I am effectively a Stranger Things kid, playing AD&D from 10-14 years old in friends' basements in the early 1980s. A little younger than the pimply nerds in the Dead Alewives skit, but their depiction was pretty accurate, sans Mountain Dew.
When my sons were 6 I decided to introduce them to the game. The 5e Starter Set had just come out and it was so similar to the original Basic Box of my youth. The rules were very different and often not in a good way: it was too sterile and formal, not as shaggy and weird as AD&D. But it was fun, and they loved it. I imagine there will be a time, 40 years from now, when they teach it to their sons.
My dad played AD&D as a kid like you, and introduced it to us when we were young (like your kids). We got our cousins into it and we spent every summer adventuring. When 5e came out we tried it a couple times and really didn’t like it for the reasons you mentioned.
Coming back to D&D as an adult (coworkers play during lunch once a week) has been strange. The new style of play feels rigid. I can understand the standardization to try and create a uniform experience but it feels like a little of that AD&D magic is lost. Also I’m an adult now haha
I don't think the rules have changed in spirit (especially in 5e) but the mindset has. Basic D&D was very ridig if you followed the rules (like a video game, with codified turns, see "Sequence of play" in B/X https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1509982170193.pdf). AD&D already had a rule for everything. But the mindset was DM were loosely following the rules apart from character tables and were making their own house rules for everything. Everybody had a different understanding, sometimes were young, and there was no internet to check if it was correct, as long as it was fun to play.
> Everybody had a different understanding, sometimes were young, and there was no internet to check if it was correct, as long as it was fun to play.
I've been realizing more and more how true this was.
I haven't played either D&D or AD&D since the early 90s. At the time the people I played with would laugh at how encyclopedic I was about the rules, source material, etc. But these days I'll go to r/adnd or something like that and see someone talking about a thing from 1ed AD&D and my reaction is "WTF? I had no idea that existed!".
Or people talking about how of course every group played a certain way, and I never played that way in any group.
Which now leaves me always astounded at how much stuff I had no idea existed. To your age point, that was definitely a part of it. I played from about age 8 to late teens. In retrospect, a lot of this stuff was over my head
Comparing different versions of an adventure module that has been released for multiple editions can be instructive. When I did this, it seemed to me that each new edition was more explicit than the last, with more precise and simple language, and less evocative prose.
There's a famous table in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide where, if you came across a prostitute, you could determine what kind of prostitute it was. AD&D was weird and arbitrary and unbalanced and a mess. It was also... more fun to explore.
How do these community versions, like Old School Essentials, differ from using the real BECMI rules? What would motivate a group to pick up one of these, rather than say a reprint of the Rules Cyclopedia (or using a free digital copy from archive.org)?
> How do these community versions, like Old School Essentials, differ from using the real BECMI rules?
Not a lot. (though Old School Essentials is based on the earlier Basic/Expert or B/X rules, not BECMI [0])
Generally the biggest change is that almost all OSR games use ascending armor class.
> What would motivate a group to pick up one of these, rather than say a reprint of the Rules Cyclopedia (or using a free digital copy from archive.org)?
Old School Essentials is far more clearly written and easier to use. A lot of thought was put into layout so that all of the relevant rules for a given topic (e.g. the steps involved in character creation, or the dungeon exploration rules) fit on a single two-page spread. Spell descriptions are bullet-pointed in a way that makes it very easy to check their effects at a glance.
You can check out the free version and see for yourself [1].
Edit: Another thing to keep in mind is that when the OSR first started you couldn't get print-on-demand versions of old rule books from Wizards. If you wanted to play with something like BECMI you had to hunt for the box sets or the Rules Cyclopedia on eBay or in Half-Price Books, or get pirated PDFs. OSR games provided an alternative.
Ah, lack of availability makes a lot of sense given these community remakes are now two decades old. Improving the content layout also sounds great. I will check them out, thanks!
