Everything printed after the original three little booklets
having to do with OD&D (the game
as it was played before the publishing of AD&D)
was about suggestions, not rules. One of the founding tenets of D&D as it was played in its
formative years of ’74 to ’77 was about rulings, not rules. Another was that it
was expected that Dungeon Masters (DM’s) would mine for ideas wherever we could
find them: books, fairy tales, movies, old comics, the pulps--all were fair
game for ideas upon which to build an adventure or campaign.
OD&D (what the
original, first version has come to be called) was simple, as in rules light,
certainly not simple to understand in reading the three. (Often the term “Old
School” (OS) and “OD&D” are used more or less interchangeably.) Every DM
sculpted his campaign as he (they were all males in the beginning) saw fit.
DM’s in those heady, halcyon days when everything was new and wonderful were
direct descendants of our Neolithic ancestors who threw sheep shoulder bones
into the fire and read the cracks. We “read” something just as exotic—platonic
solids made of pretty colored plastic and covered with numbers. (The original
d20’s had no “-teens”, just 0-9 twice.
We rolled a d6 alongside to add 10 or not.) There were no Jump Across a Chasm charts; we had Dexterity (Dex) and Strength (Str)
we could factor in to determine the chance of a Player Character (PC) making
it. Folks with high Dex stood a better chance of jumping the chasm through
which a raging torrent flows; they rolled a d20, the DM rolled a d20 and the DM
made a ruling. Was it arbitrary? Mostly not. I treated dice like Nordic
runestones; rolling high numbers was good; rolling 4 or less often meant it did
not work out so well—everything in between was where we read the cracks in the
sheep shoulders (and most of the time I paid no attention whatsoever to the die
I rolled). Oftentimes, just “rolling under your Dex” was all it took.
We all as DM’s created our own worlds in which things worked
in certain ways. Don’t like psionics? Fine, they don’t exist in your world.
Think that vampires as presented are too tough or not tough enough? OK, make
them fit your world. Think something ought to work a certain way, or not work a
certain way? No problem, they worked the way you felt “right” in your world.
When I took the first set of rules to the Southern Illinois
University-Carbondale’s Strategic Game Society (The SIUSGS) in the autumn of
’74 shortly after the GenCon I attended that summer, a few of the guys (no lady
members, back then as all we played were boardgames and miniatures (minis))
asked to see them, just to look at them. They were flustered and could make
little sense of them just casually scanning; it did not seem to bother anyone
in the slightest that only I “knew the rules”. We played 6 or 7 times a month
for at least six months before any of the dozen or so players felt like buying
a set of their own. It was two months before anyone else bought dice. The
point? You did not need a bookbag full of books to play Old School. You did not
have to familiarize yourself with dozens of charts and tables to be able to
play. All you needed was dice, pencil and paper and imagination. We had no
minis in the beginning; we used dice to teach ourselves mental spatial
reference skills. “Greg, you’re blue; Tom, you’re green and the orcs are red”.
To this day I prefer an OS type of melee, where it is flowing and fast and
one-on-ones only happen later in subsequent rounds; you might be fighting three
goblins but have hit each one only once so far… .
By now most everyone knows that TSR published the G Series
of modules to serve as a common framework for convention games and tournaments
(which were, in and of themselves, a perversion of the game’s ethos). We had to
standardize play and grade behavior against a rubric.
The untold story up to this point is why we published the
Supplements. I will give you my perspective:
Greyhawk (GH) was
the only “true” supplement in that it contained the Alt Combat system and a few
other things that simply could not be squeezed into the three original little
brown-boxed booklets referred to often as the 3LBB’s—the three little brown
books. It was truly supplementary material to flesh out the game. At first it
was thought that miniatures gamers (the original target audience) would be more
comfortable with the standard weapon damage. At some point someone had a “What
were we thinking?” moment and admitted that minis players were already
inveterate tinkerers , and Damage by Weapon Type was born.
