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Post by aldarron on Mar 22, 2022 5:50:48 GMT -6
I mean, I thought everybody already new all this stuff. I'm kinda scratchin' my head. Of course campaigns were based in real time. Of course both Arneson and Gygax had an open table style of gaming.
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Post by tkdco2 on Mar 22, 2022 11:22:26 GMT -6
Maybe people who were in the hobby for a long time or chatted with Dave and Gary online knew it. But a lot of folks, especially those who started with later editions of D&D, wouldn't. Keep in mind a lot of OSR fans switched over from the d20 system.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 22, 2022 14:05:13 GMT -6
Maybe people who were in the hobby for a long time or chatted with Dave and Gary online knew it. But a lot of folks, especially those who started with later editions of D&D, wouldn't. Keep in mind a lot of OSR fans switched over from the d20 system. Yeah. I believe Ben Milton's audience contains a bit of both sides. Videos like this and the other more obvious ones are probably geared towards 20-somethings who started with 5e and decided to pick up a copy of OSE or DCC from the hobby shop.
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Post by dicebro on Mar 22, 2022 16:39:45 GMT -6
The lost key to 80s pop music! The undiscovered band called…The Smiths!
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Post by rsdean on Mar 23, 2022 6:13:22 GMT -6
I had to google that…I am very pop-culturally-deficient, so I had literally never heard of them before. This may deserve its own thread, but I was thinking about the time-keeping issue for early campaigns. If you did have multiple groups, and hadn’t adopted a West marches “must return to base” approach, what do you do with a group that burned through a two month wilderness expedition in one session. Assuming that they do wish eventually to return to the same base where other groups (hypothetiucally) are going through dunegon expeditions at the rate of 1 per weekly session, do you put the wilderness group on hold for 8 real weeks or so while time for the rest of the players/characters catches up?
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Post by derv on Mar 23, 2022 13:29:20 GMT -6
… do you put the wilderness group on hold for 8 real weeks or so while time for the rest of the players/characters catches up? Yup. It’s not really any different than a magic user who wants to invest time on magical research. That PC would not be joining the dungeon expedition. But they could run a different PC during that time period or that same group could go out and adventure somewhere else in the meantime. Maybe shorter forays.
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Post by dicebro on Mar 23, 2022 20:51:27 GMT -6
… do you put the wilderness group on hold for 8 real weeks or so while time for the rest of the players/characters catches up? Yup. It’s not really any different than a magic user who wants to invest time on magical research. That PC would not be joining the dungeon expedition. But they could run a different PC during that time period or that same group could go out and adventure somewhere else in the meantime. Maybe shorter forays. One way to do it is to make every real time day count as 3 game time days. But I like the day for day.
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Post by Finarvyn on Mar 24, 2022 7:37:25 GMT -6
Another thought is that "the way we did it" and "vision for the future" may not be the same thing. My high school group had a lot of folks drift in and out of the game, my current group is the same four players each time. I'm not sure that one is "better" than the other, but they are different and it's hard to say whether Gary's "the way we do it" indicates the way he would want to do it given the choice between the two. What I appreciate the most about the video is that it talks about an experience that most modern gamers might not have had, but one they might really enjoy. Exposure to new perspectives is usually a good thing.
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Post by blackwyvern on Mar 25, 2022 0:24:20 GMT -6
Next thing up from Ben at Questing Beast, he found this really cool table in Greyhawk where you get modifiers on your to hit rolls by comparing the weapon you are using with the armor your opponent is wearing. There wasn't really anything lost about what he brings up in the video. It just didn't work for most groups and so became a relic of the past. I am sure there are some who still use it but there are some people who use weapon vs. armor. Who am I kidding, nobody uses weapon vs. armor. My point is that these generally aren't lost gems, they are abandoned paths. It can be fun to talk about them but they are just not usable in practice unless you have a large pool of gamers, a regularly scheduled weekly game, and a referee who really likes bookkeeping.