Kinda weird to differentiate between B/X and BECMI, considering Companion/Master/Immortals are extensions for higher level characters using the same Basic/Expert rules.
Edit: the distinction still seems pedantic to me, but these helped to understand the differences in the context of OSR:
I found some useful links below for answering my questions, ironically in a dead (but very informative) comment from johnvak01.
tl;dr: old school versions apply clarifications and enhancements to the original B/X rules for smoother gameplay, some add additional content, and many people want to avoid paying anything to WotC
> "a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings".
2 Kings 6
24And it came to pass after this, that Benhadad king of Syria gathered all his host, and went up, and besieged Samaria. 25And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver. 26And as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, there cried a woman unto him, saying, Help, my lord, O king. 27And he said, If the LORD do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress? 28And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow. 29So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son. 30And it came to pass, when the king heard the words of the woman, that he rent his clothes; and he passed by upon the wall, and the people looked, and, behold, he had sackcloth within upon his flesh. 31Then he said, God do so and more also to me, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat shall stand on him this day.
I'm a Protestant, but that explanation of transubstantiation may be the popular understanding but is not the actual official doctrine of the Catholic Church. I'm not versed enough to explain it except by way of terrible analogy to software development - everyone knows what Agile is, but no one really knows what Agile is, and once you start to read the Agile Manifesto and think deeply, you realize that.
The Catholic Church (and the bible they started from) effectively say everything and its opposite, depending on which argument is convenient at any particular time. They've been debating (and training to debate) these subjects for more than a thousand years. The only official doctrine, in practice, is that they are Right at all times, no matter what the topic might be.
I wouldn't really characterize the Catholic Church's official doctrines that way or that flexibly, but again, I am a Protestant with a number of overall disagreements with them and less personal experience with them, and it is easy for me to read your post as someone with much more personal experience. And since HN isn't really the best place for extended religious discussions, if you are interested for any reason, my email is always open.
... “transubstantiation” refers to a change in which the substance of a thing—what it really is—changes, while its physical characteristics do not. Of course, this sort of change only occurs in the Eucharist, which, though it appears to remain bread and wine throughout the Mass, nevertheless truly becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus.
I took your using the word literally to mean you were saying that the physical characteristics changed, which is apparently not what you were saying.
I think this is a difference in language expectations, because when and where I grew up, some Protestants thought that Catholics believed either that the physical characteristics of the Eucharist changed during the blessing or consumption of the Eucharist, which your link seems to demonstrate to me that you are not agreeing with.
I'm a Protestant, but that explanation of transubstantiation may be the popular understanding but is not the actual official doctrine of the Catholic Church.
I was raised a Catholic, I believe doctrine changed at some time, maybe Vatican II? I remember being told as a child (a long time ago :) not to eat some time before communion.
> But in the 1980s the game came under an extraordinary sustained assault from fundamentalist religious groups who feared its power over young minds.
> ...
> Pulling described D&D as "a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings".
It could be said that the source material for the religious groups contains far worse stories. I wonder if the irony was lost on the people back then.
It can go both ways. One of the cofounders of the Dragon Lance stories and games used his religious expertise (LDS) and knowledge of an Indonesian language learned from his religious mission to help develop story plots and the pantheon of gods.
xp for gold means you get less for killing a monster than you do for robbing it, and encourages a more careful exploratory approach. Modern D&D is much more of a tactical combat game than the original, where encounter design is "balanced" based on the assumption that players will be able to kill what they run into.
Was there a different xp mechanic between AD&D's gp = xp and 3+'s only killing is xp? Because I don't see how the switch to that could possibly reduce the incentive to murder.
If you aren’t interested in playing (or supporting) modern DnD, for the past few years there was been bit of an Old School Renaissance.
Modern reprintings of classic Basic/Expert rule sets in Basic Fantasy RPG or Old School Essentials are easy ways to get in. To say nothing of Dungeon Crawl Classics and of course getting your hands on the original TSR books.
