Quote from: chirine ba kal;1117398May I suggest the links in my signature, and ask questions?

Thank you! I hadn't run across your online writing before -- I'm pleased to make your (virtual) acquaintance!

I've been browsing through and I have a few initial questions if you don't mind:

Quote from: chirine ba kalEarly last year, an experienced D&D 5e gamer told me I should get out of the campaign that I'd been playing for a while, as I was "holding the party back because I didn't have system mastery on the 5e rules". So, since I agreed with him, I handed my player-character sheets back to the very patient GM, and left the campaign.

This anecdote shocked me. Even the most mechanically-inclined games I've ever been in were willing to approximate and fudge mechanics for well-intentioned play. Would you be willing to share (if you know) what "system mastery" mechanics this GM viewed as so important? I'm interested from a psychographic data point perspective -- I can't picture what's so critical.

Quote from: chirine ba kalWhat rules do I need to know?

Whatever set of rules - any rules - that you are comfortable with. One player is already working on a 5e PC; it's my problem to crunch the numbers, not yours.

This was another stand-out quote for me! And very thought provoking. Do you routinely support multiple rules systems for different characters in the same game? How far apart can the mechanical spread be in your experience before it gets unwieldy?

Quote from: chirine ba kalI mentioned that I've never really 'played D&D'; I've played "something called Blackmoor with Dave, something called Greyhawk with Gary, and something called Tekumel with Phil"(Note One). Back then - and this was a few years ago, remember, and back then none of these three world settings had built up the mass of materials that they have today. There was, forty years ago, a relative dearth of published information on these worlds, let alone the plethora of sets of rules that we now enjoy in our hobby.

One had to 'explore'. Get up, walk around, ask questions, have adventures. It was taken as a given that we'd all read a lot of the same books and seen the same movies; see also Gary's 'Appendix N'. We all knew what we were supposed to be about, and so we sharpened our swords and our wits and got on with our adventures. "Doing it by the book" was impossible; the book - and the game rules - hadn't been written yet. The GMs of the day came up with adventures and worlds that they were set in, and we played our Faferds, Grey Mousers, Conans, and Belits in these new worlds with all the gusto and swashbuckling vigor that we could.

This stood out to me, too. So you discovered the "rules" such as they were experientially through play? The DM guided you through something roughly equivalent to reading the rulebook description of mechanics?

How was mechanical consistency handled in this style? I imagine there was a flexible-cooperative bent to it from shared cultural background, but my outsider's guess is there would need to be some rules consistency (within some tolerance) for the game to be coherent?

Thank you very much for anything you have time to answer! Interesting stuff!

Quote from: chirine ba kal[/quoteEarly last year, an experienced D&D 5e gamer told me I should get out of the campaign that I'd been playing for a while, as I was "holding the party back because I didn't have system mastery on the 5e rules".

That person is not worthy of the name "Dungeon Master." If I knew where he was, I would confiscate his Viking Hat. Worthless scum.

From insubordinate polyhedral;1117423:

Thank you! I hadn't run across your online writing before -- I'm pleased to make your (virtual) acquaintance!

You're welcome. There's also something like 900 pages from the three 'Questioning chirine ba kal' threads on this forum, but as they wander all over the place it's a long slog to get through them; I created the .proboards forum to make it easier to find things, as well as not clog up Pundit's forum - there were, I gather, server issues starting to become apparent.

I've been browsing through and I have a few initial questions if you don't mind:

Sure. I'll answer them over here as they relate to modern gaming; my blog and forum tend to wallow in nostalgia.

This anecdote shocked me. Even the most mechanically-inclined games I've ever been in were willing to approximate and fudge mechanics for well-intentioned play. Would you be willing to share (if you know) what "system mastery" mechanics this GM viewed as so important? I'm interested from a psychographic data point perspective -- I can't picture what's so critical.

This twit's problem is that he's a so-called 'expert player', and a self-described big wheel in local gaming; like The Quartering is for 'MtG', he's a know-it-all about 5e. His issue was that unlike himself, I had not memorized all of the 5e books in all their (to me) mind-numbing detail and mechanics. He's a rules lawyer, pure and simple. I've been dealing with players like that for over forty years, and I don't need to now. The poor GM, who's both a good GM and a good friend, was quite shocked, and the other players were pretty unamused as they all knew that I'd never played D&D before. One of them asked the twit in a very quiet voice if he knew who he'd just kicked out of the game, and that's when the poop hit the fan.

This was another stand-out quote for me! And very thought provoking. Do you routinely support multiple rules systems for different characters in the same game? How far apart can the mechanical spread be in your experience before it gets unwieldy?

