Anybody wanna ask me shit about Ye Olde Dayse?

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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.
 
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?
 
EmperorNorton said:
I was 6, and I wasn't introduced by other gamers. My brother and I got the books, and we ran games for each other and our friends. Using only the books and our own imagination.

I'll tell you that the crazy shit that we got up to was wild and way out of the realm of "what is possible in the real world". It wasn't about the rules as written either. I remember we once magically grafted a manscorpion tail to our fighter and gave him it as an extra attack. Just had the wizard roll some Int rolls and a Con roll from the fighter if I remember correctly, cause why the hell not.
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I love this!
 
Gronan of Simmerya said:
Dave Arneson's greatest strength as a referee was his incredibly quick mind. He could react and come up with ideas like crazy. He often didn't even use random monster rolls, he just decided it was time for a monster, and what kind. His NPCs were not the assmunches you find on Dying Earth. He would allow players to dream up just about anything.

As flaws - later on, he decided that as referee his objective was a TPK every time if he could. And it can be a fine line between "a wide open gonzo style game" and "SQUIRREL!"
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This sounds like my kind of game, TPK ambitions aside. I aim for a good blend between a rigorous procedural games of time and resource tracking and relying on dice rolls for bounded outcomes (encounters, reaction rolls, morale, treasure, death) and a suitable open endedness to the rules that anything can fucking happen if the table is imaginative enough (and ingenious in the implementation of their imagination in the game) to make it so.
 
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?
 
KrakaJak said:
I'm really curious how Dave or Gary approached design feedback. Did they ever ask their players what they thought about what they had put together? Did they ever test what would eventually become published adventures? Any other designer/publisher things they did inside their play groups?

Is there anything you can point to in a book and say "yeah, that was my fault."?
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Well, we talked about the games we were playing constantly, so it was a lot of informal feedback. Post publication, I don't know.

Yes, different damage for different weapons, which I now regret, and the Giant Slug, which I do not.
 
Not Gronan obviously. But I've seen this exact question asked from him previously and I agree with him. It does not matter whether 4 inches of steel has been ran through you, or if it has been 40 inches. It is the same damage to your body, basically.
 
Moracai said:
Not Gronan obviously. But I've seen this exact question asked from him previously and I agree with him. It does not matter whether 4 inches of steel has been ran through you, or if it has been 40 inches. It is the same damage to your body, basically.
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Stab, blunt trauma or cut make more difference.
 
Moracai said:
Not Gronan obviously. But I've seen this exact question asked from him previously and I agree with him. It does not matter whether 4 inches of steel has been ran through you, or if it has been 40 inches. It is the same damage to your body, basically.
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Reach of a weapon is more important defensivelly, IMO. You're in a much better position being able to pike an opponent 10 feet away than having to get up close and stab them with a foot-long blade. But the minute the opponent does get close, the Pike becomes almost useless.
 
Moracai said:
Not Gronan obviously. But I've seen this exact question asked from him previously and I agree with him. It does not matter whether 4 inches of steel has been ran through you, or if it has been 40 inches. It is the same damage to your body, basically.
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I mean, vaguely true, though not 100% accurate when talking about bladed weapons, but honestly if you think being hit with a ball peen hammer and a sledge hammer do the same amount of damage...

The bigger issue is that HP doesn't represent physical damage directly anyway, so there is no reason to the amount of real world damage the weapon would do to someone to determine how much HP damage it does.
 
EmperorNorton EmperorNorton , Yeah, I've never seen a system that does that realistic like. I've been doing a system of my own for a quite number of years and I've not found a satisfactory answer for it.

I think that that speed and the assertion that counts, if trying to model things through real life.

BTW, a sledge hammer is not a weapon. It is a tool, and not useful for fighting.
 
EmperorNorton said:
I mean, vaguely true, though not 100% accurate when talking about bladed weapons, but honestly if you think being hit with a ball peen hammer and a sledge hammer do the same amount of damage...

The bigger issue is that HP doesn't represent physical damage directly anyway, so there is no reason to the amount of real world damage the weapon would do to someone to determine how much HP damage it does.
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HP don't represent physical damage until you get lit on fire. But they work as an abstraction of how much of a beating can by character take before being too badly hurt to fight.

As for damage, there's very good reasons why as armour got better, weapons tended towards blunt trauma rather than puncture or laceration as a means of delivering damage.
 
Moracai said:
BTW, a sledge hammer is not a weapon. It is a tool, and not useful for fighting.
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Mr. Helmsley disagrees.
3320580-coverphoto.jpg
 
Since this was created very specifically as a Q&A thread, maybe we can actually keep it Q&A?

The commentary and multiple side discussions are disrupting the thread.
 
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.
 
EmperorNorton said:
The bigger issue is that HP doesn't represent physical damage directly anyway, so there is no reason to the amount of real world damage the weapon would do to someone to determine how much HP damage it does.
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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
 
Posters on this thread who don't ask Gronan any questions are probably close kin to his players at GaryCon who won't go to the end of the corridor, except that the posters won't get the multiple TPKs they might deserve. There's tons of threads to tell jokes in.

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?
 
CRKrueger said:
Good luck. Just keep posting the same question over and over again, you might get it in so he can see it.
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I thought maybe he had me on ignore, but I’ll try.

Gronan of Simmerya 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...
 
Gronan of Simmerya said:
In my opinion the one minute combat round with extremely abstract combat is the best. More rules does not equal a better game, and a more detailed combat system is not necessarily more fun. And simpler rules makes for faster combats.
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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?
 
When you played Blackmoor was Dave using OD&D by then? Or was he still using the system he developed prior?
 
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