How A Forgotten D&D Rule Shaped the Entire Old-School Gaming Culture | Stealing from Older Editions 

I actually have sort of a ritual now where I usually drink a peppermint tea (or 2) during my d&d games. I'm definitely going to check out the sponsor (although shame I'm in Australia and will have to wait for international shipping).

Yes! Our sessions could run an entire day. We used to have double-night sleepovers. Party went to town to hear rumors and gear up on Friday night. Saturday we'd get up and find the dungeon and work our way to a safe location, barricade in for lunch. Then seek out at least another spot for dinner. Return to Hommlet or whatever town when it was time for bed, recover and resupply for solving challenges. All day again Sunday. Then a couple weeks off to scour the countryside looking for a suitable place to start construction on a manor or whatever. Also, even more significant than xp leveling, not every class had the same xp requirement to level up. Far faster leveling a thief than a wizard, so that meant your party really had to protect the squishy.

Use a map of your campaign, use flags to represent events/enemy, use dotted lines for their route, each dot is a time passing marker, kinda like a war map from medieval war “ movies” I use this as a DM, and when I solo play. Each day I move the flags, if I do nothing the enemy advance, I use real life chores/work to hold off the advancement of the enemy daily. I put marker points that require battle if the enemy lands on it, that requires doubling my physical exercise that week, and dice rolling combat. There’s more to it, that’s just the basic’s. I plant trees self employed so I work that in as customers are NPCs paying me to hold back the enemy from advancing on my map. lol.

It doesn't need long sessions, no. It does work best with sandbox and megadungeon play.

back in highschool around about 87 or 88, we typically ran from roughly noon or 1 until around about 10 to 11 PM, so pretty damned long sessions, though we tended to run out a few miles down the road and pick up some dinner around 6-7 or so.

True. Depending on the DM I ran both a cleric or fighter. As DM I let more experience people play two pcs. And Bola Bob was able to handle 3 pcs before his ninja ticked off his ranger.

@@RottenRogerDM Single player PVP!

@@Poldovico the story of my life

@@Poldovico True. While Bola Bob did not do voices for all 3 PCs, each was an individual. And with him kill the ninja, we all agreed my homebrew ninja class was op.

Why did they stop doing that

Oh hell, now I'm thinking about it too, but from 1981. Gonna take an extra whiskey or two to sleep tonight.

Don't worry. Abandoned characters become NPCs. All your old heros are now villagers giving quests to new adventurers.

@@abeartheycallFozzyThis makes me even sadder. They are just a bunch of has beens who are telling war stories in taverns to unsuspecting PCs who just want to randomly meet other PCs and get on with their adventure.

Honestly, they are probably doing fine without that meddling DM making their life difficult.

@@rurikau I used to be an adventurer like you....

Hey thanks ☺️

Collab? Collab? Collab?

Krawgg deals -4 damage due to his herniated disc and tennis elbow.

@@BWeManX Marcus Termilius cast True Resurrection on his mom to go make them lunch.

@@rsbrehm LOL it's good to have priorities

@@BWeManX ha

I saw a skit once ages ago (might have been before RU-vid even existed) where that was the exact premise. Two players and the DM had kept the campaign going for years, while a third guy (the rogue, of course) had moved on with life. But they decided to play one more campaign all together, and the rogue basically messes up the entire party for shits and giggles.

Wowza, could you imagine if everyone playing 5e was in the same shared campaign universe? Constantly in fear of a post on r/D&D saying something like "guys, I messed up, all followers of Pelor have lost their powers because my party just killed him", and you would just be obligated to say "okay, my paladin now suddenly cannot cast spells!"

I think you’re probably right! Although yes, still a weird interaction lol. Maybe that’s why modern WotC is leaning so hard into the idea that “every D&D game is part of the multiverse” so people can have their cake and eat it, too. Ooh that might be a whole other video topic…

You are drawing a long bow to say that is indicative of old school gaming. Been playing since mid 70s and never thought like that or any of the hundreds of other people I gamed with ever thought like that either.

@@briansmaller7443 Seeing as I referenced something that he specifically said in the video I can only assume you didn't watch all of it.

@@angiep2229 LOL, that guy was somewhat of an exception to the general mindset, I think. Been playing since the late 70s, and our various groups basically did exist in the same multiverse - but whenever gods were involved, there was a shared rule - nobody ever actually interacted with a true god, instead the gods had avatars which would manifest to carry out their plans. Defeating an avatar was impressive, and might well derail one of a god's avatars, but it didn't actually kill the god - they could manifest another avatar. The hubris of thinking your one character could kill a god and remove it from all D&D campaigns everywhere is rather...amusing, in a sad way.

