How is the hobby understood/played where you're from?

[Deleted]

I was surfing the boards and found two very interesting comments.

In this post tkdco2 implied that he (like to) use a lot of miniatures and terrain.

tombowings in this post said that, living for some years in non-English speaking country, people didn't knew about The Dying Earth, and understanding the (traditional Vancian) magic system was difficult for them.

As someone living far away from USA and in a non-English speaking country I testify that most of us don't know Appendix N.
A lot of players didn't get to know RPG from 1974~1979 editions, most people still don't have a clue about the game "history".

A lot of classic literature isn't available in our language, even in English editions.
Books like of Fritz Leiber's or Burroughs' aren't normally available and when they are they cost a fortune.
Some other "Appendix N" authors still not available at all. (As far as I know some books are not easy to find on US as well right?)


In Brazil basically nobody used miniatures, we don't really know how to play using them, war games was never common and miniatures and terrain wasn't available until maybe Warhammer showing up on big cities.
I guess some people was playing Warhammer on early 00's, but Warhammer officially come to country only after 2017...

I get to know that in Japan up to date the hobby tastes are very different, IIRC they always preferred d6 and % based systems, and some time ago someone wrote a little about the rising of the hobby in Poland which was a very interesting reading.


How is the hobby understood in the US?
Is miniature use "a norm" on US?
What about Vancian Magic, is it widely understood?
There are places where people understand "RPG concepts" distinctly as well? (Like differences in style of play between Twin Cities vs Lake Geneva vs ??)

If you're from/living in other country, how is the hobby generally understood and played?

Edit: Another thing that I just remembered, "Dungeon Crawling" and "Hex Crawling" always was something rare in Brazil. People used to play simple "novel" adventures, even though my fist RPG was Basic D&D, I didn't got to know the Dungeon Crawling and Hex Crawling concepts until some years ago. Dungeons for us was only a couple of rooms, and not Mega Dungeons.

[Finarvyn]

I can't say for certain how others in the USE perceive the hobby, but I can say something about my experiences.

In the 1970's my group started with historical minis and hex-and-chit wargames. When we discovered OD&D we did sandbox home-brew type adventures and campaigns mostly. We had access to Judges Guild materials but not so many other products other than Strategic Review, Dragon Magazine, and TSR rules sets. We had military miniatures from Chainmail and other historical miniatures combat but no monster minis. We had access to a lot of the Appendix N books, as they were commonly found in new and used bookstores at that time. Our adventures began in the dungeon and expanded outward, into small towns and then local area maps and then baronies and eventually kingdoms. My world maps got bigger as the group explored more.

By the 1980's some of us were buying AD&D modules but much of our gaming was still home-made adventures and campaigns. We bought stuff like the Greyhawk boxed set, but hardly used that material. The guy with historical minis quit playing so we were almost exclusively doing games with no minis at all. We often used tokens, dice, or RISK pieces to represent characters, but almost never on a battlemat.

Time passed and my hometown group drifted apart, but a second group of friends forged a new set of adventures. This was mostly using AD&D 2E. By the late 1990's or early 2000's my kids and I used HeroQuest (the board game) as an intro to RPGs for them, so I had a limited supply of minis but never enough where I felt I could run an adventure on a battlemat. My entire family got hooked on the Lord of the Rings movies, so that was our common frame of reference. My son started Warhammer and 40K in the late 2000's but we never mixed those minis with our RPG play. My first exposure to monster miniatures was at the game store in the 4E era, where one of the GM's who ran stuff at the store had a gigantic collection. I envied it, but vowed never to spend that much money on miniatures.

My second group drifted apart somewhat as kids grew up and many of the others devoted time to other interests. Some time in the mid 2010's I started running 5E with my family, which became my third (and current) main group. That's the point where everyone wanted to buy their own figures to use for their PC's and so I had to begin investing in monster minis and battlemats.

So in some ways my gaming has gone full circle, from historical minis to total theatre-of-the-mind to battlemat monsters.