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Post by doublejig2 on Mar 25, 2022 0:34:35 GMT -6
Next thing up from Ben at Questing Beast, he found this really cool table in Greyhawk where you get modifiers on your to hit rolls by comparing the weapon you are using with the armor your opponent is wearing. There wasn't really anything lost about what he brings up in the video. It just didn't work for most groups and so became a relic of the past. I am sure there are some who still use it but there are some people who use weapon vs. armor. Who am I kidding, nobody uses weapon vs. armor. My point is that these generally aren't lost gems, they are abandoned paths. It can be fun to talk about them but they are just not usable in practice unless you have a large pool of gamers, a regularly scheduled weekly game, and a referee who really likes bookkeeping. A large pool of gamers, a regularly scheduled weekly game, and a referee who really likes bookkeeping - hear hear!
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Post by Finarvyn on Mar 25, 2022 4:02:03 GMT -6
I think our group used that chart once, then decided it wasn't worth the effort. When folks talk about how abstract combat is in D&D (and usually they talk about it in a negative way) it might be worth showing some of these tables and explain to them that D&D doesn't have to be abstract but most of us like it that way. "Weapons versus armor" is one example, but so is "weapon speed" and "damage versus target size" in Supplement I Greyhawk and the complex hit location charts from Supplement II Blackmoor. It's easy to add in funky rules, but they tend to really slow play down to a crawl.
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Post by waysoftheearth on Mar 25, 2022 6:46:05 GMT -6
Not to mention determining when movement and actions should fall during a combat round (pp5-7 of sup III).
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Post by blackwyvern on Mar 25, 2022 22:20:39 GMT -6
Sorry, I wasn't serious. I was, not as cleverly as I thought, pointing out that there are those who are obsessed with finding "the one true way" to play old school D&D. Beyond the academics of discussing them, there is generally good reason some rules didn't make it out of the crib, or at least didn't find much traction.
I started as a player in an AD&D game with some guys a couple years older than me right around '80. We played very infrequently, maybe once every couple of months. We came at the hobby as fans of Burroughs, Howard and Moorcock. We listened to Rush and Blue Oyster Cult. We thumbed through the Boris Vallejo books when we went into bookstores. We were fans of fantasy, not war gamers. D&D was just an extension of the interest. We played one character. We hand waved time spent because we wanted to play. Time out of the game was an abstract. Having a cool character to play and talk about was the important thing. We played D&D in a way that made sense to us, we used the rules that worked for our group and discarded the rest.
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Post by rsdean on Mar 26, 2022 2:45:09 GMT -6
A difference is that massive multi-player offline play looks like it might be fun (since so many people enjoy WOW etc.) but many groups don’t have the people to try it; the addtional complexity layers tend to address dissatisfactions with “realism” which your group may or may not have. (And weapons vs armor only adds a flavor of “realism” when you are fighting opponents wearing actually human-type armor of varying capabilities; a spectre who is AC2 because he’s semi-incorporeal isn’t especially vulnderable to a military pick etc.)
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Post by aldarron on Mar 26, 2022 5:28:18 GMT -6
First, The Smiths were mind numbing. Especially if you listened to the whole album. That stuff will turn you into a zombie - buyer beware! Maybe people who were in the hobby for a long time or chatted with Dave and Gary online knew it. But a lot of folks, especially those who started with later editions of D&D, wouldn't. Keep in mind a lot of OSR fans switched over from the d20 system. I never chatted with either one of those paragons, but your point is taken regarding "OSR converts". Thing is, we've been talking about both Arneson and Gygax's large pool of rotating players on the board here for more than a decade and, ya know its in the books. There's sections covering calendars, time management and multiple players in the DMG, in EPT, in the Greyhawk boxed set... a bunch of places. <shrug> But I think you are spot on that folks moving from 3rd to 5th edition games to "OSR" games and retroclones probably have never read the originals or the old magazines etc. So I guess it is lost to them.
