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Other Stuff => General Wargames and Hobby Discussion => Topic started by: Ozreth on 26 November 2024, 08:48:19 PM
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I didn't come around until late 2nd edition. I was playing D&D before becoming interesting in wargaming in the early 2000's and we have always played RPGs is the more traditional sense (although now even our style of dungeon crawling, combat focus and lethality is considered "old school").
I have always been aware of the roots of D&D and know a lot about the wargaming history that lead up to it and have a good idea of how the game was played early on, much more akin to a wargaming campaign, with role-playing being more about what you chose to do between scenarios and during encounter scenarios etc. The original 3 D&D booklets were more of a guide on how to run fantasy wargaming campaigns rather than rules for individual encounters and characters (although they attempted to include some of that as well). The game assumed you were already using various other rulesets for exploration, combat etc and D&D was a guide on how to bring it all together into the realm of fantasy and how to bring the scale down for dungeon crawls etc.
Given the focus of this forum and the overlap of the RPG and Wargaming hobbies I am curious how many here experienced D&D as an extension of their wargaming in the 1970s and 80s (or even 90s if you were still playing the game that way then).
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Well, I had the original books, and “Chainmail” - which very young me made use of to fight small skirmishy battles using poorly painted Grenadier lead minis (who needs silver paint? Just sand the sword shiny! o_o)
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It was a long time ago so I’m not entirely sure of the timeline
I think I was playing AD&D in the early 80s before I was playing wargames - but probably only by a couple of years.
Our early AD&D games were largely dungeon crawls. But we definitely started adding in broader campaign elements- I remember my characters being boats for a trading adventure.
But we were also playing WWII wargames and a some Warhammer 2nd Edition around the same time. But I think these were very much independent games.
By the end of the 80s we were playing all sorts of games - lots of early GW boxed games but also all sorts of RPGs - a big Pendgragon campaign, one-shots eg Paranoia, all sorts of stuff
But I think they were largely stand alone. We didn’t merge the RPG and wargames into one broad campaign- I’m not sure why. Perhaps we just had everything in its own mental box??
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I bought the second copy of the white box 3 book D&D imported into the U.K. - one of guys who ran the shop kept the first copy. You would not call it a shop TBH - it was a small room behind an estate agent that you could visit. In fact so small you had to shuffle around if it was raining as they had to do postal orders inside then - normally the packages were done in the yard!
By this time though I had been playing LoTR tabletop in 25mm, WW 2 in 6mm and 1/72 for a fair while with friends and the local club so this was a great extension to the fantasy side and became dominant for the rest of my gaming. As I had the rules it was obvious for me to become the DM and I enjoyed the power for many-a-year though I died a fair number of times in other folks campaigns as we got newer copies of the rules or branched out into Traveller, RuneQuest and even Cavalry and Sorcery (the most complex RPG I have every used but great).
Oh yes - meant to say that the guy who sold me the game ran a company called Games Workshop with a couple of others - wonder what happened to them and the company???
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I started RPGs at quite a young age (9, I think) with RuneQuest in the very early 80s. Some friends had D&D, which I occasionally played, but mostly I GMed the games - RuneQuest and home-brewed games.
The wargame influence was virtually zero: none of us had played wargames before picking up Warhammer 2nd edition (a year and a half later, I think); and the big influence on how we played RPGs was the very recently published Warlock of Firetop Mountain. So the model was very much expanding a one-player choose-your-own-adventure game into a multiplayer RPG.
As the years passed, we played different games: AD&D, Tunnels and Trolls, Dragon Warriors, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Paranoia, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Rolemaster, MERP, Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer. But the focus was always on small (2-6-character) adventuring groups.
I suspect WFRP (with its foundation in Warhammer) and various board wargames (e.g. Avalon Hill's Samurai) opened our eyes to the possibility of fusing wargame campaigns with roleplaying. But we never actually did it. The 'archaeology' of D&D was interesting in explaining how RPGs evolved. But I'd say what we played in the 80s was very close to what people play today.
Today, I'm really interested in fusing wargames with RPGs. Back then, though, they were separate pursuits, linked only through the possibility of using miniatures for both.
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We (my brothers, friends and I) started in wargaming with what we called "bases" in the 1960s, these would now be called imagi-nations. Mostly Airfix WW2 soldiers, tanks and aircraft. Later D&D RPG appeared and we tried it for a short while. Something was lacking so taking inspiration from Lord of the Rings, Conan and other books as well as D&D (later AD&D) in the 70s we wrote our own version that allowed games from small adventure groups in dungeon crawls to massed battles set in our "world" of Morval Earth. Very occasionally, I still play AD&D with a friend but this more for nostalgia.
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Apart from the earliest games at uni (Holmes edition) I have always played RPGs as figure heavy tabletop skirmish games rather than "theatre of the mind". The group I gamed with were all "painters" so collecting the models was as important as the game itself.
We regularly played D&D, Paranoia and WFRP that way through the 80s & 90s, Call of Cthulhu being the closest we got to true rpg gaming.
Recently it has been very rare for me to get an rpg on the table: Forbidden Lands, Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Labyrinth these days.
I have other systems like Xas Irkalla (too esoteric), MYFAROG (too Viking) and These Dark Places (too Spacey) that I lack figures and scenery to translate for figure gaming, but I would if I could.
