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

[Lanefan]

Do you always double-check your mechanic's work on your car and similar? Generally speaking we tend to accept that professionals and skilled individuals are good at what they do, and not replicate their efforts (especially in old school D&D, where each character who checks after the first is spending ten minutes searching and providing yet another wandering monster check).

Fair enough, though oftentimes there's more than one "professional" in the party.

 

[Lanefan]

So most characters understand how to make electricity, how germ theory works, and how to speak and write English as well as Common?

Seems to me that you are making things harder on yourselves than you need to by getting rid of those distinctions.

Perhaps, but all too often IME players just can't separate character knowledge from player knowledge and thus have their characters act on information that the player heard at the table but that their characters couldn't possibly know in the fiction.

An example using the hallway intersection from earlier: if Dyson makes a clean break and both the players and the characters don't realize he isn't with them until 10 minutes later when they're well into their investigation of the green glow then nobody can act on that information. Further, when they do notice he's gone they won't know exactly when he left, or why; and probably aren't aware just how far back he dropped off. And in the meantime he could have died to a trap on the important-looking door or fallen down a chute trap and been captured - things which again neither the players nor characters would be aware of, yet.

But if the players are made aware out-of-character that Dyson has gone elsewhere at the time he does so (and even more so, what if anything happens to him while separated from the group) then 99+% of the time that'll change what their characters - who otherwise don't yet know that Dyson isn't with them - would do; as that meta-knowledge taints the players' thinking.

More broadly, it's all about preventing metagaming by not giving it a chance to occur.

 

[bloodtide]

This is utterly bizarre. Any of the people I knew of locally or remotely back in the day would have laughed at this.

It was a bizarre time.

Like making player hand outs, maps or blank character sheets in the schools Ditto Machine. And by High School the Country Library had gotten one of those new fangeled Facsimile Machines that could make 'Copies' of papers too. It was not for public use. You had to go into the Library's back office....but that did not matter in this bizarre time. You would simply walk back into the back office, make a couple 'copies' and leave.

There weren’t even RUMORS of things called “conventions” in either city. (I may have seen ads in Dragon, but certainly didn’t notice them.)

The whole convention thing was big in the Old Days. From when I first rolled a d20 to fight Bargle, all of the older, "Cool Kids" were going to conventions. Buy the time I was a teen, there were many more around. Lots of little Star Trek ones popped up after TNG came out with names like "StarBase Bridgetown" or "USS Homervile". And they played plenty of RPGs at even "Star Trek" cons. And the D&D ones were just like DragonCon or DungeonCon (such amazing creative names).

And as a teen we would save up money to go to some conventions. We would get there...of course.....by hitchhiking. Just putting out our thumbs and hopping into the first car or truck going in the general direction we wanted to go. It...was....well.....bizarrely...a "safe" way for teens to travel around. Though often your mom would ask you to make a collect call(Back in the Time Before Time, phone calls of more then a couple miles were "Long Distance" and cost a lot, like $1 a minute sometimes, so a collect call was a call charged to your (parents) home phone) home when you made it to the motel you were staying at for the weekend. She just wanted to make sure you were safe after you hitchhiked a bunch of rides from strangers....

 

[Dyson Logos]

But if the players are made aware out-of-character that Dyson has gone elsewhere at the time he does so (and even more so, what if anything happens to him while separated from the group) then 99+% of the time that'll change what their characters - who otherwise don't yet know that Dyson isn't with them - would do; as that meta-knowledge taints the players' thinking.

We obviously have VERY different playstyles. Our groups revel in scenes like that.

 

[Iosue]

I've never used xp-for-gp but if I did I'd still push the accounting over to the players. There's also the tracking of non-magical but valuable items e.g. gems, jewelry, fancy dinner sets, etc. that likely wouldn't get divided in the field as you wouldn't know their values.

Division in the field is based on encumbrance, not even shares, so it's not an issue. The gems are held by the person or persons who can carry the gems without slowing the party down.

It's unavoidable, I think, as soon as you implement "if the Caller says it, it happens"; and if that's not implemented the DM still doesn't know when to listen and when not to, meaning what's the point of a Caller?

I don't follow. It's not "if the Caller says it, it happens." The Caller simply relates the information to the DM once the players have decided on their (individual!) course of actions. The Caller can't say, "The thief checks for traps!" if the thief has not expressed their intention to check for traps.