There are dozens of kickstarters, fan zines, and self-published indie works out there, expanding, building, remixing, and making new experiences with the classic rule sets.
Feels like there is easily another 50 years to this hobby, if you look beyond Wizards of the Coast releases.
As someone who started playing in 1980, I really don't get this OSR. I remember wanting to play a wizard to cast spells but then realizing that I spent 95% of my turns throwing darts because there were no cantrips. As I have gone through the progression of the DnD editions (and of course many other TTRPGS), I have never felt the urge to look back to those earlier weak versions.
I have to wonder if people are being nostalgic for things that have nothing to do with the ruleset.
As someone who didn’t get into DnD until 3.5 was a thing, I like the simplicity of Old School Essentials.
The Basic/Expert ruleset is far more about the imagination for me at least (my style of how I referee). Yes, magic-users at low levels have like no spells but at higher levels, they are capable of doing all kinds of crazy magic, in combination with the ability to research magic, create magical items and so on. That’s part of the balance of the game. I can understand why people don’t like that type of game, but that’s why there’s so many options of Tabletop Roleplaying Games. GURPS, Apocalypse World, Mork Borg, Ghost Dog, Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, etc all play differently and all have different mechanics and philosophies of how the game should be played.
Low-level casters sucked, with or without cantrips (which didn't do anything useful in combat when originally introduced, IIRC, in Unearthed Arcana).
But at least they eventually leveled up.
Or…not, if they were non-human and hit their race-specific, often single-digit level cap.
Yeah, come to think of it, old school AD&D rules did leave plenty of room for improvement.
Demihuman level caps were even more annoying in the old school AD&D computer games that enforced them, as it's hard to role play a party of permanently underleveled characters in a high-level area of a brutal, combat-focused, non-level scaled CRPG as anything other than a pile of corpses.
>I remember wanting to play a wizard to cast spells but then realizing that I spent 95% of my turns throwing darts because there were no cantrips.
I agree, but this is the "video game" mindset of which we've fallen into the trap. Why is the expectation that you can continuously cast spells like a video game? The world wasn't designed that way.
Wizards were definitely weaker and more. Limited in those early levels In early dnd. In retrospect with the way "modern" dnd has removed those limitations it's definitely skewed the internal. Class balance now if youre not a spellcatser you're objectively worse at almost everything. See the whole. Linear fighter and quadratic wizard debate.
The bigger change over the years (which the osr has been trying to go back to) has been to adventure design, as modern dnd has shifted away from location based play to linear stories.
Something I've wondered about the OSR movement, watching from afar. My observation has been that the "typical" D&D play style has changed. By that I mean it seems a lot more common now than it used to be to lean into the actual role playing portion, getting in character, etc. Whereas as an 80s kid, most people I knew would treat it like a narrative at most, "my character swings his sword" type stuff.
Are OSR players generally playing the more theatrical/performative style of play but with the older spirit/rules? Or is this also part of the renaissance?
What's crazy is that the OSR movement itself is now 20 years old and is probably no longer a renaissance or revival but simply a bona fide style of D&D that people play for its own sake.
I haven't played old school D&D in ages. To me, AD&D 2e is the zenith of the game. I had (probably still have, I need to check) the original TSR books. My question to you is: can you point me to an explainer that breaks down all the variations and pros/cons of D&D?
I turn 50 in a few days myself, and I've been playing D&D (and other similar RPGs) since the Basic Set. I still DM two weekly groups, one high magic, one low magic. D&D has been such a big part of my life that it is hard for me to imagine how my life would have been without it. It's truly been a constant companion.
I've been gaming with my best friend since 1985.
I met my first girlfriend in a game in 1990.
I met the first woman I proposed to (but didn't marry) in a game in 1991.
I became friends with my first business partner largely through gaming together, and playing D&D after hours was part of the culture at our startup.
