Growing up in the 80s, I got into D&D during the last year or two of 1st edition. I was brought into the game by an older kid in the neighborhood. He in turn, was brought in by his brother. He had the old 70s edition AD&D books (the DM's Guide with the Efreeti on the cover and the Monster Manual that depicted flying monsters, monsters on land, and monsters underground). Retro anything is cool right now, but I've always been fascinated by those 70s AD&D books. I even use an old D&D DM screen even though all the information obviously is obsolete for Pathfinder. I write fiction as a hobby and particularly enjoy scriptwriting so for a little research, I want to hear from people who started playing the original D&D in the 70s. I want to know what the vibe was. What was that feeling in the air when you first cracked open those original D&D booklets? What kind of music did you listen to? What song got you in the mood for orc slaying? Without the internet, how did fans communicate with the company, with each other? What other hobbies did you do besides D&D? Basically, what was the feeling you had doing something so new and different at the time? Did you think it was a passing fad or was it a life altering experience? What was the culture back then? And legal disclaimer: Not looking to steal ideas for characters, plot, or real life representations of anyone one person. I'm just curious to hear what that time was like when RPGing was in it's infancy. Any and all replies appreciated.
Here's some of Stephen Colbert's take on it:
In the spring of 1976 I was in seventh grade. I had been reading science fiction for two years and had just started bleeding over into fantasy.
One day at lunch I overheard my friend Keith saying, "I listened at the door, and I didn't hear anything, so I went inside and got attacked by a giant rat!"
I said, "What do you mean, you listened at the door? What are you talking about?"
Stephen Colbert
They said, "Well, it's kind of hard to explain, but in this game called Dungeons & Dragons there's a probability that you'll hear something through a door, and my character's a thief so he can hear better. The game just came out. Come over Friday and we'll play."I did and was instantly hooked. A whole new kind of game. No board -- just dice, just probabilities. It allowed me to enter the world of the books I was reading. I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my schoolwork.
We were all complete outcasts in school -- beyond the fringe, beyond nerds. We were our own sub-dimensional bubble of the school. I'm not even sure we were on the rolls of any of the classes; that's how outcast we were.
Great interview!
Here's some of Stephen Colbert's take on it:
Great interview!In the spring of 1976 I was in seventh grade. I had been reading science fiction for two years and had just started bleeding over into fantasy.
One day at lunch I overheard my friend Keith saying, "I listened at the door, and I didn't hear anything, so I went inside and got attacked by a giant rat!"
I said, "What do you mean, you listened at the door? What are you talking about?"
Stephen Colbert
They said, "Well, it's kind of hard to explain, but in this game called Dungeons & Dragons there's a probability that you'll hear something through a door, and my character's a thief so he can hear better. The game just came out. Come over Friday and we'll play."I did and was instantly hooked. A whole new kind of game. No board -- just dice, just probabilities. It allowed me to enter the world of the books I was reading. I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my schoolwork.
We were all complete outcasts in school -- beyond the fringe, beyond nerds. We were our own sub-dimensional bubble of the school. I'm not even sure we were on the rolls of any of the classes; that's how outcast we were.
That is a good interview. And now that all makes sense when he rolled a twenty sider on his show when Gary Gygax died.
My first DnD experience was after buying the basic boxed set at a place in Trumbull Connecticut in the Mall called Walden Books. It was a chain store, but there was the comic book and games section.
I went home, and made myself and elf.
Not an elf anything. Just an elf.
Dwarf,Elf,Fighter, Magic-user, Thief.
Things like Cleric and Halfling were added later on in expert edition If i remember correctly (although the could have been there and I just dont remember them) The original box set was blue, came with some dice and a wax crayon for coloring in the numbers so you could see them. I still have my ten side. Ive lost the others.
I remember the spell list being crazy limited.
Some "cool kids" I knew, older ones actually had AD&D.
I lied to them and told them I had played already and used my limited knowledge of Basic, to con my way into letting me play with them.
So I went quickly from basic to advanced.
I almost exclusively played monks the first several times, because someone was already the fighter, or the thief or the magic user, I was usually a 5th or 6th wheel and no one played a monk.
I did alot of running away back then as the monk had 4 sided hit dice and AC wasnt modified by wisdom or dex.
I specifically remember swords in 1st Edition being weird, redundant, longsword AND broad sword? always though that was weird.
there was a alot of crossover in those days with modules being written for basic but advanced characters.
conversion was similar to what its like to play a 3.5 module playing pathfinder, it wasnt hard it was just different.
no CR or EL existed back then, so it was common to fight kobolds and a white dragon in the same adventure.
