The incredible austerity of D&D in 1980

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.

Chainmail... Ral Partha... the flashbacks keep coming. Those miniatures were indeed very cool, Pash.

above when I said "Runemaster" I really meant "Runequest", duh.

Those Freaky Trigger articles are wonderful.

did anyone ever play with encumbrance? or, like, you have to return your gold pieces to a bank to count them as experience? in my experience every character basically had an unspoken bag of holding.

wow i said bag of holding

things got a little crazy when someone got hold of deities & demigods, because that shit looked too fun not to play with, yet you had to cheat pretty hard to make your characters even remotely capable of such interaction. you can't really play a third-level cleric in a dungeon that has asmodeus in the final chamber.

Pedantic nerd moment in keeping with the thread: Asmodeus is in the Monster Manual, not in Deities & Demigods.

haha true and i should have known someone would mention it

I just remember all my friends wanted to worship Blibdoolpoolp, Bast, or the "Maiden of Pain" herself, Loviatar. Drawings of boobs for pre-teens have magical powers.

And in case anyone wonders, I did have to look up the spelling of the Kuo-Toa goddess.

did anyone ever play with encumbrance? or, like, you have to return your gold pieces to a bank to count them as experience? in my experience every character basically had an unspoken bag of holding.

wow i said bag of holding

^ real talk

except i really did make them fuckers shed what they could not carry

I remember borrowing Monster Manual 2(?) (the one with all the monsters that are shaped like various prisms on some astral plane) and photocopying in the local library it just so I could read it. I didn't even play AD&D, I just liked reading the manuals. And I know I've got a stash of old GM and GMI magazines in the garage somewhere--they were the UK mags that tried to fill the void when White Dwarf just became about Games Workshop stuff.

Modrons, I think? I was the only one in my group with Monster Manual 2. We tried to share the burdon of buying the new books amongst us, but we all owned the Player's Guide.

Modrons! That's it!

My mom was the GM of a chain of comic book/game shops when I was a kid, so I grew up bigoted toward roleplaying (particularly LARPers - those cockfarmers did something stupid at every game convention - pull the hotel fire alarm, etc) and later Magic: The Gathering. No matter what I see now I instinctively associate D&D with proto-Juggalos with hygiene issues.

My dad was a Napoleonics and American Civil War miniatures gamer - this seemed totally acceptable and not at all horribly nerdy, because those dudes bathed and had real jobs. Looking back, I suspect even the LARPers got laid more than people who could pull out $10k worth of minis to stage Pickett's Charge.

I don't know how it is in the USA, but in here the LARPing is a much less of a male-centric hobby than paper-and-pen RPGs, in fact I think there are more female LARPers than male ones. So yeah, I think LARPers get laid more often than other gamers. (It probably helps you have to be more of an extrovert than an introvert to get into LARPing.) From what I've heard there have even been occasions where people have had sex in-game, in-character. Sounds kinda weird to me, but if it's okay with them, who am I to judge?

In general the LARPers I knew tended to be kinda arrogant and judgemental of everyone who's not a LARPer, so I never got into it despite trying it a couple of times.

I don't even have a clue how LARPing works beyond dressing up and randomly hitting each other over the head with plastic swords.

Going back to the thread title - I guess if I had to put a finger on what I find so fascinating it'd run something like:

I'm familiar with two types of DnD -

1) the type I played in school with other 12 year olds and egregious bending of the rules in favour of the PCs - the type you can see a lot of in those letters about drow PCs etc.
2) the type I played alone, in my head, with only a DMG and a box of dice, picking with excitement from the random treasure table and imagining, imagining.

but almost mythically there was at the time a third incredibly austere world - that of dnd played by actual adults, wise and serious, who played by the rules, all the rules - I can see now, at 27, that much of my idea of that world was totally made up and wrong. But I'm interested in what of it was actually true!

xp judging from the remnants of a recent cosplay convention I saw over here, cosplay seems to be more popular with the fairer sex. humminahummina

great stuff

lol @ bows dont kill ppl, arrows do.

lolling at this

I was gifted my neighbor's hardback collection of early 80s AD&D tomes, which I then lent to my friend and never saw them again.

Also, I feel quite fortunate that I was a froshling away in Ann Arbor that fall when M:TG hit Michigan. I remember seeing guys playing it on the floor whilst we waited for the MST3K: Fresh Cheese Tour in 1994 and thinking, "damn, and I thought _I_ was geeky"