D&D: is it the gateway game for the rest of the hobby?

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I got What Is Dungeons And Dragons before my Moldvay boxed set arrived, and to this day I feel my "D&D mindset" owes more to Butterfield et. al than it does to any official publication (including Holmes, it was his writing outside the Blue Book that got me excited about D&D again).
Likewise Dicing with Dragons by Livingstone was an early influence on me, after the Mentzer Red Box, Marvel Super Heroes, and Top Secret (maybe Gamma World 2E) but definitely before any non-TSR products.
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I got What Is Dungeons And Dragons before my Moldvay boxed set arrived, and to this day I feel my "D&D mindset" owes more to Butterfield et al. than it does to any official publication (including Holmes, it was his writing outside the Blue Book that got me excited about D&D again).

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I think it was the same guys that did the Cretan Chronicles gamebooks. But yep, What is... was a massive influence on me as a kid. Apparently the authors were all Eton schoolkids when they wrote it.
 
Likewise Dicing with Dragons by Livingstone was an early influence on me, after the Mentzer Red Box, Marvel Super Heroes, and Top Secret (maybe Gamma World 2E) but definitely before any non-TSR products.
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Interesting, that seems to be a different cover. Is that the US edition?
 
Speaking of covers, my original copy had the blue one in your pic above but when I had to replace it a few years back all I could find was this one. Wish I had been able to get a blue one, but at least it wasn't that other monstrosity with the drippy dayglo green lettering.


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Hmm, it looks like the blue cover I posted is a second American edition from 1986, I definitely had AD&D by that time, I remember when Unearthed Arcana came out, as well as TMNT and other Strangeness so perhaps I had started to branch out but I’m positive I had Dicing with Dragons before Traveler or Tunnels & Trolls. I had the 1988(?) boxed set of Traveler and 5th edition T&T.
 
I’m pretty sure I read that book and I think Gygax wrote one too, didn’t he?
Role-playing Mastery. (Interesting to note that Gygax was still using the hyphen in 1987). Although the Gygax work I find most fascinating here is the colouring book he released in 1979.
 
I think I read one of Gygax’s choose your adventure books too. I don’t remember much about it. Lone Wolf was so good, almost all others are poor imitations.
 
Huh, all this makes me realize that this year marks my 40th anniversary with RPGs although 1984 was when I really started to branch out to different games like MSH and Top Secret.
 
I think I read one of Gygax’s choose your adventure books too. I don’t remember much about it. Lone Wolf was so good, almost all others are poor imitations.
Sagard the Barbarian and it was fucking awful. One of the worst gamebooks I've ever read. No choices, just an endless parade of combats and a not very interesting backstory.
 
That's a very complex question, as there's a lot of nostalgia mixed up in the equation, and separating that from legitimate quality is difficult. I'm sure some of the games are largely just 'grandfathered in,' by appealing to me before my tastes shifted somewhat.

When I play Deadlands, I want OG Deadlands. I actually use Savage Worlds for another game, but the SW version of Deadlands does not appeal to me. Partly this is because I found the old system very...lively? Evocative? Gonzo at times even. It seems to have a depth and robustness the SW version lacks. There's also more written material, and (and this is a big one) they didn't scrub the continuation of the American Civil War as a Cold War from the setting yet. Man that change stinks.

I run CoC 5th ed largely because I've run it for 30 years, I can easily slip back in to it like a pair of comfortable slippers, and it does everything I need it to regarding delivering Lovecraftian horror. 'Nuff said.

But even some very vintage games still have nuggets of wisdom, and I'm often surprised to find the DNA of very modern gaming ideas in dusty old tomes. The James Bond 007 rpg is a good example in that while it (IMO) has that 80's baggage and clunk, has some very cool mechanical rule ideas that found barren ground, but maybe inspired later game designers. And that's a game I owned, but never actually read through till recently, so no nostalgia there.

There's a reassuring crunch to older games. While the new way of thinking is something like 'easy to pick up, loosey-goosey rule suggestions, just fudge it/everything from one table with your differences being cosmetic (obviously this varies, plenty of newer games have medium to large crunch),' the older mentality was more like 'this is difficult to learn, but once you do we have you covered with charts and rules for anything that may crop up. We've got you, bro." Champions is ROUGH to learn, but once it clicks you can model anything with that sucker.
That's got nothing to do with new or old though. The "easy to pick up, loose rules suggestions" describes many games from the 70s, like Tunnels & Trolls and Dungeons & Dragons. There are also many heavily crunchy games from "today", like Eclipse Phase or Burning Wheel.
 
Here's an oddity--a local library had Amazon product on their shelves, so it was one of my first exposures to the hobby. A few years later, I got online, and I was confused when people were talking about the other, more infamous Fantasy Wargaming ... :smile:
 
Huh, all this makes me realize that this year marks my 40th anniversary with RPGs although 1984 was when I really started to branch out to different games like MSH and Top Secret.
Huh, too. My 40th was on Christmas Eve '22.