You werent always supposed to win back then, there was no "control" as to what one might meet when one strapped on his armor and wandered out into the world.
Smart adventurers ran away, ALOT, and just remembered where the dragon's lair was and came back in 5 levels.
Levels took longer to go up.
8th level was "really high" back then.
10th level was pretty much the pinnacle of campaigns.
Rangers were soooo different,It was almost a magus.
Rangers could wear plate mail, cast magic user and druid spells (albeit limited)
Then there was the legacy of the ten foot pole. EVERYONE had a ten foot pole and 50 feet of rope on their character sheet.At least anyone who had already lost a few characters.
Back then reading was pretty limited. Michael Morcock, Issac Assimov, Tolkien, Lewis.
It wasn't until the mid 80s more came along, really, Dragon Lance being a big one.
Music, at least for my crew was limited to Iron Maiden, Metallica, AC/DC, and the like.
I specifically remember the cartoon for adults "heavy metal" (was that 79?) being a big influence on us.
I saw the Basic 'Red Box' Edition in Toys R Us and my parents bought it for my 13th birthday. Some guys came over and we tried to run through the Keep on the Borderland, having no clue what we were doing, but we had a blast.
My first character was an Elf. Yes, that was a class. Things took off from there. A friend had AD&D and we didn't know they were different games so we just mashed everything together and played it.
Ravenloft was pivotal. We played it in 8th grade. Isle of Dread, Castle Amber, the Slavers series...ah. That was some good stuff.
White plume mountain! aha! I remembered a Basic module! White Plume Mountain! and the awesome black razor!
White plume mountain! aha! I remembered a Basic module! White Plume Mountain! and the awesome black razor!I saw the Basic 'Red Box' Edition in Toys R Us and my parents bought it for my 13th birthday. Some guys came over and we tried to run through the Keep on the Borderland, having no clue what we were doing, but we had a blast.
My first character was an Elf. Yes, that was a class. Things took off from there. A friend had AD&D and we didn't know they were different games so we just mashed everything together and played it.
Ravenloft was pivotal. We played it in 8th grade. Isle of Dread, Castle Amber, the Slavers series...ah. That was some good stuff.
Yep White Plume Mountain was great! It was actually cooler back then that blackrazor was a total rip-off of Stormbringer from Moorecock's writing.
I remember the first character I lost was in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks when my magic-user accidently figured out the elevator in the space ship and got separated from the party in the garden.
We listened to heavy metal a lot. And Tolkien, Morecock, and Conan were about all there was to read, that I remember.
Blackrazor, Wave and Whelm. The best back page of any Module that TSR ever put out.
My favorite of all time was Against the Giants. Who could forget Beek Gwenders of Croodle, the 9th level Half elven ranger whose stats were on the back of the module? The Giant Slaying TH sword disguised as a torch? The Hammer of Thunderbolts in the Frost Jarl's lair? Their first exposure to the drow and the rod of tentacles? The greatroom of the Hill Giant Lair and exactly how you were going to kill all those giants before they found you were there?
We got into some downright epic fights in that module. We went through it in AD@D, 2E where they gave the giants better AC, HP, and Str to dmg in stages; plunged down into Descent into the Depths and mauled all sorts of weird stuff, fought Lolth and her army of Abyssal Animal Growthed 16+16 HD spiders with an army of NPC's we rescued as escaped slaves from the Vault...
Good times, good times. Only the last caverns of Tsojcanth came close to that level of fun.
==Aelryinth
mazes full of rooms with monsters of every shape and size.....traps that had no saves.....running for your life at almost every encounter because you just knew you couldn't win.....link-boys with lanterns leading the party down creepy hallways and falling into pits so deep you lost the screams.....puddings that hide inside everything, like that innocent silver tea-set sitting on the table......gelatinous cubes from all four directions at once.....thieves with missing fingers from picking locks on chests that held hundreds of gold pieces.....never knowing if the magic weapon you were carrying was going to turn out to be cursed....changing the sex of my character twice due to cursed girdles and scrolls.....finally burying a hobbit thief after having brought him back to life 10 times with wishes and Raise Dead spells.....losing another thief to a Sphere of Annihilation fixed to a wall looking suspiciously like the way around a room full of trolls.....drinking a Potion of Flying and jumping off a cliff, only to find that it was a Potion of Delusion....staying up til 4 in the morning just about every Friday and Saturday having the greatest time of my life.....
