Seems like lately there's been a bit of a renaissance in Old School fantasy gaming taking place on the net. A quick search turns up excellent old-school sites such as Grognardia, Dragonsfoot, and a host of others. There are several open rule sets now available for download which capture the flexibility, spirit, and ease of play of the original edition (Oe) Dungeons & Dragons game, with additional information (similar to First Edition Advanced D&D) that allows the inclusion of more advanced rules and play without getting mired in volumes of tables, tedious calculation, or barracks lawyerism by min-maxing munchkins gaming some obscure prestige class and race bonus.
My two favorite rulesets so far are Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC. If you're an old school gamer, or interested in why table-top role-playing games used to be so popular (or why these old grognards wax so nostalgic about them), you ought to check 'em out.
I played my first Dungeons & Dragons game in 1980. I was twelve years old and had just started junior high school. A group of older kids had set up an after-school gaming group, and one of my friends talked me into joining in on a game session.
I was the twelfth person at the table that afternoon (how many gaming groups can claim even a third that number today?). I had no idea what was going on and hadn't read any of the game rules. My friend helped me roll up a character: a cleric because the group needed a backup healer and my stat rolls just happened to have a 17 for the wisdom stat. I was allowed to start out at Level 2 since the party had already been gaming for a couple of weeks and all had advanced past Level 1.
I named my cleric "Grey Hawk" because I'd been reading a bunch of Jack London novels and thought it sounded cool with a shamanistic flavor. I didn't understand the snickers around the table when I announced Grey Hawk the Cleric's addition to the adventuring party. Later, after I realized how grandiose and silly that sounded to D&D players, we could all laugh about it together.
Low level healers rank just above cannon fodder, so they stuck me at the back of the marching order instead of the front. They gave me some graph paper and told me to record where we'd been. Then they kind of ignored me for a while. I didn't care. I was fascinated by the whole thing: especially the crystalline polyhedral dice sparkling like giant precious gems and the miniature painted character figures strewn around the table. I recorded my maps in great detail (presaging my future career as a design architect, perhaps?), watched, and listened as our group began exploring a dark barrow tomb full of deadly traps and undead monsters.
Our Dungeon Master (DM) was a 9th grader and gaming veteran who colorfully described each new part of the tomb as we explored, full of excitement, adventure, and suspense. He had a fold-out screen with tables of numbers on it, but rarely consulted them unless something really complicated was going on. Mostly, the rule books stayed closed as we carefully made our way down fictional tunnels seen only in our minds and mapped out in pencil with notes on scraps of graph paper.
Typical of D&D players at the time, we played AD&D in the style of the original edition D&D: more about the DM's rulings than the rules - light on technicalities, heavy on imagination, fast, and flexible. If you could describe an action to the DM and it didn't directly violate any of the restrictions given by your character's class, abilities, or surroundings, the DM would make a ruling on it and maybe calculate a rough probability or effect then roll some dice to see if it worked. This encouraged a free-wheeling style of play that was never boring and encouraged creative thinking in a social context.
A couple of hours after I started that first adventure, narrowly avoiding gruesome death in spike-filled pits and fighting our way through zombies, skeletons, and ghouls, we wrapped it up for the day. I'd been having a great time and didn't want to stop. After using up my clerical healing spells (both of them) early on, I'd been "demoted" to cannon fodder, which gave me a much more active role in the game. My friend clued me in on "turning undead" and I began cutting a swath through the legions of zombies with my holy symbol and morningstar.
The next day, I talked my parents into taking me to the local game store to buy the AD&D Player's Handbook and some dice. Thus began my career as a gamer geek.
I played many different RPGs* over the next few years, but always gravitated back to that peculiar hybrid of Oe and 1e Dungeons & Dragons so common back in the early 1980s. Other rule sets and later editions of D&D became so complex and rule-bound that they stopped being fun. Also, I got older and pre-occupied with adult concerns. I played my last session of any role-playing game in 1989, as a Dungeon Master myself, then packed up the books and dice while I pursued my life.
To look at me now, you would likely never guess that I was such an avid gamer in my youth. Like Stephen Colbert, I don't fit the stereotype, but then few of us ever really did. 25 years later, members of my gaming group are now successful and established. Several of us are senior executives in mainstream industries and a few started successful companies. We all got married and had families. One is a politician (his secret is safe with me). I think it's fair to say that nobody who knows any of us now would ever describe us as "geeks."
I've still got the books and the dice, though.
And this got me thinking: whatever happened to all those table-top role-players? I can't be the only one who fondly remembers all those hours spent imagining spectacular adventures with friends. I did a quick web search and discovered I'm in good company.
I started reading the open rule sets and adventure models posted on the web. It got the wheels back in long-unused corners of my head turning again, thinking about magic and monsters and adventure. I know so much more now than I knew then. I don't have anybody to play these games with anymore (except maybe my own children, who are far more interested in the tangible, visually immediate world of video games...almost all of which are direct descendants of my table-top games of yore). But I still read rule books and think about the games for my own personal interest and satisfaction. As a professional creative person, I have the skills, insight, and techniques to re-create that original gaming experience and make it BETTER.
Come to think of it, maybe that's the definition of a "hobby."
Hence this blog. Although I have nobody to play with, and don't really have the time to spend playing games anyway, my brain is still full of this stuff.
Back in the day, the original rules of Dungeons & Dragons were so open and free-form that every gaming group and DM had a set of "House Rules" to clarify things that came from their experiences playing. That's where this blog title originates, and that's what I'm going to record my thoughts about. I encourage you to join me in sharing your own thoughts and observations.
* I still have a full set of original GDW Traveller rule books and a complete in-the-box original Chaosium Ringworld RPG set. Never found anyone who understood the Ringworld rules well enough to play them. It's an enormously complex and ambitious game system packed into a deceptively small package, but the books are a fun read for Niven fans. The running joke about Traveller is: it's a lot of fun to play, provided you're an expert in Excel or Mathematica and have a PhD in astrophysics. I was an early adopter of the Champions super-hero game system, and was therefore able to make the jump to GURPS with ease later on, developing a complete GURPS sci-fi campaign milieu based around Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium series of books.
* I still have a full set of original GDW Traveller rule books and a complete in-the-box original Chaosium Ringworld RPG set. Never found anyone who understood the Ringworld rules well enough to play them. It's an enormously complex and ambitious game system packed into a deceptively small package, but the books are a fun read for Niven fans. The running joke about Traveller is: it's a lot of fun to play, provided you're an expert in Excel or Mathematica and have a PhD in astrophysics. I was an early adopter of the Champions super-hero game system, and was therefore able to make the jump to GURPS with ease later on, developing a complete GURPS sci-fi campaign milieu based around Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium series of books.
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