Anybody wanna ask me shit about Ye Olde Dayse?

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Or, y'know, just tag him in the post...

Or something. With the huge digressions things get lost, and some answers require a real keyboard because I only have one thumb and typing takes forever on a tablet..

 

[robertsconley]

Or something. With the huge digressions things get lost, and some answers require a real keyboard because I only have one thumb and typing takes forever on a tablet..

Bluetooth keyboards are your friend. I have both a small one and a regular size on and used both on Android tablets and my iPad and it works well.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

and the thread drift is complete...


Gronan, any thoughts on Dave Hargrave and his Arduin Grimores?

When I was starting out these were sort of legendary tomes that only the older "cool kids" had. More talked about than actually seen.

Looked them over, shrugged, didn't buy. I was busy making up my own stuff, I didn't need to buy somebody else's.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Do you remember any rules or other elements that Gary or Dave (or Phil) tried out in their games that didn't make it into the published versions? Anything that either didn't work in play, or that worked okay but they decided to leave out for some other reason? Anything that was dropped that you wish hadn't been?

No, not really.

EDIT: I never saw the rules until publication. Dave and Gary both played by the "just tell me what you want to do, don't worry about the rules" method. Other than Gary's diddling with XP tables and spell progression, we had no idea what he did or did not change. We never saw any rules.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Question for Gronan:

Did anyone have any favorite non-English-speaking European countries for whatever reason? I'm thinking in terms of history, aesthetics, culture, etc.

Not that I remember.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

I thought maybe he had me on ignore, but I’ll try.

Gronan of Simmerya Were there any elements of the published rules that were never actually used, at least as written? I’m not sure about OD&D/supplements, but some of AD&D seems more inspirational than literal...

Never used by whom? That's a broad question.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Mike,

How has your own game evolved from how it was played back then? i.e. What stuff did did you see happening on the DM side at the table back then that you wouldn't want to do today?

In the early days, there was an unspoken assumption that a referee should let a player do anything; if, for instance, they wanted to murderous psychopathic douchebags who tortured babies just for laughs, you should allow it. Now, I'm much less reticent to say "No, I will not run that game."

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Gronan of Simmerya - do you recall how Gary or Dave described HP to you when you first started gaming? My understanding was that it was more of a pacing mechanism, but it's obviously been one of the blurriest abstractions in the game over the years

I keep hearing hit points referred to as a "pacing mechanism," and I still have no fucking idea what that means. Hit points measure how long you can keep fighting, and they are highly abstract on purpose.

Remember, we all came to this through CHAINMAIL. A hero in CHAINMAIL is killed by 4 simultaneous hits. We just kept track of the number of hits the hero took. When we went to D&D, we just used 4 HD instead of 4 hits because variable damage makes it a bit more exciting.

And in CHAINMAIL ogres take 4 cumulative hits rather than simultaneous hits. We took that as a way to make the Hero tougher, and never worried about what it represented "in the game world."

"You take 4 hit points."

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Gronan, how were the combat mechanics handled in the early games - did the DM roll HPs for characters, and did the characters know how much they had (initially or after being hit)? Was there a usual initiative mechanism, or did it vary by DM? Did anyone use Chainmail combat in D&D?

Gary rolled our HP and kept track of them for a while. Initiative everybody did something simple, usually just a d6.

Nobody ever used CHAINMAIL combat until years later. It's obviously glued on.

And by the time I started playing with Dave in 1973, he was using the OD&D system.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Did anyone use Blackmoor combat (hit location) in D&D?

Somebody sometime somewhere, probably.

I never saw it.

 

[Moonglum]

I keep hearing hit points referred to as a "pacing mechanism," and I still have no fucking idea what that means. Hit points measure how long you can keep fighting, and they are highly abstract on purpose.

Remember, we all came to this through CHAINMAIL. A hero in CHAINMAIL is killed by 4 simultaneous hits. We just kept track of the number of hits the hero took. When we went to D&D, we just used 4 HD instead of 4 hits because variable damage makes it a bit more exciting.

And in CHAINMAIL ogres take 4 cumulative hits rather than simultaneous hits. We took that as a way to make the Hero tougher, and never worried about what it represented "in the game world."

"You take 4 hit points."

This is clearly stated in Chainmail - though the effects in the game of requiring simultaneous rather than cumulative hits to kill are pretty extreme, at least you can understand them. But your description of how this translated to the way you played D+D is unclear. Are you saying that you house-ruled Chainmail to treat heroes as dead after 4 cumulative hits and then carried that over to the HP version in D+D, or are you saying you played Chainmail RAW and carried over its treatment of heroes (simultaneous hits kill you; cumulative hits are irrelevant) in D+D, or are you saying you played both games RAW when it comes to this issue? I just can't follow what you are trying to say.

