We melded together everything… basic boxed sets, hardback AD&D books, Dragon magazine articles. We just modified anything that didn’t seem a perfect fit. We never played with minis or maps other than the handrawn dungeons we designed. We had loose campaigns, but we didn’t stick to time or place constraints. In other words… we’d start an adventure, pause until later in the week, then use the same characters with a different DM and adventure, then go back and finish the first adventure with the first DM with the same characters.
when we played in 1979 you rolled 3d6 and that was your stat. No modifiers, nada. We also had no idea how to smash open doors, so we just did percentages? made it up as we went..it was the best of times. The monster manual scared the hell out of us, seeing pics of creatures we had been fighting and now know what they looked like.
It was played around kitchen or basement tables, using gummi bears as your armies, with tons of quotations thrown around at random from Blazing Saddles, Monty Python, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, hand drawn maps, crown royal bags full of dice. The DM was screened at one end and squabbled with all the other players because one was using the original pamphlets, one was using the basic, one the advanced D&D and we ended up with the "My world, my rules" method.
People didn't play 1e as written at first because it wasn't all written. It was the Player's Handbook and Monster Manual. You had to go to the little brown booklets for some things. We definitely were crawling planned dungeons, going back to town, going back to the dungeon. In the 80s it got more sandboxy. I ran a game using "City State of the Overlord" basically as a big open air dungeon/town, cutting down on travel. People often did try to play multiple characters and it was not a good thing. Parties were like 10 characters. In dungeons these big encounters were easier than you think because the standard 10 foot wide corridor means three of them are fighting three of the party at any one time. Also "Sleep". In the DMG it says to try and think about your dungeon as a living ecological place (like Greyhawk?).
Thank you for the comment. I agree that multiple characters at the same time is a bad idea. I do like having characters to play while others are in down time (spell research, traveling etc.). As for the monsters, it sounds like you were a whole lot more strategic than we were.
I started playing in the late 70s and we often played with 2 characters each. It was a great time and battles went much more quickly than they do in more recent editions where everybody has only one character. Role playing was a huge part of the games. We quickly moved away from the rule that said one day out of a game was a day in game. Sometimes one day would take several game sessions and sometimes a few months would pass.
We used a gencon copy back in 74 and progresed to AD&D when it came out, but most of our influence was still very much taken from the original game. To us it didn`t seem confusing at the time, because we just interpred everything as though the whole thing was a series of guidelines for us to invent our own take on things. For example, when rolling up encounters where it said something like - Numbers 1 to 300, we just interpreted that as the number of the entire tribe.. but we`d just throw a few of them at the party in any given encounter (and gauged how many the party could handle). We played with miniatures when we wanted to.. especially for big encounters and battles (we were all wargamers anyway and were used to Chainmail), but much of the time everything was just imagined in the mind.
Thank you for the comment. I think most groups played like you did judging by the comments. I know my group certainly didn't stick to the rules (we often didn't even know them).
There were two groups of players back in the 1e era. There were the guys who played it as a war game, and those who played it as a role playing game. I played in both types of campaigns. The interesting thing to me is that, once you got higher level in a role playing campaign, they would use a version of Chainmail to deal with battles on a kingdom level where the characters were well known heroes working for a specific kingdom. Where I never saw those large scale battles in the war gaming campaign.
BrOSR isn't trying to "Play the way Gary played it." They are trying to play AD&D 1e as if Gary asked them to playtest his game. They don't care what he said even ten minutes after he published the rules. They are trying to rediscover the exact game he created in those books.
It's Bro- S.R. a bastardization of O.S.R, which is Old School Renaissance. BroSR allegedly try to play how Gary played it... (The One True Way TM) I would guess that Gary's style changed over time, just like everyone else.
Thank you for this comment and I think you're right. So far no one has said they play (or played) the rules RAW. I'm not even sure it would be possible.
When I was playing D&D back in the 80’s, we actually played it like a 1 vs 1 where we would build characters and go head to head with one ref. We would play the modules every now and then but we mostly liked building characters to fight against each other. No minis no maps no extra rules and checks. We had a great time.
@@mstephenjoy you should try it. We would spend hours playing in that fashion. More time spent on making the champions and laughing when they would get one shot on a natural 20 hahahahaha those were the good days of D&D
We played that way in junior high school. Our teacher had a Tunnels and Trolls club and he called it Arena play. We all made characters and simply fought it out in a free for all. Later, my friends and I would do the same thing with Dungeons and Dragons at home but we would just fight monsters.
you said you don't like complicated rules but Rolemaster is your fav? We called that game "chartmaster". Love this post. I didn't understand the rules either but that didn't stop us from playing anyway. The simple DnD rules makes it easy to run multiple characters. sounds like fun. thx.
AD&D rules were written for tournament play, so that every table at the con was on the same page. That's why there are so many rules in the AD&D DMG, second AD&D was made to keep from paying David Arnason royalties.
First gaming rule book I got was the AD&D 1ed DMG when I was in 5th or 6th grade. Can't remember how getting it for Xmas came about, but i still have it, very well used. When I found other people in my neighborhood who played it was always as an RPG.
Back then wargames had campaign settings and modules, too. A dungeon crawl was an engagement. Players went from playing Panzer Leader or Squad Leader to playing Chainmail or D&D. Role-playing was not the primary focus in the early days at all. I got my first real taste of playing a role instead of units when I played Traveller.
Interesting question, but there will be as many different answers as players. As I recall, the game was played a bit differently by each DM who pretty often made rulings rather than point to a passage in a book. Most borrowed concepts from adjunct materials including magazines, modules and anything else that appealed to the DM. Wargames rules are generally played as written, with rulings to settle interpretation arguments. Cheers!
That makes sense, after all the DM Guide is really a collection of rules that evolved and were collected together. Since I'm talking about before the DM Guide was even a thing there is really no other way it could have been played.
Not even the creator of the game played RAW. The idea that there is a single, right way to play D&D is a fabrication usually perpetuated for questionable reasons. I know that my earliest days of the game were not like many others' that I know. Even in the neighborhood i started playing in, the three groups that played across the greater city area all played slightly different and the old guys who were into the hobby played a lot differently than any of us.
Thank you for the comment and yes I agree with you. After reading all the comments it seems everyone had their own way of playing the game - which is just fantastic.
We played the "original" D&D that was a cross between the brown books and the AD&D guides...in 1977. There were minis, made out of metal that we painted in our spare time, but did not use for play purposes and no scenes made out of plastic. We took our characters through many "dungeon" (loosely used to describe many environments) modules, back to taverns, shops and towns, built our sanctuaries, towers, etc. and there were obvious issues with rule inconsistencies. We did have multiple characters based on what we were doing with our "mains"... was it the "only" way to play? No... but we made it work, and it was fun. We used weapon speeds, to help determine battle hit sequences. There is no right or wrong way to play. House & table rules have been around since the very early days. Happy 50th, D&D... here's to 50 more.
We were encouraged to roll up 3 characters because of those stupid number appearing monster rules. When Dad started running he ignored many rules and the other players ran one character each. Dungeons like other works of art don't need to make sense as long as they are fun. I enjoyed hearing your stories of the old days.
Chainmail was meant to be played on a table with minis. When we got the blue book, the role-playing groups started to separate from the wargaming groups. By the time the first hardcover books came out, the two were pretty much separate things. They had big tables for wargaming at the hobby stores, so the wargaming groups would often play there. The role-playing groups tended to play at someone's house. In the late 70s and early 80s we mostly played stand alone adventures (often using the TSR modules). We'd keep the same characters to level up but there was nothing connecting the adventures. At that time we rarely used minis. By the mid to late 80s, there was a better sense of playing a true campaign. Eventually my group got some vinyl mats with a 1" grid and used minis with dry-erase markers for the dungeion/castle/etc. I don't remember the wargame side of it (D&D) being all that popular - seems like those players moved on to other games as they came out. The role palyers did too of course - there were lots of interesting new games in the late 80s and early 90s.
Back in '79 we only had the 1st edition, white box set (or 0e as you called it) without Chainmail rules. So we heavily relied on the optional rules plus a lot of house rules. It was strictly RP with no miniatures and a lot of hand drawn maps. At first we did one off adventures (dungeon crawls). But eventually we developed our own campaign world and added the Blackmoor rules over time.
Amazing, I love hearing how people played the game, thank you. I just picked up a copy of Swords & Spells by Gary Gygax from 1976, which was out before the Chaimail rules, I believe.
Nobody played pure RAW (1E) as it was impossible due to contradictory rules. Next time someone claims to play pure RAW ask them if their magical armor they are wearing is weightless?
First game was AD&D 1E in 1980. I was the last addition to the group; one or two had started with the Holmes rules but by now had graduated to the hardcovers and never looked back. As a group, there was a lot we ignored: weapon speed factors, psionics (let's fact it: Gygax was clearly off his meds that day), and random encounter tables (even then, our DMs preferred to carefully design our dungeons). Our problem is that NO one had minis, so theater of the mind was all we had to rely on, which led to. . . a lot of judgement calls.
