The Making of a 1980s Dungeons & Dragons Module 59
An anonymous reader writes: Over at Medium, Jon Peterson (author of Playing at the World) has put up a new in-depth article covering the internal process at TSR that created Dungeons & Dragons modules in the 1980s. The adventures created at that time (by the likes of Tracy Hickman, then a staff designer) paved the way for many later computer role-playing games, and this piece shows how TSR work was pitched, storyboarded, proofed, edited and organized. With the positive reception of the new 5th edition of D&D and the attention paid to the fortieth anniversary of the game, the historical record behind modern gaming gets ever more important.
How many virgins were involved? (Score:1, Funny)
Not sacrifice, just the 40 year old kind?
Re:How many virgins were involved? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sacrifice, just the 40 year old kind?
Well that brings me to a fun story of how I got into D&D. I was trucked off by my parents to Florida one summer to stay with a relative for a few weeks. Lucky me there was a hobby store nearby and I had stashed a jar of quarters that had been untapped all year. After looking around for a few hours (what else was there to do in Florida when you're 14?), I found the D&D books, they were already second edition but something about them intrigued me. They were way beyond the scope of playing a video game (we're talking monochromatic consoles/handhelds back then), but they offered so much wealth in terms of creation and exploration. I made the decision to buy a kit complete with DM Guide, Monster Manual and a few starter adventures. I went to the register to inquire if my terms could be met.
I asked the nice lady behind the counter "Can I pay with all quarters (in my New York accent which I didn't know until that day that I had one)" To which the lady replied "What are kawters?". I hadn't brought any with me, so it took me a few minutes to explain that 25% of a dollar was a coin that had a $0.25 value. When she finally got it she said "Oh you mean Kwat-ers." I came back the next day and paid with my Kwa-ters, laughing the whole way. It's one of those things you never forget, and part of it was because it was about D&D, a game that literally helped saved the bored skull of a preteen.
In the end, I actually became friends with someone I never got along with previously, simply because we wound up at a rather raucous D&D game together. Still best friends decades later.
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I used to buy them even though I didn't have any friends to play with. That was back when nerds like me were persona-non-grata in school and no one would have dreamed of openly admitting to being a D&D fan. I often wonder how many others there were in my school, or how much things could have been different if there had been some way for us to make contact without getting the shit kicked out of us for being such geeks.
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I know I spent far more time reading the manuals than playing. Especially reading monster descriptions, treasures, and equipment. I was mostly interested in D&D but probably read manuals for at least half a dozen different game types, just out of curiosity, even though I never played any of them at all.
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I realize you're making a funny, but back when I played, back in the ancient times when 1st edition was just called AD&D because there wasn't a 2nd edition yet, we had actual girls in my campaign. With real boobs and vaginas. Which I know for a fact 'cause I got nekkid with a couple of 'em from time to time. And this at a college with a 4:1 male:female ratio, even. I'm not sure how this "nerd == virgin" idea got started, but consenting nerds have been screwing e
I remember playing (Score:2)
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Nerd!
Re:I remember playing (Score:4, Insightful)
...so is blizzard going to bring on their first role playing game soon or something?
they made an ok nethack clone back in the day (18 years ago? or something) with a really neat rendered intro video but it wasn't much of a role playing game and then they made a virtual amusement park game with multiple players and rides that you needed 40 people to go through but I haven't heard of them producing a rpg yet..
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I remember playing D&D back in the 80s. For me, it was soon replaced by video games.
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I remember eventually replacing the D&D books with a D&D video game (on a Commodore 64).
Still played from the books off and on for years, though - it was amazing how many military folks played D&D back in the late '80s (at least in the USAF), and sometimes nearly the whole squadron would get together for a massive session on occasion (it got hard to play after a certain amount of alcohol, but damn it got funnier.)
I always thought these were "1 person" projects (Score:1)
Most D&D modules have 1 or 2 authors listed on the front.
It's pretty clear after reading this, that there were many people involved throughout the entire process.
Fun article. But "Quagmire"?! (Score:2)
Re:Fun article. But "Quagmire"?! (Score:4, Funny)
Giggygaxiddy.
It was a lot more social (Score:4, Informative)
When we played, it was a far more social game than any of the electronic equivalents. A good dungeon master would let you try creative solutions for problems that weren't pre-programmed, sometimes throwing the game into entirely uncharted territory. More importantly, your team-mates were characters with personality, not just players with supporting stats.
How often does the thief in the party actually steal from team-mates in the electronic versions? Yet our team had a thief character who would do exactly that -- swipe anything that wasn't nailed down -- and sometimes use a crowbar if it was. :)
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It was called "role playing" instead of "roll playing" for a reason. :)
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OK Mark Rein-Hagen.
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This. I mean, it's one reason I prefer the Paranoia series - because yes, you can make a die roll, but that's merely a suggestion - the GM has the real power to decide what REALLY happens. Roll failed? Well, what's more fun - it failed, or it succeeded, but in unexpected ways?