Whichever it is, anyone who has played D+D-like scenarios using Chainmail can tell you that heroes got massively 'nerfed' on the translation to D+D, both with respect to their resilience and offensive output. A '4 hit' hero in Chainmail is a one-person wrecking crew; a 4 hd hero in D+D is decidedly not.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

We played both by the rules. D&D heroes had 4 hit dice insted of 4 hits, but we viewed this as a minor tweak.

 

[Arminius]

Never used by whom? That's a broad question.

I’m not sure about OD&D, but some of the rules in AD&D seem like Gary was trying to systematize something he may have handled using judgement in actual play, so he wrote up some mechanics but never playtested them and never actually applied them, as written, his own games. Most suspect in my eyes are the 1e unarmed combat rules.

So, I’m wondering if my suspicion is correct there, or anywhere else.

 

[TristramEvans]

I keep hearing hit points referred to as a "pacing mechanism," and I still have no fucking idea what that means. Hit points measure how long you can keep fighting,

that's literally what is meant by pacing mechanism - a reflection of how long you last in a fight, as opposed to a "wound system"

 

[Stevethulhu]

I’m not sure about OD&D, but some of the rules in AD&D seem like Gary was trying to systematize something he may have handled using judgement in actual play, so he wrote up some mechanics but never playtested them and never actually applied them, as written, his own games. Most suspect in my eyes are the 1e unarmed combat rules.

So, I’m wondering if my suspicion is correct there, or anywhere else.

Psionics look like they might fall into that category too.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

I’m not sure about OD&D, but some of the rules in AD&D seem like Gary was trying to systematize something he may have handled using judgement in actual play, so he wrote up some mechanics but never playtested them and never actually applied them, as written, his own games. Most suspect in my eyes are the 1e unarmed combat rules.

So, I’m wondering if my suspicion is correct there, or anywhere else.

I know nothing of AD&D. Or more precisely, of Gary's process for writing it.

 

[EOTB]

I’m not sure about OD&D, but some of the rules in AD&D seem like Gary was trying to systematize something he may have handled using judgement in actual play, so he wrote up some mechanics but never playtested them and never actually applied them, as written, his own games. Most suspect in my eyes are the 1e unarmed combat rules.

So, I’m wondering if my suspicion is correct there, or anywhere else.

I've playtested the DMG system. Drop the near-meaningless d6/d4 die roll modifier choice it gives attackers/defenders, be willing to eyeball the various table mods relating to height/weight, etc., and it works great.

Like all things AD&D, the granularity isn't an obligation even if present. Granularity gives you an insight into how big an impact certain things have on the whole, but eyeballing 60% is always better than slowly adding your way to 58%.

 

[Arminius]

I know nothing of AD&D. Or more precisely, of Gary's process for writing it.

Right, so what about the original set and supplements? Psionics is a good example.

 

[Moonglum]

We played both by the rules. D&D heroes had 4 hit dice insted of 4 hits, but we viewed this as a minor tweak.

I get it; I've never heard of anyone doing otherwise (but you never know!).

I view this minor tweak as one of the defining decisions in the game, as it started us all on the 'glide path' to an idea of high level fighters as bags of hit points who don't dole out much firepower (for their level).

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

High level fighters get 1 attack per level against 1 HP opponents. Sounds like a lot of firepower to me.

For that matter, Gary didn't even bother making attack rolls; for a 6th level fighter versus orcs, for instance, he'd just roll a six sider and that was how many you killed.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Right, so what about the original set and supplements? Psionics is a good example.

Don't know. I had no interest in psionics so I only skimmed it. The supplements were a bunch of ideas one could use or not. I used some but not others. That also was after I no longer lived in Lake Geneva.

 

[robertsconley]

When you started playing Blackmoor was it pretty much like other D&D campaigns where the players were part of the same party and the rest of the world was run by Dave like NPCs and monsters? Or were there still bad guy PCs doing their own thing and Dave was more of a neutral arbiter?

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

When you started playing Blackmoor was it pretty much like other D&D campaigns where the players were part of the same party and the rest of the world was run by Dave like NPCs and monsters? Or were there still bad guy PCs doing their own thing and Dave was more of a neutral arbiter?

The former.

 

[AsenRG]

We played both by the rules. D&D heroes had 4 hit dice insted of 4 hits, but we viewed this as a minor tweak.

I know your lot understood probabilities, being wargamers .
So didn't it strike you as a bad idea that "those four hits are going to be lost, on average, by four consecutive attacks, so this change is demoting the Hero from Chainmail to the status of the Ogre", or something like it?

I wish more designers, players and referees agreed with this. My players happily accept long combat rounds in King Arthur Pendragon (because fights in Le Morte d'Arthur often take all day), but rarely like it in anything else.

So when was the one minute round abandoned? Did it persist in Gary's games after published rules had dictated shorter combat rounds?

Well, if many "designers, players and referees" don't like long abstract rounds, maybe there's a reason for that?

 

[Moonglum]

High level fighters get 1 attack per level against 1 HP opponents. Sounds like a lot of firepower to me.

For that matter, Gary didn't even bother making attack rolls; for a 6th level fighter versus orcs, for instance, he'd just roll a six sider and that was how many you killed.