“Objectively better” is logically impossible. It’s like saying “colourless green ideas sleep furiously”. Morality (good, bad, better, worse, etc.), is always subjective. Moral claims can never be proven. Definitions of what is “better”, “worse”, etc., vary from person to person and even change over time for each person.
I am persuaded by both relativism and nihilism to a great extent and have spent a lot deal of time on these ideas. I don not agree that morality is always subjective. That seems to me a claim of post-modernism which I find to be a philosophy lacking in basic reason. This is not the place for such discussions but thank you for the comment.
With the group I played with in 78, it was all about the dungeon. Lighting, rations, exploration, you left the dungeon if you lost too many characters or couldn't carry any more loot. It wasn't about your character, it was about the experience. Characters were semi-disposable until you got to 3rd level. If your character died you rolled up a new 1st level PC and you joined the game in the next room, chained to the wall and set free by the other players. If you didn't get along with the other people this is when you found out. If they didn't release your character, you were out until the next run. Not all PCs were the same level and the concept of equal share of the treasure was based on how long your PC had been involved in that run. From today's lens that all seems a bit harsh.
My friends & i had no idea how Gygax & Arneson played. It was never really described in the rules or Dragon magazine. We created dungeons that made some sense & played with the same few guys every week. We never used weapon speed or weapon vs armor modifier, and initiative was loosey goosey. We rarely used hirelings, but by the early ‘90s, we had like 2 extra PCs (highly recommended for times when a PC is immobilized). And we played theater of the mind for almost everything, altho i had a battlemat and miniatures to establish rough locations. AD&D was still based on movement on dungeon crawling, not combat, so i don’t know what you mean by measuring movement in inches. We knew we weren’t playing a wargame.
We used miniatures for Marching order, line of sight, charging, attack of opportunity, flanking AC adjustment, and range adjustment for missile attacks. Not to mention spells area of affect and range.
We just made stuff up as we went along. I laugh at some of the gatekeepers in the OSR community that think "real D&D" was super lethal and PCs tried to avoid combat and used 10' poles all the time..nope. We wanted to run through dungeons and killed lots of bad guys and be heroes. I made a PC modeled after Warduke and he was a bad-ass.
Thank you for commenting and I agree with your gate keeping comment. I think some so called "gate keepers" are really trying to preserve the original gaming culture though. I do think that is worthwhile as long as it is done nicely and with disclosure. I have run into too many people who feel intimidated by Critical Roll and photo bashers. There seems to be a tendency for some younger players to think they shouldn't play if they don't meet some minimum requirement. In that way a lot of people are gate keeping without even knowing it IMO.
That’s how we started, we ordered a fantasy war game starter set in 1983, as a change from Napolionics. We started by laying out the tower of zenopus as a huge graph paper wargames table and ran it like a skirmish wargame between dm and players. It was a year later that we ran into some theatre of the mind players and we completed the transformation from war game to rpg.
I started in 1978 with the Blue Box Edition at the old age of 23. I had no idea what this game was all I know is the box looked cool and there was no game board. No one played in our town. So it was me and a hand full of friends. We ran RAW! But after years of playing and finding other games I started homebrewing things to my liking. I don't think there's a "wrong" way to play? If the group is having fun? Then go for it.
Thank you for the comment and I believe that was the very first actual D&D book I saw. I remember it had chits instead of dice. I didn't get to play it or even look through it until much later.
been playing since 1985 when we got first edition books. always used paper dice and imagination. never used any minis or markers ever. our local game store had tons of modules/adventures and that was most of our starting play. we played store bought at first then switched to forgotten realms(1988) and started buying less and making more in house stuff. when 2e hit our local store(1989) we switched to that with house rules and original FR. in 1990 we finally got FR 2e. being we were in grade 6-12 during this time we had lots of ppl to play with. that was a great 5-6 years to play games as we had no responsibilities really and got to play 10-12 hours a day on weekends and holidays.
Thank you for the comment. I remember those days too. We would play all day, then take a sleep break, and go back to playing again. It was a lot of fun.
My experience with early AD&D was similar to yours. I was introduced to D&D probably about 1980 as a freshman in high school. I don’t think we ever played “rules as written”. We had tried playing Avalon Hill historical board games, they were so dry and frankly cumbersome and boring. So we took the RPG elements of D&D and adapted them to small party warfare instead of the epic army scale of Chainmail. At the same time, Gygax and TSR realized that having a distinct game as opposed to optional rule sets for someone else’s game could make a lot more money, so they pivoted away from Chainmail, starting down the path to the very different game as it exists today. And I’m glad they did. That rule heavy, my fighter is just a cog in a giant machine kind of approach sounds tedious.
My 1980 group of players were wargamers before we became RPG players. So, when we discovered D&D Basic (Moldvay) we played it as a skirmish dungeon exploration miniature game on a map. Great times.
My first exposure to D&D was playing through The Keep on the Borderlands and The Lost City in the early 80s. Did not question why or how the "monster hotel" style dungeons existed as a kid lol. 😂 I think the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings was an inspiration for dungeon crawling. I remember being terribly confused about hit points. Think if they had been called health points it'd make more sense. One appeal of the modules was it put some structure into adventures - otherwise a sandbox game can go off the rails or players lose motivation. Plus my friends and I were not skilled enough to create our own balanced and fun adventures. Was just recalling, don't think we ever started an adventure with "You all meet in a tavern..." In TKotB, the PCs begin the game on the road to the castle. In TLC you're in a desert caravan. Otherwise, don't know if the 1st edition rulebooks spelled out how you actually start playing the game. You just sort of materialized at the entrance to the dungeon, already in a group.
I don't care who played what how. Playing AD&D 1e RAW is fundamentally different and awesome. I have come to prefer it to current conventional play. I'm glad to see you covering this, stephen! Earned my sub! Also, I haven't heard anyone call it "Broser" It's "Bro Ess Arr."
Never heard of the concept of BROSR. As Rockhopper mentiones we used the books, box set and Dragon magazine. We used modules heavily from any souce such as Greyhawk. Noone ever used the term BROSR--ever. Now I have read up on the concept. Noone ever played that way once the books were in production and AD&D hit the world stage.
Thank you for the comment. I don't think anyone played RAW but there were definitely large campaigns likely organized similarly to the BrOSR style. There are clear hints at it in the old books that leave me without doubt. I don't think it lasted long and new ways took over very quickly.
We played D&D until the DMG 1e was released in '79, when we switched to AD&D. I DMed but only read the parts of the DMG that were of interest to me. We houseruled a lot of things and never used miniatures.
@@mstephenjoy There never was much interest in using them in my group, despite the fact that most of the players were wargamers (the Avalon Hill kind, not miniatures wargaming).
The "Real time" aspect was used between game sessions only. Means, when your party is back at the home base after clearing half of the dungeon in this game session and the next game session is next weekend, the dungeon could be reoccupied again by monsters during this week. Also, another group of adventurers in the same campaign, could go to the same dungeon and loot it while you're are resting. When you gather together with your group later on and go to the dungeon, you find it looted, between your game sessions. That was making competition between different players groups. The "real time" wasn't used for building strongholds and so on. About the "number of appearence" of monsters: It's intended to be used for a lair. Your group of adventurers stumble upon a party of 4 lizardmen. After defeating them, they track them out and find the lair of the monsters, where 50 more lizardmen live. 50% of them are non-combatant women and elderly, 10% are children, one is leader, 15 guards and so on.
i played from 79 on. we played many of the rules rules as written but also put our own things into the game. Defintiely not everything. it was definitely more rulings over rules. Some things i used. alot of, some things not as much. i did use weapon speed for example. but other rules got thrown out. I dont know anyone who played the "real time passes = game times passes" rule, for example. I also think it also mattered where you were, how old you were, what type of games you were playing. I was on the east coast and under the age of 12. So we werent doing conventions, and so it was all houserules. I honestly did a mix of AD&D and B/X types of things. I would imagine if you were at lake geneva, and playing conventions, that was proably a VERY different experience.
Great comment, thank you. I often just made up the rules since I couldn't afford the books. Could you imagine playing at the lake geneva games? It must have been amazing.
In the 80s, my games played were 50 percent AD&D, 25 percent Advanced Recon. (or Recon revised) the rest(Cyberpunk 2020, Middle earth, Chill, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, Elric Villains and Vigilantes, Champions, mechwarrior, Rifts, Gamma world, boot hill, traveller, Star Frontiers, 2300 , Twilight 2000, Aliens, Mekton. Gurps).