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Post by aldarron on Mar 26, 2022 5:35:34 GMT -6
A difference is that massive multi-player offline play looks like it might be fun (since so many people enjoy WOW etc.) but many groups don’t have the people to try it; Right. Arneson and Gygax were leading members of local gaming clubs and so had various players participating in various games at various times and various places. If you are in a local gaming club you know what that can be like, but the way most people came to play the game and still do today is with a private group that meets on a regular schedule in a regular place with always the same players.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 26, 2022 6:40:34 GMT -6
A difference is that massive multi-player offline play looks like it might be fun (since so many people enjoy WOW etc.) but many groups don’t have the people to try it; Right. Arneson and Gygax were leading members of local gaming clubs and so had various players participating in various games at various times and various places. If you are in a local gaming club you know what that can be like, but the way most people came to play the game and still do today is with a private group that meets on a regular schedule in a regular place with always the same players. Yes. It seems to me that, just like the "alternate" combat rules became the standard D&D model, the "alternate" campaign style also endured. Many of the assumptions about the audience for D&D and how they would use it in the initial release missed the mark, but it's not surprising. They had an entire new hobby on their hands with no precedent.
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Post by derv on Mar 26, 2022 10:05:18 GMT -6
It's probably not worth getting too hung up on the idea of running games in real time. Here again, it didn't occur to me that this was a lost artifact to gaming. As aldarron points out, it's in the books. The thing is, the real take away of that idea was that it was meant to make the refs job easier. Instead of tracking a bunch of abstract time segments, amongst various groups meeting at different times doing different things, you could simply open up a calendar and scribble in when each party met and what they did. If you are always running the same group of players with little variation this doesn't have the same weight of importance as if you are running several mixed groups at the same time. Otherwise, you can do something like dicebro suggested in counting days at 3:1 or, even simpler, you can just fudge it and advance the calendar so that separated parties can meet up.
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Post by captainjapan on Mar 27, 2022 14:57:56 GMT -6
There is a way to simulate the realtime campaign of Gary's envisioning without a club of twenty or fifty players. Just roll up a stable of 20 - 50 player characters. When some characters are laid up healing h.p./doing spell research/ building a stronghold, some other of the player's characters will be called up from the bench to replace them for as many game sessions as it takes the original PC's to complete their extracurriculars. It could be weeks of real-world time, but the players won't have to sit out a single night of hack-and-slash if they have a deep enough roster.
A modern gaming group of 1 - 3 regulars plus a single dm might be campaigning with up to six distinct adventuring parties in rotation.
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Post by tetramorph on Mar 27, 2022 19:14:36 GMT -6
Okay, so I get that MUs need to research spells and take time out to make magic items. Cool.
What are FM and CL doing during all that time? Do they also have activities that draw them away from adventure?
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Post by Mordorandor on Mar 27, 2022 20:29:18 GMT -6
After lurking through the conversation for a while, I thought I'd chime in.
I discovered AD&D in a mall bookstore in ~1984 at the age of 11. The rack near the checkout had AD&D modules, and I distinctly remember Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. It was about ~$5 (~$15 today). We were moving and my mom wanted to get me something to read. I knew this was a game of sorts, but I had no idea I needed another set of books to play. My mom must have known, or maybe it was too much money, because she guided me to another book. After we moved, an older boy in the neighborhood introduced me to the Moldvay D&D Basic booklet. I had it for about a week or two and tried to digest it, but what ended up happening was my imagination was kicked into overdrive without having any real understanding of what I read. The game was like no other game I saw before.
It wasn't until ~1985 I got the three AD&D hardcover books and devoured them, still understanding very little. For example, I got my 8 year old sister to sit around "looking for secret doors" for 10 actual minutes only to tell her that her character didn't find anything. Yeah, that's how clueless I was about this newfound treasure I'd discovered. And needless to say, she wasn't into this new game.
And like some of the commentary thus far, I too found it hard to square all the implications of a grand, sweeping campaign with the experience of a 2-3 person, recurring group in HS who played with no one else but our small group. People coming in and out of the play? What? That meant knowing a lot more people (or even wanting to) and that wasn't going to happen.
But still, the idea was mind-blowing. And it wasn't until later in my life, when I didn't feel the need to actual admin a group, that I was ok with the idea that not every player had to be there, and that not every CHARACTER had to be there. And then I started using the 1 real week = 1 game week fiction, and wow, did the fantasy world actually come alive. And the resource management game became even more apparent.
