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🎲🐉 Why Did Gary Gygax Prefer Fighters in D&D? ⚔️🗡️
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- Опубликовано: 12 авг 2024
- While many think the Fighter class is boring, the fiction that inspired Gary Gygax as a youth featured muscle-bound fighters and barbarians fighting evil magic-users. I talk about that today as well as showing some of Fighter PC original character sheets over the years and talk about some fun pre-generated PCs I made for the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks in this special 1 Year Anniversary Edition of the Daddy Rolled A 1 RUclips Channel! Thanks for your support!
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Introduction
0:31 Topics
3:27 Gary's Preference for Fighters
12:12 My Original Character Sheets
30:02 Pre-Generated PCs for Barrier Peaks
47:32 Wrap-Up
50:03 Bonus Content
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Happy anniversary! Loved the story. It's universal: the player who insists on lying for some reason, even though EVERYONE knows the truth. Hilarious.
Thank you so much, Professor! I means a lot that you watched the video all the way through and then took time to comment, especially with your busy schedule. Cheers!
Professor DM, is that you? Fancy seeing you here 😉
Professor DM's Caves of Carnage series was what finally convinced me to get off my butt and start running a campaign for my daughter and her friends (as talked about in my "DM Advice" playlist). I've been very lucky to chat with the Professor a few times. I just tweeted out one of my favorite comments by him on my channel, which was "This is where Professor DungeonMaster goes to school."
@@joshuaclabeaux1470 I never miss an episode.
mankind vs the supernatural. I think its drawing off real world mythos in its approach and appeal. Gigamesh, Perseus, various mythic heros from all corners of the world. Its heroic characters vs magic or demons, wizards. Big bads were tricksters who broke the rules of reality. The hero reinforced the rule of reason, and social structures in their cultures, and the baddies tried to break it.
Gilgamesh is cheating, dude's like 1/3 god or somesuch.
I started playing in 1984 when my Marine Corps brother came home on leave and introduced us to the game;. But my group loved the role-playing aspect of the game. My first character was a mage named Garnet who was an ex-prostitute and thought that adventuring would be easier than her "job". Those were the days. And what a history my character had. I worked her up to 50th level (my brother had no limits in his world. It was a very detailed world right down to different types of money systems in some countries. I believe the last time I played or role-played was 30 years ago! Yes, I'm old and yes, we still role-play but we don't dungeon any more. I've often thought of writing a book dealing with all the characters but I'm 67 years old now and it seems like too much effort to actually write a book.
As for what our characters looked like, we basically took inspiration from movie stars or popular singers or in our imagination. Garnet started out a 5'10" human but through dungeons, she got turned into a 5'1" elf when Thor answered a God call. Gosh, those were the days and we had such fun. It's funny how a simple dungeon could turn into more background history for the characters. At this point in time, Garnet was the Queen of an island country that had no type of government at all. It was a place for pirates. For the record...we played advanced D&D second edition and none of us wanted to keep buying all the new edition books. And yes, for me, the Unearthed Arcana book was my all-time favorite of the tomes followed by the Dungeoneer's and the Wilderness Survival Guide. Oh, but the stories I could tell about our group's characters. The group is still here all except for my brother who introduced us all to the game. He passed away in 2019 and I inherited his world.
I still have all my character sheets complete with all the dungeons played as well as a very detailed map of the world (Carollyn is the name of the world).
As you can see, I could go on and on and on about adventures, characters, and role-playing. :)
Write that book! It could be just the highlights; would be cool to do.
We played at school too, but we did it at recess. No dice, just storytelling. 👍👍
There was a Dor in the Piers Anthony's Xanth series. Late 70’s
I love looking at old character sheets. I have many of mine in a folder somewhere. My first character was a human cleric in AD&D 1st edition which led to me to falling in love with the magical side of D&D. My second character and the one I played the most was a gnome illusionist/thief from AD&D 2nd edition. My uncle (the DM) was very stingy with spells, so I was happy I could fall back on backstabbing and using my thieving skills.
My 1st character was a human cleric as well back in the early 80's... With a halberd. 😂 We were kids.
It''s wonderful to see someone else save their old binders and characters from when they learned the game in grade school. My stuff has moved through several states and I still can't let go of it - too many wonderful memories.
Regarding Gygax and his circle - if they didn't know why anyone would play a magic user, how come he and his friends did? I thought Mordenkainen and the Circle of Eight were.almost all magic user players (Bigby, Rigby, Tenser, Leomund, Otiluke, Drawmij, etc). Maybe Gygax thought most players would like to play a fighter, but it seems that he quickly figured out that magic users were much more fun as you progressed in levels. Just a theory and a thought.
Thank you for these wonderful videos and especially for sharing the great memories!
From what people have told, the other players wanted PC magic-users. Arnesons rules had magic accessible to players including a magic system.
