I first played it around 1974 or 1975, then gave it up after a couple years. Some friends who were Napoleonic wargamers found it at a convention. We used graph paper to map as we played, and after the first couple times, graduated to miniatures, once someone got some that weren't Napoleonic.
Of all the things for parents to lose their mind over, D&D will always rank among the absolute most absurd. The road to hell is paved with math and improv I guess.
That said, while most discussions on the older editions seems to center on how… utterly insane by modern standards so much of it is, I find myself forced to respect the gravitas of it all. Sure, no one in their right mind would design a game with rules like, “your grapple percentage chance is 10 x your Armor Class” in this enlightened era, but… if not for those early steps, would anyone be designing these kinds of games at all? Or would we all be sitting around talking about the latest edition of Strategos?
We never used boards and figures. It seems an obvious mistake now but then we didn’t really know it was an option. I stopped playing D&D around the eighth grade, but I’m impatient for my three sons to get old enough that I can start running campaigns. I already have all the new books and cardboard figures for them to use
I'm too young and live in country too far away from USA to have encountered first D&D editions... I actually only got to play when I was maybe 27 or 30, when 4th edition was already out, but my friend decided to run a throwback AD&D 2ed. campaign, and I was in.
Before that, we used to invent our own pen and paper and dice games with my friend when we were in countryside for the summer. They were mostly my attempts to re-create computer games known to me (like Civilization or Warcraft 2, and later Sid Meier's Pirates and MechWarrior 2) on paper and in a cooperative manner, because I can't stand to lose, so I never play against other people (we had a random-and-imagination-driven "AI" as an opponent in those games, e.g. I would say "1-3 this enemy city produces a tank this turn, 4-6 a battleship" and then roll a dice to see which it was).
I feel that tabletop RPGs would be a PERFECT fit for me in my childhood, but unfortunately, I never discovered them in time. I kind of heard about them, and I tried to play a few RPGs on my PC, but my English wasn't good enough at the time. Just hearing the term, I tried to outright invent a game that would fit it, but it mostly came down to drawing a huge list of completely unbalanced and vaguely worded spells, and never getting to actually invent combat or exploration mechanics.
What I missed completely was the idea that you have to prepare map, encounters and story beforehand. In our "strategy" games, we randomly generated almost everything (e.g. when an unit moved to open up unexplored terrain tiles, I just rolled to see if they were plains, mountains, water, forest or hills), and our "stories" were kind of randomly generated, too, as the player acting for AI (mostly me, my friend was content to play second fiddle here) scrambled to invent "reasons" for actions chosen from by a random roll.
Our summers together ended before we could do anything more - as we left school, and entered university, there wasn't enough time, and we drifted apart. During the last year or so, though, my friend got into MTG (local promoters actually came to his school and gifted interested students with starter decks!), and I guess there was a chance he would discover D&D and bring me in, but it never happened.
Anyway, that's my personal story about trying to invent role-playing games from almost zero and failing :)
I first played it around 1974 or 1975, then gave it up after a couple years. Some friends who were Napoleonic wargamers found it at a convention. We used graph paper to map as we played, and after the first couple times, graduated to miniatures, once someone got some that weren't Napoleonic.
Of all the things for parents to lose their mind over, D&D will always rank among the absolute most absurd. The road to hell is paved with math and improv I guess.
That said, while most discussions on the older editions seems to center on how… utterly insane by modern standards so much of it is, I find myself forced to respect the gravitas of it all. Sure, no one in their right mind would design a game with rules like, “your grapple percentage chance is 10 x your Armor Class” in this enlightened era, but… if not for those early steps, would anyone be designing these kinds of games at all? Or would we all be sitting around talking about the latest edition of Strategos?
I owned the Basic set myself. :) Man we had fun.
We never used boards and figures. It seems an obvious mistake now but then we didn’t really know it was an option. I stopped playing D&D around the eighth grade, but I’m impatient for my three sons to get old enough that I can start running campaigns. I already have all the new books and cardboard figures for them to use
I'm too young and live in country too far away from USA to have encountered first D&D editions... I actually only got to play when I was maybe 27 or 30, when 4th edition was already out, but my friend decided to run a throwback AD&D 2ed. campaign, and I was in.
Before that, we used to invent our own pen and paper and dice games with my friend when we were in countryside for the summer. They were mostly my attempts to re-create computer games known to me (like Civilization or Warcraft 2, and later Sid Meier's Pirates and MechWarrior 2) on paper and in a cooperative manner, because I can't stand to lose, so I never play against other people (we had a random-and-imagination-driven "AI" as an opponent in those games, e.g. I would say "1-3 this enemy city produces a tank this turn, 4-6 a battleship" and then roll a dice to see which it was).
I feel that tabletop RPGs would be a PERFECT fit for me in my childhood, but unfortunately, I never discovered them in time. I kind of heard about them, and I tried to play a few RPGs on my PC, but my English wasn't good enough at the time. Just hearing the term, I tried to outright invent a game that would fit it, but it mostly came down to drawing a huge list of completely unbalanced and vaguely worded spells, and never getting to actually invent combat or exploration mechanics.
What I missed completely was the idea that you have to prepare map, encounters and story beforehand. In our "strategy" games, we randomly generated almost everything (e.g. when an unit moved to open up unexplored terrain tiles, I just rolled to see if they were plains, mountains, water, forest or hills), and our "stories" were kind of randomly generated, too, as the player acting for AI (mostly me, my friend was content to play second fiddle here) scrambled to invent "reasons" for actions chosen from by a random roll.
Our summers together ended before we could do anything more - as we left school, and entered university, there wasn't enough time, and we drifted apart. During the last year or so, though, my friend got into MTG (local promoters actually came to his school and gifted interested students with starter decks!), and I guess there was a chance he would discover D&D and bring me in, but it never happened.
Anyway, that's my personal story about trying to invent role-playing games from almost zero and failing :)
Cool article! I never had the blue box - my first was the red box with Larry Elmore's red dragon art. (Man, I miss Waldenbooks!) 📚
Are you going to cover Grintooths Traps? I loved those books. Never used them ina game tho 😂
A system for shared storytelling in a kitchen-sink fantasy world was a genius idea.
Attaching insanely lethal combat mechanics to this experience was a terrible idea (and one that TSR never rectified).
Taking those insanely lethal combat mechanics and implementing them on a university mainframe was a genius idea.