It was only in the last decade+, after I gave up 3.0/3.5 (~2007) that I came to OD&D and relished the simplicity that seemed to open the door to so much more complexity. And now, my world lives on even when there has been to-date more than 50 players over the last 10 years, with only 4 players having reached 5th level, because the games, the adventures, are driven by player desire. The players come to me and say, hey, I want to take Finias Fingers through Crag Keep in search of that ring he heard about. And because life gets in the way of gaming, life gets in the way of adventuring, and suddenly three actual weeks later a handwave of a few game weeks happens, and some rumors are dolled out, and Finias finds his way back into the dungeons.
The only time "time" becomes interesting is when a party or player has a chance to go into a dungeon multiple occasions quickly, which means the player/s either (a) remain always ahead in time, or like others point out, (b) they create other characters that can venture with those who are in the past still.
What are the FM and CL doing while the MU researches spells? If not adventuring with the MU, then whatever it is they want to say is happening as their characters aren't adventuring. The key here is time will pass, and taxes (upkeep) will be paid. Death and taxes, as we all know, are the only two certain things in life, and they are the only certain things in the game.
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Post by Mordorandor on Mar 27, 2022 20:37:07 GMT -6
There is a way to simulate the realtime campaign of Gary's envisioning without a club of twenty or fifty players. Just roll up a stable of 20 - 50 player characters. When some characters are layed up healing h.p./doing spell research/ building a stronghold, some other of the player's characters will be called up from the bench to replace them for as many game sessions as it takes the original PC's to complete their extracurriculars. It could be weeks of real-world time, but the players won't have to sit out a single night of hack-and-slash if they have a deep enough roster. A modern gaming group of 1 - 3 regulars plus a single dm might be campaigning with up to six distinct adventuring parties in rotation. This. What I experienced as a player and referee early in my gaming experience, and what I think tends to happen now, is that the gravitational-like effect of 1 player = 1 character, and 1 party = same x number of characters/players, is so hard to escape, like light from a black hole, that the above idea is truly unfathomable to many; and sometimes, once fathomed, disliked or impractical to the way they play their game.
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Post by Mordorandor on Mar 27, 2022 20:45:49 GMT -6
Right. Arneson and Gygax were leading members of local gaming clubs and so had various players participating in various games at various times and various places. If you are in a local gaming club you know what that can be like, but the way most people came to play the game and still do today is with a private group that meets on a regular schedule in a regular place with always the same players. Yes. It seems to me that, just like the "alternate" combat rules became the standard D&D model, the "alternate" campaign style also endured. Many of the assumptions about the audience for D&D and how they would use it in the initial release missed the mark, but it's not surprising. They had an entire new hobby on their hands with no precedent. Instead of "Many of the assumptions about the audience for D&D and how they would use it in the initial release missed the mark...," I'd say, "The game, having struck its intended mark, had a greater impact than they possibly fathomed."
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Post by Mordorandor on Mar 28, 2022 11:01:53 GMT -6
Next thing up from Ben at Questing Beast, he found this really cool table in Greyhawk where you get modifiers on your to hit rolls by comparing the weapon you are using with the armor your opponent is wearing. There wasn't really anything lost about what he brings up in the video. It just didn't work for most groups and so became a relic of the past. I am sure there are some who still use it but there are some people who use weapon vs. armor. Who am I kidding, nobody uses weapon vs. armor. My point is that these generally aren't lost gems, they are abandoned paths. It can be fun to talk about them but they are just not usable in practice unless you have a large pool of gamers, a regularly scheduled weekly game, and a referee who really likes bookkeeping. I completely get the tongue-in-cheek reference here. In all seriousness, the weapon vs armor table offers modifiers for those that want to get close to the percent chances given on the 2d6 Man-to-Man resolution chart in CHAINMAIL when using the ACS. So in the mind of at least one person (Gary), there was a desire or inclination to offer a smoother or more faithful transition from CHAINMAIL Man-to-Man to ACS Man-to-Man. Likely to differentiate weapons for those who maintain the 1d6 damage approach. (Otherwise, what then differentiates the weapons?) These may be abandoned paths for reasons that are less to do with deliberate abandonment and more because the growing number of new players were not wargamers, or if they were, they were unfamiliar with or lacked access to CHAINMAIL, and didn't understand what the weapons vs armor table was attempting to do.
