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Posted by:
Carl
on
1/27/2010 5:27:18 PM
When I was a freshman and sophmore in high school I rode the city bus to school and back. It was a long ride, just under 2 hours. In the morning I usually slept, but in the afternoon, I read. Since I had only two real interests in high school, sex and AD&D, and by law I was not allowed to practice or pursue the former on a city bus, I read my D&D books.
I remember specifically reading the index of the Dungeon Master's Guide, finding entries in there that interested me and then reading the text in that section. I learned a lot about the game doing this. I also remember reading all of the spell descriptions and committing them to memory as a personal challenge. I was not a very good student, but I was an AD&D trivia whiz. In my peer group that put me squarely in the middle. My friend were fairly mediocre students, too, but damn did we know that game well. One of my great "what-ifs" has been, "What if I had applied myself to my academics with the ferocity I applied myself to AD&D?" I'll turn 40 this year, and as I look back now, I can say without much doubt that I probably would have gone to an Ivy League college. I don't know that I'd be as happy as I am now, though. In fact, I wouldn't be me at all. Frankly, "what-ifs" are kind of stupid.
Back to the game. As I'm reading through the Player's Handbook again, I'm struck by insight and understanding that I never had before. Take movement, for instance. The inches-as-a-representation of movement thing is pretty cool. You can scale it for mode (combat, long-distance travel, creeping down a dungeon corridor), you can scale it for time (segements, rounds, turns, hours, days, weeks, etc), you can even scale it for encumberance (none, light, medium, etc.). It's pretty basic Algebra. I never really got this before. Previously, I never really questioned why someone was only allowed to move 12' in 6 seconds. It was just a game artifact, and I accepted it at face value. Now, I can see that combat in AD&D is a true abstraction. It's not supposed to be a simulation, or anything close to it. You can only move 12' in 6 seconds because you are assumed to be fighting for your life and under attack and so you're actively defending yourself while you're moving, hence 12' but understand that this is with your weapon and shield in defensive positions, carefully keeping an eye on your opponents, carefully choosing your footing and so forth. This is where the beauty of AD&D really begins to show. As a DM, I would allow someone to move faster, but there would be a penalty. You might trip. You will be more susecptible to attacks from opponents, you may not be ready to attack once you complete your movement. It's up to me, the DM, and having good judgement and the trust of my players I can adjudicate the circumstances. That's something distinctly missing from D&D 3.0 and onward.
I'm struck by the amount of latitude a DM is given in judging a game in AD&D. Every rule is in actuality a guideline. These guidelines are there to enable the players to explore and interact with their world through their characters. They are there to empower the DM to provide his players with a fulfilling experience. In later editions, they became boundaries from within which players were allowed to act on their environment and they became limitations on DMs to keep them from making bad judgement calls. What they did was turn D&D into Monopoly. The DM became the banker. That's great if you're trying to run a tournament game where you have untrained DMs running pre-packaged adventures for players they have never met. Reading the Player's Handbook again, and recalling my personal gaming experiences over the years tells me that that is not what D&D is supposed to be. It's a very personal game, shared between a few people who have between them an understanding and an agreement of the rules (or guidelines) of their game. It's like playing pretend with your friends as a kid. You be the cops. I'll be the robbers. Between us we'll agree that these are the rules for our game. When we play at home, the cops have to touch the robbers to catch them. When we play at school the cops only have to call out the robber's name. There was never supposed to be an "official" game of Cops and Robbers, and why would you want one? Half the fun of that game was deciding the rules before play, between rounds, improvising during play, and then the post-game evaluation of how it worked (after switching sides at least once). This sounds like a primative game of D&D to me.
The reality of doing this starting to smack me in the face. I'm missing a key component of a D&D game: a game setting. I'm tempted to bribe Alexis to put together a small chunk of Europe for me to get started. I also have some questions for him about running a game without alignments (something I've done for years, but not using AD&D rules). Alignments play a huge part in AD&D. Maybe I'll just give it a little more of think and then post on his blog.
How is your week?
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