@@SusCalvin That. Very much that. My understanding has long been that Gygax wanted more of a low fantasy flavor, with rare non-human races and little to no magic except as a narrative trope and/or challenge to be overcome, while Arneson and later Brian Blume, among others, preferred to let players have the option to be low fantasy by not utilizing the high fantasy elements of the game but to also to just have the high fantasy elements available out the gate for those who wanted them.
The mixture of D&D history and your own history is very interesting to listen to! ^ ^
You Expedition to the Barrier Peaks story is a very good example of how the DM really needs to be on the same page as the players in regard to their expectations of the kind of setting they want to play, and how they should discuss it before committing to anything. Just as the customer is always right, so are the players - for better or worse. You can craft a rich, detailed world and pour your heart and soul into it, but if it's the wrong milieu no one will really want to play. And I can relate to their position in that particular case, as EttBP is a very divisive module.
I'll echo many other commenters and say those old character sheets brought back some great memories of my BECME characters from the early 80s (comically inflated scores and ridiculous amounts of loot included!). Another great video.
Thorin, ha! cool. My fave ever character was a dwarven fighter, named Thainin. I imagined him as Thorin's son. Logically, if the family lineage was Thror>Thrain>Thorin> I figured Thainin was next (remove the first "r", append "in")
I remember creating characters in a note book with no guidance. Ends up being a skill to keep organized in school.
I learned SO MANY skills that helped me in school from playing role-playing games, such as organization, vocabulary, working with a group, history, and more!
Happy Anniversary, DRa1!
Isn't it fantastic how good old Gary had all these strong opinions about Fighting-Men being superior, but his most well-known and favorite PC was a Magic-User named Mordenkainen?
I loved this video. I really enjoyed seeing your old characters and hearing you talk about your previous adventures. Hope to hear more like these soon. Cheers 🎉
Thank you so much! I'm really glad that you enjoyed the video, and thanks for commenting!
You may like my "DM Advice" playlist, as it focuses more in how I actually play the game, told mostly through the context of an old-school game I run for my 15yo daughter and her friends (they were 10/11 when we started): ruclips.net/p/PLX6jue56rzl2-VzZH19Ke2NU4r0IaJ7be&si=-bY49BGltTJPHXdz
@@daddyrolleda1 I will check these out today. Thank you!
I have some of my D&D character sheet, including the custom ones I created and got printed at my Uncles printshop. Which I had to work very hard for to cover the costs. Nothing free back then. You worked for everything! ❤
12:49 you know I'm the same way in regards to character classes like that. I love playing the mercenary, or the simple soldier. Magic users to me are just too complicated, I just want to get in there and game. Real nice looking sword, nice suit of armor.
I've played a thief on occasion, but I usually play the thief as like he's not really that good. one time way back in the 90s ad&d 2nd edition, I wanted to play the 'ultimate generalist'; so I played a fighter/thief/mage. Now the character thought he was like the greatest B&E man in the region, he wasn't, his dexterity if I remember correctly was like 10 or close to 🙂. He eventually got caught after he had snuck to a house, up the stairs, open the China cabinet, is going back down the stairs with his arms full of China and he fails his dex check falling down the stairs making a huge racket 😀. He didn't die, he ended up becoming a servant to the household he had broken into 🙂.
Pre watch. Hey! Congrats on 1 year!!!!
You were playing a pen and paper text based adventure game in class. I respect it
I had so much fun doing that, and I'm so glad I kept all those notes all these years later! Thanks for watching and commenting!
Honestly, im happy you make a lot of d&d history stuff. Taught me stuff I never knew, and taught me I was wrong about stuff I thought I knew.
Oh man, Loaded is one of my favorite albums. Excellent choice for today. Congratulations on one year!
Great to see some of those old character sheets, I wish I'd kept some of my old characters! Hilarious the extent we used to fiddle the dice rolls for stats, I remember all my old characters had 18s, sometimes multiple 17s etc. Having just rolled 8 new characters for my current 1ed ad&d campaign I'm running (4d6, discard one, six times, assign as you wish) not a single 18 for any character!
Hasn't stopped everyone enjoying the game, even the couple of 5E players are finding old school very fun, just completed B2 9 sessions in, and now they're off travelling across country to a new challenge!
So awesome that you're running B2! It took my group closer to ~15 sessions to "complete" it (although there were at least two caves they didn't explore and they fled from Cave K after being overwhelmed, so the danger there may return...) but they had a blast. That particular group is my daughter and her friends, so they have no context for anything different than B/X, but they had no problems with it at all! There's not a single 18 in the entire group!
Glad you're having fun, and thank you so much for your support of the channel!
I've played since 1978+/-. Subscribed to Dragon Magazine when I had the extra money back then. I played a few group sessions through the years at the comic bookstore. I even have tried to stay caught up on some of the Elmer's blogs when they would deep dive sharing the knowledge.
After all these years I still have to "Google" what everyone's abbreviations are talking about.
Assume Nothing. Bombarding multiple slang abbreviations will roll like water off a duck's back.