Yeah that's the really hard part to always get across. You didn't just play the game back then, you had to invent it as you played. It always saddens me when I read a comment or hear someone say that they "can't use this" because there's no rule for that specific scenario, since man, we made up _everything_ back in the day.

Wait, you played before the books were published? How did you learn about the game then, I thought DND was invented then published, did word get out some how about it?

@@hunterketch989 Hmm? There's no chronology problem with the OP, the original (white box) version of D&D came out in '74. Edit- Since i seem to be in Old Man Nostalgia mode right now, there was a version of the game available before 74, as well. It was officially called Chainmail, and was more centered on miniatures wargaming. Even if you ignored that, though, Gygax and the other creators when through some pretty extensive playtesting and would publish their findings and new supplements in fanzines of the time, as well as, er, 'more official unofficial documents' to buyers; they were pretty short on funds and trying to create an entirely new genre of game so they could use the income. It's all a pretty fun read if you want to dive deeper. I always kind of wish they'd done a movie about the early days of the game.

@@danielgehring7437 Sorry, I was confused because I was thinking about how the basic rules are published as a book now and how the box sets included manuals. Interesting to know that word did get out through fanzines though.

@@hunterketch989 There was a box that gave you pamphlets that described how to play the game though third level in a very basic way and some monster stats. It also gave you an introductory module. It was actually a good way to introduce players to this new concept of role playing and dungeon exploration. It also gave us ideas on how to create our further adventures. By the time the first books came out, we had already developed our own version. We had three people making up parts of our world and took turns DMing. We would create adventuring parties from our character rosters we had made and, typically would have two players running two characters each and one of the DMs characters. Character would die or survive to begin their adventuring history. We had fun.

I wasn't impressed with the blue book. I stuck with the books preceding it. But boy oh boy, once the other books came out I grabbed them up quickly. But, as all my players knew who tried to be "rules lawyers" "Thems is more like...guidelines."

We pretty quickly moved to bookmarking our progress in modules, as some of them were longer than one session

Sound like one hell of a ride.

Please make a video of the story summary! That's an important historical reference for how D&D was played!

I think there are like 200 named NPCs in Storm King's Thunder alone :/

I brought my dice with me to Basic in 1986, and they made me throw them away, because they could be used "for gambling." Like, what kind of gambling uses a d20, sarge? Plus, the Senior Drill Sgt. yelled, "What are you, some kind of fucking Dungeon Master?" So they knew what it was for, they were just being dicks.

@@paulcoy9060 They probably had their own war gaming group and felt threatened by your obviously superior gaming choice. 😉

@@kythian It was Fort Benning, so they probably were all Confederate sympathizers.

Makes me think back to highschool. One person had some of the 3.5 books, mainly the core book, the monster manual, and one other supplement I cannot remember (probably eberron, because that was the setting I've been most hooked on since the very beginning). We also had a single d20. That was it. No character sheets, no dice sets. Your character could do whatever the GM for that day interpreted your character could do based on class, etc. And any point of contention/combat was settled by a d20 result. Live by the d20, die by the d20. It was very heavily narrative focused, but it really got me hooked on the game.

@@altejoh Actually sounds cool

Now imagine if while your fighter waited for their sword to be repaired. You had another character that could act on all those rumours you'd picked up around town??

Damn mind fudge. Jajaja. Sometimes we get too invested in one character. I know my kids can’t leave their old characters out of campaign. They make me at least make them do a cameo appearances. It works that the new campaigns plays in the same world.

@@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork Rumors don't all have to be adventure hooks, if that's what you're getting at. They can be just a hanging thread that the players are free to investigate, that potentially contextualizes or ties together with future events, or just provides a bit of information that can be sold to the right people/person. Just because there's a forseeable complication doesn't mean an idea isn't worth while.

@@yuin3320 I'm not saying the idea isn't worthwhile, I'm tempering expectations. I agree, you should be seeding your setting with true and false, even half true rumours. Patron players unleashing propaganda during the fog of war is a sight to behold.

@@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork Ah, completely fair! It was a bit hard telling just off of your first comment.

MMTTRPG

I know the reason for no armor on a mage back in the day for us was "you can't use the arcane energies unless they can permeate your body and armor blocks that, especially metal armor.

@@starcrafter13terran Yeah, they used to say that about swords, to which I always replied, "Then where do magical swords and armor come from?"

I like that House on the Borderlands reference

I never knew anyone who used that rule. It just really wasn’t convenient. Around the 10:00 mark you get into why it wasn’t convenient. A DM would have to be a DM full time to just keep track of what’s going on between sessions.