Brosr says not so much that RAW was how it was originally played, but how it was originally INTENDED to be played. You will see from some of the other comments that there is a large community of old players that are adamant it was never played this way, and that you shouldn't bother to try it. The Brosr says "try it out, we think it's better, see for yourself"
The evolution of wargame to rpg had started well before 1974 D&D was published. They just didn’t even have the language to describe this new thing they were doing. “fantasy wargaming”, “adventure gaming”, and “roleplaying” were all used to describe the activity. See Peterson’s Playing At the World and The Elusive Shift for a nuanced breakdown of this very complicated metamorphosis.
yah played a lot of AD&D in the 80s using PH, DMG, MM, Fiend Folio(bit superior to the MM) and Dragon magazines. we used a hexagonal map to move about , in the countryside , square map to move indoors. most of the stuff we played were home brewed adventures. however I do remember my most memorable adventures were playing the whole Slavers campaign A1 to A4, that was a blast , the against the giants campaign, (died in descent though) and the Pyramid campaign, all regular modules. Played a few Judge's guild adventures they were OK though I must say the Judge's guild adventures had poor graphic quality compared to TSR ones(adventures were OK though).
Never heard of "Broser" but have been playing D&D since the basic box set. The bulk of my playing was 2e homebrew, but we definitely spent a chunk of jr high using the above advanced books. From my perspective there were two specific types of D&D players in the 70's and 80s. One group must be this Broser style you speak of. That group openly played during lunch at school and met after school at those very first hobby shops with tables in back. The second group were stoners who played but would not openly admit it. There was a bit of crossover between the two groups, a game is a game if no one else is playing... but by and large the play styles were a bit different. I do recall an interesting inflexibility about the rules as written the few times I sat in on a "nerd" session. Our version was based heavily on books, movies and music of the time. High fantasy with character backstory and world building were par for the course even back then. I've still got maps of the world my friends and I built from '86 to about '93. Far from a drop in game style. The campaign world we started in aprox '96 is still going strong to this day. In fact, I've handed it over to my daughter and her friends. Love what she's done with the place. Even more fun to be adventuring in that world with her as the DM. Rules have been heavy homebrew throughout, and recently the 5e class/subclass builds have become standard despite the world still running on thac0 and many 2e mechanics. TLDR: Definitely a high fantasy, heavy role play version of D&D going on even back then. There were a lot of REALLY good fantasy authors in the 70's and 80s as inspiration beyond the standard Tolkien mythos.
We used Holmes Blue Book as a base and added whatever seemed fun from AD&D, Gamma World, and the Arduin Trilogy. The result wasn't really what you'd call rules. Whenever I tried to have fantasy adventures, it was a disaster. Wargaming produced fun predictably.
It seems like people these days can’t use their brain enough to do anything but follow rules. Gygax said the rules are an idea, do with the game as you will and make it your own!!
Thank you for leaving a comment and I think the rules have almost become sacred in some strange way. The whole point of D&D in the beginning was that they were to be modified and changed. I do think trying to play RAW would be a fun challenge though.
I watched a Daddy Rolled a 1 video not that long ago that talked about how Modules were something that third party creators were making, specifically DM's Guild, and Gygax originally didn't want TSR to be making them because he didn't think they were necessary to the game. TSR started making modules because there was an obvious demand for them from the player base.
1979 We didn’t have any one to consult. As far as we knew we were the only players in town. I had the basic set and then the players handbook and we just played. My players never read the rules, they just let me DM and we had fun making it up. It was not a war game at all for us.
Good insights. I've always wanted to play RAW, all the rules, weapons vs AC, surprise, psionics, everything. How do you spell "Brozer" "Broaser" etc? I want to look further into this style.
Thank you for commenting, A lot of people are saying the rules can't be played RAW because there are too many contradictions and omissions. Maybe they are right but it would be a fun challenge to try. I think it's BrOSR. I found a blog with more information: jeffro.wordpress.com/2022/04/08/what-is-the-brosr/
A wise man once told me "Never let the rules get in the way of a good story" . In my campaigns (AD&D 1st ed) I always took the word "guide" in the title of the DMG literally. The only rule that really matters is rule 0 anyway
Very interesting video! I'd like to try the BROSR thing, but I'd never want to DM such a campaign. As described, it reminds me o the West Marches style of play.
It is not exactly possible to play them as written, due to inconsistencies. See the initiative rules in particular - there are at least 3 different versions obtainable from the rules as written. Also, a lot of rules can be ignored by various groups, including the armor vs weapon tables, psionics, and/or encumbrance. That said, you can get some idea from the earliest modules. Note that many tables did not have anywhere near enough players to have only 1 character/player and keep in the character guidelines. As far as 'playing it wrong', if everyone is having fun, you aren't :) I am too young to have played those games early on, but from what I recall of later play, there were often large differences between games a few blocks from each other, largely depending on the GM.
I have found memories of playing AD&D with my brother and dad. Any part of the rules we didn’t understand or like we just changed. Even Gary Gygax said that was ok.@@mstephenjoy
I can role game with just my imagination and a group of teddy bears if I want. Rolegames grew out of table top wargaming, so it is not odd that some want it to be roll gaming. But edition vs edition, I think AD&D was the best but mainly because the DMG and the Monster Manual were the best books ever made for the game. Everything has just been trying to catch up to them since. The Players was ok. I think the DMG was the best book ever written for any version of D&D. How much role and how much roll in the game though,m has always been up to the person running it.
Not only did no one play totally RAW back when I started but if you read what Gygax wrote and often seemed to promote - no one was supposed to. That is why there was tournament RPGs vs home ones. We could forget details from day to day and building a castle real time was just stupid. Keeping track of time was important but only in a west marches style of campaign would you ever think using a calendar time was a good idea. That said we dropped lots of rules that was more fiddly then we liked. Everything from segments to weapons vs armor types was simplified to keep the game moving faster. But some things worked by brute force. We could and did have hirelings and followers (5e people yes there is a difference) and sometimes it was just a matter of getting enough people in a fight that would not run away so you could use the heros to kick lizard man tail! And sometimes the right call was to runaway, period. We had meta roles in the party because the DM did not and was not required to tell you what happened or share maps. We had leadership in the party (when you had enough players) to smooth out battle and also helped with rules because our DM was you screw it up you loose it kind. Those were good days.
The most popular the game has ever been and its still hard for us old buggers to get a group together. It's a strange new world we're in. I find this type of gaming is easier from a DM standpoint.
1E AD&D as written is kind of horrid. Read the Grappling rules if you want a headache. We NEVER played it as written, and I started in 1981. I met a lot of AD&D groups over the years and just about every game I've ever played in was a blend of some of the core rules and homebrew rules. Earlier groups that were already playing OD&D might have used the LBBs because of the way AD&D 1E was released. The Monster Manual came out first in 1977. Interestingly enough, you'll find that the MM alignments are the same as the five alighment system in the Holmes Basic Rulebook. Nine tier alignment hadn't been completely worked out yet. In 1978, they released the Players Handbook. The combat charts were not in the PHB so those were pre released in an issue of Dragon Magazine. Finally, in 1979 the Dungeon Master's guide was released, and the core game system was complete. Thus, in the interim period of years, those already playing the game would have needed additional material to actually play AD&D. What is this 'Bros' system you keep mentioning. Never heard of it.
Mr Gygax makes it crystal clear that all the rules are there to be bent, twisted and broken to suit your group's fancy. Does he not write in the DMG that they are guidelines, not rules? Some folks played pure roleplay, theater of the mind while others led Napoleonic armies on an astroturf field. The genius of it all was that the rules worked for so many different play styles. There was no wrong way to play as far as we were concerned.
Thank you for the comment. I agree 100% I'm just wanting to know how they played it. I watched an interview with people that played in Arneson's game and it sounds like, to me, that they did play it in a Brosr style.
Late to the comments, but this "bro SR' nonsense sounds a lot like historical revisionism with dubious intent. It is not how it was "meant to be played" in the least, and as someone who played since pre-AD&D, I can say no one made a big deal out of any of it back then. Now, if you like that method, have fun, but noone should pretend they're playing the one true way and everyone else is wrong. It's just laughable.
Thank you for the comment. I agree with you about the rules but I will always remain open to styles of play. For me that's where the real magic of a game is. Since the RPG was born out of war games it still makes sense to me the game might have been played differently, at least initially, and it is congruent with my own experience.
The way it should be played is like this, The DM uses the rules that the DM is comfortable with controlling and leave out those he doesn't feel comfortable with. After that if everyone is having fun, then it is played right. Right now I use B/X with Shadowdark and the 1e Dungeon Masters Guide. That's all I need. Shadowdark is something new, in which I was already hacking towards, so it's in. I also use the DMG, mainly for optional rulings.
I mean that's the sign of a true gamer. When I think of all the hours we spent in sewers making sacrifices to dark gods it brings a tear to my eye. Thank you for commenting.
Absolutely and also 2e didn't have better play balance (IMO) than AD&D so running was also essential to staying alive in many cases. Thank you for commenting.
I loved AD&D, and still do. It is a wonderful confusing mess that is still a bit of a mystery to me. I now, sort of, understand how segments work along with casting times in segments and weapon speeds, etc, etc. It's a fantastic mess that is so much fun for an intellectual exercise, but a real drag for actual playing. For example, how do you rate an orc's armor? It's AC 6, but as the MM points out, the AC is a necessity for the game an not strictly speaking an equivalent for a certain armor type... so you made it up and patched the thing. I think that summed up AD&D- play with what worked and patch up the rest. That's how we play it now, and that's pretty much how we played it then.
