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Subject: "Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"     Previous Topic | Next Topic
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Gryphonadmin
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Dec-09-17, 06:18 PM (EST)
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"Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
 
   In elementary school, circa 1979 to 1984, I was part of my local school department's only-recently-established program for what were then termed "gifted and talented" students. (This is not a boast, as such, but important background for what follows.) The program was called Quest, and it met on one day per week per grade level, so the first-grade Quest kids did their thing on Mondays, and so on through to the fifth-grade group on Fridays. There were a half-dozen or so of us in the class I was in, I'm not sure about the other years, and we were drawn from all three of the elementary schools the town then possessed. (There's only one now.)

Basically, what we did in Quest was adjourn from our regular classrooms and gather in a duly designated space on one afternoon a week. I remember this space as having moved around from year to year; I have the clearest memories of the year it was in the basement utility room at the school I attended, next to the furnace room, but I also distinctly remember us meeting in an actual classroom over at the newer, shinier elementary school across town. Those of us not regularly attending the school where the program was held would have to get a shuttle van over to wherever it was. We did this transition during the lunch hour, which I remember heartily resenting in the years when it wasn't at my owh school.

Once assembled, we would spend the afternoon doing things the school department's lone elementary G&T specialist* deemed suitable for fostering our growth as the intellectuals of the future, or something. In hindsight it's clear that no one really knew what the goal was, the department just had a mandate from the state Department of Education to Do Something for the kids at the right-hand end of the bell curve, and Quest was it. When I was in the first grade, the town Quest teacher was my mother, who—if I may flatter my antecedents for a moment—had an actual plan; but owing to various facets of bullshit small-town politics, the superintendent dismissed her at the end of that year and replaced her with a woman we'll call Ms. Spencer, who did not, but who claimed to be a member of MENSA, and that was all the superintendent needed to hear.

I don't know if she was a genius, but Ms. Spencer certainly had the eccentricity part down. She was... odd, and (I found out later) problematic for the school department in her own ways. For instance, we were always told (as I noted above) that the Quest period began during lunch because it was the only time the kids who came in from the other schools could be vanned over without disrupting the rest of their school day, and on some level that was probably true; but the real reason was because if they didn't find some reason to keep Ms. Spencer at school over lunch, chances were she would go home and just not come back for the afternoon. Perhaps on some level she knew that she didn't know what the hell she was doing, and occasionally became, if only temporarily, consciously aware of it.

(It's probably just as well we didn't know that at the time; I'm more tolerant of that sort of thing now that I'm an adult with mild-to-moderate imposter syndrome than I was as an elementary school student. After all, Dunning-Kruger is just imposter syndrome that came up tails instead of heads.)

Anyway. When she arrived, Ms. Spencer disregarded most of the materials her predecessor in the job had left for her assistance, and instead embarked on a somewhat haphazard course of study that involved a lot of canned "for advanced students" stuff. We read extensively in a prepackaged literature series called Great Books, for instance, by which I was always puzzled and vaguely offended because they were not the "great books" advertised on the covers; rather, Great Books was a series of watered-down abridgements, like Reader's Digest Condensed Books that have further been rewritten for kids, then crammed full of glosses and explanatory annotations to the point where they're basically impossible to enjoy. (This should not be confused with The Johns Hopkins University's old Great Books of the Western World series, which has its own problems to do with Anglo-European chauvinism but does at least have untampered-with contents.)

This made very little sense to me, the idea of taking a group of kids that had been labeled "gifted" and then making them read books that had been deliberately dumbed down for the kiddie market. Plus, all of the "educational" intrusions into the text made the experience pretty much impossible to enjoy. Imagine trying to read your favorite novel, only to discover that it is not really that novel, plus it has Discussion Questions in boxes scattered around and an essay at the end of each chapter in which you are encouraged to Further Deconstruct What You Have Just Read.

(I can already hear Merc saying "Oh yes please!" but some of us were not that into deconstruction in the third grade, I'm just putting it out there. :)

Still, it could have been worse, and at times it was! We also did some units on Bloom's taxonomy, which was very meta in that Bloom's taxonomy is a cognitive-function/pedagogical-theory framework and not something meant to be taught to children. And one year we conducted a rather abstracted reading of Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery, the philosophical novel for children, which in the right hands can provide some pretty deep insights into critical thinking to kids who are ready for it, but which was arguably not in the right hands in this instance.

Those, however, are not the oddest things we did in Quest. No, that honor goes to the month or so, when I was in the fifth grade, when we spent our Gifted and Talented afternoons playing Dungeons & Dragons.

For all I know, this would probably be almost tragically mainstream nowadays, but in the 1983-'84 school year, I assure you it was not a typical item on an elementary school curriculum, even one as amorphous and scattershot as Quest's. I mean, if nothing else, keep in mind that the mid-1980s were the third great Moral Panic era (after the Reefer Madness scare of the '30s and Do You Know Where Your Children Are? in the '60s)—the birth-time of the Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics label, and the heyday of the heavy metal-devil worship correlation. Back then, parent groups and church organizations were distributing literature not just implying, but coming right out and saying, that if you let your kids play that kind of game they inevitably turn to a) hard drugs and b) Satan, then murder you, their teachers, and each other, in that order. The archetype of that sort of thing, Jack Chick's Dark Dungeons, was first published in 1984.

But there we were, in a classroom in far-whitebread northern New England, playing D&D for one afternoon a week and getting some nebulous grade-school form of academic credit for it.

And the thing was, we were playing the weirdest version of D&D: Basic Set. Those of you not familiar with the game, or who only played Advanced or one of the Wizards of the Coast editions, may not know of this. In 1977, TSR forked the D&D dev tree; the "flagship" version, greatly expanded in both size and complexity from the original 1974 game, became Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, while at the same time, they offered a stripped-down, tidied-up version of the original rules that they hoped would appeal to mainstream buyers of games. The Basic Set came in a box, like any other game you'd buy at a toy store, and included a rulebook, a very simple adventure module, and a set of extremely chintzy dice.

Basic Set wasn't entirely a bad thing. It was one of the first RPG rulebooks that really took the time to try and explain the concept to a lay audience, as opposed to just assuming (like the original AD&D manuals did) that you wouldn't have bought it if you didn't already know what it was. And the dice were crap, but at the time it was fairly hard to find the kind of dice used in tabletop RPGs if you didn't already know where to look for them. It wasn't like today, where you just google "bulk d20" and instantly find sources for reasonably priced bags of 50 of the damn things.

All that said, though, it was... pretty bad. In fact, thinking about it, it was in line with the Great Books series in terms of "things we did in Quest that were kind of lame simplifications of other things". For one thing, Basic Set only has three alignments, and from the context given in the descriptions, they're obviously good, neutral, and evil, although the designers copped out and called them Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic (because as we all know, lawful people are automatically kind, honest, and unselfish as well, and vice versa). For another, the classes and non-human races are interconnected, so that, for example, all elves are multiclass fighter/magic-users.

I remember that last bit specifically because I had to play the elf, and because the mental image most of my classmates had of such people was much more Santa's Workshop than Lord of the Rings... well, the role wasn't big on dignity, let's just say it that way.

None of this was helped by the fact that Ms. Spencer was about as good at being a Dungeon Master as she was at organizing a curriculum. Maybe she'd never done it before, and hey, we've all been there, but she had all the habits I would much later come to recognize as bad ones for a roleplaying GM to have. She was arbitrary, she godmoded, and she was a rules lawyer. She assigned us our characters; for those of us whose characters had spells, she further assigned those, and because she was into non-violence, none of them could be offensive in nature. Which is how I came to be playing a first-level fighter/magic-user whose spellbook contained Tenser's Floating Disc and not Magic Missile.

Seriously. Non-violence in Dungeons & Dragons. In the default Basic Set adventure, no less, which was absolutely not optimized for that approach.

Seriously. Tenser's Floating Disc.

