The incredible austerity of D&D in 1980

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.

there's also Magic Realm

https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1379702_md.jpg

thx chap - yeah reading about it it seems like I probably wouldn't enjoy it much as an adult but I do remember being super-into all of the illustrations and the weird tangent adventures that the cards would turn up.

I remember Magic Realm! iirc kind of a precursor to Catan with the tiles that get flipped over

We briefly had a copy of Dungeon! from an early 90s yard sale, but as it was missing pieces and I had no one who'd play it with me I don't believe it ever got a test run.

i have the reissue of dungeon! but i haven't played it yet. The art is a bit cute but i prefer that to larry elmoreisms.

my best friend and i tried to play Magic Realm soon after we got into D&D and found it ridiculous and impenetrable. We were 11 though. I'd try it again.

tile flipping exploration is for me always embodied in Kings & Things (Dragon Mag version: King of the Tabletop) by Tom Wham and Dave Trampier.

my favorite board game tbh

I had the original version of Dungeon! when I was a kid and played it a lot. My son got the new version and we played it once. It's not very good.

talisman is available on ios/android for tablets btw

http://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2018/01/war-of-empires-1969-gygaxs-space.html (via john d.)

love the mimeograph paper

In ADVANCED DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS, how much damage do bows do?

None. Bows do not do damage, arrows do. However, if you hit someone with a bow, I’d say it would probably do 1-4 points of damage and thereafter render the bow completely useless for firing arrows. What the bows do is allow a greater variety of ranges; all the damage done by arrows is the same

lol @ bows dont kill ppl, arrows do.

From a recent Kotaku article on the women who made D&D:

Years after she’d gotten the job off an ad in Dragon, (Jean) Wells became the titular “Sage” for the magazine’s “Sage Advice” column. She used the column to exercise her ferocious, sometimes cutting, wit. The strangest and most off-base questions were most likely to garner Wells’ “advice.” In one column, a player wrote in, “How much damage do bows do?” Wells responded, “Answer: None. Bows do not do damage, arrows do. However, if you hit someone with a bow, I’d say it would probably do 1-4 points of damage and thereafter render the bow completely useless for firing arrows.”

“I adopted this approach because this is who I am,” Wells said of the column in 2010. “I felt the youngsters under the age of sixteen were spending far too much time being far too serious about a game when they needed to focus some of that attention back on their families and schools. I’d hoped the kids would see the humor in the situation and not take the game so seriously that every breath they took, every word they said was about D&D.”

Applause for the sage Jean Wells!

oh yes, link to article:

https://kotaku.com/d-d-wouldn-t-be-what-it-is-today-without-these-women-1796426183

thanks!