Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Well, the gaming world anyway.

I was just about 16 when it happened, though I doubt most people realized it at the time.

To me it was when AD&D came out, and all of a sudden my LBBs set was no longer cool (among the uncoolest people in the world, I might add) but the large, professionally done three volume set, that was soon to be found not just in the nerdy wargame shops, but respectable book sellers like Little Professor and Barnes & Noble definitely told the gaming world that the guppy had not only swallowed the whale, but that it was on the way to creating the industry that became the whale.

At least where us nerds were concerned.

Forty five years later, I've JUST bought my first (second hand) D&D rulebook and miniatures.

No doubting D&D is very widespread, but still some conquering to go....

D&D has never really been part of my Nerdery.

I have played it a couple of times, but after I’d played other TTRPGs, such as Vampire and Rogue Trader.

Whilst it’s overall impact cannot be underestimated (we can confidently say D&D and GW are the tent poles of the modern Nerd World) as a game it’s just not for me.

Was Gygax a rags-to-riches story, or a rags-to-riches-to-rags story?

I lost track of him.

I got into the game during the boxed set era. Spent countless hours playing, still have hand-written characters on notebook paper and the dungeons to go with them. Probably from 1984-5.

stroller wrote:
Forty five years later, I've JUST bought my first (second hand) D&D rulebook and miniatures.

No doubting D&D is very widespread, but still some conquering to go....

The Dungestapo will be at your door later today. Please do not resist; as that only makes it protracted and painful for us all.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
D&D has never really been part of my Nerdery.

I have played it a couple of times, but after I’d played other TTRPGs, such as Vampire and Rogue Trader.

Whilst it’s overall impact cannot be underestimated (we can confidently say D&D and GW are the tent poles of the modern Nerd World) as a game it’s just not for me.

D&D and Rogue Trader have always been my favorite skirmish/rpg games. In my opinion, each crosses over into the other, though, in each case, the OSR rules only.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Was Gygax a rags-to-riches story, or a rags-to-riches-to-rags story?

I lost track of him.

I got into the game during the boxed set era. Spent countless hours playing, still have hand-written characters on notebook paper and the dungeons to go with them. Probably from 1984-5.

So much told about him is either second hand, or by people who had a grudge against him. He certainly seems to have thought very highly of himself, but, hey, when the dust settled, he had created the game that changed the gaming world for good.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Was Gygax a rags-to-riches story, or a rags-to-riches-to-rags story?

I lost track of him.

I got into the game during the boxed set era. Spent countless hours playing, still have hand-written characters on notebook paper and the dungeons to go with them. Probably from 1984-5.

You might check out Game Wizards by Jon Peterson. Here’s a review of it:
https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/22710606/dungeons-dragons-game-wizards-history-book-peterson-interview

There’s a blogger who reviewed and compared Peterson’s book and maybe Slaying the Dragon or Of Dice and Men (or both?). I wish I could find the link for you, but I can’t find it at the moment. It was a comprehensive comparative review. None of the players come out looking very good, but the story how Gygax got ousted from his own company is sad.

When D&D launched in '74 & the gaming world changed forever I was.... a small child living just outside Fort Hood Texas & completely unaware of it.

 Fugazi wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Was Gygax a rags-to-riches story, or a rags-to-riches-to-rags story?

I lost track of him.

I got into the game during the boxed set era. Spent countless hours playing, still have hand-written characters on notebook paper and the dungeons to go with them. Probably from 1984-5.

You might check out Game Wizards by Jon Peterson. Here’s a review of it:
https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/22710606/dungeons-dragons-game-wizards-history-book-peterson-interview

There’s a blogger who reviewed and compared Peterson’s book and maybe Slaying the Dragon or Of Dice and Men (or both?). I wish I could find the link for you, but I can’t find it at the moment. It was a comprehensive comparative review. None of the players come out looking very good, but the story how Gygax got ousted from his own company is sad.

