So I'm going to go way back to the mid-late 70's - long enough ago that I'm not sure how much to trust my memories, but not so long as to be a complete haze. I had a group of junior high school buddies that played wargames (Afrika Corps and the like), and we ordered this Dungeons and Dragons game out of the back of one of the magazines.

It was, and wasn't, a wargame. It was like, and unlike, the amazing Tolkien books we'd read. We really had very little idea what to do with it, and there wasn't that much advice out there. So we made stuff up. "GM-full" play? Well, we did always have one official "Dungeon Master" (the books told us to do that), but since nobody really know what they were doing . . . everyone chipped in. Somebody's got a cool idea about what to do while passing through the forest on our way to the dungeon? He just speaks up, the DM gives it an "official" nod, and it's in the game. Directorial power? Of course, everyone had directorial power - otherwise we'd never get anywhere. The military buff added details when we joined the army, the guy whose parents owned horses let us know what a stableboy needed to do, and everyone added bits from whatever myth/fiction they'd picked up on. Lloyd Alexander, Evangeline Walton, Alan Garner and Susan Cooper were added to Tolkien as our influences.

Somewhere along the line (maybe right in one of those original 3 books), we were advised to use the map from Avalon Hill's "Outdoor Survival" game as the "world" for our adventures. So we did, three of us sharing responsibility for that creation, another 2-3 just along for the ride. When the supplement with all the artifacts in it came out (Eldritch Wizardry?), we thought they were cool, but there was no place for 'em in the world we'd built - so we added a new continent, based on Greg Costikyian's "Sword and Sorcery" board game. We came up with excuses (almost Premise-like) for characters to go to this other continent, and bring back artifacts. And have the characters be changed by the experience. And they in turn would change the places they returned to. It was important that each character be established as someone who "mattered", that every player shared in this creation. Almost protagonistic concerns . . .

My point? If my memory is to be trusted at all, these early experiences were kinda-sorta close to what we're calling here at the Forge "Narrativist" - or at least, it seems like we were using "advanced" techniques. Now, we were also, what? 13, 14, 15? So in terms of story, we're not talking very sophisticated. And if the techniques were advanced, that doesn't mean our use of 'em always was - directorial power as a social bludgeon ain't exactly "functional", but we didn't do any worse with it than we did with any other interpersonal issues at that age.

So . . . anyone else? One purpose of this thread is to check in with others about early Actual Play - am I the only one who remembers things this way? I'm also interested in *why* it happened - maybe, before some critical mass of supplements and modules of particular types was reached, there was more "room" for the styles and techniques that, today, we fight so hard to support and understand? All thoughts welcome,

Gordon

My first experience with RPG's:

I was 11 years old and started hanging out with a 12 year old kid who had been left back. He told me a bit about D&D and one day when we were walking home from school he tried to teach me how to play. He said I was a fighter with a sword and shield and leather armor and I was walking through a forest and I saw a goblin (he had to describe one to me) and then he asked "what do you do?". I had no clue how to proceed. I think I tried to talk the goblin and it attacked me and I killed it. Then he said I saw some gold coins fall out of its pouch, which I took. By the time we got to his house I was hooked.

He broke out some strange looking dice, two red books with a red dragon on the cover and I rolled up a character---an elf named Hunter (of course in those days, elf meant "elven fighter/magic-user"). Each adventure, I would start at the entrance to a new dungeon and not stop until I had cleaned it out. Then I would go back to some obscure "town", level up if I could, buy new weapons and armor, and then play around with my new magic items. Gamism at its finest, and I loved it!

I joined this kid's scout troop and met a few other people who played at camp (although the scout masters broke the game up pretty quick---boy those were dark days for Dungeons and Dragons/Satanism). :)

I eventually learned of our FLGS---Campaign Headquarters in Norfolk, VA. It was a classic gaming store, small and dingy (in a good way) with open playing tables, painted and unpainted miniatures for sale, faux weapons hanging on the wall (oh how I wanted a sword back then!) a plethora of dice and shelf upon dusty shelf full of roleplaying and wargames.
I started hanging out at that magical and wonderful place (which I still return to when I visit VA, even if only to buy some dice), met new people and learned how to play games other than D&D---games like AD&D (the game for more advanced gamers). :)

Twenty years later, I can't stomach running or playing an AD&D game and I really can't figure out why. Perhaps it's as you (Gordon) said and things like D&D were simpler and more new back then. We didn't have much guidance or many other games to choose from so we all developed our own playing styles and enjoyed playing that way without any thoughts of changing.

