Avoiding the Mechanics for Functional Play
Callan S.:
I hope it's not way off topic, but Jesse, you mentioned your mother having "summoned" fire and water spirits with her nieces and nephews. To me it sounds like she already had skills along the lines of running an activity centered around fiction, also skills at dramatic build up and human management skills. Perhaps alot more skills. She played the summoning game before any contact with a D&D text?
C. Edwards:
I taught myself (and my friends) to play using the Moldvay Basic Set (pink box). It came with module B2 "The Keep on the Borderlands". We played it "by the rules", with the result that there was lots of PC death and mayhem. We loved it. I was 13 at the time.
We were also hardcore video game platformer players (these were the prime years for the NES), so I think that regularly having to have "do overs" just wasn't something that bothered us much. In basic D&D one character was much like the next and we were approaching the game from mostly a challenge mindset anyway. D&D was something unique and distinctly different from the video games we played and we enjoyed it for the freedom of action and cause/effect it allowed in contrast to video and board games.
The first difficulties I encountered in D&D play were entirely social. Maybe a year later I discovered that some other people I knew had an AD&D 1st Ed. game going (by this time I had purchased and devoured the 2nd Ed. core books). I tried playing with them a handful of times but there were some serious social games going on (passive aggressive PC behavior, as an example) that I just wanted nothing to do with. So I after a few attempts I didn't play with them again. I don't recall this effecting our relationships outside the game at all.
As far as the play itself and "free-form solutions", I think that if you don't grasp (intuitively or by extrapolation from the text) that the bulk of D&D play (at least of everything before 1e probably) has little to no intersection with rules or mechanics then you're going to be at a loss for figuring out how to actually play the game. As far as I can tell from snippets I've read from Gygax and Arneson, this open space is basically by design. Old School D&D is very much a game of "If this then that", narrative cause and effect where escalation in danger is synonomous with engaging the mechanics.
Mathew E. Reuther:
Quote from: Chris_Chinn on October 14, 2010, 03:00:15 PM
Hi Mathew,
Quote
but I learned on the 1977 blue box one weekend at a sleepover.
I'm not clear - did your initial experience come from playing the game or from reading the books?
Chris
My initial experience came from playing the game, but at the time the people I played with were not experienced. (Second grade, wasn't much experience to be had given we were about 6-7 years old.) I'm not 100% clear on who was involved even, it was so very long ago. It's possible that an older individual was in charge, but that could have been a sibling for all I know. I do know that another friend had gotten a hold of books from an older brother, and by the time I was 8 or 9 I was regularly getting my hands on the SJG mini boxes and TSR boxed sets.
By 11 or so my first experiences in heavy rules modification came about with a 0e clone called "Warball & Chain" that drew extremely heavily from LotR. (Our artifacts were almost all items of power from Tolkien's universe.)
The guys I gamed with throughout my childhood and adolescence moved on for the most part, but I do still have contact with some of my high school gaming buddies. With most of them up in Seattle, and me down here in San Diego we don't get a huge amount of time to game together. But every so often a game happens when I'm up north. :)
Plan is to eventually move back up (my partner in life and crime went to school up there as well and we both admitted to missing the city when we were up getting married a couple of months back) but that'll depend partly on how life unfolds . . . doesn't it always?
Hopefully that's a bit clearer on the how I kind of grew up with the evolving traditions in the earlier days of RPG gaming. I'm not first wave, that's the guys who were active in the mid 70's when I was born (I'm 36, but I am proud to share a birth year with D&D) but I came into the hobby before the time it had received any real major attention. Pre Saturday-Morning D&D, around the time the guys in ET say around gaming while an alien lurked in the fields outside. :)
Most of what I developed came from a combination of first-hand growth with other gamers, some liberal fantasy novel infusion, and as much fantasy in visual media possible.
Caldis:
I played once (for about 2 hours) with an older group, friends of a friend, after that we learned the rules from the books and it was a hodge podge of books. The early D&D box sets mixed with the 1st edition rules as they came out. We didnt run into the problem of characters dieing all the time but I think I was pretty good at pulling punches right off the bat and one player in our group was very good at coming up with those excuses/playing the game beyond the mechanics to survive. I think we had the AD&D DMG guide fairly quickly and we used the your not dead until you hit -10 hit points rule quite often. Plus rarely ever using the wandering monster rules when resting in a dungeon and being generous with magic items made the game easily survivable. I dont think we cheated the rules too much but it definitely wasnt the game that people talk about like in the old school primer. We played entirely differently and we had fun.
David Berg:
Chris,
My friend Dan read an old D&D book and ran my first game for me when I was 9. My current take is that he subconsciously modeled the adventure after action stories from comics and TV, just using dungeons & monsters for color. We played by the rules, and occasionally something happened that wouldn't have made a good action story, and we'd argue and eventually rationalize a fudge ("Oh, but you're taller, so the rat gets a -1, so that killing stroke actually missed you.").
When I started GMing 2 years later, I avoided these moments by always fudging everything to produce good action scenes.
All my rule use derived from combat and from class- and level-based character abilities.
I think the book design of the AD&D2 PHB (which I bought just before running my first game) played a role in this. My 11-year-old attention span went straight to the cool pictures of monsters and weapons, and then to the clear tables of character stats. The rest of the book was long passages of bland text, so I skipped it.
Ps,
-David
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