I lost all my old D&D stuff but I have fond memories playing AD&D in 4th and 5th grade when we had finished classwork. We'd ask the teacher if we could sit in the back of the room and play if we promised to stay quiet. Good times. Sometimes we even were allowed to sit in the "common room" where a few classes converged where we'd have an actual table to sit at rather than on the floor.
As a Forever DM back in the 1E / 2E days, most of my character sheets are long gone. I only have three 2E PCs left, mostly because I have them on paper and electronic form (and the fact that all three were later converted to 3.0/3.5 to carry on the fight).
My DM notes from those days, however, are voluminous and completely intact...
26:14 I have a few of the half-sheet red-orange NPC sheets of that vintage.
It's also easier to relate to a human than it is a non-human species.
In 5e they are all just being played as reskinned humans with human motivations and emotions.
One of the OSR games I have tried did the reverse. The world is largely human-centric. All old B/X race-as-class are reskinned as humans and have the non-human abilities replaced. A dwarf is a bodyguard, a human fighter type who happens to have high saves and a big hd. A halfling is an urban explorer, a parkeour dude who sneaks into weird places and happens to be very nimble. There is no elf equivalent. There is a single spook class for people who want to play a race-as-class vampire/ghost/plant-monster etc. Then you get to experience life without a social security number and bank account and civil rights in a human-centric modern world.
I know the racial books on dwarfs, halflings, half-elves/gnomes etc tried to expand on demihuman life and culture. The different setting modules for demihumans did as well. WFRP had a fun old article about demihuman psychology for their world and what it meant to be an imperial hobbit or an elf.
My friends decided to leave the demihumans open-ended. They are not human but you decide what cultural niche they occupy. A "small folk" can be a happy fat hobbit, but also a forest-dwelling gnome or a goblin hunter. An "ancient" could be an elf, but also an atlantean, a moon-man or a red martian. They are loose non-human archetypes.
i can't stand the menagerie zoo that appears in 5e games because everybody has to play either their specific favorite mary sue race or picks the mechanically best ones even if they're insanely rare and makes the party stand out like crazy. it's weird, paradoxically, the parties i've played in with mostly humans, elves and dwarves, those PCs wind up having more interesting personalities and roleplaying moments than tabaxi #432 who acts like a normal human, and was only chosen because they're just a really good race.
@@ggggg77273We've usually picked what fits the campaign. Sometimes it's a great amount of weirdos, sometimes everyone is danish. Elves are rare in LotR, you can still play one in One Ring but they will stand out.
For some reason the early modern period can fit all sorts of nonsense like sirian mercenaries, the vril-ya of the inner earth and lutheran insectoids. The choice of abrahamitic faith/christian sect is more important.
One of my friends used the limitation that to start as demihumans or certain rare classes, you must find them in the region. You can recruit an elf hench or start your next PC as a duck when the group has found an elf settlement.
I'm starting to like the humans-only games like Esoteric Enterprises. Every class is some sort of human criminal. There's a single spook class for race-as-class monsters, if you want to play a more typical WoD creature. You are still a cheap crappy criminal bum. A mercenary means a human fighter. An occultist means a human wizard chump.
@@ggggg77273 funny that people complain about old school dungeon ecology when it's the party ecology that's off in today's game.
@@SusCalvin I like this idea, various flavours of human to cover the different character niches. In my game I try and encourage my players to stick to human characters, elves, dwarves etc. should be rare in the world imo.
I also feel that the psychology of elves and dwarves would be very different from humans, elves are essentially immortal! Even dwarves are incredibly long lived compared to humans, that's got to have an effect on how you view how to deal with problems (i.e. evil ruler of a land? Elves might just decide to hide in the woods for 100 years until they're dead!), and I'm not sure this is at all compatible with the standard adventuring party!
LOL, Thanks for sharing man, this brings back lots of great memories as well, we didn't even have a full set of dice to play with, I had to raid dice from a Yahtzee game set.
Very resourceful! I like it!
This was a fantastic video, I loved the story time feel of it.
Happy anniversary - love your channel btw. Keep up the good work :)
Happy anniversary and your sister is in breach of contract. She has a d&d adventure she owes you.
I, too, have always favored martial PCs. I tend to suffer from analysis paralysis and having to pick out spells was always a chore for me. I prefer the simple, "I bash the orc with my axe!" style of play.
I've enjoyed making Old Fashions using 1 oz whiskey, 1 oz Grand Marnier, 1 T Raw Blue Agave (from Aldi), and 4 dashes of bitters.
Very nice! It's fun to experiment with the formula once you have the basic "spirt, sugar, water, bitters" thing down. My dad likes to add a small measure of Grand Marnier to his Manhattans!
Thanks for watching the Bonus Content. I always enjoy putting the segment together.
Happy Anniversary!
It seems that I played a lot of fighters back in the day. Also, I was obsessed with the “anti- paladin” . The Boris Valejoh ( I’m sure that I misspelled his name, sorry) painting of the warrior all in black with the battle axe really impressed me.
