Divination In My Games: Part I - the Good Old Days

There is a nice post on Divination spells over on Greyhawk Grognard:

On Divination

Divination spells are one of those areas that saw very different use in the old days than in more recent play.

Toady, let's talk the Good Old Days.

Good Old Days

In my old days of playing mostly AD&D, from 4th grade until sometime in High School, divination spells were almost entirely unused.

Some of this was a function of our age and interest - we wanted spells that did cool things like blow stuff up, create or do things you need right away, or heal. Combat, direct utility, and recovery from combat.

Part of it was how we played - I can't remember anyone ever trying out these divination spells. Too much chance of failure, too much vagary, and too much dependence on a fellow elementary school (or junior high school, or high school) kid to interpret in a way that's helpful.

The fact that we very often played games where people had read the modules and knew what to do probably didn't help any. You didn't need to figure out that puzzle door or guess the answer to the riddle, you knew it. You knew where things were. You just had to survive getting there - difficult enough when you have the answers. It's like we'd all pre-cast Contact Other Copy of the Module and knew that Blackrazor was down this hallway and not to stick our heads into the mouth on the wall in the Tomb of Horrors. And if you hadn't read the module you'd ask people who'd played it before.

In a way, that's cheating, but in another way, it was just an alternate form of getting the answers. In play, you'd throw Commune and ask the DM who is roleplaying your god. Out of play, you just went and found the answers without casting the spell.

We also didn't really see what they were for. One of my current players downplayed the value of casting a divination spell in a session because, "It doesn't matter what's beyond the door, we're going to open it and go through anyway." I can argue against that in a lot of ways, but it's fundamentally logical. It's like scrying the inside of a present you intend to open - you're committed to the course of action, so the time spent getting foreknowledge isn't helping make a decision.

At the same time, I think the way the spells were presented didn't really lend them to getting used. Like so much of AD&D, they're just there with the expectation that the players and DMs will figure out what to do with them.

Given that I learned when I was 9 and 10 years old, mostly from playing with players my age or a bit older, that didn't happen. It wasn't instantly clear what to do with those spells. There wasn't really any guiding material that said, "Oh, yeah, Divination spells - this is how you figure out really opaque puzzles in the game, or figure out where to go next when you don't have a clue. The DM will help you along in those cases but only if you do it through in-play actions like casting these spells!"

So you almost never saw Divination spells used.

(On a tangent, you rarely, if ever, saw Charm spells used due to arguments over how they worked, no one summoned animals or monsters or elementals, and those demon summoning related spells didn't see any use.)



I do see a lot more Divination in my more recent games - maybe not to the extent that they'd get used in D&D by the original players, but more than I saw in the past. I'll write more about that tomorrow.

Trampier Bugbears

I don't use AD&D-style bugbears. I use the bugbears I made up for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1 - boogeymen-like stalkers who choke and club and murder.

But I just love this picture of Bugbears from David Trampier in D1 / D1-2:



I'm re-reading D1, D2 (and D1-2) and D3 to review them, and it brought back how much I love the artwork in them. That piece especially. It makes me kind of wish I had used AD&D bugbears, so I could use that picture for them.

What D&D-based game would I run?

I periodically toy with running a D&D-based game.
I periodically toy with the idea of running a D&D-based game. We had so much fun with White Plume Mountain and AD&D, so there is this pull to do it more.

Plus, if I want to run some of the other modules on my player's request list of "put us through that someday," we'd need a D&D-based game. It would give the players valuable experience with the system that undercut their performance (but not really their fun when we played White Plume Mountain.)

While this isn't terribly serious thinking or planning - it'll take time I don't have a lot of, to do something that would probably add to my gaming setup overhead, and just swap out for DF/Gamma Terra - it's still fun to think about.

I like:

- race, level and HP schemes of AD&D (d10 fighters, d8 clerics, d6 thieves, d4 magic-users)
- the stat modifiers of Basic Fantasy (13-15, 16-17, 18 with flat +1 to +3)
- the Morale stat of Basic D&D (one of the best mechanics ever)
- the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic of D&D5 (a brilliant replacement for fiddly modifiers)

Basic Fantasy is so close, but I like single-save mechanics.

Swords & Wizardry is excellent, but it ignores an easy approach to STR by splitting "to hit" and "damage" bonuses, and making every other stat have 13+ as a +1. I could swap that in, of course, but it means the "read this book but change this rule" PITA.