I wish I could cue in some sad, nostalgic music here. :)

Pete

Hi Gordon,

I've said this before, but I suspect it's been buried so deeply in threads that I'll never find it.

You're right. Narrativism is not new. I have always said that all three modes of play have been involved in role-playing since the beginning. I can even trace the relationship between overt story creation and role-playing back into the early 60s, long before D&D was a twinkle in Dave Arneson's eye.

I don't know who first started saying "early role-playing was Gamist, 80s role-playing was Simulationist, and we are the Narrativist revolution." I am contemptuous of that sentiment's inaccuracy, and I despise its arrogance. Again, to whomever might need to see this: all three GNS modes have been present in role-playing even prior to its formalization as a hobby. (Formalization and formation are not the same things.)

Overt RPG design is a different story. I summarized that very briefly in my article, and a more complete treatment is in draft form. I'm convinced that, historically, a great deal of Narrativist play was transformed, mechanically, into non-Narrativist and largely incoherent forms when it became "rules text" in published games.

Best,
Ron

Gordon, I think you're right. When I started gaming (sounds like it was a bit after you, at the tail end of the '70s), there wasn't this calcified idea of how you were "supposed" to run a game. "Modules" (who calls them that anymore?) were pretty freeflowing, with a location & a bunch of monsters & odd characters to encounter, in no particular order. (Which is why some people recently commented here that they now get mileage out of those old adventures--there's little to no railroading in them.) We created our own settings, because there weren't that many settings available, & most games didn't come with a prepackaged setting.

It was the late '80s & the '90s that really set in stone a lot of the "standards" that most people take for granted these days--railroaded scenarios, Players getting as much "in character" as they can, massive amounts of prepackaged setting that overshadow the play group, & so on.

Gordon, Ron and Josh,

Excellent points. My early AD&D games were simply Narrativism, with me working quietly to hide as much gamist mechanics under the rug as possible. For example, in a year and a half of play the hobbit thief got to 4th level -- the highest level attained by anyone in the group. I had looked at the magic spell list and all the uber-weapons they could own and saw where that road led. My focus was on a bunch of farm kids who wanted to go out in the world and become important. And when they saved the local city from the temple after encountering death, moral ambiguity and rising against their own fears, the "campaign" closed shop. (I was the only one who bothered to read the books -- nobody knew any better.)

When went to work in the "industry" my playing style changed immensely -- because I was trying to catch up how "modules" and such were written and published. I realized only years later I hated the style of material being written in the late 80's... It was written to confound and make players dependent on more and more material. That is, instead of making RPG material designed to liberate and encourage people to create their own gaming environment and sessions (like early D&D, like Sorcerer), the basic assumption was: "You can't do this without us, and we'll show you why."

When I refer to Narrativism as "new" -- as I just did on a thread last night, it's because I think in some ways it's "new again" -- if you will. Since many RPG consumers fault a game book for not providing enough source material these days, or only want games that will be supported with a new splatbook/adventure/meta-plot background book every month for two years, I think it's safe to say certain, more innocent, habits have been bred out of gamers.

This is why, in the same post, I suggest Narrativism is easier than how the publishers taught people to play. Narrativism, I think, is up front, obvious and, again, innocent. It play to people's basic instincts about storytelling.

The current models of scenario design we've inheritted is the publisher's model, and that built on the (vital) assumption that the character don't matter to the "plot" -- since there's no bleeding way any publisher knows anything about the character in your group. In my early D&D days, all I had to go on were the characters of the players before me. I never played one module. Ever. I never picked up a source book until I was getting paid to write them. The fun was spinning the material ourselves from the basic tools.

And so, while Narrativism isn't new, it's being reintroduced -- and in some ways needs to be formalized -- as Ron is doing with the Sorcerer Library, to make sure people who started playing with VtM and other games designed to make players publisher-dependent know there are in fact other (and in my view, more joyful and simpler), ways of playing.

I'd offer too, that a recent thought I had -- that many game books not only are better reads than game aids, but that they also activtively discourage actual play. I truly think the publishing habits mentioned above have done terrible things to the fun of role-playing -- but retained, at least, the pleasure of reading.

Take care,
Christopher

Ron -

For what it's worth, I agree - you have said it (that all three modes have always been around) before. This thread wasn't meant to challenge/question that, though I suppose it's always good to be reminded that "there is no new thing under the sun."

