The incredible austerity of D&D in 1980

My Dragon subscription was my prized possession as a kid. My friends and I would hunt for back issues whenever we went on vacations to somewhere new. I still have a few issues and the odd article I cut out in a box somewhere. The two issues with big sections about the Nine Hells are tattooed on my brain. And, "you haven't lived until you've done... the Assassin's Run." Oooh.

yeah someone should really write a book about all of that history! xp lol that was written before your post, Gravel

Like I said, a lot of this stuff came out of the 70's miniatures scene, which was really insanely elaborate and probably drew some of the same people who would have been in model railroad clubs in previous decades. The folks running ICE at least were all around grad student age (some of them WERE grad students). They had a computer science guy who did a lot of the system design, an accountant, and I think the prez had a law degree?

I don't think the high school games really expanded my social circles very much, I mean we were social misfits to begin with. But one thing about RPGs is that you do get an age range sometimes, and it was hugely influential on me to have a group of friends in their late 20s/early 30s at ICE to ask for girlfriend advice etc. Pete's campaigns were always so meticulously crafted that they were far and above anything else I've ever played, no real comparison there. When I played tournaments at the conventions it always seemed a lot more competitive than any of the games I played in on the regular.

Also when I was a senior in high school I ran a MERP game and the only people who wanted to play were a bunch of 8th graders, so we ran a game for a few months. Another good example of age range. I think my experience with the older folks really served me well when I got into the college midwest punk rock scene, I wasn't as intimidated by older & more experienced people.

i've never understood how competitive roleplaying worked.

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

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

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

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

i've never understood how competitive roleplaying worked.

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

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

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

me neither! xp

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

the ridiculousness of the bolded section there is killing me

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

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

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

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

I take it you saw this at some point:

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

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

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

I'm going to stomp now and slink away.

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

Haha well it always has to be something! Welcome.

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

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

hmm was tolkien explicit to that extent? i know that orcs were a mockery of elves, but hadn't remembered any further than that tbh.

Tolkien was explicit to EVERY extent; I'm surprised no one has unearthed notes on comparative genitalia sizes in Middle Earth.

Those are in the footnotes for the The Complete Silmarillion.

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

― he's always been a bit of an anti-climb Max (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Wednesday, October 13, 2010 12:01 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

CAR WARS, not as an RPG, just as a shoot-em-up, is the best game ever invented, bar none. thank you steve jackson.

Haha well it always has to be something! Welcome.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, October 13, 2010 11:54 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

makes my day when Ned is there to welcome the delurked. <3

^^^ yep :)

One tries.

One succeeds.

count me in the 'read way more than played' camp.

speaking of steve jackson, i'm just going to bring up GURPS again like i do on all the nerd nostalgia threads we have. the fallout games were supposed to have a heavy gurps influence on the character design, to make a clean break away from D&D style rpgs. i dunno the nature of the dispute but the partnership tanked, and fallout is still very level-y

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

― BremXJones, Wednesday, October 13, 2010 6:45 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

... gillen?

I played D&D/AD&D for most of my childhood, & obv. since I post on ILM I'm inclined toward nerding out, but only once or twice in those years of playing did the play = satisfactory amount of nerding out. Usually it was "Apex quaffs potion of bone" & then sticking a pencil through my miniature's crotch. But one time, we played White Plume Mountain (best module ever imo) & mathed out---set up pulleys using rope in order to get across rooms, checking the physics, checking that we were carrying that much rope...that kind of thing. It was just for one evening/night, but it was glorious. We were all exhausted by the end, not just b/c we'd stayed up all night, but also because keeping track of all that was tiring. So that was the catch: to do it right, in a really satisfying way, required a lot of mental work, & I think none of us were willing to put in that kind of work, long-term. So we graduated to pr0n & pizza, the end.

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

this is me, basically. except i was way into SHADOWRUN and bought/read sourcebooks and created characters and w/e and didn't have a single friend who played. still have no idea how RPGs actually ~work~ in practice

ha i did play some shadowrun, actually. the answer is "badly"

there were a handful kids near me who were into this stuff but never for very long or sustained periods and never with enough agreement on system or style or much enthusiasm at all. even for a kid like me the crushing nerdiness of it started to be too much as i got older.

oh you said "RPGs" not "that RPG". though i guess the rest of my post kind of answers what you did say in a way :/

Anyone into Rifts? It had a ludicrous system involving something called mega-damage, but the world was quite cool.

