I've been playing tabletop RPGs since 1981 and reading comic books even longer. Here I'll talk about TTRPGs, Comics, Fantasy, Science-Fiction and other Geek Stuff, including product reviews, game history, and details on the 1981 Moldvay Basic ("B/X") Dungeons and Dragons game I'm running for my (currently) 13 YO daughter and her friends that I started for her when she was 11 during the pandemic lockdowns.
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I started playing very late. I was playing in a mutants and masterminds game themed off of an anime called code geass, but my first character turned out to be one of my best. i made her japanese and manipulative. Due to circumstances in her background she wanted the Britanian forces to win, but everyone else allied with the japanese. Then while we tried to play both sides the party made a big mistake and had me be the one to negotiate with the britanians, where i realized all the cards are in my hand, I'm going to betray the party. From there the party was permanently split. i'm surprised the dm and players went with it and I think it became really cool because we sort of had parallel but interesting stories together. Another highlight when when she found a scientist who could tell us how to disarm the bomb and was about to interrogate her, but then the gm says her daughter was with her and my character froze not knowing what to do and all of the other players used to her selfish and cruel behavior were stunned, but the gm read the backstory and knew that she had a soft spot for kids and couldnt bring herself to do anything to the mom with the kid there. Very fun times.
There were great bonuses tied to ability scores, especially the primary ones for your class, in 1e. Wizards were limited in max spell level they could learn/cast, and got bonus spells in their books with high INT, for example. Melee characters got increased damage and to hit bonuses as well. My group wouldn't think of playing a character that didn't have at least an 18 in their primary attribute, while in 5e for all its faults and the evilness of WotC/Hasbro you can play someone with much lower primary scores (at least to start) without much trouble.
I’ll never forget reading Roger Moore’s evocative Dragon magazine article about the astral plane at age 12 in 1982 as I was flying to Germany with my family. I imagined the pea soup outside the plane’s windows was the astral plane!
I feel like I have at least heard of a lot of the things you have posted about before, but this was entirely novel and very interesting new information about the history of the hobby! Thank you so much for doing this research and sharing what you've found.
I appreciate that! I will also direct you to Zenopus Archives who researched a lot of this stuff years ago. They are so knowledgeable about the Holmes edition of Basic D&D (hence the "Zenopus" name of the blog which comes from the Tower of Zenopus in that edition). There's a chapter in a recently published book called "50 Years of Dungeons & Dragons" (finally got my copy yesterday!) that includes a lot of this info, written by Zenopus Archive and Tony Rowe. I haven't read the entire book yet, but their chapter is really good. zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/ mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547604/fifty-years-of-idungeons-and-dragonsi/
I don't think it was realism they were shooting for in combat. I believe they were looking for an objective way to adjudicate the process of combat, so the PCs/players get a fair chance to utilize planning and strategy without get an off the cuff decision of the GM that "oh, the monster hit you before you acted" based on a snap judgement.
A facet of the MAR Barker situation that I never see discussed is that everyone gets so stuck on "Was MAR Barker personally evil y/n?" that there is almost no sober reflection on the worldview and biases that his work itself is communicating. EotPT itself communicates a pretty noxious worldview about how the world works and how disparate groups interact and extreme-even-for-the-time bioessentialism. I certainly hadn't guessed the *degree* Barker sucked prior to the 2022 statement, but I could tell something was seriously off with EotPT when I read through it. Terrible shame, there are facets of it that are interesting, but it would be more work to fix it than to make something new from scratch.
Prolific bestselling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson made a critical framework for fantasy stories - hard magic, which has rules which let the point of view protagonist use magic or be unable to use it. For example the “bending rules” magic in Avatar. The alternative is soft magic, where magic is mostly in the background and is mysterious and for atmosphere. Take Gandalf. What are the “rules” for magic in LOTR? Tends to be deus ex machina or nerfed when the story calls for it. Pre-d and d, 95% of pulp stories featured grounded magicless fighter hero’s. Conan, Doc Sampson, Zorro, Flash Gordon, the knights of the round table, Tarzan, Buck Rogers, John Carter. Only the character named Mandrake himself uses mysterious powers without rules the reader can understand to resolve plot points. Later Harry Potter, Dr. strange and Jedi knights join mandrake as soft magic protagonists but in 1970 you didn’t have those stories until d and d.
its also more important in a dungeon that you are expected to visit again and again, so it doesnt feel exactly the same each time. If you are doing a big WOTC module you may visist each place onece and then never touch the book again after fininshing it so its less important there.
The whole thing about Gary changing his mind etc is pretty to explain. OD&D Gary was Chill Hobbyist Gary. AD&D Gary was asshole corporate cocaine fiend Gary.