Yes. I have no problem with multiple sets of rules, as I think in probability curves; I read through the set of rules that the player likes, get a grip on the curves, and off we go. In my current Tekumel group, I am running EPT, S&G, T:OEPT, Bethorm, and D&D 5e in parallel with each other. I'll be running Tractics and 5e in my upcoming 'Sturmgeschutz and Sorcery' game, which is as about as far apart in mechanics as you can get; I don't seem to have an issue with it, and I'm not sure why. I suspect it's because I think in 'simulationist' terms, in the probability curves that I work with.

This stood out to me, too. So you discovered the "rules" such as they were experientially through play? The DM guided you through something roughly equivalent to reading the rulebook description of mechanics?

Yep. "Dave, what do I need to roll?" "Roll and I'll tell you what happens."
Nope. We just played our characters, and learned by doing.

How was mechanical consistency handled in this style? I imagine there was a flexible-cooperative bent to it from shared cultural background, but my outsider's guess is there would need to be some rules consistency (within some tolerance) for the game to be coherent?

Dave, Gary, and Phil all knew how their worlds worked, and because they were intellectually honest they were mechanically consistent. There was none of this malarky about "the rules are there to protect the players from the GM"; The GM was a facilitator and moderator; the worlds were out to kill us, so they usually just had to fill us in. They were honest referees. no 'fudging', just smarter then we were. Most of the time.

Bob Meyer still runs Blackmoor this way, as my players found out this past May at The Annual Blackmoor Reunion Game where they played two boatloads of Skadaharians.

Thank you very much for anything you have time to answer! Interesting stuff!

Again, you're welcome.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1117430Early last year, an experienced D&D 5e gamer told me I should get out of the campaign that I'd been playing for a while, as I was "holding the party back because I didn't have system mastery on the 5e rules".

That person is not worthy of the name "Dungeon Master." If I knew where he was, I would confiscate his Viking Hat. Worthless scum.[/QUOTE]

And he wasn't even the GM; he was some git who wandered into the game from the local AL play scene to pick some quick XP to advance his League standings. He'd been a twit throughout the game session, and this was simply the last straw for me personally.I'm told that he was the same with people in the AL, and at the FLGS open nights, and was eventually told that he was simply not welcome as he was literally driving new people away from the store by his arrogance and attitude.

He's one of the reasons why I shy away from doing public games at conventions and at the FLGS; you, as GM, have to take whatever walks up to the table no matter how much of a jerk that they might turn out to be. I've been doing this for over forty years at conventions and stores, and it's gotten to be that I don't think it's worth the time and energy to be 'open game' and 'on-grid' any more. If - the gods forfend! - I ever do a convention again, it's be off grid in my own suite with only people that I think will work well in my games. I've done that as an experiment, and it's worked wonderfully well.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1117392Dave's combat system had three major differences from the OD&D alternate combat system...

1)  Lower hit point totals
2)  Critical hits
3)  Dave used the Tony Bath syztem where you roll to hit and the defender gets a saving throw based on armor, rather than the Don Featherstone system where armor is factored into the to-hit roll.

Welcome back Gronan!!!

Please give us more details about all three of the above.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1117392Not only did I game with Dave, I worked for him at AGI when he published First Fantasy Campaign.

Dave's combat system had three major differences from the OD&D alternate combat system ( which Gary never used).EDIT:  I MISWROTE.  Gary never ever used CHAINMAIL for Greyhawk, even on Day One.  Rob Kuntz can verify this.

1)  Lower hit point totals
2)  Critical hits
3)  Dave used the Tony Bath system where you roll to hit and the defender gets a saving throw based on armor, rather than the Don Featherstone system where armor is factored into the to-hit roll.

Hi Gronan!

Hope everyone had a good holiday here! I have been checking in, however only now have time to actually write. Over Christmas I worked on painting minis, I"m trying to get my backlog of unpainted minis down to say, ...a few hundred or so.

Thanks for joining us here again! Of course I have some new questions now as well. The 0D&D had a hp total that for all practical purposes capped out at about the 12th to 15th level, after which characters generally recieved only 1 Hp per level gained, and the characters had to earn ridiculous amounts of experience points @ 250k plus, per level, just to level up just to earn that extra single hp. I never did expect that Dave used a straight d100 roll to determine character hp, even though that was mentioned in his notes in the First Fantasy Campaign. I never saw that, or heard about that in discussions anywhere else, ever. Was he actually using the tables that we used for 0D&D in the little brown books where the character would roll a number of d6s for hit points with some additional pips depending on level?

