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Grade school, playing Dungeons & Dragons.  At least that's what the older kid running the game called it...I think the only similarity between what we played and Dungeons & Dragons is that we rolled 3d6 to determine our attributes.

Combat was odd - we rolled 1d12 AND a 1d20 - if the 1d12 was higher than the 1d20, we hit!

I believe he had the old three little booklets - my guess is, like many people before him, he bought them, couldn't make heads or tails of them and made up a bunch of house rules that he and his friends could live with.  All the older kids who played "Dungeons & Dragons" used this odd 1d12 and 1d20 combat system.

Hello, and welcome to the Forge.

I've split your post into its own thread because the original thread, Early role-playing experiences (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=11623) is about a year old. If you would, please check out the sticky posts at the top of the Site Discussion forum to learn more about posting here.

This is no big deal, though! No scolding. We'll just continue your conversation. I think the 12/20 dice technique you guys used is worth a good talk.

For instance, in my first D&D experiences in about 1978 or so, we tried very hard to understand the to-hit system ... not being wargamers, we had no idea that the standard "matrix" concept was to be assumed. So as best as we could tell, the example said you rolled and got 13 or under, so you hit.

So that's what we did: roll d20 (or in our case, d6 for odd or even, then d20 with a double set of 0-9), and if it was 13 or under, you hit.

What other ... unusual interpretations of the system did people employ in their early D&D experiences? I'm not talking about mutant strains of homebrew concocted by long-time DMs who were "fixing the system," but rather plain old reading it, puzzling over it, and deciding it "must" mean a particular approach.

Best,
Ron

Hi - I didn't realize how old that thread was...I was just browsing through the forum (blindly clicking NEXT) late at night and that thread caught my eye.

The wargamer roots of Dungeons & Dragons are pretty obvious in the way combat was conducted - it's basically a combat results table where you cross reference "attack strength" with "defending strength" to get a "to kill" number; the differentiation of units (characters) into distinctive categories (classes) which in some iterations had their own separate attack tables may also be due to D & D's wargame ancestry...or maybe I'm reading too much into this.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsWhat other ... unusual interpretations of the system did people employ in their early D&D experiences? I'm not talking about mutant strains of homebrew concocted by long-time DMs who were "fixing the system," but rather plain old reading it, puzzling over it, and deciding it "must" mean a particular approach.

Must have been 1982 or 83 when some D&D stuff was included in my elementary school book fair. I think I was in 4th grade. My mother had already bought me some of the AD&D choose your own adventure books (shame they never released Mirror Mountain as a full module, that place rocked and I've continuously placed it in my own campaigns) and some minis. In fact the whole reason she started me on D&D was so she could paint the minis. *shrug*

Anyhow, they had Keep on the Borderlands and Village of Hommlet at the book fair for a few bucks. The rulebooks were more, so we didn't get those!

Imagine me and my friends with two modules, no rules, and no context for what was supposed to happen except the text in the choose your own adventure books. Trying to play.

Well the introductory material in Keep was extensive so we played that. we picked characters from the pre-gens in the module, we put the map down as a playing board, rolled dice, and moved that many squares when it was "our turn". We didn't understand why the squares were made so small that the minis couldn't fit in them. When we got to a room with monsters, we'd fight using some imagined set of rules guessed from the beginner text and the stats. We'd both make a beeline for that hobgoblin armory so we could be invincible with all that stuff!

Man, that Hommlet thing didn't explain ANYTHING about the rules, darnit! And taking out turns on the big village map seemed pointless, we knew that we weren't supposed to kill the villagers! So why didn't they put the moathouse on the big map and make the village the tear-out sheet map?

After I got the red box basic set and had that "oh... OOOOHHHHHH" realization of How You're Supposed To Play, I tried to DM for my friends but they were never ever play because it "was not fair" that they weren't allowed to see the map or the module and I was.

Quote from: Ron
What other ... unusual interpretations of the system did people employ in their early D&D experiences? I'm not talking about mutant strains of homebrew concocted by long-time DMs who were "fixing the system," but rather plain old reading it, puzzling over it, and deciding it "must" mean a particular approach.

I started playing in '82 with the Moldvay-edited Basic set.  I think I was too impatient (as a 12 year-old, go figure!) to read everything carefully.  With the help of my dad, I understood that hit dice tied in to the combat matrix, but I completely missed how they were connected to hit points; unable to figure why certain creatures in modules had x amt. of hps, I just started assigning hps as desired.  Soon my players were facing goblins with 30 or more hps, and dying at an accelerated rate...

Castiglione, I'd certainly like to hear more as well about how that dual-die system worked; seems like a very unique mechanic.  I have no idea what kind of odds that generates, but, by God, you got another use out of a d12...

The D12-beats-D20 method comes out to a 27.5% to-hit chance. Not bad for beginning AD&D characters. That's actually pretty close to THAC0 20 trying to hit AC4 or AC5.

The main thing we decided was that waiting to level up was way lame.  If you survived an adventure, you gained a level.  Granted, we were like 10 at the time, but I still think the whole XP thing is slightly ridiculous.

Also, whenever I DM'd, all the monsters fought to the death because I couldn't understand the morale system.

Incidentally, I never had any real trouble reading the whole THAC0 chart/saving throws or anything, but dang! the whole 3E approach to armor class is numerically equivalent, far easier to explain, and such a simple fix!  How come people didn't think of that a million years ago?

The system was incredibly basic and bare bones.  As far as I know, they made no adjustments for armor class or attribute scores; weapons all did 1d6 damage (however, I believe this 1d6 universal damage was consistent with the original three little books rules).  Our attribute scores never really entered into play except to "color" our characters and maybe the DM would glance at our scores and arbitrarily decide:  "Oh, you've got a CHR of 16?  Well, the female orcs of the village decide that you WON'T be thrown into the pot of human stew just yet..."  We never even considered the probabilistic consequences of such a system (we were just kids then).  As house rules go, they were pretty "primitive" (the "bid kids" who cobbled them together were in the 5th to 7th grades).  There might have been more stuff to their system but the only thing I remember distinctly was the D12 & D20 combat system and the fact that everything we had did 1d6 points of damage.

