History is one of my interests. Both researching, and talking with people who existed before I did.

I have often understood the 1970s to be something of a special time or the first popular dawn of role playing games. At the same time in general I have heard the 70s described as "a more innocent time". I have observed that entertainment from the 60s and 70s was more retarded and nonsensical and more fantastical; consider the ridiculousness of shows like "The Man From UNCLE" or the original "Hawai'i 5 0". For your moment of Zen, clear your mind of all thoughts and imagine a caucasian man in a blue polyester suit with greased up late 60s hair running down Waikiki beach at high noon and engaging some murderous bad guy with a snub nosed .38 revolver (no doubt loaded with FMJs, even), and not even breaking a sweat or pissing in his blue polyester suit pants in so doing.

Has anyone played role playing games in the 70s? What was it like? What were the typical subject matters? How did it feel to only be able to play with people in your neighborhood instead of being able to organize something over the internet? Did individual personalities come to dominate the table due to the constraints of the times?

Any reflections would be most valued.

It was interesting. The whole nerd taint hadn't really had time to form in the same way, so there was more openmindedness (although the wargamers were definitely nerds).

There was also a halo effect from a lot of the media at the time. Tolkien's works were riding high, and of course things like Star Wars were coming out too. At the same time, escapist fantasy was attractive because between oil crises, cold war paranoia and economic stagnation, there was a lot to escape from. It's no coincidence that quaaludes were the drug of choice for many.

The games tended to the more lethal. Things like save vs poison or die were just how it was done. Also, the range was obviously more limited. I saw three huge advances in roleplay: first, the invention. Second, mostly in the eighties, was a huge genre expansion (Hi, Shadowrun!) and then in the nineties was a major advance in playability and regularised systems. Back in the seventies rules arguments were much more common, because the rules were pretty crappy, to be honest. House Rules were the way to solve a lot of these problems, particularly when the systems were really restrictive (Original D&D, I'm looking at you). Even then, Vancian magic felt wrong to me.

Game balance, worldbuilding and so on was more fast-and-loose, and in some ways common sense had to be applied just because of rules gaps. Yeah, an orc with a spear can kill you. It's not a 4hp piece of useless bladefodder.

I enjoyed being exposed to the hobby. Was a big mind-opener. Even reading the books was a wild experience, as possibilties seemed to explode from them.

Feel free to ask more. That's just what springs to mind.

A friend of mine got the original boxed set of D&D for Christmas. He gave it to the guy who usually figured out the rules of games for the gang ... me. My wife and I took turns DMing. The gang played a couple of times a week! She and I finally built a world, strongly influenced by Tolkien, in which we all adventured. Character creation was entirely up to the dice. We learned how to make the good and the bad work.

Death was always possible. Resurrection was out of the question. I had a barbarian fighter, Trund (bonus points if you can recall where that name comes from), for whom I actually rolled 18/00 strength. My play dialogue consisted mostly of, "Trund hit, Trund kill!" He died, when returning severely wounded from a successful cave raid, a rock fell outside the cave mouth and hit him ... for 1 hit point. All he had. My wife was the DM. Tells you a lot about our relationship.

Figure painting and mapmaking were part of the joy. Lots of jokes in some of the place names. Same relationship, so not so bad, huh?

Did people have more time to play RPGs then? I notice a lot of Avalon Hill games from the era as well need a really long time to play. I feel like today time is more fragmented and this is also part of the reason people play video games more today.

Ahh, I'd heard that women playing RPGs was uncommon in the 70s and that it is more common today. (Although I am not sure what the stats are.) Is this true?

With regard to the current events backdrop, do you think that people were more or less stressed/escapist than today, or less?

Is it fair to say that if you went from town to town, you might have games done in very different ways due to house rules? KODT gives the impression of there being some kind of unified official way to do things a long time ago, but thinking about it, that doesn't seem as likely as it would be today given the decentralized nature of the 70s and the lack of computer systems.

Depends on where you were, I guess. But I'd say generally more. You can probably find some starry-eyed nostalgia freak who could wax lyrical about the heady days of sexual liberation and so on, but this is also the era that gave us Punk, birthed the Goths, and turned what had been once described as modern jazz into all-out Heavy Metal. Many people who today would be regarded as crazy preppers were simply building their bunkers and gathering their food because it was generally expected that nuclear warfare was one bad decision away. Japan was just starting to come into its commercial own, Britain was Miserable Britain, ripe for Thatcher's message, America under Nixon, Ford and Carter was not all that great either. Europe was divided and feeling the pinch, South America was running at a revolution a minute, terrorists were hijacking aircraft and tossing bombs. Really, it wasn't that great of a time and a lot of people were worried about all of the above plus the general economic malaise and inflation which was eating at the savings of the people who actually had jobs - so yeah. Not awesome.



Town to town? Hell, table to table. When BBSes made communication of that sort common, there was a grand crash of a thousand rules lawyers all calling for the others to be hanged.

Believe it or not I think your post made me into a happier person. I thought we were all doomed so I'm glad to hear that things were arguably worse in the 70s. It implies things are getting better. Thinking about it, not having nuclear annihilation be as clear and present a danger is sort of a big deal.

I'm fascinated by the idea of uniqueness of the game from table to table. I guess some of that comes through in the early D&D where official NPCs are actually player characters from Gary's table. Rather than sitting down and planning out an abstract world as a first step, and then running it as a second step, it's sort of like it all kind of emerged organically from one man's living room, which is amazing.

Given the highly decentralized nature and free flowing nature of role playing games of the era, how did the "Mazes and Monsters" scare about D&D being of the devil even manage to take off? It would seem to me that if you actually looked at people playing you'd probably see so few similarities between the groups it would be hard to assume they were in league somehow. Actually, it is starting to remind me of old Cold War propaganda films about how there were supposedly decentralized Communist cells hiding throughout Middle America. Was the "Mazes and Monsters" scare essentially another iteration of the Communist cell idea?

