The incredible austerity of D&D in 1980

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!

excellent

yeah that article was awesome. the original "orange edition" of Jean Wells' banned adventure module is available here: http://pandius.com/b3_orig.pdf

fantastic!

heyo

https://boingboing.net/2018/10/23/e-gum-gary-gygax.html

https://i2.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/91-yvF2mpCL-1-2-1-1.jpg?w=970&ssl=1
https://i2.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/81SrRTTvTIL-1-2-1-1.jpg?w=970&ssl=1

rad and reasonably priced even... $75 on amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Arcana-Special-Ephemera/dp/0399582754/

fuck yes is this finally DAT's day in the sun?

https://kotaku.com/dungeons-deceptions-the-first-d-d-players-push-back-1837516834

One day, he was flipping through a copy of a neighbor’s Playboy magazine when he saw something that captivated his 13-year-old imagination: an advertisement for board games.

can we talk about this picture for a second
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Re4xgKrh--/c_fit,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/cc2t7nnepjtf2u0szpn0.jpg

the pocket protectors, the Napoleon pose, the one guy not wearing horn-rimmed glasses

so gonna happen

aw, beat me to it

One day, he was flipping through a copy of a neighbor’s Playboy magazine when he saw something that captivated his 13-year-old imagination: an advertisement for board games.
― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Tuesday, August 27, 2019 1:25 PM

I was going to post this exact quote. A geeks’ geek.

The article is annoying. Playing at the World, cited in the article, is an 800 page history of games leading up to and including the development of D&D. It has the same basic conclusion: Arneson had the key insight making RPGs what they are and Gygax was a prolific writer who created something that could be used by the public.

that book is soooooo great, I still need to finish it!

(speaking as someone who was almost at ground zero, I started playing in 1976-77 at age 10)

I thought the content was great, but the guy isn’t much of a stylist.

You’re a few years older than me, but I started young at age 7-8 in 1979 or 1980. Later I was a big Rolemaster fan so I love your long post way upthread recounting the early days.

awww <3

and yeah the writing is a bit dry, it reads like a PhD thesis (a really cool one, but still)

I was totally fascinated with the early Los Angeles role-players

and yeah the writing is a bit dry, it reads like a PhD thesis (a really cool one, but still)

This was exactly what I thought it was.

I was totally fascinated with the early Los Angeles role-players

Yeah, that chapter about all the alternative proto-RPGs was very cool. All these groups all over the world who got adjacent to some of the same places as Arneson/Gygax, but never really made the final leap that they did.

oh, yes I meant literally re: the thesis (at least iirc)

was also struck by the whole "wargames weren't cool with the hippies" take on as to why fantasy and Tolkien became the basic template. my own experience there was super different b/c the HSS (mentioned above) in Cville had a strong contingent of scientist/military/spook guys there and wargames had always been part of the equation, in fact the group predated the RPG craze and some of them were older than the late-70's grad students who ended up forming ICE.

oh and in a weird update, all my old ICE stuff (2 boxes including some other games) was stolen out of my house's basement sometime in the last 3-4 years, best guess is that a junkie former renter (long story) found someone to sell the stuff to. my only satisfaction was that altho all the original Squad Leader boards etc. were in the boxes, the counters were all in a little file cabinet type thing. and I still have my battered old copy of Cosmic Encounter with all the expansions, plus a couple other boardgames.

That photo is like all the people who get interviewed in Mindhunter all in one room.

I could Photoshop in a photo of my dad from that era and he'd fit right in except he had long hair, he was a wargamer (Napoleonics primarily, later American Civil War), somewhere I have a copy of a game he wrote that Avalon Hill printed.

Thinking about this stuff brings back so many memories for me of that late-70s early-80s interregnum period before what we think of the 80s really got going. The only thing I can compare it to is the early days of the Internet/WWW where things were unprofessional and clunky but hadn't ossified so there was a sweetness and openness as well. Like just the questions and answers at the top of this thread speak to this quality - people hadn't thought through all the possibilities, so anything seemed possible.

I was introduced to gaming by neighborhood friends with older siblings. I still remember this first session: we all played halflings named after the LOTR hobbits and were all thieves with an NPC ranger with us. We fought a hill giant and kept trying to backstab him to little effect. It didn't matter: I was hooked. I reluctantly came home because I had to get ready for church (Tuesday night service), but I kept trying to explain to my five year old sister this amazing experience I just had.

We didn't have much money and my parents were basically evangelicals at the time and weren't too keen on D&D, so they wouldn't buy it for me. They didn't like polyhedral dice either initially so I made my own set out of folded paper and glue. But I would try to go down to my friends to play when I could. While we played, their father made sandwiches with Miracle Whip, which my family never used, so the sandwiches seemed so exotic. They played Jackson 5's Greatest Hits on the turntable during a break in the action. I remember we all died playing the Hall of the Fire Giants.

I think by 4th grade, I had annoyed my parents until they let me buy a set of dice from a Waldenbooks in the mall. More to the title of the thread, I would ride my bike to the local game store and spend hours looking at weird, shoddy books for the hundreds of games that sprang up in the wake of D&D: TSR's other games (Boot Hill, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and especially, Gangbusters!), so many unauthorized D&D modules, but also Tunnels and Trolls, early Champions supplements, dozens of Car Wars/Ogre plastic box sets and books (man, Steve Jackson just pumped shit out), Traveller, etc. I didn't buy any of these until later, but I would get ideas and then spend hours making up my own shoddy RPGs in spiral notebooks, long since gone.

I met Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman at a Waldenbooks when I was a kid, they were doing a signing and no one was there. I was totally starstruck (and also very surprised that Tracy Hickman was a man).

incredible post, PBKR

Waiting for the UPS guy to bring me Caesar's Legions is still burned in my brain.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1722/caesars-legions