The incredible austerity of D&D in 1980

Usual Sunday Catan group is getting burned out on the same game over and over (esp. because six player games aren't as fun as the smaller board somehow) so we bought the basic D&D rules box set - but no one will volunteer to read them and figure out WTF to do.

I wish I had my old Battletech figures. Wargaming with giant robots and lasers - that's the right way to nerd out.

Reading these D&D Q&As gives me the same deep satisfaction that simply paging through the Dungeon Master's Guide does, the pleasure of a calm, unrelenting delineation of the fantastic.

god, i spent a good two or three years of my life puzzling over questions like this. still have pages of elaborate notes somewhere.

and f. OTM (and so nicely said). love fantastical guidebooks of any sort for the same reason. barlowe's guide to extraterrestrials, etc.

f. hazel OTM, that was meant to say...

A further guideline on the subject is found in the Monster Manual in the description for ghouls.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/28/Talmud.jpg

oh man, Barlowe's Guide To Extraterrestrials was the best!

still waiting on thype...

I have mentioned this on Noize Board but from 1980-84 I worked for & played with the crew from Iron Crown Enterprises, RPGs were my life back then. Went to Origins, Gencon, all that stuff. Chivalry & Sorcery TOURNAMENTS!

oh man I would LOVE to know more about this!

Reading these D&D Q&As gives me the same deep satisfaction that simply paging through the Dungeon Master's Guide does, the pleasure of a calm, unrelenting delineation of the fantastic.

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Wednesday, October 13, 2010 5:01 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

Yes! When I used to roleplay I pretty much preferred reading the sourcebooks to actually playing.

Each of these questions betrays so clearly the bickering that prompted it.

xp it's the stress free memorisation of knowledge that ha no real life purpose. Completely opposite to the high stress of having to memorise stuff from a math/CS textbook for an exam.

the pleasure of a calm, unrelenting delineation of the fantastic.

It reminds me a little of Christian extremists' long logistical extrapolations about the science behind the flood

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.

all the damage done by arrows is the same

This is a bit bullshitty really, pretty sure a longbow has greater penetration than a short bow irl

also a p big lapse to ignore the increased damage done by magic arrows

Surprised nobody's gone in on the o_O that is "elves have no souls" yet. Sounds like some kind of segregationist propaganda to me.

That's a standard fantasy trope isn't it?

If you caught a newly hatched silver dragon and raised it, would it have your alignment or its mother’s alignment?

It would retain the alignment of its parents, since that is what its natural tendencies

nature vs nurture debate now closed

played ad&d loads when i was younger, it always ended in fights and arguments. the dms in my experience would always end up picking on whoever was messing and not taking it seriously. then in time magic: the gathering just utterly murdered our will to ever play role playing games (or do anything else) ever again.

also played call of cthulu rpg which was brilliant, though v difficult, and i think a warhammer rpg too, which was cool. naming the characters etc was always the best.

CoC was my favourite. I also really liked Ars Magica.

And yeah, Warhammer was better than D&D in many ways. A grittier and scarier world, and a much more elegant gaming system (no fucking alignments for a start).

there was one i played once at a convention (after getting knocked out of magic: the gathering obviously!) called, i think, Mage. it was pretty cool, the essential concept of it was you could do anything, like bend reality etc, but at a cost of your character's sanity/morality/health. so you sort of mutated yourself. it was quite cool though as the weirder the thing you tried to do the more likely even weirder shit happened as a rebound. I remember delighting a table full of ultra nerds by turning some dickish bartender's head into a cabbage, and his entire body then began turning into vegetables.

x-post yeah the warhammer scenarios were much more urban and just better really. don't know if it was our DM but it felt like it was just endless fucking kobolds. we used to joke about this behind his back then we played the next week and sure enough as we went through some field "a large pack of kobolds surrounds you"

Games Workshop always got really good artists for the books as well.

That's a standard fantasy trope isn't it?

No, I don't think so. Or at least I can't think of any examples of fantasy books where elves wouldn't have souls.

Maybe it's something to do with their super-long lives but I don't remember ever hearing this "fuck an elf, soulless bastard" stuff before.

They were always kind of sinister and inscrutable in Warhammer.

Which begs the question as to why the Paladin was trying to save that Orc's non-existent soul, also.

This is a bit bullshitty really, pretty sure a longbow has greater penetration than a short bow irl

Yeah, this changed in second edition iirc.