Thank you, but for this I would have never known Warlock existed. I only learned of Chainmail and OD&D a few years ago despite playing first B/X in or around 1983. My only modules played being KotB, IoD and Castle Amber. So much homebrewed even back then, but most just from the Basic or Expert books and those modules!
I’m a proud nerd Papa today. Riley (14) texted me from the high school cafeteria and asked me to send her screen prints of her character, Gilbert the Glorious (half elf paladin). Apparently they’re playing D&D during lunch!
I somehow missed this one. You need to do a video where you reenact the filibuster from Parks and Rec, but you read an entire issue of Dragon. Another great video!
So interesting, would be cool to see the original version, someone needs to make a pdf for the masses! I pledged for the hardcover + pdf on the first day. Great momentum there, hope you hit the stretch goal soon!
FYI, the 1975 Warlock does not include Paladins, Rangers, or Triple or Quadruple Multi-Classes. It's limited to the following classes: Magic-Users, Clerics, Thieves, Fighting Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, Magical-Fighter Combination, Magical-Cleric Combination, Clerical-Fighter Combination and Elves. Essentially, the LBB classes (although it's definitely in the "Race as Class" camp) plus Thieves and Combinations of the three LBB classes. The "Combination" classes are meant for humans and each have their own level/experience tables.
I really appreciate the nerdy scholarship you’re doing. I love the Caltech campus. Those turtles wander pretty far from the pond. In highschool, my friends and I would sneak into the steam tunnels. In the mid to late 2000s it was a relaxing place to take my dog and let him run around off leash. Anyway, I think Warlock was probably the least nerdy RPG thing that was played at Caltech. I used to play at a rpg store on Colorado (near the cross street of Michigan, I think), and occasional a Caltech student would drop in wanting us to play test something they came up with. They were systems that only an engineering student could love. 😂 Back when I played (approx 79-84) every game had “house rules”. I don’t think I’ve ever played in a by-the-book campaign. We didn’t know what home brew was because it was all home brew, more or less.
Thank you for the update adding the link to my blog. You can find my posts where I originally reported the influence of Warlock on Holmes Basic D&D here: zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2012/02/influence-of-warlock-on-holmes-basic.html
FYI, Tony Rowe and I also just co-wrote an article about Holmes' work on Basic D&D in the new book, "Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons", part of which discusses Warlock. zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2024/04/50-years-of-d-forthcoming-book-from-mit.html
On the contrary, I think the richness in choices and options in 1e that greatly impact gameplay, and interconnected puzzles like encumbrance, illumination, food and water, and overland travel, which all fade in importance by mid-level as PCs gain magic that eases or negates these burdens, shows that 1e is extremely good at offering a lot to chew on at levels 1-7. This is the level range where dungeon delving is super common, and that makes certain things important like weapon speed, space required, Thief skills, breaking doors, surprise and encounter distance, etc. This is NOT just "roleplaying", this is a wargame about a small team of specialists assaulting a fortified dungeon environment. Although of course there is important parelying with creatures, and negotiating with NPCs especially in town, and I would again characterize these as interactions with game elements rather than purely roleplay. There are wins and losses in them, and something to gain, the choice to ignore it entirely. So it's war in the sense that diplomacy is prelude to war. Only interactions between PC team members are really purely roleplaying. As for enemies, the humanoids and undead up through 4 HD are human-scale and work a lot like man-to-man combat, and these enemies are fairly common. Your encounter tables are also going to include a lot of actual humans and demihumans. Maybe not in a dungeon, but certainly in town and the "close" wilderness. And nonhuman enemies like Stirges and Giant Rats don't operate any differently from humans unless you actually use the WvAC rules (almost none did or do) and speed factor for monsters is generally as unarmed fighting ... because they're unarmed. 2e introduced SF for large monsters so you could use that if you like. Rules pottage can make for a good D&D game. Then at mid-level the DM's creativity becomes much more important in creating new challenges, although the game supports things like seafaring and underwater adventure, aerial adventure, and deep wilderness adventure. Monstrous monsters come into play more frequently that don't wear armor or wield weapons, and magic weapons have faster weapon speeds approaching 0, and being in larger dungeons or outdoors gives more room to fight and opens up the tactical possibilities and expectations - and lacking the security of impassible walls to guard your flanks can be a big change to the wargame. And the rewards on the more valuable and high-end range of the magic item lists start becoming a lot more available. The mid-level spell options start becoming really useful on a large battlefield. Too, you can imagine a wargames setup where there are nonhuman elements that don't use exactly the same rules. A tank or artillery piece in a WW2 game, or a high-altitude drone spotter who calls in airstrikes in a modern setting. A medieval wargame could include siege engines, fortifications, men-at-arms, sappers, and the construction and hiring of the same - and 1e DMG devotes large sections to this. And finally at high level, again DM creativity is impactful, but premade challenges like plane travel become available. There are a lot of really powerful magic items that players can still salivate over, high-level spells, etc. and these are generally modifications to the same rules used before, and applicable in a dungeon or wilderness adventuring environment. What we don't see is support for mystery-investigation, extensive rules for negotiation and interrogation, seduction, PC lineage, political jockeying, growth in PC personalities and achievement of emotional objectives, etc. It is not a game about those things! In fact, with magic like Charm Person and ESP it becomes trivial to bypass a lot of these situations and centering an adventure or campaign around them will create rather stale gameplay. The DM can always ban those powers, such as by making the vital NPCs immune to them, but that is a campaign-level change and doesn't affect what the published game is about. These roleplaying elements should exist in the D&D wargame, just not as the central pillars. For a game that is truly about these things, see Burning Wheel. So, I would suggest instead that it will take 5e players a very long time to realize that D&D is almost completely a wargame in which you are very much encouraged to roleplay.