We also used Critical Hits from day one out in Colorado as a house rule. A natural twenty would always do double whatever we rolled for total damage,and magic weapon pluses counted for determining critical hits as well if the roll was twenty or over, ...CRIT! How did Dave run critical hits?

So, with the Tony Bath wargaming rules, if a character/leader was hit, the player rolled a d6 as a saving throw, if he/she were wearing light armor a 6 negated the damage, with Heavy Armor, a 5 or 6 negated the damage, and if a character was carrying a shield the player added one to the die roll. Is this the way Dave ran it?

Finally a couple questions about Gary and his D&D game.  So did he use the OD&D alternate combat system after all?... that's what I thought that he used... and if not, what did he use?

With the addition of Greyhawk, damage by specific weapon type was added, as well as variable monster damage, as well as variable armor resistance versus weapons. Did he ever use any of those in his campaigns? When I watched him run Castle Gygax he had the 1eAD&D books with him, and used that instead of the Castles & Crusades. From what I understand of his original Dungeons and Dragons games, he preferred just running with the 3lbb, and some house rules.

A couple of additional comments on our early Colorado group D&D campaigns. Critical hits were revamped after we got our hands on the Warlock! rules, and of course, Arduin, bloody Arduin, and we of course added fumbles as well. Adding in some graphic lethality was great fun! When I ran (and even now) D&D games, I always included rules for morale for both NPCs and Monsters, as only the most fanatical of troops would fight to the death, like the followers of an Evil High Priest for example, otherwise NPCs and monsters in my games erred on the side of self-preservation, and would flee if their lives were in jeopardy or they were low on hit points. If they fled, it counted as a win for the players, in terms of gaining experience points.

Finally one often overlooked venue of commentary from Gary for early D&D games was Alarums and Excursions published by Lee Gold. I would specifically point readers here to Gary's Letter published in Issue #2 from July of 1975 and from Issue #15 published in October of 1976. I'll leave a couple of  quotes from him here, today...

Dave and I disagree on how to handle any number of things, and both of our campaigns differ from the "rules" found in D&D. If the time ever comes when all aspects of fantasy are covered and the vast majority of its players agree on how the game should be played, D&D will have become staid and boring indeed. Sorry, but I don't believe that there is anything desirable in having various campaigns playing similarly to one another.

...Frankly, the reason I enjoy playing in Dave Arneson's campaign is that I do not know his treatments of monsters and suchlike, so I must keep thinking and reasoning in order to "survive".

...and later in the issue two article...

I desire variance in interpretation and, as long as I am editor of the TSR line and its magazine, I will do my utmost to see that there is as little trend towards standardization as possible. Each campaign should be a "variant", and there is no "official interpretation" from me or anyone else. If a game of "Dungeons and Beavers" suits a group, all I say is more power to them, for every fine referee runs his own variant of D&D anyway.

So, early on, there was no one true way to play original D&D, there was the way each group worked out to play, and that depended entirely on the GM, and the players.

Quote from: Omega;1117412So how did the Blumes enter into this? When? I know that one of the brothers was into gaming, and the other was apparently the source of alot of the troubles Gary had. But no info on how much either played, it at all, before or after publication?

This is also a Rob Kuntz question. I just got his Redbook about Don Kaye right before the holidays, and will post a brief review here in the next couple of days.

Quote from: Mistwell;1117396Wait...I started playing D&D in 1978. And I too have met Dave at Gencon and hung out with him for a bit (my wife was also a special guest that GenCon and I sat with her which put me between her and Dave, so we chatted). Does that make ME special now too?

Yes, indeed! ...also a pain in the ass as well, ...but a special one, special as we all are that share this interest. You should have led with what you and her and Dave chatted about, ...that would have been much more interesting than just picking fights with ancient GM's, but hey, it's like Dragonslaying right? Find an old GM in a cave somewhere, and you find ways to make it miserable?

Quote from: SHARK;1117315Greetings!
You know, that's not the first time I have heard about people *hating* Rob Kuntz. What is up with all the hate towards him?

It is hard to hold a reasonable discussion with him especially if your opinion differs. He is versed in various academic fields, like systems theory. He often presents his opinions as facts as well as uses an extensive amount of academic jargon. Which just adds to the difficulty of participating in any discussion with him.

Quote from: estar;1117450It is hard to hold a reasonable discussion with him especially if your opinion differs. He is versed in various academic fields, like systems theory. He often presents his opinions as facts as well as uses an extensive amount of academic jargon. Which just adds to the difficulty of participating in any discussion with him.