This (IME wrongly, a lot of the time) assumes some things:

--- that the players, in and-or out of character, are willing to come to any sort of agreement on a regular basis

Irrelevant to the function of a Caller. Agreement is not required.

--- that all the players are willing to tell the Caller what their characters are doing

Session 0 problem.

--- that the Caller's own character isn't doing something unknown to the rest of the party

I'll get into this below, but again irrelevant to the function of the Caller.

--- that players won't change their minds during the time the Caller is talking to the DM

Not an issue. The deadline for changing their minds is not the Caller speaking, but the DM adjudicating what has been communicated. If they tell the Caller one thing, but then change their minds while the Caller is telling the DM, they just say, "Wait, actually I'm going to do X." The Caller says, "Okay, Player A is doing X," and continue. They can even do that after the Caller has finished speaking, but before the DM starts adjudicating. It's not ideal, but no more of an issue than a character in combat saying, "I'm going to shoot my bow," picking up their d20, and then saying, "No, wait, I'm going to swing my sword."

At the intersection, for example, if everyone goes toward the green light except one character wants to hide, hang back, and then sneak to the door instead, ideally none of the other players know what this character is doing - which means the Caller can't be told either. And yet if everything has to run through the Caller...then what?

So this is an interesting case, particularly if you value keeping player-headspace as close to character-headspace as possible, which I can fully understand and get behind. But then, I would just ask, how is this done without a Caller, in a way that maintains that congruity of IC and OOC knowledge? And why would that not work with a Caller? Because if it's just the player telling the DM, in full view and hearing of the other players, then I don't see the difference.

Yes, running a big party is often an exercise in cat-herding; but as both DM and player I'd far rather that than have it be an exercise in sheep-herding.

I resent the implication. And we were having such a good discussion.

The basic disconnect here is that you're still looking at the Caller as some kind of party leader who wrangles the other players, obtains a consensus, and make sure everyone's moving in the same direction. And that's simply not what I'm talking about. I don't want that in my group, either.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It was a bizarre time.

Sure, but I'm talking about that time--or earlier.

The whole convention thing was big in the Old Days. From when I first rolled a d20 to fight Bargle, all of the older, "Cool Kids" were going to conventions. Buy the time I was a teen, there were many more around. Lots of little Star Trek ones popped up after TNG came out with names like "StarBase Bridgetown" or "USS Homervile". And they played plenty of RPGs at even "Star Trek" cons. And the D&D ones were just like DragonCon or DungeonCon (such amazing creative names).

I ran games at conventions; I did it at DunDraCon III and on for many years (though after about 78 it probably wasn't D&D). None of the "Convention Play is the best play" thing (especially setting ahead official games over the stuff in Open Gaming) was anywhere to be seen. Nor at any of the Los Angeles cons I attended.

 

[MGibster]

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.

One thing a lot of people forget is just how isolated many of us were. I had a very limited pool of players to draw on in middle and high school. My group even had some friends in common who also played with their group, but we never gamed together for some reason. Like nobody ever said, "Why don't you guys join us for some Gamm World this Saturday?" I had to depend on Dragon Magazine for most of my gaming news and what I happened to find at the game store. There are a swath of important games I missed out on simply because nobody in my small group played it or owned it. I missed out on Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, and others. Somehow I ended up playing Cyborg Commando because fate is a cruel mistress.

Very often we look back at our own experience and believe they're typical, but how do we know? It's kind of like a family tradition. You might think it's normal to have pickle Thursdays but nobody else but your family does that.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The whole convention thing was big in the Old Days.

Maybe in some regions, but like I said, it wasn’t universal.

 

[Dyson Logos]

Yeah, I started going to conventions in '79 and never ran into the "tournament D&D is best / only D&D" thing. If anything, people were more excited to play weird off-shoot games and variants. But my experience was mostly around Origins and GenCon back then.

 

[MGibster]

Yeah, I started going to conventions in '79 and never ran into the "tournament D&D is best / only D&D" thing. If anything, people were more excited to play weird off-shoot games and variants. But my experience was mostly around Origins and GenCon back then.

I remember the first convention I went to, it was hosted at the Collin Creek Community College back in 1990 or 1991. It was the first time I ever played a game with a g-g-g-g-g-girl!