In remembrance I pulled out my old copy of Space Vovayer that started it all. Steve Jackson (not that one) hooked me with his bit of prose on the first page. And there's the bit I cut out of the advert to order, with my life savings, copies of RuneQuest, Traveller, and D&D as they were known in those days before edition wars. That butterfly-winged barbarian is an illustration by 'Fangorn' (Chris Baker), who immediately became my favourite RPG artist - imagine my joy when 3 decades later I discovered he illustrated most of the Games Workshop UK edition of Holmes Basic D&D.

I never got those games because they got lost in the post, hence my start with a Moldvay boxed set I picked up in a department store in Dublin just before Christmas. I bought the deluxe RuneQuest and Traveller boxed sets for my birthday the following year, though the RQ box had the greatly superior GW chainmail bikini cover. From that point onward for the next 20 years I converted everything and the kitchen sink to RuneQuest rules.

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No it isn’t, the correct comparison is with the aforementioned basic rules of 180 pages. That’s a full game, it’s the modern day B/X the same way the full PHB, DMG and MM is the equivalent of AD&D.
Are you really trying to imply that the non-A editions of D&D were a quickstart for the AD&D:devil:?
Because that's what those 180 pages are, a quickstart:grin:!

OTOH, if B/X is an actual edition in its own right, then the comparison is with the full PHB, DMG and MM combo:thumbsup:!
Just think about how much money people involved in organised sporting activities often fork out over the course of a year.
...guilty as charged:shade:!
OTOH, I wouldn't spend that much on RPGs, not even on my favourite system, which D&D ain't. So I'm not sure how many other people would agree to spend that much, and how many would resent the attempt to make them pay.
 
Are you really trying to imply that the non-A editions of D&D were a quickstart for the AD&D:devil:?
Because that's what those 180 pages are, a quickstart:grin:!

They started out intended that way yeah, then evolved into something else. And the current Basic rules aren't a quickstart, you can play those as a full game. It doesn't say quickstart anywhere, there are no rules that are missing that you need to play. What exactly are they missing in order to be a full game?
 
They started out intended that way yeah,

I'd think quite the opposite, considering the lawsuit to not give Anderson any profits from AD&D where the argument Gygax/TSR made was that it was a completely new and individual game system separate from D&D.
 
I'd think quite the opposite, considering the lawsuit to not give Anderson any profits from AD&D where the argument Gygax/TSR made was that it was a completely new and individual game system separate from D&D.
The first basic set, Holmes, came out before AD&D was fully out. It also only went up to the third level and was intended to be followed up by AD&D when players were ready to buy more stuff. Then Anderson sued over the royalties he got from that set and I'm sure that made Gygax more intent on separating the two lines.
 
Here's an oddity--a local library had Amazon product on their shelves, so it was one of my first exposures to the hobby. A few years later, I got online, and I was confused when people were talking about the other, more infamous Fantasy Wargaming ... :smile:

I've got that one, I've always wanted to try his miniatures rules. There's a second edition that has the roleplaying rules and doesn't have the hobby introduction / retrospective.
 
The first basic set, Holmes, came out before AD&D was fully out. It also only went up to the third level and was intended to be followed up by AD&D when players were ready to buy more stuff.
Sort of but not quite... more later when I have time!

EDIT: Okay, here we go. Actually, Holmes wrote his Basic Dungeons & Dragons (for free!) as an introduction to OD&D, because it was a hot mess and normal kids had no idea how to play it without someone experienced to show them the way. His really was the original quickstart. It was only during editing that AD&D started happening, so lots of references to the latter were shoe-horned into the Holmes text by TSR even though all the rules in the Blue Book were actually derived from OD&D. Well, apart from a few things Holmes cribbed from other sources like Warlock! and his own interpretations of OD&D, which slipped past the TSR editors. The Monster Manual is actually fully compatible with Holmes rather than AD&D, because most of AD&D hadn't been written yet (e.g. it has Holmes's 5-point alignment system, and 'no armour' is AC 9 - AD&D is 9-point and AC 10, respectively).

You can read all about it on Zenopus Zenopus's blog: https://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2013/11/at-long-last.html
 
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My 45th anniversary with RPGs will be in 2023 as well, although I'm not sure of the precise month that I bought Gamma World 1st edition.

I still have a few of my first dice from that boxed set, although they're not exactly usable by this point:

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Whenever I mention FF as an rpg, people always assume AFF Dungeoneer because it got a bit more profile a few years later

Knowing about the original version definately places you as a kid in the 1984 to 1985 niche, as the print run was limited and superceeded later by AFF Dungeoneer.

I'm impressed !!!

IMG_20230103_225155774.jpgMy copies. Not quite sure why I bought them at the time given that I already had BX D&D then Dragon Warriors, but gamers will game and they were affordable for a school boy.
Had most of the FF books up to about number 22 (Robot Commando) and still have about half of those now including a first printing of City of Thieves complete with bite marks where squirrels attacked it when stored in my parent's attic.
 
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