Obviously, she controlled what we had in our inventories, too. You know those laughable suggested starting equipment lists in the Player's Handbook? The ones that always include a 10-foot pole and 50 feet of rope? (Do they still have those in the newer editions?) Yeah, we all had those. Oh, and because she assigned our inventories, she controlled what weapons we had, too. Which is why my character didn't have one, even though Basic Set elves are basically multiclassed in fighter from the get-go. So he was essentially a first-level magic-user who wasn't as good at it as a human (i.e., non-multiclassed) one. Maybe he had an extra HP or something, I don't know.

With those starting conditions, you can probably guess that the game was a bit of a shambles. None of us had ever encountered an RPG before, and as far as I was ever aware later in school life, nobody else from that class was ever much interested in them again. Certainly I wasn't, for the next three years or so, so this isn't one of those heartwarming "how I found my way into the roleplaying community" stories.

Except that it kind of is, but—as is often the case round these parts—only in a sort of ass-backwards roundabout way. Three years later, I was sitting in my freshman high school Spanish classroom waiting for the teacher to show up, and the guy sitting next to me rummaged around in his bag and came up with one of the licensed D&D novels to pass the time. (I have no memory of which one. There can't have been all that many of them in 1987, can there?)

Ordinarily, I would never bother someone who's trying to read, which has probably cost me any number of Life Connections in its time, because on that particular instance I couldn't help but blurt out something like, "Is that based on the game?"

"Yeah," he said, eyeing me with that wariness that high-school nerds throughout time have regarded that kind of question. "Do you play?"

I shook my head. "No. Well, I tried once. I didn't think it was very good."

(Well, that's how my memory wants to remember it. I was a freshman in high school, I probably said something like like, "It sucked.")

"Was it the red box?" he asked, and when I said yeah, wondering what the color of the box had to do with it, he snorted dismissively and said, "That's Basic Set," but before he could explain what that even meant, the teacher finally rocked up and class got under way.

Next day, same bat-time, same bat-channel, that guy hauled out a battered copy of the AD&D Player's Handbook (the '80s first-edition-second-version one, the one that had the wizard with the 10-foot white beard on the cover) and said "Here, read this" (and probably some '80s equivalent of "Advanced or GTFO" :). Sometime the next week, he invited me over to his place after school and I met a couple of his friends who were a year (or two? I honestly can't remember now, maybe two) ahead of us, and we all rolled up new characters and hit the obligatory tavern for the obligatory adventure hook.

(A bit disappointingly, there were neither hard drugs nor Satan.)

So, yeah! I guess I kind of got into D&D in spite of having played Basic Set in class in the fifth grade. :)

I still have a beat-up, mooshed-box, dice-long-since-lost Basic Set in one of the boxes of junk from my old house, around here someplace. Not sure why I bought it, as I'm pretty sure I never played that version again after Quest. Maybe it's the red box; after I left elementary school, they replaced Ms. Spencer with my mom again, and she presumably inherited all of the the stuff she left behind. I don't remember now, but that has a pleasing symmetry to it.

Also, one of those older guys was Joe Martin, creator of Detians 413 and our same group's long-running MechWarrior GM. So in a really oblique way, I suppose this could also have gone on the UF Source board. But I've rambled enough for one day.

--G.
* I once abbreviated it this way while talking with someone about the program, and caused great confusion until my listener realized I was not saying I'd been placed in a special gin & tonic class from the first to fifth grades.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box StClair Dec-10-17 1
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 2
         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Dec-10-17 14
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box zwol Dec-10-17 17
         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box rwpikul Dec-11-17 26
             RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box zwol Dec-11-17 27
                 RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box rwpikul Dec-12-17 34
                     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-12-17 35
                         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Dec-12-17 36
         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box jonathanlennox Dec-19-17 41
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Mephronmoderator Dec-19-17 40
  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Wiregeek Dec-10-17 3
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-11-17 28
         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Dec-11-17 29
  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box drakensis Dec-10-17 4
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 12
         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box drakensis Dec-11-17 25
  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Mercutio Dec-10-17 5
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box MoonEyes Dec-10-17 6
         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Mercutio Dec-10-17 7
             RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 8
             RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box MoonEyes Dec-10-17 13
                 RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Dec-10-17 16
                     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Trscroggs Jan-02-18 42
                         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Jan-02-18 43
                             RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Jan-02-18 44
                             RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Trscroggs Jan-02-18 45
                 RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 18
                     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box MoonEyes Dec-10-17 23
                         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Nova Floresca Dec-11-17 32
                         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Silversword Dec-18-17 39
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 10
         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Mercutio Dec-10-17 20
             RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 21
         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-13-17 37
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Proginoskes Dec-10-17 15
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box MoonEyes Dec-10-17 24
  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box DaPatman89 Dec-10-17 9
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 11
         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box StClair Dec-10-17 19
  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box pjmoyermoderator Dec-10-17 22
  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Kendra Kirai Dec-11-17 30
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Dec-11-17 31
         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Kendra Kirai Dec-11-17 33
             RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Jan-02-18 46
                 RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Kendra Kirai Jan-03-18 47
                 RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box MoonEyes Jan-03-18 48
                     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Jan-03-18 49
                         RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Jan-03-18 51
                     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Jan-03-18 50
  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box BobSchroeck Dec-18-17 38

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StClair
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Dec-10-17, 00:10 AM (EST)
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1. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #0
 
   LAST EDITED ON Dec-10-17 AT 03:08 AM (EST)
 
Ah yes, Red Box Basic. I remember it well, may even still have a copy of the book somewhere (not any of the rest, of course; definitely not any of the terrible dice).

My own entry into the hobby was just a few years earlier, and followed a similarly confused wandering among the various forks then extant, the distinctions between them being rather vague to a tween. My very first exposure was to what I call "Red Dragon Basic", the 1977 or 79 version with a red dragon on the cover, during my time at an alternative school; my own gifted, talented, and probably-somewhere-on-the-spectrum self had not done well in middle school, so my well-meaning parents went shopping, and placed me there for a while. It was great for my imagination but didn't help at all with my social awkwardness and/or backwardness when I got mainstreamed again a couple of years later, and was dumped right back into the adolescent shark pool with barely any idea of how to swim... but that's another story.

(Just for bonus wtf, while the box was in full color, TSR apparently didn't have the budget in those days to do the same with the book cover, which was the above art all in shades of blue. So its full identifier in my head is "red dragon, blue cover". Go fig.)

One of my few clear memories from those first fumblings included a run through that classic old module, B1 "In Search of the Unknown". We came in through the basement, er, cave level, and as some of you may recall there was one of those random-magical-effect inflictors that early modules so loved, a mica outcropping that you were supposed to chip a flake off and put in your mouth. When the other players urged me to go through this, I was sure both IC and OOC that this was some sort of hazing/initiation ritual, but gamely went along with it. (I have no idea what I rolled.)

A few years later, after I'd left that school, I jumped from that edition to what I figured was the next step - "Expert" edition. And so it was, technically, though its precursor was not the "Basic" that I had played, but the new "Basic" that had come out by then, and which Gryph describes above. This led to some confusion, of course... which only got worse when I found a book that did seem to match up with the sort of "Basic" I was coming from, though it wasn't actually a rulebook at all. No, it was the Monster Manual for AD&D ... first edition, we'd call it now, but I had no clue.

From the seed of the MM, I managed to acquire the rest of the AD&D books - the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide - and read them obsessively cover to cover, for lack of any actual gaming group to play with, and gradually figured out how they related to the Basic-Expert-Companion-etc fork. And then, of course, Second Edition came along and... well, anyway.


One final note: when Gary Gygax died, I tried to host a session of 1e AD&D with my then-current group, in his honor. (My bare-bones setup had the PCs protecting a halfling village against a band of goblin raiders; the villager who'd hired them kept fussing about them numbering only six, and asking if anyone knew where he could find a seventh, which was apparently "traditional.") In truth, we barely got past character generation, and I was struck again and again by how many things I'd come to take for granted were simply missing - more by that than all the superfluous grognardy detail about pole arms, etc.