It's one reason the game basically says "GM fiat" is the best armor you can equip yourself with (or worst, depending), as with weapons and such.
Otherwise the game r
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The flip side of this is when you just want to play a game. There is a bit of fun in bashing shit, taking its stuff, then being able to bash BIGGER shit and getting BETTER stuff.
People I know set up a game for after work, asked me to play, and I had to sa no. Why? The thought of having to wait 40 minutes between events where we got things done because you always had to wait for whoever felt the need to ROLE PLAY MY WACKY QUIRKS at that exact time, when I just want to buy some fucking rope, would have made
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well.. as often as it's scripted in.
quite a few games have backstabbing party companions as part of the story.
but.. were your friends playing the roles of the characters - or were they roling the character as them(which, actually, isn't the point, the point being taking the role of the character instead of making the character act like you would, which would take the story to uncharted pointless ends quite quickly).
like, if the character has low wisdom.. well.. then he has low wisdom - same with alignments
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which, actually, isn't the point, the point being taking the role of the character instead of making the character act like you would, which would take the story to uncharted pointless ends quite quickly
What authority decides what the point of a role playing game is again? I just want to make sure I'm playing my RPGs in the proper manner.
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Exactly!
I played a good bit of these types of games as a kid, D&D, Shadowrun, various White Wolf games. And we played them as games, none of us cared to actually try and act out scenes or conversations. Even my Thespian friends didn't care to play some predetermined role, just playing the game using the established rules and systems was all we wanted. This probably worked well because we were all too broke to afford buying silly modules anyways. So the stories and adventures we had were almost entirely
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So, to get this straight, you are seriously wondering why someone would insist that the point of playing something called a "role playing game" would be to play a role. Probably because if they didn't then what you were playing would have to have another name.
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So, to get this straight, you are seriously wondering why someone would insist that the point of playing something called a "role playing game" would be to play a role.
Believe me, I don't wonder about that even a little. Instead, I want to make sure my role playing is sanctioned.
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I left D&D behind a long time ago, but in a Gloranthan campaign I once played a primitive barbarian. The referee got bored with Glorantha (it was the last in a long run of campaigns), so he warped the party into Cthulhu By Gaslight and someone made the mistake of trying to explain revolvers to the characters. It didn't take long before my character had an injured hand from testing/demonstrating what he was told using a bullet in one hand and...
He wasn't a dumb character, he was just seeing if he underst
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How often does the thief in the party actually steal from team-mates in the electronic versions? Yet our team had a thief character who would do exactly that -- swipe anything that wasn't nailed down -- and sometimes use a crowbar if it was. :)
It's those little amusing things that make RPGs so much fun. One of my groups has an ongoing joke that usually crops up in Sci-Fi games where we make strong booze on the side and get a little business going selling that despite the fall of governments or alien invasions going on.
I remember a fantasy game where I was the only character to have a magic sword (or any magic weapon, for that matter) - yet I never once drew it. It wasn't cursed or anything like that, I just rarely got into those kinds of scrapes
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The "anything can happen" rule is both the life and death of RPG's. No, it doesn't translate to even online play necessarily.
And it's more difficult than you might think to have a team of people playing those kinds of games WITHOUT going stupid. Your example is perfect. Exactly the kind of thing to give players a laugh, keep the DM on their toes, and not be covered by any existing rules.
Problem is, having people to play with where it doesn't descend into what happens in friendly-fire CS:GO matches.
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Just curious - did y'all treat your Party thief like any other (NPC) thief? Or did he get special treatment because he was part of the Party?
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But did they even know someone was stealing from them, or who was doing it? Just because the players knew what was going on doesn't mean the characters did.
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How often does the thief in the party actually steal from team-mates in the electronic versions? Yet our team had a thief character who would do exactly that -- swipe anything that wasn't nailed down -- and sometimes use a crowbar if it was. :)
I can remember a couple of sessions where we never even got fully equipped before getting into trouble because the party thief tried to rip off the shopkeep or someone in the bar where all the characters met to start, but I can't think of many cases where the thief didn't have at least a little respect for his party. The rest of them knew where he slept, after all.
Sphere of Annihilation in the Mouth (Score:2)
Most of the Expert (X# series) were damn good, like X1: The Isle of Dread and X2: Castle Amber. This one was completely underwhelming. PS I had to add the Tomb of Horrors trope somewhere...
Finally, 5th Edition! (Score:1)
My 4th Ed books are totally worn out.