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Post by tkdco2 on Mar 28, 2022 14:22:21 GMT -6
Okay, so I get that MUs need to research spells and take time out to make magic items. Cool. What are FM and CL doing during all that time? Do they also have activities that draw them away from adventure? Fighting men would most likely be training. They'd be learning new weapons skills, new techniques (or brushing up on old ones), and leadership skills for when they get retainers at name level. They may also be performing any military services required by the local lords. Clerics would be performing their duties within their churches. They would be performing marriages, funerals, etc. They would of course be interacting with church officials and their congregations. Of course, people are more than just their jobs. All classes would also pursue any business opportunities, indulge in their hobbies, and spend time with their families and friends.
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Post by blackwyvern on Mar 28, 2022 21:19:31 GMT -6
Yes. It seems to me that, just like the "alternate" combat rules became the standard D&D model, the "alternate" campaign style also endured. Many of the assumptions about the audience for D&D and how they would use it in the initial release missed the mark, but it's not surprising. They had an entire new hobby on their hands with no precedent. Instead of "Many of the assumptions about the audience for D&D and how they would use it in the initial release missed the mark...," I'd say, "The game, having struck its intended mark, had a greater impact than they possibly fathomed." I think this is incredibly accurate. D&D was conceived as a variation on war gaming, written for war gamers by war gamers. Who would have thought it was going to grow beyond that market? I started war gaming over a decade after I started RPGing. I was adopted into a group of Cal State Sac professors, most of whom were closer to Dave and Gary's age than mine, who played mostly WWII games and had almost no RPG experience. The course of this discussion has really made me think about those gents from decades ago.
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Post by dicebro on Mar 29, 2022 8:18:59 GMT -6
Okay, so I get that MUs need to research spells and take time out to make magic items. Cool. What are FM and CL doing during all that time? Do they also have activities that draw them away from adventure? Fighting men would most likely be training. They'd be learning new weapons skills, new techniques (or brushing up on old ones), and leadership skills for when they get retainers at name level. They may also be performing any military services required by the local lords. Clerics would be performing their duties within their churches. They would be performing marriages, funerals, etc. They would of course be interacting with church officials and their congregations. Of course, people are more than just their jobs. All classes would also pursue any business opportunities, indulge in their hobbies, and spend time with their families and friends. Okay, so I get that MUs need to research spells and take time out to make magic items. Cool. What are FM and CL doing during all that time? Answer: They are going on other adventures! Do they also have activities that draw them away from adventure? Answer: Yes, they are resting and preparing for the next adventure. In OD&D (without the supplements) only Wizards can make magic items. That means 11th level Magic User.
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Post by smubee on Mar 29, 2022 11:53:53 GMT -6
I really think that something like the open table / “always on” is only feasible when you’re playing OD&D or a very rules-lite game.
The time it takes to create a character using the 3 LBB is what.. 10 minutes? That includes buying equipment and developing a personality based on the stats.
The time it takes to create a 5e character? 45 minutes - 2 hours depending on how deep you want to go.
I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of an Always On campaign, and that’s what drew me to the original rules in the first place. 5e is a technically better game if you want a more narrative approach, but if you want an open world fantasy simulator, then OD&D is the way to go.
I’ve been looking to start exactly this for years now, but never can find enough players to even get it started.
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Post by dizzysaxophone on Mar 29, 2022 21:49:20 GMT -6
This style of play is still around. There are a few discords with a good amount of people playing in a west marches style. I've been working on creating my wilderness for one using OD&D + Chainmail.
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Post by Finarvyn on Mar 30, 2022 4:26:29 GMT -6
I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of an Always On campaign, and that’s what drew me to the original rules in the first place. <snip> I’ve been looking to start exactly this for years now, but never can find enough players to even get it started. For me, those games worked best when I was in high school. We would play on the weekends, but during the week sometimes I would have impromptu sessions with friends over the phone. Some of those were 2-3 hour things and my mom would get so mad. "But you won't let me go over to Mike's during the week!" Or, sometimes during lunch period. Much harder to do when everyone has actual jobs, but 5E's Adventurer's League is a little like that. Tables of seven, but not always the same seven, and we'd try to have the same GM. None of the "my character will be out of action for awhile while I make a sword" stuff, of course, but the drift-in-and-out aspect.
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