I think it’s cool that you have those old sheets- I saved very little from my teen years playing D&D. Once, however, I bought a book and some modules at a used book store and came across a little treasure trove of notes and player sheets that were in the book. Very cool time capsule type stuff.
Great upload , thanks for sharing!
Cause they’re the best!
Congrats again! Fun topic!
My first character ever, and my first D&D experience was probably the most quintessential D&D experience ever. My friends parents were into D&D, and I really loved fantasy, so they had invited me to join. They had already been playing, so I had to make a new character to fit into their party. They didn't have a magic user, and I loved wizards in fiction so I decided to play one. So I played a human magic-user named Merlin. My first action ever was to cast magic missile on a goblin, and kill it. Later I opened a door in the dungeon without checking it or anything, and was killed by a fire beetle. Good times.
I love the Doppleganger cleric. I love the idea of players having secret agendas in D&D.
Man, those are some good friends going through that situation with the assassin and the paladin but keep going. Very cool.
I usually play fighter. For many of the same reasons as you. Another reason is that as a kid i had an auto immune disease which made me weak. Its been cathartic to play strong characters
I've never been one to play with spellcasters. My thing was always playing with either fighters or thieves. With a preference for the dwarf fighter/thief. I don't know what it is but they always seemed like the ultimate badass character to play!
And I also started playing in school using Basic D&D. Started with a thief and found out really fast that you didn't want to fight everything that you encountered. That stealth also required cunning and planning.
I later started reading a lot of fantasy novels and that really got me hooked on fighters.
I LOVED those gold sheets!
They were so good, but I felt like I needed to keep them "pristine" and not use them all up, because they cost money, whereas making my own sheets on a typewriter was "free"!
@@daddyrolleda1 There was another good one, a 2-pager that was a class universal for AD7D and had the additional Oriental Adventures info like honor. They were good but it came in a glossy hard cardboard cover that was itself a 4-page character sheet. THAT was may fave!
Oh, wow! I don't recall ever seeing a character sheet that had info for Oriental Adventures, but I may just be forgetting. Sounds fantastic!
Back in the 70s and 80s all our characters tended to mimic our favorite fantasy authors characters. ❤
Happy first year. What a great start to your channel. Thanks for all the hard work doing these
I really like your videos on game theory, it's very original content.
Congrats man. Keep on keeping on 😎🤘🍻
Love your content. I was introduced to dnd with 1e, but never played until with my friends in highschool with 5e. Its really interesting with how the game progressed with time. My first character was a dragonborn monk, and I wish we played out our first campaign as one of our friends got banished to hell, had a change of heart, and came back as a villian changing his ways. It was fun but we had to stop early because our dm moved out of state. Life happens, and I sympathize with the different feelings you had with your characters! Thanks for sharing your characters and how you played.
If you got a big Jazz collection I bet you have The Weather Report. Trying to imagine dnd over Elegant People.
Also...that Barrier Peaks story man....what a ride lol.
We were actually taught to play by an English teacher in class, after reading The Hobbit. We only played for a week or so in class then continued at lunch.
Love the history bits.
congrats on the anniversary. I love the fighter and what mmo players call tanks. To me they are so much fun to play. My mains are always fighter classes. Love EC Comics myself, I share that love of that genre with Gary Gygax.
One of my friends think of the dwarf as the "tank" of B/X and similar. Sometimes the dwarf has the largest HD of the game, greater than fighters. Sometimes they have the best saves vs poisons and magic effects and paralysis. In a few games the dwarf has a larger carrying capacity, and can easily walk around in the heaviest armour. They might have a lower attack bonus than a fighter or, in games where only the fighter has an attack bonus from level, fight like a level 0 mercenary like a thief/rogue/specialist, cleric, wizard etc. But my mate figures that it doesn't matter how much you hit them and how much you hurt them, only that you can outlast them. So into a brawl strides this bloke in heavy plate suits, kevlar riot suits, shields and a helmet with plexiglass face plate. The rest of the group might be doing magic or shooting rifles and tossing hand grenades from behind this bloke that is much scarier than this bloke's sword, but you can't reach them.
Of course this is exactly the same sort of people who make up the SWAT team and riot detail in Esoteric Enterprises, when the state wants to put down some occult-criminal weirdos. The only upside is that these people have at least one level of encumbrance from their kit and can be outrun. Eight of these people cracking their door open is scary.
Love your work!
I started playing very late. I was playing in a mutants and masterminds game themed off of an anime called code geass, but my first character turned out to be one of my best. i made her japanese and manipulative. Due to circumstances in her background she wanted the Britanian forces to win, but everyone else allied with the japanese. Then while we tried to play both sides the party made a big mistake and had me be the one to negotiate with the britanians, where i realized all the cards are in my hand, I'm going to betray the party. From there the party was permanently split. i'm surprised the dm and players went with it and I think it became really cool because we sort of had parallel but interesting stories together. Another highlight when when she found a scientist who could tell us how to disarm the bomb and was about to interrogate her, but then the gm says her daughter was with her and my character froze not knowing what to do and all of the other players used to her selfish and cruel behavior were stunned, but the gm read the backstory and knew that she had a soft spot for kids and couldnt bring herself to do anything to the mom with the kid there. Very fun times.