I think in descending AC and THAC0, thanks to growing up with AD&D. But I think ascending AC and roll d20+bonuses and beat AC is far easier for everyone else.

Labyrinth Lord* is also nice, especially with Advanced Edition Compendium, but it still sets fighter and thief HP (and thieving skills) lower than I'd like.

I have DCC and ACKS, but they're not for me. I like elements of both, but dislike too many elements of both (dice chains and d7s, and the rules depth of ACKS). I'd play them, heck, I'd play any of these, but to run them, no thanks.


In the end, then, I'd probably run AD&D. I know it extremely well - I read those books over and over dozens of times. But the morale stat of D&D is pretty excellent, and the system is far less clunky than the old in AD&D that I never used or saw used. But I don't love race-as-class and it would make running AD&D adventures too tough.

Really the closest system to what I'd actually want to run is probably S&W, with just a bolted-on replacement of stats and D&D-style Morale, or AD&D with bolted-on D&D-style Morale. Why not change the stats for AD&D? Because it's easier to run AD&D straight up as AD&D than change the PC end.

One small issue is some of the adventures I'd probably like to run assume you have Unearthed Arcana. I like that book, and some of my best gaming in my life used it, but I think I'd want to play without it if I ran a campaign. So that wouldn't help.

The "obvious" solution is to take the bits I like and make my own Retro-clone of AD&D but with the bits of other systems I like. That's a lot of work, though, and could easily turn into a big project because of the scale of text-re-use and combing through material and re-writing.


* Speaking of LL, is there a list of changes in the Revised Edition? My hard copy of LL and AEC are from 2012, and I'd rather not go line by line and check for changes. :)

More AD&D?

My players and I played two sessions of AD&D.

Some of the players asked me, when making their characters, if this was going to grow into anything larger. I said no - which allowed min/maxing for a one-shot, like CN fighters alongside a LG paladin (a no-no, but if it serves a greater good for one mission, the paladin can do it) and sub-optimal stat choices like a low INT score for a wizard because CON and DEX would be more useful right now.

And I'm sticking to that. This post isn't reversing that decision.

But it did get me thinking, will we do this again? And what about a campaign?

That's two trains of thought to work out.

Another Module Playthrough?

Yes. Unhesitatingly yes. This was a lot of fun. I'd be willing to run either a pre- or post-Unearthed Arcana module with pregens (if it comes with them) or self-generated PCs (if not). There are a few on my short list that I might do that with - WG5 I've run in GURPS but was fun in AD&D as well. WG6, perhaps would be fun with AD&D instead of GURPS, A4, the Mud Sorcerer's Tomb from Dungeon Magazine #37 . . . that might be it. Too many have read S1 to make it playable as a real challenge and S4 suffers from the same issue plus re-used setpieces in my games.

S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks would be better in GURPS than in AD&D. That would make a great DF small side campaign.

But yes, I'd do it, especially if the players have an itch to scratch and it's not something already plundered for my GURPS gaming or memorized by too many of my players. Something that benefits from a rush of nostalgia or is just structured in a way that the GURPS skill system and magic system won't short-circuit.

A campaign?

Much less likely, but possible.

It would have the advantage of players getting used to AD&D, not getting thrown off the deep end of a mid-level high-challenge adventure that demands you know your spells, the monsters, and the rules well to survive. It would also just be fun, because AD&D is a different sort of entertainment and challenge than GURPS.

It would have the disadvantage of grabbing us by the back of the head and grinding our faces in the nitty-gritty weirdness of AD&D. Tracking XP. 10 gp to the pound (and if you make it 100 to the pound, you really need to drop XP value to 10% to keep the challenge:reward the same). XP divided by level. To use training costs or not. Magic item identification issues. The agony of rolling 1 HP on your level up twice in a row (funny in a one-shot, painful otherwise). The dizzying madness of Resist Fire, Potions of Fire Resistance, and Rings of Fire Resistance all having different mechanics from each other. THAC0 with breakdowns thanks to repeating 20s.

In other words, I'd have to house rule the hell out of it. Do that enough and I'm the path of making a retro-clone to add to the massive slurry of them out there right now. Pick a retro-clone and then ask myself why I'm not just playing another game from the choice pool.

It's doable, of course, and it can be fun. But it's not as simple as it sounds. It would also mean doing that instead of other things, like Gamma Terra and Dungeon Fantasy. It's possible we will do it but it would be more involved than a one-shot.