White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever White Plume Mountain (best module ever

:))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

weirdly enough, one of my childhood best friend's dad was an ancient gamer of the avalon hill/railroad baron/SSI wargamer/hippie/computer programmer type. and he had a room in his basement with shelves of basically every game printed in the 70s. 90% of the space was taken up by war sim board games but there was plenty of crazy roleplay stuff, mostly runequest, some call of cthulu. very early D&D but none of the 80s stuff, and he did have a copy of the proto-d&d "chainmail" rules which was pretty cool to look at, tho it was treated like a holy relic and i didn't get to touch it more than once, ha

Shadowrun IIRC had the most impossibly complicated and protracted gameplay system ever. It would take ten minutes to resolve a single gunshot.

and there was no detail to show for it! weren't there like four competing dice rolls of unlimited number of dice each just to tell you "moderate wound"

Honestly I can remember exactly what the outcomes were just that I was like "wow this seems like an interesting setting/concept such pity it's basically unplayable."

I totally winged it as a DM for my lone summer playing D&D. I had no idea what was going on. Eventually the bickering between the players got so bad I was like "Um, you are attracting attention to yourselves" ::bickering continues:: "Every Orc in the caverns knows of your presence" ::bickering continues:: "You see 50 Orcs charging at you down the hallway"

game over, the DM is off to watch college football

Wait, has this seriously not been posted on the thread yet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHdXG2gV01k

(There are a million video riffs and parodies of the original audio recording, the above being just one. But the audio is the original audio.)

^lol

I do remember the first time I bought graph paper to make my own dungeon. ::wistful +1::

....I always really liked the Rolemaster system but obv I am biased to a degree....

― sleeve, Wednesday, 13 October 2010 14:47 (7 hours ago)

I remember buying Rolemaster! It must have been the very early eighties, I was still at school I think. It had a rep as the elitest RPG there was, I paid shitloads for it, as it was an American import. I sat up for night after night sussing out how it worked, then I found that no-one else locally had a copy, maybe I should have done my research beforehand, I could have spent my money on Eloy or Klaus Schulze albums instead. I still have the Rolemaster as well asAD&D and a bunch of the scenarios in the attic, haven't looked at them in many, many years. I remember this amazing AD&D scenario set in sopme kind of Transylvanian Dracula castle, a hugely detailed map of this place which I wish actually existed, it was amazing. I never really got deep into playing any RPG, it was a real tiny cult thing back then, and very few people even knew what it was. Also, I found I was more into painting the little figures, I got really good at it, I still have a bunch of them in boxes in the attic somewhere too. I didn't like Warhammer too much when it came out because I really liked the Ral Partha figures that Tom Meier* designed, that chunky style the Warhammer figures all had was & is kind of ugly to me

*a great american artist of the late 20th century.

I remember this amazing AD&D scenario set in sopme kind of Transylvanian Dracula castle, a hugely detailed map of this place which I wish actually existed, it was amazing.

ravenloft?

...I was more into painting the little figures, I got really good at it, I still have a bunch of them in boxes in the attic somewhere too. I didn't like Warhammer too much when it came out because I really liked the Ral Partha figures that Tom Meier* designed...

never knew who designed the ral partha figures, but yeah, they were great. had a bunch at one time, as they were what originally attracted me to RPGs (couldn't afford the giant pewter dragon clutching crystal gazing orb in the hobby shoppe window). only painted a few, cuz they never came out like i'd hoped, and i lacked the patience to acquire the skill. better a silvery gray guy than a gunked-up greenish brown.

just wanted to say...

dragonlance

Revive the thread Remy. You know you want to.

Ravenloft, yeah that was it. I still have that somewhere as well, I'll dig it out and see if anyhting in it makes any sense to me after all these years.

Tom Meier's site is here: http://www.thunderboltmountain.com/ everytime I look at it I want to buy something :-/

Ravenloft was a fun world, as was Dark Sun.

I remember Rifts! Megadamage was the thing that they used so that you couldn't, technically, knock a house down by punching it with normal human fists, right?

I torrented a whole bunch of 1980s Dragon and White Dwarf mags last year and spent many happy hours reading them.

I was always intrigued by D&Ds etc, but ultimately too lazy :(

Relevant short story here: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/10/04/101004fi_fiction_lipsyte

never played one of these IRL but I remember playing star wars and final fantasy themed ones on IRC. it was just a way for the chatroom regulars to snark and neg each other in different ways than usual iirc.