Congrats on making it a year! Here’s to many more!
It's interesting how things can come full circle. When I got into Goblin Slayer (anime, manga, then trpg) the fighters and rangers are the central focus with cleric support. The fighter heroes really do have a job to do slaying evil goblins and monsters. If you look to Goblin Slayer, Himmel the Hero in Frieren, pretty new takes on old fantasy in Japan fall back to the fighting man standard. For an older example of the fighting man front and centre, see Lodoss War. They love it, and so do I. Always include male fighters as npcs in my AD&D games that can help the heroes (if they want it).
I've always felt a strong draw towards fighter-type characters... But for a different reason.
Call it strange, but I have weird aversion to magic. I guess you could say I want to be a paranormal straight man of sorts.
This adoration of the mundane even inspires me to take a magical class and remove the magic-this is also due to the fact I play Pathfinder where class archetypes allow that sort of thing; a magicless Ranger is a prime example, making them a bit like a Rogue but with a focus on wilderness survival.
There's also a factor where if I imagine magic... Magic is pretty terrifying, especially if you were from a setting where magic is uncommon. Imagine you are a foot soldier in an army, as you are given the order to charge, your enemy remains still. "Ha! Our foes are frozen with terror at the might of our army! Victory is assured!"
But lo! Who's that elderly man upon yonder hill garbed in but flowing robes? Is he mad? He is liable to catch an arrow.
And then the very earth before you errupts in a wall of fire, incinerating those caught in it and causing such a heat that even those feet away have their skin begin to sear. I don't know about you, but I would flee.
But you can't have that if you are the wizard... Instead, it becomes "Elementary, a wall of fire... Let's see... Luckily, I have prior prepared with a casting of a counter-measure for such magical occlusions." Which has its appeal, as well, but I just prefer to former.
I think I also just prefer the fantasy of overcoming seemingly impossible odds without the help of convenient magic.
Congratulations on one year!
I enjoy the bizarre and fantastical powers, myself, but as I grew older, I gained a greater appreciation for human characters and the fighter types. Though, I think that DMs limit them a bit too much in the name of realism, when even back in the day they had the ability to bend bars etc, and there's so many stories of heroic feats of strength performed in myth which go completely ignored in favor of fanciful spellcasting.
Call of Cthulhu had a slightly similar skew between the source material and how to translate it into an RPG. The typical Lovecraft protag is a solitary, anglofile bloke who slowly discovers a terrible secret. Some scholars on the mythos form lasting careers fighting it but are as often mentors and contacts. They are haunted loners who are both drawn to and want to escape the influence of the mythos.
The typical investigator group is 4-6 people, sometimes with three PCs each as spares plus retired former PC investigators in the background. In a longer game they will all be semi-professional investigators actively searching out the mythos. They will get their hands on a BAR at some point. They are going to personally walk through all the fun steps of investigating people and places. They'll be everything from Great War veterans to flappers to scholars to burglars to detectives.
Both are very different approaches to the mythos. Delta Green added a third where you work out of the federal government and manipulate parts of the state to fight the mythos. 1/3 of the classic DG adventures end with a good old federal raid that can feature anything from the local SWAT team to hundreds of feds and the National Guard.
“Idk why I keep stuff like this”
-me “idk either but it’s cool you did”
He prefered Fighters because throughout our collective history of Mankind, the greatest heroes we have are all Fighters.
Gary’s vision of D&D was very humanocentric, and he loved the fighter class. But it’s interesting that in the “Rogues Gallery” accessory from 1980, the only characters included that belonged to Gary were the magic-users Mordenkainen and Bigby! *Edit* I forgot to also include his cleric PC, Riggby! 😂
I knew there was a reason why my magic user characters always failed!! 😅
If you haven't introduced the term 'Monty Haul', you may wish to.
more than just the history i like your knowledge of all this other literature and influences, pulpy and sci fi and everything else
Jazz is awesome. ❤
So, I don't know why Kask said what he said. He's the only one I've personally heard say anything close to that. All you have to do is look at the PCs EGG was playing in the development of the game in RJK's dungeons and see that he tended to play spellcasters.
Thank you for watching and commenting! And, I've struggled with that seeming contradiction myself!
My understanding is that often Gary would play characters, such as in Rob Kuntz's games, as a form of play-testing. He wrote that magic-users had the potential to take-over the game if they weren't properly balanced, so this might have been a way to check game mechanics of new spells/ideas.
But, I've also read (without any sources being cited) that he enjoyed playing Mordenkainen the most out of all of this characters, so I think it's also very possible that his views changed over time, and that while he may have originally conceived of folks playing only noble warriors and savage barbarians fighting against evil corrupt magic-users, he perhaps then grew to appreciate the fun of playing such characters. As early as 1976, two years after D&D was published, he wrote in The Strategic Review that he knew the magic-using classes would be popular, so he wanted to ensure they were viable as characters by being neither too strong nor too weak. This would seem to be contrary to his initial views, as expressed by Tim Kask, that everyone would want to play a "strong superhero."