But I can see more AD&D in our future. It was a fun trip down memory lane, and it makes me appreciate what I have and why I chose to have it.

Why AD&D?

So we played AD&D yesterday. We've been planning this for a while, and originally scheduled in March but had to roll it back due to scheduling concerns. Even after doing that we lost 3/8ths of the planned group due to scheduling issues and cascading problems. In my Felltower game, this is a non-issue. In White Plume Mountain, it was more significant - we were doing a one-shot or two-shot, not a campaign.

In any case, though, AD&D 1st edition. Specifically, pre-Unearthed Arcana 1st edition AD&D.

Why?



Why AD&D?

When the idea came up to take a session (possibly two) and play White Plume Mountain, as-written, I had a couple of ideas:

- run it with AD&D 1st edition

- run it with a retro-clone like Swords & Wizardry

I wrote both ideas in an email and hit send, but honestly, by the time I hit send I knew the answer was "AD&D." Why hand out copies of S&W, explain the differences, re-calculate the ACs of monsters for Ascending AC (or point out how to do descending AC in S&W), re-do saves, re-do monster stats, etc. when we could just play AD&D? Why go retro-clone when retro is sitting right there?

Plus, as I've said a few times, AD&D is my native gaming language. I grew up with it. It wouldn't be too hard to get back into it. Just a refresher on how the system works and I'd be good to go.

It wasn't exactly that simple.

The AD&D DUNGEON MASTERS GUIDE isn't exactly laid out or written with quick reference in mind. Rules are buried in all sorts of places. Pages in the PLAYERS HANDBOOK refer to things ahead sometimes and to previous things other times - and details for something you choose on one page are often on another. The index for the PHB is in the DMG, and entries in the TOC and the Index aren't always taking you to that specific information you need.

It's kind of a mess. Good stuff, and it generally works, but it's a mess. It's like finding information on someone else's cluttered desk.

I just reveled in it. Any weirdness, oddness, or silliness that came up I generally just said, "Like it says in the book."

It took a while to make sure I read all the things I needed to read, and I made sure to look things up instead of assume I remembered them. I read every monster and spell and magic item in the book. Re-read the module a few times in order and out of order. I made note sheets and crib sheets for magical items in the party. I put in my homework.

Why not GURPS?

Because much in WPM rides on specific notions being true that are not in GURPS. Most foes not using magic - that would be a more trivial issue in GURPS. Cheap-and-easy buff spells ("We just cast Levitation and Resist Fire on everyone and then go down the hall.") Area-changing spells. And fights with terribly serious consequences for being hit yet which lopsidedly favor numbers. None of these really would give the same feel. Things would have the same name, but lacking "Should we use out one Fireball spell here?" it wouldn't be quite the same. Take that from someone who routinely converts and plunders AD&D modules for GURPS - I don't think WPM would match the feeling I wanted to get back if I'd done with 3d6 instead of 1d20.

Why no Unearthed Arcana?

Simply put, because S2 White Plume Mountain pre-dates Unearthed Arcana. Once you factor in d12 HP double-CON bonus barbarians, weapon specialization, higher expected stats across the board, routinely lower AC *(full plate, not plate mail), broad access to new spells not planned for in the dungeon's design, and race and class options greatly expanded, you get a different game. I'd need to sit down with WPM and modify it. More of certain monsters, since fighters would be expected to have at least 3/2 attacks, usually 2/1, and have +1 to +3 to hit on top of superior stats. Magic-Users would have access to a wider variety of damaging spells. We'd have cavaliers and their weapons of choice, barbarians with their intra-party issues and physical prowess, and races with special powers beyond what is in the PHB.

Me, I like all of that stuff.

But it's all stuff that came after WPM. To make WPM challenging, I'd need to change it. I didn't want to change it, I wanted to run it as written.

On top of that, the players would have a very large variety of choices. Up from a handful of races and classes to a large variety. Lots of min-max choosing about weapon specialization. Which race are you, and which am I, and how will that work out if we play together?

So I kept the party back to where you'd start back when I started, with three books on hand - the PHB, the DMG, and the MONSTER MANUAL. It kept it simpler for all of us.

If I ever pull this kind of thing again with a post-Unearthed Arcana module, I'd absolutely break out UA and use it.

Rule changes?