[ThrorII]

I started playing around 1978-79, here in the States, learning from my Dad's friend. No idea if it was OD&D, Holmes, or AD&D. We never used minis. When I played AD&D in Jr. High in the early 1980s, we never used minis. I never used minis until I got back in the hobby with 3.5

[Deleted]

Like the others here, I can only speak about my personal experiences. I'm from a small corner of a very unique part of the continental U.S.A. and my personal story doesn't even cover the different styles in my home town, let alone my country.

In this part of rural Appalachia, D&D was being played as far back as the seventies, but I was born in 1984 and was around ten when I got pulled into the hobby officially. Unofficially, I had been toying with RPG ideas for a year or two beforehand. My brothers and I had already incorporated elements of RP into structured play. We'd imagine units in Candy land had names and custom objectives. We'd draw cards to determine outcomes in our campfire stories. We grew up with video games, including rpgs, so we absorbed tabletop ideas indirectly and reverse engineered them to the best of our understanding.

When I got into actual D&D, it was my love of Godzilla of all things that inspired me to stay. There was a Godzilla game on the NES where you controlled Godzilla and Mothra and moved them around on an overland hex map to seek out bad guys like Gigan and the Smog Monster to bash their brains in and save the day. When a kid at school invited us to play D&D at the library, the hex map on the table drew me in. This game had the essence of the mighty Godzilla, and that made it a good game.

I believed in the power of Godzilla as a kid and I still do. Our games included many elements of giant monster movies back then. Not just Godzilla but the Harryhausen films, Jaws, the works of Wells and Verne and all the Victorian classics about lost lands. There was "the ooze" from TMNT, lightsabers and the Force, derelict craft with Xenomorph eggs, the power of Greyskull and the metal fortress of the Thundercats. Once, the Megazord appeared to fight King Ghidorah. In essence, it was the kitchen sink fever dream of pre-pubescent boys.

I'm gonna be honest. We strayed far and fast from the rules and narrow genre of D&D but we always called it that. Years later, when I came back to study the early history of rpgs I was delighted to discover how similar the gonzo campaigns of Arneson and Gygax had been to my own. Turns out I really was playing D&D all along. From the heart, based on things I loved. I'm in the process of bringing that feeling back. This place is filled with the types of people who know what I mean. I like it here. Hope you do, too.

[tkdco2]

My personal preference is using miniatures, but not all the groups I've played with like that style of play. Some prefer theater of the mind; others find that too abstract. Using terrain is fairly new for me; my AD&D group used a battle mat and wet erase markers for our games. Painting miniatures was my creative outlet for many years, so I built my collection back then. I still buy new miniatures when I find something I really like, but that's relatively rare these days.

I got into D&D when it was still a niche hobby. At first my family thought it was just a waste of time. Then that idiotic Satanic Panic nonsense came along, and my family started cautioning me about the supposed dangers of the game. I pretty much dismissed those ideas and did my own thing. Nowadays, my family accepts my gaming

I used to do a lot of solo gaming when I didn't have a regular group. I can do that now, although I notice a lack of motivation to play lately. I concentrate on world building more often than actual play.

I prefer to play different kinds of games. Playing the same game, the same genre, and the same setting all the time bores me. I need variety. One of the reasons I left a group was because nobody else wanted to try something new, and I was bored with the current game.

[jlcapps]

For background: I grew up in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, USA (waves in Appalachian to ampleframework) and first played D&D (Frank Mentzer's red box Basic) in 1983. From '85-'89 I ran a weekly AD&D game. I was always the DM. I never played (as in played a PC) until I got back into gaming in 2015. Until the pandemic hit, I was really making up for lost time, though, playing mostly B/X, D&D 3.5, and Pathfinder, but also some con games (three years at Gary Con) of 5E, Traveller, Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, AD&D, etc., etc. I live in the Midwest now.

In the '80s we never used minis in combat. I ran everything strictly theater of the mind as we'd call it now, occasionally clarifying position by pointing at the players' map (they always mapped) or once in a great while making a sketch on scrap paper. In about 1988 one of the players got interested in collecting and painting miniatures, and he'd set them out on the table. But we only used them to establish marching order.