Does that about sum it up for you? :-)
Good stuff. The old 3.5 Wizards archive actually has a free modern version of White Plume Mountain. I haven't played it yet or the original so I don't know how close it to the original. Traps and such definitely seemed more lethal back in those early days. Looking at the 1st edition AD&D guide they had quite a few examples of very lethal traps. Also, the sample adventure they provided had a lethal yellow mold trap in the very first room-save vs. poison or die in 10 turns! Anyway, love to hear what people have to say. Where did you buy products? How did you hear about products? What hobbies did you do when you weren't playing D&D? What did you listen to to get you pumped for those dungeon crawls? I started my newest campaign by playing "Gates of Babylon" from Rainbow. In case you don't know, it's Dio playing with Ritchie Blackmore from Deep Purple and came out shortly after D&D started. Search for "Rainbow" on myspace music if your interested.
I got my boxed set from Toys R Us, but later from book stores or a hobby store in a mall in Oklahoma City.
I didn't live close to the city, so I had to cash in whenever I went there.
Apart from that, I played football, basketball and worked at Wal-Mart (if that counts as a hobby).
Without the internet, how did fans communicate with the company, with each other? What other hobbies did you do besides D&D?
Communicate with the company? No such thing ever happened, or was likely to happen, nor really could have happened. At least from Australia.
I guess we could have written an airmail letter and posted it (costing a fee almost as much as my weekly newspaper round paid me), and a few weeks to a month later they'd have gotten it... only to not really reply if ever, at all.Communicate with other players? Well someone usually knew someone who got a Dragon Magazine and we all read it, maybe there was a letters page. The way we met each other was having a poster in the local library/school, as tehre was no such thing as a FLGS. They didn't exist. You bought your D&D books from wither a toystore, or occasionally a book shop/department store had them.
What did we think when we opened the book? It was like cracking open the universe for a sneak peek on how it all worked mechanically.
That was about 1982. I was 8.
My oddball neighbour introduced me to Basic, and I went out and found AD&D a week later... was the coolest thing I had pretty much seen (no video games back then excpet Pong really)
Without the internet, how did fans communicate with the company, with each other? What other hobbies did you do besides D&D?Communicate with the company? No such thing ever happened, or was likely to happen, nor really could have happened. At least from Australia.
I guess we could have written an airmail letter and posted it (costing a fee almost as much as my weekly newspaper round paid me), and a few weeks to a month later they'd have gotten it... only to not really reply if ever, at all.Communicate with other players? Well someone usually knew someone who got a Dragon Magazine and we all read it, maybe there was a letters page. The way we met each other was having a poster in the local library/school, as tehre was no such thing as a FLGS. They didn't exist. You bought your D&D books from wither a toystore, or occasionally a book shop/department store had them.
What did we think when we opened the book? It was like cracking open the universe for a sneak peek on how it all worked mechanically.
That was about 1982. I was 8.
My oddball neighbour introduced me to Basic, and I went out and found AD&D a week later... was the coolest thing I had pretty much seen (no video games back then excpet Pong really)
A friend of mine introduced me to the game when I was visiting Sydney.
I lived in the country the nearest city that may have had some books was Brisbane in Queensland (at the time it was a very conservative state and they banned D&D and anything else that was not Christian)which was about 4ish hours away. My State capital Sydney was 12ish hours away.When my parents visited Sydney and my uncle who lived in Sydney all got told what books they had to get.
Then in the 80s I found out about Military Simulations where they had a catalogue of RPGs and Wargames that they would post out to you. My mates and I would just save up and make an order.... for lots of stuff.
They were fun days...
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I started in 1978. The only players I knew were my cousin (who introduced me) and anyone I introduced to the game. After my first exposure, I did every chore I could to earn the $12 to go to Leisure World on 18th Avenue and 84th Street in Brooklyn to buy my first basic set. It was the beginning of summer vacation and I got nearly all my closest friends to play.
We would meet every day on my back porch and play till sunset. We had an awning so we could even play in bad weather... but no light. The mean old bag next door complained about us being there every day. My mom was cool. She told her, "I know where my son is every day and what he's doing." It was a dig at her. My mother grew up in the same house and knew the old bag's son got into drugs because he was never home (because his mother was a mean old bag!)
The next summer, all my friends said, "I'm not wasting my summer on D&D again!" and I asked them, "Did you have fun?" They all did but were determined not to play D&D as much as we did. But we did.
My cousin showed me Dragon magazine. That was about the only contact I had with there being gamers in the outside world at that point.
Other than the occasional discussion with someone at the FLGS (Walt's Hobby Shop on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn) and the occasional trip to the Cmpleat Strategist on E33rd in Manhattan, and a small handful of really weird guys who played D&D at my High School, I really didn't get to contact other gamers until 1986. As a matter of fact, all of those contact were with people odd enough that I didn't really care to contact them! Nearly every one of them set off my creep-o-meter. It was bad luck, I know now.
