OGD&D: What was "Original D&D" like?

Bill Willinghams inside cover illustration, from the (OrangeRed) Moldvay Basic Set Rulebook (1981).  That's a strong female lead (in admittedly era appropriate, useless, sexist armor... baby steps) too!

When the pandemic started, I took notice of what Critical Role and others were doing only because a good friend of mine asked if I wanted to play D&D with the group he and his brother had formed.  I had grown up with D&D, but from around 2nd edition on, I had let the little things like High-School, College, Family and a Career take the place of frivolous things like hobbies, or personal enjoyment.  While I have much more to say on that topic, it is all very personally specific to me, and therefore uninteresting to anyone else, so I will spare you that pointless bloviation.  It can be summarized by the phrase "place the mask securely around your own face before helping others" and it is a good reminder that self-care is as important as sacrificing for the happiness others.  See, I told you it was boring.  At least I made it sound self-aggrandizing too. 

 I am very glad he got in touch though.  It has been both exciting and nostalgic to see what has happened to the experience since I was a teen ager.  Over 40 years later, the worlds, and the game still fire my imagination, and that is something that is worth bloviating a little about: and here we both are.

First Contact

If you know the history, and were right there with Gygax himself playing "Chainmail"  in the early 70s, I'm going to gloss over a bunch of stuff, get a bunch of stuff wrong, and generally only approach a point slowly and asymptotically in this meandering attempt at humor. For your own sake, just skip a section ahead, or at least have the courtesy to begin your strongly worded diatribe with the word "Actually, " so I know what's coming in the comments.

D&D, as first published by Gary Gygax and Don Kaye came out in 1974, when I was 4 years old.  As precocious as I want to seem, no 4 year old is that precocious, and I am pretty sure I was focused on learning to read, being taught to ride a bike by our neighbor (I still have the "license" he made for me, misspellings and all) and probably dinosaurs or Star Trek stuff.  Living on the East Coast, it took some time for the variant of an obscure medieval wargame, put out by a tiny company in Lake Geneva Wisconsin, to make all the way to Vienna, Virginia where, in 1981, I lived when I was 11.

 See what I mean?  Skipped right over all of it.  Didn't talk about Kaye's heart attack, or Arneson at all.  If only there was a way we could, somehow, tap the sum of all human knowledge with an easy, pocket sized device then people could find out more.  Alas, such devices didn't exist back then, and, as such, I didn't know any of it back then either.  Gygax was a cool name though, I did think that.

When I first encountered D&D in 1981, it had already transformed into the Orange Boxed Set "Basic Dungeons and Dragons" which I still have... worn out 3 ring holes and all.

 It cost $8.95 at the time, and as a military brat who took very long car 20-30h trips with my family in the summers to visit extended family in Texas, it was a godsend.  I don't remember if my parents bought it for me, or if I did.  I had a small income from mowing yards in the neighborhood so $8.95 was easily in the realm of possibility.  I think it may have been me, because I remember getting a non TSR board game that had a fantasy theme the year I asked for D&D, and it was somewhat disappointing.  If I could sound more petulant and spoiled there, I am not sure how, but if the shoe fits...

I do remember, I could sit in the back seat of our 1974 weirdly beige yellow Chrysler Town and Country Station Wagon, facing backward of course, with a pack of graph paper, a pencil, and "Keep on the Borderlands" and the miles would roll by.  Seat belts at the time were lap only, but they were mandatory in our car because my Navy Pilot father, as part of his personal safety checklist, wouldn't even start the car until everyone was buckled. 

That and those invisible ink books were my internet.  

To say I was "bookish" as a kid would be an understatement, and the +4.5x reading glasses I wear now in my 50's are perhaps the most obvious physical manifestation of that.  Another physical manifestation, which I wouldn't realize until I was almost 50 years old, was I had fairly aggressive ADHD.  Us Gen X'ers are not the best when it comes to Mental Health, and in the 70's and 80's if you had a diagnosis of ADD/ADHD you probably actually had something on the spectrum of Autism because unless your symptoms were profound, you were told to just deal with it because it was clearly your fault for being lazy and inattentive.  It comes as no small irony that this tangent about ADHD is itself, indicative of both my condition, and my frustrating ability to be both aware of this, and still not be able to do anything about it (at times).