Since I got back into gaming, I think literally every home game I've played in has used miniatures (or battlemat and some sort of tokens) at least some of the time. The convention games are maybe a fifty-fifty split. FWIW, I love playing with miniatures. Even just a battlemat and some dice and pawns is great in my book. Naturally there's a tradeoff for setting up, portability, all that. I know other people have a different experience, finding them distracting, but they really help me visualize what's going on, track things I'd normally forget, make tactics more interesting, that sort of thing.

I grew up reading a lot of the appendix N stuff before I ever heard of appendix N. As someone mentions above, it was in all of the used bookstores. We had a bunch of it in the public library, too. Somehow I never got to the Dying Earth stories until I was an adult, though. So everything I knew about "Vancian" magic was D&D magic. I suspect that remains the experience of many, that is that they don't really know Vance. They know D&D and it's peculiar magic system.

I don't know about regional practices. Probably there are some. But I will say that when I started gaming again a quarter of a century and half a continent away from when/where I last played, I was a little surprised that the experience was the same, that I'd been playing it the same way back in the 80s when all I had were the books and the occasional Dragon magazine to inform my playing. So anecdotally there was more uniformity than I would've supposed.

[DungeonDevil]

Wargaming was popular (but still very much a niche hobby, mind you) in the 60s and 70s (dying out abruptly in the 80s with the volcanic advent of video games).

Early D&Ders (1974-) were undoubtedly using minis far more commonly than the big wave of (regional) popularity of D&D in the early 80's, when Moldvay and later editors seemed to deemphasise them (IIRC).

However, IME, D&D books, dice and other things like minis were VERY expensive, and also VERY hard to find, and the Satanic Panic in Missouri (USA) made things pretty much impossible to find.

If I had to make a generalisation* it would be that most OS D&Ders use minis only for tactical resolution of encounters with monsters, marching order, etc., and the balance is the DM's narration.

I don't know if that helps. It's late (quarter after 1 am, and *yawn* I'm beat).


________________________________
* a wise man once said that all generalisations are false -- including this one.

[Finarvyn]

Mar 27, 2021 15:45:02 GMT -6 ThrorII said:

I started playing around 1978-79, here in the States, learning from my Dad's friend. No idea if it was OD&D, Holmes, or AD&D. We never used minis. When I played AD&D in Jr. High in the early 1980s, we never used minis. I never used minis until I got back in the hobby with 3.5

For me, some of this had to do with prep. Older minis were unpainted metal and required priming and painting. Lots of work for the return, since if you had the wrong monster a mini was almost worse than no mini.

Much of my personal interest in using minis is tied to plastic pre-painted minis. We had the HeroQuest ones and did a little painting in the 1990's but my collection really started with 5E and my current group.

[Finarvyn]

Also, I thought I would put in a plug for Jon Peterson's newest book, The Elusive Shift. He spends some time talking about the main groups in the USA in the 1970's. This is all from a poor memory and I am sure there are a lot of details missing, but here are some thoughts:

(1) Twin Cities, Minnesota -- the epicenter of role-playing through Braunstein and the Blackmoor campaign. Play style was really loose, with rules being created on the spot as needed.

(2) Lake Geneva, WI -- the second wave, encouraged by the presence of GenCon so that word spread fast. OD&D was written here and published from here. Early issues of Dragon Magazine tell tales of the experience, as did Gary's posts on various boards.

(3) The California crew -- I think that Arduin and Warlock and other variants emerged here. These games appear to be higher level and high gonzo.

(4) I think that Boston was mentioned as a major hotbed, but I can't recall their style.

Basically, the concept of D&D spread through the country quickly and mutated into different play styles just as quickly. TSR tried to dictate a common style through its rulebooks, but once the "make the rules your own" philosophy was out there it would have been impossible to control the masses. Finding a "one way we did it in the US" would be impossible.

increment

[Deleted]

Ohhh yeah. I kind of forgot to address the main point of OP's post. I was getting there but got way off track with my recollections.

We sort of used minis sometimes, but we also sort of didn't. There were minis and there was terrain early on, with the older DM. There were cheaper toys and those types of plastic castles they sold at Wal-Mart when we started running games at home. At some point we just stopped using them except sometimes in big battles where there was confusion about who was where, but we never actually noticed the moment in time we stopped using them otherwise. It wasn't a conscientious decision. It just sort of happened. Years later, my brother got really into terrain again for a year or two. He bought a huge sand table and lots of miniatures, lots of Dwarven Forge style stuff, and started sculpting his own terrain, and then he moved away from D&D and just started setting up little town dioramas and stuff.

