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Looking Back At Dungeons & Dragons
An anonymous reader sends in a nostalgic piece about Dungeons & Dragons and the influence it's had on games and gamers for the past 36 years. Quoting:
"Maybe there was something in the air during the early '70s. Maybe it was historically inevitable. But it seems way more than convenient coincidence that Gygax and Arneson got their first packet of rules for D&D out the door in 1974, the same year Nolan Bushnell managed to cobble together a little arcade machine called Pong. We've never had fun quite the same way since. Looking back, these two events set today's world of gaming into motion — the Romulus and Remus of modern game civilization. For the rest of forever, we would sit around and argue whether games should let us do more or tell us better stories."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong
1972, it seems.
One that hath name thou can not otter
... nobody wants to play D&D with me now that we have video games (THANKS FOR NOTHING, PONG). :( does /. want to play?
o hai
That article links to this image (NSFW), which I'll now have printed, poster-sized, and paste on my apartment door. No one will ever knock on that door again, ever.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Rogue-like games are here since 1972!
And you have been killed by a troll!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
D&D taught a generation of kids that they could make the games they play, and that nothing was more fun than getting together with friends for an evening of games.
Utter bollocks - an evening of games pales in comparison with a day-long pizza-fuelled session at the weekend.
I played D&D, AD&D well before the "One Hasbro to rule them all" era. I survived the "Mazes and Monsters" era. Nowadays, D&D et al. is just a MMOG, MMORPG anti-game shitfest with books like Dungeons and Dragons for Dummies.
YIA
I am in my mid 40's and ran into it in the late 70's. it did open your head a bit and make you think, Dream , Imagine.. it also was a monumental time waster. It prevented you from learning or doing some thing that had lasting EXP points, in your True Life. You learned about skills and game play.. related to the game.. which were not related to skills useful in any type of every day life. Most of the kids i played with were obsessive about it.. i was.. for years. We even had a few Real Artists and designers make images for us.. and a few OCD members spend Days and Weeks and serious Months,designing new Modules. ( cost us all a lot of Lunch money to pay for the art too) But all in all.. there was no lasting positive effect on me or nearly any of the persons we played with other than learning how to draw real nice. I wasted the better portion of my Junior and High School years being a 26th level Magi or a 16 level Cleric. and DM'ing here and again.. I could have learned more in a Comparative Religion Class or taking a practical art class.. Hell Dating a little bit.. It was just over overpoweringly easy to obsess on such a game.. it gave you sense of RANK and Earning Rewards.. even Favor with your peer's. BUT all that passes the second you get old enough to have to deal with REAL LIFE. I can see using a Game.. one you play a little and then it's done.. this was nearly Demonic in it's effects on those who were young and impressionable.
The Basic/Expert rule version was the most fun to play. If only the Companion rules hadn't taken so long to come out that, when they did, they weren't compatible with the first two versions of the Basic rules.
I once played a shadowrun game where my decker took a round out of combat to reply to slashdot.
What you just said is like claiming that "no one will read books" anymore after TV was invented.
Pen and Paper Roleplaying games offer a completely different kind of experience that you get from books, movies, computer games.
It has it's own advantages and disadvantages and offers a "unique" kind of entertainment - just as all other forms as other "unique" kinds of entertainment do as well. I really do not see why those cannot co-exist. And as we are it I'd also say that LARP will also be around in the years and decades to come as it ALSO offers something you don't get with watching a movie or with sitting around a P&P-table.
You SOUND old because you ARE old. And I'm not talking about your body. Your set-of-thought is what makes you old and from yesterday. You entered the stage of "my youth is the measurement of all that is good and today is totally different, thus bad". I can give you a very short example that shows how rididculuos your post was (and also the mods who moded you +4 insightful, geez!). Example: "Kids seeing Star Wars will be imagination-impaired".
You'll be happy to hear that there's a lot of great games that aren't driven by the Hasbro/WotC machine and many of them hew faithfully to what made the old games so great - rules-light (compared to today's versions), tool-kit approach, "imagine the hell out of it" attitude. It's been mainly a niche of a niche, but in the last year or so, interest in the "Old School Renaissance" has really taken off.
