You-tube interview with Gronan

[Finarvyn]

Rafe pointed this video out to me. It's a 4-hour podcast but only the last 3 hours actually has Michael in it. While he was often very grumpy and snarky on message boards, in this video he is very helpful and articulate and gave a lot of ideas and stories about the good old days and how gaming in the 1970's compares to gaming today. I wish more of the old guard would take the time to honestly reflect and share stories. I know that many of them feel like they are being picked on by those who prefer the modern style of play, but only through interaction with the old timers can todays newer gamers grow to understand and appreciate the style of gaming prevalent in the 1970's.

I never got to play at Gary or Dave's tables in the 1970's. My interaction with both gentlemen took place long after that, so my impressions and stories aren't at all from the era that Michael is discussing. What I can say is that my home group from the era seems to have played OD&D in a manner which sounds a lot like that described by Michael (and Jeff and others) and it's a great way to play the game that we all love.

I started to listen to the video, then backed it up and took some notes. I will not claim that everything is an exact quote, but I tried hard to get the wording close and to maintain the spirit of what he had to say. For those who aren't interested in listening to three hours worth of podcast, I will post my notes below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-PixYZHviQ&feature=emb_err_woyt

[Finarvyn]

Not exact quotes, but some notes I took.

January of 72 – Dave Magerry’s Dungeons of Pasha Cada. (Michael got to play in 73.)

October of 73 – Gary’s got this cool new game called “Greyhawk.” You’re a bunch of guys exploring a wizard’s castle full of monsters and treasure and stuff.

Modules were a different beast. Original modules were all tournament modules. How do you declare a winner when you have ten teams of 9 players each? The answer is to make dungeons really deadly and “whoever’s body falls farthest from the entrance is the winner.” A lot of the modules were a lot more lethal than regular play, and that idea was not well transmitted.

First level of Greyhawk Castle – a next of six trolls who would make utter hash out of a gang of first level characters. If you ignored the broken skulls, the gnawed bones, the horrible stench – then Gary’s attitude was, “well, that’s just too bad. Michael says, “there was no way we fought everything.”

Advantages of playing Dungeons of Pasha Cada first:
(1) We already knew that the deeper you go, the tougher the monsters.
(2) Wandering monsters are nothing but trouble. Magerry rolled a d6 every turn to see what level the monster showed up on, and it would attack anyone who was there. It had no treasure but it could wound you and make you drop a treasure, or maybe even drop all treasures and make you go back to the entrance. Wandering monsters are bad news; they exist only to deplete your resources. Don’t fight any stinking thing that wanders down the corridor.

Why gold for experience? Because it changes monsters into a hazard instead of XP on the hoof.

I try to limit my backstory to 25 words or less because the game is about how cool your character is now, not how cool it used to be.

What were Gary’s games like? It was a game. Volume 3 says that monsters can always open doors but players have to force them open. Monsters can see in the dark but if they are hired by players they lose that ability. For world-building that makes no flipping sense whatsoever, but to build a game those are fantastic rules. Greyhawk dungeon was the funhouse from hell, because Gary was fond of a combination of silly and dangerous.

Role play was emergent in play rather than built into the rules. It’s like if you have ever played poker – the rules for bluffing do not exist in poker. In one adventure Ernie had to negotiate for around 15 minutes with a chimera so the party could get out alive – you just can’t write rules for that kind of thing.

Gary would call and ask if you wanted to play, and when you got there you didn’t know who else would show up. You were not one tried-and-true band of adventurers , we were a bunch of characters who drifted together and then drifted apart again.

To be a good wargamer you have to balance caution with the willingness to take a calculated risk.

Except for spell lists and experience point charts, we never saw the rules.

Back in the University of Minnesota Michael’s group had a house rule about wishes. They were used to get something back that you had lost. You weren’t going to write a half-page essay to get the wording correct, but you got that something and we moved on with the game.

Gary didn’t use miniatures playing Greyhawk. He never used a battlemat. Dave Arneson always used miniatures and a battlemat.

Back in the day around half of the players were fighters. Half of the remaining were clerics because (1) clerics hit name level faster, and (2) clerics got great benefits at name level.

The first cleric was Mike Karr (Bishop Karr) as a reaction to the vampires in Dave Arneson’s campaign. (Dwayne Jenkins was a fan of Dark Shadows on TV and wanted to play a vampire. Later, Dave Fant’s character got turned into a vampire. Vampires were taking over the campaign.) The original cleric was designed to be a vampire hunter, which gradually evolved into a holy man.

If you play wargames, you will get your ass handed to you in a basket sometimes. Everyone knows that someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. When we first went into Castle Greyhawk we had that same basic mindset. You can’t win a battle without exposing your troops to danger, and if you expose your troops to danger you are going to lose some.

How did the Blackmoor games with Dave differ from Greyhawk with Gary?
(1) In Blackmoor, there was no honor among thieves. Blackhawk players were more self-centered and not as cohesive a group as those in Greyhawk. In Greyhawk there was more of a “fighters in the front ranks to protect the magic users” type of play.
(2) In Blackmoor there was no “raise dead.” Dead was dead.