Differenciating class items armor weapons blah blah.......that there is horseshit uhhhg why can I not use that So many heated discussions I have seen over that very issue

It's kind of why going up levels was at the base or village or local lord or wizard's place, between game sessions: Took about a week, sometimes more. In the meantime players would play other characters. Mike keeps referring to "the adventure." We used to refer to modules. Modules were location-based, almost one-shot things though sometimes DMs placed them inside their campaign world, like Gary Gygax liked to place his modules in Greyhawk. Usually we would say things like "We're playing S1 today" and play that module, then the characters (and players) would go home. No "adventure paths".

@@PatriceBoivin A nice touch for a campaign with milestone leveling would be to have a lull in the story and some downtime whenever the PCs level up.

That's an awesome birthday present!

My old high school buddies and I are all turning 50 this year and next. We're all getting together-flying in from all over North America-to do a reunion game next month. :-)

@@Xhalph There are unfortunately no half measures. If you do not utilise 1:1 time in its fullest, you may as well not use it at all. When used with Modules, you should also look at utilising Patron Play. This way your High-Level NPCs are also constrained by the forces of time, however they are also a lot more active in the game. 👍

I started playing D&D (both Basic AD&D) around 1981 and played throughout most of the 80s. Never once did we use the “real-time” passage of time rule, and I didn’t know a single person who ever did. I was vaguely aware of it, but everyone ignored it completely. I would say its importance to the “old school” playing style expressed in this video is greatly exagerated (to put it mildly).

@@winter9703, we attempted to use the real time, but it worked like the original poster, we hit the dungeon and retreated back to the village each time the session ended. Then we got into a long battle and we finished it but it was late (1:00am late) and called it a night. We did not play until the next Friday, at which point we realized that the DM had to either let our PCs make it back to the village without us playing that out, or we were right where we left off. So, that time rule went out the window very quickly as impractical. But it does explain why a lot of the earlier D&D adventures that were written could be completed in a single session. Of course when T1-4 was published there was no way you could compete that game in a single session, or even explore it and retreat.

I think he forgot something else in the original rules. One that is related to this rule. A large part of the original rules is about your character building a castle, or building a tower, or building a religious monastery, or a thieves' guild. This is of course later in the PCs career, but they were supposed to take time off to purchasing land, buying materials, overseeing construction, and ultimately ruling over your subjects. So early in the PC career, they are coming back to base camp and resting after battles, drinking beer, and puttering around camp. As they grow, they will get into more and more lengthy projects that take up a lot of time.

@@kevinerose And training! I don't remember the exact algorithm for how much time it took to train up a level (which you could only do under the tutelage of a more experienced master, of course), but it could eat up weeks or months of downtime.

@@danielgehring7437 One week per level - that was the easy part; finding someone willing to teach (that you paid) was the hard part.

Explains why some classes like Fighters, Magic-Users, Clerics had strongholds, you needed taxes and a safe place to hole up while your were doing research.

This is actually how a lot of Adventure League groups run online. They have their own communities of a few dozen player / DMs, sessions start and end in a home town that everyone shares (with some exception for specific games). The players usually impact the town for each other and drive the narrative. Very interesting that Adventure League Communities seem to have, in their own way, gone back to the original D&D style of play.

@@MikeyAwbrey You how all a lot of modern gamers complain about wanting "impactful choices"..... when what they really mean is that they want to decide the narrative. That basically can't work when you have a pre-baked narrative driven game; and I can essentially prove it by how easily a lot of DnD podcasts/streams can have their stories derailed by one player not taking a hint. You're stuck with a problem of forcing the player (and the events) to fall in line with the pre-written outcome and related story beat..... or rewrite the whole rest of the adventure to account for it, because narrative ones tend to hinge on certain conditions being met to move forward. IE: one player escaping into the vents of a prison turned what was supposed to be a 2-month (game time) prison mini-arc into a 6 hours (game time) prison break episode. However, it lent to one of the most absurd jokes about how the mage, who was separated from the party in Solitary with his magic disabled, went Uncle Iroh in preparation for the part where they escape..... in 6 hours..... That said. Sandboxes don't have this problem, because its more cause and effect driven. Any narrative or story beat tends to be compact, precisely to limit paradoxes due to order of execution. If you want an escalating threat, thats part of the world system, not individual story paths for the players. In a lot of ways, this would have way more impactful choices, as the whole design focuses more on world state rather then story beats. And actually can lead to better stories on an individual level, because the evolution of the world state is the story players will remember. To explain this better, Planetside 1 was a game effectively devoid of story, and mechanically just an endless war between 3 factions. But you talk to any of those players, and almost all of them have a collection of war stories of the most notable things they've witnessed. Stories that can be as tense as any well crafted thriller, to the comically absurd as to how a series of events unfolded. And thats just from ONE perspective. The unique thing about this game is that when you start combining stories from multiple sides, the collective retelling of events from multiple perspectives elevates it that of a Documentary. Stories like how the nightly Bridge battle between bases (which generally go no where for 4 hours) got totally turned on its head, when an enemy tank found its way into the back line, and started a roll that cleared over half a map that night. And how the majority of players stuck around for an extra 2 hours that night to keep the fight going, because it landed up in map territory that rarely sees fights during prime time. The only other online game I've ever seen to that kind of capacity is EVE Online. And that can only happen because EVE is a single shard universe, where all players are affecting the world state for each other at all times. And how one chat fight eventually escalates into an interstellar war.... mostly involving massive Corps who had no stake in the original spat, but very much noticed one groups fleet passing through their turf.

