When guns were deadly in TTRPGs.

 

I want to record a few recollections of early TTRPG gaming with the idea that it might help people understand why some of us played the way we did. It is a little bit ramble and meant to be light-hearted.

I’m an old-ish nerd from northern California. I was less than 10-years-old when D&D was originally published, and I was a tween before I left war-gaming for what we now call TTRPGs.

And I was there, Dude. I was there. I saw it. I played it. I was there when guns were deadly in TTRPGs!

You need to understand, I grew up in a house full of disabled military veterans. My father had brough back with him, from the south of France, two holes in his ankles that never healed. My stepfather lost much of his hearing to the big guns of the battleships in the South Pacific, and my oldest brother was boots-on-the-ground in the jungles of Viet Nam—he had more complex issues.

You should also know that in 1980s, when I was in high school, they reinstated registration for the draft in the US. They ended up not drafting anyone (so far), but we had no way to know that. There was a cold war going on.

Old school gaming. My “lived experience” of D&D in the late 1970’s was game sessions that played like jungle patrols from the war in Viet Nam. A squad of people, maybe 10 to 12, enter into a place of adventure. No one really cares about where the characters were from or their backstory, all that mattered was what they were doing. In their adventure, there will be deadly traps and dangerous enemies. Members of the group will die. Everyone has a role to play in the operation. Fighters have to hold the line. Wizards have to deliver that one massive blast. Clerics have to fight where they can and put the survivors back together before the next encounter. Thieves have to deal with the obstacles, typically the traps and doors. We’re talking grunts, radiomen, corpsmen, and tunnel rats. Sound familiar?

The Apocalypse. I first encountered post-apocalyptic gaming with TSR’s gonzo 1979 game “Gamma World”. There were talking trees and robot death tanks. I had a humanoid rabbit named Peter who attacked with a giant leap and a salvaged fire poker. It was fun, but silly. It didn’t draw people away from the dungeons.

In contrast, Morrow Project was the first thing I ever ordered by mail. I saw an ad and had to have it. Mom helped me with ordering it. Released in 1980, Morrow Project had generally simple mechanics and a cool story setting, but it had two awesome features—and as I think about it, half a dozen other cool innovations—I’m looking at cold sleep, portable fusion, psionics and more. But the two I want to talk about are the table of nuclear targets and the damage system.

At the height of the cold war, two decades before the information age and the internet, Morrow Project taught nerds about nuclear war. It listed real weapons that were actually pointed towards you—in the real world. And it had a table of places they were likely pointed at. This was groundbreaking for those who were processing the last war at the table, and useful for those of us worrying about the next.

Morrow Project also had dangerous guns. The language nerd in me really wants to write “firearms” but I’m purposefully sticking to the colloquial term “gun”. In D&D, the risk of damage from an attack is modeled by the dice rolled. The more dangerous the attack, the larger the range of possible Hit Points lost. Not Morrow Project. They recognized that a weapon typically delivers a fixed amount of destruction per impact. Instead, it is more important where the destruction occurs on the target’s body. Where the character was hit is the important roll. Not damage but hit location. Morrow Project was not the first game to do this. Certainly, Runequest had been doing it for years by then. But Morrow Project introduced the “instant kill” roll. The torso was broken into four strips numbered 1 to 4, with Torse 1 running down the center from the neck to the groin. Torso 2-4 heading out on either side. Each firearm would have an E-value calculated from its muzzle energy. Higher the value, the higher the chance the target would just die when shot.

(Just as a little aside, notice that Morrow Project’s cover was designed to look like a 1980s US military handbook.)

Aftermath! dropped the year after Morrow Project, in 1981, and is the primary game I played for the following eight to ten years. Where Morrow Project had characters emerging into a destroyed world and attempting to repair it, Aftermath! was a game about characters in a changing world. Whatever it was in your game that ended civilization, it happened twenty years ago and we are playing characters who either remember the old world or who are living their life totally in the new.

In many settings, this is a rough and brutal world with frequent hand-to-hand combat. Big, strong characters with sharp swords ruled the world—until someone showed up with a gun. Firearms and ammunition were rare. They were relics of the last world—they were the wizard’s big spell, if you would.

Aftermath! is extremely detailed. It has lots of mechanics and was not for those who feared multiple calculations with small integers. But there were five or six values that defined each firearm and one thing which made Aftermath! interesting was that you could calculate these numbers for any real-world weapon. You could take information from some gun magazine and stat a weapon for the game. And the different statistics had in-game importance.

Another key feature of Aftermath was that it recognized that armor which protects from melee attacks seldom helps against firearms. A 9mm Glock will poke holes through steel armor as if it were not there.

So what? Gaming went through a period of diversification in the early 1980s, and one of the things some of us were looking for was realism. Not everyone. But enough of us cared more about how the mechanics modeled the situation than about the story that was being told. Stories are great. I love a good three-act-rising-action adventure as much as the next person. But for early gamers, many of us realized that stories are told by the survivors, and if you want to be one of the survivors, you need to know how the world really works. And in the real-world guns are deadly and surviving is often more important than the “rule of cool”.

Thanks for taking the time to read my recollections and I hope you found them interesting. Please feel free to leave comments below.

Hey, let's end with a few more cover images. Both apocalyptic and post apocalyptic...

Wizards as an RPG did come out until the 1990s, but it was based on a 1970's movie that was popular with the people in my community.