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Gryphonadmin
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Dec-10-17, 00:15 AM (EST)
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2. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #1
 
   LAST EDITED ON Dec-10-17 AT 00:43 AM (EST)
 
>One final note: when Gary Gygax died, I tried to host a session of 1e
>AD&D with my then-current group, in his honor. In truth, we barely
>got past character generation, and I was struck again and again by how
>many things I'd come to take for granted were simply missing -

Heh. We played First Edition with a ton of house rules, mostly gleaned out of issues Dragon Magazine. (So, basically, Second Edition. :) Years later, when I next had occasion to play D&D, I was puzzled by the fact that there were only six stats instead of the eight I was instinctively expecting. Of course, by then Third Edition was out, so...

>more by that than all the superfluous grognardy detail about pole
>arms, etc.

This just made me think of that one-panel comic from Dragon, with the clerics. "I used to carry a lucern hammer. Imagine my embarrassment when I found out it was a pole arm!"

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Peter Eng
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Dec-10-17, 04:14 PM (EST)
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14. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #2
 
   >
>This just made me think of that one-panel comic from Dragon,
>with the clerics. "I used to carry a lucern hammer. Imagine my
>embarrassment when I found out it was a pole arm!"
>

Yeah, I know that feeling.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.


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zwol
Member since Feb-24-12
217 posts
Dec-10-17, 04:44 PM (EST)
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17. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #1
 
   >Ah yes, Red Box Basic. I remember it well, may even still have a copy
>of the book somewhere (not any of the rest, of course; definitely not
>any of the terrible dice).
...
>
>
>(Just for bonus wtf, while the box was in full color, TSR
>apparently didn't have the budget in those days to do the same with
>the book cover, which was the above art all in shades of blue.
>So its full identifier in my head is "red dragon, blue cover".
>Go fig.)

I believe this is the same edition that my dad brought home from a garage sale circa 1987, and tried to run the included module (which IIRC was B2, not B1 -- "Keep on the Borderlands" -- did they maybe randomize which module you got in the box, along with the ruleset?) with myself, my sister, and my mother as players. It didn't go well, because my mom wasn't into it and my sister was too young for something with that many rules.


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rwpikul
Member since Jun-22-03
178 posts
Dec-11-17, 08:21 AM (EST)
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26. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #17
 
   >>
>
>I believe this is the same edition that my dad brought home from a
>garage sale circa 1987, and tried to run the included module (which
>IIRC was B2, not B1 -- "Keep on the Borderlands" -- did they maybe
>randomize which module you got in the box, along with the ruleset?)
>with myself, my sister, and my mother as players. It didn't go well,
>because my mom wasn't into it and my sister was too young for
>something with that many rules.

You had the next edition after this one, assuming the module you are remembering is the one about the Caves of Chaos, (a bunch of different humanoids living around the sides of a small valley).

--
Chakat Firepaw - Inventor & Scientist (Mad)


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zwol
Member since Feb-24-12
217 posts
Dec-11-17, 12:24 PM (EST)
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27. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #26
 
   >>I believe this is the same edition that my dad brought home from a
>>garage sale circa 1987, and tried to run the included module (which
>>IIRC was B2, not B1 -- "Keep on the Borderlands" -- did they maybe
>>randomize which module you got in the box, along with the ruleset?)
>
>You had the next edition after this one, assuming the module you are
>remembering is the one about the Caves of Chaos, (a bunch of different
>humanoids living around the sides of a small valley).

Yeah, that was it. Weird that they would have shipped different modules with different editions of the basic ruleset, but then, the entire concept was pretty weird anyway.


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rwpikul
Member since Jun-22-03
178 posts
Dec-12-17, 07:45 PM (EST)
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34. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #27
 
   >>You had the next edition after this one, assuming the module you are
>>remembering is the one about the Caves of Chaos, (a bunch of different
>>humanoids living around the sides of a small valley).
>
>Yeah, that was it. Weird that they would have shipped different
>modules with different editions of the basic ruleset, but then, the
>entire concept was pretty weird anyway.

B1 had a number of issues, most notably in that it was effectively unfinished: Many of the rooms, (it was a pure dungeon crawl), either had random contents or were left for the GM to fill.

--
Chakat Firepaw - Inventor & Scientist (Mad)


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Gryphonadmin
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19317 posts
Dec-12-17, 08:50 PM (EST)
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35. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #34
 
   >B1 had a number of issues, most notably in that it was effectively
>unfinished: Many of the rooms, (it was a pure dungeon crawl), either
>had random contents or were left for the GM to fill.

"Oh no! It's that unfinished part of the dungeon we 'feel strangely compelled to avoid'!"

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Peter Eng
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1467 posts
Dec-12-17, 11:34 PM (EST)
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36. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #35
 
   So, something like this comic?

http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=181

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.


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jonathanlennox
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Dec-19-17, 12:50 PM (EST)
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41. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #17
 
   >>Ah yes, Red Box Basic. I remember it well, may even still have a copy

>I believe this is the same edition that my dad brought home from a
>garage sale circa 1987, and tried to run the included module (which
>IIRC was B2, not B1 -- "Keep on the Borderlands" -- did they maybe
>randomize which module you got in the box, along with the ruleset?)
>with myself, my sister, and my mother as players. It didn't go well,
>because my mom wasn't into it and my sister was too young for
>something with that many rules.

I had the edition with "Keep on the Borderlands"; it's probably still in a closet in my mother's house somewhere.

It says something about me (what, I don't know) every time I see that title, from the day I first saw it until this one, I try to sing it to the tune of the Carter Family's Keep on the Sunny Side.


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Mephronmoderator
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40. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #1
 
   I still own that book.

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
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Wiregeek
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3. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #0
 
   I got beaned by the Satanic Panic, and didn't have the wherewithal to tell my parents to stuff it and _make it stick_, so I didn't get to start playing RPGs until I was 17 and older.. and I had some seriously good times. Never played much actual DnD - I've always been a GURPS fan, mostly because it can be so hilariously broken, and Car Wars is my jam.

But recently I was able to spend six glorious months at a table IRL on a saturday game - we were running the Kingmaker module for Pathfinder, heavily modified.

We were all dragons.

It was such a blast. The GM was.. like a grognard, without being offensive or scary? Very interested educated and dedicated - he did the conversion, and did it so well that for most of the campaign I thought it was designed that way.

It was great fun. It was a wonderful opportunity to socialize and spend time with friends, and yes, kill goblins. Summer came, and job schedules changed, and we haven't been able to play in months. I miss it, I really do.


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Gryphonadmin
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28. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #3
 
   >The GM was.. like a grognard

As an aside, I never encountered this word when I was an active RP gamer, so I choose to believe it's the orc parliament's equivalent to Hansard.

HON MR GUKKT V'TUKH (Spannerthorpe)
One further feels his learned colleague from Wrathton still has much to learn about personal grooming.

HON MR HAGAKH MUKKT (Wrathton)
Perhaps my honored associate would care to step outside and place this matter in the sacred hands of Gruumsh.

--G.
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Peter Eng
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29. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #28
 
   This compelled me to look up "grognard," and now I'm imagining the classic Kids These Days speech.

"Back in my day, we didn't have none of those fancy feats or masterwork weapons! We had spells and THAC0, and the lower the AC the better! Now you're up to umpteenth edition, an' nobody knows what the rules are unless you have six dozen books. Three books was all we needed to play Dungeons and Dragons!"

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.


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drakensis
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4. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #0
 
   I certainly didn't get to play D&D at school - I'm not entirely sure anyone at any school I went to had any familiarity with it.

(I did get pulled out of our elementary school equivalent once a week on a special programme, but it was anger management not gifted and talented. I can't testify to grand effectiveness since I don't recall much from back then in detail but there were a couple of _spectacular_ instances in my mid and late teens that suggest that something along those lines would have been a good idea)

My first bid at actual roleplaying was at university but before that I did come across the concept via encountering at roughly the same time Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame (well, the first book, which I found in a discount store and bought mostly for the dragon on the cover) and a set of three Tunnels and Trolls adventure books that the school librarian more or less unloaded on me in the assumption no one else was ever likely to want to borrow them. (I generally got on well with school librarians).