I do also recall that when some of us got the Basic D & D rules and some of us started DM'ing rather than relying on the "big kids", they would walk in and wonder aloud why we were bothering with all that needlessly complicated stuff of cross-referencing level/HD with AC when rolling the D12 and D20 together was so much easier and faster.

Quote from: JimLotFPShame they never released Mirror Mountain as a full module, that place rocked .

Damn straight!  Although this isn't a misunderstanding of D&D rules per se, the book casts you as an "elven prince."  None of my friends had ever seen this weird word "elven" before, so we kept reading it as "eleven."  As in, you were this prince who was eleven years old.  Which fit the illustrations pretty well, actually...

Hiya,

If folks happen not to have seen it already, my article A hard look at Dungeons & Dragons (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/20/) provides a good conceptual backdrop for this thread. The idea is (as Rob MacDougall put it, I think) that all of us formed little Cargo Cults based on a smattering of diverse artifacts, each smattering being (a) a unique minority-assemblage of stuff and (b) entirely unclear about what you actually do.

But this thread, based on Castiglione's input, raises a very interesting focus for discussion: actual System. How do miniatures relate to this activity? What's the map for? Why can't I see the map (and frankly, that's a damn good question, as currently, we always play open-map when maps are involved)? And what do these dice do? And so on.

The point is that we all came up with solutions, and (evidenced by our presence at this website), that those solutions were functional. I even suggest that many of our solutions were more functional than anything ever published under an AD&D rubric in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Let's keep comparing. Who knows, maybe a whole bunch of role-playing designs might emerge from our youthful moments?

Best,
Ron

P.S. Paul Czege posted an amazing summary of his experiences with the 1977 (Holmes) version of D&D, especially the bit about how "halfling" was completely undefined, so they all assumed it must refer to the reptilian guy in one of the illustrations. That reminds me of the "eleven prince" interpretation.

Hi,

My older cousin had given me his old box set when he went away for college.  I can't recall exactly which edition, but it was definitely a Gygax written one, filled with a vocabulary that totally lost me.  I had struggled with it for some time, unable to figure it out until the Red Box Basic came out.

A frustrating experience even afterwards, because the image on the box illustrated this one warrior facing off against a dragon over a sea of gold.  In actual play, rarely did anyone survive against kobolds, or falling in a hole, much less dream of getting to a dragon.  I figured there had to be some kind of strategy that kept you alive long enough to "get to the dragon", but just couldn't figure out what that was.  

It wasn't until a few years later, when I got to play with some older folks that I realized that there was NO magic strategy that made things significantly easier... It mostly came down to numbers and luck for the first couple of levels until one had enough resources to do more than play craps with one's hitpoints.

Chris

PS- I had somehow read "Ogre" as "Orge"(Ohr-g), and in my head, they simply were bigger, more grown up versions of orcs.  They looked mostly the same in the illustrations...

Quote from: Ron EdwardsIf folks happen not to have seen it already, my article A hard look at Dungeons & Dragons (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/20/) provides a good conceptual backdrop for this thread. The idea is (as Rob MacDougall put it, I think) that all of us formed little Cargo Cults based on a smattering of diverse artifacts, each smattering being (a) a unique minority-assemblage of stuff and (b) entirely unclear about what you actually do.

Is the idea of a Cargo Cult supposed to be the 'fault' of the game or the player? I don't know how the hobby was before the AD&D hardbacks were out, but by the time I came around everything was clearly labeled 'You Need X Book(s) To Use This Module' inside and outside the book. We just ignored it at first. Entirely a failure that can't be blamed on the game itself.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsHow do miniatures relate to this activity?

Marketing scam. :p

When my mother would paint the things (with testors model paint, no priming!), we didn't want ANYBODY touching the darned things. We'd use spare dice or coins when any sort of positioning or tactical issue was important.

And then Battlesystem came out and those counters were the most awesome thing ever.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsWhat's the map for? Why can't I see the map (and frankly, that's a damn good question, as currently, we always play open-map when maps are involved)?

Wouldn't the map issue be entirely a player/character knowledge issue? I have always been in favor of the "if the characters don't know it, it is better if the players don't either" school of thought, and half the fun of a dungeon crawl is not knowing where you need to go... exploring! But I also have no desire to try to explain mapping information verbally. I've always wanted a tranparency projector like teachers used in school so I could just draw the map as players explored, but that was always too expensive and difficult to cart around so the MO in games I've played or GMed is that every time we go someplace new, the DM takes the players' map and draws where we are.

The 'mapper' as described both in the redbox D&D and AD&D hardbacks is just asking for more confusion and more bitter arguments than playing Pictionary with a girlfriend.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsAnd what do these dice do?

I admit I had no clue how to properly read d4s for like ten years. I just used the little white crayon to color in a 1, 2, 3, and 4 on a different side, and when rolled we picked it up and read bottom of the die to see what was colored in.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsThe point is that we all came up with solutions, and (evidenced by our presence at this website), that those solutions were functional. I even suggest that many of our solutions were more functional than anything ever published under an AD&D rubric in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Well the game I was playing with Keep on the Borderlands ended up being what the Dungeon boardgame actually was. Too bad they never made 'modules' for that, I would have loved supplements with a paper board with custom player-pieces, monsters, and treasure for each one. That's a lot of fun by itself (as is the Zombies tile game with its add-ons) but it's not role-playing.

Ooh, one of my favorite topics.

The 'Cargo Cult' metaphor is right on.

Task resolution: roll d20 under relevant statistic. Except when, y'know, you could find a table for that particular task somewhere, in which case the table determined it. Except when the table sucked.

But then there was the problem where you had two different tables in Dragon magazine, one in the Ready Ref Sheets, one in Arduin, one in Gamma World, and one in Empire of the Petal Throne. Which one should you follow? The GM usually had the credibility to decide this.