Started play in 75. We ended up with multiple DMs and everyone had multiple player characters. The games were essentially pick up basketball games. Someone would want to play one of their characters close to a level and w e would build a party around them....sometimes we'd make a bad mix and pay for it. Live and learn. The time we would use was 7x....as we played numerous games per week. The 7x was necessary due to rule for researching a new spell....that was a time consuming activity for the magic-users. Which is why the mages would often get together to trade spells and scrolls would be so valuable.

This is literally my dream game man.

Our ex-playgroup of millenials is a bit younger, but that is exactly how we ran every P&P RPG we played, mainly bc we had the luxury of multiple people actually wanting to be a GM and tell their mini-stories - and that was like 15 years ago until a couple of years back when we stopped playin' regularly. So this style certainly is still around, bc it also just makes a lot of sense. Actually the shift to pre-written campaigns is something I never grapsed, bc with people I knew that also played RPGs this was very looked down upon. "A proper GM runs his own stories" was the mentality.

I always use a hybrid model essentially for this purpose. Sometimes my sessions end on a cliff hanger and no time passes between sessions. But I always build in downtimes in the narrative fairly regularly to allow things to develop- but also to allow my players to spend time working on things off screen. Or sometimes we do this when a player can't make a particular session; instead of cancelling, the rest of the group does something small scale without them, and I work with that player to figure out what they're doing while they're gone. One of my players doesn't care about it all, and always spends his downtime drinking and gambling. Occasionally he meets a useful contact or stumbles upon useful information. So even his downtime becomes productive. Giving the story that space to breath makes it feel more realistic, and the longer timelines adds a weight and depth to the narrative that my players seem to really respond to, even if I started doing it just to give one particular character a chance to work on their inventions.

Yes back in the day we would use the time in between sessions for training time to go up a level instead of always gaming them out,

@@_AcatHat In Talislanta they had a mentor availability chart. Your mentor is glad to see you, but they are very busy. They can make time to go over that lost tome you found in d3 days. or Since you had that falling out with your professor, they've viewed you with nothing but contempt. There is a 75% chance they'll answer one question, just to get rid of you, before they have you thrown out.

You mean not playing for 2.5 months? Since I doubt you're doing it at the exact same time as you're doing the actually play session, and I doubt your character would be in the middle of a dialogue with an NPC, the clock has struck midnight, and you all have work tomorrow so you pack up for the night to continue later, and then your character just begins training in front of the slack jawed NPC for the next week.

I’m so glad you enjoyed it!

Neither would surprise me lol

There's also the story about the woman who stores her cans upside down. When asked, she doesn't know why, but learned it from her mother. Mom doesn't know why either, so they ask granny. Turns out grandma didn't like having to dust off her cans before opening them, so she would just put them in the cupboard upside down! The "secret family recipe" which was passed down from generation to generation after originally coming from the back of a mayonnaise jar! You'd be surprised how many grampas learned a salsa recipe from a guy they were in jail with in Mexico, who swore him to secrecy. You get a lot of this in martial arts schools too. When there's no attempt by each generation to learn the whole history, and the language, and learn from original sources instead of the game of Telephone that is a student teaching a student. So people start mispronouncing and mis-spelling things, techniques in forms get swapped out, the order of the forms changes, their names can change. But also the fine points of individual techniques can change. One student who starts his own school can teach a generation of students to stand wrong because they all watch him and he has a trick knee which has adjusted his stance. And then we drag in techniques we like from another style, stretching from yoga, etc. until it's difficult to say what is the traditional art.

Ooh I like that too!

This is what is recommended in Kobold Press's Midgard setting book iirc. Their 5e stuff is written pretty "normally" for 5e adventures, but real time "catches up" between chapters/adventures/dungeons. [I believe the recommendation they use is actually 2x real time.]

It also makes the natural healing rules of older editions viable. In AD&D you'd only heal 1 hit point for every 24 hours of rest, so if you made it back to town injured and didn't have a Cleric handy, you might need that week off to recover.