I was there for 1e, and like so many survivors I find myself scarred, jaded, and bitter. I twitch thinking about the culture of toxic adversarial play and all the wasted hours of groups arguing about rules. I break into a sweat recalling modules impossible to run as they were maddeningly linear and made no goddamn sense. I have nightmares of rulebooks heaping with bizarre requirements and restrictions, and of rules minutiae that no one used. I quake when I remember the wonder that 2e brought, how my old groups crumbled, and how little rules actually changed. I was there, and like so many survivors, I am now impossibly addicted.... to homebrew.
Any who tells you they played (play) 1E AD&D "rules as written" is a liar. Every group I ever played with always had an individual style of play....The game is IMPOSSIBLE to play as it is written. Even the writers themselves didn't.
Thank you for the comment, I definitely agree. I had to switch to AD&D though because my players liked it more. I never did play it like it was written. I think most people didn't. 🤔
Great upload. We tried to play RAW, but felt free to borrow from Dragon magazine, MERP, etc. Also we had no idea why number appearing was so wildly large. But we were in a rural town in the Midwest and did not go to conventions. I do think the BrOSR is on the right track about patron play, but a little dogmatic in their belief that AD&D 1st edition is a complete system. It most assuredly is not.
Thank you for the comment and I totally agree. It's that do-it-yourself and it's-your-game culture that I love so much about the OSR and classic D&D. I love the idea that no one knows how to play the game "properly" because there is no way to play it properly.
If anyone tells you how all people played any pre 3.0 d&d game .. they are simply wrong People got the rules, sometimes a copy, sometimes a mashup of several, misinterpreted them, made a lot of houserules, found out how to play from others, misremembered things, and each group end up playing differently than all others ... If anyone tells you different, they are describing how their group played, and are assuming everyone else played the same
Just so you know it's pronounced like combining the word BRO and OSR so BRO SR. I don't hear good things about them but I wanna hear your take. I am writing this comment when I just started watching this video. After watching the video: Yeah I think some groups play that way. I try to get my groups to open up to a campaign like that but I think modern players are just too stuck in their modern way of thinking, it's unfortunate. I notice players are not even comfortable with playing more than one character. My least favorite thing modern players have said to me is "I don't even like combat I just want to roleplay" that really means "I'm a coward even in my imagination and I don't want my character to face the possibility of being harmed because that would hurt my fragile ego". Sorry just had to rant a bit. Anyway I would love to try and integrate some of this stuff into my game.
The game has really changed since the early days I think. I think too that most people aren't familiar with tactical combat games mixed with roleplaying. I'm pretty sure the roleplaying aspect was not meant for the table while battles were happening. I'd love to try this style of play out too. So few people have the time for it anymore though. Thank you for the comment.
The weapon "to hit" armor types found in the PHB is not properly implemented. None of the monsters specifically spell out in Monster Manuel how the AC is determined. After looking at male lions, and brownies descriptions. I can to the conclusion all monsters in the Monster Manuel have a base AC of 7. Where as players it is 10. If DMs choose not to use this rule, which is often the case. All players have a -3 to hit. Your character is running massive expenses by raising an army. That gives a reason for that player to keep returning, otherwise the other players will insist that they play that character. You can schedule different play session times with a different DM. That could be beneficial. If all the DM can devote the time, and communicate between sessions. The players can make their rounds between all the DMs. If cohesion between the DMs could be established. I cannot even name one example of this occuring. Not even in 5e Adventures League. The DMs have no reason to communicate anything beyond submitting an update to a player's ledger.
This issue is dealt with in the rules - page 28 of the DMG: ‘In most cases, monsters not wearing armor will not have any weapon type adjustments allowed, as monster armor class in such cases pertains to the size, shape, agility, and/or magical nature of the creature.’
@@elliotvernon7971 A monster using natural weapons would recieve hefty penalties against an armored player charcter. That seems to have been handwaved by many. If the reverse is true. Again, no "to hit" modifiers are shown for natural weapons used by them. Nor is reach for these natural weapon attacks. Nor is weapon speed directly given. A few monsters indicate with vague language that they are "fast." All natural attacks are given a damage range, however no difference are made for medium or large targets. There is plenty of combat design choices that didn't make its way into the Monster Manuel. That is what you get when publishing books, before factoring in the consideration for what the other 2 books will contain.
@@josephpurdy8390 I think the historical reason is that by AD&D Gygax had lost interest in simulationist rules like weapon v armor, speed factors, specific area attacks or Role Master levels of crunch (see his discussion on the first column of the DMG p.61). For example, on EnWorld he said he never played weapon v armor, weapon speed, or any of the simulationist aspects of AD&D and, indeed, the evidence is he even stopped using miniatures by the time of AD&D. However, TSR was a business and Gygax had lots of war gamers and crunch players who were asking for these things at cons in the 1970s. He put them in (implemented from OD&D) to please a section of TSR's customers (who were into gaming knight v knight type combat) but did not go the whole hog and implement them for monsters. The DMG suggests the whole weapon v armor rules are optional rules any way (see DMG p.28).
@@elliotvernon7971 He makes that argument on simulatuonist rules in another part of the DMG. When it came to considerations for hit points. Yet, if you go through on a elf race, strength, dexterity, cavalier class, weapon "to hit" armor type modifiers, magic weapon, medium/long ranged attacks, target condition (prone/blind/stunned), backstab, and weapon specialization. These all can theoretically stack with one another. By only dismissing it for when applied to a player character hitting an unarmored monster. That may not be accurate.
We melded together everything… basic boxed sets, hardback AD&D books, Dragon magazine articles. We just modified anything that didn’t seem a perfect fit. We never played with minis or maps other than the handrawn dungeons we designed.
We had loose campaigns, but we didn’t stick to time or place constraints. In other words… we’d start an adventure, pause until later in the week, then use the same characters with a different DM and adventure, then go back and finish the first adventure with the first DM with the same characters.
That's how my friends and I played too. We took our characters from game to game. Thank you for sharing.
Absolutely how I remember it.
Same here!
what happened when a character died?
@@zZGzHD you either just continued playing with it or not. Sounds weird but that was what it was like at our table.
when we played in 1979 you rolled 3d6 and that was your stat. No modifiers, nada. We also had no idea how to smash open doors, so we just did percentages? made it up as we went..it was the best of times. The monster manual scared the hell out of us, seeing pics of creatures we had been fighting and now know what they looked like.
Fantastic, thank you for this :)
It was played around kitchen or basement tables, using gummi bears as your armies, with tons of quotations thrown around at random from Blazing Saddles, Monty Python, The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance, hand drawn maps, crown royal bags full of dice. The DM was screened at one end and squabbled with all the other players because one was using the original pamphlets, one was using the basic, one the advanced D&D and we ended up with the "My world, my rules" method.
OMG...you just brought me back.....
People didn't play 1e as written at first because it wasn't all written. It was the Player's Handbook and Monster Manual. You had to go to the little brown booklets for some things. We definitely were crawling planned dungeons, going back to town, going back to the dungeon. In the 80s it got more sandboxy. I ran a game using "City State of the Overlord" basically as a big open air dungeon/town, cutting down on travel. People often did try to play multiple characters and it was not a good thing. Parties were like 10 characters. In dungeons these big encounters were easier than you think because the standard 10 foot wide corridor means three of them are fighting three of the party at any one time. Also "Sleep". In the DMG it says to try and think about your dungeon as a living ecological place (like Greyhawk?).
Thank you for the comment. I agree that multiple characters at the same time is a bad idea. I do like having characters to play while others are in down time (spell research, traveling etc.). As for the monsters, it sounds like you were a whole lot more strategic than we were.
The Judges Guild module? Never played it but Judges Guild had some great modules back then...
We played with multiple Characters, usually 2 per player, it was awesome!!@@mstephenjoy
I started playing in the late 70s and we often played with 2 characters each. It was a great time and battles went much more quickly than they do in more recent editions where everybody has only one character. Role playing was a huge part of the games. We quickly moved away from the rule that said one day out of a game was a day in game. Sometimes one day would take several game sessions and sometimes a few months would pass.
Play as written? That's impossible. It would take forever. Aren't the "rules" supposed to be suggestions?
We used a gencon copy back in 74 and progresed to AD&D when it came out, but most of our influence was still very much taken from the original game. To us it didn`t seem confusing at the time, because we just interpred everything as though the whole thing was a series of guidelines for us to invent our own take on things. For example, when rolling up encounters where it said something like - Numbers 1 to 300, we just interpreted that as the number of the entire tribe.. but we`d just throw a few of them at the party in any given encounter (and gauged how many the party could handle). We played with miniatures when we wanted to.. especially for big encounters and battles (we were all wargamers anyway and were used to Chainmail), but much of the time everything was just imagined in the mind.
Thank you for the comment. I think most groups played like you did judging by the comments. I know my group certainly didn't stick to the rules (we often didn't even know them).