Uses for d12s. A guy playing a character named 'Getafix' in my 5th grade game had a 'funky spear' I gave him. The thing did 2d12 damage, but if either die came up an 11 or 12, something 'funky' happened - we all tried to think of something weird to happen and it just happened. Double 12's was 'superfunky' - portals to another universe, the sky turns orange, whatever. I guess that was an open-ended group consensus narration mechanic.

One guy who ran some games for me in '78 ditched the elementals because they were scientifically wrong. Early Sim player, I guess. In his game we had to fight the 111 'true' elementals - the radioactive elements were nasty.

The systems we played were a patchwork. We'd go "that should work like this" and then we'd patch in a rule from a supplement or else just write our own. There was a certain drag effect back to the official rules because a new book would come out and then we'd use that stuff.

AD&D we used as a D&D supplement. I know very, very few people who actually played with the full DMG initiative system, etc. But how could you pass up paladins and triple-classed half elves? Well, actually, a lot of people did.

But anyway we figured out the roll high d20 combat, do 1d6 damage system right away, so nothing good to share there.

My early experience with role playing was a flyer from a model engineering convention. It had a description of some D&D play on one side and an advert for White Bear Red Moon on the other.

The D&D game gave me and my brother the idea of a game where my borther described what I met and I described (basically) how I chopped the skeletons to pieces, how I leapt over a chasm etc. This was good fun and led to me buying the Eric Holmes edited blue covered book. My borther wasn't too interested at this stage and no one I knew had heard of D&D but I was fascinated. Coincidentally, I won a cash proze in a local newspaper competition and used the money to order a Dungeon Maser Guide.

From there I got a few friends involved, some people that seemed interested who became and still are friends, and our games commenced.

I'm not sure we had too many real rule misunderstandings as such. we made a lot of stuff up and chose to adapt stuff (we liked critical hits tables, we used peculiar 'conversion' rules, we had a clerical prayer rule for casting cleric spells,  etc. But these were not so much misunderstandings as preferred options.

This is a an aside, but recently I've been re-reading my DMG, and find myself amused at the weird archaic prose style it uses, and also impressed by how many points are covered that I really had taken no notice of before:

Examples:
"Pronouncements there may be but they are not from "on high" as respects your game."

This beats YGWV by a considerable number of years.

"In the heat of play it will slowly evolve into a compound of your personality and those of your better participants, a superior alloy."

A forerunner of some sort of idea of social contract.  

"You must view any non-DM player possessing it [the DMG] as something less than worthy of honourable death. "

OK, this is more Hackmaster or Paranoia. I'm sure we ignored it even then.

"The final word, then, is the game."

This is clearly "MGF", or at least a clear admission of Gamist roots. Again, something we pretty much ignored. Back then what we all argued about was realism. No one would have argued a rule was silly because it was realistic but boring - I think we, as  11yr olds were interested in Sim.  

Thus, I guess we were totally ignoring and misunderstanding:-
"As a realistic simulation of things from the realm of make believe or even as a reflection of medieval or ancient warfare or culture or society, it can only be deemed a dismal failure."

These were not so much rule though, more advice or design footnotes.

Not sure where I'm going with this post so I guess I should stop.

Keith

When I started playing the AD&D Player's handbook had come out, but none of the other Ad&D books had.  Note that the player handbook had none of the to hit or saving throw charts in it.  However one guy's older brother had some of the original D&D stuff, so we managed to use that with AD&D characters for a while, even though there were little issues like going from nine armor classes to ten..... I can still remember the incredible excitement when the DM's shield came out full of AD&D tables (it came out before the DMG did)

I was the sort of kid willing to read through a book front to back and try to make sense of it all.  By the time I was done that we were mostly playing "by the book," however I was not totally popular when I pointed out that the magic users spells per day were TOTAL number of spells per day, not times per day that they could cast each of their spells.  Oddly, at low levels our original interpretation was not at all unbalancing.

The one part that we didn't play per the rules was the experience system.  This was not mis-reading it, just not liking it.  We made what I'd now call a social contract decision that we didn't like giving XP for treasure found, so only gave it for killing monsters, but didn't divide by the number of players.  This probably helped emphasize our early adolescent bloodthirstiness, and gave a lot of incentive to go after tough creatures.

The interesting thing for me personally from that, was that it got me thinking about "experience" systems.  As we proceeded to play a wide variety of games one of the earlier parts I'd look at was that system.  There was an incredible variety in early games, from ones that tried learning and studying systems (oddly one of the only parts of Space Opera that actually seemed to work was this system), to variants on XP, to other things entirely.  

In the homebrew system that we eventually ended up using for our last few years of sporadic gaming we had a hybrid experience system (well, it was homebrew, never fully defined and always in flux and being negotiated, so "system" is a bit of a kindness).  One part of that system you might call a D&D like system (kill enough people, you got better at combat), but the other part "bullshit points" worked remarkably like karma in shadowrun or hero points in Heroquest (and similar systems, no doubt, in other games now, I've long since lost track of most new games coming out).  Anyway, its been interesting to see various people converge on the same sort of currency system.  It seems to be more than "This is neat!" and more something like a local optimum.

--Bryan

Paul Czege posted an amazing summary of his experiences with the 1977 (Holmes) version of D&D, especially the bit about how "halfling" was completely undefined, so they all assumed it must refer to the reptilian guy in one of the illustrations.

That post is here.

Paul

Quote from: Sean
Task resolution: roll d20 under relevant statistic.

Absolutely.  This we started doing almost immediately.  Even in Basic DnD, stats were almost irrelevant, so it gave some weight to stat variation.

Not so long ago, I found pdfs of the White Box rules, and I've been reading them very carefully, trying to get a feel for what the game would've been like, wondering what I my group and I might've done to cargo cult-it, as it were.  Stats were even more irrrelevant at that point; there really wasn't any bonus for a stat over 15, so I'm sure we would've been doing the ol' "Roll under your strength on a d20 to hold onto your sword when you fall into the river".  In fact, we did this so much that for years I thought it was part of the rules, and was surprised at some point when I couldn't find it anywhere.  