I'll go over these in another post, along with character generation.

But in short, I didn't change much.

We did ditch:

- grappling/overbearing/pummeling in favor of a Dungeon Grappling-based system. It didn't come up in the first session.

- the aging rules. I dislike these because there is seemingly no base case - once you use these every character has to modify their stats based on current age, and what you rolled is never experienced in play unmodified.

- the Helmet rule. I just assumed people have helmets. That rule did point the way to how we were always supposed to handle split-AC monsters, though.

- random height and weight. I don't even think that's for PCs, anyway, but it could be. I didn't care.

We modified:

- encumbrance. I mostly based it on armor encumbrance (DMG, p. 27) with modifiers.

- initiative. I used an OSRIC-influenced stripped down version that worked really well. Unlike back in the old days, I used segments and it played out better than I'd expected.

. . . and that's about it that I can remember changing. Everything else was by the book, even when it did weird stuff. Yes, we even checked for Keen Eared Individuals. No one made the roll.

How did it play?

Generally well. People adjusted right away to the quirks of AD&D. We did a lot of rules lookups, because as easily as I could make a ruling we all really wanted to know what it actually said. That made for a lot of fun, when we'd hit lines like, "Leather armor +1 is usable by those characters permitted to wear this form of armor." So those permitted to wear it can use it? Those not permitted, then, can't? Helpful. Heh. We chuckled a lot over the effects of Potions of Growth, how harsh ghoul paralyzation is (duration, uhm, never specified), the magic-item destroying Scroll of Protection from Magic, the oddly specifically aimed Wand of Negation - all things we hadn't had to deal with in many years.

At the same time, it could be hard to adjust completely. No defense rolls means taking damage is routine - but in AD&D, healing it isn't as simple as "time and energy" like in GURPS. A bad roll - like the guy who rolled minimum HP healed on a Cure Serious Wounds - can dramatically change your upcoming options. You can't expect a fighter to hold people off unless they keep missing (and Parrying is there, but not a very good choice),

AD&D is a good system. It has so many moving parts, though, and so many special cases with special rules, mixed resolution mechanisms, half-explained ideas mixed with overly-explained ones, etc. that it isn't exactly smooth and easy. Often important information is hidden in some corner - like what to do with the 2nd through sixth repeating 20 on a hit table, or the infamous helmet rule - yet profoundly impacts how the game is played. But still, it was a lot of fun. I remember what I miss about it, and some of what I don't.

It had been over 30 years for one player, over 25 for another, and probably around 20 or so for me since we'd last played AD&D. I'd played Swords & Wizardry online, and I guest starred in a single session of 1st edition AD&D back in the 90s (and probably rolled one die, once - it was a talk-heavy session of an ongoing game where the PCs had no immediate goal to accomplish). I hadn't GMed AD&D since my high school UA-era campaign. Yet it all went quite well. And it was enjoyable enough that in a few weeks we'll see if a fresh group of PCs can't reinforce the two survivors and retrieve Whelm and Wave and get them out of the dungeon.

I liked it enough that I might do this again after WPM, maybe with some other module I have that won't play with quite the same feel converted to GURPS.

Gary Gygax on monsters as PCs - '74 vs. '79

I stumbled across this article by Gary Gygax about D&D in Wargames Digest the other day. I'd downloaded it (from here) and read it on my Kindle and left it there. I was looking for something else and found it again.

It's a fast read and pretty entertaining. It's got that nostalgic pull of what attracted me to fantasy role-playing gaming in the first place. It's got that way a good game writeup implies endless fun in the scenes you see in between the words.

I hit this quote and knew I needed to post about it:

"Players selected a "character type to begin the campaign - either a fighter, magic-user, or cleric (whether human, elf, dwarf, or what have you; and naturally, they can also opt to play as monsters instead)."

It had sure changed by the time the DMG, my formative gaming reading, came along.

"The considered opinion of this writer is that such characters are not beneficial to the game and should be excluded."
- Gary Gygax, DUNGEON MASTERS GUIDE, p. 21

That's six paragraphs into a seven paragraph exposition on why you should do that.

I'm not a big proponent of freakshow PCs, myself, because I like "normal PCs, weird world" more than "weird PCs, normal world" and "weird PCs, weird world" just makes me tired all over. I wonder how much of it came from this? Not even a simple no; it's an op-ed on Hurting Wrong Fun.

Ah well, I'm no better. It's just such a stark change.