I pretty much just never use anything fancy for visual any more. Maybe counters or coins for D&D. I'm somewhat wargame-curious since I played a lot of Warhammer games in a high school club and I'm reading up on Chainmail and Tony Bath's campaign notes. I'm not sold on it yet, though. I feel like I could become obsessed and pour a ton of money into a hobby like that, and you really need the in-person aspect of that to make it work. I'm not convinced there's a big enough local audience for this kind of stuff for me to go all in.

[tkdco2]

If you like terrain but don't want to spend a lot of money, there are a lot of YouTube channels devoted to crafting terrain on the cheap. They use inexpensive materials and even stuff meant to be recycled or thrown away. The down side is that it takes a lot of time and can turn you into a hoarder of household junk.

[badger2305]

I grew up in the Twin Cities during the 1970's - I was in junior high school and high school from 1974 to 1980. During that time, we had:

• The Little Tin Soldier Shop - a wargames store on a busy commercial street in south Minneapolis
• Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore - closer to downtown
• The Green Enchanter - another science fiction bookstore, by the University of Minnesota campus (the predecessor to Dreamhaven Books
• Other game stores and book stores opening in the area, as well
• Several wargames and roleplaying clubs across Minneapolis and St. Paul. including student groups at colleges and universities
• Minicon, an annual science fiction convention getting several hundred attendees each year
• Minnesota Campaign, a regular gaming convention, first in Rochester, then in St. Paul

...so there was no lack of gaming and reading fantasy and science fiction. There was also the Society for Creative Anachronism, and the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, and... and...

Never had to worry about finding a book or a game, or people to game with. Didn't really realize how lucky I was.

[EdOWar]

Mar 27, 2021 12:38:43 GMT -6 @jacksonbenete said:

How is the hobby understood in the US?
Is miniature use "a norm" on US?
What about Vancian Magic, is it widely understood?
There are places where people understand "RPG concepts" distinctly as well? (Like differences in style of play between Twin Cities vs Lake Geneva vs ??)

If you're from/living in other country, how is the hobby generally understood and played?

Edit: Another thing that I just remembered, "Dungeon Crawling" and "Hex Crawling" always was something rare in Brazil. People used to play simple "novel" adventures, even though my fist RPG was Basic D&D, I didn't got to know the Dungeon Crawling and Hex Crawling concepts until some years ago. Dungeons for us was only a couple of rooms, and not Mega Dungeons.

How the hobby is understood in the US varies depending on who you talk to. My general impression is that RPing, as a whole, is viewed as a collaborative story-telling experience.

I would say miniatures, overall, are not the norm. Even in OD&D circles there are many who swear by "theater of the mind." 5E is more conducive to miniatures use, but hardly required.

Most people I've played with understand how Vancian magic works, rules wise. But they don't really "get" the origins of it. Most often I hear comments that it doesn't make sense to suddenly forget a spell you've learned.

There may have been a time when geographic areas had distinctly different understanding of how to play RPGs, but these days I'd say everyone who RPs understands the core concepts about the same. I've played with a lot of different people in a lot of different parts of the US and never run into someone who did things radically different, no matter which game I was playing.

Dungeon crawling is a fairly common approach to fantasy RPGs, particularly D&D and it's many clones. Hex-crawling is not as common outside of OD&D and clones, though there are some newer games that embrace it, such as Mutant Year Zero. From what I've seen, mega-dungeons are almost uniquely old school D&D.

[DungeonDevil]

Apr 1, 2021 16:57:47 GMT -6 badger2305 said:

I grew up in the Twin Cities during the 1970's - I was in junior high school and high school from 1974 to 1980. During that time, we had:

• The Little Tin Soldier Shop - a wargames store on a busy commercial street in south Minneapolis
• Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore - closer to downtown
• The Green Enchanter - another science fiction bookstore, by the University of Minnesota campus (the predecessor to Dreamhaven Books
• Other game stores and book stores opening in the area, as well
• Several wargames and roleplaying clubs across Minneapolis and St. Paul. including student groups at colleges and universities
• Minicon, an annual science fiction convention getting several hundred attendees each year
• Minnesota Campaign, a regular gaming convention, first in Rochester, then in St. Paul

...so there was no lack of gaming and reading fantasy and science fiction. There was also the Society for Creative Anachronism, and the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, and... and...