Again, bordering on the "specific to me, therefore boring" part of the map here, but the kids who did have a diagnosis when I was growing up, were not treated well by the rest of us (even those of us who should have been there with them).  "Spaz" and worse was what you were called, throw in also that therapy was for crazy people, and meds were for the people in mental institutions... which were still a thing back then until basically Reagan.

It isn't a surprise that my condition was missed for so long, and now that I can see how the right meds can really help, I mourn the loss of those years when I could have combined my imagination and youthful exuberance without including my extreme lack of follow through that has characterized so much of my life.  Now we are squarely in the boring part.  Moving on.

ADHD did mean that I could obsessively hyper-focus on things that interested me... to the exclusion of the world and people around me, and so that's what I did.  I got lucky, in that I have a fairly good memory for facts, and caffeine exists, because I drank excessive amounts of caffeinated beverages to try and stimulate my ADHD brain into not screwing me over, constantly... which it did anyway, because as treatments go, caffeine has nothing on Dexmethylphenidate. <chef's kiss>.

As fads went, D&D moved very quickly across the country.  Once one kid in the neighborhood had it, the social nature of the game meant that all the other kids wanted it, and it was something of a viral sensation before things were described in that way.  This mechanic meant it was spreading like a social network, because it was creating tiny little social networks everywhere it went.

Role playing games tried to copy the lightning in a bottle that D&D seemed to capture, and by 1982 there were several variants and settings besides the what was by then the "standard" fantasy setting of worlds like Greyhawk.  In Vienna, in the early 80s, and importantly: within biking distance of my house, was the store "Executive Hobbies." A magical place of sword and sorcery art, wargaming miniatures, Dragon Magazines, and those colorful Platonic solids called "dice" that added an undeniably awesome part to the game.  I am pretty sure I bought my first set there.

I recall, on those long car trips, that adding the element of "random" to my reading/solo playing of D&D made it very interesting.  You found yourself immediately confronted with whether or not to cheat, and what kind of person that made you.  I was the kind of person that only cheated a little, and only for the sake of the story... or so I tell myself.  Adding dice, if nothing else, meant I wasn't actually alone, because Entropy or Randomness itself was a player with me.  You can tell yourself all kinds of grandiose stories when you are lonely. <stares off into the middle distance dramatically>

That isn't to say I didn't play the game with others.  Quite the contrary.  My friends and I had epic battles, and stories both purchased from TSR and created ourselves (I still have a village map of a mythical French Village, Toultraque somewhere.)  I liked Paladins back then.  They seemed the perfect blend of martial and magical prowess.  I still like Paladins, but I did back then too (to paraphrase the great, sadly late, Mitch Hedberg).

I had 5 or 6 friends who played, in 2 different groups, but the most frequent "grouping" was 1v1, Player vs DM... usually during a sleepover where we would fight about the rules as much as play the game itself.

There wasn't much "RP" in RPGs in the 80s

At least that was my experience.  We did have epic battles, which "Stranger Things" captured expertly, where we kids fought and killed and died.  We, in a way, worked out for ourselves what things like wrong and right meant in a world where we could choose to do anything.  We could be the good guys, but we could also be the bad guys, and that made for some animated discussions in what I would later recognize were ethical and philosophical debates.  We had a chance to "try on" different personas, and different moral frameworks.  This seemed to irk the religious folks for some reason and we have the "Satanic Panic" and movies like "Mazes and Monsters" to thank for a special brand of ignorance that can only be attributed to the kind of adults who still have imaginary friends dictate their sex lives.  

Did you know Tom Hanks starred in "Mazes and Monsters"?