I think the de facto play vs. overt design thing is what was gnawing at me, and caused me to post. So many things that are discussed here at the Forge, I have this "yeah, I've done that" feeling, but then I wonder how that's possible, since all those years ago we had none of the "tools". Actual Play vs. rules text, Coherency . . . a few more pieces slide into place.

Pete, Joshua, Christopher,

Thanks. It's interesting how many angles there are at this - publishing concerns, weight of setting, RPGs as reading . . . I'll add a phrase Ron's used before, and say that the "tournament culture" that seemed to take over the actual play of D&D in the early-mid 80's just about drove me out of the hobby. I *think* I participated in the first ever RPGA-endorsed tournament (at GenCon East?), and it was so weird, so different from what I was used to, that I almost didn't recognize it as the same game.

Anyone else?

Gordon

Gordon C. Landis wrote: I'll add a phrase Ron's used before, and say that the "tournament culture" that seemed to take over the actual play of D&D in the early-mid 80's just about drove me out of the hobby. I *think* I participated in the first ever RPGA-endorsed tournament (at GenCon East?), and it was so weird, so different from what I was used to, that I almost didn't recognize it as the same game.

The whole "narrativism" thing is new for me in the last few years. I started playing RPGs in junior high, and we were very much in the dungeon crawl frame of mind. We had exactly one game in high school which wasn't just a dungeon crawl--it was wonderful, we played every night for something like a month, and when that game was over the magic went away.

It took me years to come back to the hobby, first with D&D sessions that were just an excuse to drink beer with friends. Our games were more than a little linear, and our characters were not quite as protagonistic as our beers. Then we played a Traveller adventure that I wrote. I'd never heard word one about narrativism. I just knew that I liked detective novels, and I structured it like a detective novel, with all of the action based on the relationships that characters established with NPCs. Until a recent 7th Sea campaign by a first-rate game master (who used identical design techniques), that Traveller session of four years ago was the highlight of our gaming group.

It took me a long time to realize that what I wanted was games where the characters really could make a difference. System has something to do with it: D&D and its system descendents make that difficult at lower levels; White Wolf games are tied to their setting, and modifying that setting is awkward.

Traveller and Call of Cthulhu provided my release. There is no setting to be tied to, and even in Cthulhu, where there are some specific NPCs (GOOs), there's no prohibition against killing them, just the warning that it isn't a permanent condition with them. It took me until I picked up Sorcerer to realize that the important difference was less about the game system and more about how the game master structured the game. Recently that has dawned on my gaming group as well.

This has been long and rambling; I'll stop since nobody is reading by this point anyway. There is at least the bright spot that both I and my group know a lot more about what makes a good game. Now we just have to put that knowledge into play.

My early experience of this was completely bizarre. Basically, in the latter years of primary school I had vaguely heard of some kind of game "that was a bit like playing an Infocom game except you did it by talking instead of typing on a computer". And one day, I suggested to a friend that we play one. Just like that. There was no preparation, because at the time I had no clue that you were supposed to prepare. After that, we both enjoyed it so much we did it regularly, swapping who was "pretending to be the computer" and who was "doing the commands".

Effectively, we were playing diceless with no stats, with one 'GM' and one 'player'. The 'player' just described their actions - the 'GM' didn't ask them to suggest consequences, but did use their actions as a basis for spinning things off. One thing did help, though - we invariably set the 'adventures' in real world locations we know, such as our school and the surrounding area, which gave both of us a basis to work things into, as well as a coherent background (since we could pull people we knew in as well). (The 'secret in the school' plot was popular in kidvid shows at the time, so we both recognised that too.)

Strangely enough, I don't think I've managed to GM a game quite as well since then - nor been in a game which was GMed so well when I was playing. But that's probably just rose coloured nostalgia.

Hyphz, that is really cool. I wonder what happens if you assume that those recollections are not just rose-colored nostalgia. What lessons would you take away?

In fact, let me generalize that question and throw it out to everyone who posted here. Is there yet more we have to "unlearn" in order to recpature more of the strengths of those early experiences? Or is that a vain hope?

- Walt

Walt,

I'm going to go with "unlearning" -- and have been for the last year now.

I'd say that when I had mastered the information to build a career as a freelance game designer is exactly when my severe writer's block kicked in. One of the reasons I'm hunkering down with Sorcerer so deeply is to peel back what I intuitively knew about storytelling before I learned out to make disfunctional narrative for the publishing end of things.