That changed in 1986. A guy my age started working at the FLGS and he wasn't weird... or he was MY KNID of weird. I dunno which. Also, I put up a BBS in Brooklyn devoted to RPG gaming. We had online PBP games, gamer discussion forums, set up gamer meets (Paranoia BBS, for anyone who might actually have been a user and actually remembers.
I married a girl I met because of that BBS. She was a gamer and I TOTALLY didn't believe she was a real girl so I think she was one of the 4 or 5 people I actually voice validated. She was an honest-to-goodness real, live girl who played D&D and, somehow, I actually made her interested in me. So I can directly trace my marriage and our 3 kids to D&D. I've actually introduced my kids to gaming via Oone games Venture. My daughter (she's 6) was just in here asking me to play! Her twin sister and big brother love it, too.
Incidentally, that BBS also led me to meet a guy who became a friend for life who, earlier this year, donated a kidney to me. I lost mine to a genetic disease in July last year. So I can directly trace my still being alive (I was responding terribly to dialysis) to D&D.
I know I got a little of topic... hope you'll forgive me.
Thanks for the posts so far. It's been very interesting to hear what it was like back then. Another question if I may? Since D&D was so new back then, how did you hear about it? What drew you to the game? A couple of you have mentioned that so far. Also, what did hobbies/games were you involved with prior to D&D? I wasn't even born when D&D first came out so I didn't play until I was about 8 near the end of AD&D first edition. An older kid in the neighborhood saw my brother, another friend, and I, playing "knights" outside and rightly guessed that we would like to try to play D&D. As a child, I saw little difference between playing "knights" and playing D&D since the combats took place in my imagination.
I started in 1978. The only players I knew were my cousin (who introduced me) and anyone I introduced to the game. After my first exposure, I did every chore I could to earn the $12 to go to Leisure World on 18th Avenue and 84th Street in Brooklyn to buy my first basic set. It was the beginning of summer vacation and I got nearly all my closest friends to play.
We would meet every day on my back porch and play till sunset. We had an awning so we could even play in bad weather... but no light. The mean old bag next door complained about us being there every day. My mom was cool. She told her, "I know where my son is every day and what he's doing." It was a dig at her. My mother grew up in the same house and knew the old bag's son got into drugs because he was never home (because his mother was a mean old bag!)
The next summer, all my friends said, "I'm not wasting my summer on D&D again!" and I asked them, "Did you have fun?" They all did but were determined not to play D&D as much as we did. But we did.
My cousin showed me Dragon magazine. That was about the only contact I had with there being gamers in the outside world at that point.
Other than the occasional discussion with someone at the FLGS (Walt's Hobby Shop on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn) and the occasional trip to the Cmpleat Strategist on E33rd in Manhattan, and a small handful of really weird guys who played D&D at my High School, I really didn't get to contact other gamers until 1986. As a matter of fact, all of those contact were with people odd enough that I didn't really care to contact them! Nearly every one of them set off my creep-o-meter. It was bad luck, I know now.
That changed in 1986. A guy my age started working at the FLGS and he wasn't weird... or he was MY KNID of weird. I dunno which. Also, I put up a BBS in Brooklyn devoted to RPG gaming. We had online PBP games, gamer discussion forums, set up gamer meets (Paranoia BBS, for anyone who might actually have been a user and actually remembers.
I married a girl I met because...
Glad to hear it turned out all right for you and thanks for your post.
Started playing in 1977...
First game (at the university wargames club where a lanky youth came up and asked me if I wanted to play 'D&D' - didn't have a clue what he meant, but he looked a nice chap...) I played a female barbarian, well it was a fighter really but I played her barbarian-style with a large axe.
Nobody used prepared modules much except Keep on the Borderlands and (when it arrived on the shelves) the odd adventure out of White Dwarf which was just starting up. We just bought the rules and made up our own stuff.
My extensive collection of castle plans got raided a lot. A Welsh castle called Harlech Castle had all manner of shenanigans go on there. They didn't recognise it of course. Another one, a folly 19th century one called Castell Coch, which is on a hillside just outside Cardiff, got 'visited' quite a lot too. Orc hordes tried to get over Hadrian's Wall.
We didn't go in for music whilst playing, but we did have a habit of burning incense.
Between your post and the two other posters from Australia, I hadn't realized that D&D had moved out of the States so quickly. Thanks for the post!
Where did you buy products? How did you hear about products? What hobbies did you do when you weren't playing D&D? What did you listen to to get you pumped for those dungeon crawls?