There were two groups of players back in the 1e era. There were the guys who played it as a war game, and those who played it as a role playing game. I played in both types of campaigns. The interesting thing to me is that, once you got higher level in a role playing campaign, they would use a version of Chainmail to deal with battles on a kingdom level where the characters were well known heroes working for a specific kingdom. Where I never saw those large scale battles in the war gaming campaign.
BrOSR isn't trying to "Play the way Gary played it." They are trying to play AD&D 1e as if Gary asked them to playtest his game. They don't care what he said even ten minutes after he published the rules. They are trying to rediscover the exact game he created in those books.
OK, thank you for the comment.
I played AD&D from '79 until 3rd ed. came out. 3rd was such a relief.
Thank you for commenting. Do you still play 3rd?
Got that right! Some of my players WEAPONIZED the ambiguities in 1E and 2E. 3.X brought that to a screeching halt. Still playing 3.5/PF1E to this day.
It's Bro- S.R. a bastardization of O.S.R, which is Old School Renaissance.
BroSR allegedly try to play how Gary played it... (The One True Way TM) I would guess that Gary's style changed over time, just like everyone else.
Thank you for this comment and I think you're right. So far no one has said they play (or played) the rules RAW. I'm not even sure it would be possible.
I don't know if any of us old dudes ever played it the way Gary played it... except for Gary.
Why doesn’t anyone want to play it like Dave played it?
@@russellharrell2747 Seems the Cult of Gygax has a much stronger presence, sadly.
When I was playing D&D back in the 80’s, we actually played it like a 1 vs 1 where we would build characters and go head to head with one ref. We would play the modules every now and then but we mostly liked building characters to fight against each other. No minis no maps no extra rules and checks. We had a great time.
Wow, I haven't heard of that before. It never occurred to us to do that. It sounds fun. Thank you for the great comment.
@@mstephenjoy you should try it. We would spend hours playing in that fashion. More time spent on making the champions and laughing when they would get one shot on a natural 20 hahahahaha those were the good days of D&D
We played that way in junior high school. Our teacher had a Tunnels and Trolls club and he called it Arena play. We all made characters and simply fought it out in a free for all.
Later, my friends and I would do the same thing with Dungeons and Dragons at home but we would just fight monsters.
you said you don't like complicated rules but Rolemaster is your fav? We called that game "chartmaster". Love this post. I didn't understand the rules either but that didn't stop us from playing anyway. The simple DnD rules makes it easy to run multiple characters. sounds like fun. thx.
AD&D rules were written for tournament play, so that every table at the con was on the same page. That's why there are so many rules in the AD&D DMG, second AD&D was made to keep from paying David Arnason royalties.
First gaming rule book I got was the AD&D 1ed DMG when I was in 5th or 6th grade. Can't remember how getting it for Xmas came about, but i still have it, very well used. When I found other people in my neighborhood who played it was always as an RPG.
Thank you for the reply and it's great you still have your very first edition you owned.
Back then wargames had campaign settings and modules, too. A dungeon crawl was an engagement. Players went from playing Panzer Leader or Squad Leader to playing Chainmail or D&D. Role-playing was not the primary focus in the early days at all. I got my first real taste of playing a role instead of units when I played Traveller.
Thank you so much for this comment, you've given me an idea for another video.
Interesting question, but there will be as many different answers as players. As I recall, the game was played a bit differently by each DM who pretty often made rulings rather than point to a passage in a book. Most borrowed concepts from adjunct materials including magazines, modules and anything else that appealed to the DM.
Wargames rules are generally played as written, with rulings to settle interpretation arguments.
Cheers!
That makes sense, after all the DM Guide is really a collection of rules that evolved and were collected together. Since I'm talking about before the DM Guide was even a thing there is really no other way it could have been played.
Not even the creator of the game played RAW.
The idea that there is a single, right way to play D&D is a fabrication usually perpetuated for questionable reasons.
I know that my earliest days of the game were not like many others' that I know. Even in the neighborhood i started playing in, the three groups that played across the greater city area all played slightly different and the old guys who were into the hobby played a lot differently than any of us.
Thank you for the comment and yes I agree with you. After reading all the comments it seems everyone had their own way of playing the game - which is just fantastic.
We played the "original" D&D that was a cross between the brown books and the AD&D guides...in 1977. There were minis, made out of metal that we painted in our spare time, but did not use for play purposes and no scenes made out of plastic. We took our characters through many "dungeon" (loosely used to describe many environments) modules, back to taverns, shops and towns, built our sanctuaries, towers, etc. and there were obvious issues with rule inconsistencies. We did have multiple characters based on what we were doing with our "mains"... was it the "only" way to play? No... but we made it work, and it was fun. We used weapon speeds, to help determine battle hit sequences. There is no right or wrong way to play. House & table rules have been around since the very early days. Happy 50th, D&D... here's to 50 more.
Thank you for commenting. The game really felt like it belonged to everyone didn't it? That's how it felt to me.
We were encouraged to roll up 3 characters because of those stupid number appearing monster rules. When Dad started running he ignored many rules and the other players ran one character each. Dungeons like other works of art don't need to make sense as long as they are fun. I enjoyed hearing your stories of the old days.
Chainmail was meant to be played on a table with minis. When we got the blue book, the role-playing groups started to separate from the wargaming groups. By the time the first hardcover books came out, the two were pretty much separate things. They had big tables for wargaming at the hobby stores, so the wargaming groups would often play there. The role-playing groups tended to play at someone's house. In the late 70s and early 80s we mostly played stand alone adventures (often using the TSR modules). We'd keep the same characters to level up but there was nothing connecting the adventures. At that time we rarely used minis. By the mid to late 80s, there was a better sense of playing a true campaign. Eventually my group got some vinyl mats with a 1" grid and used minis with dry-erase markers for the dungeion/castle/etc. I don't remember the wargame side of it (D&D) being all that popular - seems like those players moved on to other games as they came out. The role palyers did too of course - there were lots of interesting new games in the late 80s and early 90s.
Back in '79 we only had the 1st edition, white box set (or 0e as you called it) without Chainmail rules. So we heavily relied on the optional rules plus a lot of house rules. It was strictly RP with no miniatures and a lot of hand drawn maps. At first we did one off adventures (dungeon crawls). But eventually we developed our own campaign world and added the Blackmoor rules over time.
Amazing, I love hearing how people played the game, thank you. I just picked up a copy of Swords & Spells by Gary Gygax from 1976, which was out before the Chaimail rules, I believe.
Having a book eating dog as a D&D collector is like a blacksmith having a rust monster for a pet isn't it?
LMAO...that's what I was thinking too.
Nobody played pure RAW (1E) as it was impossible due to contradictory rules. Next time someone claims to play pure RAW ask them if their magical armor they are wearing is weightless?
Fake News
First game was AD&D 1E in 1980. I was the last addition to the group; one or two had started with the Holmes rules but by now had graduated to the hardcovers and never looked back. As a group, there was a lot we ignored: weapon speed factors, psionics (let's fact it: Gygax was clearly off his meds that day), and random encounter tables (even then, our DMs preferred to carefully design our dungeons). Our problem is that NO one had minis, so theater of the mind was all we had to rely on, which led to. . . a lot of judgement calls.
Thank you for commenting. We didn't have minis either until a friends dad went nuts and bought a pile of them. Brings back such good memories.
“Objectively better” is logically impossible. It’s like saying “colourless green ideas sleep furiously”.
Morality (good, bad, better, worse, etc.), is always subjective. Moral claims can never be proven. Definitions of what is “better”, “worse”, etc., vary from person to person and even change over time for each person.
I am persuaded by both relativism and nihilism to a great extent and have spent a lot deal of time on these ideas. I don not agree that morality is always subjective. That seems to me a claim of post-modernism which I find to be a philosophy lacking in basic reason. This is not the place for such discussions but thank you for the comment.
We played AD&D fast and loose with little restrictions which made it A LOT of FUN vs being tedious and nitpicky over "rules."
Thank you for commenting. I didn't use them all because I had no hope of remembering them all. I think we were meant to pick and choose.
Yeah most importantly we had fun with it!@@mstephenjoy
With the group I played with in 78, it was all about the dungeon. Lighting, rations, exploration, you left the dungeon if you lost too many characters or couldn't carry any more loot.
It wasn't about your character, it was about the experience. Characters were semi-disposable until you got to 3rd level. If your character died you rolled up a new 1st level PC and you joined the game in the next room, chained to the wall and set free by the other players. If you didn't get along with the other people this is when you found out. If they didn't release your character, you were out until the next run. Not all PCs were the same level and the concept of equal share of the treasure was based on how long your PC had been involved in that run.
From today's lens that all seems a bit harsh.
Thank you for commenting, it really brought back memories as we played in a very similar way.
My friends & i had no idea how Gygax & Arneson played. It was never really described in the rules or Dragon magazine. We created dungeons that made some sense & played with the same few guys every week. We never used weapon speed or weapon vs armor modifier, and initiative was loosey goosey. We rarely used hirelings, but by the early ‘90s, we had like 2 extra PCs (highly recommended for times when a PC is immobilized).
