This is my 18th post for RPGaDay 2023, if you’re not sure what that is you can find Autocratik’s blog post about it by clicking here.
Basically a list of prompts is provided to generate discussion around RPG topics, with creators making a blog post, video or podcast each day during the month of August, the list of prompts is included below:
Favourite game SYSTEM
Again I’m going to cheat a bit for this one and probably be terribly boring and plump for old Dungeons & Dragons, now I’m not going to argue that D&D is the best gaming system on the planet, in some cases it’s barely a system at all; however I’ve got to give it respect for really launching RPGs into the world and for all the hours of enjoyment I have had running D&D, whether that be official editions, retroclones or whatever, there is so much stuff that has sprouted from the central tree of D&D that it’s difficult for it not to hold a special place in my heart.
If you need any evidence for how passionate people get about D&D you need only look online where people are endlessly debating—and sometimes arguing about—various editions, rules queries, the history of the game and all manner of other stuff associated with it. If we weren’t that bothered about it, people wouldn’t do it, it’s my experience that people only argue for any length of time about something they’re invested in.
So why do I say “old D&D”?
For me the older versions of the game lean much more towards a slightly grimmer, low power-level, dung-farmers picking up a sword and striving to become an adventurer vibe that the more recent versions of the game; that’s not to say more recent editions are without merit, but the older versions appeal to me taste more, my beloved retroclones and various spin-offs also tend to start with the older versions. I feel that there is a lot more room to customise, change and “hack” the older editions of D&D without worrying about breaking them, they also have the adventage that people have been playing and re-jigging these versions for years, chance are if you want to find some alternate rules for an aspect of old D&D then someone out there will have already done it or at least something similar.
You only need to look at some shots of my gaming shelves to see how many D&D clones and D&D-adjacent books I have:
… and those pictures don’t even show the three shelves of 3rd edition stuff I’ve got, and—to some extent or another—I love the fact that I can pull stuff from all of these books and use them in whatever OSR or early D&D style game that I am running.
My own history with D&D
I’m not going to get into the actual history of D&D in this post because that would take far too long and there are numerous people, both on the internet and off, who have done a far better job than I would, but I can definitely talk about my own history with the game.
My earliest memory associated with D&D was seeing a battered copy of the Rules Cyclopedia in a second-hand shop when I was very young and was exploring some town or other with my parents; I don’t recall much about that trip save that we were in a rush and I didn’t have long to spend in the book-shop. I was set on spending my saved pocket money on this book that looked so bizarre and intriguing, of course my parents counselled me to wait and see if I saw anything else on the trip I liked better and than the book would be here when I got back, of course when we got back someone had bought the book and I was—I think it’s fair to say—devastated in the way that only small children can be over something so innocuous.
Of course this was back in the day before the internet when PDFs were widely available and I never saw another copy of the RC until may years later when I would buy a POD copy from DrivethruRPG (fairly recently in-fact); however, my parents—not really understanding this whole RPG thing but wanting to cheer me up—bought me a copy of MB Games Heroquest for Christmas and my eyes lit up when I opened it and read the simple rules for running people through dungeons and the like. I loved the plastic miniatures and the cardboard furniture, all of it.
It would become something of a tradition that my parents would get me some random RPG-adjacent boardgame for Christmas for a good few years, eventually leading into myself and some school-friends falling down the Games Workshop miniatures wargaming rabbit-hole for far too many years, until I discovered Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and became enamoured of that, but that’s another story.
Sadly I don’t have any of the boardgame still and only clearly remember a couple of them, one was in the very early nineties and was an “Easy to master” version of the game:
I only really remember this version of the game due to an unfortunate incident, I went to sleep on Christmas day with the books open next to my bed having been excitedly reading them until the wee small hours, sadly I was violently ill during the evening and vomited all over the box and books which pretty much ruined them. It’s fair to say I was pretty gutted about this, but a few years later my parents would get me a copy of Dragon Strike with it’s infamously cheesy video:
If you’re “feeling brave tonight” then you can check out the full video that came with Dragon Strike on Youtube:
This video is beyond cheesy, it’s well into Stilton territory, but it really sold the game of D&D to my impressionable, young mind, I wanted to be that guys who was doing the silly voices and making a game world for the people gathered around the table, cheering when they did well and commiserating in their defeats.
I’d had the Advanced Fighting Fantasy books for a while before I got any D&D stuff, since you could buy them in the highstreet stores at the time and they had some cool advice in them (in-fact I still have my original AFF books) but that cheddar-dripping video from Dragon Strike was the first game that allowed me to really visualise how running a game would work. I stuggled with reading when I was younger—although later I would overcome that and I now love it—and would often have difficulty picturing the things that books were talking about, in the dim and distant past when you couldn’t go on the internet and see a million videos on how to run a D&D game, this gorgonzola-infused video was a really lifeline for my love of RPGs and it really fired me up, leading to me trying to run some games for friends using a mixture of Heroquest minis and barely understood rules.
Of course the games were objectively terrible and eventually we’d move onto the other things, but we had fun for a while and that love of being a GM never really left me, and I pretty much owe that to D&D and Dragon Strike, so that—as well as the infinitely hackable and tweak-able system—is why it will always have a special place in both my heart and on my bookshelf.