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D&D Is 30
mainframemouse writes "For those who have not seen the Beeb article, Dungeons and Dragons is 30 years old.
After many years of role-playing is wonderful to see the mother of all RPG's given respect and mention in the national press. There's even a note about the false accusations of the 80's." And for the record - flanking & attacks of opportunity in 3/3.5 Edition still irritate me. Combine a familiar with Master Tactician and some rogue levels, and you're off to the races.
Just last night I printed off a bunch of polyhedra polyhedra for my six year to cut out and assemble for fun.
...
I remember before the Dungeon Master's Guide, Player's Footbook and Monster Manual (which our DM forbade us to read), there was only a thick pamphlet-like book with a few monsters (giant rats, hobgoblin, gelatenous cube), and a sample 1/2 level. There sure were a lot of gelatenous cubes for level 1
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
it paved the way for my favorite game, Knights of the Old Republic and really, the whole genre. Makes me want to dust off the ol' board and get the gang back together for another all night game.
http://www.chick.com/bc/2002/dnd.asp
Quote from the link: "The goal of the game [D&D] would be to see who could obtain the most erotic pleasure"
As my friend who sent me the link originally so accurately stated, "I don't know about you, but my D&D sessions were never like that."
Btw... D&D is 30... But what about its other attributes? What's its alignment? Strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc? Okay I'm a nerd.
I remember that "expose'" where they made D&D out to be some big satanic training session because (gasp!) there were demons and devils listed in the Field Folio. And then some shooter someplace had a DMG in his backpack or something like that...
Parents just ate that shit up. I think a lot of them couldn't understand why we just weren't spending our time watching TV like normal kids. We basically had to operate under the radar or risk losing a several of our players to easily paniced parents.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"The game was wrongly implicated in a missing persons case, a teen suicide and a number of murders. Some schools banned the game, and many parents refused to let their children play."
It bugged me at the time that for the amount of people playing the game, the incidence of suicide seemed lower than in the rest of the general public, but the press never seemed to report that.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Of course I ripped through all of the SSI games and the Baldur's Gate Series. Then came Neverwinter Nights. A beautiful game, but instead of controlling a party of people, it's just one character and a side-kick. This was a big mistake. However, the fact that one could assume the role of Dungeon Master made this game somewhat revolutionary.
But after playing multiplayer online a bit, I must say, that although I have found some new places to explore (people have spent some time on putting together some very cool levels), it still seems to come down to everyone being 40th level and killing each other. Maybe I'm just not playing in the right places?
Maybe I'm just missing the old days of getting together with pen paper and the dodecahedrons? I don't think so - who's got time for trying to orchestrate that?
And yes, I've tried Everquest and just couldn't seem to get into the flow of it. I couldn't see what the "big deal" was ...
..will argue rules in the DM's Guide better than the highest paid lawyers. You don't know arguing until you watch two more geeks citing obscure sentences in backwater paragraphs as evidence in supporting claims that you would swear held the fate of the world in the balance.
AD&D lawyers have always been the best and worst to play with!
Well it's a good thing I have my son and his friends playing (all in the 10 year old range). They'll be able to consider themselves the "real deal" now.
Seriously though, my son and his friends love it. With all the "eye candy" offered in the video game world, it's still amazing to see that kids use their imagination to create a fantasy world instead of viewing someone else's version of one.
No, it doesn't count. I see where you might feel like it counts but it's just not the real thing. There's a certain "aura" around the D&D "lifers" that no video game, regardless of how close to the rules it sticks can ever match.
I knew a guy once who literally lived in his yellow cab. He drove it to make money during the day, had a large portion of his trunk filled with piles of D&D stuff, and was constantly asking people "Want to game up?". For all practical purposes this was a homeless man who lived to get lost in his fantasies.
Don't get me wrong. I like D&D as much as the next geek but I don't see anyone taking Neverwinter Nights to the point of living in a cab on McDonalds food. Sure you've got your Evercrack players getting counciling and stuff but they're a pale shadow of the D&D lifers.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I remember playing this for the first time back in 1980. We were playing "AD&D" by the way...hehe.
The second edition rules were a cludge...everyone knew that...but that's why I loved them. I loved how they worked. When the d20 system came into being..I felt it just lost something. Hard to track down. The second edition rules with their patched together charts...the rules that contradicted other rules etc...that was just part of the fun.
But the ultimate insult was when "Call of Cthulhu" when to a d20 system. Yes, you can still play with the old rules...which were better...than using the d20 system, but still. They should have just well enough alone. "Call of Cthulhu" was and still is my favorte PnP role playing game. Bar none.