As much fun as we had, we didn't actually do much of what today would be called "Role Playing."  Doing voices was seen (by my peers) as over the top, and until Monty Python entered my life, I had no idea how other accents sounded. There definitely wasn't a concept of "Yes And" from the world of improv comedy (which would often make scenarios awkward), sub optimal choices for the sake of the story were rarely chosen, and the early game's emphasis on gold and XP made for very combat heavy, and story light encounters for the most part.  We wanted loot, but we didn't care about Acerak's manipulations in the wider world.

We also weren't particularly gifted storytellers yet, so there was that too

Perhaps the biggest difference between playing D&D in the early 80's and now: there weren't any girls playing rpg's (with me at least.)

I don't think it was because of any exclusionary effort on the parts of any of my friends, we just didn't know any.  They were exotic creatures that smelled funny and made me feel a little queasy in the stomach when they talked to me.  Which wasn't often.  Sometimes you would see them in the Arcade. Sometimes they would make you Square Dance with them in a special assembly where a "Caller" dosed out doe to elementary hormone monsters.  Why was that a thing?  Did that really even happen or is it some kind of Mandela affect marker, and I am the odd one out who quantum swapped with their counterpart one universe over? At least we (or maybe he) had punk rock to go with our acne.

I'm not saying there wasn't rampant sexism and exclusion of women and girls in the nascent but burgeoning RPG "industry" along with everything else back then, there probably was, but as a self-admittedly bookish 13 year old in 1983, my naturally repellent nature insulated me from the fairer sex for the most part, so that particular cultural war was fought elsewhere, by adults (a notion I hold in less regard now that I am one).  I hope, that as a socially awkward 13 year, that excuses me from being a Feminist in 1983, especially since Betty Crocker still looked like the second from the left on the bottom row back then.  Unrelated to D&D, but Betty Crocker always looks like whomever the first lady at the time is. 

Actually, she starts to darn near predict what the first lady looks near the end there.

I say "near the end" because they started phasing out an actual portrait for Betty Crocker in 1996, so that last one, which looks eerily like Laura Bush is one of the last official 'cannonical' Betty Crocker's I suppose.

If we eliminate the obvious answer: Betty Crocker has Supernatural Powers to either predict or  more diabolically - psychically mold the next FLOTUS in her image against their will... we are left with weaker theories:

1. Culture impacts people, both fictional and real.  Vanilla is also the best flavor of ice cream too if this is the case.

2.  It is SOP for political consultants to either consciously, or unconsciously psychically mold potential FLOTUS's into the ideal American First Lady which is exactly the same criteria that the marketing minds over at Betty Crocker used to select their portraits.

3. Betty Crocker, like most politicians and their wives during the 100 years of Betty Crocker Portraiture, was as white as Conan O'Brien is funny (and pasty white).  

So much love CoCo, but you were a convenient confluence of 2, very specific things to make that bit work, and I thank you.

4. Some admixture of the above 3.

See?  Ludicrous.  Eldritch powers from beyond, in a parallel universe where the red in Betty's outfit comes from the blood of her many vanquished foes... only real explanation.  To further extend this rickety framework of logic, it is entirely not impossible that her oracular power saw the fierceness of Michelle Obama, realized that defined a kind of power and femininity that she could never posses, and she gracefully left the stage... which would be better than the expected racism a rich white woman born in the Midwest United States around the end of World War 1.

If it isn't obvious: I have no idea where any of this is going.  I think I will try to start with D&D but I have a "Magpie Mind" and like to collect shinies for my imagination.  

If that's somewhere you'd like to join me, let  me know and I will continue.  If you hate the way I write, think my viewpoint is wrong, and what the hell is going on there at the end with a racist Betty Crocker?  Definitely let me know, otherwise I won't learn nuthin'.

Self Importantly,
MMc

"Calvin & Hobbes", Bill Waterson, Genius. October 14, 1993

 

 

 

 

 

note to self: that profile pic is over 20 years old.  Perhaps think about changi... annnnd ADHD!<it's gone!>