Reliving RPG gaming: circa 1980


Gamer Life General Discussion


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With all the histrionics and angst being vomited up on these boards about how this hobby has fallen into decadence and despair, I thought I would just post a simple bit of reminiscing about the game which demonstrates why I love it now at least as much as I did when my brother first plopped the Players Handbook on top of my physics text in 1978 and said "take a break, you're going to roll up a character."

I was a physics student struggling to get by, working two jobs each summer and one job during the school year and paying rent, groceries and, when I could manage it, dinner and a movie for my latest opposed-gender companion. My brother was in the Navy where he had discovered the game of "Dungeons and Dragons" since it was played regularly on long ship deployments. I was an avid reader of fantasy and sci-fi and had even written an unpublished novella and a couple of short stories. My room had the latest "Lord of the Rings" calendar on the wall, and most of the individual paintings tacked up from the previous year's LotR calendar. I even had some sculptures of Gandalf that I had created myself. Studying Physics was quite an investment of time and energy, especially on top of my paid job.

"OK." I said. And soon I was reading the PHB and contemplating the creation of a "player character" that I would "role play" in a "campaign" that my brother had created while on ship. Looking through the available options, I decided that the game was clearly human-biased and the whole idea of magic was sort of fascinating, so with my brother's help, I rolled up a level 1 human wizard (which was actually called a "magic-user" as I recall).

My brother was a ruthless GM. You got what you rolled. And I have always had notoriously poor luck with dice. However, he did have somewhat generous ability rolling rules, allowing you to choose where to put your 3d6 results so that you could construct a character targeting your preferred class. Luckily one of my rolls was a 16, and that meant my wizard was extremely intelligent. But when I rolled a "1" on the tiny four-sided hit die, I was crushed.

"No worries" my brother said. "Your first character is just gonna die anyway."

Physics forgotten I then went through the fascinating experience of fleshing out my wizard. Soon I had a character sheet filled with numbers, text and repeated marks of erasures and rewriting. When I finally completed the process to my brother's satisfaction, I spent the rest of the evening creating pencil drawings of my new wizard. Finally I had one that I thought was suitable and I cut it out and taped it into the little square reserved for "character illustration."

I was all set. The next day was a Saturday and my brother had rounded up a group to go into his campaign.

My memory isn't terribly reliable, but as I recall, the next day the group of players settled into couches and bean bag chairs in the living room of my rented apartment. My brother started the session by describing a strange medieval-sounding world where all of our characters had been born and grew up. My character had been off at "wizard school" for a few years and had recently returned home as a newly certified wizard. This gave my character some renown in the town. As I recall, his ale was free at the tavern. "Cool!" I thought.

But trouble was brewing in the town. Goblin raids had begun recently and a childhood friend had gone missing. An angry crowd had converged on the tavern with the idea that "something must be done!"

"Hey! You're a wizard! You need to protect us!" one of the villagers said, pointing at my character. My puffed chest at the free ale suddenly became a sense of cold fear as I looked at the "1" written in the "Hit Points" block on my character sheet.

"Wizards are not the only help you can seek, my friend!" A voice came from the table next to mine. There a young man clad in simple armor and wielding a sword rose up, raising his sword above his head. "Steel has ever been the bane of goblins." he said.

"Your steel and mine!" another young man strode forth, clad in leather armor and adorned with daggers. "I will not let the goblins get away with kidnapping or murdering my friend!"

"Wizard! Do you care to join us?" the first volunteer asked, looking at me.

"Of course!" I had my wizard reply, sneaking a peek at that character's sheet. NINE HIT POINTS! OMG! Maybe I can just hide behind him...

Soon a fourth villager, a young priest sent by the local temple to aid us, joined our group. The villagers cheered our resolve and some even offered to help with small items like rope, old rusty daggers, and the local priest himself handed us a rare and treasured flask containing a potion which he said could save us at need.

Before I knew what was happening, we were at the edge of town, following the trail of refuse and blood left by the rampaging goblins. "What have I gotten myself into?" I wondered.

Eventually we caught up with the evil monsters, and their captives. We attempted to sneak up to their camp, but were spotted. Suddenly we were in battle! My wizard pulled forth his one and only spell and half of the goblins fell to the ground asleep. The rest were soon disposed of by the cold steel of my wizard's companions.

As we walked back to town with the captives and the town cheered our success, I thought "This is pretty cool!"

I've been hooked ever since.


I wasn't yet alive in the 1980s, but that sounds like an awesome experience. It makes me consider what the gaming community has lost over the years.

Now days, adventures always seem to be filled with intrigue and dark themes, where the PCs are treated as soldiers or mercenaries, the lowest of the low. Whatever happened to the classic adventure of meeting in a tavern, taking down the local threat, and being hailed as heroes? I continually find myself yearning for such a campaign.

Your post inspires me though. Perhaps I'll try and DM such a campaign in the near future.


CCCXLII wrote:

I wasn't yet alive in the 1980s, but that sounds like an awesome experience. It makes me consider what the gaming community has lost over the years.

Now days, adventures always seem to be filled with intrigue and dark themes, where the PCs are treated as soldiers or mercenaries, the lowest of the low. Whatever happened to the classic adventure of meeting in a tavern, taking down the local threat, and being hailed as heroes? I continually find myself yearning for such a campaign.

Your post inspires me though. Perhaps I'll try and DM such a campaign in the near future.

Nothing wrong with intrigue and dark themes, but a lot of things are still closer to classic. A large part of the mercenary thing is just that it makes it easier to shoehorn characters into an adventure. For modules particularly, it's much easier to start with "You've been hired to..." than to come up with good way to hook a completely unknown party into the adventure.