Professional, soulless dungeons vs. real played (Score:3, Interesting)
-- James Maliszewski, Grognardia.blogspot.com
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I'd mod up except that whole me posting stuff already...and probably more, since the Erol Otus Basic and Expert sets were my vector into the whole RPG shebang. Then AD&D after that. The A1-A4 Slave Lords' setting were some of my favorites and I think they were designed for gaming specifically, I remember the test-characters names. Same with Tomb of Horrors and The Temple of Elemental Evil. But, the original I6: Ravenloft was mainly a story-driven session and it was best before all the back-story was
Keep on the Borderlands... (Score:2)
Best damn module EVER. :) I had bought a second hand copy of the original boxed set, and with it the guy threw in that module since it was low level and he'd played the hell outta it. I introduced it to my little brother and all my friends and there weren't any caves safe for Kobold or Orc or Bugbear to be found! I never played a character to very high levels, I found that D&D was more fun at the lower levels. At the point where you had to fight Dragons, Gods and Giants I lost interest. I moved on
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D&D 5e brings back a lot of the crap I didn't like from 3.x, ignores positive changes made to the game in 4e (powers, tactical battle with miniatures, skill challenges) and introduces a couple of new things: higher prices for books, missing information on how to handle certain situations (for instance: poison), and advantage/disadvantage. All summed up, it's got me saying "meh". The fact that the core rulebooks cost $50 each instead of $20-$30 makes them out of the price range of what 12 year-olds can afford (the age when I started playing AD&D). It seems to me that WotC really fucked up this release, not having the PHB, DMG, and MM ready at the same time. Yes the new books are gorgeous, but have you ever had to use them for building a character or referencing information mid-game? I give it a C.
I respectfully disagree. I started with 1st edition AD&D but lost interest once 2e came around. I once had a look at 4e, and found it completely baffling. I recently got back into D&D with a group of other middle-aged folk, and we initially using the 1e rules. When the 5e playtests came out, we switched to that, because we found that the new rules evoked the feel of AD&D, but are well-designed and coherent. I have all of the 5e rulebooks now, and I personally feel that these rules are like
5th Edition kind of sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
D&D 5e brings back a lot of the crap I didn't like from 3.x, ignores positive changes made to the game in 4e (powers, tactical battle with miniatures, skill challenges) and introduces a couple of new things: higher prices for books, missing information on how to handle certain situations (for instance: poison), and advantage/disadvantage. All summed up, it's got me saying "meh". The fact that the core rulebooks cost $50 each instead of $20-$30 makes them out of the price range of what 12 year-olds can afford (the age when I started playing AD&D). It seems to me that WotC really fucked up this release, not having the PHB, DMG, and MM ready at the same time. Yes the new books are gorgeous, but have you ever had to use them for building a character or referencing information mid-game? I give it a C.
Re:5th Edition kind of sucks (Score:4)
I'm pretty sure there's precedent for staggered releases of the core rulebooks. 3.5 and 3rd edition were like that, from what I remember, which actually allowed some third-party publishers to swoop in and fill the gap a bit for a few months.
Also I find it amusing that the things you list as "positive" changes to 4th edition are the exact things people like myself didn't like about it. Considering Pathfinder is far and away the best selling tabletop RPG today, it seems people who liked the 4e "improvements" are in the minority.
I'd also add that when I bought the 4th edition books, I was shocked to see they lacked rules for crafting (or anything not related to combat, really), stats for metallic dragons, or really any information about monsters other than their most basic combat statistics. So, again, precedent.
After seeing 5th edition played, and talking to the designers, I'm much more hopeful for it. At the very least, my group is going to try the starter once we're done our current Pathfinder campaign.
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Considering the intricately detailed magic item creation rules in the 3rd edition derived games, I have to disagree with you. There's obviously a market for it, as Pathfinder spent a lot of effort on refining the existing mechanics.
And I said metallic dragons. Chromatic dragons were in the 4e Monster Manual. And that was exactly the problem: The b
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Skill challenges were positive? We're thinking about the thing with the broken math ('fixed' a few times during the 4e active lifetime), the thing with 5 minutes of dicking around a a dozen dice rolls to get a binary result, and the thing that actively encouraged players with characters whose skills didn't match the challenge to not participate for fill of hurting the party's chances?
If your skill challeneges didn't suck, your DM was doing one hell of a job - and smartly house ruling a moderatly complex por
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The beauty is that you can still buy and play all the old stuff. There are both official reprints of the old 1st & 2nd edition games as well as free/low cost clones of everything pre-3rd edition (the Original game as well as the early "Basic" box set games). A great many of the adventure modules are available in both PDFs and hardbound reissues of the more iconic ones.
As for the price of the books, $20 in 1980, adjusted for inflation is $57. It's still hard to swallow when you can buy a printed copy [basicfantasy.org]
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Re:Still playing 1e after 35+ years (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't start playing until 2nd edition I believe, but I feel much the same way. The more I read about the newer editions the more it sounds like they are trying to imitate video games. Which is amusing because what I always wanted was a video game that would imitate the open world sandbox and freedom of D&D and similiar games.
Young people... (Score:2)