A persistent story is that Gygax didn't design it, but he did copyright and trademark it and that the creative genius was Dave Arneson, whose obit was full of reproach that he never got the credit he deserved.

As in so many other cases of "hobby friends strike it rich," the battle over wealth and credit destroyed relationships.

Gygax was very much into self-promotion, and I recall him pushing a new system after his ouster that never took off.

TSR's fate itself is a cautionary tale of what happens when gamers with zero actual business experience are successful beyond their wildest dreams.

Say what you will about GW, but it became the behemoth that TSR should have been and the key difference was better management.

I had not been born, and I am rather old now.

I started with the Red Box set from a locally owned bookstore in a small strip mall I had to bike to.

I didn't find out about D&D until around '79, when I was about 9 years old. They had a bit on the nightly news showing a dungeon setup, I think at Gencon. Centerpeice was a red dragon standing over its hoard as I recall.

Got the Holmes set that Christmas and been playing ever since, one version or another (well, except 4E...). I'm greatly enjoying the current 5E version and I'm happy to see how popular it's become.

My dream was to be a designer/writer for TSR - and I did manage to get an adventure published in Dungeon a little before 3E dropped, which made me very, very happy.

Was not able to read in 1974 being less than a year old. First exposed to D&D in 1983.

CB

My first endeavor into RPGs was buying the Time Trap for the Marvel Superhero RPG, not knowing anything about the game I had just bought a module with no game rules. Luckily I asked around my school and found
that people played D&D and explained the basics to me. It was then I learned of 1st edition D&D and about Gary Gygax, but at that point, he was leaving TSR and starting his own company. Being more into Sci-Fi than Fantasy I was happy to see he released the game Cyborg Commando and I saved up my money to buy it. Look it up, it almost broke me from playing RPGs ever again. Calling it bad is being nice.

The story of TSR, Loraine, the Blume brothers, etc., was a sad and small-spirited one. Gary thought he was a far greater genius than he acually was, and Arneson was certainly much, if not all of the creative genius behind the whole thing.

Gygax's success was in marketing the whole thing, but he got lazy and made a lot of enemies.

Fun, but sad stuff. In every Camelot, there are a few Mordreds.

 Genoside07 wrote:
My first endeavor into RPGs was buying the Time Trap for the Marvel Superhero RPG, not knowing anything about the game I had just bought a module with no game rules. Luckily I asked around my school and found
that people played D&D and explained the basics to me. It was then I learned of 1st edition D&D and about Gary Gygax, but at that point, he was leaving TSR and starting his own company. Being more into Sci-Fi than Fantasy I was happy to see he released the game Cyborg Commando and I saved up my money to buy it. Look it up, it almost broke me from playing RPGs ever again. Calling it bad is being nice.

Wow, that was when I was really active in gaming and somehow that never registered. I remember Dangerous Journeys and thinking that it had a whiff of desperation about it.

So much of RPGs in those days was to create as many tables as humanly possible for as many bizarre circumstances as might arise. "Buy our game, we have a rule for everything!" seemed to be a recurring pitch.

One detail I remember about those days was that we mapped the dungeon, but never the combats. At most someone would throw some dice down to explain the positions, but we never got that "tactical." If a player could come up with a plausible thing he wanted to do, it was generally allowed. That flowed through multiple groups of people in the area.

It was only later on that we used miniatures on maps, and the frequency and intensity of the disputes exceeded anything I'd known before then. Weird that middle schoolers and teenagers were more cooperative than actual adults with degrees in things.

Or, maybe not so weird.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Genoside07 wrote:
My first endeavor into RPGs was buying the Time Trap for the Marvel Superhero RPG, not knowing anything about the game I had just bought a module with no game rules. Luckily I asked around my school and found
that people played D&D and explained the basics to me. It was then I learned of 1st edition D&D and about Gary Gygax, but at that point, he was leaving TSR and starting his own company. Being more into Sci-Fi than Fantasy I was happy to see he released the game Cyborg Commando and I saved up my money to buy it. Look it up, it almost broke me from playing RPGs ever again. Calling it bad is being nice.