The older brother of a friend got the first boxed set with the dragon on the front for Christmas. He wanted nothing to do with it & he let me borrow it. We also had a hobby and toy shop in my hometown (outside Chicago) & the owner knew some people who owned stores like his in Chicago and southern Wisconsin (where Lake Geneva is located) He started stocking the stuff....everything he got, we bought. Got a copy of the original 3 booklets from him. We used a mish-mash of the rules until AD&D came out.....thousands of hours (and dollars) later - and 31 years of real time, I'm still playing
Where did you buy products? How did you hear about products? What hobbies did you do when you weren't playing D&D? What did you listen to to get you pumped for those dungeon crawls?The older brother of a friend got the first boxed set with the dragon on the front for Christmas. He wanted nothing to do with it & he let me borrow it. We also had a hobby and toy shop in my hometown (outside Chicago) & the owner knew some people who owned stores like his in Chicago and southern Wisconsin (where Lake Geneva is located) He started stocking the stuff....everything he got, we bought. Got a copy of the original 3 booklets from him. We used a mish-mash of the rules until AD&D came out.....thousands of hours (and dollars) later - and 31 years of real time, I'm still playing
I'm trying to remember without looking it up, but Gygax lived in Chicago growing up (can't remember if he was born there). I also remember reading that his early maps of Oerth were roughly the Northern American continent with the City of Greyhawk being the rough approximation of Chicago. Being so close to where D&D started do you think it was more widely available and known about it your area than other places?
I like these posts, It's good to know that there are others out there that have been playing longer than i have with as much zest. I've only been playing for about 10-12 years. (started the addiction in high school)
I like these posts, It's good to know that there are others out there that have been playing longer than i have with as much zest. I've only been playing for about 10-12 years. (started the addiction in high school)
I find it very interesting to hear what people have to say about D&D or roleplaying in the 70s when it was in its infancy. Much like Black Sabbath invented what we call heavy metal, at the the time, it was so new and innovative that no one really knew the impact and effect it would have for generations to come. Besides D&D, so much was going on in the 70s as far as music and technology. I find it very enlightening to hear from people who were at the ground floor of these changes. So keep the posts coming!
My first exposure to fantasy was at age 5, in 1978, when mom and I watched the Rankin & Bass animated Hobbit movie. I was fascinated with that movie, and probably watched it a hundred times.
I loved Greek mythology, and marveled at the strangeness of the stories from pretty early on, too.
I was probably 8 or 9 when I first played D&D. My first character was a fighter named Jason (I had seen the old '60s Jason & the Argonauts in school I think), and my younger bro (would have been 6 or 7) and another kid lost to memory also rolled up PCs. Our first adventure was either Keep on the Borderlands, or Ghost Tower of Inverness, can't recall which, but I do recall Jason dying at the hands of bugbears. In fact, I think it was a total party wipe eventually, after which our DM (his name was Eric Boomershine) invited us to his house to play what I suppose was freeform LARP with plastic swords and shields, pretending to be adventurers. From that day on, I was HOOKED. Crack hos are not more hooked on crack than I was on D&D (and by extension, all swords & scorcery) growing up (and still am, to be honest).
I spent any money I earned from chores, b-days, etc. on D&D material -- dice (I still own probably 200 polyhedron dice, some probably dating to the early '80s), Dragon mags, mods, character sheets, miniatures (they were made of pewter or lead and you had to prime and paint them if you really wanted to be cool-guy-#1).
Movies of the time were very inspiring -- the traps from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the temple filled with evil cultists from Conan the Barbarian, the giant spiderweb and spider from Krull, the amazing array of critters in Star Wars and the Dark Crystal, the Thunderdome, everything about Clash of the Titans, and even elements of Beastmaster probably made its way into many of my dungeons.
Music of choice in the early '80s? Probably Duran Duran, Prince, Pink Floyd, REO Speedwagon, Murray Head (remember "One Night in Bangkok"?), Men at Work, Police, and other radio-friendly stuff. Later, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Boston, Queen -- alot of stuff I still listen too, actually.
My bros, friends, cousins, and I were also obsessed with Marvel comics -- Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, etc., and ninjas. I wanted to be a ninja so badly, that in addition to training in taekwondo, I put myself through dangerous tests of my "ninja skills", including breaking into my school at night on several occasions. We watched Kung-Fu Theatre every saturday. Every. Saturday. We mimicked what we saw, occasionally hurting ourselves or others.
I distinctly recall wrestling in the pool with cousins and bros, pretending to be Vaprak the Destroyer, or Thor, or Indra, or some other badass from Deities & Demigods.
