Role before Character Playing Revisited

 

 

Last week I published a blog post reflecting on my experiences during the earliest years of Dungeons and Dragons. (You can see it here) That post had more reads in the first week than everything else I have written to date. That made me think people might be interested in a second round.

A couple of caveats

1. I’m not saying that the old way is better than the new. This is simply a set of recollections to help people joining the hobby understand where certain elements of it came from.

2.  I have enough graduate training in the field of Learning and Memory to know that these old, episodic memories are rehearsed over the years and that each time I rehearse them, they can and do change slightly. Elements of some of these old stories are going to be false. I will have miss-remembered them. But everything here will be as I remember it.

3. This is likely my last post on this topic. I may write more on early gaming, but there is not much to say about my gaming in these earliest years—from back when I was age 14 to 16.

 

The Dungeons and Campaigns. By 1979 I was involved in multiple gaming groups. Where I grew up there were three small towns, each about 10 km / 6 miles apart. And each had a collection of people who played D&D. They were a mix of older high school students, university students, and those just gainfully employed. I was always the youngest in the group—I was that egg-head kid that tagged along and did the best he could.

Most players were involved in either community theater, the Society for Creative Anachronisms, or the university. People moved in and out of groups fluidly and without question or concern.

“Hey, I’ve got a lead in play X and won’t be able to game for eight weeks.”

“Cool, see you when you’re done.”

Each DM had their own world. No one used any published worlds or adventures. All the worlds were known by the name of the DM. There were three main ones, Will’s, Ian’s, and (I think) Bob’s. (Bob was really cool guy who wrote his own plays—and a TV show—but was also the first to move away.) Ian, like Bob, ran a great game. Before Bob left, Will ran two games but picked up Bob’s slot when he left and thereafter ran three.

The Sanskrit Place. Will’s low-level dungeon had a carving, like a Greek Key, running along the top of the wall. The writing was described as looking like Sanskrit, and the whole dungeon was simply, “The Sanskrit Place”.

There was a single “players” map that each expedition would improve it. Typically, we would explore a few rooms per session. The further in we went, the more directions opened up for us.

“Let’s go to this place,” says someone, point to a location. “I want to know what’s around that corner or behind that door.”

“Wasn’t that the one where Toni’s thief heard the loud clanging?”

“Yah. I think it might be related to this thing was saw over here,” pointing to another part of the dungeon.

And that is how we would pick our destination for an evening. There were always simple “puzzles”. This thing here related to that thing there.

And there were obstacles. There was, for example, a flight of stairs that went down to a lower level which were exceptionally deadly. I seem to recall that we tried and failed on several attempts to get to the bottom. And when we did there was a trap which shot hundreds of poisoned needles. Killed someone’s thief instantly. But my magic user safely stored some poisoned darts in a pouch. We didn’t get through the door at the bottom of the stairs that session.

As the average character-level got higher, we left the Sanskrit Place dungeon and started other adventures.

During a random encounter months (or maybe even a year) later, some big monster—either ogres or small giants—was attacking us during the night.

“Hey Will, my magic user is invisible. Can I sneak up and poke the monster in the ankle with a poisoned dart?”

Will calls for some sort of a roll, and I succeed. “Okay, what poison is on the dart?”

“I don’t know. It was one of the darts from that weird door in the Sanskrit place. The one at the bottom of those stairs.”

“Oh!. The monster falls over, instantly dead.”

A trashy front room. I think it was Bob who had this memorable dungeon. On our first expedition, we found a couple of guard rooms near the main entrance. After clearing those, the main hall entered a large space with flanking vaulted passages and a large central space filled with piles of trash where monsters would hide. There was a massive fight in the entrance room. Later random monsters would hide there and slow progression deeper in. This became a feature of the dungeon.

“We’ll go through the front hall, to the right and try and get to this door. From there we’ll head back to the south.”

We would typically add a few rooms per night. The party was a single unit of exploration. Everyone had a role, but we had to be fluid. As things changed, you needed to respond to events in a way that kept as many of your teammates alive as possible. And this is where we get, “Don’t split the party”. The group as a single “character” exploring the dungeon. Character advancement was the reward, but for most of us, the real reward was figuring out what was around the next corner.

Typical Action. The group, typically, moves as a single unit. The standard, in every game I played in, was that you could fit three characters across a ten-foot-wide hallway. As mentioned last week, there would be a fixed marching order which would define the configuration we were in when we contacted an enemy.

Typically, there were three kinds of encounters, encounters in halls, encounters where we swarmed into a room, and encounters where we held something—a door, an archway—against an onslaught of foes. Single big monsters were the easiest to face because of the limited number of enemy attacks. Large swarms of little monsters were the worst, because it was harder to control them. Rats and centipedes can rush through lines and get to the MUs and thieves in the middle.

The front would form a shield wall. General tactics—what is a heavy fighter versus light fighter

Clerics cast cure light wounds. Problem was you had to be second rank in order to touch the front-line fighters. Clerics would bolster the front as needed. Unfortunately, because they were armored, eventually, someone would go down and they would step forward. But whatever just took down a heavy fighter is now looking at them. No cleric ever lived long enough in our games, as I can remember, to ever cast any other spell. Last person to the table had to make the cleric, or as a second character. Cure light was such a valuable resource that no other spell was useful enough to justify taking it.

Air Strikes. Magic users were essential. They were the artillery that could make or break an expedition. There were only two first-level spells. Sleep can take out all opponents on a given flank, saving half the team. Charm person can remove a single large opponent. Famously, for our early group, once the ogre or what not was charmed, they would be instructed to run through the dungeon yelling, “Oiseau, oiseau, come and get my oiseau”. Can’t tell you why, but that’s what we did. If you live to third level then your spell would be web.

Say Fish. But there were some element of modern “roleplaying” here. One time were found a fissure in the floor of a hallway, and out of it came a sleeping gas. We had sorted out the problem, pulled back and were getting ready to move on when a random patrol of orcs came down the hall from the other direction. We knew we had to hold our breath when we stepped over the fissure, as did the orcs. As their front rank stepped over it, out of nowhere, Mary has her fighter blurt out, in orcish, “Say fish”. The DM agreed that it was so unexpected that the orcs had to make a saving throw or in confusion say, “Huh?” or “What?”, which would, of course, make them pass out.

Touch the green stone. Bob or Ian had this recurring green stone and many other “funky,” non-standard-rules-based, magic things. And they would propose alternate variations on classes—we were always trying out this or that. I recall having a Movement Mage once, that got teleported by stepping through a mirror. Had to miss several games making their way home. Every second or third session there would be some sort of weird magic.

When you encountered weird magic, it was about 50/50 that it would improve your character or hurt them. But the most memorable weird magic of all was the green stone. It was a glowing rock that would raise attributes, or do some minor bad thing, or teleport you away and teleport in someone else. Eventually we figured out the teleport bit. When you touched the green stone, you swapped places with someone else—from another time—who touched the stone. There were several side quests as the character who swapped places with someone tries to get to safety and the party deals with the new person. Mary lost a fighter swapping places with a German snipper on the Eastern front. And there was thereafter a new assassin in our base town.

But the fun part was, whenever a character encountered the stone, everyone at the table would start chanting, “Touch the green stone,” over and over again.

Thanks. Anyway, that is likely more boring, old gaming stories than most people will want to read. But I have put them down for those who might be interested. As always, I love hearing from anyone who has questions, concerns, or just your own fun gaming stories.