Even 1 week real-time = 1 day game-time would be a good comprise, I feel.

Unfortunately, 1:1 time must be strictly adhered to. To be utilised properly. It does not work so well when you start to mess around with it. If you are going to hand wave time then it is better not to implement 1:1 time in the first place, lest you be disappointed by it.

@@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork Good point.

it absolutely works far better for crafting, research, training and other typical downtime items which gives a better 'overall' 'pseudolife' rather than more of the 'hack and slash' focus on combat. It may not be all THAT useful for dealing with groups consisting mostly of murder hobos but it can certainly benefit even those characters that are mostly strictly fighters.. as it gives them time to work with local militias, act as guards for merchants and other time consumptive networking events

I love it!

I guarantee the real reason was that your DM just didn’t know what the rule was

The DMG is also pretty clear about needing to follow the rules in order to create consistency between games because Gygax intended for dms to run big shared worlds and you, as a player, should be able to seamlessly move from table to table. Go watch stranger things and notice how when Erica (Lucas’ sister) shows up she doesn’t “make a new character”, she already has a character. Her character exists in the world already, the shared world with consistency. The dmg has one small paragraph that says “don’t let the rules tie your hands and force you into a bad, unfun situation” but early DnD was not all about tailoring the rules, that’s a 5E misconception of earlier editions

@Steven Keck I can also vouch for each DM having their own (mis)interpretation of the rules but I think you are straw manning what I said...I was speaking specifically to what the DMG says (and you can go look it up if you don't believe me) and what Gygax had to say on the topic (which you can read in the DMG). Please avoid straw man arguments. They are not condusive to adult level conversations. Case in point, did you even KNOW that this time keeping rule existed? Thats why each DM had their own "interpretation". It was based on misconceptions and oral traditions that changed slightly over time as people misremembered things. I even had a DM that used the reaction adjustment for charisma as an initiative modifier...which was entirely based on his misconception of what "reaction adj" meant for DEX vice CHA. When DND was new, it was very much more akin to what Gygax's vision was, and it deviated from there. If you want to have a conversation about that, I am game, but don't mistake THIS conversation for what was being discussed earlier.

@@LB-yg2br If he didn't it was because of how piss poorly the DMG was written. Though I was spoiled by GDW - they actually knew how to write & the Traveller rules, while having some odd choices, were always much more easily understood than AD&D. I'll play Classic Traveller still (so does Marc Miller) but AD&D sits on the shelf gathering dust.

@user-hb9hs5dk7p Yes, let's go by what is the DMG says since you don't seem to know it. This is a direct copy/paste of the Afterword "AFTERWORD IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE GAME, NOT THE LETTER OF THE RULES, WHICH IS IMPORTANT. NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU, IF IT GOES AGAINST THE OBVIOUS INTENT OF THE GAME. AS YOU HEW THE LINE WITH RESPECT TO CONFORMITY TO MAJOR SYSTEMS AND UNIFORMITY OF PLAY IN GENERAL, ALSO BE CERTAIN THE GAME IS MASTERED BY YOU AND NOT BY YOUR PLAYERS. WITHIN THE BROAD PARAMETERS GIVEN IN THE ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS VOLUMES, YOU ARE CREATOR AND FINAL ARBITER. BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS 8 DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE. MAY YOU FIND AS MUCH PLEASURE IN SO DOING AS THE REST OF US DO!"

When I was a pastor in Missouri i lived in the country. My players had to drive 2-3 hours to get to my game so not everyone was always there. I gave my wife (who was always there) a castle (ruin actually that used to be a castle, and my two sons 7 and nine were men at arms with her. One a knight and one an elven ranger/wizard) as a reward for killing an assassin who attacked the king. It had no men at arms, no roof, but a small town (that wasn't sure they wanted a Lord/Lady until she and the party began killing the bandits and marauders, trolls and orcs. But it worked well. IF a player couldn't make it his character was doing something to build the barony. One player wanted to raise horses. One wanted to patrol the kings highway in the area. Others chose other things that their characters were working on if they couldn't play that session. sometimes they would right out stories of what their "work" had been like and send it to all the players (after my approval, sometiimes I would add clues to their story that hinted at upcaming adventures I had planned. ) It worked well and kept it from having a strange feel because players were missing.

@@SabersEdge I really like this way of handling players who often can't get together to play at the same time. Seems like it would make playing a lot easier for adults who have far less regularly and cohort-scheduled free time like kids and teens living their lives on the same public school timeline tend to have.

If you think about it, 5e plays very much like a MMORPG. There are no lasting injuries. No permanent, or even long lasting, effects from spells. You can only use/carry so many magic items. Most player classes can fill most every role in a typical party. There is no morality system for behavioral guidance. And the systems are focused to encourage quick play and quick rewards.