I once ran a 30 year campaign (1987-2017) which ran for 50,000 years of in-game time and finished with a time loop from the end to the beginning. Yeah, trying to DM with time loops and keeping everything consistent is a nightmare, I'm never doing that again. Nevertheless, it was pretty epic and fun.
I'm pretty sure that I was always going to be an imaginative person, but I'm thankful that D&D gave me the tools to share my imagination with my friends. It helped me to make a good social life for myself and not just be a loner living in my own mind.
I got fed up with DnD (and roleplaying games in general) for the following reasons:
* The Emperor has no clothes. Dungeons and Dragons suffers from the very thing that makes it great, all you actually need is imagination. Any rule set and you simply can know in your mind and explain to players. There are many open rule sets if you want a rule book. Thus, there is literally no reason to buy any of the books, figures, etc. unless of course you want them. But then, this is exactly why Wizards of the Coast tried to kill the open source gaming license retroactively. Because they sell a product that is simply a shiny veneer over a person's imagination. I would say games like shadowrun and vampire: the masquerade do a much better job at this because they have created a rather interesting world for characters to participate in. While dnd has scenarios, i never found them all that engaging compared to whatever it is the DM or myself would create.
* I started traveling and doing fun things in the world we live in and I stopped having fun in the imaginary world of dungeons and dragons. Simply put, it takes a lot of time to play dnd and I could be doing something else. I have had a lot of fun playing dnd throughout my life but it takes a special group of friends to play with and that only comes along when it comes along. Simply playing for the sake of playing is not fun.
* all of the online tools, apps, and all of the various technology that people want to bring into the game destroys the game for me. Why? Because every single piece of technology, even the technology of pen and paper and books takes away from the improvisational collective imagination that occurs in the game. Of course character sheets give players artifacts that represent their players and helps them feel connected to the game. But most other things, other than dice always seem to rip people out of the game and suddenly you are searching a book, app, etc. to find the rule to figure out how to do the thing instead of simply relying on the DM to decide how it should be done.
Maybe I have become overly opinionated about this having played an enormous amount of dungeons and dragons, shadowrun, vampire, starwars saga, and every other system that someone wanted to try sometime because it either was attached to some kind of show/movie (although i never played a star trek rpg) or it was a new system that promised to engage the imagination more. But I dunno, I kind of gave up. Also, I DM'ed every game I've played for the 15 years. Maybe I just became jaded. Anyways, essay over.
I understand a lot of your points, but in general, I have found there's a big spectrum between rules heavy and rules light and a lot of players do not want to be on the "light" side of things for any of these few reasons.
- They don't know what they can do
- They feel doing something cool but cringey (trying to dodge bullets like Neo) is more acceptable when there's explicit rules letting them do that. Otherwise they're embarrassed to do it.
- Rules actually make creative actions feel more creative.
- The decisions of the DM can feel arbitrary and, at times, ill-informed by their world views.
I think what makes TTRPGs work for a lot of people is finding a good balance between feeling restricted and feeling free. Otherwise we're kids on a playground, making up imaginary shields to block each others lasers. And I never liked that game.
I would suggest experimenting with a rules-light system like Fate (if you havent) if you ever find yourself interested and have the time to role-playing.
Personally, I find myself reading RPG books for the setting (Eclipse Phase, Star Trek, Tunnels&Trolls, Traveller ...) and for their mechanics. I agree that the technology mostly gets in the way of the improv. Also, find a group that lets you play! Stop DMing everything. Maybe check out the Mythic Game Emulator which can take on a lot of the directing part of being a DM. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/422929/Mythic-Game-Mast...
yeah i think my favorite books, besides vampire the masquerade, were those old star wars magazines that would have campaigns and short stories and other things in them. What I think a lot of people think I am saying is that I dislike the rules and that isn't really true. I quite enjoy doing things within the rules to push them to their limit. Minmaxing is probably the reason I became so interested in machine learning at some point (see this jupyter notebook I made for 3.5e to max out your critical hit probabilities: https://github.com/mnky9800n/data-analysis-tools/blob/master...). I dunno. I just feel sometimes like I have done all there is to do in dungeons and dragons and other roleplaying games.