The extra little bonuses in ADnD for having a stat at 18 always bugged me, too.  It just seemed to lead to players, one way or another, having the stats they needed at an 18, in order to get that bonus.  Who wanted to play a fighter with 17 strength??  Even Basic DnD had this problem, by splitting the bonuses up by 13-15, 16-17 and then, of course, 18.  Actually, when reading the White Box rules, I immediately started thinking that, first, Fighting Men should get some kind of bonus for strength and, second, it made sense just to lay it out as a +1 for 13-15 and a +2 for 16-18.

A couple other bits from the WB that I found interesting:

Magical armor subtracted its bonuses, not from

the character's ac, but from the monster's hd; an interesting difference, I thought.  I haven't checked to see what it says in the Basic rulebook.

When characters were fighting manlike monsters with 1 hd or less, they (the chars) got as many attacks as they had lvls; e.g., a 4th lvl fighter could make four attacks a round against, say, orcs or goblins.  However, against a troll, that same character would only get one attack.  This, I admit, was only garnered with clarification provided by an early Strategic Review...
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Quote
Uses for d12s. A guy playing a character named 'Getafix' in my 5th grade game had a 'funky spear' I gave him. The thing did 2d12 damage, but if either die came up an 11 or 12, something 'funky' happened - we all tried to think of something weird to happen and it just happened. Double 12's was 'superfunky' - portals to another universe, the sky turns orange, whatever. I guess that was an open-ended group consensus narration mechanic.

That rocks!  We were never quite that creative, but I remember making up a magical cup that, when you drank from it, would confer some sort of magical powers: lightning bolts, fireballs, flying, etc.  Sometimes, too, we'd just make weird chars; I made a character who was a skeleton, due to a wizard's curse, and off we went with the adventure.


One thing I think we were striving for is something a lot of current games have (especially the kind talked about around here): simply the ability to make the character that you want to make.  Now the rules, especially the early rules, were very vague in places, and until ADnD they always had text present telling you to take what, change what you like and run with it, but I always felt uncertain about just where "cheating" would come into the picture.  For example, I had no patience to go up levels, but I just couldn't bring myself to start out at any level higher than first, even if that character was a werebear berserker with wings who breathed fire.  Weird.

Ok, I started with the pale blue Basic D&D in the fall of 1977 (I have a 2nd edition copy of the rules, but we would have had the 1st edition).

I recall that I had looked at white box D&D in the store, and decided this idea of a totally pencil and paper war game with no miniatures wasn't my cup of tea, and bought Tractics instead.

My best friend at the time got Basic D&D for his birthday. His older brother had played at school. Not being interested in this pencil and paper game, I just watched as my friend DMed a few others in the game. But I read the rules, and pored over the dungeon geomorphs and the encounter cards that came with the box. And I noticed something interesting about the game. It was a cooperative game. As someone who hated competition, this looked cool. I stayed up almost all night reading the rules and preparing to run. In the morning, my friends created characters. I had decided that all weapons doing 1d6 damage was silly and announced that I would base damage off the cost of the weapon, at which point my friend announced he wanted a small boat (the most expensive piece of equipment he could afford with his starting gold).

I think monsters did their hit dice as damage. Or maybe that rule came in at some later point of confusion. I really don't remember where that came from, but I very distincly remember that being something I was confused about.

I certainly had an advantage for having played wargames. I had started playing Avalon Hill games when I was 8 or so, playing Little Wars when I was 10, and getting deeper into WWII miniatures when I was 13, culminating with Tractics when I was 14. We also had just enough information passed down by my friends older brother that we were able to make pretty good sense of the rules.

During grad school, a friend told me about one thing he had been confused by. The encounter cards had an encounter with footpads, but somehow he didn't connect that with what a 2nd level thief was called (perhaps because he was using white box which didn't have thieves). So he came up with this creature which was two disembodied feet... And I think he had them in the dungeon he ran for me and a couple others in college even though by then he was aware they were supposed to be thieves.

Frank

Hi, Kesher. Thanks for the thoughts.

Interestingly, the roll-under-stat on d20, which was incredibly common from day 1, was I think finally codified only in the Rules Cyclopedia (pg. 82) and maybe the Mentzer "New Basic" boxed sets which precedes that. That was a good game, for which I ran quite a successful little campaign in the early nineties. (We had a mix of male diehards and female newbies, so I ran it with purely descriptive character sheets ('blind stats') to level the playing field and to encourage imaginative play. People had a good time.)

The way we played the original ruleset back in the late seventies and very early eighties was to encourage as much creativity as possible, but then to make tables for every new eventuality. For example, when my namesake character 'Calithena' was depressed over her lost lover, she sailed out into a mana-storm and used a magic rod with energy absorption to suck up a lightning-like bolt of pure magical energy (my friend had magic storms on his world). We all thought this was pretty cool, but we had to wait for forty-five minutes while the GM considered all the possibilities (no-one had done this before) and then made a d1000 table for me to roll on to see what happened.

Endless tables were widely considered klugey by the game nuts I knew back then, and I guess I agree, but they gave things a certain unpredictability and charm. Rather like the D&D spell lists: they too were baroque and nonsensical, but an arbitrary spell list means you can introduce arbitrary effects (Unseen Servant, Tenser's Floating Disk, Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound) that would be extraordinarily difficult to provide for in your typical shake-and-bake element-combining freeform system. It's a nice example of the difference between Renaissance and Modern thinking, actually: for whatever reason, the old D&D books feel more like the lists in the old bestiaries than like a modern ecology & evolution primer.

Virtually all games have moved away from this model. Even Fantasy Heartbreakers tend to have 'more unified' mechanics. It's certainly more manageable for designers to create a closed-ended rules-set, and it helps to moderate some kinds of argument at the table. But there's a certain mad element of whimsy that the lacunae and endless baroque modifications of early D&D created that I think is pretty cool. I'd like to see that element somehow taken up by more current designers, actually - a functional System which incorporated an open-ended/polymorphous/heavily home-table-adaptable Rules set.