Wow, that was when I was really active in gaming and somehow that never registered. I remember Dangerous Journeys and thinking that it had a whiff of desperation about it.

So much of RPGs in those days was to create as many tables as humanly possible for as many bizarre circumstances as might arise. "Buy our game, we have a rule for everything!" seemed to be a recurring pitch.

One detail I remember about those days was that we mapped the dungeon, but never the combats. At most someone would throw some dice down to explain the positions, but we never got that "tactical." If a player could come up with a plausible thing he wanted to do, it was generally allowed. That flowed through multiple groups of people in the area.

It was only later on that we used miniatures on maps, and the frequency and intensity of the disputes exceeded anything I'd known before then. Weird that middle schoolers and teenagers were more cooperative than actual adults with degrees in things.

Or, maybe not so weird.

Interesting. Totally different from the way we did it when I started in '79.

Everybody had miniatures, and painted ones at that. It was simply an extension of miniatures wargaming into the dungeon, and that's how we played it. It your dwarf had a movement of 6, then he could move up to six squares on the tabletop, and no more. There were a lot of "DM calls" of course: "if I swing over the crocodile pit on the rope, and try to grabe the princess before the pirates lower her in..." the DM would give his ruling about the modifier to the dexterity save, or whatever, but once he made a final ruling, you rolled your dice and took your chances, or tried something else.

Played AD&D 2e my last three years of high school. Moved off for college, found my way into the game store group there. They introduced me to skill-based games, and I've never been able to go back to class-and-level games, despite a few attempts. (Usually with each edition of D&D's release.)

 Psychopomp wrote:
Played AD&D 2e my last three years of high school. Moved off for college, found my way into the game store group there. They introduced me to skill-based games, and I've never been able to go back to class-and-level games, despite a few attempts. (Usually with each edition of D&D's release.)

I think that was one of the better elements of the first iterations of D&D actually.

In the middle ages, you didn't go to college or a trade school, you did what you're father did. If he was a knight, man at arms, tavern keeper or franklin, you probably were too, because that's the way God intended it.

For that reason, I've always found skill based games more unrealistic the further back in time they are placed.

Yeah, I got and used miniatures the day after getting my first D&D set. Couldn't use them at school, of course (but neither the dice - school considered it "gambling"), but had them for everywhere else. For a game mat, we used my mom's sewing board - a perfect 3 ft. X 6 ft. area that folded up nicely between games.

I also remember using the Lego castle bricks & plates for dungeons too - back when the castle bricks were yellow!

 Stormonu wrote:
Yeah, I got and used miniatures the day after getting my first D&D set. Couldn't use them at school, of course (but neither the dice - school considered it "gambling"), but had them for everywhere else. For a game mat, we used my mom's sewing board - a perfect 3 ft. X 6 ft. area that folded up nicely between games.

I also remember using the Lego castle bricks & plates for dungeons too - back when the castle bricks were yellow!

I used to make "battle mats" by drawing o 1" square grid on cardboard.

Sigh. Good times.

 NapoleonInSpace wrote:
Interesting. Totally different from the way we did it when I started in '79.

Everybody had miniatures, and painted ones at that. It was simply an extension of miniatures wargaming into the dungeon, and that's how we played it. It your dwarf had a movement of 6, then he could move up to six squares on the tabletop, and no more. There were a lot of "DM calls" of course: "if I swing over the crocodile pit on the rope, and try to grabe the princess before the pirates lower her in..." the DM would give his ruling about the modifier to the dexterity save, or whatever, but once he made a final ruling, you rolled your dice and took your chances, or tried something else.

I didn't play in a D&D game that used figures until the early 1990s. All my games to that point in high school and college were "in your head' with sketch diagrams or white boards to show where people were relatively.

