Quote from: droog.... but realised that RQ was already there from first principles.

Very true.

I guess what I wanted at the time was the freedom to houserule..... if this makes any sense.

Regards,
David R

16, 1980. Experience matches those of Clash and Pundy. Single most important supplement for me was TSR's Lankhmar book (the one with the urban geomorphs). We did play the hell out of the UK modules, which are usually a combo of wilderness plus "motivated" dungeons. But the appeal of the "true," North American dungeons a la Caverns of Thracia or the G and D series I understood only when Cali et al. explained it to me.

I started playing when I was 7 in 1983.  My brother and I were playing AD&D with our cousin and his friends that were 10 years older than me.  Usually this was just them handing me a character and telling me when to roll the dice.  

Red Box D&D and Star Frontiers were the first games my brother and I started to learn how to play.  We DMed for each other back and forth.  The adventures we were trying to emulate were the ones our cousin and his friends were running with a good mix of influences.  I don't think it ever occurred to us that the system was promoting dungeon crawls or hack & slash.

Well our first D&D game was a dungeon crawl. I got the blue basic book and taugh myself but didn't grasp the fact that you didn't need a board so I drew the whole dungeon out on A0 graph paper (my dad was a graphic designer so the house was full of stuff like that) and used figures for the characters.
After that they stopped us sitting in the clas room all lunchtime and made us go outside so the map and the figures disappeard and we just talked through it.
I only ever bought 1 D&D module I think it was bone hill but never even played it. I did play a couple of scenarios taken from the early White Dwarf and I think this influenced me the most becasue they were all much more narative than a standard dungeon crawl. You know they were outside there were little riddles to solve subplots etc ..
I don't think we ever played another dungeon crawl after than first one to be honest, although there were plenty of small dungeon type elements to our other games.
We moved on to AD&D Xmas 1980 (about 3 months after starting basic). As for other systems we picked up Traveller pretty quickly and used it to run games that felt like Blakes Seven or whatever was in 2000 ad that month. We always houseruled, added skill systems or whatever and I designed my first system in 1982 when I was 12 becuase we had tried Gamma World but thought it was crap and I wanted to play a sci fi game with lots of aliens and mutations (hey I was 12)

Quote from: David RI guess what I wanted at the time was the freedom to houserule..... if this makes any sense.

Maybe...I found RQ had a more elegant modular framework to hang shit off.

Quote from: John Morrowone of my all time favorite role-playing magazine articles is Bill Armintrout's article "Metamorphosis Alpha Notebook" (linked from here) originally published in The Space Gamer #42.  That was the August 1981 issue.  .

Bill's published?



I play both crawls and role-play sessions. IME, crawls make for a good starting point to learn a character - say I decide to play a half-elf sorcerer, I know the basic gist of the character - not accepted by either group, possibly a freak in my hometown as both Ms. pointy-ear and then Ms. burned-down-the-barn-by-accident or whatever. But how does that shape my interaction with the rest of the PCs? The dungeon crawl lets me figure that out before the group has to save the world

And we're not rules lawyers too much - if it's a mechanic we rarely use (grapple) we'll look it up and follow it closely. If it's something we know, we can adapt to interesting situations.

Then again, we're grownups

Quote from: JimLotFPI was finishing up a blog posting when I ran across this thread... interesting coincidence.

All the Dragon articles and RPGA ads weren't going to help them get through to us when the meat of most of their published adventures was "here's the dungeon, here's a reason to go in if you're lucky, have fun!"

And that influence was so pervasive that Dungeons and Dragons, as presented by Wizards of the Coast, is nothing more than a reflection of the surface of the game as presented by 1970s and 1980s gaming products.

Shit.

I missed all of that. There were no modules when I started GMing, except for a few published by Judges Guild and they were wilderness adventures, dungeons, and campaigns set in a world with pre-existing cultures. Then there was Harn and Middle Earth too. Both very good medeival settings.

For anything else we made up our own campaign worlds right from the get-go. Always have, although there are a couple of campaign worlds I have adopted, and try to play in regularly, Airde, and Eberron. Made up our own adventures too.

I dissented in 1979-1980 as the published adventures and advanced books  came out. A few of them were very very good (1e dmg), and were able to build the skills of the GM as they used them. Most were railroads to nowhere. The beginnings of a decline, so to speak.