Quote from: Sean
But there's a certain mad element of whimsy that the lacunae and endless baroque modifications of early D&D created that I think is pretty cool. I'd like to see that element somehow taken up by more current designers, actually - a functional System which incorporated an open-ended/polymorphous/heavily home-table-adaptable Rules set.

Absolutely; nicely phrased!  I went back and re-read Ron's "Hard Look" article last night after I posted (probably should've done it before I posted...) and was really struck by his thesis that there never was an original DnD rule-set; anytime someone bought it and started playing, they immediately began modifying things.  They had to, because there wasn't enough info to run things otherwise.  The text (in early editions) certainly wasn't reader-friendly, as Keith pointed out:

Quote from: KeithI've been re-reading my DMG, and find myself amused at the weird archaic prose style it uses

Poorly organized, vague, contradicting itself about freedom of interpretation vs. rule-book "credibility", etc.  However, there was something inside the text, in the vague idea of what you could do, in those early days, that acted like a creativity bomb.  Ron's certainly right when he says that Arneson and Gygax, per se, didn't create role-playing games; it was created by A LOT of people all at once, passing things along, using whatever piece they happened to be able to get their hands on.  This is, of course, related to what you're describing about finding new, cool tables in Dragon, or wherever.  "Correctness", at first, didn't really matter.  The halfling example given earlier is a great example, as is Frank's friend's footpad experience:

Quote from: Frank
During grad school, a friend told me about one thing he had been confused by. The encounter cards had an encounter with footpads, but somehow he didn't connect that with what a 2nd level thief was called (perhaps because he was using white box which didn't have thieves). So he came up with this creature which was two disembodied feet... And I think he had them in the dungeon he ran for me and a couple others in college even though by then he was aware they were supposed to be thieves.

I just think that's beautiful!  Especially the way it carried through even when everyone knew what "mistake" had been made; "correctness" still lacked importance, though now it had perhaps been reduced to an inside joke.

I'm perhaps rambling, but my point is,  it'd be fascinating to try and create a playable game out of evocative lists.  Especially lists where the effects of, say, magical items, are as vague as they were in early editions of DnD.  

Okay, this is kinda funny: I was just going to plunk in a link to this old thread (which I read with much delight and rumination),

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12288&highlight=grognard+speaks

when I realized that you (Sean) were its author!  Not surprising, then, that this thread caught your eye...  :)

Early, early DnD had only two effective stats: character level and player creativity in the use of resources (everything from 10' poles and furniture fragments found in rooms to potions of gaseous form); these, as you and others point out in that thread, were applied in astoundingly creative combinations in order to survive the lethal conflict resolution systems (combat matrix and arbitrary saving throw values).  Now, I imagine this is the reason for much immediate rules-drifting as well; certainly it's why we started using stats as defacto task resolution target numbers!

However, it'd be interesting to see how you could capture some of this in a "modern" game; after all, we're looking back on all this stuff, and much of the misunderstanding stemmed from youthful naivete.  Would you do it with, say, multiple inexpensive related products?  With a magazine whose sole purpose was to provide variations?  Could intentional vagueness be usefully incorporated?

I think this post is probably drifting away from the thread's original purpose, so I'll stop with just one more on-topic question:

What other kinds of dice variations did others use back in the "I'll change it if I wanna" days?

Quote
What other kinds of dice variations did others use back in the "I'll change it if I wanna" days?

I had one, that I don't think I ever actually used... Before I got a set of polyhedral dice, I proposed the following way to get something approaching a d20: Take all the number combinations from rolling two six sided dice where order doesn't matter, and number them 1-21. I think I eventually figured out that the probabilities weren't quite even (since the two of a kind only show up 1 in 36 and the other combinations show up 2 in 36).

Frank

Quote from: RonThe point is that we all came up with solutions, and (evidenced by our presence at this website), that those solutions were functional.

I'd like to have examples of why everyone came up with solutions, as well. In the face of confusing, conflicting and complicated text, instead of giving up and doing something else, groups of young males spontaniously worked out rules (not to mention significant SC). Why?

Do the conditions for this genesis exist now? Was it because there was less to turn to back then? Do video games, especially (ironically) those with a D&D feel, kill the incentive to do so? Because you can just get what you want (some play) without having to invent it?

Then again my extensive experience with Rifts suggests that they don't just turn away. But I wonder if there is a significant lost demographic who did turn away, for what market still exists.

Why? Tabletop RPGs are fun. So if you find something that doesn't work for you, you fix it. Note that I designed my first game at about 6 years of age (it was called Space Race, and looked a lot like "Life"). So, obviously, I liked this sort of tinkering. So I didn't mind at all having to do it when it came up.

I do think that, in fact, these games selected for people who like to tinker. I think that this explains the zillions of RPGs that one can download, and all of the other homebrews that are out there that we've never seen. There are nearly as many RPGs as there are players. If you consider minor variations, in fact there are as many RPGs a players just about.



I believe that my early experiences are already in the threat which this one is split off of. But I'll comment that I used a "roll under stat" rule when first playing "Blue Book, Boxed Set Basic" because I'd previously played "Death Test" which was a "module" for The Fantasy Trip, basically a series of encounters that played like a "Choose your own adventure" book using the rules from what were essentially the two boardgames, "Melee" and "Wizard" from Metagaming (Steve Jackson). In that system, you roll under your Dex to hit your opponent. So we figured that this must be true in D&D. First rolling 3d6, and then a d20 when we discovered that this is what you rolled to hit. Then when we discovered the to hit table, we used both for a while - roll d20 under Dex, and a d20 to get past the armor. Then, finally we realized that your Dex didn't matter at all to hitting your opponent. And went, "Wha?" The roll less than your Dex model was already palpably superior to D&D's roll to hit against armor.

BTW, Chris, holy cow...

QuotePS- I had somehow read "Ogre" as "Orge"(Ohr-g), and in my head, they simply were bigger, more grown up versions of orcs. They looked mostly the same in the illustrations...