Michael quotes p.36 of tU&WA: “[W]e urge you to refrain from writing for rule interpretations or the like unless you are absolutely at a loss, for everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way! On the other hand, we are not loath to answer your questions, but why have us do any more of your imagining for you?” And then Michael says, “I miss that attitude. Every game was different in some way and that was part of the attraction.”

You had OD&D and then came the Greyhawk supplement, and it was optional. Everything was optional. Then with the Monster Manual, it’s like, hey, here are some new monsters. The AD&D Player’s handbook had some new spells. If I use some spells from AD&D does that mean I’m playing AD&D?

Right around the time that AD&D came out, TSR made a deliberate shift in their marketing strategy. Instead of marketing to adult wargamers, they wanted to market to the 11-17 year old demographic because that demographic has a lot of disposable income. It was a good business move, but you can’t write the same kind of game for adolescents as you do for adult wargamers. At some point folks started writing about ways to protect the players from the arbitrary whims of the referee.

To quote Dave Arneson, “Don’t ask me what number you need. Roll the dice and I’ll tell you what happens.”

I’m not a big fan of mixing skill systems with level systems in a game system. Pretend for a moment that that Gary didn’t put those level titles on to levels for fun. If you are a fourth level fighter, you’re a hero. Is this something that a hero should be able to do?

The land of Ramshorn is half Conan the barbarian and half Daffy Duck cartoon, so if I can turn failure into something comical I probably will.

Two kinds of miniatures wargaming.
(1) Two guys show up with armies and fight. Everything is codified.
(2) The Kriegspiel style is where the referee sets up a scenario and acts as arbitrator.

ROTC Principles of War: The #1 principle is to know your objective. What are you trying to accomplish? (In a Kriegspiel approach the objectives of the two sides don’t have to be the same.)

With the LBB approach of all d6’s for hit dice, and weapons all doing d6 damage, it seems that low level magic users were less afraid to get into combat in a more intelligent way. Sneaking around in a flanking maneuver is not the same as expecting to stand in the front line of combat and duking it out.

Empire of the Petal Throne – it was both different and the same, if that makes any sense at all. Tekumel was about how you fit into society. It’s all about performing noble actions within the ethos of your temple and your family. It would have been a big help to the game if the novels had come out first, because you learn a lot about the society of Tekumel from the books. Without the novels Tekumel becomes a re-skinned D&D.

I’d like to move back to the days where players didn’t feel like they had to be protected from the whims of the referee. When we went into Greyhawk dungeon, Gary wasn’t the adversary. He was the referee who had set up the scenario. The referee is simply describing the action. The referee is not your opponent. I’ve been working on (Free Kriegspiel Revolution) for a couple of year to try to re-establish the basic level of trust so that not everything has to be codified. I could run an entire evening’s adventure with nothing but the notebook containing the dungeon, the hit charts, and the saving throw table. If I don’t remember a rule, I wing it.

Two things that happened in Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor that marked when fantasy games became more than just a wargame:
(1) The day that Pete Gaylord said, “I want to play a wizard” and Dave said, “okay, what do wizards do?” and they sat down and negotiated it.
(2) The scenario was the Egg of Coot versus Blackmoor and Dave expected the players to fight against the Egg of Coot, but the players did other things instead and the Egg of Coot took over. Theoretically the game should have been over because the good guys lost, but instead Dave said, “I’m just going to keep running this game and see what happens” and there was no fixed agenda. There was no pre-determined way to see when someone had won and each player got to set his own victory conditions.

Blackmoor was a village of 500. After the Egg of Coot took over and the elves moved in, they put turn-styles in the dungeon entrance and started charging player characters to go down in the dungeon. And then the merchants in town set up booths and tents outside of the dungeon entrance to sell the players ten-foot poles and rope and spikes and iron rations and if Dave had thought of it there would have been a little guy selling sausage in a bun.

I (Michael) think of Gary as a very imaginative, hard-working man. Very imaginative, very humorous. Dave was a very sweet, very kind, very gentle man who, when he was on the other side of the wargame table from you, turned into a demon who would reach into your chest, tear your heart out, eat it in front of you, and laugh hysterically the entire time. Phil was brilliant, a major-league linguistic scholar, he had travelled all over the world, and when you read books off his shelf you could see where he got his ideas. They were all very imaginative in different ways.

[captainjapan]

Jul 3, 2020 19:41:12 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

While he was often very grumpy and snarky on message boards, in this video he is very helpful and articulate and gave a lot of ideas and stories about the good old days and how gaming in the 1970's compares to gaming today.

Yeah, I haven't seen the video yet, but I do remember listening to a BBC Radio interview with him, once. The Michael Mornard on that program was so warm and accomodating an interview, I thought it couldn't possibly be the same guy posting to these boards. It was very surprising.