And we played theater of the mind for almost everything, altho i had a battlemat and miniatures to establish rough locations. AD&D was still based on movement on dungeon crawling, not combat, so i don’t know what you mean by measuring movement in inches. We knew we weren’t playing a wargame.
Thank you for the comment.
We used miniatures for Marching order, line of sight, charging, attack of opportunity, flanking AC adjustment, and range adjustment for missile attacks. Not to mention spells area of affect and range.
We just made stuff up as we went along. I laugh at some of the gatekeepers in the OSR community that think "real D&D" was super lethal and PCs tried to avoid combat and used 10' poles all the time..nope. We wanted to run through dungeons and killed lots of bad guys and be heroes. I made a PC modeled after Warduke and he was a bad-ass.
Thank you for commenting and I agree with your gate keeping comment. I think some so called "gate keepers" are really trying to preserve the original gaming culture though. I do think that is worthwhile as long as it is done nicely and with disclosure. I have run into too many people who feel intimidated by Critical Roll and photo bashers. There seems to be a tendency for some younger players to think they shouldn't play if they don't meet some minimum requirement. In that way a lot of people are gate keeping without even knowing it IMO.
That’s how we started, we ordered a fantasy war game starter set in 1983, as a change from Napolionics.
We started by laying out the tower of zenopus as a huge graph paper wargames table and ran it like a skirmish wargame between dm and players.
It was a year later that we ran into some theatre of the mind players and we completed the transformation from war game to rpg.
Awesome, thank you for commenting.
I started in 1978 with the Blue Box Edition at the old age of 23. I had no idea what this game was all I know is the box looked cool and there was no game board. No one played in our town. So it was me and a hand full of friends. We ran RAW! But after years of playing and finding other games I started homebrewing things to my liking. I don't think there's a "wrong" way to play? If the group is having fun? Then go for it.
Thank you for the comment and I believe that was the very first actual D&D book I saw. I remember it had chits instead of dice. I didn't get to play it or even look through it until much later.
been playing since 1985 when we got first edition books. always used paper dice and imagination. never used any minis or markers ever. our local game store had tons of modules/adventures and that was most of our starting play. we played store bought at first then switched to forgotten realms(1988) and started buying less and making more in house stuff. when 2e hit our local store(1989) we switched to that with house rules and original FR. in 1990 we finally got FR 2e. being we were in grade 6-12 during this time we had lots of ppl to play with. that was a great 5-6 years to play games as we had no responsibilities really and got to play 10-12 hours a day on weekends and holidays.
Thank you for the comment. I remember those days too. We would play all day, then take a sleep break, and go back to playing again. It was a lot of fun.
My experience with early AD&D was similar to yours. I was introduced to D&D probably about 1980 as a freshman in high school. I don’t think we ever played “rules as written”. We had tried playing Avalon Hill historical board games, they were so dry and frankly cumbersome and boring. So we took the RPG elements of D&D and adapted them to small party warfare instead of the epic army scale of Chainmail. At the same time, Gygax and TSR realized that having a distinct game as opposed to optional rule sets for someone else’s game could make a lot more money, so they pivoted away from Chainmail, starting down the path to the very different game as it exists today. And I’m glad they did. That rule heavy, my fighter is just a cog in a giant machine kind of approach sounds tedious.
My 1980 group of players were wargamers before we became RPG players. So, when we discovered D&D Basic (Moldvay) we played it as a skirmish dungeon exploration miniature game on a map. Great times.
Thank you for the comment 😊
My first exposure to D&D was playing through The Keep on the Borderlands and The Lost City in the early 80s. Did not question why or how the "monster hotel" style dungeons existed as a kid lol. 😂 I think the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings was an inspiration for dungeon crawling.
I remember being terribly confused about hit points. Think if they had been called health points it'd make more sense.
One appeal of the modules was it put some structure into adventures - otherwise a sandbox game can go off the rails or players lose motivation. Plus my friends and I were not skilled enough to create our own balanced and fun adventures.
Was just recalling, don't think we ever started an adventure with "You all meet in a tavern..." In TKotB, the PCs begin the game on the road to the castle. In TLC you're in a desert caravan. Otherwise, don't know if the 1st edition rulebooks spelled out how you actually start playing the game. You just sort of materialized at the entrance to the dungeon, already in a group.
monster hotel had me rolling. thank you.
I don't care who played what how. Playing AD&D 1e RAW is fundamentally different and awesome. I have come to prefer it to current conventional play. I'm glad to see you covering this, stephen! Earned my sub! Also, I haven't heard anyone call it "Broser" It's "Bro Ess Arr."
Thank you for the comment. Like I said, I'm not any kind of expert.
Hi, very nostalgic. Our Boy scout troop taught the drop in system for D&D in summer of 1977. PC'S come, PC'S go. nice episode.
Thank you so much for the nice comment. It sounds like you must have had some amazing times playing :)
Never heard of the concept of BROSR. As Rockhopper mentiones we used the books, box set and Dragon magazine. We used modules heavily from any souce such as Greyhawk. Noone ever used the term BROSR--ever. Now I have read up on the concept. Noone ever played that way once the books were in production and AD&D hit the world stage.
Thank you for the comment. I don't think anyone played RAW but there were definitely large campaigns likely organized similarly to the BrOSR style. There are clear hints at it in the old books that leave me without doubt. I don't think it lasted long and new ways took over very quickly.
We played D&D until the DMG 1e was released in '79, when we switched to AD&D. I DMed but only read the parts of the DMG that were of interest to me. We houseruled a lot of things and never used miniatures.
Thank you for commenting. Did you ever try using miniatures and decided against them, or just noped right out from the very start?
@@mstephenjoy There never was much interest in using them in my group, despite the fact that most of the players were wargamers (the Avalon Hill kind, not miniatures wargaming).
The "Real time" aspect was used between game sessions only. Means, when your party is back at the home base after clearing half of the dungeon in this game session and the next game session is next weekend, the dungeon could be reoccupied again by monsters during this week. Also, another group of adventurers in the same campaign, could go to the same dungeon and loot it while you're are resting. When you gather together with your group later on and go to the dungeon, you find it looted, between your game sessions. That was making competition between different players groups.
The "real time" wasn't used for building strongholds and so on.
About the "number of appearence" of monsters: It's intended to be used for a lair. Your group of adventurers stumble upon a party of 4 lizardmen. After defeating them, they track them out and find the lair of the monsters, where 50 more lizardmen live. 50% of them are non-combatant women and elderly, 10% are children, one is leader, 15 guards and so on.
Thank you for the clarification and taking the time to comment.
i played from 79 on. we played many of the rules rules as written but also put our own things into the game. Defintiely not everything. it was definitely more rulings over rules.
Some things i used. alot of, some things not as much. i did use weapon speed for example. but other rules got thrown out.
I dont know anyone who played the "real time passes = game times passes" rule, for example.
I also think it also mattered where you were, how old you were, what type of games you were playing. I was on the east coast and under the age of 12. So we werent doing conventions, and so it was all houserules. I honestly did a mix of AD&D and B/X types of things.
I would imagine if you were at lake geneva, and playing conventions, that was proably a VERY different experience.
Great comment, thank you. I often just made up the rules since I couldn't afford the books. Could you imagine playing at the lake geneva games? It must have been amazing.
In the 80s, my games played were 50 percent AD&D, 25 percent Advanced Recon. (or Recon revised) the rest(Cyberpunk 2020, Middle earth, Chill, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, Elric Villains and Vigilantes, Champions, mechwarrior, Rifts, Gamma world, boot hill, traveller, Star Frontiers, 2300 , Twilight 2000, Aliens, Mekton. Gurps).
Thank you for the comment. It brought back a lot of memories.
We're currently playing Recon and 1e RAW.
Recon is Amazing.
@@rwustudios very detailed RPG on the Vietnam war.
Yeah, and the miniatures rolls are pretty fun too.
We're starting a living Marc campaign shortly here on discord.
Brosr says not so much that RAW was how it was originally played, but how it was originally INTENDED to be played. You will see from some of the other comments that there is a large community of old players that are adamant it was never played this way, and that you shouldn't bother to try it. The Brosr says "try it out, we think it's better, see for yourself"
Thank you for the comment. That makes sense.
The evolution of wargame to rpg had started well before 1974 D&D was published. They just didn’t even have the language to describe this new thing they were doing. “fantasy wargaming”, “adventure gaming”, and “roleplaying” were all used to describe the activity. See Peterson’s Playing At the World and The Elusive Shift for a nuanced breakdown of this very complicated metamorphosis.
Awesome! Thank you.
yah played a lot of AD&D in the 80s using PH, DMG, MM, Fiend Folio(bit superior to the MM) and Dragon magazines. we used a hexagonal map to move about , in the countryside , square map to move indoors. most of the stuff we played were home brewed adventures. however I do remember my most memorable adventures were playing the whole Slavers campaign A1 to A4, that was a blast , the against the giants campaign, (died in descent though) and the Pyramid campaign, all regular modules. Played a few Judge's guild adventures they were OK though I must say the Judge's guild adventures had poor graphic quality compared to TSR ones(adventures were OK though).