I made exactly the same mistake. Both the pronumciation, and the assumption of what an Orgy was. I can still remember the look of shock on the face of my friend's mother when she came into the room and I said "There's an orgy in this room." She corrected us, and it wasn't for many years til I would understand why it was that she knew that the term was incorrect. Being only 10 years old at the time, I couldn't have known what an Orgy was. :-)

A similar thing happened with the character "Enik" from Land of the lost, and the term Eunuch, once. But that's another story.

But, you see, Callan, I had already played two RPGs. Actually I think we'd played Boot Hill, Gamma World, and Traveler by that time, too. So we knew that there were loads of ways to do all of this stuff. So, no surprise that tweaking occured.

Truth be told, we spent a lot of time trying hard to "play by the rules" of most of the games we played. I started making up my own homebrew games in 1981, so that I'd have a set of rules that worked like I wanted from the ground up, instead of all of the tweaks that I wanted to put into other games, but which seemed somehow potentially "wrong". I mean, we really didn't like not playing by the rules, most of us. Fudging was to me then, and still is, something that I don't like to do.

Mike

Quote
Why? Tabletop RPGs are fun. So if you find something that doesn't work for you, you fix it. Note that I designed my first game at about 6 years of age (it was called Space Race, and looked a lot like "Life"). So, obviously, I liked this sort of tinkering. So I didn't mind at all having to do it when it came up.

Boy does that mirror my experience... Soon after I got Tactics II, I was developing my own game boards and scenarios.

But what was the hook for me to RPGs? The fact that it was cooperative. I have never liked highly competitive play (probably started when I was the smallest kid in gym, it wasn't until 6th grade that I wasn't the last person in line when you lined up by height). When it became obvious to me that RPGs were about cooperation, I practically dropped traditional wargames and never looked back (well ok, I do occaisionally play, but I need a deeper trust in my fellow players to play a boardgame than I do to play an RPG).

Frank

Hi Mike,

I mean, before you even know if the games fun, you start making stuff up as you read it so you can (ironically given what you've just done) play it.

Tinkering might be fun...but doing so before you know whether the game is even worth it? Why sink that effort into an activity? I can think of some of my own reasons, but I'd like to know other peoples reasons from back then.

Or am I asking in the wrong place? Basically a place which is a community of people who just went for it...so I can't get much perspective from asking here?

Hi Callan -

There are two common answers to your question.

The more common, I think, is that you saw some older kids playing the game, maybe at the school cafeteria or library, and it looked like a lot of fun. So then you got the game, but you couldn't figure it out, so you made stuff up to let yourself play it, something like those kids in the cafeteria. The rules were vague and incomplete enough that this story holds even for a lot of people who went and joined that other game - getting a character and rolling dice when the DM told you to didn't tell you everything you needed to play the game.

In my case, I got the game without ever seeing it played. I just thought dragons and fantasy adventures were hell of cool, so I started making stuff up. Same story, really, but without the experience of others playing to shape it.

My first introduction to D&D went fairly smoothly, as far as I can tell.  My younger brother also thought it was cool, so we absorbed quite a bit of it.

Then we figured, hey, that Top Secret box looks cool, so we saved up our little allowances and bought it.

The rules looked reasonable enough -- James Bond meets D&D.  So my brother made up a character and we jumped into a module.

Me:  "Okay, you're in town.  What do you do?"

Him: "Uhmmm... are there any, like, stores or houses or anything?"

Me:  "Sure... there's some stores and some houses and stuff... but they're all locked."

So he pretty much just started breaking into random houses and shooting people.

Because the D&D model of dungeon crawling was the only model for game play we had.  We thought that was the way RPGs were run.

It was sort of fun, in its way.



Cheers,
Roger

Callan,

I think that, like Sean says, there are reasons that one might still want to participate, and be fixing before you see play.

But I think that, in fact, some percentage of people had good experiences with these games first. Perhaps the game was run by somebody else (was my case), or the problems of play didn't get noted the first time through. So you get hooked.

Put another way, "broken" role-playing is still better than Monopoly. For the people who like RPGs like we do. So if there's some extra effort involved to get going, you'll do it.

And to look at your precise case, where the player has never seen an RPG, doesn't know how to play, is reading the rules for the first time, and notes that he's going to have to fix them to be able to play - well, I think some of those people never do play. Or, rather, they'll probably find somebody else who knows what's up, and ask them to help them understand (many may think that they just have misunderstood what it's supposed to look like, and ask others). But, I suppose it does fail for some of these people.

For those who it doesn't, well, I think that the human mind is, to some extent, capable of extrapolating from the rules of a game what it's going to be like playing. Like Sean liking the dragons on the cover, and thinking, "Gee, I get to be the guy who fights the dragon? Cool!" I mean, RPGs are that powerful a basic draw that, for a certain type of person at least, no small problems of understanding the rules are going to get in the way.

Are you looking for what that basic draw is? Well, I think that's going to be personal to individuals, but I've recently been speculating that it has to do with a basic need in some people to create myth, that has no other outlet in modern society. Yes, I think that most of us RPGers would be shamans in another age and society. Or something equivalent that got to make up the stories. RPGs give an outlet for that primal need to communicate in this fashion. That's what D&D tapped into that got us all hooked, I think.

But there are probably other answers just as valid or moreso. Doesn't matter, really, IMO. The fact is that we did all end up plowing through those rules, and making them work. So there's obviously something there.

This is no different than anything. Somewhere there's a golfing board where they're discussing why it is that they play such a completely aggravating game. How anyone can get into playing golf when the learning curve is so difficult. The answer there, as it must be here is that we love it, and have since it was first described to us (or seen by us, or played by us, depending on how we were introduced).

Mike

Hmm, in thinking about incomplete rules and changing rules before playing the first time, I have a few thoughts:

I wanted to add a rule giving different weapons differing amounts of damage dealing capability before I played the first time. But I had prior experience with wargames that distinguished between different weapons, so this was a discrepancy that was natural for me to find.