Oh, we might still be doomed, and for excellent reasons. The concerns have just changed over the years. And it wasn't all sunshine and roses back then. Many of us alive now really never expected to see our thirties.



And then a lot of those metamorphosed into game systems in their own right. Let a thousand flowers bloom!




The mistake you make is in imagining that the progenitors of moral panics need facts or evidence on their side. A mildly popular hobby which kids liked and somehow involved demons was just obvious fodder, in retrospect. This was around the same time as the panic about heavy metal being a satanic plot. Are you old enough to remember Al and Tipper Gore on the same stage as Melissa Etheridge? Are you old enough to remember the Hollywood Wives and the PMRC? Apparently Hollywood took too many drugs to retain much of a long term memory, otherwise they'd have been calling for Tipper's head on a pike, not her husband's election.

I'm not saying Al Gore was a bad guy, or shouldn't have been elected - I'm just saying that there was a broad cultural hostility to lots of things at the time which went all the way to the top, and roleplaying games and fantasy novels were caught up in the general slavering panic about insidious forces corrupting the souls of the innocent kiddies.

I started playing in the 80's. One of the games I got was twilight 2000. Basically in a nutshell WWWIII happened and nukes flew, but not en-masse. Just gradual enough not to completely wipe-out humanity--eventually leading to the colapse of society. First game I ever played that had rules for catching disiese like malaria and pneumonia.

D&D was always present and until the mid to late 80's it was pretty much the only game in town RPG wise. I think the second most popular was West Ends star wars role playing game. Shadow run didn't come out until 88 or 89.

Things to keep in mind:
Computer games were real simple and did not have much depth or graphics to them. So they could not compete for the depth of wargames such as advanced third reich, Nato--the next war in europe, 2nd fleet and others. Ohh sniper.....

Getting together was a bit easier--once everyone had a car. Set the day and time and go. Being a teenager helped (no bills to really worry about). But that is mor a function of not being a full adult than it being the 80's. Well maybe not. With parents these days would they let their teenage son or daughter go to game store and hang out until 11:00 AM with a mix of other teenagers and adults?

What I have found is that in hte past 30 years gamers have trended for playibility over realism/simulation. Gamers also prefer quicker games that take no more than 3-4 hours to play. In the 80's people would set up and run games that would last days or months. That was more acceptable.

I feel like today everything is shorter than it used to be. Look at how news coverage has gone down the toilet. Apparently as recently as the 80s though people still had time for a good in depth game. Today people complain about having to run back and forth across the game world in The Witcher.

I'm only 31, so I was born in 83. But when I was around 10 or 11, one of my cousins(actually, no relation, though his sister had a daughter with my uncle...so... kinda relation now) gave me all his old D&D stuff. Ya know, the Red and Blue books,, Keep on the Borderlands, a copy of Tomb Of Horrors*, and, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Then a year or so after that, my mom was convicted of a DUI, and attended AA. Her sponser's husband played D&D, and since I was interested, I would spend weekends with them and play D&D. Well, AD&D. With a bunch of 40 year olds.

So, I grew up playing with "old skool" players and GMs. My first ever character was an 8th level minotaur fighter. Had a blast. They were very big on forcing roleplaying over rolling dice, backstories, etc.

And yeah, what Koekepan said about the lethality: true. The first time I ran Keep on the borderlands, the party was killed at the gate for being douche-bags and not knowing how to be polite. Then the next time, they rolled in, were just civil enough, then wandered out into the swamps and were eaten by a bunch of lizardmen. THIRD time, they got into the keep, avoided the swamp, went to the Caves of Chaos, and were promptly killed by the pit trap just inside the kobold cave. All in one session.

Playing with the older folks, I was told to bring multiple characters: there were only three players, but our party had about 13-15 people in it, counting a few henchmen, with levels ranging from 1st(my characters) up to 12 and 13, but with many around the 5th or 6th mark. And if your character died, that was it. Done.

Oh, and holy batman, the house rules. All sorts of'em. Some good, some bad, but some very interesting.



*Anyone tells you they "beat" tomb of horrors, they are either a liar, or a cheat. Everything you touched in that fuckin place would kill you, trap your soul, etc.

Yeah, I have that adventure. I've never seen so many freaking traps. Never ran it though....

And you shouldn't except as an exercise in sadism. For a similar style, though no nearly as insane, I recommend Necropolis. It's got the theme of dealing with a powerful undead being, with a ridiculous amount of traps, but it's not nearly as "gotcha" as ToH.

I was so curious about ToH that I went and found it on the internet and read it.

The thing that bothered me the most about it wasn't even the sheer deadliness (after all, if I had the funds to do so, why wouldn't I be able to build a labyrinth that would pretty much kill everyone who went inside, if that was the deliberate and only function of the structure?) but the fact that it was completely arbitrary. There was no real good explanation of how the various things in there were created nor was the stuff in there particularly consistent with other published works. It was basically like a statted-out one-time hallucination.

I could almost see, on that basis, running it, and then doing the whole "it was just a dream" bit after the TPK.

Actually, in that way, it kind of reminds me of weird fiction from the 60s and 70s, which were kind of like that. See also Ray Bradbury, for disturbing fantasies that taken as a whole didn't really make sense; exuberant, but not logically consistent.

Perhaps that was the zeitgeist and things didn't start to get concrete and logical till the unification of the rules systems of the 80s.

Well, the purpose of ToH was more or less to kill munchkins. 20th level characters barged in in their dozens, only to be annihilated. It's basically an exercise in sadism, designed by Gygax to kill all the "uber" characters people walked around talking about how they could beat everything. It's purposefully dickish.