Elliott is right, but is points only will make sense to the unitiated if they do some research on the genesis, history and reception of D&D in the 70ies.

Wargames is the key word, club is the second one. D&D was written for adults, adults of a specific background.

What others, who lacked the specific socialization made of it, is history.

Only on rare occasion did anything worthwhile come from someone lacking a  (old school) wargaming/ club gamer background. I could possibly name five (in print) people who really understand RPGs in this day and age.

Quote from: Elliot WilenThe reason for the thread title is that a fetish, in one of the senses of the word, is an object which is imbued by the observer with magical powers. Wikipedia describes this (undoubtedly quoting some early anthropological theory that may no longer hold much currency) that "fetishism" is a primary stage in the development of a culture.

A case could be made from an entirely materialistic standpoint that culture is ONLY fetishism. From that you could argue that the only real differences between cultures are differences in form and presentation of artifacts.

Anyways, I think you're right about D&D. D&D is primal fetishism. It makes relics out of old character sheets and totems out of a stack of hardback rulebooks. The dungeon crawl itself is a ritual with no obligation to make sense beyond the circle of participants. In that sense, it's a lot like a cave painting of some ancient hunt. It's a convergence of random events in a controlled setting that forms the basis of a heroic tale in the minds of the participants. Powerful and primitive social magic that can't be reliably explained but only experienced. And IMO, a much more 'real' experience than the forced plot you see in most 'storyteller' games.

Quote from: Herr ArnulfeHeh, when you have rules for detecting sloping passages, finding secret doors and Saves vs Dragon Breath, but only Halflings can attempt to hide, it implies a certain playstyle. It basically says "this is a dungeoncrawling game, and unless you're a Halfling, you have to fight." Now if the rules had been more universally rules-light, and not so meticulous about defining the dungeon-exploration / combat aspects, I might buy into your theory.

It's not a theory. I don't do theory. It's a fact. That's the way we played, and we didn't need any rules "supporting" it. No-one in the circle of GMs I knew played any different. I ran D&D, then AD&D, once a week for 20 years and in that time I ran maybe 5 dungeons. The vast majority of our play was in cities or in the wilderness. We almost never ran modules - the Village of Hommlet and something else I can't remember were it for me, both heavily modded to fit my setting. We never used minis either. That's the way everyone I knew played.

-clash

Quote from: KellriAnyways, I think you're right about D&D. D&D is primal fetishism. It makes relics out of old character sheets and totems out of a stack of hardback rulebooks. The dungeon crawl itself is a ritual with no obligation to make sense beyond the circle of participants. In that sense, it's a lot like a cave painting of some ancient hunt. It's a convergence of random events in a controlled setting that forms the basis of a heroic tale in the minds of the participants. Powerful and primitive social magic that can't be reliably explained but only experienced. And IMO, a much more 'real' experience than the forced plot you see in most 'storyteller' games.

Wow...very well put, Kellri!

QuoteIf someone started playing D&D when they were 10 years old, there's a good chance they treated it as a random dungeon crawl. Then if they started to become interested in a different style of play, many people sought out other games even though D&D wasn't particularly ill-suited to other styles. Essentially people tend to attribute the style of play to the game, as opposed to their reception of it through the eyes of 10-year-olds...

I did start to play it when I was 10, and we did play it as a dungeon-crawl. But that was the best part! I can't begin to convey the sense of wonder we had creating and exploring magical labyrinths full of monsters. We absolutely loved maps, and we loved exploring - the most serious transgression in our group was peeking at the DMs map. It wasn't crude playing at all - there was more wonder, drama, and imagination in one of our homebrew dungeoncrawls than in any AAR I've read of a sophisticated storytelling game.

Our play style did involve into more free-roaming wilderness campaigns, with evolving storylines and ongoing narratives. Our games became gritty, and took on a sometimes darkly ironic and fatalistic tone. But we never felt the urge to either ramp up the mechanical complexity, or to explore more 'sophisticated' setting-based games. We never got into deep PC backgrounds or tried to emulate serious fiction. We played D&D and it was good enough for what we wanted to do.

Despite starting as 10-year-olds, we never had any of those socialization issues that others bring up in their hatred of early D&D. The DM's weren't domineering assholes. The players weren't rules-lawyering munchkins. Nobody played favourites. We did meet players like that, but we ran them out of our group immediately. Maybe that's because we're all close friends outside of gaming, and fairly well-adjusted socially.

But perhaps my experiences are unusual, being the only hardcore gamer in a largely casual group who have played together for almost 30 years.

