Saturday 5 January 2013

On Economic Factors and Play Styles

I was thinking earlier on about AD&D 2nd edition, which is the iteration of D&D I probably played the most during my formative years. It occurred to me that for a long time the only books I had were the DMG and the Monstrous Manual. I was only about 12, and didn't have a part time job, and my pocket money was at most about £5 a week, and the money I did have was being mostly spent on Warhammer plastic skeletons, so I couldn't afford the PHB. I just ran games using the classes from Red Box Basic and tried to guess at what the abilities of rangers and paladins were; likewise, we just cribbed the combat rules from the Red Box.

So from the very start, I've been used to house ruling and coming up with decisions on the fly. There was no question of playing the rules as written because we didn't know what they were.

Without trying to sound too much like a grumpy old fart from Yorkshire, kids nowadays probably don't experience that kind of making-do mentality that we had to put up with, because kids nowadays tend to want for much less than people of my generation did (which is of course more true the further back you go).

I wonder if, then, there is a partial economic explanation for the fact that "DIY D&D" (rather than complete and all encompassing rule systems like 3rd and 4th edition) is so popular with those who are somewhat older, above and beyond the obvious notion that it is based on nostalgia and familiarity.

19 comments:

  1. I think that you may be on to something there. Only a partial explanation, as most of these things are, but certainly an important piece to the puzzle.

    Other parts include the fact that we grew up with action figure playsets instead of video games (which forced us to make up stories), and that there was no such thing as the internet to mine for whatever information you didn't have. Or to tell you that your solution was "wrong".

    Oh, and we're much cooler and smarter than kids these days.

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  2. I played 4E for a few weeks with my kids at a game store. A "true grognard" was running the game at the store. He had been a gamer since the late 70s. He was older than the creators of the game, if I were to guess.

    The girls hated 4E. They are currently 10 and 13. They started with AD&D 2E. We switched to Labyrinth Lord at the beginning of 2012.

    I don't find your last two paragraphs to ring true in my experience. I think, with all things, it depends on how you were first exposed to the subject.

    Mike Mearls is older than us, what is he currently doing? ;]

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    1. Well that proposition - that it depends on how you were first exposed to the subject - sort of builds my argument, I think.

      And I was careful to suggest it was only a partial explanation.

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    2. I don't have the answers myself. Surely Mike Mearls and this "true grognard" were not exposed to 4E when they were kids. Hell, one of them created it.

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    3. Sure - like I said, I'm not saying the economic explanation is the only factor: that would be stupid. But I think it is possibly one of many factors.

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  3. All the kids I know kick it old school and don't have any money.

    Every d&D book ever has been within Working Class Christmas Gift price range for the entire existence of the RPG hobby.

    I suspect the real social difference is how much people are on the internet.

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    1. Every D&D book, perhaps, but not every edition of D&D. When I was a kid the PHB, DMG and MM came to, I reckon 60-70 quid all told, maybe more. I don't want to give the impression we lived hand-to-mouth, but that was out of my parents' range for a Christmas gift when I was 12 or 13 or so.

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    2. Ok, I only ever got one book at a time, too, but there was the red box, which was a complete intro for much cheaper.

      That's what I more meant: the game in a complete form has always cost about the same in real dollars. (Or real Doubloons or whatever you guys use in the Isles.)

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  4. Also with the old editions you could mix and match stuff. For a while as a kid I had a 2ed phb a1ed DMG and the RC for monsters.

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    1. At the time I learned to play, 'my D&D' consisted of the blue box, the 1e AD&D Monster Manual, Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and The Arduin Grimoire. It wasn't 'cause of economics, though - it was 1977, and that's what I could get my hands on at the time.

      Certainly the element of mixing and matching disparate but related sources was present.

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  5. I still have nostalgia for when I started and dice had to be split economically between rolling and representing monsters and you were never quite sure enough to keep from accidentally rolling the wizard's dog across the table.

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  6. As a young DIY RPG gamer (I'm 20 and started 5 years ago) I think I might want to weigh in on this topic.

    I love fiddling with rules and making my own subsystems and campaign ideas. I feel guilty using anyone's ideas for adventures instead of coming up with something on my own.

    That being said, while most of my friends grew up with the latest video games I grew up with considerably less. I'd see the games but rarely play them. Going outside with a stick for a sword and making up my own adventures became a regular past time. This is why I inevitable got into the creative aspects of table top and find it so much better than most video games.

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  7. Take this for what it's worth, but a few years ago I had a roommate who was 20. I showed him D&D and he was interested. I asked him if he had heard of it growing up, and his answer was that basically the only kids who played D&D or any pen and paper rpg were the poor kids who couldn't afford computers, playstations, etc., so they couldn't afford to play WoW and the other mmo's. P&P gaming was ghetto gaming. And looked down upon, the players stigmatized, by the kids who could afford the latest technology and mmo monthly subscriptions.