Wow! Great video Martin. Talking about the Complete Warlock, Balboa Game company, and the Warhouse really brought up some great memories as I practically grew up at the Warhouse since 1981 until it closed in 2022 with the passing of the owner and my good friend Steven Luckey. The early history of the game and its variations is important to the games legacy as well as its future. Thanks for taking the time to explain the gaming scene in California during those early days. 40+ years of my life with good friends and memories of playing the games we all love. Thank you. Looking forward to more videos from you.
Those warlock rules look to have been written by a Computer Science person. The formatting of it almost hints at nroff/troff being used. Now idly wondering if Rob Pike was involved in those early games.
They might have been CS majors. Or just engineers. Warlock was the most playable system to come out of Cal Tech, playable enough to gain traction. It wasn’t the only one. I used to play D&D in the back room of a game store on Colorado Blvd not far from Cal Tech, and occasionally a student would show up and want us to play test their new systems. The most impressive (and unplayable) combat system was written and bound like a thesis. An inch and a half thick, page after page of matrices and charts of weapons and armor made of different alloys and materials. Penetration angles. The mohr scale. And I don’t know what, I only thumbed through it once. It was as if material science engineers and physicists had gotten together. 😂 (That’s exactly what it was.) The Cal Tech students didn’t (afaik or remember) play at the store. They played in their dorms. The student body was somewhat insular. But we’d still hear stories about epic marathon games. The Warlock rules defined 1 real day as 1 game week for a reason. They were playing for days. That’s why they were reaching the high levels that Gygax couldn’t understand. Your theory about nroff/troff is probably correct. These kids had access to mini computers. The dorms were equipped with terminals.
Okay so it is called the War House, and the owner was Steven Luckey who was part of the Caltech wargames group back in the day. He published their rules for them until he received a cease and desist letter from TSR I think in 79-80. I had the good fortune to speak with him around 2001 and will tell you a couple things he shared with me then. First a bit of background though… I started playing D&D in 1977, and was located in Colorado. A friend from college had introduced me to D&D when he was home from college on Christmas Break that year. We bought our original RPG gaming books from Mile High Comics which had a store in Colorado Springs at the time. I originally bought one of the last of the brown boxed D&D sets however was called back by the store owner in early 1978 and he traded me a white bookset, a Holmes blue box, and a set of polyhedral dice for the 1st printing of the Little Brown Books that they had originally sold to me. By late 1978 our gaming group was looking for additional rpg gaming material, and whoa and behold, my friend Rodney bought a copy of the Complete Warlock, and I quickly snapped up a copy as well. Still have one now of the original four color cover (much faded, the brilliant green from the early version did not hold up well over time). So, a couple things to share with you. First original D&D, the reason they don’t specify which dice to use is because original D&D used six-sided, and in fact the brown box and early white box sets shipped with three very poor quality wooden d6’s. I have a photo of one of my original whitebox sets which included the three wooden dice. If you will look carefully at the alternative combat rules in original D&D you will notice that none of the combat tables in Men and Magic have a to-hit number higher than Seventeen. Now the rules mention using a d20 to resolve combat, however polyhedral dice were generally not available until after 1977, and they were definitely not included with the D&D LBB Boxed set, so you could (and we originally did) use d6s (because we were wargamers) to resolve combat using the alternate combat system in the original D&D rules. We didn’t have access to any copies of Chainmail because they were out of print, and had not been distributed to Mile High Comics. I didn’t ever play a game of Chainmail or own a copy of the little silver book until I attended GenCon in Indy after the Millenium some twenty five years after I started playing D&D. In the Complete Warlock they mention using d20’s for playing Warlock, what they mean was the d20’s that were 0-9 twice which are also used as percentile dice. If you check the attack tables and also the fumbles crits tables on page twenty they use percentile numbers to determine hits with a roll-under hit mechanic. Almost everyone had these dice because they were sold and used with war games. High quality Polyhedral were not commonly available until after 1980. Blue box included a set of Polyhedrals but they were very poor quality and wore out much too quickly. For combat we used the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets which had the Original D&D to-hit tables included. Ready Ref Sheets also included to-hit adjustment tables based on specific weapons types as well as a melee attack/strike order based on weapon length. Ranged weapons used Dex, and bow and thrown dagger users could always attack first, and got an additional attack at the end of the combat round if they were still alive. We used this because it was much simpler than the Melee rules in both D&D and Warlock. Early D&D was very much a hodge-podge of rules from different sources and this was reflected by what was available in our local gaming store. We should talk about Arduin, another D&D variant sometime as well . Steven Luckey was a great gamer, and he continued to run Warlock privately for a group of the Caltech Gamers, and still do I believe as they preferred their more concise rules over the vague hand waving of the original D&D. He also ran his game store in Long Beach until his untimely death in late 2021. I only learned about this today… I do have a full copy of Mike Riley’s revised Warlock rules, as well as an archive of his Warlock Rules Website. He was a gamer in the Caltech Group that also played in Steven’s games in Long Beach.