As with much that we've seen written by (or about) Gary, I suspect the truth is more gray than black-and-white and that it changed over time depending on the situation.
Really interesting video. I like all those old genuine (I.e. not obviously fake Reddit) tabletop stories. I always played fighters but not pure fighters, so paladin, ranger, fighter-thief. I still gravitate to those in video games. I’m shocked at the character stats. We took the whole 3d6 down the line thing seriously even as kids, although I do remember the DM allowing a lot of rerolls and swapping one stat for another (but only once). I found I was really miserly with magic items too but my friends liked that because it made each item very precious. We rarely played pre-gen modules. I disliked most of the TSR stuff - it was basic and often made little sense. Instead we would get Warhammer Fantasy modules and adapt them to d&d (because we didn’t like Warhammer rules). Warhammer made by far the best modules back then.
I like the old WFRP adventures. They are built for the kind of chumps that make up a WFRP party though. I like the WFRP experience of playing a coinclipper, a student, a dwarf, a pimp and a bailiff who drift along the roads and rivers. The path to become the heroes the empire deserves is a long and winding one.
The older adventures can be sparing with fights. Even a fight with two fools with daggers or a bloke in ambush with a crossbow is gnarly in that system. An adventure can have just a few fights and still have weight. A lot of the adventures are more grounded in everyday imperial life, like snotlings stealing pies and some dudes robbing a coaching inn than constantly tossing demons on the PCs. You do a fair amount of investigation, talking and exploring.
Fighters are cool, masculine, brave... and get a castle at 9th level. 🏰
If I had to guess before watching, because the early game was intended to be a huge interwoven world and he didn't want to advertise the wizard with a pile of his own dead bodies
Not my 1st PC but in highschool I played a Draus (Drow /Demon - Bard Games) Cleric-Magic User who specialized in true names , demon summoning & binding and Necromancy , a big Orcus fan. The 1e campaign lasted a few years & had entirely too many PCs . Near the end of the campaign I had concluded the BBEG was gonna siege our castle much earlier the DM had anticipated. Partly because I was responsible for keeping "the one ring" so to speak, & I stashed it back @ a demi plane only accessible from the darkest depths of my lair under the party's castle. Which was my little secret. Since I knew where the BBEG was gonna be in for the final showdown & I had sometime to prepare as wel as access to these Gems of Time & Probability the artifact in question. So I figured w/ a bit of luck I could take the BBEG singlehandedly. Instead of adventuring w/ the party the last couple levels/months/modules etc I secretly prepared. Raising every corpse I could get my hands on & summoning & binding every outsider I could till the point of exhaustion & insanity. I made ever conventional & magical preparation I could, to ensure absolute complete secrecy of my troops existence throughout their service & victory. I Surveyed the defenses, most likely approachs of the enemy, setting traps, triggered illusions, triggered boons, prepared to poison water sources & wild game etc etc etc. The party knew nothing of this except one other evil PC fighter/mage the defacto leader of the party but not the secular leader of the city above my lair, our home base. Many loyal underlings were tragically lost in the process, never once leaking a single whisper of my endeavors, & even more they bravely went on serve the cause in death. The 1st waves of the enemy camped against us & with the nature of my army it wasn't plausible to fight along side my allies & within sight of the general public. As the enemy gathered it was foolishly decided to meet the enemy in the field in the daylight in hopes of disbanding the foe before they reached maximum strength instead of defending the castle. This was counter to my strengths & strategy, I had to draw them in. I only had one shot, I couldn't renegotiate w/ all these bound feinds & outsiders, transport all these undead back under the castle undetected let alone control them, I wouldn't have the spells left either. I had to inflict maximum damage on the enemy in one major assault & hopefully escape w/ my life. So the day came & they party assembled their forces, went out meeting the BBEG's forces in the open field & got absolutely slaughtered. They retreated, shooken from their experiences & began preparing their defenses. Their loss was my gain. I went out to the battlefield, w/ my acolytes recruiting new troops, then raiding morgues, funeral parlors, & cemeteries etc. In the meantime the BBEG's reinforcements had arrived, the enemy moved in & camped just outside of the extended range of siege weapons positioned high along the city walls. That night they would bring in their war engines to within range of the city walls under the cover of darkness. The time had come the DM took me in the other room. I unleashed my hordes undead & contractually obligated extraplanar beings upon the enemy & taken the field, banishing BBEG to remain as the last lone survivor. I returned to our gates @ the break of dawn & the Paladin PC who owned the castle & ran the city asked me "Where's Azryn (BBEG) where's the enemy army, what have got to report"? I replied "Oh uhm hello, good to see you. uhm, ah, Azryn? Here? What? What army?". The group was shocked they couldn't believe it, they were grateful, but a bit bummed they missed out & that was it... After years of gaming w/ way too many players thats how it ended. Plans fell through we never got to chase down the BBEG together, kill him, & unite the gems. For better or worse thats how it ended.