And hyphz,

Remember, feelings of pleasure are pleasure. Let's not trick ourselves, as we often do, that "sophistication" or "complication" is better or more the "real thing." I personally think people are wired for stories -- so maybe we actually did do it better before we learned habits out of the publishers that made our storytelling dependent on third parties with no personal interest in our particular group of players.

RPG sessions, at their best, are of value in the sense of craft (which, until the last couple of centuries, also meant art). By this I simply mean hand made, not made for mass production, and of value because the craftsman (the players) and the consumer (again, the players), say it's of value -- not 'cause everyone else on the block has one.

Take care,
Christopher

In fifth grade, I saw a boxed set for Dungeons and Dragons in the local bookstore. My mother wouldn't buy it for me, and I didn't have an allowance, so I invented my own rules. I understood that it had dice, but not that they were an action-resolution mechanic. In my game, you rolled 1d6 to determine your class (knight, wizard, archer, . . . uh, I think "knight" might have been 1-4). Then you rolled 1d6 to determine what magic item you started out with. (Most of them I took from items in Atari 2600 video games, like Riddle of the Sphinx and Swordquest). Then you rolled 1d6 to determine what your animal companion was. I talked my parents and sister into playing a game with me -- every action was resolved by "GM's fiat." It was not a tremendous hit -- my parents gave it a lukewarm reception, my (8th grade) sister hated it, but I was captured by the *idea*.

Two years later I found a group that actually played AD&D, then I discovered GURPS and convinced our rapidly-enlarging group to play a set of home rules that was the bastard son of the two game systems, called (imaginatively enough) "GURPS-D&D". It was basically the GURPS rules (with shameless munchkin 2000-pt. characters!), with experience points and levels, and a plot line ripped directly from the recently-released, original "Final Fantasy" game for the NES.

I look back on the old days with nostalgia -- "munchkin" wasn't a swear word (I had a character, created with the GURPS psionics rules, that could levitate faster than the speed of light) -- five of us would actually face *an entire army* at a time, GMs were *expected* to come up with an original system as well as an original gameworld, and the games were modelled as much on console video games as fantasy literature.

What began as an essentially narrativist idea, telling a mutual story around the kitchen table (all dice having been removed after character creation), quickly became gamist (note tell-tale influence of video games) and, as I grew older, simulationist (the GURPS elements got purer and purer, and the power levels toned down to a more reasonable 100-200pts. in high school).

I don't know where I'm going with this, although it may simply be to note how, after an extended hiatus from roleplaying in college (consisting only of an email campaign that lasted three game-days and a year real-time), I entered graduate school and came whole-circle back to rules-light storytelling after discovering Over the Edge.

Ah, the old days . . .

Ragnar

Ah, yes back in the day...

My first experience with role-playing game design came from the very first "Games 100" from Games magazine. Down in the 80s or so was a review of 'blue box' Dungeons & Dragons. (This was the original second edition, when the covers first had color, blue.) I was totally hooked on the idea, but living out in the sticks, no one carried it. I spent two summers trying to write a fantasy game where you took on roles of Elf, Wizard, Fighter, or Thief that barely didn't have a 'board.'

Then, quite by accident, I found myself possessed of two paper routes' worth of pay in a hobby store staring at the animal sitting next to the macrame cord and shenelle bumps.... We must have played module B1 forty times, I still remember the pool that turned everything to gold....

So, technically I started designing them before I got to play them too. (And it was back before any hardbound editions of anything were made. 'Blue box' kept referring to the 'soon to be published' Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Christopher Kubasik wrote: It was written to confound and make players dependent on more and more material. That is, instead of making RPG material designed to liberate and encourage people to create their own gaming environment and sessions

...I'd offer too, that a recent thought I had -- that many game books not only are better reads than game aids, but that they also actively discourage actual play.

wfreitag wrote: Hyphz, that is really cool. I wonder what happens if you assume that those recollections are not just rose-colored nostalgia. What lessons would you take away?

Here's a very different story, since I'm much younger than most of you. Today, most young people get to know roleplaying through, well, computer RPGs. In fact, a games-forum I frequent has learnt me that many people who play CRPGs dont even know that pen&paper RPGs exist.

