Role Playing before Character Playing

 

 

TL;DR: Old guy records his lived-experience as a TTRPGer in the late 1970s. Particularly, how play was focused on role in the group rather than the individual characters.

Like most people I meet, I have my own lived-experience, one that is unique to me. Unlike many people today, mine included playing Dungeons and Dragons in the late 1970s. There was a recent Reddit post where someone asked us old-timers to talk about how we used to play. Working from my phone, I couldn’t write too long of a response, but the short, little response I put there has gotten more upvotes than just about anything else I’ve ever said on that platform. This makes me think that there might be some people who would like to know more about my experience playing D&D when it was still young.

Back then we played the game differently. I’m not going to say that it was better than the way we play today, but it also wasn’t worse. It was just different.

Short backstory. When I was what we would now call a tween, I was hopelessly nerdy and living in a small, rural, university town in upstate California surrounded by hundreds of miles of trees, mountains, and the occasional ocean. Before the Information Age, boredom was a real thing and from about age 13 to my early 20s I lived in the same town and gamed with a core group of people that slowly changed over time and an ever rotating cloud of others. Being in Northern California, we were early adopters of Runequest and we had another game called The Arduin Grimoire. I recall playing Tunnels and Trolls a few times, Traveller a lot, same with The Fantasy Trip when it came out, and for me and some of my friends, every post-apocalyptic game as it came out, Gamma World, Morrow Project, and finally Aftermath! But most of those were in early 1980s.

Who was at the table. From about 1977 until 1981 or so, I played a lot of D&D. In the summer, around three 8-hour D&D sessions a week. There would be usually at least five people, typically seven or eight, and sometimes ten or more. For the first few years, I was usually the youngest player. Ages of the players would run from tween to college-age. The gender ratio was heavily skewed towards males, with a fair representation of openly gay players, but every game would have one or two women playing. After about 1981, I pretty much left D&D for Runequest, Aftermath! and then GURPS.

Roles not Characters. We played it differently from today. We tended to play roles, not characters. Each game session would start with organizing a party. Depending on who showed up, we would pick which characters to play, or we might roll up new ones. Most players had a small stable of characters—maybe three or four. If there were not enough players to make a good team, the DM would frequently allow some players to run multiple characters. You would usually want ten to a dozen characters going into the dungeon.

Once the party was assembled, the characters would head into the dungeon. For several years, my best friend, Will Handrich, would run three games a week (one in each real-world town in our area) and I would typically go to all three games. The parties would head into one of a small number of dungeons—places with names like the Sanskrit Place or the Old Tower. The game would ALWAYS end with the group leaving the dungeon, or the occasional TPK. After we got out, there would be some bookkeeping and dividing the loot and magic items. Nothing was ever left hanging for the next game—because you never know who would or would not be there.

But here is the thing, when we organized our groups, we didn’t really care about the characters, what we were interested in was the character’s role in the team. That’s why we called it roleplaying. Roles typically included heavy fighters, light fighters, thieves and magic users. Even after AD&D came in, these were still pretty much the roles we had. Even when Will let us start playing monster PCs, and I ran a young, Chaotic Evil red dragon that was trying to be Lawful Good, it was still more about the character’s role as a heavy fighter than about the wild and wacky backstory.

Party Organization. We always organized the characters into a marching order. It would be a block, three abreast. This is what would fit in a ten-foot-wide corridor, and the corridors were (almost) always ten-foot wide. Ideally, if you had, say a group of 12 PCs, you would want three heavy fighters up front. The second rank would often be light fighters like clerics who could also provide healing to the tanks. The “soft center” of wizards and thieves should never get directly exposed to monsters and the back rank would be lower-level heavy fighters or higher-level light fighters.

Levels. Characters progressed up level depending on how much they were played and how lucky they were in their adventures. We would routinely have third to fifth level characters forming the core of the group with new level one characters be protected as best we can. But here is the thing, characters died. Even high-level characters. Usually, one or two per game. Often up to half the party. If you survived a dangerous adventure or a bad encounter, you would be greatly rewarded. The treasure and the experience would be divided among less characters—so all the survivors got more. But you had to live. If you had a scholarly magic user, you might not opt to send them into what is expected to be a major fight. But then they don’t advance. I had a great, orcish fighter who had gotten to third level. Lots of HP and could really deal a lot of damage. I still remember that someone had to hold the door as we retreated from a swarm of goblins. Best I ever did with a normal fighter character. He did not make it out of that encounter—but he held the door and the others did.

The Great God NCR. One of the older players in the late 1970s had a cleric who, like all adventurers, was in it for the money. Someone asks the play who the cleric worshiped—this didn’t come up until several games in—and the player created the Great God NCR (National Cash Register made all the point-of-sale systems in our community and likely most of the US at the time). This is, I think, the earliest example of a player character having a unique character rather than just a role, I ever encountered. It couldn’t have been earlier than 1978.

Enter Characters. In my world, we were well into the 1980s before games became centered on the character’s character rather than the character’s role. When I ran Aftermath! every character, by their nature, was unique. So, players would make a unique character and try and find their role in the broader group. But there was a lot of what we would now call roleplaying by then. Same with our early 1980’s Runequest. Certainly, by the time GURPS dropped in 1986 everything was about the character and not their role in the group.

Conclusions. I mostly wanted to write this down so there was a record of the play style from when I was a kid, and the hobby was young. I don’t play this way today, and I don’t want to. It was a different time and place. But there are some things I’ve brought forward with me. In my Monday night game there are six of us in total, five players, and we could comfortably accommodate another one or two. Part of this is because we always end the session with the characters outside the place of adventure. When someone calls in sick (or whatever) it is not an issue, they just don’t run their character.

And also, boredom is gone from my world. If I don’t have something pressing to do, I’ll write a blog post or work on a new game system (or—you know—or clean the dishes.) It is almost impossible to get ten people together for eight hours per week. It was fun, but those times are gone.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this post and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below. (I love hearing from people and I’m certainly happy to talk more about old-school gaming with anyone who cares.)

p.s I wrote another, related post. It can be found here.