I picked up a AD&D game book second hand at some point in my teens but I'm pretty sure I didn't actually play any D&D until 3.5 when I was twenty or so. The first RPG I actually played was SLA Industries, a grim-dark science fiction game which was fairly entertaining either because or despite it's more or less a really bad Saturday night in Glasgow with science fiction tropes bolted on.

D.


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Gryphonadmin
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12. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #4
 
   >The first RPG I actually played was SLA Industries, a
>grim-dark science fiction game which was fairly entertaining either
>because or despite it's more or less a really bad Saturday night in
>Glasgow with science fiction tropes bolted on.

Heh, heard of that, never played it. Some folks I knew when I lived in Worcester were into it. I remember thinking the premise sounded like Cyberpunk 2020 with the Max Headroom dial turned to 12—that thing about how everyone is on TV all the time and everything is branded.

Also had some friends back then who were into Feng Shui, which was a kung-fu action RPG and not a method of arranging furniture. :)

--G.
-><-
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drakensis
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25. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #12
 
   Fen Shui's had a second edition lately and is hella fun.

D.


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Mercutio
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5. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #0
 
   >In elementary school, circa 1979 to 1984, I was part of my local
>school department's only-recently-established program for what were
>then termed "gifted and talented" students.

Same, only I rocked up into that about six, seven years later.

>In hindsight it's clear that no one really knew what the goal
>was, the department just had a mandate from the state Department of
>Education to Do Something for the kids at the right-hand end of the
>bell curve, and Quest was it.

Do you know, I have talked to a lot of people who were int Gifted and Talented (before they realized that as a pedagogical decision those programs were... flawed, and moved on to other things) and no two people have the same story about what the hell their school district was up to with it. They're all WIDELY variable.

That's weird. Most other things, there's some commonality. You get the same stories about gym class, or history class, or whatnot, from Maine to San Diego. Sure, maybe there's some local color, or some race/class stuff going on (kids from poor urban schools will have different stories than kids from poor rural schools will have different stories than kids from rich suburban schools will have different stories than the only black kid from a rich suburban school, etc.) but there's an enormous amount of commonality among most kids of the same age cohort re: the American public school system.

Not with the old G&T stuff, tho. Everyone has a SUPER DIFFERENT story. Those charged with educating us really were throwing whatever they had against the wall and seeing what stuck, weren't they?

>(It's probably just as well we didn't know that at the time; I'm more
>tolerant of that sort of thing now that I'm an adult with
>mild-to-moderate imposter syndrome than I was as an elementary school
>student. After all, Dunning-Kruger is just imposter syndrome that
>came up tails instead of heads.)

The new version of "imagine everyone in the room naked" is "imagine that everyone is just as afflicted with imposter syndrome as you are."

I'm only like... 25% joking.

> Imagine trying to read your favorite novel,
>only to discover that it is not really that novel, plus it has
>Discussion Questions in boxes scattered around and an essay at the end
>of each chapter in which you are encouraged to Further Deconstruct
>What You Have Just Read.
>
>(I can already hear Merc saying "Oh yes please!" but some of us were
>not that into deconstruction in the third grade, I'm just putting it
>out there. :)

This actually sounds legitimately terrible, and a great way to put kids off reading. And that's hard, because most kids fuckin' love to read. They might not necessarily want to read what's set in front of them by the people trying to hammer them against the anvil of formal education in such a way as to produce a solid citizen at the end of the process, tho.

Deconstruction is a powerful tool, but it's just that, a tool. You wouldn't hand a kid a hammer and tell them to buck wild with it; they'd hurt themselves or others. You teach'em what the hammer is for before doing that.

Lobotomizing classics of western literature, and then taking that lobotomization and trying to chop it apart into something kids are then meant to apply their intellects to productively sounds... really awful. Like, that's one of the cardinal sins of education: missing the forest for the trees. It's looking at the sort of thing that highly motivated people who are passionate about the subject matter (or at least passionate about getting full course credit) are doing in post-secondary education and trying to apply the form but not the substance of it to kids in primary school.

This is not effective pedagogy.

>For all I know, this would probably be almost tragically
>mainstream nowadays,

Doing it as part of course curriculum would still be regarded as rather outre, the sort of thing that extremely progressive/experimental schools would do.

But having it sanctioned by the school in some way isn't. My high school has an RPG club that's a shade over twenty years old. Gets a picture in the yearbook with all the other clubs and everything.

>For one thing, Basic Set only has three alignments,
>and from the context given in the descriptions, they're obviously
>good, neutral, and evil, although the designers copped out and called
>them Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic (because as we all know,
>lawful people are automatically kind, honest, and unselfish as well,
>and vice versa).

The story I have heard is that this isn't so much a copout as it is trying to cram a square peg into a round hole.

The original law/chaos axis is supposedly based on the idea of a morally neutral tension between Law and Chaos in the cosmology of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone novels. (Which, by the way, have NOT aged well. Moorcock is a talented writer but great googly moogly the Elric books are extremely 70s and not in a good way.) This is why the good/evil axis exists alongside it.

They apparently wanted to keep the idea of the law/chaos cosmology around, but also didn't want the full three-by-three grid. Because it was too complicated? So they just... folded everything together.

>For another, the classes and non-human races are
>interconnected, so that, for example, all elves are multiclass
>fighter/magic-users.

This completely baffled me the first time I had it explained to me by a friend before another friend interjected in a way that made it clear:

"You didn't play a Fighter, or a Mage, or a Cleric, or anything like that. You played an Elf. Your class is Elf. The Dwarf's class is Dwarf. You didn't gain levels in Fighter or Mage. You gained levels in Elf. Humans have a race AND a class. You just have a class."

Conceptualizing it that way made it make a lot more sense.

>Obviously, she controlled what we had in our inventories, too. You
>know those laughable suggested starting equipment lists in the
>Player's Handbook? The ones that always include a 10-foot pole
>and 50 feet of rope? (Do they still have those in the newer
>editions?)

They do, but it's much saner.

F'rinstance... lemme crack open my 5e PHB to a random spot in class choices.

Okay, Rogues. Here's what a Rogue starts with:


  • A rapier OR a shortsword
  • A shortbow and a quiver of twenty arrows OR a shortsword
  • A burglar's pack OR a dungeoneers pack OR an explorers pack
  • Leather armor, two daggers, and thieves' tools.

What's in the various packs, and the thieves' tools, is detailed in the equipment section elsewhere in the book, but it's basically a bunch of general-use stuff for the stated purpose. And yes, rope is among them. A dungeoneer, explorer, or burglar probably could use about fifty feet of rope.

Other classes get different options but it all makes sense. Like.. the Burglar's Pack contains a thousand ball bearings. You, personally, might not ever use them... but you can certainly conceive of why a pack of general-purpose burglar's tools would have ball bearings.

> and the guy sitting next to me
>rummaged around in his bag and came up with one of the licensed
>D&D novels to pass the time. (I have no memory of which one.
>There can't have been all that many of them in 1987, can there?)

This would almost certainly have had to have been a Dragonlance novel, of which there were ten in publication by the end of 1987. There is a small, outside chance it was one of the two Greyhawk novels, or the single Forgotten Realms novel, available at the time, but weight of probability says Dragonlance.

(There was a time in my life when I thought Tanis Half-Elven was maybe the coolest guy in the world. To my credit, I have never, ever thought that about Drizz't Do'Urden.)

-Merc
Keep Rat


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MoonEyes
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6. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #5
 
   Having not really looked at 5e, since the vast majority of the gaming group I played in has scattered to ever wind there is, I have to ask...