Never had to worry about finding a book or a game, or people to game with. Didn't really realize how lucky I was.

Sounds like a Golden Age in Mnpls. Sorry I missed it. The only place I recognise from my college years there is Dreamhaven -- FWIR, a big used-book store. In my time there (late '92-late 2000, Dinkytown and later Seward) I wasn't aware of any wargaming or hobby-related stores and never once met anyone who claimed to be into wargaming or RPGs. I do very much miss Minneapolis though. Very sad I had to leave (due to lack of jobs).

[badger2305]

Mar 27, 2021 12:38:43 GMT -6 @jacksonbenete said:

How is the hobby understood in the US?
Is miniature use "a norm" on US?
What about Vancian Magic, is it widely understood?
There are places where people understand "RPG concepts" distinctly as well? (Like differences in style of play between Twin Cities vs Lake Geneva vs ??)

Edit: Another thing that I just remembered, "Dungeon Crawling" and "Hex Crawling" always was something rare in Brazil. People used to play simple "novel" adventures, even though my fist RPG was Basic D&D, I didn't got to know the Dungeon Crawling and Hex Crawling concepts until some years ago. Dungeons for us was only a couple of rooms, and not Mega Dungeons.

In the Twin Cities and here in Madison, WI (a short driving distance to Lake Geneva, WI), there are multiple different styles of gaming. Miniatures vs. no miniatures, you can find both and everything in between. Gaming is considered relatively ordinary here - there is an excellent game store in Fond du Lac, WI, a town of maybe 15,000 people, for example. Madison has something close to ten game stores for a metropolitan area of about 350,000 people. Vancian magic is both understood and misunderstood as a concept; it depends on who you are talking to.

[badger2305]

Apr 1, 2021 17:09:12 GMT -6 DungeonDevil said:

Sounds like a Golden Age in Mnpls. Sorry I missed it. The only place I recognise from my college years there is Dreamhaven -- FWIR, a big used-book store. In my time there (late '92-late 2000, Dinkytown and later Seward) I wasn't aware of any wargaming or hobby-related stores and never once met anyone who claimed to be into wargaming or RPGs. I do very much miss Minneapolis though. Very sad I had to leave (due to lack of jobs).

Uncle Hugo's moved from Franklin Av. and 3rd Avenue, just east of Nicollet, to 29th Street and Chicago Avenue, sometime in the 1980's IIRC. (It was the victim of arson by white supremacist rioters last year, in the aftermath of George Floyd getting murdered.) Dreamhaven is still at 38th Street and 23rd Ave, in south Minneapolis. The Source Comics and Games is in Roseville, and is one of the larger game stores I have ever been in.

[jeffb]

I was born a poor.....


No seriously- I started with the white box books, GH, and EW, a AD&D MM, and eventually a Holmes basic boo- around Thanksgiving/Xmas of 1977. My group had been playing for about a year prior.

Groups was 5 people. We all DM'ed. And we all played in each others game. We all had our own houserules and interpretations. Our games were very different. One was very Medieval England/France. One was S&S with some Sci Fantasy elements (my fave DM!) . One was typical vanilla tolkien-esque. One was fantasy Japan. Mine was very much an action movie- Star Wars in Hyborea, if you will.

None of us could afford minis, even if we could have found some (non existent in our shops until 1980 or so). When we could afford them, we still didn't buy them. We bought new games/supplements/adventures to try.

We didn't get into kingdom/name level play, massive megadungeons, resource management, or anything that is "celebrated and venerated as the keys to old school gaming" by the OSR. In fact the OSR elite would probably call us "Storygamers" as a term of derision (even though most of them started playing D&D way after we did :rolleyes: ). Not that there is anything wrong with year long campaigns, megadungeons, name level play and such. I do not believe in "badwrongfun" when it comes to gaming. Just that I like what I like, and life is too short/gaming time too infrequent for me to play/run something I have little to no interest in.