True 1:1 timekeeping is kept alive by the LARP communities as well, though thankfully Jeffro Johnson and the good folks over at the #BrOSR decided to do a deep dive on a single passage in the 1e DMG: "In Ad&d it is emphasized even more: YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." The successful thought experiment is still continuing, and we can now share our findings with the wider D&D community. 👍

I've had a similar experience as a player on the (pathfinder) campaign Rise of the Runelord; the player characters have been handling one emergency after the other, with barely enough time to breath before the next disaster occur. It's to the point that a sentiment of player fatigue has started to creep in.

My Curse of Strahd took two ingame years but I edited it significantly

@@ArcaneGeek001 IE: Remember 4e?

It's a tradeoff, but one way of awarding XP is to do it immediately. The upside is the players understand what actions gave them rewards, which encourages more of that action. Downside is it's more bookkeeping, and players find out what treasure is worth when they haven't yet appraised or identified it. The old SSI Gold Box games worked this way. Or, the DM adds up the XP and awards it at the end of the session (or when the party returns to town, because they might be able to train). This is obviously easier, obscures the source of the XP, and if you're super tired at the end you can text the players the next day what their XP was. Anyway, this latter method prevents leveling mid-expedition because they can't level without awarded XP. Assuming you don't require training. If you do need training to level up, of course you must return to town to do it.

I stopped playing before my children were born and recently played in a session in my son-in-law’s gaming group. THAC0 is exactly the way I remembered playing and the new system they use now feels ass backwards. It was still a pretty fun session, though.

#TeamDeathToTHAC0 🤣

@@sonipitts that’s fine. You do you.

I haven't played a live game since 2nd edition, and what Mike describes is how I think the game works. This explains a lot about why I find the newer rulesets confusing, because I'm trying to apply them in a context for which they are not intended. That characters heal fully with a long rest blows my mind.

Hop on the train, d&d really came back at the front of internet these last years. There are numerous youtube channel to see interesting games, have people share stories or learn about intriguing monsters or ways to play

A LOT of folks play on-line now. Many are on Facebook and most games are free. It's always time consuming, but still satisfying to do in the big bad guy! ;)

@@SylviusTheMad current D&D bears little resemblance to original D&D... they are radically different in playtime, outcome, & expectations. Dungeon crawling was dungeon crawling... you started with a finite amount of resources & used them to explore as much of the Dungeon as the party could before having to retreat to town to refit/reequip. These long sprawling narrative campaigns were unimagined to what was basically an interactive math problem... same reason why Clerics are broken overpowered since Gary Gygax designed them to be used by women or DMPCs since they were vital but most players didn't want them for PCs. Whoever brought their gf would just make her play the Cleric otherwise the DM would need to run the "healer" resource

@@nationalsocialism3504 I think you just solved a potential concern I was having in trying to get the gang back together for a few one shots.

And I'm the mum that brought them up this way. We synchronise every three months.

Yes, these are indeed ways 1:1 time could be utilised, and I encourage you to check out "BDubs' Essential Guide to Patron Play for your D&D Campaign" to help flesh out how such things might be implemented.

Kinda... it's just a different perspective. The dungeon was the main "character" and PCs were way more disposable... all DMs had their notebook of grid paper with their dungeon in it, to play a game meant having a DM with his dungeon. Everyone could just throw together PCs in a few minutes then tackle exploring as much of the dungeon as possible before the party ran out of resources. Playing often with the same DM meant that you'd have "maps" of his dungeon that let you bypass all those areas for the most part... though most would repopulate "explored" portions to some degree. For the most part... everyone had their own Dungeon & working on it was part of the hobby.

The adventurer busts in, to find her counterpart in bed with a Kenku. "WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS" "Darling, I am having a political affair" Kenku reaches over to the nightstand and shakes his talisman of office, for emphasis. "How many XP are in it for us?" *whisper whisper* "Carry on then!"

Not just the same in game town. Different campaigns, in different settings at different real-life tables. All linked by the simple utilisation of 1:1 time. A true Multiverse of Madness.🤯🤯

For some reason this made me think of the Goblin Slayer anime.

Is it a kingdom building campaign?

Wait till you hear about what happens when you hand the running of High-Level NPCs to other Players.😉

Cool!!

Yeah, everything in D&D & AD&D was simply a suggestion.

No one could play a character in my group that was not created for and built up in my group. It kept people from importing magic from a "Monty Hall - Let's Make a Deal Game" that passed out magic like candy.