Does that mean that your rogue is equipped with TWO swords, potentially? Because that sounds remarkably silly.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"


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Mercutio
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7. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #6
 
   >Having not really looked at 5e, since the vast majority of the gaming
>group I played in has scattered to ever wind there is, I have to
>ask...
>
>Does that mean that your rogue is equipped with TWO swords,
>potentially? Because that sounds remarkably silly.

Dual-wielding is a thing explicitly supported by the game, and Rogues are potentially, if they build for it, very good at it.

If that's going to be your build, you can absolutely go rapier one hand, shortsword other hand at the start of the game, foregoing bow and arrow.

-Merc
Keep Rat


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Gryphonadmin
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8. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #7
 
   >>Does that mean that your rogue is equipped with TWO swords,
>>potentially? Because that sounds remarkably silly.

(And somewhere in the space-time continuum, every samurai who ever lived reads this post and thinks, What? :)

>Dual-wielding is a thing explicitly supported by the game, and Rogues
>are potentially, if they build for it, very good at it.

Besides, stuff happens when you're adventuring. Things get broken. Or thrown. Or eaten by a rust monster. It's good to have backup if you can afford it.

--G.
-><-
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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MoonEyes
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13. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #7
 
   Ok, as I noted, supremely silly to me. Because while dual-wield certainly should be POSSIBLE, in my opinion at least, it should require a whole rigmarole.

Using two anything is not easy, if you want to be at least marginally competent at it. Sure, anyone can grab two swords, axes, pistols, whatever, and flail around as it were. But using both at the same time takes quite a bit more. There is a reason why people in movies shoot one gun at a time, as it were, even if they have two.

My opinion, which is why it's silly to me.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"


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Peter Eng
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16. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #13
 
   >Ok, as I noted, supremely silly to me. Because while dual-wield
>certainly should be POSSIBLE, in my opinion at least, it should
>require a whole rigmarole.
>

Well, in 3E, it did require a whole rigamarole. I suspect that it does in 5E as well.

> Sure, anyone can grab two swords, axes, pistols, whatever, and flail
> around as it were.

As I understand it, nobody with any intent of hitting anything on purpose is going to dual-wield firearms.

As far as flailing around goes, people can do that with one melee weapon as easily as two. Fighting with intent to survive, on the other hand...that takes training, regardless of whether you're using weapon-and-shield, a two-handed weapon, or two weapons.

Parrying daggers were a real thing in European swordsmanship as well, by the way. So, either "learning how to fight effectively" is equivalent to "a whole rigamarole," or you may want to reconsider just how silly it is.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.


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Trscroggs
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42. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #16
 
   That isn't to say that there aren't builds that can, or want, to do it but duel-wielding doesn't appear as common as it was in previous editions.

5th edition allows any character to pick up two weapons and wield them simultaneously, at least under specific circumstances.

Any character can wield two light one-handed weapons in each hand. Using their once-a-turn bonus action they can make an attack with the off-hand weapon during their round. The off-hand weapon doesn't get your static stat bonus to its damage. And for light weapons in 5e this can be about 50% of the weapon's average per-round damage.

Two classes, the fighter and the ranger, can chose to take a class feature that give the stat damage to the off-hand attack. In addition, if the DM allows them, there is a feat that removes the 'light weapon' requirement.

This seems pretty powerful, but several classes have reasons not to dual-wield.
--All the spell casters generally need to keep a hand free for material or somatic components.
--The monk has a mostly superior version built into their class.
--Barbarians and Paladins will either want a two-handed weapon for superior average damage, or to go 'sword and board' to increase their AC.

Many Rogues, oddly enough, have other things to do with their bonus action. The have abilities that make them the most agile of all the classes, if not the fastest for many levels, and a rogue who hangs out in melee combat to get an off-hand attack is probably going to end up getting killed. (In 5e rogues get one sneak attack per turn, period. This was done specifically to limit the dual-wielding rogue's damage output.)


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Gryphonadmin
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43. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #42
 
   >Many Rogues, oddly enough, have other things to do with their bonus
>action. The have abilities that make them the most agile of all the
>classes, if not the fastest for many levels, and a rogue who hangs out
>in melee combat to get an off-hand attack is probably going to end up
>getting killed. (In 5e rogues get one sneak attack per turn, period.
>This was done specifically to limit the dual-wielding rogue's damage
>output.)

Klingon proverb: "A thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man, except in 5th Edition."

--G.
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Peter Eng
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44. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #43
 
   >
>Klingon proverb: "A thousand throats may be cut in one night by a
>running man, except in 5th Edition."
>

(Insert pedantic math proving that a rogue could in fact cut a thousand throats in one night, even in 5th Edition, assuming that she made all her skill checks and that the enemy forces are a little bit lacking in good sense.)

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.


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Trscroggs
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45. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #43
 
   LAST EDITED ON Jan-02-18 AT 04:49 PM (EST)
 
In my experience 5e Rogues make great skirmishers and mobile snipers.

Most characters "I move into melee and attack." Once engaged in melee they won't leave it until the target is dead because in 5e almost any blow can be fatal if the encounter is level appropriate. And leaving melee provokes opportunity attacks.

Rogues are likely to do this regularly: "I move in, attack, and as my bonus action Disengage and use the rest of my original move to retreat." As long as they have an ally to prevent the enemy from chasing them down, this keeps the rogue safe from counter-attacks.

The other major rouge tactic is: "I move to cover, take a bonus action to Hide, then range-attack from stealth." This is particularly common for certain types of Haflings, which can hide behind their own medium sized allies.

With a starting AC and only a d8 for HP, rogues don't usually want to be counterattacked. (When doing the math for this comment I noticed that monks and barbarians also have low AC, they just have tools to make it less of an issue for them.)


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Gryphonadmin
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18. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #13
 
   >Ok, as I noted, supremely silly to me. Because while dual-wield
>certainly should be POSSIBLE, in my opinion at least, it should
>require a whole rigmarole.

Being a player character is a whole rigmarole. Unless they added one in the fourth or fifth editions, there is no "ordinary mook" character class in D&D; all adventurers, even first-level scrubs, are far better than the Common Folk at whatever they're doing. To that end, there are plenty of historical precedents involving melee weapons. They all require specialized training, but then, so does picking locks.

With guns, not so much, but for different reasons; with any ranged weapon, the typical human visual field only has one small field of foveal vision, and so can allow for only one point of aim. This is why fictional characters who can effectively dual-wield with simultaneous fire (as opposed to ambidexterous alternating fire) generally have some kind of shtick going on where they don't need to aim or even be able to see what they're shooting at (e.g., the gun kata in Equilibrium).

--G.
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MoonEyes
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23. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #18
 
   >Being a player character is a whole rigmarole. Unless they
>added one in the fourth or fifth editions, there is no "ordinary mook"
>character class in D&D; all adventurers, even first-level scrubs, are
>far better than the Common Folk at whatever they're doing. To that
>end, there are
>plenty of
>historical precedents
>involving melee weapons. They all require specialized training, but
>then, so does picking locks.

Well, sure, but there is a lot of difference between "better than ordinary folks" and "able to utilize a very rare and difficult combat method." And sure, there are two-sword methods, but they're, well, rare and difficult. Using a main-gauche is rather different than swinging two swords around, the dimachaerus trained long and hard and literally did nothing else, on the premise that dying in the arena would be bad, and Niten-Ichi is the single "formalized" form that I know of, ANYWHERE, that really does the two-sword thing. As best I know, there is nothing even remotely like it in any fecht-bucher.


>With guns, not so much, but for different reasons; with any ranged
>weapon, the typical human visual field only has one small field of
>foveal vision, and so can allow for only one point of aim. This is
>why fictional characters who can effectively dual-wield with
>simultaneous fire (as opposed to ambidexterous alternating fire)
>generally have some kind of shtick going on where they don't need to
>aim or even be able to see what they're shooting at (e.g., the gun
>kata in Equilibrium).

That being entirely my point, yes, about shooting.