If you liked AD&D 1e, the books are very easy to get off of Ebay/Craigslist, but OSRIC (http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/) is a retroclone that is free to download, and has promoted a few small publishers to continue releasing new 1e content.
If you liked Basic/Expert (the two book set from the early 80s) or the BECMI (the 5 "basic" books from the mid 80s) then Labyrinth Lord would be your thing: http://www.goblinoidgames.com/labyrinthlord.html - also free.
If you really want to go old school, back to the original 3 "Little Brown Books" printed in 1974, then Swords & Wizardry is a retroclone that simplifies an already simple game. http://www.swordsandwizardry.com/ - the Core Rules are the 3LBBs and the Greyhawk supplement (uses all the dice for HD and damage), while the "Whitebox" is a toolkit game that is strictly just the 3 books (d6s only for HD/damage)
There is a lot out there and there are tons of blogs, forums and groups that try to keep the flames alive on the old games. One of them is TARGA - http://www.traditionalgaming.org/ and in interest of full disclosure, I run an "old school" blog myself http://oldguyrpg.blogspot.com/ - I currently run a 3 group AD&D campaign setting and a solo OD&D campaign with my wife.
Neurowiz
There are two girls in our current D&D group. And they aren't hideous trolls either.
In fact there are quite a few women in our university roleplaying society, albeit most of them don't tend to play D&D.
For the rest of forever, we would sit around and argue whether games should let us do more or tell us better stories.
Uh, which one is Pong supposed to represent? Aren't "can do more" and "have actual story" the two historic strengths of RPGs?
Property is theft.
As someone who grew up in the 90s, I found that playing DnD in late middle school/ early high school is one of the most enjoyable ways to have fun. I was always impressed by the impact the game had on me, especially with the improvements in the sheer number of words I knew as well as reading skills. Although, I never had to use harbinger or aberration when talking to someone at that age, knowing what these and many more words meant was great when it was time for the SATs.
I was a DM during the heyday of AD&D 2nd Ed. I ran successful AD&D and Traveler campaigns for several years, until work commitments and the old gang moving away put and end to that. After ten years of my old roleplaying stuff gathering dust I put it in the library book sale.
When I was running campaigns, I quickly realized that the rules were not really workable from a DM's perspective. The roleplaying aspect of the game was too open ended to be practical for this set of rules. That's why the ridiculous "dungeon crawl" campaigns were so popular, because they paid back *all* of the DM's work. If you filled a hundred rooms with treasure and monsters, the players would methodically clean out each level.
In a sense this recaptured the old strategic simulation games from which this kind of thing evolved. If you set up Napolean vs. Wellington at Waterloo, you didn't have to worry about players saying, "I think I'll take my army and move back over Belgian fronteir, then negotiate a treaty which will apparently give Britain what it is looking for, under the cover of which I can build other geopolitical alliances that will undercut her." After you did all the work of researching and setting up the initial conditions for an elaborate battle simulation, the players were jolly well going to play out *your* scenario. But the freedom to do something unexpected is the essence of roleplaying.
That the rules were really not very adequate didn't hurt, because short of simulating the whole world, they couldn't possibly be. The DM makes up rules governing outcomes as he goes along, and if he does it skillfully the players don't even notice. In fact once I got very experienced at this *most* of the campaign, and usually the best parts of the campaign, were improvised on the spot. Instead of spending five hours preparing for a five hour session, I could spend one hour on something that would make a really big difference.
The key insight I got was this: roleplaying games aren't simulation. They're "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and indians" with just enough structure to make them interesting and challenging. It's group story telling, not for the end product but for the experience of being in the story.
Now recently my teenaged daughter expressed interest in learning D&D, so I picked up the latest books. Now before I start yelling at all you kids with your newfangled systems to get off my lawn, let me say that the new rules are impressive. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into them, and they cover contingencies a lot more clearly, and tweak some of the things that were illogical. These are much better *simulation* rules. But they aren't necessarily better roleplaying rules.