The "Walked Two Miles Uphill in the Snow to Game" Story

So we're not technically in a blizzard anymore - changes in conditions here have reduced the weather from that to just a nasty mix of snow, sleet, wind, and whatnot. Still, it's a state of emergency and pretty much everything is closed. Pretty standard weather if you go north of here far enough, but crippling nonetheless.

I've mentioned before about some of my players hiking through snow to my house to game.

Way back in the 90s I ran a game for a couple of players - three of them ultimately, two of whom still play with me and one of whom is an occasional drop-in.* We had a blizzard that shut the state of New Jersey down for a couple of days. No non-emergency vehicles on the road, snow piled up everywhere, etc.

I lived over two miles from the pair of them, on the other side of town, with plenty of steady, steep hills in between.

So as soon as the snow stopped, and the road got plowed enough to move around on - although it was still illegal to drive on them - they got their winter clothes on and hiked over. The state was closed for like 2-3 days, and we played on them. They walked all the way over, we played all day, and they walked home. I still remember walking part of the way back with them - all the way to the steep hill down near the elementary school by my house. I don't really remember the walk back home, but I remember standing there about 1/3 of the way and thinking, geez, this is crazy and cool. It was cold, but sunny and not windy, and if you can walk in the middle of mostly-plowed streets on packed snow with no black ice you're really not trudging too much.

These days that couldn't happen. The closest gamer to me is several times as far away with highways cutting between us at four points. Two gamers live in different states. We'd likely just play by Skype if I could keep my group down to three players and a story-centered game like we had going them. The one time we had a snowstorm the day before a game day one of my gamers picked me up so I didn't have to dig my car out of the snow in order to drive to game (also, so we'd have one less spot to hopefully find near our host's house.)

Still cool though. It's something I still think about after every snowstorm.

And I always think, I need to make the PCs walk around on snowshoes in my game. I think there are handy rules for them in DF16 and GURPS Russia . . .


* The brothers who run Vryce/Gerry/Short Bus and Dryst/Nakar/Angus McSwashy/Princess and our long-time friend who ran Caveman in the first two sessions of our Gamma World game. Those that know these three won't be surprised that they walked two miles plus in the snow to play games. If I said, "two of my current group walked uphill in the snow to play games" my current gamers could guess who. They're not easy people to discourage.

My DF "this is awesome" moment

Back in 2011, my then semi-active gaming group and I played some Dungeon Fantasy.

We'd played a long campaign that had ended a year or so back. We'd get together and play boardgames and cardgames occasionally, including Munchkin. Playing Munchkin wet my taste for giving GURPS Dungeon Fantasy a go. I had the PDFs, and I'd even done some work on the line, but I hadn't really been able to sit down and play the game as written(-like) with my usual group.

But I'd gotten a playtest copy of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventures 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon. I'd asked for it, hoping we could try it out. It was late in the process but still we got the files and I got to reading.

My players made up characters based on the templates in DF1.* Or I made them for them, either way, depending on their interest. I remember doing up a dwarf fighter that became Borriz Borizmann while sitting at the gym between clients.

In any case, we got the characters and started to play. They gathered information, and set out to the quest location (I'd had to skip a bit to keep things moving.) I rolled up a random encounter - an orc shaman and some skeletons.

The players were used to 3rd edition GURPS characters more than anything, and a game where skill 20 was an outlier and wasn't on the guy with ST 17+. One of the characters started with Skill 20 and ST 17. One of them was a cleric with Turning. All of them approached the fight with a little bit of caution, knowing how dangerous fights in GURPS can be.

The cleric turned undead and the skeletons were kept at bay with ridiculous ease. The orcs and skeletons within reach of the PCs went down in seconds. It wasn't even close.

Although later fights would show us the rift between front-line fighters and rear-rankers, and how dangerous glass cannon foes like ogres and well-armed orcs can be, that little random encounter was my "ah-ha!" moment. My "this is awesome" moment.

We had characters of tremendous power, facing tremendous difficulties. But they had skills. Clerics weren't hoping their powers would work, it was by how much and was that enough? The fighter-types weren't betting they were better, they were betting they were better by a sufficient margin to pull off something cool.

It was heroic, and it was awesome.

I was hooked right there.

It wasn't all that long before we kicked off our DF game now known as DF Felltower.