Anyway, my first roleplaying games were games like 'Ancients', 'Might and Magic 4' en 'Castle of the Winds'. These games were all highly combat-based, most of them containing very little story. There were no conversations. All you could do was explore a world, kills monsters, get treasures, disarm traps, buy stuff, then go exploring and killing some more. And of course, you could get better and better, increasing your skills, hit points, etcetera. Was it roleplaying? Maybe. Was it fun? Certainly.

A friend of mine in secondary school (I'm not quite sure what corresponds to this in US-terms. It's for children of, say, 12 to 18 years old) told me about AD&D2E. He didn't tell me about the mechanics, he told me the stroies that unfolded in his sessions. It sounded great, and I was hooked by the idea of being able to create a real story, to play real characters with a lot of freedom - to go beyond mere monster-killing. I did not actually play in his group (which was close group of friends of whom I knew only him) so it remained stories - and my imagination created an idea of what this game called 'AD&D' was that was probably better than reality.

More CRPGs entered my life in the meantime, including Might & Magic 6, Diablo and Baldur's Gate. My tastes became clear: purely combat-based games like Diablo couldn't live up to my idea of a roleplaying game, whereas a still combat-heavy, yet more story- and conversation-oriented game like Baldur's Gate could.

By this time, I had copies of the 3 principal AD&D books on my HD, and I had read the Player's Handbook and DM's Guide at least twice. I knew the mechanics (which were also used in Baldur's Gate), and I knew what a pen&paper RPG was. A short while later, I met someone at University who played AD&D, and I joined his group.

It was a lot of fun. The DM always made a quest for us to solve - but our players were rather anarchistic, so most of the time we were doing whatever our characters felt like, including trying to kill each other (which was all very 'in character', and since we didn't want to piss each other off no-one ever quite died). I loved the freedom, and I found that I disliked the slow combat system. I loved the character interaction, and I disliked the way you could only cast a few pre-made spells. I liked the stories we created (the GM's pre-made stories combined with our in-party struggles made some good stuff), at the same time disliking the inconsistencies of AD&D. I started wondering why, if I liked combat least of all, so much of the AD&D-system was about combat.

So here I am - born from the heavily combat-based CRPGs, and the quite heavily combat-based AD&D2E. Did it shape my view of RPGs? Of course. But in subtle ways. For instance, I found it really easy (and more fun) to drop the idea that RPG-ing is about 'winning', or about 'combat'. From the first sessions of pen&paper RPGing I played, I tried to be 'in character' as much as possible, and to talk a lot - thing I always missed in CRPGs. Because that's the point: once, a game like D&D3E would have been a game that took players to games so hack&slash-Gamist never yet seen - but this is no longer the case. The players of today started playing CRPGs, and nothing is more Gamist than a CRPG. (There are a few exceptions, such as the brilliantly Narrativist 'Planescape: Torment'.) Whatever pen&paper RPG people start playing today, it will always be a step away from pure hack&slash Gamism. The step from hack&slash towards more social interaction and storyline is very easy, and will come naturally to all who move from computer to pen & paper.

What will not come so naturally is the basic understanding of an RPG. CRPGs are heavily quest-based. It took me 2 weeks to forget about hack&slash, but it took me 2 years to realize that "one GM who thinks up quests and a number of players who solve them" is not the only way to roleplay. Walt mentioned 'unlearning' the habits created by 80's and 90's RPGs - I think for my generation unlearning the habits created by CRPGs is the real problem.

Well, back in the day, my mother brought me to see the Old Country (UK)when I was 11 whereupon I promptly broke my arm falling off a bicycle. Red box D&D was bought for me as something to do, and my first dungeon map was sketched while the arm holding the caryon was still in plaster cast. A while after that a friend nagged me to run it, which I did, and it sort of took off amongst our group of friends as a group activity.

All our early play was dungeon crawling and much fun was had by all. It was pure gamist play I think... development of a true Sim aesthetic took a while but IMO emerged more or less naturally. I cannot distinguish this "natural" developement from the stuff we were reading then - Greyhawk had a lot of sim sentiment frex, weather patterns and whatnot. This appealed to us without IMO being too prescriptive, subjectively. I'm not sure we ever went through a period of narrativism which has since been supressed, although it may depend on understandings of the term narrativism. But I don't think so.

Back in the day, one of my aunts (against my parent's wishes) gave me the D&D box set for Christmas in '78 or '79 and I excitedly poured over it and began collecting AD&D material on my own. Not having many friends, I mostly drew maps and created characters rather than playing. But from time to time I was able to run a game.