And they ran much more smoothly, because no one argued about LOS or measurement or such. It was just "Hmm, he's hard to see, roll a d6 and on a 3+ you can see him" kind of thing.

The nice thing about it is that everyone has their own version of the room/dungeon/forest and they're all correct in their own ways. Once you plot figures on a map, people argue because the visions conflict.

Again, we did the "graph your way forward" thing, but that was just to see how the dungeon looked and how to get out, not to find tactical advantages.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


I didn't play in a D&D game that used figures until the early 1990s. All my games to that point in high school and college were "in your head' with sketch diagrams or white boards to show where people were relatively.

And they ran much more smoothly, because no one argued about LOS or measurement or such. It was just "Hmm, he's hard to see, roll a d6 and on a 3+ you can see him" kind of thing.

The nice thing about it is that everyone has their own version of the room/dungeon/forest and they're all correct in their own ways. Once you plot figures on a map, people argue because the visions conflict.

Again, we did the "graph your way forward" thing, but that was just to see how the dungeon looked and how to get out, not to find tactical advantages.

Same. I was surprised the first time I saw a tactical map. I can see why people like it, but I guess I prefer the whole theater of the mind concept. And good point about “everyone has their own vision in their head and they’re all right.”

Us boys were going through the books from the White Box, and one of their sisters wanted to play. She looked at the cover of the Monster Manual and said she wanted to play Dave Arneson.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 NapoleonInSpace wrote:
Interesting. Totally different from the way we did it when I started in '79.

Everybody had miniatures, and painted ones at that. It was simply an extension of miniatures wargaming into the dungeon, and that's how we played it. It your dwarf had a movement of 6, then he could move up to six squares on the tabletop, and no more. There were a lot of "DM calls" of course: "if I swing over the crocodile pit on the rope, and try to grabe the princess before the pirates lower her in..." the DM would give his ruling about the modifier to the dexterity save, or whatever, but once he made a final ruling, you rolled your dice and took your chances, or tried something else.

I didn't play in a D&D game that used figures until the early 1990s. All my games to that point in high school and college were "in your head' with sketch diagrams or white boards to show where people were relatively.

And they ran much more smoothly, because no one argued about LOS or measurement or such. It was just "Hmm, he's hard to see, roll a d6 and on a 3+ you can see him" kind of thing.

The nice thing about it is that everyone has their own version of the room/dungeon/forest and they're all correct in their own ways. Once you plot figures on a map, people argue because the visions conflict.

Again, we did the "graph your way forward" thing, but that was just to see how the dungeon looked and how to get out, not to find tactical advantages.

Very different for my group, because we started with the TSR (was it even TSR back then? Lost in the mists of time...) rules set Chainmail, which was a very badly written, even for the time, fantasy miniatures game. SInce we played that with miniatures, and the rpg was written as an extension of the minis game, it was only natural to do the same thing there. The only real differnce, and I think everybody did it this way, was to throw out the twelve inch ruler in exchange for a square grid as a playing surface.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ced1106 wrote:
Us boys were going through the books from the White Box, and one of their sisters wanted to play. She looked at the cover of the Monster Manual and said she wanted to play Dave Arneson.

Cute


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Fugazi wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


I didn't play in a D&D game that used figures until the early 1990s. All my games to that point in high school and college were "in your head' with sketch diagrams or white boards to show where people were relatively.

And they ran much more smoothly, because no one argued about LOS or measurement or such. It was just "Hmm, he's hard to see, roll a d6 and on a 3+ you can see him" kind of thing.

The nice thing about it is that everyone has their own version of the room/dungeon/forest and they're all correct in their own ways. Once you plot figures on a map, people argue because the visions conflict.

Again, we did the "graph your way forward" thing, but that was just to see how the dungeon looked and how to get out, not to find tactical advantages.

Same. I was surprised the first time I saw a tactical map. I can see why people like it, but I guess I prefer the whole theater of the mind concept. And good point about “everyone has their own vision in their head and they’re all right.”