APs often have better starts. Reign of Winter doesn't start in a tavern, but does start with the PCs as local (potential) heroes asked to rescue a kidnap victim. Unfortunately, you're not likely to make it home to be lauded for quite a while.

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Are you somehow transmitting all of this via telegraph?


Jeff Wilder wrote:
Are you somehow transmitting all of this via telegraph?

Er... uh...

What?


thejeff wrote:


Nothing wrong with intrigue and dark themes, but a lot of things are still closer to classic. A large part of the mercenary thing is just that it makes it easier to shoehorn characters into an adventure. For modules particularly, it's much easier to start with "You've been hired to..." than to come up with good way to hook a completely unknown party into the adventure.

APs often have better starts. Reign of Winter doesn't start in a tavern, but does start with the PCs as local (potential) heroes asked to rescue a kidnap victim. Unfortunately, you're not likely to make it home to be lauded for quite a while.

"You are in a tavern..." became so cliche that there was massive backlash. Pretty much every GMing article I read back in the Second Edition days included a warning to not start your adventure in a tavern. Game writers have progressed, or at least moved away from the tavern for an adventure hook, though maybe they've just replaced it with a new cliche?

But the dark, non heroic stuff was just as popular, at least with the people I played with, back in the 80s and 90s as the heroes/good guys stuff. I read Thieve's World and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and liked to play games with a similar tone.

Jeff Wilder wrote:


Are you somehow transmitting all of this via telegraph?

What, you mean this isn't rec.games.frp.dnd?


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The "you are in a tavern" angle became a cliche because it actually makes a lot of sense in the milieu. Taverns were pretty much the social center of most small towns, and much of the town's business was conducted there.

I am not ashamed to admit that I sometimes use the tavern cliche to this day. It's frequently more believable than many of the GM contrived "hooks" that have replaced it.

Webstore Gninja Minion

Moved thread.


Sigh, the point of this thread was to provide some sort of counterweight to all the "Gaming today is el sucko!" threads that have erupted all over the general discussion forum.

Oh well.


Akerlof wrote:
thejeff wrote:


Nothing wrong with intrigue and dark themes, but a lot of things are still closer to classic. A large part of the mercenary thing is just that it makes it easier to shoehorn characters into an adventure. For modules particularly, it's much easier to start with "You've been hired to..." than to come up with good way to hook a completely unknown party into the adventure.

APs often have better starts. Reign of Winter doesn't start in a tavern, but does start with the PCs as local (potential) heroes asked to rescue a kidnap victim. Unfortunately, you're not likely to make it home to be lauded for quite a while.

"You are in a tavern..." became so cliche that there was massive backlash. Pretty much every GMing article I read back in the Second Edition days included a warning to not start your adventure in a tavern. Game writers have progressed, or at least moved away from the tavern for an adventure hook, though maybe they've just replaced it with a new cliche?

But the dark, non heroic stuff was just as popular, at least with the people I played with, back in the 80s and 90s as the heroes/good guys stuff. I read Thieve's World and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and liked to play games with a similar tone.

I've also seen in various places plenty of "old school players" complaining about why all the newbs want to play heroes and how real D&D was about killing monsters in dungeons just to take their stuff. No other motivation needed.

Gamers have always played heroes. Gamers have always played murder-hobos. Gamers have always played scoundrels and anti-heroes.


I was born in 1980... Ok, admit it, which one rolled my stats?!


It was me... and I cheated.


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Oh, for Otto's sake! Is this another, "when did you start playing Dungeons & Dragons" thread? I swear...You kids get off my lawn.


stormraven wrote:
It was me... and I cheated.

And got caught, so the DM made you reroll with 2d6 per stat while he watched like a hawk.


Just ran B11 King's Festival over the past weekend for my brother and three friends. We used the RC rules (with some house rules) and it ran great. It felt very much like playing back in the 80s with the B/X or BECMI boxed sets. Even used my recently bought B/X rulebook PDFs on my Kindle Fire to show the wandering monster tables.

Nothing wrong with starting an adventure in a tavern or showing up at a town with an orc problem that needs fixing. :-)


The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, the group needed an extra body, so I was a fighter, mace and shield because I'd heard about skeletons. If I remember right he died at 2nd level in Danger at Dunwater. I even bought a figure specially.


kyrt-ryder wrote:
stormraven wrote:
It was me... and I cheated.
And got caught, so the DM made you reroll with 2d6 per stat while he watched like a hawk.

That explains my Strength. At least stormraven managed to cheat on Intelligence score even while being watched.


In 1980, I started High school. I would play D&D with my friends during lunch. Towards the end of Highschool, when I got a car, I played at an old Pizza place in town with local friends. They were of different ages. Some were younger then me and a few were maybe 10 years older. They were gamers that congregated in a familiar place. That was the time when I started out as a 15th level character and had really neat magic items and I had a background for my character. This was the group where the GM had a GMNPC called Nicron99 with the Kill-O-Zap gun and he kept those high level characters (like the guy playing the half silver dragon) in check with the hairy lightning bolt that did "enough" damage.
We played other games like Star Fleet battles. I played once when the guy who was teaching me cheated (!)

In college (CMU) I got with the Mt. Pleasant Gamers Association and we played all kinds of games including D&D. Amongst them was Paranoia and Champions. I do remember a strange D&D game where a guy introduced new character types. There was this Wolverine type that had dual shields and and claws to match. There were other races too. And this game ran all night and into the next day (16 hours I think but this was college).

I graduated from the 80's and things got better!


Drejk wrote:
kyrt-ryder wrote:
stormraven wrote:
It was me... and I cheated.
And got caught, so the DM made you reroll with 2d6 per stat while he watched like a hawk.
That explains my Strength. At least stormraven managed to cheat on Intelligence score even while being watched.

Nah, he just got lucky and rolled Midnight alongside otherwise average 2d6 rolls :P

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