I was also thinking about Basket Ball. Look here at the original rules (http://www.ku.edu/heritage/graphics/people/naismith.html) and  here at the NBA's rules (http://www.nba.com/analysis/rules_index.html). I can see right off that people picking up the original rules would have to "invent" part of the game. What size is the court? What size are the baskets? Do you set them on the ground or at a height? Do you mark the inbounds play area in any way? Are the baskets inside the play area or just outside? But obviously people played this game anyway, to the point that it has become a game almost everyone in the US has at least some clue as to what it's about and how to play.

Frank

Mike and Sean, thanks!

Yeah, I think I'm seeing the viral RP transmission vector again. With the rules, it's sort of like how a virus grows in a host too...you have just a few rules, but then the players make more and more, like a virus duplicates itself.

Quote from: MikeFor those who it doesn't, well, I think that the human mind is, to some extent, capable of extrapolating from the rules of a game what it's going to be like playing.

Not so much looking for the basic draw, but the (presumably) large reward for overcoming the work load. From you quote, I'd also say the human mind is capable of making things up, but not realising that. It's like a drawing of a triangle that's had all it's tips erased. There is not a triangle there, but your mind mentally adds the tips so it forms a triangle. The same goes for the rules, though it's more opinion based. To use the shape analogy instead of talking about rules, I've read many posts from people ferverently argueing that the lines make up a triangle, while someone else ferverently argues it makes a square. Without cognitively realising where they are adding material, they can only see it as being the way those lines indicate. Not a negotiation starter.

An issue of personal interest to me is; In the sim essay on how people will read separately from each other and it's still actual play, but then when they come together they just don't mesh because they read it in differing ways. Here is similar or the same. I suppose it's: Wonderful imagination sparker Vs actual syncronised group use. I think it sparks ghettoism.

QuoteNot so much looking for the basic draw, but the (presumably) large reward for overcoming the work load.

That's what I'm talking about. You look at the game, and see, "Gee, I kinda get to be one of these cool characters in this alternate world, and tell their story. That rocks!" What the Big Model calls Exploration - which is unique to RPGs IMO (I think it's definitive, in fact). And you put in as much effort as you need to in order to be able to do it.

I don't know about you, but the basic draw of RPGs is like crack cocaine to me. I could no more easily give up playing them than cut of my own left arm. And I felt that way after playing in my very first game. I can remember it like it was yesterday, that's how powerful my first encounter with RPGs was. I remember going from room to room killing monsters and taking their stuff, and thinking that this was more fun than anything I'd ever done before. Despite the fact that it wasn't really particularly well run, and my cousin running the game had to cobble it together from bits of other games (the hexmap was from a WWII aircraft carrier game, your piece was just a bit of paper with your name on it, you rolled up your entire character by rolling 3d6 - scrounged from some other game - and consulting a chart that my cousin made to see which whole character you got). That is, I saw right then and there how complicated, and effort-laden playing was. But after that first game, it didn't matter what I had to do to get that reward, short of killing folks or so, I was going to do it.

I think for those people who did it reading the book, it was simply a matter of finding it as compelling as I did just reading the book, combined with a personality that finds such "work" kinda fun. Again, I had already designed games from scratch so I was clearly not put off by the effort required in any way. Again, you see that in most RPG gamers, I think.  

Yes, the ratio of effort to play is lower than in other activities in these cases. But, first, I don't think it's as low as you're making it out to be, and, second, again, it's just worth it.

If you don't see how it was worth it, then I'm not seeing how you got started. I mean, even if you were taught to play, and the games were the best RPGs sessions out there, the effort to play ratio is still higher in RPGs than in most other activities out there. The simple answer is that there's something about RPGs that we (well some of us anyhow) find compelling - getting to explore. Seems pretty simple to me.

Mike

Mike, good insight on the compelling nature of RPGs. I haven't quite put my finger on it, but there is something I get from RPGs that I get from no other activity I participate in. I think part of it for me though is actually that work of coming to grips with the system (and eventually realizing that system isn't just the written rules, but covers all the unwritten rules, whether they be part of the social contract or just "this is how you do it" bits).

I know I access bits of the experience from other activities, but never as a whole. Programming accesses the tinkering, puzzle solving, and technical creativity bits. Building with LEGO accesses the imagination creativity and the visual and tactile senses. Listening to music accesses the sense of hearing. Going to church or a LEGO convention accesses the group socialization bits.

Hmm, so is that all of it? That RPG is interractive creativity that includes technical creativity and imagination creativity, along with engagement of the senses (and would RPG be enhanced if we purposefully engaged the senses of smell and taste?).

Frank

Quote from: MikeThat's what I'm talking about. You look at the game, and see, "Gee, I kinda get to be one of these cool characters in this alternate world, and tell their story. That rocks!"

Emphasis mine.

But isn't this logic circular?

"I get to be in this game world!"
"How does the game facilitate you getting there?"
"With these rules!"
"The ones your making up?"
"Yes!"
"So how does the game facilitate you getting into the game world?"
"With these rules!"

Don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing with you by pointing out the circular logic. If it is circular logic like this, it's like a magicians illusion to early roleplayers and useful for it. I'd like to know how to replicate it with adults. Whacha think?

QuoteThe simple answer is that there's something about RPGs that we (well some of us anyhow) find compelling - getting to explore. Seems pretty simple to me.

No, you don't get me. I'm not saying it's not fun enough...I'm trying to quantify what is fun about it (and mentioning the workload to indicate this opposing reward must be there in counterbalance to it). Then I can bottle the stuff so to speak.

Actually, here's a thought: Does the workload only appear latter? I mean, think about it, your a newbie player...the GM can tell you anything and you'll go with it. There isn't much workload in him just telling you anything that comes to mind.

But latter, in keeping consistant with previous statements, and previous world creation, the workload starts to creep in. But by then your hooked. But on the other hand, what hooked you wasn't the same sort of thing/same workload as now. Whatcha think?

Hello. I read this thread and found it so interesting that I had to register and reply.