Oddly we had B2, Keep, X1, Dread, and Castle Amber, the only modules I actually played way back in that day. Later I had AD&D but never actually played it! I think all my characters were just fighters.
And the rye old fashioned is my favorite. Cheers!
Gary Gygax's fascination with Conan was a little strange.
I played D&D as a child during the golden age. I couldn't afford stuff like modules, but I could afford The Dragon (it was still "The" Dragon in those days), and I read and re-read every issue I could get my hands on. Gygax wrote tons of essays, letters and articles, and his name was easily recognizable to my 11-year old brain, so I got a strong sense of what he thought about fantasy and how it fit with his world view.
And at first glance, it's hard to square his fascination with Conan with the rest of his personality. Gygax was self-consciously Lawful Good, to the point he thought human civilization inherently tended toward that alignment. Nations could promote values at odds with lawfulness and goodness, but only because their fundamental values have been corrupted. This intersected nicely with his interest in his own Swiss heritage and his fascination with medieval and renaissance Swiss history. He saw the Swiss (reasonably) as fundamentally egalitarian, socially conservative, and committed to the greater social good.
Thing is, that's not at all how RE Howard saw the world. Howard's Cimmeria is an idealized version of the west Texas where Howard spent his whole short life. In other words, pitiless and bleak. And Conan (at least in his youth) was basically Chaotic evil. And Gygax was consciously aware of that.
And maybe the key was that Conan's evil tendencies were just ordinary, human impulses, while the wizards and demons that he fought were a thousand times worse. And he mellowed out considerably as he got older. So perhaps there's even a bit of a redemption narrative in there.
Sometimes we played hack & slash, sometimes cerebral, and all combos in between. The way we looked at ability scores later in our adventures, ridiculous as you call it out, was why play some scrub? Why play some peasant that inherited his grandfather's armor? Yes, randomity is great for group play among many people, but the few core closer friends we assembled for our long term campaign world, Avengers assemble! So we played nearly overpowered superheroes against mega-villains. Super-human and demigod play is fun. Well, really we played different characters for different settings, and years in we would even pause that and play something low or mid-level. Even different incarnations of the same characters. We did pay our dues up through the lower levels for years though. The Keep On The Borderlands was great at the time at Basic level 1-3. Our imaginations were very healthy, and the setting I and the other DM came up with for our campaign world is worthy of a book series on its own, as good as anything anyone else ever dreamed up. I think you know that 'whisked away in a breeze upon strange environs and a chill of excitement crawling over your skin' feeling that good reading takes you into. We found that. Pretty sure that's what Gygax had in mind. I have a pile of character sheets and notes just like that one you have. Forty-five years later.
I no longer imbibe it, but when I did I took my whiskey straight.
Well, in the original; Fighters were outclassed by Mages after level 5, just as they are today after lvl 10.
Yeah, I thought that was Aslan. 😄
I'm pretty sure I copied it from one of my old paperback books of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (or another of the Narnia books).I can almost see the cover in my mind.
Spanish class was *totally* authentic D&D! Indeed, closer in some ways to how Arneson ran his games.
Because fighters are the best.
Mutant used to give humans social status and higher attributes. A human has 3d6+2 instead of 3d6 (using the BRP scale). A human can use the char gen points a mutant, robot and psionic would use on abilities on skills instead, or buy social advantages.
Non-mutant humans fill practically all upper class positions as landowners, judges, officers and buerocrats. Even the many humans who aren't direct parts of the extreme elite have networks with other humans who provide social benefits. Humans can be members of the right club and know contacts, they can find a tutor for a rare skill, they have inherited old tech, they know the dirt on another human, they can call on a contact to bail them out. A human PC can start with an aristocratic title if they spend the points for it.
Fighter characters are the ones that push the action and make action happen in D&D. THAT's why Gygax preferred fighters. Without my fighter, my first campaign would never have gotten very far. We couldn't have gotten far without the mage or thief or cleric... but without the fighter the action in the campaign would have been minimal.
Prolific bestselling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson made a critical framework for fantasy stories - hard magic, which has rules which let the point of view protagonist use magic or be unable to use it. For example the “bending rules” magic in Avatar.
The alternative is soft magic, where magic is mostly in the background and is mysterious and for atmosphere. Take Gandalf. What are the “rules” for magic in LOTR? Tends to be deus ex machina or nerfed when the story calls for it.
Pre-d and d, 95% of pulp stories featured grounded magicless fighter hero’s. Conan, Doc Sampson, Zorro, Flash Gordon, the knights of the round table, Tarzan, Buck Rogers, John Carter.
Only the character named Mandrake himself uses mysterious powers without rules the reader can understand to resolve plot points.
Later Harry Potter, Dr. strange and Jedi knights join mandrake as soft magic protagonists but in 1970 you didn’t have those stories until d and d.