I definitely relate with you about the technology bit. My favourite way to play is on a table with dice and a dry-erase grid in front of us to play on.
That said, technology has meant that my group of friends who've been playing together for going on 10+ years now were able to keep getting together virtually on Foundry, work around busy lives where health, kids or work or other circumstances are dragging us away. In person at a table is still preferred when we can, but technology has kept something going that probably would have died away without it.
Role playing games existed before DnD, they were story narrative games where people took turns extending the narrative. My elementary school set were very into these oral improv narrative games, with our favorite being "dungeon" - a game apparently played by one of our set's grandparents when he was a kid, that was very much like DnD, but without the purchased items like dice, characters, or scenario books, purely oral, pure imagination.
Sounds to me like you're no longer interested in playing games, where a "game" is something that has formal rules, mechanics, and physical equipment. You'd rather just sit around a campfire and tell stories. Which is of course fine, but don't blame games for being games.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who is eternally grateful for this game. It's given me years of regular social engagement and strangers have turned into great friends. All because it's weird enough that you usually have to seek out new people rather than play with your existing friends.
My only issue is that I've grown a massive addiction to clicky math rocks.
I played in the 80s and left for a couple decades. Got back into it and was more obsessed in my late 40s! Being a DM is still too hard. Started a little side hustle to help DMs leverage expert advice to prep and play better games http://rpgvanwinkle.Etsy.com
You forgot the important part: Declare it a 'collector's item' only and ban anyone who actually uses them from official events. Enforce this with armed thugs.*
*Yes, I am aware that these are in fact two separate incidents.
Are you sure you're not confusing D&D with AD&D? Pretty sure, the original D&D didn't have the player guide/dm guide split. There are also at least two version of the core first edition AD&D books, with the first edition (published late 70s)[1] being a lot more rare than the updated version (early 80s)[2]. The second print editions of the 1st edition AD&D books are the ones you tend to see everywhere.
Fair enough. When/where I was growing up up D&D meant one of the coloured boxes (white if you where very old, but red/blue mostly). AD&D was always called AD&D. Never heard anyone say "0e".
huh. I have one of those first cover ADND ones. Matching players handbook and a few supplements from the time. What do you say they're worth? it would be a shame to sell them, I love the weirdness, but it would be nice to know at least.
Only 50? I'm shocked. My sister is 47 and I remember her and her friends playing D&D when I was too young to play, so they put me infront of a computer where I could play Wolfenstein 3D instead. ;)
Coincidentally, after many months of not playing, running, or writing anything for RPGs, tomorrow I'll be running the first session of a new campaign of advanced 5E.
Good luck! I’m slightly ashamed to say this but I have found ChatGPT 4 an absolute godsend to design small quests and encounters when I’m pushed for time (or more regularly when my party decides to do something utterly random). Your mileage may vary, of course.
That’s really useful, ta! The advantage of ChatGPT is that I can ensure a certain kind of setting or flavour, or push it to include particularly thematic actions or terrain. Or if the party arrives at a marketplace in a new city, I can quickly spin up ten characters with different backgrounds and potential side quests for them to talk to (and dig in deeper if something particularly fun comes up). I know this makes me weak and feeble but I only have so much time to prepare each session sadly (and my players regularly go off the beaten path).
I DM for my son and his friends after school on Fridays. Every week is the same: I try and prepare some grand sweeping conspiracy to uncover, some memorable encounters, a few funny accents. I sort out the relevant terrain tiles, prepare the right miniatures. We painstakingly level up their characters and choose some new spells.