Greetings!

Hey Estar my friend! I hope the holidays are going well for you!

That's an interesting commentary by you, Estar. I can see how Rob Kuntz's attitudes would make a discussion difficult. *laughs* That's unfortunate. Ah well, you know? I always appreciate your insights, Estar.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: estar;1117450It is hard to hold a reasonable discussion with him especially if your opinion differs. He is versed in various academic fields, like systems theory. He often presents his opinions as facts as well as uses an extensive amount of academic jargon. Which just adds to the difficulty of participating in any discussion with him.

Isnt he also a little mercurial in his friendships? I recall Gary mentioning someone offering support for one of his projects and then pulling out. Thought it was Kuntz but can not find my notes.

Quote from: Omega;1117477Isnt he also a little mercurial in his friendships? I recall Gary mentioning someone offering support for one of his projects and then pulling out. Thought it was Kuntz but can not find my notes.

My only direct experience with Rob Kuntz was participating in discussions he was involved in on various forums. Along with reading some of his books like The True Genius of Dave Arneson.

Quote from: Omega;1117477I recall Gary mentioning someone offering support for one of his projects and then pulling out. Thought it was Kuntz but can not find my notes.

You may be thinking of Rob's participation in the Castle Zagyg project (via Troll Lord Games). Early on, Rob and Gary intended to work on this together, drawing on both of their Castle Greyhawk material. (Some Greyhawk levels were Rob's -- for a complete presentation of the old Castle Greyhawk material, you'd need both the Gary-authored/owned material and the Rob-authored/owned material.) Before earnest work on the actual Castle Zagyg dungeons really began, Gary worked up the (new) Yggsburgh mini-setting. Rob worked up the (new) "Dark Chateau" adventure site. And Gary was organizing a team of contributors working on detailed modules for Yggsburgh city. I was sorta involved in the CZ project in that Rob asked me if I wanted to work on developing the dungeon areas beneath Dark Chateau (the "Watery Caverns"). I agreed and had started initial work on that.

However, Gary and Rob had a falling out over how the work on the Castle Zagyg dungeons/material would proceed (and possibly additional factors that I can't speak to). Rob wanted to basically release the actual Greyhawk material, including scans of the original maps and such, perhaps with notes/annotations and some additional development. Gary wanted to essentially re-do the dungeons in a new form with more detail and new presentation (a great deal more work, but by this point there was a team of people involved in the CZ project). I should note that I wasn't involved in that, and my comments on it are drawn from some discussions with Rob, as well as what Rob and Gary did release, later. In any case, their disagreements ultimately led to Rob and Gary parting ways on the project. (That also ended my involvement, since the Watery Caverns thing was part of the overall Castle Zagyg project, and I decided not to continue with it outside of the CZ umbrella.)

Rob released some of his own Greyhawk levels or rooms under his Pied Piper Publishing mark. From those, especially Bottle City, you can get some idea of what Rob seemed to have in mind. Original maps and notes scanned, a transcription of the notes, some annotations and commentary, et cetera. Personally, I would've liked that approach to all of the old Castle Greyhawk material, but it wasn't to be. Having seen some of the Greyhawk material, I speculate that Gary believed it was too minimal for publication as-is. Much of what I saw was very brief in its key/writeup: basically brief notes like what you might expect from an experienced DM that prepped a huge, ongoing dungeon for his personal campaign. Not at all what you might expect from a "ready to publish" dungeon.

The Castle Zagyg project continued after Rob left the project, with the main development being spearheaded by Jeff Talanian. Troll Lord Games eventually released the "upper works", which, as far as I can tell, was mostly new material. The aftermath of Gary's death killed the project entirely, with Trigee ending the relationship with Troll Lord Games. So we never got to see much drawn from the actual original Greyhawk dungeons.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1117436Welcome back Gronan!!!

Please give us more details about all three of the above.

If you are interested, I now hang out at RPGPub.

I no longer post at theRPGSite because I'm sick and tired of "SJWS and/or StoryGamers are ruining the hobby" screeds.  Over at RPGPub we actually talk about fun.

Just like I have disassociated myself from Star Wars fandom because Star Wars fandom is now all about how much they hate Star Wars.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1117545If you are interested, I now hang out at RPGPub.

I no longer post at theRPGSite because I'm sick and tired of "SJWS and/or StoryGamers are ruining the hobby" screeds.  Over at RPGPub we actually talk about fun.

Just like I have disassociated myself from Star Wars fandom because Star Wars fandom is now all about how much they hate Star Wars.

Take the blinders off sunny boy.