In high school (late '80s, early '90s), my friends and I played every weekend. I introduced many people to AD&D. Sometimes we skipped school and met to play at someone's house, and whoever had the deepest voice called school pretending to be our fathers so our parent's wouldn't receive calls inquiring about our absence. And when summer vacation came? It was all D&D, all the time. (Well, not really, I did have girlfriends for a few months here and there, and enjoyed going to the beach with girls, etc. Nothing puts a damper on a D&D campaign like puppy love, especially when the DM is the puppy.)
First campaign where I actually knew and played by most of the rules was when I ran The Temple of Elemental Evil by Gygax and Mentzger for my bro and a couple friends. We were ENTHRALLED. Several PCs met gruesome ends therein, but all who played that campaign are still nostalgic about it.
Then I got into world building, created my own (highly derivitive) campaign setting, and ran another campaign of my own (highly derivitive) adventures. That campaign lasted two years, and the characters attained levels in the mid twenties by the end. At one point, one of the players' characters betrayed the rest of the party in a stunning act of greed, and from there the campaign was player-driven awesomeness. "Kreel the Treacherous" (1/2-elf fighter/magic-user) plotted to rid himself of the vengeance-seeking other PCs, coming up with several cunning plots -- he sent them to the Abyss with a skeleton minion activating a cubic gate in their vicinity once, and though interparty conflict usually spells a short and unsatisfying campaign, in this case the conflicts created the campaign, and everyone really had alot of fun (with occasional flaring tempers and trash talk).
Anyhow, thanks for starting this thread. It got me thinking about what an awesome childhood and teen years I had, and what an awesome life I still have, thanks in large part to D&D.
I can't believe no one's mentioned the bell-bottoms and huge awkward mustaches yet...
I can't believe no one's mentioned the bell-bottoms and huge awkward mustaches yet...
I didn't bring that up as a question but yes, feel free to describe the trends of the day if you feel like.
I can't believe no one's mentioned the bell-bottoms and huge awkward mustaches yet...I didn't bring that up as a question but yes, feel free to describe the trends of the day if you feel like.
Well, I was being silly, but I could easily take it more serious...
For starters, there was no gaming subculture in the 70's. You didn't have convention halls full of people running around in themed t-shirts and laughing at their new Epic Purple Shirt, or ogling the rare female gamer in her Serra Angel cosplay.
By and large, this was the pocket-protector crowd - button downed shirts, slacks, good shoes. Our people, at least in my area (the SF Bay Area) were nerds, one and all - we had computers in our garages, read newspapers, watched imported programming on PBS, and were Going Places with our grades. Granted, I was in elementary school in the 70's, but the point is the same - if you played D&D (or Traveler), you were a NERD.
Or, strangely enough, you were a stoner. It's safe to say that about half of my first D&D group (in which I played an Elf!) was two Nerds, two Stoners, and the GM, who worked that fine line between the two crowds. He'd smoke his pot from a pipe that was a replica of the one JRR Tolkein described Gandalf as having, and wore glasses and had a severe, "I'm going to work at IBM" haircut.
When I got to my first gaming convention, the first offered here in this area, round about 1980-ish, I was SHOCKED to discover that there were SHIRTS. With GAME RELATED SLOGANS on them. And pictures of things that weren't pop-culture related! I'd seen similar things at Science Fiction conventions, but never anything specifically game related. I think if I tried hard enough I could probably pinpoint the exact moment that SF-con vendors figured out they could cross-contaminate their customer bases and began commissioning items and procuring product to sell to the crowds - and in so doing helped create the gaming subculture we have today.
I wonder if anyone's ever thought to turn this into a term paper?
I am such a n00b. I did not start playing until '81.
Better than me. I started playing in '05.
Neophyte. :P
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I was just out of college in 1978 and had some friends coming over for a night of games. I was always creating games for my friends to play--adventure games all over the city, so expectations were high and I hadn't had time to really prepare something great so I stopped that afternoon in a game store near my house. I picked up the boxed set and had no idea what it was, but it sounded like something I could put my own spin on. I opened the box at home and read the little adventure booklet in the bathtub and WOW! I could really make this thing work. My friends were immediately hooked. We started playing every other week. Those were amazing times.
Our first group had a few theater students, a soon-to-be computer/software engineer, an electrical engineer, and tv announcer. We were a creative, nerdy bunch, and Dnd was just what we needed. The computer guy in the group once took us all to his apartment and showed us how he could play Zork on this gigantic computer he had put together. We were all, "Adventures on a computer? Right, that will never catch on." Ha!