As GH was named
after Gary’ campaign, it was widely perceived as “Gary’s supplement”. Wishing
to be fair, TSR told Dave that he could have a supplement also, and refine and
tinker with the overall system should he wish to. This became Blackmoor, the second supplement, so
named for his seminal campaign. As he stated frequently before his death, Dave
was not very happy about “his supplement”. (The reasons behind that have all
been dealt with at length in other venues. I go into a chunk of all that on the
thread I have on Dragonsfoot.org.) In it we introduced new ideas and
suggestions for building a temple and cult around it and making it a focus in a
campaign as an example for others to mimic; remember that “borrowing” was encouraged.
We showed players ways to go underwater and adventure. We were literally trying
to open minds to possibilities. It was the last true supplement; the following
books were horses of different colors.
Gary had very distinct ideas on how he thought his game
should be played. One quirk? He found it intellectually incomprehensible why anyone
would wish to play anything but a human Player Character (PC). He found the
idea of “half-breeds” to be repugnant, and not just half-orcs, either. He
simply could not wrap his head around it at first. However, he knew there were
some battles he could win and some not worth fighting, especially if they drove
sales. There were other challenges to the game, which brings me to the subject
of hubris.
Dictionary.com defines hubris thusly; “…excessive pride or
self-confidence; arrogance.” We
had a little pride, but a lot more arrogance, now that I look back on it. We
absolutely felt that we “knew” the way the game “should be played”. We fought
off the waves of sexual weirdos on the East Coast with their fascination with
Girdles of Sex Changing and more; no Moms were going to let their kids play that stuff. We outlasted the hordes
clamoring for Spell Points, the most unbalancing feature at the time that would
have had wizards ruling the worlds. (Another of Gary’s quirks was that he
really did not like wizards and that human fighters should be the heroes of the
campaign.) We persevered against the adherents of critical hits and hit
locations; didn’t they realize that fighting a really bad guy with something
like a Vorpal Sword was going to cost them limbs causing them to bleed out? We
preserved the original abstract concept of hit points. We felt that these
challenges to the game, as well as many others too numerous or petty or
insignificant now to name, needed to be quashed so that the game remained true
to Gary and Dave’s vision.
At one point a bunch of would-be “improvers” flat-out
told us we did not know what we were doing and should let the game out into the
world, giving up all rights. Now that was arrogance.
We shaped and guided the evolution of the game with the
supplements. When magic began to
proliferate, we saw a way to shape it and expand it in an “approved”’ fashion
with new spells and artifacts. We also addressed an area of imbalance
overlooked for some time; monsters with psionic powers like Mindflayers were
too horrible even in a fantasy game as they wielded an unstoppable weapon. So
we came out with a psionics system that was grotesquely misunderstood and
misused from its very publication. (As the author of a great deal of it I
acknowledge that it could have been done better and explained more
clearly—hindsight.) This was Eldritch
Wizardry. These were always presented as suggestions and ideas, never
rules. It said so in every Foreword I
wrote, but we also hoped that our “gentle nudging” would steer the game back.
Time passed and the game continued to grow as well as
expand in unexpected directions. Level-creep--PC’s at high Levels that were
never considered, let alone allowed for, began to proliferate. In the early
years PC’s “retired” at Lvl 9 or 10 and a new PC started; this level-creep was
eating up the game. We were getting pleas for help from DM’s and players alike.
The tipping point came one day in a letter I had to open
that day that spurred a supplement
almost that very week. (I must have “had
the duty” that day; we took turns opening and reading mail to TSR.) In this
powerful thought provoker, a bewildered DM wrote the following, more or less (I
will paraphrase a bit):
“Dear TSR, I
don’t know where to go with my campaign next. Last session, my players went to
Valhalla. They killed Loki, all the Valar, a dozen Valkyries, Thor and Odin and
destroyed the Bifrost Bridge. “
I read this aloud to Gary and Brian; when
we picked ourselves up off the floor or regained our senses, as the case may
have been, ( I swear to you that this is true) we knew level-creep had gone too
far. That week saw the impetus for one more supplement gather enough steam that
I set out to edit the last of the RPG-oriented supplements, Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes. This was
the closest to a rule book that we came; we felt that PC’s should not be
powerful enough to knock off gods. So we gave them really high amounts of HP:
Odin 300, Thor 275. We charted out character levels undreamed of in the
original game.