I guess that's maybe why I find the theater of the mind thing vaguely repugnant.

To me, rpging was, is, and probably always will be an extension of wargaming. Chess, being the primordial wargame is a good example. The queen can move all the way across the board, but she can't leap over other pieces, like the knight, nor can she change directions in the midst of her move. No matter how persuasively her controlling player might argue that, because of her deep love of the king, she ought to be able to sneak past the enemy bishop and in between her beloved king and the rook that has just checkmated him, the ref, if there is one, or your opponent, if there isn't, is just going to look at you funny and say, "Uh... sorry. That's checkmate. You lost."

I can see why people do it that way, and I get it that rpgs should and do allow for flexibility, but if you can't lose, you can't rally win either.

Okay, I have to confess I've never played (A)D&D. I regret not having experienced a late mentor's sessions of D&D, which he would DM in full Gandalf costume.

My introduction to RPGs was with "Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-playing Game" (1984), which was the RPG version of the classic Fighting Fantasy books. From there, I branched out to "proper" RPGs like Paranoia, Twilight: 2000, MegaTraveller, and eventually Vampire: The Masquerade.

Interesting to read about people using miniatures for RPGs. I've never played an RPG where people have done that - the odd sketch map or printout (back in the day) has been the extent of any visual props.

My firs game was in 1988. I never left the hobby since. Thanks, Gary!

 NapoleonInSpace wrote:
he had created the game that changed the gaming world for good.

 NapoleonInSpace wrote:
He certainly seems to have thought very highly of himself

I would to, if I were him, and that's a moral action to do!

 NapoleonInSpace wrote:
I guess that's maybe why I find the theater of the mind thing vaguely repugnant.

To me, rpging was, is, and probably always will be an extension of wargaming. Chess, being the primordial wargame is a good example. The queen can move all the way across the board, but she can't leap over other pieces, like the knight, nor can she change directions in the midst of her move. No matter how persuasively her controlling player might argue that, because of her deep love of the king, she ought to be able to sneak past the enemy bishop and in between her beloved king and the rook that has just checkmated him, the ref, if there is one, or your opponent, if there isn't, is just going to look at you funny and say, "Uh... sorry. That's checkmate. You lost."

Ah, but D&D bends the laws of reality. The queen can cast a flying spell, while pawns can summon swarms. You take the knight, but he drinks a healing potion and comes back for more.

I don't want to imply that my teenage role-playing consisted of deep storytelling or dramatic presentations - we played essentially a gang of remorseless killers bent on slaughtering everything we ran into. We absolutely used tactics, but we didn't describe them in terms of movement on a grid but rather how a fight would unfold.

In many ways, that is a more realistic way to look at it than simply dividing time into six-second increments and ticking off actions like a game of Squad Leader.

I can see why people do it that way, and I get it that rpgs should and do allow for flexibility, but if you can't lose, you can't rally win either.

Oh, people could definitely lose. Lots of character sheets torn up in frustration over the years in various groups. I only rarely lost a character because I played clerics, who everyone wanted to keep alive at all costs. Gotta protect the healer.

 NapoleonInSpace wrote:


I can see why people do it that way, and I get it that rpgs should and do allow for flexibility, but if you can't lose, you can't rally win either.

There is no "winning" in RPGs. RPGs are only played.



Granted, I think this has evolved a lot from Gary's day as I think there was an idea of a "win state" for D&D even if it was simply survival.

NapoleonInSpace wrote:I can see why people do it that way, and I get it that rpgs should and do allow for flexibility, but if you can't lose, you can't rally win either.

I don't see how this follows at all. If you want to use these terms, sure, you have a win state when you succeed in the mission/quest/adventure/whatever. You have a loss state when you don't. You have a marginal victory state or tactical victory state if you succeed in parts of the quest but fail in others.

All CvT and I are discussing are different ways to go about it. You can use minis on a map or you can use description. Either way, that's just the *how*

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:Oh, people could definitely lose. Lots of character sheets torn up in frustration over the years in various groups.