Come high school, I found my first group of "gamers" and began actually playing games (as opposed to just reading and designing settings) more often. It wasn't until I got to college though (1989) that I found really talented and obsessive gamers and had a concrete circle of friends that gamed constantly. Shadowrun was the game of choice until 1991 when I happened to visit some friends who'd just gotten back to Olympia from a party in Seattle where Vampire pre-edition was being introduced around. Suddenly everything was VtM this and WoD that, slowed down only a little when the alpha edition of MtG came out and we played that seriously for a year or so.

And that marked the next ten years of my gaming life, until I read Little Fears and found the Forge the rest is recent history.

I'm not a big fan of nostalgia (and that's being politic about it). Sure it may feel good to fondly look back, but I find that mostly it's about a false sense of regret. That change is bad, and things are now worse somehow than they were before. Which simply isn't true.

Ever read the INWO "Every Year is Worse" card?

Play hard and have fun now.

Mike

A good portion of my life has been gaming. [Looks down: 1 year {Yells!}... mabee not that much.] I remember my first day. My mom was going to Barns and Noble (a book store). I had been hearing about Pen(cil) and paper RPGs and liked the concept. What she brought back was strange. It was an introduction to "the" Star Wars RPG (I found out latter that it was D20). It came with pre-packaged characters, a simplistic rulebook and pre-made adventures (which it also called "missions"). We finished the adventure and my friend GMed our first "mission". We were robbing a trade federation bank (on Naboo) and , with my +10 cloak of protection, I defeated all of the battle droids and the Destroyer (the damned thing couldn't even hit me!). My brother tried to dissable the trap door, but at that moment Anthony put a die on the board. The die claimed omnipotence and it talked to us for a while. It wasn't long before I convinced the die that it didn't make "a damned bit of sense". It left with the words "behold the power of the mighty Jiggy Wiggy!". Mabee now you will understand the nature of my RPG development.

I think that now is a sad day in P&P RPG history. This guy at my high shool asks me "What are you doing after school?" I reply, "I might be bringing a bunch of friends over to play the D&D."

Him:"What?"

Me:"They're coming over to play Dungeons and Dragons, an RPG."

Him:"What, D&D is an RPG?"

Me:"Yes, of course."

Him:"Oh. See, I thought that like Resident Evil was an RPG."

Me:{Looks around the art room for some sort of razor blade to punish ignorance.}

I think that the industry is dying and that a new generation will degrade to playing NWN, and the everincreasingly clique MMORPGS.

Now the ironic thing is that RIGHT NOW, as I type this post, I'm listining to the main theme of Chrono Trigger, as my friends play Dead or Alive 2 at Scratchware's house...

Wow. I can't even remember the first time I roleplayed. Sometime around 1984.

- My initial gaming was very much the GM-runs-the-show variety. One GM with an adventure, all the Players were in pawn mode (complete with GM vetoing actions, "Your PC wouldn't really do that!").

Early on, though, I found that improvisation was a great thing. One of my favorite early gaming experiences was me as DM with brother as player. I improv'd the whole setting a la Sorcerer & Sword (though with the AD&D 2nd ed. rules). Play revolved around Exploration of Situation (PC was new to town, from a faraway country, and trying to survive) and some proto-Relationship Maps (instead of precanned adventures, the PC grew increasingly tangled in with several NPCs, all of which had some connection, though not blood/family)

Well Pyron, not all is lost. First of all, I have seen that many people who liked computer RPGs were intrigued by pen&paper RPGs and started playing them. I don't think the amount of pen&paper-players has decreased as CRPGs have increased in popularity. Secondly, not all CRPGs are a waste of time. I spent some of the best gaming-hours of my life with the brilliant "Planescape: Torment".

I think the problem is more what I claimed in my last post: our generation has to unlearn the assumptions of CRPGs (like: lots of combat, characters becoming stronger and stronger, quest-based play) if we don't want to become stukc in just one kind of roleplaying.

Hey,

I'd be a lot happier with this thread if people focused on the topic, which is to see whether long-term experience with RPG culture or publishing standards has a negative impact on enjoying play. Or, to say it differently, to see whether we all did actually know how to role-play (in whatever GNS mode) at the outset, then were trained out of that knowledge.

It's not a thread about reminiscing, gee, back in the day, I discovered role-playing, and the lemonade tasted like cold sunshine, and the summer air was full of the trees' first wave of pollen.