[geoffrey]

Jul 3, 2020 19:41:47 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

Back in the University of Minnesota Michael’s group had a house rule about wishes. They were used to get something back that you had lost. You weren’t going to write a half-page essay to get the wording correct, but you got that something and we moved on with the game.

Yep, that's pretty much how I do wishes: They fix/restore you and/or your stuff. They do NOT give you new powers/riches/etc. Examples:

So your party lost a total of 20 experience levels in a fight with spectres? No problem! A single wish will restore them all.

So you want to go up 1 experience level? Sorry, but a wish will not help you here. You have to acquire xp the old-fashioned way.

And Fin, thank you for typing all that up!

[Deleted]

Jul 3, 2020 22:20:07 GMT -6 captainjapan said:

The Michael Mornard on that program was so warm and accomodating an interview, I thought it couldn't possibly be the same guy posting to these boards. It was very surprising.

Without trying to resurrect that particular kind of discussion, but - yeah, precisely. Which is why I never quite understood his tiring and obnoxious antics, either here, or elsewhere. First, because him catching fame as a histrionic person surely doesn't make him more attractive to potential collaborators. (Like the guys from the podcast.) Even if he was a very stupid person, he would know by pure trial-and-error field testing at this point which kind of action garners him more positive reactions.

But second, and lamentably so, because it's pretty obvious that Michael is not a very stupid person: He can play things cool if he chooses to do so. The idea that he purposefully acts and behaves the way he did here is quite disappointing. One cannot but wonder about his reasoning behind it. That he has a reputation within the overall community that's big enough for people seeking him out for interviews etc. is because platforms like ours continue to supply him with an audience, and, particularly in his case, not because of any merit of his own. (In comparison, to, say, any of the actual game designers that worked back in the day, for example.) So, if he enjoys being in the spotlight, then one has wonder why he so notoriously and needlessly tests what the boundaries of goodwill are with people. Not "me", not "us here", but generally anyone who has the bad luck to run into him online.

[Deleted]

I listened to all of this last week. I enjoyed the part about Ernie negotiating with the Chimaera particularly. The way Michael described the monster's personality and how Ernie had to carefully reverse all the normal Human sentiments to retain its favor was very amusing. I...wish that when I'd ran into him on Facebook back in the day that it had been this version of the man I'd spoken to. I got somebody else inhabiting the same body.

[doublejig2]

Jul 6, 2020 0:05:35 GMT -6 @rafael said:

Jul 3, 2020 22:20:07 GMT -6 captainjapan said:

The Michael Mornard on that program was so warm and accomodating an interview, I thought it couldn't possibly be the same guy posting to these boards. It was very surprising.

Without trying to resurrect that particular kind of discussion, but - yeah, precisely. Which is why I never quite understood his tiring and obnoxious antics, either here, or elsewhere. First, because him catching fame as a histrionic person surely doesn't make him more attractive to potential collaborators. (Like the guys from the podcast.) Even if he was a very stupid person, he would know by pure trial-and-error field testing at this point which kind of action garners him more positive reactions.

But second, and lamentably so, because it's pretty obvious that Michael is not a very stupid person: He can play things cool if he chooses to do so. The idea that he purposefully acts and behaves the way he did here is quite disappointing. One cannot but wonder about his reasoning behind it. That he has a reputation within the overall community that's big enough for people seeking him out for interviews etc. is because platforms like ours continue to supply him with an audience, and, particularly in his case, not because of any merit of his own. (In comparison, to, say, any of the actual game designers that worked back in the day, for example.) So, if he enjoys being in the spotlight, then one has wonder why he so notoriously and needlessly tests what the boundaries of goodwill are with people. Not "me", not "us here", but generally anyone who has the bad luck to run into him online.

I'm no moderator and confess I enjoyed (hence sort of 'expense free') the unpredictable and sometimes explosive Mornard posts. I thus wish him well and more generally so. Same regards this forum.

[Deleted]

Sure, mate, and so do we all. Hope he stays well, and hope he finds a way to channel his evident passion for the hobby in a positive way. - That said, and I can't emphasize that enough, this wasn't, in principle, a personal issue between our team and Gronan, or could be justified by the age difference or by a growing disconnect within a changing hobby: Gronan, repeatedly, and against our explicit warnings, tried to outright harass posters he didn't personally like, or, in a general sense, "approve of". And when we told him that he couldn't go on doing that, he threw a fit, and deleted his account here. That wasn't an issue of, whatever, different perspectives. That was him being a bully, and the rest of us watching him with growing sadness and disgust. I don't miss that guy. I'd like to miss the person we see in the video: I don't think I've ever met that one, though.

[doublejig2]

Yeah, and so history is served by heroes in the house of moderation.

[scalydemon]

Thanks for taking notes and posting that Fin. Some interesting bits/takes.

[Finarvyn]

Yeah, I really liked it. Stuff like this gets me thinking about the good old days of my campaigns. Lots of nostalgia for an era long gone. Listening to Michael motivated to finally buy a CD copy of the "Secrets of Blackmoor" project.