One other crucial point to consider about the
supplements is that they produced money on a regular basis and helped the
company grow. They were predictably reliable cash cows.
Earlier I mentioned that we ran a lot of tournaments at game
conventions. They were huge moneymakers for us, particularly at GenCon where we got all the admission
and event fees. Even with modules, we were still finding it nearly impossible
to find a large enough pool of DM’s that thought enough like us to feel
completely comfortable. It also came to pass that various lawsuits came to be
filed at this time that caused a desire to create a new brand. TSR came to the
conclusion that it was time to actually codify D&D; thus was Advanced
Dungeons & Dragons born, and the death knell of the loosey-goosey,
fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants OS style of play. There were so many things we
did not see coming, the most reprehensible of which is the rules-lawyer.
I have told the story elsewhere: Gary and I spent a week
in his office at the end of which the general outline of Basic D&D and AD&D
had been laid down. Basic was toned
down for younger players and made simpler to understand for easing them into
it. AD&D was a tarted-up,
codified version of OD&D that
would now compel everyone to play the same. Worse, it was now a whole hell of a
lot less engaging to the imagination; everything could be found on a chart or
table. OS, or OD&D if you will, is more mentally engaging and more
challenging than all the subsequent editions, not less. It is also tons simpler
to play.
The sequencing of the releases of those first three
hardbounds was a masterpiece of marketing. We knew everyone would have to have
the whole set and released them in an order sure to sell them all well, and it
did. And it killed the OS style of
play for a great portion of then-current players; new players only saw AD&D.
So why do I continue to play OD&D when I mid-wifed AD&D?
Because it is all the things 1st
Edition AD&D (1E) is not. It is not slaved to charts and tables,
although it has some. It is not arguable; it works that way on my world because
I say so. It is about gathering information, not relying on Skills and
Abilities to do the work for you. It is about playing well, having fun and
living to fight another day.
I see a dearth of those skills and abilities in newer
versions. I think that in some ways OS
required a higher caliber player as well as requiring trust at the table; I see
the art of running a great table being less respected (and practiced). I
actually had a young man in a game at GaryCon tell me I was doing it wrong one
time and that I was not being fair; the table stared in open-mouthed amazement
all the while. I told him that I was sorry he wasn’t having any fun and that he
was free to leave the game; he did not ask for a refund, although I am sure I
could have gotten him one.
Old School-style was more difficult and much more
nuanced than what later editions engendered. It required more roleplaying, it
required asking lots of questions; thus was “the caller” born. The term “the caller”
surely had many other synonyms, but it was a vital role in early role-playing.
When the entire party started to ask questions for one reason or another, the
DM could be overcome by the cacophony. The caller had to be able to sort
through his compatriot’s babble and then turn around to the DM with a coherent
set of questions, as well as making sure that all his party was heard;
sometimes the player that hardly ever opened his mouth had a spectacular
insight. Contrary to what you might be thinking, the caller was not always the
“dynamic leader-type” that every group seemed to produce that made decisions or
swayed the decisions through force of will. But that role was one hell of a
character builder. Ofttimes, the caller was the one that led the party in
exploring.
Another salient point to keep in mind is that we gamers
then (yes, I count myself in that group) were not all possessed of the greatest
set of social tools and skills, not all of us, anyway. (I was an exception in
that I had been four years in the Navy during Nam, been an NCO, l was married
and had a child while going to college; also four years is a lot of time in
which to mature.) Lots of players “found their voices” playing RPG’s, gaining
self confidence and self assurance. I am not making this up; one of the more
common themes I hear at cons is how playing RPG’s (particularly D&D) brought people out of their
shell and into a social world.
The caller’s day is done; charts and tables and skills
and abilities have all superseded that role; thinking creatively has been
stifled; if it isn’t on a chart or table, it can’t be done. In one of my games at
GaryCon one time, I had a dwarf PC kill two huge polar bears single-handed.
That was not on any chart, but in OS,
it could happen. It’s all fantasy, after all.
I guess what I have been leading up to is not another Edition War salvo, but
simply this; OS/OD&D involved
more roleplaying, not less, and more thought
and consideration and just plain thinking. OS
may be simpler, but in no way is it easier.
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