* If we had been exposed to it at the right time, I'm pretty sure we would have switched to WFRP.

Quote from: Herr ArnulfeHeh, when you have rules for detecting sloping passages, finding secret doors and Saves vs Dragon Breath, but only Halflings can attempt to hide, it implies a certain playstyle. It basically says "this is a dungeoncrawling game, and unless you're a Halfling, you have to fight." Now if the rules had been more universally rules-light, and not so meticulous about defining the dungeon-exploration / combat aspects, I might buy into your theory.

I never saw the rules that way.  In fact, I wonder if this assumption (and a few related ones) are key to the way people experience the hobby.  Some people seem to see the rules as a straightjacket while other people tend to see the rules as guidelines.  I never saw the absence of rules for social interaction in an RPG to mean that social interaction wasn't important.  I saw the absence of rules as an indication that you didn't need rules to work that stuff out.  I never had a problem with tinkering with rules or creating my own rules and random tables yet some people seem to need "permission" from the game author to do this.  I also never had a problem with ignoring rules to make the game run faster, while other people describe groups where players demand to use every rule in the book.  Perhaps the key here is the realization that the rules serve you rather than you serving the rules?

Quote from: John MorrowI never saw the absence of rules for social interaction in an RPG to mean that social interaction wasn't important.  I saw the absence of rules as an indication that you didn't need rules to work that stuff out.

Bingo, John.

-clash

Quote from: John MorrowI think Tim Kask is misidentifying the problem.

I think via a little charitable reading you can reconcile his opinion with yours. We're talking tendencies here. I'm assuming most people pass through similar stages of development; the exact timing varies, but in the general population there are apparent trends.

In other words, sure, it's a social maturity issue, but "maturity" is tied to age (more loosely in some than others, but nevertheless); even the folk-term "munchkin" for a certain style of play reflects an observation (or if you must, opinion) that it's found most commonly among younger players.

I find it hard to argue with Elliot's main point: that your perception of "traditional" gaming is heavily influenced by your start in the hobby.

However, I also remember a lot of articles, letters to the editor, and published adventures and supplements that seem to indicate that the hobby as a whole started out in large part by dungeon-crawling. I can remember numerous "What Happens When The Adventure Ends" and "Get Your Party Out Of The Dungeon" and "101 Town Encounters" style articles in Dragon magazine and elsewhere.

I am sure there were lots of groups doing lots of different types of gaming, even back in '78 when I started, but I do think there has been a gradual transformation of what is considered the norm, and that it generally coincides with our nostalgic rememberings of "traditional" D&D.

My whole progress in the 80's could be summed up as "The Quest for Better Rules" by better rules I mean rules that elegantly supported aspects of fantasy role-playing. More options for combat, more options for spell casting, more monsters ,etc ,etc.  Better rules could also mean cool rules for cool genres epitomized by Traveller, Paranoia, and Call of Cthulu.

Understand that making up your own shit takes only so far when you don't know much in the first place because of age or experience. THE GAME was still D&D in both it's B/X/C version and AD&D version.  

It wasn't until White Wolf and Vampire hit that I saw a serious alternative style of play arose in RPGs. After Vampire the Masquerade was released I started to see large numbers of different type of role-players in addition to the earlier crowd.

The lack of rules didn't inhibit styles so much. More was a saw of uneven play, arguments, lack of playtesting, lack of maturity in some groups, etc. With a good rules system a lot of those problems went away along with the benefit of additional possibilities put in by the game's designers.

Again I stress there was a large large group that was happy with Mentzer's D&D or AD&D and never moved on to anything else. When 2nd edition came out most of that crowd withered and turned to 2nd edition AD&D, but by then there was the vampire crowd as well.

I will also point out that the mid 80's was when Japanese Anime hit hard and there were a hell of a lot of BattleTech, RoboTech, etc fans. Paladium Games benefited the most from supporting that crowd with TMNT, RoboTech, and finally Rifts.

Quote from: cmagounHowever, I also remember a lot of articles, letters to the editor, and published adventures and supplements that seem to indicate that the hobby as a whole started out in large part by dungeon-crawling. I can remember numerous "What Happens When The Adventure Ends" and "Get Your Party Out Of The Dungeon" and "101 Town Encounters" style articles in Dragon magazine and elsewhere.