Well, we know how it's played now. D&D is a "Mother, May I?" party game.
Never heard of "Broser" but have been playing D&D since the basic box set. The bulk of my playing was 2e homebrew, but we definitely spent a chunk of jr high using the above advanced books.
From my perspective there were two specific types of D&D players in the 70's and 80s. One group must be this Broser style you speak of. That group openly played during lunch at school and met after school at those very first hobby shops with tables in back. The second group were stoners who played but would not openly admit it. There was a bit of crossover between the two groups, a game is a game if no one else is playing... but by and large the play styles were a bit different. I do recall an interesting inflexibility about the rules as written the few times I sat in on a "nerd" session.
Our version was based heavily on books, movies and music of the time. High fantasy with character backstory and world building were par for the course even back then. I've still got maps of the world my friends and I built from '86 to about '93. Far from a drop in game style. The campaign world we started in aprox '96 is still going strong to this day. In fact, I've handed it over to my daughter and her friends. Love what she's done with the place. Even more fun to be adventuring in that world with her as the DM. Rules have been heavy homebrew throughout, and recently the 5e class/subclass builds have become standard despite the world still running on thac0 and many 2e mechanics.
TLDR: Definitely a high fantasy, heavy role play version of D&D going on even back then. There were a lot of REALLY good fantasy authors in the 70's and 80s as inspiration beyond the standard Tolkien mythos.
Thank you for this comment. It's so awesome your campaign is still running!
We used Holmes Blue Book as a base and added whatever seemed fun from AD&D, Gamma World, and the Arduin Trilogy. The result wasn't really what you'd call rules. Whenever I tried to have fantasy adventures, it was a disaster. Wargaming produced fun predictably.
That's the way to play the game I think, by making it your own. Thank you for commenting.
Each player can have henchmen based on their charisma, so each player can have 2 to 5 "characters" at a time.
We always treated henchmen as player controlled NPCs (that's to say we payed less attention to them). IDK why. Thank you for commenting.
It seems like people these days can’t use their brain enough to do anything but follow rules. Gygax said the rules are an idea, do with the game as you will and make it your own!!
Thank you for leaving a comment and I think the rules have almost become sacred in some strange way. The whole point of D&D in the beginning was that they were to be modified and changed. I do think trying to play RAW would be a fun challenge though.
I watched a Daddy Rolled a 1 video not that long ago that talked about how Modules were something that third party creators were making, specifically DM's Guild, and Gygax originally didn't want TSR to be making them because he didn't think they were necessary to the game. TSR started making modules because there was an obvious demand for them from the player base.
One of Mr Gygax's quotes, "The DM's real secret is that you don't need any rules, all you need is this..", and he held up a d20 and a pencil.
1979 We didn’t have any one to consult. As far as we knew we were the only players in town. I had the basic set and then the players handbook and we just played. My players never read the rules, they just let me DM and we had fun making it up. It was not a war game at all for us.
Oh my god you take your time getting to the point!
lol, thank you for the comment.
Good insights. I've always wanted to play RAW, all the rules, weapons vs AC, surprise, psionics, everything. How do you spell "Brozer" "Broaser" etc? I want to look further into this style.
Thank you for commenting, A lot of people are saying the rules can't be played RAW because there are too many contradictions and omissions. Maybe they are right but it would be a fun challenge to try. I think it's BrOSR. I found a blog with more information: jeffro.wordpress.com/2022/04/08/what-is-the-brosr/
@@mstephenjoy awesome, thank you. I'll be digging into this for sure.
A wise man once told me "Never let the rules get in the way of a good story" .
In my campaigns (AD&D 1st ed) I always took the word "guide" in the title of the DMG literally. The only rule that really matters is rule 0 anyway
Very interesting video! I'd like to try the BROSR thing, but I'd never want to DM such a campaign. As described, it reminds me o the West Marches style of play.
Thank you for commenting. Right? It sounds like a lot of fun.
Hit up Jeffro, Gelatinous Rube, BDubs, and Jon Mollison. I think you're gonna have a great experience playing with them!
It is not exactly possible to play them as written, due to inconsistencies. See the initiative rules in particular - there are at least 3 different versions obtainable from the rules as written. Also, a lot of rules can be ignored by various groups, including the armor vs weapon tables, psionics, and/or encumbrance.
That said, you can get some idea from the earliest modules. Note that many tables did not have anywhere near enough players to have only 1 character/player and keep in the character guidelines.
As far as 'playing it wrong', if everyone is having fun, you aren't :)
I am too young to have played those games early on, but from what I recall of later play, there were often large differences between games a few blocks from each other, largely depending on the GM.
Thank you for commenting and I agree 100%: as long as everyone is having fun you're playing it right.
Good video, it brought me back
Glad you enjoyed it, thank you for commenting.
It’s not that complicated. We read the rules and played. No miniatures required. We later bought mini’s which helped with combat aspects of the game.
Thank you for commenting.
I have found memories of playing AD&D with my brother and dad. Any part of the rules we didn’t understand or like we just changed. Even Gary Gygax said that was ok.@@mstephenjoy
I can role game with just my imagination and a group of teddy bears if I want. Rolegames grew out of table top wargaming, so it is not odd that some want it to be roll gaming. But edition vs edition, I think AD&D was the best but mainly because the DMG and the Monster Manual were the best books ever made for the game. Everything has just been trying to catch up to them since. The Players was ok. I think the DMG was the best book ever written for any version of D&D. How much role and how much roll in the game though,m has always been up to the person running it.
Thank you for the comment. There is an rpg about teddybears. I did some art for it :)
love this content man keep it up!
Not only did no one play totally RAW back when I started but if you read what Gygax wrote and often seemed to promote - no one was supposed to. That is why there was tournament RPGs vs home ones. We could forget details from day to day and building a castle real time was just stupid. Keeping track of time was important but only in a west marches style of campaign would you ever think using a calendar time was a good idea.
That said we dropped lots of rules that was more fiddly then we liked. Everything from segments to weapons vs armor types was simplified to keep the game moving faster.
But some things worked by brute force. We could and did have hirelings and followers (5e people yes there is a difference) and sometimes it was just a matter of getting enough people in a fight that would not run away so you could use the heros to kick lizard man tail!
And sometimes the right call was to runaway, period.
We had meta roles in the party because the DM did not and was not required to tell you what happened or share maps. We had leadership in the party (when you had enough players) to smooth out battle and also helped with rules because our DM was you screw it up you loose it kind.
Those were good days.
Thank you for the great comment. I love hearing how people played. Yes, indeed, they were good days 😀
The most popular the game has ever been and its still hard for us old buggers to get a group together. It's a strange new world we're in. I find this type of gaming is easier from a DM standpoint.
Right? I guess everyone plays online now. That doesn't feel like D&D to me. It's fun, just not like it was. Thank you for commenting, take care.
There's no right or wrong way to play if you're having fun.
Thank you for saying this, I absolutely agree.
1E AD&D as written is kind of horrid. Read the Grappling rules if you want a headache. We NEVER played it as written, and I started in 1981. I met a lot of AD&D groups over the years and just about every game I've ever played in was a blend of some of the core rules and homebrew rules.
Earlier groups that were already playing OD&D might have used the LBBs because of the way AD&D 1E was released. The Monster Manual came out first in 1977. Interestingly enough, you'll find that the MM alignments are the same as the five alighment system in the Holmes Basic Rulebook. Nine tier alignment hadn't been completely worked out yet. In 1978, they released the Players Handbook. The combat charts were not in the PHB so those were pre released in an issue of Dragon Magazine. Finally, in 1979 the Dungeon Master's guide was released, and the core game system was complete.
Thus, in the interim period of years, those already playing the game would have needed additional material to actually play AD&D.
What is this 'Bros' system you keep mentioning. Never heard of it.
Awesome! Thank you for the comment. The Bros isn't a system but a way of playing from my understanding but I am not really qualified to comment on it.
Mr Gygax makes it crystal clear that all the rules are there to be bent, twisted and broken to suit your group's fancy. Does he not write in the DMG that they are guidelines, not rules? Some folks played pure roleplay, theater of the mind while others led Napoleonic armies on an astroturf field. The genius of it all was that the rules worked for so many different play styles. There was no wrong way to play as far as we were concerned.
Thank you for the comment. I agree 100% I'm just wanting to know how they played it. I watched an interview with people that played in Arneson's game and it sounds like, to me, that they did play it in a Brosr style.
Late to the comments, but this "bro SR' nonsense sounds a lot like historical revisionism with dubious intent. It is not how it was "meant to be played" in the least, and as someone who played since pre-AD&D, I can say no one made a big deal out of any of it back then. Now, if you like that method, have fun, but noone should pretend they're playing the one true way and everyone else is wrong. It's just laughable.
Thank you for the comment. I agree with you about the rules but I will always remain open to styles of play. For me that's where the real magic of a game is. Since the RPG was born out of war games it still makes sense to me the game might have been played differently, at least initially, and it is congruent with my own experience.