I still remember that moment of, "Wow, these guys are good." I haven't lost that feeling, either - I enjoy seeing the power of the PCs in action, and throwing challenges that would wreck lesser groups. But I can trace it back to that little printed out battlemap of a watering hole and some foes that just got blown away.


So, if you've had a moment of like that with GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, what was it?





* One of them is recognizably a character still around today - Vryce is 90% or so loyal to the original version run in the playtest, for example.

Why I use initiative rolls in GURPS DF

Doug took the initiative and got inside my OODB loop (Observation-Orientation-Decision-Blogging) and posted a way to deal with shifting initiative in a fight.

If I had to sum up the GURPS rules for surprise, they are for "attacked out of nowhere" and "blundered into an ambush," basically.

Otherwise, initiative is fixed, there is no overall turn, and being fastest means going first. Being slow means you react after. If you're all in a hair-trigger situation like a Tarantino-inspired Mexican Standoff, GURPS Martial Arts has Cascading Waits rules to see who really goes first. And similar rules for quick-draw contests and such. Otherwise, fixed order.

I'm okay with that, and ran games that way for a long time. It's simple enough, it works, and it rewards people who make fast and capable PCs by giving them fast and capable PCs.

Even when we went to round-the-table initiative order instead of interlayered speed order, I just let the side with the fastest guy go first.

But not DF. With DF, I went with random rolls, detailed here:

My DF Alternate Surprise Rules

This wasn't because I had an issue with the GURPS system.

It was, in fact, because I liked the feel of "surprise" and "initiative" from D&D/AD&D and from early video games. "You are surprised by 4 bushwackers, 4 bushwackers, 2 bushwackers, and 1 goblin" - you know, after you kicked down the door in a dungeon while you're on hair-trigger and terrified of death. Stupid stuff, but fun.

I also assumed that walking around a dungeon, even noisily, meant that sometimes you blundered into prepared opponents who knew you were coming. And sometimes you'd blunder into unprepared opponents who just assumed, wrong, that the metal noises were those stupid orcs from down the hall again.

Pretty much, it's a dungeon genre switch. In dungeon delving games, you have to see if you're surprised by the monsters behind the door you just kicked down. You may know Charlie is in the trees but still get surprised when he's in that tree, not that other one.

My game is full of this kind of homage:

- wandering monsters
- doors that need forcing
- treasure in chests in rooms, often trapped.
- non-breakable environments
- a safe town to sell loot in
- reasonably cheap and available resurrection*
- more danger as you go deeper

It's not logic, it's genre switches that push this. And surprise/side-based initiative is one of them.

Pretty much the only way I could make this more D&D would be rolling Reaction Rolls for all of the monsters. "You are surprised by a beholder! Hahaha! Oh, wait, he's friendly and wants to negotiate."

That's a different, future post right there.



* In GURPS DF, getting raised from the dead costs 15 x Starting Wealth. That's like charging ~1500 gp in AD&D.

Sincere silliness

I was thinking about why I really like a particular band and it lead to a gaming thought. A DF gaming thought.

Here is why I think my DF game works. And partly why it's lasted so long.

It is sincere in its silliness.


That is, we do all the things that are cool about heroes fighting monsters in tunnels for treasure.

We also do all the things that are silly about that, too, and take them and own them.

We love all of these things.

We do our level best to make them the most appropriately cool, or the most appropriately silly.

And we play them sincerely.


It doesn't matter if the Church of the Good God (Motto: "Good God, y'all!") is silly. It does matter that we love the joke inherent in it, execute it well, and go after it sincerely.

It doesn't matter if it's kind of strange that there are giant megadungeons full of monsters and loot. Again, we make the jokes, embed them in it, and play it sincerely.

It's not ironic enjoyment, but sincere enjoyment of something twisted ironically. It's a hard difference to explain in words, but I can feel the difference between "make it a joke" and "enjoy the jokes." We and the game are in on the same jokes - laughing with the game elements, not at them.

That's why I think it keeps going. No ironic enjoyment here. Nostalgia flavored but looking back for inspiration not elusive fun that was never really had.

Just sincere silliness.

Or, in a single word: sincerity.

More Random Memories of the Very Old Days

I wrote a post much like this before, called Random Memories of the Very Old Days. But I got to visit my friend, editor, and five-time writing partner Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch this weekend, and we were chatting about what it was like getting gaming stuff when we started out gaming.

So here are some more random memories.

