Okay, you do you. I’m glad we’ve got this cleared up.
Twelve year old me was all-in on cheap titillation but I wasn’t finding it in a dry list of synonyms in the DMG. I assume Gygax included it because he liked showing how many old-timey words he knew for stuff and because it was more simulationist world-building nonsense like charts for random renal diseases, what a peridot can be used for and 200 different flavors of Sage you can hire (but will be selected randomly so hopefully you’re cool with the local sage being a herpetologist).
It’s unnecessary and, as noted, isn’t even especially useful since it doesn’t account for location, but I find it amusing that people still get hepped up about it 40+ years later – not just this thread but mention the 1e DMG online and it always seems to come up; 240 pages of tiny, dense, text and all anyone remembers is two column inches about strumpets and doxys. At least the polearm appendix everyone remembers from the Unearthed Arcana was a good four or five pages.
Hadn’t we established earlier in this thread that Gygax could be a bit of a dick?
Yes, but was he a glaive-dick, a dick-guissarme, a longdick, a dickpike, or a halberdphallus?
He was a petard
Now if Tolkien was English, so was Patrick O’Brian, and Master and Commander certainly mentioned homosexuality, adultery, prostitution, bestiality, alcoholism, venereal diseases, etc., along with a copious amount of old-timey jargon, but it was not dungeon-oriented (albeit absolutely related to a certain type of warfare).
When I refer to a dungeon as Gygaxian it’s not a compliment. I appreciate his contributions to D&D, but I don’t think I’d want him to DM a campaign for me. Especially not now. He’d have to be a lich or something.
I must admit, I didn’t realise how much the early D&D games were dungeon-focused until I saw this video yesterday.
The game I started playing in (in … '87 or so) was way more about adventuring outdoors and in town, in a much more fleshed-out world, so the idea of that style of perpetually-existing, mass-player-party multi-level dungeon-as-sole-focus seemed like a quaint cultural artifact that - surely - must have been eagerly dropped by everyone within a couple of years of the game’s development. The kind of thing early Order of the Stick strips and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? are parodying. But I guess not.
I should add, I would hate that style of play.
A dick de corbin, I believe.
A couple years ago, I saw someone was republishing Expedition to Barrier Peaks, the classic D&D module where the “dungeon” is really a crashed spaceship. I’d had the module when I was a kid, but never actually played through it. I was running a campaign with a similar “crashed spaceship in fantasy setting” theme, so I thought I could drop it in as a side adventure, or something.
Until I read it. I have no idea how to run this thing in a way that would be any fun at all. Look at this map. There’s dozens of rooms on that left-hand map, and virtually none of them have any sort of encounter written for them. It’s 100%, “open door, roll for random encounter, repeat.” For upwards of fifty rooms.
We’re currently playing that module in my group. We have a GREAT DM who makes it work.
I had that one as well, but never played it. It had a picture book, right? For example a picture of a weird looking blaster that goes around the wrist. The party was supposed to figure out it was a blaster. It seemed like a cool way to make the 20th century human players as confounded by the future as their characters would be.
Yeah, it had a sixty page booklet with illustrations of the advanced tech and the weird monsters in the ship. The campaign I was running was the Iron Gods campaign from Pathfinder, which was explicitly inspired by the original module, and had already reworked a lot of the major beats of the module into something that worked better for a modern game. But one thing they majorly dropped the ball on was the illustrations. The campaign didn’t come with a booklet, but you could buy a deck of cards that had illustrations of a lot of the treasure on it. Except, they put the name of the thing on the front of the card. So I couldn’t say, “You see a metal sphere with lights and switches on it,” and then show them the card and let them figure out what the thing was, because the card said right on the front, “Fusion Grenade.”
I should have known better. I got burned by a similar deck of cards for a different Campaign. I bought it because I thought it would have pictures of the significant, unique loot from the campaign. Instead, I ended up with a deck that had things like a “torch” card. Because that’s something that desperately needed an illustration before the players could fully grasp what their characters had just encountered.
Without spoiling the module, the confusing illustrations and descriptions are fantastic. I also am having a lot of fun describing advanced technology in terms my character would use and understand “It’s a scrying device used by the town watch to keep track of what transpires in this metal keep.” “It’s a war golem!” and so forth.
I remember the crashed spaceship adventure, I think.
Wow on that video! I have played since '80 and never found that rule. I would also hate that style.
My own experience was different. I could only play with a group I found. If not the group I started with, then either I had to see if my college roommates played, or find a group at the gaming store. To this day, that is how I have gotten players. The players had friends or co-workers who want to play and they fit the group.
I never ran any of the “classic” modules because my players all had them and knew them.
I also never did the one to one downtime thing. We picked up where we left off. I do agree that time is weird in games, with quick advancement for a starting character to the end of the adventure. I still have the issue and work on having downtime.
Ha on the many polearms! That’s funny!
Thanks for the discussion!
The 1:1 downtime rule would be kind of essential, in the old style of “dozens of people in the campaign, and whoever shows up is who plays”. Otherwise you’d end up with characters getting badly out of synch, when some players can show up more often than others.
I ran a D&D group for years that had twelve players. The huge number of players mostly guaranteed that we’d have enough people available for a session every week. I didn’t do anything like 1:1 downtime, and the campaigns were pretty standard plot-wise for modern D&D. I just ruthlessly ignored continuity when it came to which characters were there each season. Andy can’t make it this week, but Mark can? And we ended last session in the middle of combat? Okay, Mark’s character is fighting the guy Andy was fighting. No wasting time with an explanation, because I’d just need another one next week when Andy was in and Mark was out.
Worked pretty well for years, until covid basically killed the group. Usually character levels stayed pretty even, with a couple more consistent players having an extra level over guys who were only able to make it every so often. Occasionally someone would get far enough behind that I’d just have him level up once or twice until they were on par with the rest of the party.
Well, OK, ignoring continuity is another option.
It’s sort of in the name isn’t it? Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeon crawls are still a thing even in the most popular of MMOs. My guess as to the popularity of them is that slaying monsters and getting loot is a fun tactical exercise/fantasy for many players.