Then they spend several hours setting up a street food stall or Rickrolling local dignitaries, laughing until they cry.
my friend and i use to play in middle school, at the time i lived in Abilene TX during peak satanic panic so we played at school and kept all our stuff hidden from parents/teachers. He was a DM and loved making up these crazy stories and maps and all that. I just played along and had a lot of fun. One time we met up at a friend's house with some HS kids playing as a group. They took it so seriously the experience was miserable for me.
a while later, my friend made up a football game modeled after DND. It was amazing, you would roll for pass completions or quarter back sacks and other things. He was a bright kid but fell in with the wrong crowd and ended up dropping out of HS, not sure what he's doing now.
edit: the satanic panic thing was hilarious. I was a skater in middle school Abilene TX and in Baird TX there was a concrete drainage ditch we use to skate in. My friends and I would beg one of our older skater friends who had a driver's license to drive all of us out there to skate. One time someone spray painted a pentagram on the ditch and it was front page news in Abilene, the headline read "Scared in Baird!"
Some details on the early days of D&D, from a now MIA 2008 Boing Boing post, based in a recycled Joel Johnson 2003 Gygax interview (originally posted in kcgeek.com it says):
" Undaunted, he raised $1000 with his long-time friend and fellow gamer, the late Don Kaye, and formed TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) in 1973. Together, they hand-assembled 1000 copies of the rules..."
Last year, I started playing DnD with 5e rules and lots of homebrew content for the first time. It is an online game with my friends on Discord. We have character sheets, roll a dice using a bot, and so on.
This is really fun, we had some crazy adventures and this campaign is just at early stages :)
I was a troubled soul during my sophomore year in the University back in the early 2000s. Somehow I found several Dragonlance novels and in turn found a lot of AD&D documents online at the Candlekeep website. They satisfied my imagination of escaping into some fantasy world and pulled me away from depression.
I'm not a people person so I read the rules, modules and novels all by myself. My favorite settings are Dragonlance, Ravenloft and Planescape but FR has the best novels and computer games.
I still have a half-completed Ultima spinoff game based on Dragonlance. Maybe I'll complete it one day.
I was 9 then DnD was "released", and me and my friends were already playing "dungeon" for years. We looked at the advertisements, one of the guys got the game kit, and we hated it. Dungeon (our game) was pure imagination, where the DnD was RULES and looking crap up and arguments. And spending money.
We argued for a day about it, and never played the official DnD again. I continued playing the pure imagination, no maps, everything vocal and conveyed live, like impromptu jazz, through the 80's, until my career ate my life.
I lived in a small town in the deep south during the 80s and had no problem buying anything D&D, including the Monster Manual, Deities & Demigods, Fiend Folio, and the variations. I don't doubt there were some communities where such things were restricted, either through pressure on the mom and pop stores or because of social pressure killing demand, but in general the panic over the D&D panic was as overblown as the D&D panic itself. But it was incredible free advertising for D&D.
> For all the reasons listed above, it's probably impossible to narrow in on one date and say with any certainty that this is when the game was released. But if we need to celebrate somewhere in the neighborhood of late January, then the last Sunday of the month (this year, the 26th) seems like the best candidate.
The post seems to suggest that it be a "floating" day of celebration rather than "fixed" on January 26th of every year.
There are quite many virtual table top. Or VTT softwares around. Some more official, some less official. So really there is plenty of choice. Still it takes a bit of managing as fully automating everything is quite complex.
Reminder for anyone who missed it last year: the movie "Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves" is funny, slick, and does convey a good feeling of what the experience would be to play a game run by an imaginative if whacky Dungeon Master.
I was quite shocked at the muted reception this movie received. I watched it on a whim after seeing the ad on a Redbox of all places, and I thought it was fantastic. Its a shame it did so poorly because I was hoping for more!
When my sons were 6 I decided to introduce them to the game. The 5e Starter Set had just come out and it was so similar to the original Basic Box of my youth. The rules were very different and often not in a good way: it was too sterile and formal, not as shaggy and weird as AD&D. But it was fun, and they loved it. I imagine there will be a time, 40 years from now, when they teach it to their sons.