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    1. My son (now 10 years old) has just played his first round the table game. He has been raised on World of Warcraft and various other video games directly inspired by D&D. His reaction to experiencing a game engine where the clock speed of your imagination is the limiting factor was quite surprising. He loved it ... adored being able to be unexpected and having unknowns to deal with. No quest givers (that he could see) and a plot that changed as he (and my friends) tried to figure out the fiendish plot I'd thrown at them. Poor kids, yeah, poor kids that never get to try this out!

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  8. I remember coming away from reading the Red Box (which had just come out when I began gaming in 1983) with the impression that the game had been expertly handcrafted and the mechanics shouldn't be tinkered with. I quickly learned that was a nonsense. Items could be invented without upsetting the mysterious "Game Balance" .. monsters, treasures and whole rules could be slotted right in. This home brewing was the source of the original game afterall. I quickly dreamed up much more playable systems that allowed players access to options and character types they really wanted to play. Our group was playing an urban near future Shadowrun style game with high tech weapons and fantasy characters in 1985... thanks to not listening to "don't upset the game balance" ...

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  9. I think economics are still very much a factor for most young people. A couple years ago I was chatting with a gamer in his early-mid 20s and he related how for years as a teenager he had to rely on checking out the 2e PHB and DMG from his local library and basically making up the rest.

    The primary difference nowadays, as others have alluded, is the Internet. "Kids these days" are no longer forced to rely on what their local game store is stocking. Forums and wikis provide instant answers and resources aplenty, both rules-wise and in terms of research and world-building. If anything, I think the Internet actually enables and encourages DIY gaming for the younger generation--hell, you can pretty much play 3.x/Pathfinder for free what with the SRDs and so forth.

    Having said all that, the factor economics play in one's development as a young gamer is something I've given a bit of thought to myself. I almost went down the same route as you, buying the 2e DMG first because it was a whole $2 cheaper than the PHB. I happened to read the first few lines of the foreword while still in the bookstore, though, and took heed of the warning that the DMG should only be read by people who had already read the PHB. So I waited another week to save up a whole $20 and the rest is history... ;D

    Even for the "kids these days" and their fancy Internets, they still have to be able to convince their parents to place an order for them (and also pay the shipping!).

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  10. I remember my friends and I got our hands on Holmes basic (blue box) when it was carried for some reason at our local Pay'n'Save drug store. Then the whole 'demonic influence' scare occurred and the game completely disappeared from any retail source we (as kids) had access to. In suburban/rural areas this stuff was just not around.

    Holmes topped out at 3rd level. The indicated upgrade path from there was 1e ADD. We didn't even know the ODD 3 LBB's even existed. When we (as a group) collectively obtained the three ADD books, we had to keep them super discreet - think contraband. If a parent had discovered the 1e MM, with the succubus, demons, etc. that would have been the end. (this is before the cartoony orange-spined nerf reprints were around). Luckily the DMG had that table with all the monster stats in the back, so we didn't actually need to have the MM out -and at risk- to play.

    Our workaround was to transcribe data (level tables, 'to hit' charts) from the ADD books onto the edges and between the columns of the more benign Holmes blue book.
    Depending on who was hosting that weekend's sleepover, (and how cool their parents were) we were often playing our hybrid ADD from the notes cribbed on the edges of Holmes.

    No internet. No copy machine. A couple of us had typewriters. And a few sets of those god-awful cheapass plastic dice that came with Holmes...

    So our games were total hodge-podge, seat of the pants, slightly secretive, utterly home-brewed, AWESOME affairs.

    It's interesting reflecting upon this as I write. I've always been discreet about this hobby. Not because I'm afraid of social stigma, but deep down on some level I'm still paranoid that someone's going to show up and confiscate my books.

    This relates to why we subsequently hooked onto Traveller so hard. The three Trav LBB's (little BLACK books) had NO art and were comparatively nondescript. All the better to keep the MAN off our 11-year-old backs...

    So while I think that economic factors (physical supply of the product) do play a part, here was also a social side to it as well.

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  11. I think there is something to this, but it’s only one factor. I was fortunate enough to be able to get all the oAD&D hardbacks as they came out. There were a couple that I skipped—like OA—but I had most of them, and I carted them to every session.

    I started with the Moldvay basic set, which explicitly tells you to make the game your own. Years later I was looking for the “only guidelines” text that had had such a big impact on my approach to the game. I was convinced I’d read in the AD&D books, but it actually appears in Moldvay’s booklet.

    And despite having all the AD&D books, we played it more like D&D anyway. I think we’d all learned the game from the Holmes or Moldvay basic sets, and so we cherry-picked from AD&D rather than playing it by-the-book.

    I’m not really sure why we didn’t use many modules, but it wasn’t because we couldn’t have gotten our hands on them.

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