But the AD&D games me and my friends would play around 1989ish were some of the best times I've had with a group of goof-balls joking around, drinking huge amounts of caffine drinks and pizza and generally just having a good time.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
The best part of the golden D&D years for me was reading Phil Foglio's cartoon in Dragon Mag.
Did the characters ever managed to play Sex&Dungeons&Dragons or did I miss that issue entirely?
I tried to play D&D, fairly seriously, at three different points in my life.
:)
In 7th grade, my next door neighbor declared openly that girls couldn't play. Unfortunately, my female friends weren't that interested. I made my sister play, but having never played myself, I was a rotten DM and kept killing her off.
I had all the books, though, because my Mom was Gary Gygax's divorce lawyer. (He, it seems, thought it was great for girls to play.)
In high school, a few of us were invited to join the gang playing, but the group was too large and unruly, so extremely little RPing actually got done. The (male) leader of the group blamed the girls and told us we couldn't come back.
And then a few years ago, when the last big D&D update came out, I thought I was FINALLY going to get to have a full bore D&D adventure.
Unfortunately, the relationship and social circle exploded fairly dramatically, and I was *not* invited to continue the game. That was the only time it actually felt fair to me, but I was still disappointed. And I've still never ACTUALLY played a game beyond creating a char and playing for an hour or so that day.
Ah well. On the up side, I'm married and have a great life.
Liza
These opinions are my own. My employer is not aware of them, does not endorse them, and is not responsible for them.
Speaking of people overreacting to D&D, did you ever see the movie "Mazes and Monsters" starring Tom Hanks (no, I'm not kidding)? It was made in 1982, and Hanks played a D&D obsessed kid who ends up killing his friend because he thinks he's a gnome (or something like that).
Check out the imdb listing here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
I think every geek who grew up in the 70s and 80s made their own "D&D program" that either was just for character sheets or for rolling all sorts of die.
:)
My first was on my Micro-ColorComputer3 and it filled my 4K memory and I bought a 16K RAM expansion and filled it too! I had to load the program from a casette player. My program even let you type in stuff like 8d8+3 (for monster HP rolls) and had some treasure allocation tables in it. I rewrote several versions of it on the Apple ][ series and the Atari ST using GFA Basic. The Atari one was menu driven and had multiple methods for rolling up character stats (including the Unearthed Arcana "by race" way) and would verify class/race combinations that required a 7 dimensional array!
People talk about D&D as just the kids playing with friends, but sometimes it was a family affair. My grandmother taught my cousin and me D&D in the late 70s when we were both under 10 years old. All of us sitting out in the garage playing late into the summer night are still some of the fondest memories she has of me and my late cousin.
But man was she a harsh dungeon master.
It also led me to gaming conventions, where I made lifelong friends who later got me jobs, helped me out of tough times, etc... And yeah, sure, I might have gotten the same thing out of being a Rotary Club member, but I didn't have the grades, and besides, they never give you a +5 dancing vorpal blade to fight that 15d8 monster ... at least, anymore.
I met Gary Gyagax at Imaginecon 2000, and despite all the stuff said about him over the years, I found him personable and approachable.
I still have all my D&D stuff. It's worth over $3000 in cover price, but I think in actual current value, maybe $600 (and only because I have some first edition stuff, like the "Deities and Demigods" with Melnebonie and Cthulhu mythos in it). I can't bear to part with it because I feel I owe it so much, it's like an old friend ... in several boxes ... in a closet.
Man, I felt like Dahmer there, for a second.
I started gaming when churches actually allowed it in their function rooms, along with the civil war gamers and chess players. Then in the 1980s, they connected the game to some poor sucker who got lost in university tunnels or something, then it got this Satanic cult label, and then it was fun to play it because you were an outsider! Woo hoo!
I stopped gaming when I got married. I just didn't need it anymore. I now had a steady job, social life, and the game was just too time-consuming. I have run a game or two here and there for old times sake (mainly to show my teen son what it was like). Recently, I was with my son's school group at a Science Olympiad, and a girl there had a bunch of the 3rd Edition rules. I thumbed through them, and thought, "Jesus, this is even more complicated than the Slackware manual! How EVER did I memorize all those rules and terms?" She was just impressed I knew 90% of the monsters.