We loved the game. Players would call during the week with thoughts about their characters and objectives. I remember one player running by another player's apartment and throwing a handmade scroll with some cryptic message on it onto the balcony.
I was in a game store once and this guy had printed up an adventure he was writing and when he found out, I was a DM, he gave me a copy. I still have it--the blue, handbound copy of Rahasia by Tracy Hickman. Little did I know, I should have had him autograph it.
They were great days: No arguing about rules all the time. Just play.
Good stuff. The old 3.5 Wizards archive actually has a free modern version of White Plume Mountain. I haven't played it yet or the original so I don't know how close it to the original. Traps and such definitely seemed more lethal back in those early days. Looking at the 1st edition AD&D guide they had quite a few examples of very lethal traps. Also, the sample adventure they provided had a lethal yellow mold trap in the very first room-save vs. poison or die in 10 turns! Anyway, love to hear what people have to say. Where did you buy products? How did you hear about products? What hobbies did you do when you weren't playing D&D? What did you listen to to get you pumped for those dungeon crawls? I started my newest campaign by playing "Gates of Babylon" from Rainbow. In case you don't know, it's Dio playing with Ritchie Blackmore from Deep Purple and came out shortly after D&D started. Search for "Rainbow" on myspace music if your interested.
I'm actually running the WPM in PbP right now. Yeah I'ma noob too, started at 12 in 83. LoL Walked by the lunch tables, and some of the other GATE students were playing...I asked what they were doing...rest is history.
How could I forget the movie Excalibur when I listed inspirational movies of the time? I've seen it probably as many times as that Hobbit cartoon, and loved everything about it. BTW, the soundtrack is great, lots of Richard Wagner and maybe the first (but certainly not the last) use of Carl Orff's O Fortuna from Carmina Burana (sp?)in a film.
I'm intrigued by the idea of a script that would include information like this, John. Will it be a documentary? Or a historical fiction-type thing with characters that play D&D back in the early days? Just curious.
P.S.: Better yet, a humorous, tongue-in-cheek mocumentary!
Maybe a comedy about a group of gamers in the late '70s who travel to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to meet Gary Gygax and play D&D with him?
Once the game starts, you could steal the Dead Gentlemen's schtick and occasionally cut to scenes of the actors dressed as their PCs in dungeon settings, etc.
It was fun, funny and new and fresh. The best times in my life next to marriage and children. Thank you Gary and Dave.
How could I forget the movie Excalibur when I listed inspirational movies of the time? I've seen it probably as many times as that Hobbit cartoon, and loved everything about it. BTW, the soundtrack is great, lots of Richard Wagner and maybe the first (but certainly not the last) use of Carl Orff's O Fortuna from Carmina Burana (sp?)in a film.
I'm intrigued by the idea of a script that would include information like this, John. Will it be a documentary? Or a historical fiction-type thing with characters that play D&D back in the early days? Just curious.
P.S.: Better yet, a humorous, tongue-in-cheek mocumentary!
I have some ideas floating around in my head but all very nebulous right now, but probably something that would celebrate in the game in a tongue in cheek way. However, since I wasn't even born when the game came out, I just wanted to do a little research. If nothing else, these posts are fun to read and people seem to enjoy reading and posting them.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Thanks for the posts so far. It's been very interesting to hear what it was like back then. Another question if I may? Since D&D was so new back then, how did you hear about it?
The same way we heard about Intellivision, or Zork!, or other stuff: from friends, who heard about it from friends.
What drew you to the game? A couple of you have mentioned that so far. Also, what did hobbies/games were you involved with prior to D&D?
Again, it was a way to meet friends, plus the opportunity to essentially collaborate on fantasy fanfic. Although I'd owned a few of the D&D / AD&D books in high school, I came into the hobby in the fall of 1980, the beginning of my freshman year at college; there was an "organizational meeting" in a dorm lounge for anybody who was interested in role-playing games. Different people opened up their established campaigns to any new players. Besides AD&D, other games that were popular at the time included RuneQuest and the original Traveller.
I've mentioned before, and perhaps it bears repeating here: most everybody I knew or heard about in the fledgeling RPG hobby was already a voracious reader of sf and fantasy. The guy running the Traveller campaign explained: "The background is mostly like the Foundation trilogy, but I've thrown in a lot of Dune." And everybody at the meeting understood what he meant. When Gygax wrote the "recommended readings" appendix in the DMG, he wasn't kidding. It wasn't "Hah, hah; look at all the books I've read"; rather, it was a strong recommendation that the DM should read them, too.