In all honesty, unless you're essentially Japanese, who didn't do the whole shield-thing, as a personal bit of kit(there were Pavis-like ones, as I recall, but...) there is no reason what so ever to do two swords when a sword and a shield is much more efficient. Thus, "rule of cool" which, sure, it's a game, but all the same, it should require a bit more than "I bought two swords instead of one sword and a bow".

As noted, my opinion, worth what you pay for it, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
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Nova Floresca
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32. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #23
 
   >In all honesty, unless you're essentially Japanese, who didn't do the
>whole shield-thing, as a personal bit of kit(there were Pavis-like
>ones, as I recall, but...) there is no reason what so ever to do two
>swords when a sword and a shield is much more efficient. Thus, "rule
>of cool" which, sure, it's a game, but all the same, it should require
>a bit more than "I bought two swords instead of one sword and a bow".

As a counterpoint, while yes sword + shield is more efficient than two swords in most cases, the list of cases where the two swords could prove to be more useful and the list of situations a party of D&D adventurers might get into overlap quite well. For one, there's the clockwise stairs problem in castles, which would make being ambidextrous an advantage.

Second, the name of the game is Dungeons and Dragons, and their definition of "Dungeons" is pretty much "old, decrepit, hazardous, and underground". A large shield is going to be your worst enemy when trying to clamber around obstacles in such an environment.

Lastly, yes, anyone can wield two weapons just by picking up two blades- at a hideous penalty. It takes a substantial investment of training (in the form of feats) to be any good at it. A 2nd-level Wizard can spray fire from his hands, strike down distant foes with homing darts of force, and give a man the size and strength of an ogre. A 2nd-level Cleric can call upon the blessings of his deity to heal wounds, withstand the blazing heat of a desert, and understand any spoken or written word with perfect clarity. A 2nd-level Fighter . . . can hone his skills to where he can swing two swords at the same time without them getting in each other's way too much, and even use the off-hand weapon to parry attacks.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."


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Silversword
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39. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #23
 
   >In all honesty, unless you're essentially Japanese, who didn't do the
>whole shield-thing, as a personal bit of kit(there were Pavis-like
>ones, as I recall, but...) there is no reason what so ever to do two
>swords when a sword and a shield is much more efficient. Thus, "rule
>of cool" which, sure, it's a game, but all the same, it should require
>a bit more than "I bought two swords instead of one sword and a bow".
>

So, I feel obligated to point out that China is a very big place with a lot of martial arts styles, and the exclusively dual-weilded butterfly swords are way more common than the shield in my experiance, and that's not even touching on all the other dual-weilded weapons in which I have none.

As for why you'd dual weild instead of using a shield, well, if you're excluding all the noncombat things like concealability, manouverability and redundancy (and you probably shouldn't - a shield's efficiency in combat is cumbersome in another), a pair of short weapons is remarkably effective against spears and poles, which are very common weapons. An offhand smallblade gives you a level of control over your opponent's weapons that a shield does not.

Granted, this does not make dual-weilding automatically superior or even practical in many cases, but remember that the shield is the tool of a soldier and is best employed in ranks, and a D&D group is generally not those things. Rule of cool may be a very big draw for a lot of people, but there wouldn't be dual-weild styles at all anywhere ever if it wasn't a practical thing in some capacity.


~Silv'


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Gryphonadmin
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10. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #5
 
   >there's an
>enormous amount of commonality among most kids of the same age cohort
>re: the American public school system.
>
>Not with the old G&T stuff, tho. Everyone has a SUPER DIFFERENT story.
>Those charged with educating us really were throwing whatever they had
>against the wall and seeing what stuck, weren't they?

Yup. To be fair, it was a new field at the time, and there was virtually no guidance available. Best practices couldn't be referenced in the development of those programs in the late '70s/early '80s, because they didn't exist. For example, the local program here started because one teacher (coincidentally enough, my mom) read something about such a program somewhere else, found out that there was federal money available through state education departments for them, and applied to the state for a grant to develop the program and fund the position it would create.

She then had to develop the program—mostly by herself, with a bit of input from the two or three other teachers in the system who were in any way interested in such things—and defend both the necessity and the expected efficacy of it before a committee in Augusta. A lot of bigger, better-heeled school districts were looking to get on that wagon, so it was a pretty competitive process, and I would assume that most if not all of them were improvising their asses off just as much, since there were no published standards to meet.

The kicker is that when the grant came through, the town school board only narrowly, and with reluctance, voted to accept it, partly because they were not altogether convinced that such a thing would be useful, and partly because the funding it provided was a diminishing match over three years with a non-diminishing mandate to provide the service being paid for, which struck them as a shady deal. Once they did accept it, the Superintendent of Schools (who was not a particular believer in "special education" at either end of the curve) tried everything he could think of to get out of following through on it.

Part of the backlash from this, which the superintendent regarded as a fast one having been pulled on his office, was that the position existed, but the person responsible for its creation would be employed in it only over his dead body. I am informed that the actual sentence "You may have gotten the grant, but you're not getting the job" was uttered. And then Ms. Spencer came in and just made up whatever the hell she was doing instead of using any of the framework from the grant.

(The thing Mom ran while I was in first grade was evidently the part-time pilot, done under the auspices of that individual school's principal while the grant was being written, and so not involving the superintendent's office or the board. She was basically being paid as a substitute teacher—no benefits, no CBA—while she developed the program. I was six at the time and so either didn't know or had long since forgotten most of these details.)

Anyway, multiply that kind of bullshit town-pump politics and state/federal ad-hockery by however many individual school jurisdictions there were in the United States in 1978-80, and you have, I suspect, at least a partial explanation of why the situation was so confused.

>It's looking at the sort of thing that highly
>motivated people who are passionate about the subject matter (or at
>least passionate about getting full course credit) are doing in
>post-secondary education and trying to apply the form but not
>the substance of it to kids in primary school.

There was quite a bit of that going on in Quest—I mean, as I noted, one of the other things we studied was Bloom's taxonomy, and that is explicitly a teaching-theory thing, not an actual subject matter for students themselves. It's as if Ms. Spencer thought, Well, these kids are advanced, I should try teaching them what I was taught when I was older than they are. Which was the stuff from when she was getting her primary-education degree.

>This is not effective pedagogy.

It was, indeed, rather not.

>The original law/chaos axis is supposedly based on the idea of a
>morally neutral tension between Law and Chaos in the cosmology of
>Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone novels. (Which, by the
>way, have NOT aged well. Moorcock is a talented writer but great
>googly moogly the Elric books are extremely 70s and not in a good
>way.) This is why the good/evil axis exists alongside it.

Heh, I wonder how much of that is because they legit have aged poorly, and how much of it is because the reference pointers have flipped and the D&D player reading them recognizes all the stuff that was stolen from them for D&D, but subonsciously perceives it as riffing on the game instead. :)

(Similar to the reaction a friend had to The Lord of the Rings as an adult: "This is like somebody's D&D campaign journal with some really insane house rules." :)

>"You didn't play a Fighter, or a Mage, or a Cleric, or anything like
>that. You played an Elf. Your class is Elf. The Dwarf's class
>is Dwarf. You didn't gain levels in Fighter or Mage. You gained
>levels in Elf. Humans have a race AND a class. You just have a class."
>
>Conceptualizing it that way made it make a lot more sense.

Well... does it, though? I mean, if you want your dwarf or elf or whatever character to hit all the stereotypes, great, but enforcing them that way in the game mechanics? Enh.

>Other classes get different options but it all makes sense. Like.. the
>Burglar's Pack contains a thousand ball bearings. You, personally,
>might not ever use them... but you can certainly conceive of why a
>pack of general-purpose burglar's tools would have ball bearings.

Well, I suppose, although a thousand of them seems a bit excessive. I guess it would depend on what size they are.

(Also, ball bearings, patented in 1794, are anachronistic to the game setting. Also also, they probably mean "bearing balls", since the phrase "ball bearing" properly refers to the entire mechanism with the balls, the rings, and the lubrication and retention materials assembled. Did I read somewhere that they have guns in 5th Edition? Perhaps "round shot" would have been a better descriptor. Also to the third power, I might just have spent several minutes trolling Wizards of the Coast and they're not even here.)