Best,
Ron

I knew I should have worked harder on the thread title . . .

Thread drift happens, and I guess that's OK, but - What Ron Said. This is Actual Play, and what seems interesting to me is what we can learn from our early Actual Play experiences, and use today.

And if we've reached the end of insights there, it's OK for the thread to end.

Gordon

(Ed. Note: This post does contain topical material. Bear with me.)

I got my first RPG, blue-box D&D, in 1981 or '82. My mom had been intrigued by the idea of the game, and bought it for herself, but I hijacked it and ran.

I had no idea at all how the game worked. I thought that one's character's level was equal to the number of dungeon levels cleared, +1. So it made sense that the game only covered 3 character levels, and the module included (B1: In Search of the Unknown) included only two levels. By the time you cleared the dungeon, you were third level...

After a while, I found that other lonely geeks at my high school (hey, what do you want? I'm talking about rural Iowa here...) played, and they understood the game better than I did. So we got together on irregular occasions and played. By this time, I'd branched out into Gamma World and Top Secret (1st ed of both), and a friend had MERP. We understood the game mechanics better, but it was all just some version of a dungeon crawl. Hell, we pronounced "tome" as "tomb."

Thing was, we were making up stories about our characters. Sometimes complex, occasionally good, but stories none the less. And this is where I get to the topic: The stories about the character were all backstory. We wrote hack fiction about what happened to our characters in between dungeon crawls. The thought that our actual play could generate stories about our characters, rather than just be extended fight scenes in our private fictions, never occured to us.

Or, rather, I thought it would be nice, but I had no idea how to do it. It wasn't until the last year of high school and the first year of college that I actually began playing games where the whole of my character's story was encompased within actually played sessions (do I get extra topic points by using the forum name in past tense?).

Part of this was due to the frequency with which we played. Once a month or so, we'd crawl a dungeon. The rest of the time, we wrote vignettes about our characters, or at least daydreamed them. Regular, weekly campaign play was something like the strange monsters medieval explorers would describe to a fanciful public. They were strange beasts we could not quite imagine, yet which people we never really met assured us existed, somewhere out there.

When we played, we took turns running each other through modules. We had some vague idea that all these modules (and, hence, our characters) existed in the same world. We assumed it was the World of Greyhawk, since that was the campaign setting my friend Andy owned.

Then came 1988, the University of Iowa, AD&D 2nd ed, Champions, Call of Cthulhu, and Paranoia. I can't point to the magical moment "my guy's story" changed from the time between runs to the events during runs. I suspect that it was the effect of playing with older gamers, who had started in the middle seventies, and who had always played campaign-style.

I was GMing most, if not all, the time, so "my guy" was the whole damn world. The stories of the world and the people in it had become "my guy's story," and telling that story was the point of GMing for me. This is when I became a world-building junkie. It was also when I lost something in my imagination as a gamer, something that only came back to me when I was knocking around GO a few years back and started reading about GNS.

What I'd lost was a sense of the free-wheeling fun of the old days. My game worlds had to be bounded and known, and I felt that I was failing as a GM if I had to make stuff up on the spot, or if I did not maintain a firm directoral hold on the themes and content of my game worlds. I became a parody of a Sim GM.

I got better, of course. Counting it all up, I'm looking back at 20 years or so of gaming experience, which divides neatly into 6 or 7 year periods.

The First Age of Lon's Gaming Life was a frustrated, lonely age. I understood the games well enough to get that there was vast potential there. I just didn't understand them well enough to unlock that potential. What I did like, and occasionally miss, was the shared-world aspect of it all. There was an implicit assumption that, since we were all playing AD&D, all our characters were in the same world, and when we switched GMs (but not systems), we stayed in that same world. No a priori world, no ideas of what "belongs" and what doesn't. Just imagination and a world flexible enough to stretch and include it all.

The Second Age was more prolific. I understood the games much better, and I knew how to build worlds. It was a trade-off, though. My worlds were mine and had no room for other people's ideas of what could be found there.

The Third Age has been an attempt to synthesize what I liked about the previous two. Kudos to Ron, whose work with Sorcerer gave me a language with which to describe what I was after. This is especially true of Sorcerer and Sword, which spends a good amount of space discussing how to re-integrate the freewheeling build-it-as-you-go world with characters who have meaningful stories.

Lon

Lon,

Great stuff. "Shared world" moves to "my creation" to improve the quality, but the joy of sharing - the communal, during-the-activity creation - gets lost. Where we are now is trying to have it both ways. I think my experience maps to that pretty well.