Definitely. The model for the earliest games was a single dungeon that players return to again and again. By the time I started playing in '79 the horizons had widened a bit. But you only have to look at the dungeon (B1) bundled with the Holmes Basic set (the first version of D&D to achieve mass-market reach) to see that dungeons were still central to the game. We learned what the game was about by buying those old pastel dungeons, and until Hommlet those were all, well, dungeons. We never did stop calling published adventures 'dungeons.'

Quote from: John MorrowI never saw the rules that way.  In fact, I wonder if this assumption (and a few related ones) are key to the way people experience the hobby.  Some people seem to see the rules as a straightjacket while other people tend to see the rules as guidelines.  I never saw the absence of rules for social interaction in an RPG to mean that social interaction wasn't important.  I saw the absence of rules as an indication that you didn't need rules to work that stuff out.  I never had a problem with tinkering with rules or creating my own rules and random tables yet some people seem to need "permission" from the game author to do this.  I also never had a problem with ignoring rules to make the game run faster, while other people describe groups where players demand to use every rule in the book.  Perhaps the key here is the realization that the rules serve you rather than you serving the rules?

Sure, I too made judgement calls on how to resolve climbing attempts by non-Thief characters, or how non-Halflings could hide. But I can't see how anyone could read the OD&D rulebook and modules as being more than a dungeoncrawl game -- it's simply not there, neither in the rules nor in the flavour text. The Expert set included a page on how to build a castle once you'd collected enough treasure, but that was about it. And I don't recall any modules supporting epic play until Battlesystem came out for AD&D. Being able to kill monsters and take their stuff outdoors was about as far as it deviated from the formula in the first 3-4 boxed sets.

OD&D talks lovingly about fighting through 20' x 20' rooms and breaking down doors, but where's the love for shadowing enemies through crowded markets or piloting rowboats down treacherous rapids? OD&D didn't conjure that kind of imagery, neither with rules nor in the flavour text. We did have a lot of fun playing D&D dungeoncrawls for awhile, and I still get the warm and fuzzies looking back at some of the graph paper mazes I designed. But other RPGs were clearly written by people who's tastes were closer to my own, and inspired me to create games like the fantasy fiction I was reading in ways that D&D didn't.

It was less about being a 'slave' to the rules, and more about wanting rules that seemed to care about more than just dungeoncrawling.

Dungeon adventures only?  Bullshit.

Dude, one of the OD&D rulebooks was titled "The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures."

That book had rules for overland movement.  There were rules for castles, a bit about kingdom income.  There were rules to determine what happened when you approached a castle or town.  The monsters section had encounter tables for the wilderness.  Rules for naval combat.  Rules for aerial combat.  (What more did you need?)

Later editions of D&D (B/X, BECMI, AD&D, etc.) expanded on this info.  It was a bit more than "a page" on castle building.  Yes, your basic sets concentrated on the dungeon because they were basic sets.  But they said plenty about what was upcoming in the expert set (wilderness!).

One of the earliest campaign-style supplements for OD&D was called The Wilderlands of High Fantasy.  Its most popular and enduring supplement was a city setting.

The rules were always about more than dungeoncrawling.

EDIT: As per Clash's request, my first RPG experiences were at age 6 in 1982; my older brothers (12 and 13 at the time), stuck with babysitting me, begrudgingly let me play in their weekly game because it was easier than keeping track of my running around like a nut.  I really started playing on my own 4 years later using my brothers' old Moldvay/Cook boxes, then inherited all their AD&D stuff a year or so after that!

Could people please state how old they were when they started RPG gaming and when that was in their posts? For the record, I was 21 in 1977.

Haffrung started 2 years later than I, in 1979, yet his experience was very definitely tied to dungeon delving, and his group bought lots of dungeon oriented modules from which they "learned what the game was about."

My experience couldn't be more different. We almost never ran modules, we played in our own world, most of our adventures were urban/town or wilderness, and we learned what the game was about by just playing it. This was the pattern all the other GMs and groups I knew of - all also adults - followed.

This is so radically different I am staggered, and wonder what the ages as well as years involved were for him.

BTW - Rock ON Ken! You the man!

-clash

Hang on a sec, the third booklet of OD&D is "The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures". 1st edition expert set by Cook, published 1981, also explicitly describes making an outdoors, setting up kingdoms, etc. It included the outdoor adventure "Isle of Dread" in the box set.

Even the Holmes Basic set was including "The Keep on the Borderlands" in 1979. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but "Keep" is somewhat more than just a dungeon or even complex of dungeons.

As for AD&D, the DMG (1979) has extensive material on outdoor adventures and kingdom and campaign building.

EDIT: cross posted with Ken & Clash.