>> and the guy sitting next to me
>>rummaged around in his bag and came up with one of the licensed
>>D&D novels to pass the time. (I have no memory of which one.
>>There can't have been all that many of them in 1987, can there?)
>
>This would almost certainly have had to have been a Dragonlance novel,
>of which there were ten in publication by the end of 1987. There is a
>small, outside chance it was one of the two Greyhawk novels, or the
>single Forgotten Realms novel, available at the time, but weight of
>probability says Dragonlance.

True, although we used the Forgotten Realms setting, so it's possible it was that one.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Mercutio
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20. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #10
 
   >>"You didn't play a Fighter, or a Mage, or a Cleric, or anything like
>>that. You played an Elf. Your class is Elf. The Dwarf's class
>>is Dwarf. You didn't gain levels in Fighter or Mage. You gained
>>levels in Elf. Humans have a race AND a class. You just have a class."
>>
>>Conceptualizing it that way made it make a lot more sense.
>
>Well... does it, though? I mean, if you want your dwarf or elf
>or whatever character to hit all the stereotypes, great, but enforcing
>them that way in the game mechanics? Enh.

Oh, my apologies.

I meant makes sense in the vein of "Why is my Elf so weird compared to everyone else?" "Think of Elf as being your class, not your race." "Oh! Okay, now things make sense."

Not in the vein of "doing it that way and enforcing it via game mechanics is actually a good idea."

-Merc
Keep Rat


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Gryphonadmin
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21. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #20
 
   >I meant makes sense in the vein of "Why is my Elf so weird compared to
>everyone else?" "Think of Elf as being your class, not your race."
>"Oh! Okay, now things make sense."

Well, yeah, I didn't have trouble comprehending how it worked, I just thought it was stupid. :)

--G.
-><-
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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Gryphonadmin
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37. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #10
 
   Oh yeah, also,

>She was basically being paid as
>a substitute teacher—no benefits, no CBA—while she
>developed the program.

I should probably clarify this mention of a collective bargaining agreement a little. The teachers in Maine's public schools are unionized... kind of, on paper. I mean they are required to belong to an organization to which they pay dues and which bills itself as a teachers' labor advocacy group, but... well, imagine if instead of a traditional union, a group of workers banded together and formed an organization tasked with policing their own tendency to make demands and generally making sure they don't take advantage of management too badly. That's pretty much what the Maine Education Association is. The adjective "supine" doesn't get used often enough, and it applies here, so there, I have just used it.

To be fair, they haven't got access to organized labor's traditional weapon of choice; teachers' strikes are illegal in Maine. The state Department of Labor will not help them. About the only thing their pseudo-union is legally able to do when the town government offers, say, even more terrible pay than is customary in exchange for continuing their health insurance when they retire, and then years later pleads financial hardship and drops retirees' health insurance,* is wave its hands and fret like C-3PO. "Oh dear, oh dear. This wasn't part of the arrangement."

--G.
* which happened
-><-
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Proginoskes
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15. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #5
 
   Elementary school Gifted programs are alive and well in British Columbia, or at least were as of 2001. My experience followed the same general pattern of going to some other school one afternoon per week to do some random activity. I was fortunate in that, while none of our Gifted specialists seemed to talk to each other, they all had reasonable ideas of what to do with a bunch of clever but easily distracted children. Most memorably, my group spent a great many afternoons playing with HyperCard on a bunch of Macintosh computers, several of which were older than we were.


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MoonEyes
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24. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #5
 
   >This would almost certainly have had to have been a Dragonlance novel,
>of which there were ten in publication by the end of 1987. There is a
>small, outside chance it was one of the two Greyhawk novels, or the
>single Forgotten Realms novel, available at the time, but weight of
>probability says Dragonlance.

Strictly speaking, by the end of 1987, there were six Greyhawk books out, 5 by Gygax and one by Andre Norton, Quag Keep, though that one would've been about years old by that time, so probably not it. As an aside, Quag Keep was the first D&D novel ever.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"


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DaPatman89
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9. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #0
 
   My introduction to the world of roleplaying was different, but probably no better: the entire party died to the first encounter. (Then again, we were playing Call of Cthulhu...)

Fortunately, I had a much better series of experiences once I went to university, the highlight of which would have to be a 4th ed campaign that ran for two years. This is mainly because of the homebrew magic items the party picked up as we progressed, including Tenser's Floating Tea Tray, as well as a stone that turned you pink while you held it, but only from the point of view of everyone else.

---

"Things in life aren't always quite what they seem,
There's more than one given angle to any one given scene.
So bear that in mind next time you try to intervene
On any one given angle on any one given scene."
Angles - dan le sac vs. Scroobius Pip


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Gryphonadmin
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11. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #9
 
   >My introduction to the world of roleplaying was different, but
>probably no better: the entire party died to the first encounter.
>(Then again, we were playing Call of Cthulhu...)

Yeah, that's kind of supposed to happen in Call of Cthulhu, albeit perhaps not right out of the gate.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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StClair
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19. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #11
 
   In Paranoia, that's why they give you clones.


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pjmoyermoderator
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22. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #0
 
   My earliest memories of RPG'ing were from Junior High and High School. I was part of a CMPS Magnet in both, which bused people from over the county to go to the schools in question, and my longer term early friendships were established there. Sadly, none of my gaming attempts at that early an age never quite made it past one or two sessions, and I had more appreciation for borrowing the game books to read than the actual playing. I have recollection of having attempted Teenagers from Outer Space, Mekton, GURPS Supers, and I think at least one anime-based one without recognizing what it was -- it should be noted that in High School I was borrowing my friend's Zelazny's Amber series and Wild Cards' novels, along with the Sci-Fi and Fantasy stuff I or my dad checked out from the Library. My parents did give me the cautionary warning about Dungeons and Dragons and Bad Influences due to us being regular Catholics... but given by then I'd started reading the Xanth novels and Anne McCaffrey's PERN series, it didn't really stick. ^_-;

--- Philip






Philip J. Moyer
Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios
"Insert Pithy Comment Here"
Fandoms -- Fanart -- Fan Meta Discussions


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Kendra Kirai
Member since May-22-16
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Dec-11-17, 01:44 PM (EST)
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30. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #0
 
   My first proper exposure to a pen and paper RPG was stumbling upon the RIFTS monster Manual back in like...1997 or so. I read the crap out of it, and eventually managed to get into a game of it held online on a MU*.

It didn't last very long - I don't think we ever reached what could be considered any sort of ending, but I was sort of hooked. A few years later I stumbled upon another MU* that was doing 3.5 in a nonstandard campaign environment (modern day when the world was getting 'invaded' by portals and monsters and things coming through to everyday Earth).

I'm currently in two 5e games, and I have to say....5e is terrible if you want to actually have rules for who and how awesome your character is. 3.5 was great for that. All those feats and skills and stuff. You could actually MAKE your character in 3.x.

5e has succumbed to the 'everybody is okay at everything' ideal of many newer Final Fantasies and Elder Scrolls.

Though I do rather like that they gave casters infinite casts of at least basic damaging spells rather than the piss-poor 'Level 0' spells that did 1d3 damage.

But a Fighter is no better at fighting than a cleric or paladin or rogue or ranger or anything else that can use a long sword and that's just lame.


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Peter Eng
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31. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #30
 
   >
>I'm currently in two 5e games, and I have to say....5e is terrible if
>you want to actually have rules for who and how awesome your character
>is. 3.5 was great for that. All those feats and skills and stuff. You
>could actually MAKE your character in 3.x.
>

The best that I can say for 5e is that I like it better than 4e. Neither one would support my halfling shuriken master or my dagger fighter from 3.x.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.


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Kendra Kirai
Member since May-22-16
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Dec-11-17, 09:35 PM (EST)
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33. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #31
 
   Yeah! Those off the wall builds, or even just something more than "bog standard version of X class" is just....GONE from 5e.