Pendragon is a game heavily geared to fighter PCs. Specifically, every single PC is meant to be a knight out of Mort d'Arthur operating somewhere on the british isles or France. Your knights are going to do knight stuff and not much else. You might be gifted a potion from a maiden or a magic shield from some mysterious monk but that's as close you get to using magic. NPC wizards and the power of God exists, there is a DM-facing magic system for how many years Merlin needs to retreat into the fey realm after popping a spell. The power of God is subtle in comparison and manifests through the natural world. But all the PCs will be knights who have no idea why these wizards pop up one day, are gone the other and what much of their advice means. They have their skill at swords, riding, hunting, hating saxons and romancing.
They must have known Moorcock's Elric or Mercedes Lackey, the circle around Lovecraft and other authors as well. Elric is the opposite of Conan in many, many ways. Elric is a sorcerer, a frail fighter held up with drugs and the power of Stormbringer, a scion of a high culture instead of an outsider and a cultured scholar. Elric and Stormbringer are constantly in a tug between eachother. And he goes on weird adventures across the world with a varying cast of companions.
Sounds like you had a fun group, sorry Gygax gave them all radiation poisoning. I like how you played in class with only pencils and imagination. Thanks for the Easter egg of Mahars of Pellucidar and happy 50th.
And yet his circle of 8 or the Thief Gord of Greyhawk…
This must be the one most "real" way to play DnD! In class passing notes. After all it is a game of your imagination and the dice are tools to randomize things. For the DM has always been the final arbiter of anything happening at the table...if you trust them, they can make those decisions based on THEIR imagination. ymmv
I find it ironic that Gary loved playing Fighters, but his most famous character is a Wizard.
The ridiculous ability scores, monty haul and the brand of humor bring back memories 😅
Sounds like you may have been influenced by some Paranoia material at the time you set up that Expedition to the Barrier Peaks one shot.
My experience with Paranoia has been one-shot adventures that are satires on RPGs. Some are very silly and start to feature time travel and penguins and gimmicks.
Me And My Shadow Mk. V is one of the best. You are assigned to guard a warbot. You must report to a storage room, identify yourselves and remain there for half a day. The end. Then a complicated Rube Goldberg death trap unfolds out of this simple premise.
@@SusCalvin Sadly my only experience with it was reading, cameo modules, reviews and other material for it in White Dwarf, always seemed like it would be hilarious, probably the nearest game experience I ever got to it was years later with White Wolfs VTM. always imagined the game experience might be much the same, just without the humour hard baked into the Paranoia rules or the clones, particularly as a new to VTM player experience when you don't know anything about the clans what's happening who you can trust who's likely to be trying to off you and why, so though while still fun, less hilarious than I imagined Paranoia 🙂
@@pelinoregeryon6593 All Paranoia adventures are more or less carefully made death traps. PCs have many different loyalties. They have their superiors in their service group, the departments of the complex, who want to advance departmental schemes. They most likely have some low-key mutation. They are part of a more or less covert and illegal secret society, from ones who only run the IR market and want to collect bugs from Outside to the communists.
The adventures are set out to more or less force the players on track. There was only toke rules on how to run a campaign. Most adventures gave you a handful of pre-gens. PCs are repeatedly dragged along in humiliating scenes in a parody of other games and genres. Sometimes they referenced other games like Cyberpunk, Twilight 2000, D&D, WoD etc.
The humour is more or less silly. I like how understated "Mk. IV" is. There's no killer penguins and time-travellers and nonsense, just you and a room and a giant warbot who get visited by a cavalcade of nonsense.
I was always vain so all fighters had a high Charisma even at the expense of bonus xp! Magic Users are nerds anyways.
Typical sister…. Getting out of a clearly legally binding contract 😅
B/X, not as clumsy or random as 5e, a more elegant rpg from a more civilized age.
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Extra bits: skipping over Who Loves the Sun. Shame on you. Only because it's my favorite song off the album.
Ironic considering Gary's most famous character is a wizard.
i never really understood why he made thieves have no fighting ability even tho in fiction, they were always great fighters as well :/ it wasnt really until jrpg's and fans of d&d creating their own video games like Elder scrolls, where they made thieves and rogues strong ambush fighters.
like assassins cant fight in his mind? makes no sense to me at all. Gygax really never read anything outside of a few books. Like even conan himself was a thief mainly. And even robin hood was a thief. But to play that fantasy, you gotta play a fighter...
ur level 8 thief couldnt pickpocket a brand new player...
I plöay casters cause I want to play the game. "I attack" gets boring fast. Ggax is very bad at writing and very ignorant that much is clear
I've played since 1978+/-. Subscribed to Dragon Magazine when I had the extra money back then. I played a few group sessions through the years at the comic bookstore. I even have tried to stay caught up on some of the Elmer's blogs when they would deep dive sharing the knowledge.
After all these years I still have to "Google" what everyone's abbreviations are talking about.
Assume Nothing. Bombarding multiple slang abbreviations will roll like water off a duck's back.