True fact. High level play, characters where portable between game groups. This is why many players kept a notebook(s) of thier characters exploits to document their level gains, magic items, titles and property

I came across a house rule for how to deal with that very thing: a DM might have someone show up with a decked-out PC and tell them, pick just 4 of these magic items that you have with you for this adventure - the rest are safe at your home and unavailable. This helped keep things simpler and easier to manage, and an insanely rich PC couldn't hand out magic items to his new party members. I saw that at work in a few other situations too. "You left the lab in a rush and instead of all the future tech you could only grab a couple things".

Thank you!

Yes. Leveling up was something you did when you were no longer in the "stress situation" and had time to reflect on your own actions. You had to train with someone who possessed skills and/or knowledge that surpassed your own by a good amount (2-3 more levels). The idea behind this was the same as doing "lessons learned" sessions after you finish a project at work. You look at what you did or didn't do, what went well, what could have gone better, how to make everything go better next time. You can't do that in the middle of a project any more than you can in the middle of a crawl through the underdark.

@@ArcaneGeek001 And what happens when those Trainers are High Level NPCs, controlled by other players. Patron Play happens.

Training to level using 1:1 time keeping is complimented by Patron Play. And by the sounds of it, also by running Henchmen/Hirelings. 👍

@@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork You got it. Made for interesting interactions.

@@ArcaneGeek001 Question! I recall this being done in the NES port of "Pool of Radiance" (I have not gotten my copy of the Gold Box game to work on a modern PC... yet.) but I don't necessarily recall seeing it in the AD&D 2nd Edition book? It's been a LONG time so I could be misplacing it in memory but...

The exact quote at 6:18 was "A lot of early D&D was almost like an oral tradition", but that actually just makes your comment BETTER, since like a true Oral Tradition, you paraphrase.

@@HansLemurson I'll pass that along.

Old school D&D is for math nerds... new school D&D is for drama geeks. They aren't the same game and have little cross over demographic appeal for either extreme

I was SO tempted lol

@@SupergeekMike hey who turned out the lights

No they shouldnt have

Doctor who?

Nah. They should have had a JoJo saying "nani?!"

You do not need a large group to implement or utilise this, the True "Always On" campaign benefits greatly from pairing the strict time keeping with Patron Play.

That also importantly gives more time for wandering monsters to bother the party and interrupt the rest. What's supposed to happen is that the party enters an adventure zone, and they must make do with their resources available until they find an opportunity to rest and recover. So a dungeon should have a difficult entry that either burns resources or takes time which generates wandering monsters which burn resources. This prevents them from just leaving to rest, and thus prevents the 15-minute adventuring day. (Wandering monsters are to be avoided from a 1e perspective because they sap resources and grant little XP, because they carry little to no treasure. They're a stick mechanic to encourage efficient play.) The result of this is that the players withhold resources instead of spending them like mad money. If you have something that recovers only after long rest, you won't use it just to stunt on a monster that can be overcome some other way. You have to carefully decide whether it's better to use an action surge to get another action which you could use to kill a low-HP enemy before he gets to go and possibly cause a whole bunch of damage to a party member. If you can just all hunker down in a port-a-potty for an hour and get most of your resources back, then Short Rest abilities are all essentially per-combat. An 8 hour Short Rest also puts the natural healing rate back into line with earlier editions, although getting 1 HD per short rest is still a lot compared to 1 HP per day from earlier D&D!

Actually done a "campaign" like this whilst running a real campaign. Id do 2 or 3 of the real campaign session and then mix it up with a oneshot for a adventuring/merc guild that would have get contracts. Had my players make 3 seperate characters. 1 being really low level like 3 or 4, 1 being mid level from 8-12, and one legendary adventurer from levels 16-20. And the character that best fit the cintract was sent out. Some punk bandits terrorizing a village the low levels would be sent to investigate and stop them, some lich that oartnered up with some vampire lord trying to destroy a kingdom then the legendary heroes were sent. It was fun for my players and gave me more time to prep stuff for my main campaign since thw oneshots were always pretty straight forward and quick to make.

​@@ProperlyGaming Hell yeah! Consider this experience noted. This makes me wonder about it's potential utility for worldbuilding for an ongoing campaign. Since you were running them in-between main sessions, it seems like it'd be feasible (depending on the general setting/lore) to weave in plot foreshadowing, or additional depth to an organization some NPC belong to, or w/e. That's... man. Like imagine the guild got contracted by, say a mining company that had some something get into the tunnels (they think) and send in some PCs rolled to be a part of this one-shot guild, who get TPK'd or captured on the mission. Then, in main-game, the guild reaches out to the party, and is all "Look, we need some help. We sent some dudes, the didn't come back. Presuming they're dead. We said we'd do this thing but we just can't, can we sub-contract you to handle this? We'll pay you whatever else we can get out of these miners, because this job is bigger than we thought." That'd be cool as shit, as a player. At least I think it would be. Like "Oh now I know why this mission even exists. We weren't the first thing they tried. It wouldn't be just "Oh some guys died in a cave, go find out" because I "WAS" those guys, so to speak.