We played episodic action games set in fantasy worlds just like the movies, TV shows and books we loved: The Sinbad movies, Jason & the Argonauts (any Greek mythology, really) The Lost World, The Time Machine, 20000 Leagues under the Sea, Planet of the Apes, El Cid, Robin Hood, John Carter, The Lord of the Rings, Conan, Lion The Witch & the Wardrobe, Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, Kung Fu Action Theatre on Saturday mornings, Star Wars, John Wayne War movies and Westerns, Tarzan, Classic 30s horror, Vincent Price, Hammer Horror films, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Lost in Space, James Bond movies, The Phantom, Charlie Chan, The Six Million Dollar Man. And comic books- good ol comic books- S&S comics-Conan, John Carter, all the weird one-offs. Spiderman (including the 1967 series cartoons), Xmen, Flash, Justice League, Green lantern, Ghost Rider, G.I Combat, Ghost Tank, Sgt. Rock, Fighting Leathernecks, etc etc.

A couple trips to Disney World's Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, and 20K Leagues under the Sea in the mid 1970s was a MASSIVE influence for me personally. I wanted to play (and did play) games based on that kind of adventure with my friends running around the woods, creeks, and town- instead of cops & robbers or cowboys & indians. D&D was a natural fit when I found it.

Star Wars was the next big influence, and I ran my games like Star Wars (and later Raiders). Action, not much downtime. Scene/Location hopping stories. Most Dungeons of the time were too static/monotonous and stereotypical. We just didn't really get into that. We liked adventures that (what we would say now) had better storylines or fictional elements. Something more than loot n' scoot.

When modules started becoming readily available, we used those instead of creating our adventures, most of the time It was just so much easier to take a module and "plug it in" our world as they were designed to be used. Most of the time they were cut up to fit taking the parts we liked the best. We also used alot of published material, all that "official" nonsense was disregarded-rules and material. Arduin, Judges Guild, Tekumel, C&S, T&T, some weird third party stuff sought out by collectors, anything was fair game.

So we played a very different way- We had no wargaming roots at all, and our games were very different than the forefathers- this was probably because of our age. We were all 11-12 or younger. I think one of our group had an older brother in college who introduced the original 4 guys to the game. No clue how they played in college or whatever.

[Deleted]

Apr 2, 2021 9:34:04 GMT -6 jeffb said:

We didn't get into kingdom/name level play, massive megadungeons, resource management, or anything that is "celebrated and venerated as the keys to old school gaming" by the OSR. In fact the OSR elite would probably call us "Storygamers" as a term of derision (even though most of them started playing D&D way after we did :rolleyes: ). Not that there is anything wrong with year long campaigns, megadungeons, name level play and such. I do not believe in "badwrongfun" when it comes to gaming. Just that I like what I like, and life is too short/gaming time too infrequent for me to play/run something I have little to no interest in.

I've got a lot of strong feelings about the revisionist narrative of the OSR that could be the basis of their own thread, come to think of it. Not sure exactly when this narrative started getting pushed, but it's probably Finch's "quick primer on old school gaming" aka "everyone in the seventies played exactly like Gygax and Arneson's tournament modules". 

I can't tell you anything objective about the seventies because I wasn't around yet. My mom and uncle apparently had friends who played in high school and college but they were more into the music scene than the tabletop scene and didn't directly participate. I know that in the Nineties, in my hometown, in the games that were specifically D&D (2e and, more often, BECMI) pretty much everyone was playing "narrative style" games built around individual character arcs. I'm of the personal opinion that Basic and Advanced D&D are both simply re-interpretations of OD&D, so it stands to reason that plenty of people would have used the original booklets in the same fashion my classmates and I used the revised editions. There never was anything about the writing that forbade people from doing so, and Peterson's research indicates that a whole lot of people quickly went in that direction. 

