lots of things into account very fluidly, and tell you what you needed to roll

that was my best experience too

disclaimer: I was the DM

My DMing has gotten super slouchy these days. I make a loose map and basically don't even prepare other than that. I'm trying to let things the players do or say guide me in what to make up on the fly. This does result in some serious mistakes and spillouts but it's fun.
Also almost every player has a fuckin pet or animal companion or familiar, nothing makes them more happy and engaged.

thx all for saying nice things about the thing what i wrote

jordan i picked up a copy of that one as an adult. as an adult, i'm afraid, i've been unable to find it anything but charmless.

jon how are you finding 'playing at the world'?

I’m in the prehistory section still. It’s totally fascinating stuff.

I am gonna go out on a limb here and see if you guys can help me remember something. There was this D&Dish boardgame that my friends and I played a bunch in the late 80s that I can never remember the name of, much less find. I don't think it was a TSR product. It had a basic "move your pieces down the path" board layout, and you could choose between playing various D&Dish characters (a halfling, a wizard, etc.). You rolled dice to advance spaces, lots of cards were involved both for you to "play" during your turn and that you had to pick up if you landed on certain spaces, etc. I realize this is kind of vague as I don't recall a lot of specifics but maybe if this rings a bell or people start throwing names out I'll be able to figure it out...

Was it Talisman?

https://tarmor21.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/2015-04-14-talisman-1.jpg

heroquest?

OH SHIT IT WAS TOTALLY TALISMAN!!!

I used to love that as a kid, to the extent that I persuaded my mum to keep it in the cupboard while she gave the rest of my childhood boardgames to charity... Dug it out and played it as an adult and it actually sucks as a game. But I can see why young me liked it so much, the art and design are cool and immersive.