I'm not convinced Saves and To-Hits would be written on OD&D character sheets.

Even in AD&D, the player rolled the die to hit, while the DM (on his hidden chart in the book) told the player IF he hit. That's what made the "nat 20" so special back then--you didn't have to wait for the DM to tell you if you hit, you knew you did.

Saves, likewise, were on special charts in the AD&D  DMG (there was a "general save" chart in the blue book), so players again didn't necessarily know their saving throws. Players didn't roll that many saves in OD&D--while nowadays many characters and monsters have effects that generate saves with every single attack, in OD&D, there wasn't nearly so much saving.

You had a special column just for dragon breath--really worth writing down? Another for rods/staves/wands...just how often does that come up? One fight a level, perhaps. About the only one that came up "often" was poison, but most DMs knew better than to use poisonous monsters because the option in older D&D was "save vs poison or freakin' DIE". Modern versions of D&D have much, much, weaker poisons, to the point that some monsters' poisonous attacks are laughably weak...but now you can use the monsters all the time, unlike say, the Giant Centipedes, whose "weak" poisonous bite still had around a 50% fatality rate.

I wouldn't say OD&D was a black box, and I honestly think telling players what they need to roll to hit is an improvement over the DM looking it up on a chart...but it is a very different game than more current versions of D&D.

Quote from: Omega;869522Exactly. How can the player choose a class if they dont know their own stats?

DM: "Ok, choice A is kinda weak but a little nimble. Choice B is really smart and fairly tough."

Gary rolled and told me the numbers.  Considering the thousands of words written in the last forty years about players cheating during character creation, I've heard worse ideas.

This entire thread is full of people missing the fucking obvious.

How long did "the referee rolls all the dice" last?  Until players had dice.  Polyhedral dice used to be rare and expensive, not "available all over the damn place."

Sometimes the obvious mechanical answer really is the right one.

Quote from: Doom;869698I'm not convinced Saves and To-Hits would be written on OD&D character sheets.

I never wrote that stuff down or saw them written down.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;869701How long did "the referee rolls all the dice" last?  Until players had dice.  Polyhedral dice used to be rare and expensive, not "available all over the damn place."

3d6 in order dude. Everybody back then had friggin' six-sided dice. Yahtzee!

Running a complete black box works really well for a lot of things, especially rules that are easily misinterpreted like thief skills. Did it with my students a good bit until class sizes got to big for D&D games to work well.

Quote from: Bren;8697153d6 in order dude. Everybody back then had friggin' six-sided dice. Yahtzee!

And I didn't bring any along when I went to Gary's, nor did he tell me to.  Nor did I know that stats were 3d6 in order.  Nobody but Gary had the rules.  We were not seated around a table; Gary had his desk and everybody else was sitting on chairs or the sofa/daybed.  Not only would it have been a royal pain to pass around dice, but we had no place to roll them.  The referee rolling the dice goes back at least as far as Kriegspiel.

Given that the numbers are given to the player, and OD&D had no options on assigning ability scores apart from the somewhat-ambiguous sentences on trading points from one ability to another for the sake of the XP bonus*, having the GM roll up abilities is no different from having the players press a button on a random number generator and record the values. Which in turn is no different from having them roll the dice except for the pleasure of handing the cubes and the potential for outright cheating or using one's personal psi powers to influence the dice.

I.e., barring dishonesty or superstition, I don't see the point of this line argument.

I do remember that while HP, AC, the bonuses of magic weapons, spell slots, and damage caused by spells were all commonly player knowledge, it was also standard to leave it up to the DM to look up results on the combat & saving throw tables**. One reason for this apart from allowing players to play the game without knowing the rules, is that the AC of enemies, and possibly DRMs for saving throws, could be concealed. It also gave the DM more leeway to fudge**, although I don't know if that was Gygax's intention or simply something that happened.

* What I mean is that when I played the game, we interpreted this as literally erasing points off one score and adding points to the other. In the last few years I've learned that this may not have been intended--that you kept the scores as-is and just used the "tradeoff" to see if you met the XP threshold.

** There was no THACO or BAB. Instead you looked up the character class & level or monster HD against the target AC to find a target score.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;869749And I didn't bring any along when I went to Gary's, nor did he tell me to.  Nor did I know that stats were 3d6 in order.  Nobody but Gary had the rules.  We were not seated around a table; Gary had his desk and everybody else was sitting on chairs or the sofa/daybed.  Not only would it have been a royal pain to pass around dice, but we had no place to roll them.  The referee rolling the dice goes back at least as far as Kriegspiel.

And none of that has anything to do with the limited availability of polyhedrals with other than six sides.

Quote from: Arminius;869769Which in turn is no different from having them roll the dice except for the pleasure of handing the cubes and the potential for outright cheating or using one's personal psi powers to influence the dice.

I don't think that is an insignificant reason behind why most RPGs are played with the players rolling the dice themselves.

Quote* What I mean is that when I played the game, we interpreted this as literally erasing points off one score and adding points to the other.

That's how we all read it.

Granted, I doubt that six-sided dice were hard to come by--apart from scavenging them from Yahtzee, Monopoly, or any of the kiddie Milton Bradley games, people needed them for gambling--but Gronan's point is reasonable for lots of other mechanics. That is, provided we assume that polyhedral dice were used very much at all for early D&D; remember there are some who believe that Chainmail was used extensively for dungeon adventures. Since I think they're wrong, this tidbit slightly reinforces my belief.

But I also see no reason to disbelieve Gronan's report of wargaming culture at the time. I was playing Avalon Hill-style war-games a few years later, which didn't use referees, and of course, you always rolled your own dice when attacking. But I could easily see in multiplayer miniatures games that a referee would keep the dice as "tools of the trade" as he went around the table adjudicating events.

There were always the little cardboard chits thrown in a glass.  Those sucked so much.

Quote from: Bren;869779I don't think that is an insignificant reason behind why most RPGs are played with the players rolling the dice themselves.

That's how we all read it.

Now. but not necessarily then. There was, and probably still is a gap between how some wargames are played and how that carried over into early D&D, and how most board games are played.

Ive seen games where the players roll their character and damage. But the DM rolled all the rest. Saves, hits, checks.

I think over time and pretty quickly DMs delegated more of this to the players to free themselves up. And as Gronan points out. Polyhedrals became more availible.

This is where the boxed sets of BX had the leg up on AD&D. They packed in those dice. Sure the things disintigrated with use. But unlike AD&D you didnt have to go out and hunt these mythical things down. No-where local when I was starting RPG gaming up until nearly the 90s stocked polyhedrals.

Quote from: yosemitemike;869801There were always the little cardboard chits thrown in a glass.  Those sucked so much.

My friend insisted on calling them "shits". More in reaction to SPI's effort at cost-cutting--where before they would include nearly microscopic, but functional, six-sided dice, they started claiming at one point that the price of oil had driven up the cost, so they included punch-out sh..., uh, chits in the counter sheet.

Remember when you had to rub crayon into the numbers because they were made to teach kids about the Pythagorean solids rather than for gaming?  Better than the chits anyway.

Quote from: yosemitemike;869879Remember when you had to rub crayon into the numbers because they were made to teach kids about the Pythagorean solids rather than for gaming?  Better than the chits anyway.

I still have in my bag dice with crayon in the numbers. Some of my dice are 35+ years old.

When I was introduced (late '76, I think), I wasn't taught mechanical stuff. Whether or not that was what Gary intended as normative, it was fun.