Let's Read D&D From 1974
Added 2022-04-13 15:36:15 +0000 UTCOur next Hangout Club is Friday, April 22nd @ 11am CDT. Mark your calendars!
UPCOMING STREAMS @ Twitch:
WED APR 13th @ 6:30pm CST: Let's Read Dragon Magazine
Comments
Lots of people forget that D&D was (and still is in many respects) a war-game. There's a lot of frosting on the game but it's still about tanks (fighters), artillery (mages), logistics (supplies), unit composition (party balance).
2022-04-22 23:42:10 +0000 UTCI played chainmail before I discovered white box D&D. It was obvious then that D&D was designed as a build in to creating organic wargame campaigns. I remember using a graph paper map from a castle siege to be one of my earliest dungeons. The looseness of the rules was not a surprise. Referees were commonly used in our figurine wargames. We were dealing with the real world. The referee was expected to be a compendium of relevant knowledge and could make judgement calls based on that. The rules were "associated" in that they modeled real world things, so real world rulings were agreeable to all players. The magic supplement in chainmail brought some interesting twists on that, since nobody had real world knowledge of spells, or the ability of an ogre on the battlefield. We chose reference fantasy books to act as the knowledge base. This became even more convoluted when D&D came on the scene. Some players immediately went for the pure hero vs the world, and magic works like I say it works, style of play. This became problematic for the referees who wanted to stick strickly to RAW while building up a model based on ruling precedence. Few players around me ever kept going up to wargame level, where we became lords or patriarchs. Only in one D&D game did that happen for me, after we had moved into AD&D and the wargame army/kingdom leader funnel had more or less been stripped out.
2022-04-16 03:55:04 +0000 UTCLoved this - fascinating stuff! Would love to get you on my podcast to talk about your experiences with that 2009 OD&D campaign, but I guess I will settle for further instalments! Thank you for all the generous work you do. You are an inspiration for me as a GM!
Che Webster
2022-04-15 16:59:40 +0000 UTC