I've mentioned before, and perhaps it bears repeating here: most everybody I knew or heard about in the fledgeling RPG hobby was already a voracious reader of sf and fantasy. The guy running the Traveller campaign explained: "The background is mostly like the Foundation trilogy, but I've thrown in a lot of Dune." And everybody at the meeting understood what he meant. When Gygax wrote the "recommended readings" appendix in the DMG, he wasn't kidding. It wasn't "Hah, hah; look at all the books I've read"; rather, it was a strong recommendation that the DM should read them, too.
I noticed that Paizo had a recommended reading list in the Core Rulebook but I didn't know it was a trend started way back when. It would be interesting to compare the one from the 70s/80s to the one from the Pathfinder CRB to see what books have weathered the years and what new books have been added as D&D approaches its 40th anniversary this decade.
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I feel like I should start this post with "My name is "Bob", and I'm a Gamer..."
I've started playing in '80, when I was 10. My older brother & his friends played the original box set. They let me try it once... We switched to AD&D shortly after, and it was a huge part of my life all through high school. We used some pre-gen modules, but mostly home-brew adventures. I used to spend days drawing maps of castles & dungeons.
The game was a lot different back then - and not just the rules. There was no such thing as gamer culture like there is today, although I did meet a few other kids in school that played D&D. Fortunately, I lived within walking distance of the local game store (Keystone Hobbies in Winnipeg, if anyone else is from here), which helped me keep in touch with a bit of what was going on in the bigger D&D world. It also made it easy to spend my allowance on books, dice & real lead miniatures!
We didn't listen to music when we played, but we always had candles burning to make it feel more medieval.
Thanks for triggering the trip down memory lane!
I started sometimes in the late seventies... I remember saving up for quite a while to buy the AD&D DM guide...
Remember how illustrations of gamers (as opposed to characters) had awesome feathered mullets? :) Thank you Errol Otis!
It's good that you brought up the art. It definitely had its own style back then and it's one of the reasons I feel drawn to those good old early days. Like I mentioned early in the post, I have an old DM's screen that I still use even though the information on it is obsolete. How do other people feel about the early art from D&D? Did it draw you into the game or was it just something you had to tolerate to play?
It's good that you brought up the art. It definitely had its own style back then and it's one of the reasons I feel drawn to those good old early days. Like I mentioned early in the post, I have an old DM's screen that I still use even though the information on it is obsolete. How do other people feel about the early art from D&D? Did it draw you into the game or was it just something you had to tolerate to play?I started sometimes in the late seventies... I remember saving up for quite a while to buy the AD&D DM guide...
Remember how illustrations of gamers (as opposed to characters) had awesome feathered mullets? :) Thank you Errol Otis!
I love Errol Otis' art. His cover for A4 In the Dungeon of the Slavelords makes me feel like I'm tripping on mushrooms or something. (It's not just because of the myconids, it's the whole dreamlike quality of all of his illustrations.)
Jeff Easley, Keith Parkinson, Larry Elmore, and Jeff Dee (I think is his name?) are all great iconic D&D artists, too.
I much prefer the old skool art.
This new anime oversized weapons trope thing just leaves me a bit...meh.
I've always enjoyed the work of Elmore and Parkinson. They managed to capture the fantasy feel and make it look realistic at the same time. But I attribute that art to the late 80s and early 90s when it frequently showed up in 2nd edition products. The early art in those 70s edition AD&D books was both sometimes very simple for black and white and very complex and detailed. I saw somewhere here on the Paizo website a company that specializes in making minis with that old school look (pig snouted orcs).
It's good that you brought up the art. It definitely had its own style back then and it's one of the reasons I feel drawn to those good old early days. Like I mentioned early in the post, I have an old DM's screen that I still use even though the information on it is obsolete. How do other people feel about the early art from D&D? Did it draw you into the game or was it just something you had to tolerate to play?
I much prefer today's awesome art. Back in the day I don't ever really recall having much of an opinion of the art where as these days some of the pieces that one see's are truly awe inspiring. D&D art has come a long way IMO.
To the point where I include some of the art as hand outs when I'm playing, something I'd not do unless the module specifically called for it (like Tomb of Horrors) back in the early '80's.
Has anyone mentioned Judge's Guild products? City State of the Invincible Overlord, CS of the World Emperor, Tegal Manor, were some of my absolute favorites. Frequently they made no sense at all, and the production values were...not the best. But wildly creative. In the hands of a good GM, priceless.
The closest we got to any third-party material was a Dragon magazine.
There were no TPP or their ilk available in any sort of usefull way until at least the late 80's if not 90. Even then, extremely scarce and limited.