The incredible austerity of D&D in 1980

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.

man, the maps have gotten alot better looking than when I was young halfling

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4map/20090930/h1

the big games back then at the club were Rail Baron, the SPI version of War Of The Ring (now there's a collectors item, all that SPI stuff sells for mad bucks), and later Titan (which was HUGE for some reason). They were also really into this more complex railroad game called 1829 I think? Squad Leader was also popular and I still have all of those original sets. The Rolemaster campaign eventually moved to the ICE office instead of at the club.

other club demographics - librarians, CIA spooks, later on a few other teens like me.

i've never understood how competitive roleplaying worked.

sometimes it was as simple as "last person standing wins", other times it was whoever got the most exp points in a session or something like that.

oh man, Squad Leader. I remember Cross of Iron fondly. After it morphed into Advanced Squad Leader I couldn't deal with it.

yeah competitive roleplay seems to run counter to the "plucky little band" template inherited from the Fellowship of the Ring. but even that had its Boromir i guess!

me neither! xp

Since most dragons appear in groups of one to four, most dragons lay one or two eggs. Faerie dragons, which appear in groups of up to six, lay up to four eggs. The minimum number of eggs laid is one. If one assumes that young dragons stay with their parents at least until they reach the subadult stage at 16 years, each clutch must be at least 16 years apart, since dragons would be found in larger groups if they laid eggs while rearing young.

the ridiculousness of the bolded section there is killing me

Doesn't this logic also just fall down? Assuming faerie dragons appear in groups no larger than six and a child-raising period of 16 years, you could also have a max clutch of 1 egg every 4 years or a max clutch of 2 every 8 years...

Via the FT archives Tom Ewing talks about the debut issue of the UK sort of equivalent White Dwarf (adding just now on Twitter that 'the rules lawyering in that ish im writing about would be out of fashion by the early 80s tho - Dragon seen as v childish')

yeah that i was a goblin series of TE's was just out of sight

i never really actually enjoyed playing RPGs themselves (besides making characters), but i always loved reading ABOUT them, i guess i still do

I take it you saw this at some point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6AOd6r6Qi8

Damn me that this is the thing which finally makes me make an ilXor account, but the soul thing? I believe it's from Tolkein, so anything which directly draws from him tends to do a "Elves don't have souls" thing.

(The reason why orcs don't have souls is presumably because they're debased elves)

I'm going to stomp now and slink away.

Damn me that this is the thing which finally makes me make an ilXor account

Haha well it always has to be something! Welcome.

This is SUCH an interesting thread for me, because I spent a lot of the end of the 80s and very early part of the 90s wishing I could play these games. But, living in the middle of nowhere Illinois, I literally did not know anyone that played these or was willing to learn with me. So I spent hours upon hours upon hours reading the Monster Manual, rolling characters, and coming up with scenarios. But only ever played ONE session in my life that I conned friends into playing, but they didn't take it serious at all and quit after two hours of character creation. Had a long-running obsession with MERP and a shorter-lived one with Top Secret, neither of which I ever played. Of course, when I got to college there was more likely to be people to play with, but I had since replaced RPGs with my budding music obsession. Besides, all the dudes I saw only played Magic.

I did run a long-lasting Car Wars campaign in sixth grade though, two good friends were up for that.

"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