When I was about 12-13 one of my friend's older brothers introduced us all to Dungeons and Dragons. We watched one of his games, he explained the rules to us and we made up characters for a game DM'ed by his little brother. We got most stuff "right", as it were, but we mostly just steamrolled over the rules in the name of speed and/or action movie heroism.

When we had some question about a THAC0 or some other statistic, we'd quickly thumb through the PHM and DMG, find the number, and move on. We'd never actually read the rules front to back because we all kind of knew how it was played.

One of our players brought a copy of Shadowrun to one of our games, and as soon as I had flipped through the background section and looked at all the pictures I knew I wanted our group to run a Shadowrun game. I could have a character that was not just a wizard, but also a cyborg? That's like twice as good! And he could probably even be a ninja to boot! I immediately started convincing the other players to make some characters, but our DM was nonplussed. He said he'd look at the rules.

Next Monday at school, he told me the rules were too screwed up to use. He explained that every character, regardless of stats, only had 10 hit points. Even trolls! And a regular old pistol did 9 damage, no die roll attached! Crazy!

I told him he was nuts and asked him for the book. He had it with him, and he opened it up to show me the offending sections. Sure enough, the character sheet only had ten check boxes for hit points, ending in death. He flipped to the equipment table. The damage code for the standard pistol read 9M. Puzzled at the bizarre rules system, I reluctantly agreed that this Shadowrun thing wasn't very good.

We didn't think to actually read the combat section. After all, we already knew how to play a role playing game.

Callan,

First, your argument would assume that everyone who learned to play had to make up all of the rules themselves. They didn't, they mostly went from the book. Yes that includes interpretation of the rules, but that's true for every activity in the world. So RPGs aren't really all that different than anything else. Yes, somewhat more effort to get them to go, but not too much. In any case, without the rules to get the idea into one's head to actually play an RPG, it doesn't happen. Oh, sure people did interactive storytelling and such before RPGs, but not quite the same thing.

The rules are attractive, because they give us a structure in which to do the exploration.

Second, I've said repeatedly that it's the Exploration that's fun, so you must be asking why exploration is fun? Yes? Because if not, I'm confused. I keep answering your question, and you keep insisting that I haven't. Getting to explore is, I think, the reward that keeps us coming back.

Rewards, and why we want rewards are two different things. Money is a reward, but just because it's a reward for most doesn't mean that you know why people want it automatically. Why do people want Exploration? Well, there are about as many reasons for that, I suspect, as why people want money. Some possibilities:

*It gives them a sense of wonder
*It feels freeing
*It's an interesting way to employ the imagination
*It gives the brain a workout
*It's inspirational for some other activity like writing

I could go on and on, I think. Like most things to do with motive, most people are blissfully unaware of why they like what they like. Further, you can chase any motive back into complete obscurity if you like. Why does one person like to work their brian out? Because it makes them function better. Why do they want to function better? Because it makes their lives easier. Why do they want their lives to be easier? Because they don't like stress. Why don't they like stress? Because it makes them feel bad. Why don't they want to feel bad?

Because nobody likes to feel bad.

I mean, what's the point here? People play RPGs for the exploration. Why doesn't that suffice? What deeper digging is going to come up with something you can bottle?

Mike

If you cut open the goose, you won't find gold there.

Hi SicaVolate, welcome to the Forge!

It's interesting how assumption can come first, system wise. Have you ever read The riddle of steel? I've read a few reviews for it where the writer basically ditched a major component of how combat works, and then wrote a scathing review of the game despite having not really played it.


Mike,

I'm not arguing with the appeal of exploration. When I brought up circular logic, I mean these early roleplayers aren't exploring the material provided...they are making up stuff, but then exploring it as if it is the game.

From the examples here, they aren't making up stuff like having +2 instead of +1. They replace pivotal rules like how to hit or such like (pivotal for combat centered games, anyway). It's like gutting SA's from TROS...your not really exploring TROS without the SA's, you've basically made a different game. Sure, lots of the same rules...but the way it'll work out is a lot different. From examples in this thread, these new roleplayers replace core elements of the system but then go on to play as if the game is great, rather than their creation is great.

If many of the rules aren't a feature of play (since the comprehension of the main rules and actual use are low, I assume they aren't), what is? Much like tacking on a combat system despite the games intent, what other traditions do we include in RPG design, despite what actually interests a begining user? They obviously like something in those pages, but they aren't actually using all sections. Why? Sure they like exploration, but that's not helping to find what's important in those pages and what was just added on because 'that's what you have in an RPG'.

Let me try to paraphrase what you're saying, because I may still have it wrong. It sounds like you may be saying that certain players alter rule X, and others rule Y, so at the heart of what makes RPGs interesting can't be X or Y, it must be that which never gets excised?

But that's a fallacy. Maybe you excise X. And I excise Y. But I play for X specifically, and you play for Y specifically. So then we have to say that what is "Core" to RPGs is different to each player. And given that the alterations here are all different, and that we have no reason to suggest that there's any one thing that doesn't get excised, then we can't make any generalizations at all.

In fact, you'll find that after playing for a while, there's a certain kind of player who throws out "all" of the rules. The freeformer decides that all of the RPG structure is "bad." But what are they left with?

Exploration. It's the only commonality that's never jettisoned. It's the core of what people play for. Absolutely everything else about RPGs, CA, techniques, settings, everything can be jettisoned, and you can still be playing a RPG. The point at which you say that you no longer want to explore, that's where you have decided to play Monopoly or something again, and are no longer playing RPGs.

So, again, if the question is, "What is it that all RPG players have in common that they desire, that keeps them playing no matter the problem in potentially any other part of the game?" The answer is RPGs. If the question is, "Beyond exploration, what is it individual players get from RPGs that's what attracted them to game X that they altered?" there are a million answers.

Are you looking for some of those million answers? Because we have those, too. Challenge, for example. Story for another. Etc.

This seems to be yet another of those times that you're looking for something between A and B where I'm not seeing a definition of what you're looking for that's not A or B.

Mike