Like I said, though, I can't make any useful judgments about how people play in America. America is big, man. America is diverse beyond the belief of people who don't dwell here. We have like six major ecosystems and 30 or so distinctive cultures, not to mention divisions within. It's not even helpful to talk about the Tennessee gaming scene. Hell, which one? Nashville and Knoxville scenes are completely different. People just don't get how HUGE America is. I can only speak about one small, rural area for two particular periods in time, being the mid-nineties and the period beginning around 2008 through the present. I know nothing useful farther out than that in time, or geographically. And the biggest difference I can think of between the two is... eh. People dressed nicer and were about 20 lbs lighter on average in the Nineties. 

[stevemitchell]

"What about Vancian Magic, is it widely understood?"

My (American) gaming group was well read in fantasy--we liked Burroughs, Howard, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Vance, Moorcock, and others. When we decided to transition from miniatures wargaming to roleplaying, we selected original Dungeons and Dragons as our rules set. But--we all hated Vancian Magic as a game system. So we tossed it out, and grafted in the magic system from Tunnels & Trolls instead. Heresy to many, I'm sure, but we liked it, and played that way for several years.

[tkdco2]

I wasn't exposed to a lot of fantasy novels in my early teens. Tolkien was the exception, and I only came about his works by happenstance. So I didn't know much about Jack Vance until later. I've never actually been able to find his books in the stores or the library; I guess I should look for them on Amazon.

This made the D&D magic system a bit confusing at first, but I went along with it. Not a lot of other games were popular in my area during the 1980s, and I remember the books being a bit hard to find. So I didn't know about any variant systems, and I just stuck with Vancian spellcasting.

[tkdco2]

I've developed a few preferences with regards to miniatures and terrain over the years.

Miniatures: I used to be more enthusiastic about painting miniatures. I prefer metal miniatures, but I'm okay with plastic. I hate resin with a passion; they are so difficult to paint without a spray primer (which I avoid because of environmental issues). Pre-painted miniatures are a good choice, since my eyesight has gotten worse over the years.

Bases: I've never liked the slotta bases GW introduced, but I had to put up with them since there were miniatures I wanted. I much prefer integral bases, which I just paint green and leave it at that (I'm old school). I don't enjoy basing, so I avoid that. I now prefer clear bases, which I usually order from Litko. They're great for rebasing Heroclix miniatures. People either love or hate clear bases it seems; I'm in the first camp. I also prefer thinner bases, as I don't like the miniatures hovering over the ground.

Terrain: I use a mix of 2D and 3D terrain, depending on my needs. I've bought a few pieces and crafted others. For some reason I don't like mixing materials (other than glue and paint) when I build terrain. So I build everything in cardboard or foam, but so far I haven't built anything mixing both materials.

Battle Maps: I'm okay with grids, but lately I've been looking at gridless options.

I once ran a game that uses a gridless map, miniatures with clear bases, and 3D terrain. That's my preferred combination at this time.

[thegreyelf]

Neat thread!

As with the others, this is just my experience. I started playing in 1979 in my grandma's basement with my uncle and his high school friends. I was 5 at the time, and AD&D had just come out. They never used miniatures. I played every edition of D&D since then, and up until 3.0, never used a single miniature in D&D or any other game. We used minis at first in the 3.x years and then I tossed them in my games. I felt they turned the game into a tactical board game that bogged everything down and made a 2 minute in game combat take hours to resolve. They took everyone out of the story and made it devolve into an advanced chess game instead of a story of great heroics. Others' miles clearly vary, and that's fine. It's worth mentioning that by all reports, Dave Arneson often (though not always) used minis, while Gary Gygax never did. To this day I won't use miniatures in a game I'm running, and while I certainly won't refuse to play in a game that uses them, it's the opposite of my preference.