Perfect, even *reasonably good* simulation rules for roleplaying are impractical, in my opinion, because such rules would have to be a reasonably good ontology of some world. Well before you'd get to "reasonably good" you'd reach the point where the rules are cumbersome. What rules ought to do (in my opinion) is provide a framework in which players are forced to make decisions that are meaningful to them (e.g., "Am I up to fighting this guy, or should I run away and heal up?"; "If I want to steal the jewel from the idol, how should I prepare my escape?").
It seems to me that roleplaying rules should focus on (a) forcing player decisions, (b) being convenient to use and (c) being easy to learn for both gamemaster and player.
It seems to me the new D&D rules are no better at A, not significantly better at B, and a lot worse at C.
It used to be that you could bring up a new player with about fifteen minutes of explanation and another fifteen minutes of walking him through his character generation. That coincided with the phase of the evening's entertainment that featured pizza and chatting for the other players. If you wanted to bring a whole group up, you took them all through the half hour orientation then treated them to a one evening dungeon crawl, after which they'd know everything th
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My wife and I were in college at the time we discovered D&D back in the late 1970's. We found a gaming shop in town and got interested in the miniatures they had, as well as the fact that various games involved science fiction or fantasy. One of our first purchases was the D&D rule set in the blue dragon box. We also picked up a few sets of dice, all of which were single color and many of which had sharp edges.
We've continued D&D over the decades, in addition to other role playing systems, introducing it to our kids when they were old enough to play. It is one of our substitutes for television.
just modding him down won't work.
Yeah, it's tough kill-filing something which regenerates 3 KP every story (Karma Points).
Then again, I'd much rather battle trolls than try to kill that which has no life.
You engage in roleplaying while playing chess? I guess it could be done. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
A DM prepares a campaign setting for the evening, players prepare their characters. You work together towards a common goal. There's politics, infighting, bickering, there are people who bring new ideas into the game, people who shut those ideas down. People show up unprepared, some do not pay attention. Some try to suck up, strike alliegences, break rules, etc.
This is exactly like every meeting I have ever participated in in my adult life. Working as a PM, putting together timelines, assigning goals, creating subteams. A story arc is not much different than a project task. Establishing rules, keeping everyone engaged, while accomplishing your goals and having fun is exactly like a project meeting. Even meeting minutes are much like the notes I would keep about what transpired on any given gaming session. There would be a common goal and a certain amount of time in which we'd have to try to achieve those goals.
Strategies, planning and cooperation... working in a team. The skills just go on and on and on. Even roleplaying is important. You represent the goals of your manager or your department, not your own personal opinions. You have to play the role assigned to you. There are rewards for success and consequences for failure. Sometimes things aren't fair, and you have to argue to your peers or DM while maintaining the freindship and trust that the game is based on.
How again is it not like real life?
(I've been considering rewriting roleplaying as a microcosm of modern business... it sounds dull, but the structure and tools could turn it into a weird kind of "educational" game.)
I seem to recall an explanatory note that was published outside of the references --I think it must have been Dragon magazine. It said that the rule was actually "1d6 per ten feet for every ten feet fallen", but this was either misunderstood or it got edited out as redundant.
What the damage should be is: if you fall 100 feet (say), then you would sustain 1d6 damage from the first 10' fallen, 2d6 from the next 10', 3d6 from the next 10', and so forth. The last ten feet would account for 10d6 damage, so for that 100-foot fall you would take 55d6 damage (which we all know is exactly 192.5 damage since the standard deviation from 55 die rolls is next to nothing).
So, the intent of the rule is that number of d6's to roll := (fall_distance**2 + fall_distance)/200, which would get rid of that thing about 13th-level fighter falling 100 feet and then getting up and walking away. I seem to recall that this came from Gary Gygax (or an interview with him or something).
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
What, you've never played chess with a 12-sided die?
It's like 2nd edition without THAC0! http://www.basicfantasy.org/
Sorry, I should have been mentioned that part, too.
After falling 200 feet, the last 10' of that 200' would cause 20d6 damage. After that, every additional 10' fall would only cause 20d6 additional damage (instead of 21d6, for example, for the last 10' of a 210' fall). If I recall correctly, there was not supposed to be a cap on the total amount of damage sustained. But when you reach 20d6, it becomes linear damage instead of quadratic.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]