Early role-playing (split)

[Paul Czege]

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 http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=49689&highlight=#49689">here.

Paul

[Kesher]

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...
[/list:u]

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.

[ffilz]

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

[Sean]

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.

[Kesher]

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:

I'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:

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?

[ffilz]

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

[Callan S.]

The 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.

[Mike Holmes]

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...

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...

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

[ffilz]

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

[Callan S.]

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?

[Sean]

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.

[Roger]

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

[Mike Holmes]

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

[ffilz]

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 and here at the NBA's rules. 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

[Callan S.]

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.

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.

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.