Listening to old-timers describe RP in the 70s and 80s

[ThorinTeague]

It really grinds my gears when people who played [A]D&D in the early days describe their style as if it were the way it was played. I've been listening to people say that the game was, you made a couple characters, started in front of a dungeon and went in. The dungeon was always generated randomly. Brought the loot back to town, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. And I'm like, no, that's the way your group played, it wasn't universal. 1e had dozens if not a hundred or more modules. Several of which didn't involve a dungeon at all.

Mostly I just hope it's not turning off the new generation to OSR/OSRIC/FG&G et. al. for no merited reason. I am very much a person who embraces the new blood and sees it as necessary and I don't want them coming in with prejudice. That is all...

 

[wicked cool]

Back in my day you went into a dungeon with a hireling that carried a 10 foot pole. And we liked it

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

It really grinds my gears when people who played [A]D&D in the early days describe their style as if it were the way it was played. I've been listening to people say that the game was, you made a couple characters, started in front of a dungeon and went in. The dungeon was always generated randomly. Brought the loot back to town, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. And I'm like, no, that's the way your group played, it wasn't universal. 1e had dozens if not a hundred or more modules. Several of which didn't involve a dungeon at all.

Mostly I just hope it's not turning off the new generation to OSR/OSRIC/FG&G et. al. for no merited reason. I am very much a person who embraces the new blood and sees it as necessary and I don't want them coming in with prejudice. That is all...

Completely agree. I think one of the great boons of the modern era is that we are seeing a lot more serious scholarship of the early days of RPGs, and it overwhelmingly shows that the 1970s and into the early 1980s were actually an incredibly diverse time for different types of games and styles- that you had everything from the so-called "golden hole" (dungeon, no real town) and "meatgrinder" D&D games to completely narrative games that were focused on politics and more closely resembled an RPG version of Diplomacy than it did a dungeoncrawl.

People will often compose some type of overlay of an idealized historical past, which ignores the nuances of the time and substitutes a comforting and uniform but incorrect meaning to the messy actuality.

 

[deganawida]

I started later, in 1990, but I know that I've never actually played a session where we went into a dungeon, much less going into one at low levels. Instead, going into a place and fighting was reserved for going into the villain's lair. You know, like 80s movies and cartoons.

Point being, though I'm younger, I also did not experience what the OSR people are making videos about at my table.

 

[Reynard]

It really grinds my gears when people who played [A]D&D in the early days describe their style as if it were the way it was played. I've been listening to people say that the game was, you made a couple characters, started in front of a dungeon and went in. The dungeon was always generated randomly. Brought the loot back to town, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. And I'm like, no, that's the way your group played, it wasn't universal. 1e had dozens if not a hundred or more modules. Several of which didn't involve a dungeon at all.

Mostly I just hope it's not turning off the new generation to OSR/OSRIC/FG&G et. al. for no merited reason. I am very much a person who embraces the new blood and sees it as necessary and I don't want them coming in with prejudice. That is all...

Read Peterson's "The Elusive Shift." There was no one way they played the game. there were many heated debates about how to play the game and even what the game was.

 

[cranberry]

I guess it partially depends on who you managed to play with, but people also gravitate toward groups that share their preference and playstyles.

Personally, most of the people I've ended up with prefer a heavy combat focus, (even most of the 20 and 30 somethings that I've played with in the past 10 years. "young blood")

There has been less emphasis on dungeon crawls, but it's almost always about combat.

 

[Firwood]

Do not forget that with D&D first and AD&D later, the game was not yet as widespread as it was in later years. Those who heard about it played it the way they had seen it, so they repeated the same way of playing and so on from group to group.
Those were 'simpler' years, with a game in its infancy that had only just dawned on the minds of the players.
It is somewhat the same as with other types of entertainment: in general, the further back in time one goes, the simpler the pastimes were, made up of a few essential elements, without excessive lucubration.
I started in 1985 with the red box (in Italy, novelties always arrived late), and I remember with great pleasure the evenings spent slaying monsters in cramped dungeons, even if there was little variety in the plots told.

 

[nevin]

It really grinds my gears when people who played [A]D&D in the early days describe their style as if it were the way it was played. I've been listening to people say that the game was, you made a couple characters, started in front of a dungeon and went in. The dungeon was always generated randomly. Brought the loot back to town, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. And I'm like, no, that's the way your group played, it wasn't universal. 1e had dozens if not a hundred or more modules. Several of which didn't involve a dungeon at all.

Mostly I just hope it's not turning off the new generation to OSR/OSRIC/FG&G et. al. for no merited reason. I am very much a person who embraces the new blood and sees it as necessary and I don't want them coming in with prejudice. That is all...

I agree but it is human nature to try to distill any idea into a simple thing that anyone can understand. Then they can talk about it as if it were an absolute. GENX vs GENY vs Baby Boomers for example.

But yeah there were all kinds of groups in the day not just one style. But I'm sure there were more of my type.

 

[payn]

It really grinds my gears when people who played [A]D&D in the early days describe their style as if it were the way it was played. I've been listening to people say that the game was, you made a couple characters, started in front of a dungeon and went in. The dungeon was always generated randomly. Brought the loot back to town, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. And I'm like, no, that's the way your group played, it wasn't universal. 1e had dozens if not a hundred or more modules. Several of which didn't involve a dungeon at all.

Mostly I just hope it's not turning off the new generation to OSR/OSRIC/FG&G et. al. for no merited reason. I am very much a person who embraces the new blood and sees it as necessary and I don't want them coming in with prejudice. That is all...

Im not terribly worried about this. There is so much post Hickman adventuring going on in modern gaming that newbies are looking to OSR for that dungeon crawl exposure. Thats my experience anyway.

 

[ThorinTeague]

Read Peterson's "The Elusive Shift." There was no one way they played the game. there were many heated debates about how to play the game and even what the game was.

I’ll check it out. I’m getting a lot of reading homework from enworld