Splitting off from http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13143.

John Kim said:

As far as I can tell, the examples of play I've seen are exactly what they purport to be -- examples in order to illustrate how the game works in practice.

Read the section and compare with actual play you have done using those rules. There is a part where a PC dies, or appears to die. The treansript is... bizarre.

JamesDJIII wrote: Splitting off from http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13143.

John Kim said:

As far as I can tell, the examples of play I've seen are exactly what they purport to be -- examples in order to illustrate how the game works in practice.

The more I look at the Red Box Basic D&D set example, 11th printing or so, the more I don't think this is true.

Read the section and compare with actual play you have done using those rules. There is a part where a PC dies, or appears to die. The treansript is... bizarre. Did any ever play in the same the way these "players" did? Can anyone recall the gaming memes that are present in that example? I started playing D&D when I was young, so I missed out on the game's dawn.

Side note: play with a 'caller' has always been pretty rare IME, but I did see it in some of the D&D groups I played in in '77-'78. Basically, it was a pretty functional strategy when you had a group of six or seven 5th-9th grade boys at the same table. One of the older and smarter boys would ride herd on the rest and funnel their communcations to the GM. People would break out for 1-on-1 roleplay all the time, and there was lots of direct interaction, but when things got too crazy to keep track of the GM would call an end to nonsense by 'stopping the buck' for party input with the Caller: "What do you guys do now", with the clear implication that the Caller would answer.

We didn't call it a "caller", but we always had a party leader, even when we were down to a referee and two players all of whom had college degrees. Later, when I refereed for a house full of gamers whose median age was probably fifteen but who ranged from seven to thirty and whose number ranged from half a dozen to one and a half score, it was indispensible as a method.

In short, the referee dealt directly with the party leader, and the party leader stated what the party was going to do. Anyone who disagreed could speak up and say they were doing something different, or they wanted to talk about it, but we didn't wait for full agreement of everyone before proceeding--we assumed that the party leader spoke for the party, unless someone objected.

That's how I played until I got Multiverser going, in most situations. I still run D&D games that way, because it's very functional for party-based play.

But if the point is that this approach to putting the example of play in the book is intended as instruction to get play to follow a particular pattern, I would agree, and don't see that as controversial. That is, the point is to say, "this is how we play this game; copy this, and you're doing it right." I also don't see how that's different from advice that's sometimes followed in games here: show people how the game plays in practice.

Now, maybe people didn't always follow that model, but it was a workable model.

--M. J. Young

I don't recall the Red Box example of play, but I don't recall being struck by its weirdness either. It was at the time THE ONLY example of play I had to work with so I guess I could not have perceived it to be weird.

I remember the example in the 2nd Ed DMG a bit better; I always liked it actually, has a certain adulthood to it our contemporary games did not.

We tried the caller system and it failed miserably. That remains the weirdest social convention related to RPG that I am familiar with, and certainly IMO the least conducive to any first person identification with your character.

Something else that struck me after my earlier post...

While it's possible that the Red Box example of play was made-up, rather than being a transcript of part of an actual play session, I don't really see any reason for the author(s) to lie about what play was like.

D&D was six years old at the time that the Red Box set was published -- the authors had surely played enough to have some idea of what a "typical" session would be like, so if they did make up the example, they were drawing off of their own knowledge of play. And making something up that wasn't representative of real play wouldn't have gained them anything that I can see.

As a side note, I pulled out my original D&D and "blue book" D&D sets, and checked them for examples of play -- neither had one. So the 1980 "Red Box" example of play is the first "example of play" to appear in a D&D set. Out of historical curiousity, does anyone know if there's an earlier "example of play" in another game?

Perhaps they were aiming to present what they saw as an "ideal example" of play rather than an actual example of play?

efindel wrote: As a side note, I pulled out my original D&D and "blue book" D&D sets, and checked them for examples of play -- neither had one. So the 1980 "Red Box" example of play is the first "example of play" to appear in a D&D set. Out of historical curiousity, does anyone know if there's an earlier "example of play" in another game?