I've been working on my own game system for about 3 months now. Started teaching my wife 5th edition & she reminded me how overly complicated & numbery it is. That was the thought I had at 12 when I was first introduced to 2nd edition having never played a ttrpg game. I started designing my own system as a child, but it was above me at the time. I have the bones of my system & my wife & I are having so much more fun now. I designed a spell point system that is easy to understand & allows for high magic use. The 2 main things I don't like about a lot of systems are that damage, to hit, armor class & hit points all tend to scale together. Meaning at higher levels players have to calculate bigger numbers & do more math however the damage & to hit percentage actually hasn't changed. Some players may feel this adds realism, but for us it just adds numbers. The other thing was how 5e's spell concentration rules are more geared towards balancing spell mechanics rather than thematic realism. Necessary, but at the same time spells that feel to me like they should require concentration like mage hand don't, while spells like bless do. Again, everyone has there own play style. Warlock is lost on me, but I wouldn't knock anyone who does enjoy it. To each their own 🙂
You might check out a lot of the OSR and retro-clone stuff. For an extremely simple gaming rule set, try Searchers of the Unknown (1 page). For a little more depth try Pocket Fantasy RPG (4 pages) or Microlite 74 (16 pages). 5e tries to keep the numbers low, as in modifiers to a d20 roll for example as a correction to 3e's excessive modifier calculation, but then replaces that with a thicket of counters and if:then reactions that can quickly complicate things. While 0e and 1e do an excellent job of keeping numbers small, and 1e/2e have mechanics that taper off PC power gain after mid-level.
Yet another awesome video of yours. I saw you did the Bard but would love for you to deep dive on each of these individually. Absolutely fascinating and I truly appreciate your work. 😊
Always great content but youtube makes it impossible to watch by keep bombarding me with 30-40 second Ads. RU-vid is a premium only service nowadays. Only creator's can change this trend by turning off midroll Ads, take a short term hit on revenue and give youtube back to the people.
Your appreciation of abstract combat vs rules heavy is what I see as the difference between a role--player vs a typical gamer. Gamers love rules. They need (ney, crave) structure; the more, the better. I used to watch miniature gamers at my local game store with such fascination as to how they kept all of their rules in their heads, and how they were able to complete a turn faster than I expected (though still about10-15 minutes). These early D&D folks mostly came from the gamers world. It's portrayed in the microcosm of Gary Gygax (the gamer) and Dave Arneson (the role-player), played out in their water and oil relationship.
Oh! That was so frustrating! Thank you for the tip... I will try to remember that next time. And... thank you SO MUCH for staying through the bonus content. That means so much to me. Cheers, friend!
Thanks for this video. A great trip down memory lane! I must have been among the first people in the UK to have the MM2. I believe it was released at (US) Gen Con in 1983, so July or August. I wasn’t at the con but did come back from a holiday to the US in, I think, August ‘83. I recall that the comic/bookstore that I got it from in the US had only just received it themselves. When I showed it to my gaming friends in the UK, they were amazed! Back then, it took many months for books released in the US to be sold in the UK. I remember eagerly awaiting the release of the UA and loving it when I finally got my hands on it. It had a lot of errors, so much so that a pullout errata had to be published for it in Dragon Magazine. I pasted mine in my UA. I got L&L when it came out with the Easley cover. I didn’t acquire D&DG until the ‘90s when I bought a couple of secondhand copies with the Cthulhu and Melniboné mythoi. Neither was in perfect shape but my mother, a qualified craft bookbinder, was able to make them look almost new.