When you had a large number of rotating players, things just worked differently. I also never had to worry about "Bob" not being able to make the session.

Wtf are you talking about? No one does that. Time OUTSIDE of the game passes at the same rate as real time.

It's basically the same concept as play by post/play by email. I never did either, but the basic concept is the same.

In my experience, very few people used the rule during AD&D 1st edition or OD&D either! Or at least, they didn't use it for long. And, of course, no one in the 70s actually new how Gary or Arneson played outside of their own group and friends - almost all of that information came out decades later.

Dave Arneson

@@deadlyDM Good catch. Sorry, I failed my save vs autocorrect.

It depends what you do when you see the faces 😈

This is an awesome idea! You could even have a mini "combat" that you narrate via text or at the beginning of the next session. You would just need to make it a relatively easy combat that reinforces that the world is dangerous, but couldn't lead to a PC death.

that always seemed weird to me, i love creating characters so much, with cool backstories, and specifc traits and flaws, and most times i had at least 3 or 4 characters ready to go,waiting impatiently for when i finaly get killed so i can start that new character ive been hoping to roleplay as soon as i could.

Unbalanced encounters are how you figure out what the party can and can't handle. Not to mention balanced encounters get boring and repetitive. Anyway, easiest way (for me) to sort out encounters is to take the average party level then create and encounter "party" with the same average level. For easier encounters, reduce the encounters average level or keep the average level with fewer beasties. For harder encounters, shift it the other way by increasing the encounter level or by keeping the level and adding beasties. No idea how 5e deals with levels, but in older editions, monster hit die generally equated to level unless otherwise specified in the source book. This approach works with any TTRPG, and I hope it makes sense. I'm not very good at 'splainin stuff.

The Monster Manual had things listed for a base 4 person party... increase up or down as needed. It also wasn't a guarantee that what you encountered while exploring a dungeon was something that the party was capable of defeating just cause we encountered it. I have done a few TPK in my day as a DM but usually its the Players fault for not running away either from an early lucky action with dire consequences or the players didn't immediately disengage from something they weren't supposed to fight anyways. We used to play a whole lot more scared than people do today... TPKs are a good teaching moment & i recommend that you just commit to doing it, then breakdown what happened when its over to see what can be learned by all involved. Even if that lesson is that the party isn't always expected to win or even survive certain encounters if that was your intention... but it can also serve as a lesson for you about what you are doing wrong if you didn't intend to place an insurmountable obstacle as a level gate to an area.

Balance is a myth. When to retreat and when to advance is a matter of being a good player. What’s there is there, if rolled as a random encounter or if planned.

Those are the ones most able to absorb travel, though. Spending 1.5 hours on a random encounter as you move from town to town, or town to objective, is half your play session if you only have 3 hours. Which means you make much less progress on the adventure.

Ehh, why would it have to be long sessions?

Here's a blog post guy using this method. If you want to chase the full ramifications of this rule, give it a read. One thing our host hadn't considered is how this One Simple Trick lets you tie together events on multiple campaign world run by multiple DMs. This is just the start of how to build those sprawling and epic campaign groups that were common back in the day. bdubsanddragons.blogspot.com/2021/07/jeffrogaxian-time-keeping-vs-variable.html?m=1

Back in the 1990s an 8 hour weekly game session was the standard around here. Sometimes if we could pull it off we'd have an all weekend sleep over session.

Honestly as it is what i run, bastarized a westmarches and hexcrawl in one big thing. I run the world as if it was a permanent one, players doing sessions or not. Villains do villains things, factions do enacts their plans, and consequences are done with absolute fairness and in an uncomprising manner. It is a bit time intensive on the dm part because you must have a good idea on what's going on on a large scale, but it can easily scaled down by limiting it to what the players have discovered. Playing on a VTT help a whole lot since we can play whenever 2+ of my players are on and Pathfinder 2e is really cool for multiple character to play with. Travel if it is what worries you is dealt tile by tile, with a tile a day on foot or on regular horses and doing a roll each tile for encounters&randomevent.

Thank you!

High Gygaxian is a barrier to entry.

We run it with expansive worlds and crazy stuff happening. Time passes in the dungeon and it’s different every time. “Clearing a mega-dungeon” just doesn’t happen anymore and it’s awesome

Thank you so much!

That’s awesome! I don’t know anyone else who has done that, it’s awesome to hear that it’s being well-received 😁