Ronan, you were a serious M:TG player?

yeah from about age i guess....11 or so on till 15 or 16? i sold all my cards for about 300 quid aged 16ish...or maybe earlier, can't exactly remember.

No interest in http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=77&threadid=82583 ?

My first ever AD&D character was a half-elf, I was about 6 or 7, I looked at the picture in the 1st edition player's handbook and he looked the least threatening.

Then I had a dwarf called 'Bashy'.

that link just takes me to the generic board list?

It's a 77 thread.

haha...awkward.

the link still won't work!!!

why won't it work????

Works for me. If you're not a member of 77, it doesn't work for you.

Hang on, I don't understand??

77 is a secret board on ILX. You have to be added as a member to see the board or threads over there.

You can ask to join 77 over here:

Request Access to 77 Borad

yo Gravel, allow me to free associate some memories here...

I think I was in 5th grade when my 1-year-older friend Tony (who ended up designing Age Of Empires) came over with a copy of Tunnels & Trolls, which was a simpler version (maybe the 1st) of the D&D template. We moved on the regular D&D pretty fast. I played with those original three books in the box, remember being all excited when Greyhawk (1st expansion book) came out.

in 1979 I hooked up with this great bunch of game nerds who played at the University of Virginia, they were called the Historical Simulation Society cuz they had come out of the miniatures scene (they are still active today, some of the same peeps even!) However, it ended up being all wargames and this crazy guy who was running a mutated RPG system that he had designed himself. This guy was Pete F3nl0n, whe became prez and CEO of the nasscent Iron Crown Enterprises in 1980.

I think for the first few years I just played in the monstrous campaign that he was running, ostensibly to "playtest" the system but it was really about geeking out. I remember the first copies of "Arms Law" arriving, they also started out with another wargame called Gettysburg which sank w/o a trace.

Can't remember if I went to the 1979 Origins but from 80 on I would go with the ICE crew and help run the merch table. Gencon was usually out near Lake Geneva (we all know where that is, right?) but at least one year they had it on the East Coast. By the time I was 16 I was working in the warehouse running the shrinkwrap machine. I also did a lot of proofreading and some editing. They only ran an official Rolemaster tournament one year, the prize was a lifetime subscription to all ICE products (!!!). I remember it got down to two dudes and when the last guy finally won the loser was in tears. People loved it.

I worked for them the summer after 1st year college, which woulda been 1985. They expanded a lot during the rest of the decade but I mostly wasn't around. in '89 I wrote a NPC character compendium for the Cyberpunk RPG called Cyber Rogues, my crowning achievement of RPG geekiness. By this time they had gotten the rights to the Tolkien stuff and times were good. Then the card games came in and just killed them financially, after that they lost the Tolkien rights again. I think they went under in the late 90's.

I always really liked the Rolemaster system but obv I am biased to a degree. My high school crew and I played on our own, mostly D&D at first but some Runemaster as well (another good system). I was pretty into the ridiculous Chivalry & Sorcery game but I could never find anyone who wanted to spend the time it needed, so I was really excited when there was a C&S tournament at Origins one year - I was probably 15. I got knocked out in the first round but then somone else couldn't make round 2 so I was reinstated. We played that round until 4 A.M. on the last night of the convention. I think it started at 8? Good times.

my last D&D character was named "Anaujiram".. i think you can see why it was the last

By our last few sessions the PCs just wanted to go to taverns and rut with wenches rather than slay things.

Amazing post sleeve, thanks!

I'd really love to know so much more about this period: what kinds of people were the guys running the companies? What kind of adults were into the hobby? My dad always spoke with awe (this is a bit UK-centric) of the way that a shared love of killing goblins allowed him to meet people he never would have otherwise, and the way he described it always made it sound like such a cool powerful shared secret to be in on? How did the high school games you played in at that time differ from the grown up games?

(Ronan check your webmail)

I don't really want to do a phd but if I had the time & money I'd want to write about RPG culture in this period, it's the most fascinating subject to me!

By our last few sessions the PCs just wanted to go to taverns and rut with wenches rather than slay things.