Gordon

I think I’ve been incredibly lucky when it comes to gaming, in that I’ve always been involved in narrativist sessions, even if they were ‘vanilla narrativist’ (is that the term?) or a form of narrativist that did not necessarily push any boundaries (as an example, the games themselves were not narrativist, even if the sessions where).

This is not to say our games were great, as young males they did sink pretty low, but they were still narrativist, if juvenile, and certainly not rail roaded (I am thinking when I was 14-15). Even some of our early games (18 or so) were very much grounded in mature narrativism – we ran a good number of Star Trek seasons in which the narrativism was very much followed the TV shows flavour of narrativism.

So, looking back, even though the language was not present at the time, I’ve been very lucky.

I certainly have no history of being stuck frustrated in heavy simulationist of gamist sessions. Well, may be one session here and there, never to return. Nothing wrong with those styles of play, I just know it ain’t me.

Now, to stop the 'golden days thinking', and get back to the question. Yes, I think that 'thinking' about role-playing too much can damage your enjoyment of the hobby. What do I mean? Well, thinking about it and analysing it does not make me cynical and jaded, which is a problem most people have. For me the problem was (and note I say was) that I raised my expectations so much I suffered from analysis paralysis - some I lost track of the 'just game' factor, stop trying to create perfection.

I'm over it now. I start a Star Wars campaign on the 11th July. Okay its D20, but I see that game as surprisingly narrativist in many ways, and it don't stop me being so. Also, Star Wars, all about rail-roading? Bollocks. I'm looking forward to it.


As for actual play? I have nothing but positive experiences from actual play (which links with the above). No actual play has made less enthusiastic for gaming. In fact it was the advice in three games that has influenced my gaming style/gming style the most:

Star Wars D6
Vampire
Sorcerer

Sorcerer the least because I've still yet to put 'all of its advice' into actual play. Notice all the above have influences my style of gming due to advice on how to actual play, rather than the system.

Here's a long convoluted story of how my first roleplaying showed me everythinhg I did NOT want to do when roleplaying....

I started when I was 8. My cousin had come to stay for the summer and brought a Monster Manual and Top Secret. The Monster Manual was the coolest thing I'd ever seen: all these cool monsters and they had statistics for comparing which is more powerful. My cousin (who was 9) then pushed me to read the Top Secret rules so I could GM for him. I did and it turned into this: I ran it like a mystery that he was trying to figure out and he played it like trying to find all the cool stuff. Neither of us had a good time and we stopped roleplaying.

A few years later when I was 12, some friends and I started diceless roleplaying as a way to pass time. We would drawa dungeon on graph paper, fill the rooms with monsters and treasures, and then let a player go through it. What happened was that the player would kill monsters and accumulate treasures until it wasn't fun anymore because we got bored with it. There was no story and the best parts of it would be figuring out the puzzles we devised for each other.

In high school, I tried again. Some friends and I played some D&D and Star Frontiers and they ended up frustrating to me because while there was some story this time, the focus was still on killing things and getting treasure. (I contributed to this since I found out a first level D&D character was so pitiful I decided to do all I could to get to a better level so I pursued experience points instead of the story I had planned for my character.)

Amazingly enough, I discovered story-oriented roleplaying in an rpg called Dragonraid. My parents got it for me when they decided I wasn't going to give up roleplaying and were hoping me not to get involved with that devil's game: D&D. While Dragonraid had a horrendous combat system and the adventures provided were the worst railroading I've ever seen, the whole game hinged on morality which provided some interesting scenarios and a great framework to make stories. (If anything, the horrible combat system made us concentrate on stories more because we didn't want to run a combat with such a bad system!) Finally, I got a taste of what I wanted in a roleplaying game.

I moved and made new friends and we got into Palladium games (TMNT and Heroes Unlimited). I tried to run games with more moral conflict than physical but it seemed the players (who had played D&D before) were used to hack & slash games and had trouble adjusting their playing style. They liked the new focus but fell into old habits.

I moved again and got to my twenties and ran some Deadlands for a group that hadn't played D&D but were White Wolf players. We had a great roleplaying session which only a minimal focus on combat. So, in conclusion, my experience tells me that people who played D&D as their primary rpg focus on hack & slash and those that played other games roleplay more like the style that I prefer. Also, I feel that a system that supports that style is essential.

---Jon