@@mstephenjoy Why don't you just ask the people who were actually there and wrote the rules? You know many of them are still around, right?
Where did you get that spiral bound PDF of the basic rules?? Great vid btw
Thank you :) I printed them out after getting the pdfs on DriveThruRPG.
The way it should be played is like this, The DM uses the rules that the DM is comfortable with controlling and leave out those he doesn't feel comfortable with. After that if everyone is having fun, then it is played right. Right now I use B/X with Shadowdark and the 1e Dungeon Masters Guide. That's all I need. Shadowdark is something new, in which I was already hacking towards, so it's in. I also use the DMG, mainly for optional rulings.
Thank you for the comment. Sounds like a great way to game. I really need to check out Shadowdark.
Just ask Rob Kuntz and Dave Megarry how it was originally played. They were there.
Thank you for commenting.
As someone from that era, I can tell you that, yes, we went down into the sewers, tried to use our powers in real life, and worshipped Satan.
🤘👹🔥
I mean that's the sign of a true gamer. When I think of all the hours we spent in sewers making sacrifices to dark gods it brings a tear to my eye. Thank you for commenting.
If I you wanna play a more modern game that sounds like this is the IKRPG, which was also a war game first.
Before the Internet you just had to guess. You made it up as you went. No two tables played exactly the same. House rules ruled the hobby.
In 2e its good to run because you can get XP through Gold. From what I heard.
Absolutely and also 2e didn't have better play balance (IMO) than AD&D so running was also essential to staying alive in many cases. Thank you for commenting.
@@mstephenjoy I like this concept more. Seems more realistic for beginning heroes.
We gotta chat about this sometime, partner!
That would be great. I am watching your channels introduction right now.
@@mstephenjoy hope you like it!
Absolutely! Awesome stuff. It will take me a while to get through them all. @@gelatinousrube
@@mstephenjoyhis voice alone is worth it.
@@mstephenjoy Do you have discord, guilded, etc?
I loved AD&D, and still do. It is a wonderful confusing mess that is still a bit of a mystery to me. I now, sort of, understand how segments work along with casting times in segments and weapon speeds, etc, etc. It's a fantastic mess that is so much fun for an intellectual exercise, but a real drag for actual playing. For example, how do you rate an orc's armor? It's AC 6, but as the MM points out, the AC is a necessity for the game an not strictly speaking an equivalent for a certain armor type... so you made it up and patched the thing. I think that summed up AD&D- play with what worked and patch up the rest. That's how we play it now, and that's pretty much how we played it then.
Thank you for this comment. Calling AD&D a wonderful fantastic mess is one of the best descriptions I have ever heard.
I was there for 1e, and like so many survivors I find myself scarred, jaded, and bitter.
I twitch thinking about the culture of toxic adversarial play and all the wasted hours of groups arguing about rules.
I break into a sweat recalling modules impossible to run as they were maddeningly linear and made no goddamn sense.
I have nightmares of rulebooks heaping with bizarre requirements and restrictions, and of rules minutiae that no one used.
I quake when I remember the wonder that 2e brought, how my old groups crumbled, and how little rules actually changed.
I was there, and like so many survivors, I am now impossibly addicted.... to homebrew.
Thank you for the great comment!
Any who tells you they played (play) 1E AD&D "rules as written" is a liar. Every group I ever played with always had an individual style of play....The game is IMPOSSIBLE to play as it is written. Even the writers themselves didn't.
OK, thank you for commenting.
Weapon type vs Armour tables. I never met anyone who played that. IMHO BX/BECMI is far more playable than AD&D RAW
Thank you for the comment, I definitely agree. I had to switch to AD&D though because my players liked it more. I never did play it like it was written. I think most people didn't. 🤔
Great upload. We tried to play RAW, but felt free to borrow from Dragon magazine, MERP, etc. Also we had no idea why number appearing was so wildly large. But we were in a rural town in the Midwest and did not go to conventions. I do think the BrOSR is on the right track about patron play, but a little dogmatic in their belief that AD&D 1st edition is a complete system. It most assuredly is not.
Thank you for the comment and I totally agree. It's that do-it-yourself and it's-your-game culture that I love so much about the OSR and classic D&D. I love the idea that no one knows how to play the game "properly" because there is no way to play it properly.
If you're enjoying it, you're NOT playing it wrong.
Thank you for the comment, and absolutely, there is no arguing that.
What do you mean by playing it “Wrong”? Were you not having fun?
Thank you for commenting,
Nothing was RAW back then , anyone telling you otherwise knows nothing
How was it really played? That depended on who was playing.
Absolutely! Thank you for commenting.
If anyone tells you how all people played any pre 3.0 d&d game .. they are simply wrong
People got the rules, sometimes a copy, sometimes a mashup of several, misinterpreted them, made a lot of houserules, found out how to play from others, misremembered things, and each group end up playing differently than all others ...
If anyone tells you different, they are describing how their group played, and are assuming everyone else played the same
yes, the Jungian dreamscape underworld dungeon is the most logical and classic dungeon. any other interpretation really makes no sense.
I agree entirely. It makes the job of building dungeons a lot more interesting, too.
Just so you know it's pronounced like combining the word BRO and OSR so BRO SR. I don't hear good things about them but I wanna hear your take. I am writing this comment when I just started watching this video.
After watching the video: Yeah I think some groups play that way. I try to get my groups to open up to a campaign like that but I think modern players are just too stuck in their modern way of thinking, it's unfortunate. I notice players are not even comfortable with playing more than one character. My least favorite thing modern players have said to me is "I don't even like combat I just want to roleplay" that really means "I'm a coward even in my imagination and I don't want my character to face the possibility of being harmed because that would hurt my fragile ego". Sorry just had to rant a bit.
Anyway I would love to try and integrate some of this stuff into my game.
The game has really changed since the early days I think. I think too that most people aren't familiar with tactical combat games mixed with roleplaying. I'm pretty sure the roleplaying aspect was not meant for the table while battles were happening. I'd love to try this style of play out too. So few people have the time for it anymore though. Thank you for the comment.
He gets to the point at 7:15.
interesting
Thank you for commenting.
The weapon "to hit" armor types found in the PHB is not properly implemented. None of the monsters specifically spell out in Monster Manuel how the AC is determined. After looking at male lions, and brownies descriptions. I can to the conclusion all monsters in the Monster Manuel have a base AC of 7. Where as players it is 10. If DMs choose not to use this rule, which is often the case. All players have a -3 to hit.
Your character is running massive expenses by raising an army. That gives a reason for that player to keep returning, otherwise the other players will insist that they play that character.
You can schedule different play session times with a different DM. That could be beneficial. If all the DM can devote the time, and communicate between sessions. The players can make their rounds between all the DMs. If cohesion between the DMs could be established. I cannot even name one example of this occuring. Not even in 5e Adventures League. The DMs have no reason to communicate anything beyond submitting an update to a player's ledger.
Fantastic, thank you for the comment! I think you're right about the AC too.
This issue is dealt with in the rules - page 28 of the DMG: ‘In most cases, monsters not wearing armor will not have any weapon type adjustments allowed, as monster armor class in such cases pertains to the size, shape, agility, and/or magical nature of the creature.’
@@elliotvernon7971 A monster using natural weapons would recieve hefty penalties against an armored player charcter. That seems to have been handwaved by many. If the reverse is true. Again, no "to hit" modifiers are shown for natural weapons used by them. Nor is reach for these natural weapon attacks. Nor is weapon speed directly given. A few monsters indicate with vague language that they are "fast." All natural attacks are given a damage range, however no difference are made for medium or large targets.
There is plenty of combat design choices that didn't make its way into the Monster Manuel. That is what you get when publishing books, before factoring in the consideration for what the other 2 books will contain.
@@josephpurdy8390 I think the historical reason is that by AD&D Gygax had lost interest in simulationist rules like weapon v armor, speed factors, specific area attacks or Role Master levels of crunch (see his discussion on the first column of the DMG p.61). For example, on EnWorld he said he never played weapon v armor, weapon speed, or any of the simulationist aspects of AD&D and, indeed, the evidence is he even stopped using miniatures by the time of AD&D. However, TSR was a business and Gygax had lots of war gamers and crunch players who were asking for these things at cons in the 1970s. He put them in (implemented from OD&D) to please a section of TSR's customers (who were into gaming knight v knight type combat) but did not go the whole hog and implement them for monsters. The DMG suggests the whole weapon v armor rules are optional rules any way (see DMG p.28).
@@elliotvernon7971 He makes that argument on simulatuonist rules in another part of the DMG. When it came to considerations for hit points. Yet, if you go through on a elf race, strength, dexterity, cavalier class, weapon "to hit" armor type modifiers, magic weapon, medium/long ranged attacks, target condition (prone/blind/stunned), backstab, and weapon specialization. These all can theoretically stack with one another. By only dismissing it for when applied to a player character hitting an unarmored monster. That may not be accurate.
meh