Early D&D play and "problematic procedures"
The_Barwickian:
My route to RPGs is, perhaps, unusual. The only boardgames I'd played were things like Monopoly and other family games. I'd played toy soldiers with the lad next door as a kid, but we didn't really have any complex rules for that - we hid our soldiers around the room and called shots; any soldier spotted and shot was removed from play.
At school, we played little pen and paper games at breaks or in the back of dull classes. Squares, noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe to Americans), battleships and a kind of pencil-flick wargame I don't have a name for: each player draws a shoreline with gun emplacements on opposite ends of a sheet of paper. To attack, you place the tip of a pencil on one of you guns and flicked it out to leave a path across the paper, hopefully hitting (and thus destroying) one of your opponent's gun emplacements. The one with guns at the end is the winner (my Dad told me of playing the same game when he was at school in the '40s).
By the spring of '81 someone in our group came up with a game we called Mazes. Someone drew a maze, and someone else had to work their way through it, either to the centre or to the other edge. Then it started to get elaborate: if I fire was drawn you could only get through if you'd prevously found a fire extinguisher. You could only get past a dalek if you'd founf a gon (and of the guns a pistol could be used once and a submachinegun 3 times).
The mazes became bigger and more elaborate still. We reused them - if you drew a maze, each friend could try it. A lad called Jason Spence drew the biggest maze, I remember that clearly. It could take an entire maths class to run through it.
After summer, Jon Midgley came to school with a proper printed rulebook for something called Dungeons & Dragons (the Holmes edition, for those who keep track of such things), which he'd played with his cousin over the holidays. What is it, we wanted to know. "It's like mazes, only better."
I think I missed the first game, but a coupld of friends were keen for me to try it. I rolled up a character with some borrowed dice, we walked into a room in a dungeon and got killed by zombies with two-handed swords, I was hooked.
We were on the cusp of the first and second wave of gaming. A lot of the things in Jon's dungeon had been handed down like folktales. One room jad a sleeping giant called Jarl, who we never dared wake up. If we found a secret passage, a LIttle Old Man appeared and yelled "secret passage".
For my birthday, a few weeks later, I wanted nothing but a copy of Dungeons & Dragons of my own. I got the Moldvay version, with the Keep on the Borderlands, then the Expert set...
By the following Easter, we'd kind spread out, Some lads got AD&D. I got Traveller and RuneQuest. We looked forward to lunchtimes, when we'd find an empty classroom and play Car Wars, Melee, T&T, and later Rolemaster, Warhammer (the first edition), Call of Cthulhu and MERP.
A couple of lads joined a wargames club which allowed roleplaying. We were very much the newcomers, but I think they were keen to get us in and expose us to 'real' games - there was always an Ace of Aces crew there, but others did medeival skirmishes and napoleonic games, mostly using rules written by one of the established mamers, which used playing cards as the randomiser.
There were hobby game shops in abundance in those days, and even Woolworths and department shops stocked AD&D and scenarios. I avidly read White Dwarf and (later) Imagine, TSR UK's magazine, which exposed me to new games.
I've always tended to collect supplements to read when I'm not actively playing or GMing. I think that tendency started with Traveller, which I mostly played solo, friends being more into fantasy gaming rather than SF. I grew up in quite an isolated area, so solo gaming by creating Trav characters and doing trade and speculation was an enjoyable way to spend an evening I even played the Prison Planet adventure as a solo game.
When I really got into a game, I'd get everything I could find or afford. I still have a ton of MERP supplements, for instance, and a load of RQ2 and 3 stuff. But I liked setting or background supplements better than rules supplements.
But aside from the occasional adventure scenario, I don't remember ever using much more than core rules in play. If it came to looking up something obscure, we tended to wing it instead.
I still like supplements, but I have cut down the number of games I try to stay current with. I play 3.5, not 4th. I javen't really upgraded my GURPS tp 4th edition. My most recent edition of RUnequest is RQ3 (the Avalon Hill version). I'm up to date with Hero System, and I've just started Burning Wheel with the Gold version *and the Monster Burner and Magic Burner are now in the mail).
So there's me: not kind of wargaming experience, but an outgrowth of traditional schoolboy pen-and-paper games.
Gordon C. Landis:
Barwickian - I played MANY of the solo Tunnels and Trolls books, and remember trying to do "solo play" with other systems, but I never played with Traveller that much. Thinking back, it would have been a good fit . . .
One of the main things I was trying to examine here for myself was how much of that clear rule/supplement "craving" I remember from the old days actually turns out to be problematic for the kind of play I'm interested in nowadays. It took a bit of work (and definetly some support from this-here Forge thing to get clarity/polish to that work) to get my mind focused on the play styles and techniques that actually work best for me, so that I look back at the need for official word and wonder "what was I thinking?"
You remind me, though, that some good play and great experiences resulted anyway, so thanks for that!
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page