Sure, there was plenty of wargaming before D&D. There were also plenty of alternatives that many preferred. The first was probably Tunnels and Trolls (TnT) which had been in development at the same time Gygax and gang were playing around with Chainmail, although it wound up hitting the stores just after D&D. Where D&D had a very serious aura, TnT was infected with a quirky sense of humour. TnT character creation, combat and the like resolved much faster, and was at least as realistic despite that (and later was expanded in Flying Buffalo titles like MSPE to become far more realistic, without losing it's initial advantage in playability.) A number of great systems came out within a few years of the first two. For those into the sort of detailed, meticulous world-settings of great writers like Tolkien, it's worth trying to find a copy of 'Empire of the Petal Throne.' The gaming system was nothing particularly great, but the setting was absolutely incredible. Runequest was another great, the first 'skills based' RPG with again a combat system that beat D&D both for realism and playability simultaneously. Runequest (or rather the Basic Roleplaying System abstracted from Runequest which also became the core of Call of Chtulu, Stormbringer, and several other games from the same publisher) almost evolved into a true Generic system , but Chaosium never quite took that step, leaving the opportunity for former GW stalwart Steve Jackson to produce GURPS. Runequest was pretty much killed off by Avalon Hill later on, but it was a great system.
There are several more early systems I remember very fondly but can't quite remember the names of. One was published as a fairly large hardcover book, and took a very historical medieval view, with a wonderful magic system which was quite open ended without being nebulous... with distinctions such as between witches and hedgewizards versus high and cabalistic magicians... to cast a spell on someone you had to first make a link, often aided by a snip of the targets hair or a toenail or the like. Another was set in an almost Indian themed world, with guards who wore elephantine masks, one had a magic system based on magical 'nodes' I think they were called, tied to 5 elements, harvestable in particular ways and without which a magic using character was pretty helpless. I still remember my poor little L1 necromancer skulking around to kill folks housecats so he could harvest low-grade death nodes from them to power his spells. Anyone remember the names?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
This is definitely a trip down memory lane.
I got into D&D as a sidebar to military wargamming, starting with Risk and moving onto several Avalon Hill games (Third Reich, Blitzkrieg, 1776 (I got massacred by my brother at this one), & Squad Leader).
When I went to the hobby shop to see what other cool games they had, I saw a box for the original Basic Edition of D&D, together with the 1st Edition Monster Manual. The DM Guide was released just a little after that, and trying to get polyhedrial dice was almost impossible. We actually used the old chit system at first to generate our characters becuase we couldn't find any polyhedrial dice at all. When I finally got some dice, the d20 was badly misshapen in manufacturing, and gave some really wild results when used (I wish I still had it now).
The best fun I had was a week at Boy Scout Camp where we also turned it into a week-long D&D marathon. The logistical planning for this was something that could only be done by a bunch of hard-core D&D players that were also boy scouts. The D&D manuals were smuggled in with the camp kitchen supplies, talked our parents into a week's worth of munchies & pop (with some extra money on the side for buying stuff that wouldn't keep in the cooler for more than a couple of days), and took off to camp looking like a group of real trustworthy, loyal, helpful (etc.) boy scouts our parents thought we were. We also hid miniatures, dice, DM screens, map graphs, and pens & paper (that was more out in the open.. . but in retrospect our parents should have realized that we took too MUCH paper and too MANY pencils with us).
Our Scoutmaster (actually an assistant who could get the time off from work) was this young guy that looking back now was just totally snowballed by us boy scouts. I was about 16 at the time, and he placed a lot of trust in me as a junior leader. I did what I could, but this adventure took a life of its own that this poor assistant SM couldn't keep under control.
After about 5 P.M. we would finish up our camping chores every evening and start playing D&D. In addition to the munchies, we brought along 4 gallons of Camp Fuel for the Coleman lanterns we placed under the tarp and played well into the night with the group of about 10 scouts in our troop. My younger brother was the D.M. for this whole affair, but there were several experienced and hard-core players, as well as a few totally new initiates into playing D&D (the kids who were really there to attend Scout Camp for real).
During the day some of these new initiates would get a chance to read the rule books and get them explained as we were building fires, cooking breakfast or supper, and doing the other camp stuff (like swimming, firing shotguns, making crafts, etc.)
For this experience, we decided to try out the Gary Gygax module series (Giants & Drow stuff) that we bought (because it was from the grand master... we bought everything from him at the time) but we always seem to put it off doing other stuff when we were normally playing D&D. I didn't realy how awful they were until after we really started to play them, and I knew just what Monty Haul Dungeons really came from.
The sad part was the aftermath to this whole event. Needless to say our parents were absolutely pissed at us (my dad was the regular Scoutmaster and was unable to attend camp due to some other things that came up in his personal life). Some of the scouts in our troop also failed to complete any merit badges while at camp, and the D&D game was directly blamed for it. (I think we did make up an "unofficial" D&D merit badge for the event, however.) One set of parents totally forbade their kids from ever playing D&D again (the born-again Pat Robertson follower type), which was quite sad. My parents were more of the attitude that neither I nor my brother should "corrupt" the minds of the innocent, but they would rather that we pour our energies into D&D rather than dating or drugs or cars. In that respect D&D was a rather cheap hobby by comparison.