The end of MANY campaigns.

i have fond memories of stopping by renaissance books (in milwaukee) before family trips and getting a bunch of old Dragon magazines for cheap

My Dragon subscription was my prized possession as a kid. My friends and I would hunt for back issues whenever we went on vacations to somewhere new. I still have a few issues and the odd article I cut out in a box somewhere. The two issues with big sections about the Nine Hells are tattooed on my brain. And, "you haven't lived until you've done... the Assassin's Run." Oooh.

yeah someone should really write a book about all of that history! xp lol that was written before your post, Gravel

Like I said, a lot of this stuff came out of the 70's miniatures scene, which was really insanely elaborate and probably drew some of the same people who would have been in model railroad clubs in previous decades. The folks running ICE at least were all around grad student age (some of them WERE grad students). They had a computer science guy who did a lot of the system design, an accountant, and I think the prez had a law degree?

I don't think the high school games really expanded my social circles very much, I mean we were social misfits to begin with. But one thing about RPGs is that you do get an age range sometimes, and it was hugely influential on me to have a group of friends in their late 20s/early 30s at ICE to ask for girlfriend advice etc. Pete's campaigns were always so meticulously crafted that they were far and above anything else I've ever played, no real comparison there. When I played tournaments at the conventions it always seemed a lot more competitive than any of the games I played in on the regular.

Also when I was a senior in high school I ran a MERP game and the only people who wanted to play were a bunch of 8th graders, so we ran a game for a few months. Another good example of age range. I think my experience with the older folks really served me well when I got into the college midwest punk rock scene, I wasn't as intimidated by older & more experienced people.

i've never understood how competitive roleplaying worked.

Some people, sure they stop the d&d-ing but still maybe never really get in touch with the other stuff.

― The Lubitsch Touchscreen (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, April 29, 2023

Do you have commentary or are we just gonna .....

*rolls for initiative*

pinefox, take your clueless shtick elsewhere plz

The "D&D" movie was shockingly well made. Funny, witty, entertaining, engaging, etc., with a couple of really clever action sequences and novel special effects. Of course it basically flopped. I could imagine it making the rounds as a beloved cult film.

Thread needs more gelatinous cube content

(Tbh I could never quite get into RPGs or games generally - I just lack the attention span. But I do find it anthropologically interesting that in 1980, the nerd-adjacent codes and signifiers and stereotypes had not quite been established yet.

So, like, yr middle-aged suburban mom could bring home a D&D box set thinking it was something like Scrabble or Monopoly. It had yet to acquire cultural baggage.)

I'll see your gelatinous cube and raise you a green slime, an ochre jelly, and a black pudding!

I just watched the movie with my son and it was pretty good! Gelatinous cubes for the whole family! Our attempts at doing tabletop RPGs at home have been thwarted by his older brother who can't sit still for them, but even our minimal experience was enough to notice plenty of little moments that felt as though they could have been rolled for

Loved the film.

Having a zoom call with a group of fellow beginners as a preliminary to our first ever session. We have a friend with a little DMing experience who has kindly volunteered to do the thing. Other than that, I really don't know what I'm in for

30-second encounters that take hours to play out

I never played much of the game, but I am pretty familiar with it (as a kid I used to read the arcana books a lot): in-jokes and little winks aside, was there anything about the movie that was particularly unique to D&D? I always thought a lot of the appeal of the game was that every campaign is different - personalized characters, unique stories, different enemies and encounters and obstacles - with the only constant being the gameplay, more or less: rolling dice, dungeon masters, maps, namely the things this movie totally (by necessity) lacked. I wonder if it would have done better if it was just called, like, "Heroes and Villains" or something more generic, and they played it up as a self-aware fantasy satire of sorts (which is kind of was) rather than an adaptation of something that is not, by design, adaptable.

pinefox, take your clueless shtick elsewhere plz

― Perverted By Linguiça (sleeve), Saturday, May 6, 2023 9:35 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

maybe we could not have bullying on the D&D thread, lol

ok

Gelatinous Cube is the name of my Ice Cube tribute band

"The Wrong DM to Fuck With"

30 second encounters that take hours to play is a modern thing. I think we had three combats in our last 2 hour session, using the 1981 basic d&d rules.

^^ was gonna say

Half the time your first level magic user gets hit once and they’re dead, fight over.

i had my first game either late 79 or early 80, my 8th grade teacher brought me and a few friends for an overnight trip to some weird DM in suburban NJ, some sterotypical jersey name like Passaic or Parsippinay. tbh my parents thought it might be some pedo front and told me to be careful. anyway the dm was quite good and me and my pals were hooked for the next 3 years. many a trip to the compleat strategist in midtown ensued.

ha, seems i've been over this before

i played D&D between 79-82 give or take

the austerity didn't really register

― velko, Tuesday, October 25, 2016