Sort of; I thought the rule was 1 attack per level against opponents with less than1 full HD. But anyway I get the point.

In any case, for the (common) situation where you are up against things with 1 or more HD, fighters only gradually improve in their ability to dish it out (i.e., through modest improvements in to-hit roll). This is part of the reason why so many people gripe about wizards being 'quadratic' while fighters are 'linear'. I have never been terribly concerned about the fact that a 10th level wizard and a 3rd level wizard are very different cats. But it is tiresome when you realize your 10th level fighter is kind of like your 3rd level fighter, except he or she lasts longer in extended fights.

My original point was just that in Chainmail fighters were also 'quadratic', in the sense that a 4 HD hero was enormously harder to kill and enormously more dangerous to foes.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

I know your lot understood probabilities, being wargamers .
So didn't it strike you as a bad idea that "those four hits are going to be lost, on average, by four consecutive attacks, so this change is demoting the Hero from Chainmail to the status of the Ogre", or something like it?

No. Probably the single biggest change from "ye olde dayse" is that we didn't agonize endlessly over trivia.

 

[robertsconley]

The former.

Granted a lot can happen in two years but was there anything left from the earliest days of Blackmoor that you observed or heard about?

 

[robertsconley]

No. Probably the single biggest change from "ye olde dayse" is that we didn't agonize endlessly over trivia.

So what was the deal with the account of folks arguing over the effects of various artillery pieces or was that more a Napoleonic thing.

 

[AsenRG]

No. Probably the single biggest change from "ye olde dayse" is that we didn't agonize endlessly over trivia.

Incredible!
I guess it would depend on the kind of trivia, though.

 

[EOTB]

This is part of the reason why so many people gripe about wizards being 'quadratic' while fighters are 'linear'.

Use all the idiosyncratic fiddly combat bits in AD&D 1E and you'll be surprised how "linear" wizards become in play. Those magic items they depend on in that environment are mostly fixed to mid-level wizard damage (6th level for wands, 8th for staves, etc.)

"elegant" streamlined rules create the quadratic wizard problem.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Actually, I never even heard of that until after 3rd Ed. came around.

In OD&D, a magic user who isn't screened from a high level fighter will get butchered. Yes, the fighter will have to eat a spell on the way in, but especially in a dungeon it's easy to close with the wizard.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

So what was the deal with the account of folks arguing over the effects of various artillery pieces or was that more a Napoleonic thing.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. It certainly wasn't part of the early years of OD&D.

 

[AsenRG]

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. It certainly wasn't part of the early years of OD&D.

I'm reasonably certain that he means the wargaming arguments. You keep repeating that you were wargamers first.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

I was never involved in creating wargame rules, so that was never really an issue.

i went through a "more rules is better" phase, including discrete stats for swords based on their Oakeshott typology. But about six or seven years ago I went back to one minute rounds and all weapons do 1d6, and never looked back.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Though I've lost interest in "We Made Up Some Shit We Thought Would Be Fun," after finishing the first draft and then reading said same, I realized something really interesting in retrospect.

Gary obviously had a very strong idea of what kind of game he wanted D&D to be, and a very strong idea of how he wanted it to play. Virtually every decision he made in the original edition was "making the rules support the play style I am after." And he achieved it remarkably well. You may not like the play style, but he sure hit it.

 

[AsenRG]

Though I've lost interest in "We Made Up Some Shit We Thought Would Be Fun," after finishing the first draft and then reading said same, I realized something really interesting in retrospect.

You've lost interest?!?

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Yeah. Writing is easy, revising into a coherent whole is a pain in the ass.

and I have serious doubts about the level of interest.

 

[AsenRG]

Yeah. Writing is easy, revising into a coherent whole is a pain in the ass.

and I have serious doubts about the level of interest.

Thou shall persist, for the RPG gods are jealous and suffer no deviation from the path of their own glory!

More seriously, you ran dungeoncrawls you were unhappy with for how many years? I'm sure some editing is nothing in comparison!
And yes, I have experience with editing.

Also, you can always run a KS to gauge levels of interest, and to hire an editor, and I predict you shall be surprised!

 

[Ladybird]

Gary obviously had a very strong idea of what kind of game he wanted D&D to be, and a very strong idea of how he wanted it to play. Virtually every decision he made in the original edition was "making the rules support the play style I am after." And he achieved it remarkably well. You may not like the play style, but he sure hit it.

Ultimately, that's the only real definition of a successful project.

 

[Moonglum]

I think any self-aware DM who writes house rules or fantasy-heart-breakers will also tell you that most of what seems clever on the page never survives contact with play testing. Unfortunately, you can tell that a lot of material that makes it into official rules books is there because it never was play tested. A classic example mentioned in the thread above is the inclusion of the Chainmail combat system in the OD&D core books, which by all reports was never used for this purpose by the authors and their groups. And, of course, all that goes 10-fold for white-room arguments people present on internet forums.