Exactly. I remember "Total Party Kill" or TPK was a term. That was a definite possibility in the early D&D days. You can TPK on a map or theater of the mind equally. It has nothing to do with how you choose to run combat encounters.

These days, I gather most DMs use minis/maps and TPK is rare or frowned on. So again you can see that loss states aren't necessarily linked to minis/maps.

 Fugazi wrote:
Exactly. I remember "Total Party Kill" or TPK was a term. That was a definite possibility in the early D&D days. You can TPK on a map or theater of the mind equally. It has nothing to do with how you choose to run combat encounters.

There was absolutely an undercurrent back then of players vs DMs. I remember DMs who kept "kill tallies" of PCs and were proud to compare their totals with others.

Nowadays that seems bizarre in the extreme, but it was part of the adolescent competition that fueled the growth of gaming. If you ask why a player would want to deal with such a psychopath, it was exactly the need to notch a "win." Serious rules-lawyering often ensued as players proved that they had outfoxed the DM at his own game. Obviously, the DM could just rain holy (or unholy) fire on the party and kill them all, but that not only resulting in a wave of paperwads, but social ostracism.

Some of the best games I played had rotating DMs, and in addition to the game itself, there was a competition among DMs to demonstrate superior preparation, appropriate mood and imagination, and keep things challenging while avoiding killing sprees because the guy whose character you creamed might be the next one to sit in the big chair. Payback is heck, etc.

And of course having a "name level" character kitted out with +5 everything, a castle, an army, minions and artifacts was definitely winning.

Ultimate victory was the well-earned retirement of a beloved character marked by the solemn placement of the notebook-paper record sheet in the very special foil-colored folder in your Trapper Keeper.

And yes, I still have my D&D Trapper Keeper.

 Stormonu wrote:
Yeah, I got and used miniatures the day after getting my first D&D set. Couldn't use them at school, of course (but neither the dice - school considered it "gambling"), but had them for everywhere else. For a game mat, we used my mom's sewing board - a perfect 3 ft. X 6 ft. area that folded up nicely between games.

I also remember using the Lego castle bricks & plates for dungeons too - back when the castle bricks were yellow!

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Easy E wrote:

 NapoleonInSpace wrote:


I can see why people do it that way, and I get it that rpgs should and do allow for flexibility, but if you can't lose, you can't rally win either.

There is no "winning" in RPGs. RPGs are only played.



Granted, I think this has evolved a lot from Gary's day as I think there was an idea of a "win state" for D&D even if it was simply survival.

This is one that I really just don't get. The whole point of the trip to Mordor, or Witchland, or Beyond the Wall, or wherever, is that its tough, uncertain, and things really, really, bite if you don't succeed.

Why play a game that essentially simulates a trip to Disney World?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Fugazi wrote:

NapoleonInSpace wrote:I can see why people do it that way, and I get it that rpgs should and do allow for flexibility, but if you can't lose, you can't rally win either.

I don't see how this follows at all. If you want to use these terms, sure, you have a win state when you succeed in the mission/quest/adventure/whatever. You have a loss state when you don't. You have a marginal victory state or tactical victory state if you succeed in parts of the quest but fail in others.

All CvT and I are discussing are different ways to go about it. You can use minis on a map or you can use description. Either way, that's just the *how*

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:Oh, people could definitely lose. Lots of character sheets torn up in frustration over the years in various groups.

Exactly. I remember "Total Party Kill" or TPK was a term. That was a definite possibility in the early D&D days. You can TPK on a map or theater of the mind equally. It has nothing to do with how you choose to run combat encounters.

These days, I gather most DMs use minis/maps and TPK is rare or frowned on. So again you can see that loss states aren't necessarily linked to minis/maps.

@Fugazi: There are, I think, multiple streams of thought running through this discussion. Just hold on and enjoy the ride ;-)

@Commissar von Toussaint: Yep. That's the way I loved it, and still do.