You Got What Was Available. Pretty much, what was in the stores nearby was what you had to choose from.

Not all stores would order stuff for you - and for me, being a pre-teen gamer, "you" did not include "me." The first place I recall ordering stuff for me was what is now Timewarp Comics & Games. Otherwise, it was what was on the shelves. They ordered stuff in, and it sat there until it was purchased. People didn't necessarily differentiate between Basic, Expert, original D&D, and AD&D. So it was all jumbled together, and there wasn't any clear attempt at maintaining a line.

This could be good - I got Eldritch Wizardy, the now-called OD&D supplement, for a few bucks off the shelf of a gaming store. AFAIK that was my first OD&D purchase, followed closely by Blackmoor. Now I have them all.

This could be very good - Ogre and Car Wars were prominently displayed and easy to get.

This could also be very bad - I never saw a single Judge's Guild product until much later, although I remember ads for them in Dragon magazine. We saw Role-Aids stuff, but I wasn't (and still basically am not) terribly impressed by them. They weren't "official" either, would meant we couldn't point to any external authority to justify using them. That was important either as a young kid trying to convince other young kids your rules were the right rules, or when dealing with the occasional older kids who didn't want to game with you either.* Not only that, but I got Fiend Folio before the Monster Manual, at least partly because the Jamesway I bought it at didn't have the Monster Manual. I wanted it more, but I also didn't have the other one around - I remember being really excited to get to take a look at my uncle's copy much later on. It was this mythical tome.

Mail Order Hobby House - I ordered stuff from the Mail Order Hobby House starting sometime later. I'd save up, make the order up, get my mom to write a check for the amount, and send away and wait 4-6 weeks for the stuff I ordered to show up. No drop shipped or POD or Amazon Prime in those days. Sometimes it would come with a refund because stuff wasn't available. Sometimes it would come with a bill because something increased in price since I ordered it. I vaguely recall not paying them $1.~ I owed near the end, or not getting that amount back in overpaying - I can't recall which.

Dragon Ads - Another way to get stuff was mail order from companies advertising in Dragon. I have a couple issues with stuff cut out for that reason. That's how I got my back issues, although I ordered too late to get Dragon #69 (with the Astral Plane adventure featuring Githyanki) and got a refund check for that issue. I also got at least one SJG supplement that way, but for the life I me I can't recall which one. It might have been GEV, maybe. Or Shockwave.

Pre-Painted Minis. I don't know who was doing them, but you used to be able to get four figure packs of pre-painted lead minis. I have what's left of one wizard, now, who I re-painted all blue with enamel paint at some point. I don't know why, either - maybe they didn't seal right and the paint flecked off? Who knows? I tended to mistreat my toys.

That's your random old memories for today.


* If the gaming blog-o-sphere seems a little high school sometimes, with cliques and name calling and spite posting with the names filed off, it's still better than the pre-junior high stuff I lived through in actual reality. Gamers were marginal in school, and we marginalized each other. Hurrah for internecine conflict.
I think I've told the story about how my first scheduled settle-this-after-school fight was over gaming, with another gamer, right? No? Maybe some other time . . .

LJN Action Figures - the N is for Nostalgia

Cleaning out some boxes last night after work, I found these guys:



Mostly intact. Warduke (not sure why people think he's cool, but anyway) has his stuff. Melf's cape broke and he must have had a sword or something. And I know the helmet from the troll king is missing. But the rest is there.

I'll bring them over to my friend's house, where my shambling mound figure lives (minus his treasure sack, which I lost.) I was never careful with my toys. But either way, these guys might find their way home with our newest player, who is way into fantasy gaming and killing monster figures with explosion sounds. Or they'll hang around on the gaming table and we'll debate what Warduke was thinking forgetting half of his armor.

Figured I should take a picture while they're as intact as they'll ever be from now on.

Random Memories of the Very Old Days

So I started playing in 1981 with (more-or-less) a mix of Basic Set D&D and AD&D. I say more-or-less because sometimes we'd look stuff up in a Holmes Basic Set, my uncle used the Rolemaster Arms Law critical hit tables sometimes, and we used the DMG alongside the Basic Set. If this sounds like a mess, man, you should have tried settling rules arguments.

If this stuff sounds crazy or infantile or juvenile or stupid, remember we were in 4th grade (and then 5th, and 6th) during most of this. Think South Park - foul-mouthed argumentative kids playing pretend. By the end of 7th grade most of the groups had long fragmented and only a hard core of gamers still played.