As for Appendix N, I'm not nearly as versed in it as some folks here--I am a diehard fan of Robert E. Howard, and even something of an amateur Howard scholar. I love Burroughs' Mars books. I love Fred Saberhagen. I have only read a bit of Lieber and really didn't like Vance's Dying Earth all that much. Of course I've read Lord of the Rings, and my feelings on that are Tolkien had a wonderful story to tell which informed fantasy ever since...he was just crap at actually telling it. Not my favorite writer, but an unparalleled story guy. Moorcock, again, I tried the Elric books and just couldn't get into them. I do feel like I need to give them another go, however. Appendix N is a smorgasbord and one of the biggest mistakes a lot of gamers and geeks make is to get arrogant about what you "have to be familar with," and what you're "required to love." You don't have to love Vance. You don't have to love Howard. You don't have to love Tolkien. You can, as the worldwide phenomenon of D&D shows, successfully enjoy the game without having read a single book in Appendix N. That being said, it's well worth tracking down some of those books because the 60s and 70s was really a golden age for pulp fantasy and there was SO MUCH stuff out that you're bound to get sucked into some of it, and it might just change your world.

As far as Vancian magic, yeah...we played with Vancian magic over the years because it was in the rules but certainly experimented with point-based spellcasting systems (which eventually evolved into the MEP system I use in Amazing Adventures) as well as skill-based systems (which evolved into the system I use in O.G.R.E.S.) As far as D&D systems go, I think the spell slot system in 5e is my favorite "official D&D" magic system. I tend to skew with the idea that magic is a wizard's stock in trade and the idea that they "forget" spells after casting them is just stupid. I always understood the concept that it's magic and it wipes itself, but I still found it outside the realm of believability. I always rationalized it in a different way (which works with the system but is NOT how Jack Vance portrayed it). To my mind, all magic is ritual based. When preparing spells in the morning, a wizard creates an elaborate ritual which could take up to several hours. This ritual combines all the elements of every spell they think they might need for the day. In effect, he's casting every spell all at once, holding back only 1 to 3 elements: the specific somatic, verbal, and material components that will complete the spell and unleash its energy. So Magic Missile, for example, could require a ritual that takes 10 mintues to cast. The wizard adds that ritual into his morning preparation, holding back the trigger to unleash it. That's how spells are able to be cast with a single action. It can't be cast after they run out of spells because it requires a full ritual to cast, and during a normal day of adventuring they don't normally have the time to do that. I like that rationale better than "they forget it after they cast it," but that's by no means a canon rule; it's just the way we think about it in my games.

[tkdco2]

One resource I've used that doesn't get mentioned too often is the scrapbook. Even if you prefer the theater of the mind style of play, visual aids are a good way of getting players immersed in the game. I haven't done a lot of that in D&D, but I created one for my Castle Falkenstein campaign. Since I didn't have regular access to the internet at the time, I cut out photographs and drawings from magazines and newspapers. I also bought a couple of books about Victorian architecture to supplement my resources.

If you are good at drawing, you can also use your skills to depict NPCs, monsters, and locations. One GM I know used that technique to good effect when he ran his games.

[vilecultofshapes]

I live in Oklahoma, which is basically the same thing as living 10 years in the past.

Most of my players fall into one of three categories:

1. Zero experience with RPGs beyond 'D&D is for nerds' or 'is it like that movie with Tom Hanks?' (these are the best to play with because they come to the table with few preconceived notions)

2. Long-time fantasy or RPG fans or fan-fiction writers with no experience with d&d. These guys are fun because they know some of the tropes and have ideas about roleplaying, but it's a little sad when their special snowflake character gets their skull cleaved open during their first combat, despite repeated warning that they shouldn't get attached to their first couple PCs.

3. 5e players who think they know everything and immediately start coming up with ways to 'improve' my game by demanding I add lots of fiddly bits and rules to protect their twinks. These guys are the least fun because they're the most likely to ragequit rather than adjust their expectations like the other two groups.

Very few people know about swords and sorcery. If they've played old d&d at all it was 2e a billion years ago and they've forgotten everything. Most players expect a paperback high fantasy vibe and are very surprised and a little disturbed when the rayguns and tentacle monsters come out.

We don't use minis despite most of my players expecting it because, honestly, I have better things to spend my time & money on. Sometimes I draw pictures or we use dice if we need help imagining it. If somebody gifted me a big collection of old minis or I found a tub of plastic figurines that roughly equated my beastiary I'd probably use em.

I like to geek out over classic mini collections like Dungeon Dwellers or the original TSR Jack Scruby minis, because the ruddy spectacle of it speaks to me, but minis seem like an enormous amount of effort I could better use fixing up my house or doing some extra weeding in the garden.