The argument has been made to me that it's more about the STORY but how is it MORE interesting for the story if you're just a completely standard "CLASS" with one or two little quirks that BARELY affect how you work?

Any RACE CLASS is going to be the same as any other RACE CLASS mechanically and probably even equipment wise for an extremely long time. In 3.x you could START OFF as something unique. Actually make the character YOUR OWN in actual play.

I won't argue that 3.x is easier to do for beginners, because that's just untrue. But you can't tell me that 5e is BETTER than 3.x.

Except for casters, I'm totally onboard with giving casters the ability to actually DO something if they used up all their bigger spells for the day.


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Peter Eng
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46. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #33
 
   >
>I won't argue that 3.x is easier to do for beginners, because that's
>just untrue. But you can't tell me that 5e is BETTER than 3.x.
>

Coming back to this late...

I won't say that it's better - just that it has its own flaws.

The main variation between versions of D&D is about Control vs. Flexibility. The more Flexibility the player has, the more fun can be had - but it weakens Control of what the GM, game designer, and module writer can expect.

In my opinion, First and Second edition D&D had a moderate tendency towards Control, Fourth Edition pushed the scale about as far towards Control as possible without having everybody play the exact same character, and Fifth Edition has a slight tendency towards Control.

Third Edition, especially with all the prestige classes and feats from the expansion books, became a rampaging beast of Flexibility. (See: Pun-pun the kobold.) I used it to create fun things, as did my best friend. (Half-elf pacifist diplomat.) Other people created combat monsters.

The effect this had on the Living campaigns can not be understated. Any adventure that was national was generally geared towards challenging the combat monsters, which meant that my characters, which were capable but not at that level, died like flies unless we made sure at least one member of the party was a combat monster. The effect was more often than not like being in a UF mission team of Neo, Gryphon, Hellbringer, and three bluesuiters.

I prefer 3E, and the Pathfinder system that is its descendant, but I think they're still looking for that sweet spot between Control and Flexibility.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.


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Kendra Kirai
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Jan-03-18, 12:17 PM (EST)
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47. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #46
 
   'slight' emphasis towards control? At low levels, you may as well just not play some of the classes. Fighter especially. Everything they do, a Paladin or Barbarian can do better. They get no more feats than anyone else, which is the only way they can differentiate themselves from the other fighty types. a Rogue gets in and out better, a monk has built in two handed fighting, a Paldin has almost the same good points and also gets spells and can heal other people as well as themselves (And BETTER).

Before you get that first feat, when everyone else gets theirs as well, you're CLEARLY inferior to a Paladin.

....I just looked it up. You have to CHOOSE if you want a feat or a stat boost at level four?! What bullshittery is this?!

Yeah, this is not flexible AT ALL. And the only level 4 feat for a fighter in the SRD appears to be GRAPPLER. Who the FRICK makes a grappler fighter?

.....wait, are you only supposed to do a point buy up to 16? In the SRD chargen?

This entire thing is bullshit.


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MoonEyes
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48. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #46
 
   LAST EDITED ON Jan-03-18 AT 03:04 PM (EST)
 
Pun-Pun isn't flexible. Min-Maxing isn't about flexible, it's about loophole-chasing and powergaming, and Pun-Pun is min-maxing at its very most extreme, something which is already extreme. In fact, in a sense, Pun-Pun is probably the very most of "control", and as is even noted, is completely game-destroying.
Just noting.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"


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Gryphonadmin
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Jan-03-18, 03:13 PM (EST)
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49. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #48
 
   >Pun-Pun isn't flexible. Min-Maxing isn't about flexible, it's about
>loophole-chasing and powergaming, and Pun-Pun is min-maxing at its
>very most extreme, something which is already extreme.

I believe the way the terms are used here, a system heavily weighted toward "control" (by and for the DM) would be inclined to prevent, or at least minimize, that kind of thing, whereas one that gives the players the flexibility to do so would not.

I haven't really got a dog in that fight, since I haven't played since before 3.5, but I will say that I had a hell of a lot of fun playing in the one 3E game I was in, in large part because that version of the system allowed for a person to do really silly off-label shit (like the character I played, whose capsule bio sounds like I was completely taking the piss if read at face value) and play it completely straight; but it required a great deal of circumspection on the players' part to make that work, and a lot of house rules and Understandings with the DM. As I read the original post, the point of the "Control" formulations of the game's base rules is to reduce the workload on the DM and the level of discretion required of the players by just barring them from doing silly shit in the first place. Which is, on the one hand, rather anticreative, but on the other, some people crave structure.

To paraphrase a favorite old remark about operating systems, "Unix doesn't stop you from doing silly shit, because that would stop you from doing clever shit." Under this rubric, Third Edition was Unix; it sounds like Fifth Edition is more like MacOS. :)

--G.
-><-
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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Gryphonadmin
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Jan-03-18, 05:22 PM (EST)
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51. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #49
 
   LAST EDITED ON Jan-03-18 AT 05:25 PM (EST)
 
>To paraphrase a favorite old remark about operating systems, "Unix
>doesn't stop you from doing silly shit, because that would stop you
>from doing clever shit." Under this rubric, Third Edition was Unix;
>it sounds like Fifth Edition is more like MacOS. :)

Although, boy howdy, you want to talk about a prescriptive/restrictive system, I've just recently re-read bits of the first-edition AD&D Player's Handbook, and I had forgotten what a straitjacket the original Advanced system was. Dwarves can only be fighters or rogues? Really? Different ability score maximums for male and female characters. Maximum levels in some of the few classes available to some of the races. Multi-classing mechanics that were a complete load of old arse. If Third Edition was Unix, the first one, fittingly for its era, was VM/370. :)

(And, though this is not strictly relevant to how iron-fisted the game rules were, all presented in that eyestrain-inducing sans-serif font, with illustrations that in some cases look like I drew them. In hindsight, you can really tell that the first edition was made by like a half-dozen dudes, not all of whom got paid and none of whom seriously expected the product to go big, at least a decade before desktop publishing.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Peter Eng
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50. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #48
 
   >Pun-Pun isn't flexible...

Gryphon's explanation of what I wrote is correct; sorry if I was confusing in my phrasing.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.


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BobSchroeck
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38. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #0
 
   My first exposure to tabletop RPGs (as opposed to traditional LARPs like "Cowboys and Indians" and "Cops and Robbers") was the summer of 1979 (between my junior and senior years of high school), when my then-best friend John came back from a long family vacation raving about this amazing new game he'd been introduced to, "Dungeons and Dragons". He didn't have a copy of the rules, but that didn't stop us from free-form roleplaying for the rest of the summer.

Although fun, the unevenness of the experience left me with a desperate need for more structure in my gaming, so I ended up getting my hands on TSR's mail-order catalog, and decided, well, let's start at the beginning, why don't we? And I ordered the original three-booklet box set of D&D.

You know, the one that assumes you have the Chainmail miniatures rules.

Which I didn't. I also didn't have a clue what the hell it was talking about with "Man + 1" combat abilities and stuff.

But it was enough to prove my friend had been talking about a real game, and it was radically different from anything I'd ever seen before.

I kinda tried to use that set for the next year or so, but it was, really, like trying to run le Mans without tires. Or an engine. It looked great, but it didn't go anywhere.

It wasn't until I got to college that I actually started playing for real, and that was because I found a copy of the AD&D1 Player's Handbook in my college bookstore. And the DMG. And the Monster Manual. And other stuff which I ordered (and still have -- like the 1st edition Deities and Demigods, the one with the Cthulhu and Erewhon chapters which got lawyered out of later reprints). I found a campaign, a couple years later started my own, and the rest is sort of history... And that, children, is how I ended up being a paid game writer for a few decades.

-- Bob
(But yeah, I remember the "red dragon, blue cover" edition. I found it when I was already far enough down the road that it was just uselessly weird to me.)
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.


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