The dead stayed dead. Our games were often extremely lethal, and Raise Dead/Resurrection were totally unheard of. If you didn't have a friend with a high-level cleric, you died and stayed dead. Since almost no one had a high-level cleric, that meant all fatalities were permanent. The idea you could run to town with gold and get raised was sheer craziness. The example in the DMG of how miserably hard it was to convince someone to even un-petrify your friend meant there wasn't any swaying us. Sometimes someone would die in my game and then bring that guy, or someone with mysteriously identical stats and magic items, to another game. Yeah, that happened.

But in general, there was no network of NPCs in the world. Just the PCs and that's that.

People would level up on their own. Guys would buy a module and then run their own parties through it and come back with higher levels and more magic items. Arguing this would get ugly, and resulted in parents calling other parents to scold the complainer.

Actually, that's another point - the GM's word wasn't law. The book's word was law. Period. Any appeal of the wording was to a handy parent or teacher, and usually you'd get stuck with that interpretation forever. This is also why we played with what the rules said you could do. If the rules didn't say "a 10' pole can detect pits" then it couldn't. If it said thieves can climb and didn't say anyone else could, they couldn't.

We named all of our guys. Sometimes "you didn't even the name the guy until 2nd level" is held up as a hallmark of Old-School Play. Not for us. You had to name your guy. Not naming your guy meant you couldn't play him. You could just add "II" or "III" to the end of a prior name - I remember Dru the Druid XIV at some point, years in - but you had to name your guy.

We had actual arguments over names, about who named which guy and could use the name again, or if that name went with this class, etc.

We ran modules. You played B1 or B2 or B3 (generally B2), and then graduated to X1, and then eventually the A-series and/or G-series. Everyone tried S1, S2, S3, and/or S4 as soon as possible, usually at too low a level (I remember playing a 4th level elf in White Plume Mountain. He was level 3 after fighting some wights.) We played D1-2 and then Q1, skipping D3 because no one had it and it was expensive to get it.

We often skipped whole sections of adventures because they were complicated or uninteresting. I don't ever remember anyone getting through D2, or getting to use it. By the time they got there, everyone was eager to get to the Abyss (and we all knew it was at the other end of the tunnels).

Why did we know that Q1 was at the other end? Often, the players also owned, and read, the adventures. Getting your hands on ones they hadn't read was hard.

You didn't make up your own stuff that often, because the only way to avoid a fight was to have a module to point at. Plus the modules were cool. The guys who made the game up made them, and they were the exemplars of adventure design. Finishing them gave you some status. "I beat Peter's dungeon." Big deal. "I beat White Plume Mountain." Wow, cool!

(Which makes me amused when I hear even older gamers and/or early game designers say we were slaves to modules. Yeah, you guys wrote them and sold them to us.)

We played every day. Or close enough to it. We'd play anywhere and everywhere. I remember running the opening fight of S3 while sitting on a bench on the playground near my Elementary School at lunchtime. We didn't finish it that day, lunchtime was too short.

No character backstory. Or frontstory. Or story. Or description. At all. So much so that I can rarely conjure up any memories of specific characters, other than a few who survived so long that they did spectacular things (like Blackstar the thief surviving the Tomb of Horrors, and Hana the mage breaking his Staff of the Magi on Lloth's back at the end of Q1 after luring her out of her anti-magic zone, and then making his "shifted to another plane" roll.) Characters weren't characters, just game pieces. I only remember Blackstar, really, because years later I found the Adventure Log for his second trip to the Tomb of Horrors! I mean, we played almost daily for years, and I can't remember more than a few names and nothing about the characters attached to them.

On the other hand, my high school AD&D game had PCs with a short backstory and real personalities. I can remember almost every one of them and cool stuff they did. The short-run "my guy is just some guy" players didn't last and I don't remember much about their characters. I don't think this is coincidence.

No Dragon. Not until 6th grade, when someone got Dragon #55 (I now own that exact copy, as his collection was passed to my cousin and then to me over the years). I got Dragon #78 in 7th grade, and then I eventually subscribed. Once we did, what it said was law.

We had a lot of fun, but it was different fun than I sometimes hear about. I miss the sensawonder of my first sessions, but I don't miss much else about those days. Just some random memories of playing back in the day, with tween-age DMs and tween-age gamers.