Hybrid RPG lite/board game systems have largely taken over on my table these days, Dungeon Saga, Folklore the Affliction, Hybrid and my own mix of Cadwallon/City of Thieves.
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One thing that's probably worth throwing into the mix is that RPGs in general veered quite heavily away from miniatures quite early on. In the likes of Tunnels and Trolls, RuneQuest and the Basic family of D&D (if memory serves - certainly by the time of BECMI), mentions of miniatures are essentially an afterthought (a small paragraph in a large rulebook). The outlier here would be The Fantasy Trip, for which hexmap and miniatures - or at least counters - are essential.
I'm pretty sure that Gary Gygax largely ditched miniatures in his games, too (can't remember where I read it), and it's probably worth remembering that D&D grew, in part, out of "Braunsteins", which were supposedly preludes to miniature wargames but didn't actually get there (the person-to-person prep was actually the game, at least as I understand it).
One thing I remember a lot from the early 80s is "using miniatures/not really". So you'd have a few figures on the table showing the party's marching order or whatever, but they were largely ignored or forgotten as the game went on. If I remember correctly, Greg Stafford more or less endorsed this approach in (or when written about) Pendragon: something along the lines of, "miniatures can sometime be useful, but in any case, it's cool to have a figure painted up of your character in front of you".
Obviously, there are great games to be had both ways: the skirmish-game approach that Rob sets out and the theatre-of-the-mind approach - and anything in between. I've always found that the best dungeon crawls are 'theatre of the mind' because they can move faster and be more dynamic and immersive (no time wasted setting up floor tiles or scenics or whatever). A few years back, we were playing RuneQuest and ran through Balastor's Barracks [a classic RQ dungeon] in the Big Rubble. I remember thinking it would have eye-waveringly slow and static to have done with miniatures (which we used sometimes for above-ground encounters) because there was so much movement around the corridors, often in different directions, along with other elements like a truly massive giant lying down in the darkness and so on. It was great as theatre of the mind, though.
Against that, The Fantasy Trip works really well, though I think it works best with quite open, cavernous 'dungeons' rather than the traditional corridor-and-room sort.
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I'd echo Hobgoblin. We used minis but not in a skirmish type of way but as representative.
This was again mostly down to two things - the sheer variety of creatures and places and the speed of play. Imagine having to lay out every room and have a figure for every monster. It would have hampered things so much. The beauty of D&D lay in the enormous variety and limitless possibilities.
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The first group I played D&D with used bootleg photocopies of the rules because they weren't available in the UK plus a legit copy of Tekumel: Empire of the Petal Throne.
We dropped Tekumel pretty fast and concentrated on D&D dungeon crawls with miniatures for characters and monsters. Well, I say miniatures, one of my characters was eaten by a gelatinous cube pencil eraser.
As a group who were first and foremost wargamers our games were very figure heavy. That said, the figures only came into play when there was action, or the possibility of it. Whether it was moving through a booby trapped lair or confronting a band of orcs or squaring up to the under-sheriff and his thugs in his office position mattered.
I still prefer the use of miniatures because I am unreasonably irked by characters who declared themselves to be busy doing something thirty feet away teleporting into the action when a fight erupts.
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We used miniatures for combat encounters - and we all spent time finding the right miniature to represent our characters.
I remember buying a big sheet of light brown artists board to draw floor tiles up to use for the dungeon room. Later I had some commercial dungeon tiles. We certainly never went 3d with our dungeons and I’m pretty sure monsters were represented by what was available, rather than worrying too much about having the right monster figures.
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We used miniatures for combat situations, mainly because we were wargamers first and partly to counter one of the players who specialised the the annoying teleportation business that ithoriel remarked upon.
I think this is why I enjoy Sellswords and Spellslingers, it's a (sort of) RPG for tabletop gamers and has the same vibe as those old miniature-heavy D&D games.
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Well I was a wargamer...and D&D was a different game. Never played it like a wargame once - other than noting that there were rules and you threw dice to introduce a random factor.
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Doing it now, when the occasion calls for it. Does that count?
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I have a blog post about some aspects of my early D&D games here: http://sharpbrush.blogspot.com/2021/04/dungeons-digressions.html
I guess it depends on what you mean as “similar to a wargame”. We were also wargamers, and played fantasy miniatures games, both with Chainmail and with the D&D alternative combat system literally used as a wargame, among other things. These were unconnected to the ongoing D&D games. Our campaign veered into a couple of small wars, but, due to the numbers involved, we used counters rather than miniatures (as best I recall) to resolve them.
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I have a blog post about some aspects of my early D&D games here: http://sharpbrush.blogspot.com/2021/04/dungeons-digressions.html
An interesting read. Good for you for preserving gaming history. The idea of revisiting your setting and advancing its timeline is an appealing one.
With regards to the OP’s question, roleplaying was its own distinct thing for my gang. A couple of us came to it from a Warhammer background but none of us were wargaming at the time. That would have been tricky as we were students with space, money and transportation challenges. We did use miniatures for our PCs, but they were representational and used to show marching order.
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I have a blog post about some aspects of my early D&D games here: http://sharpbrush.blogspot.com/2021/04/dungeons-digressions.html
I guess it depends on what you mean as “similar to a wargame”. We were also wargamers, and played fantasy miniatures games, both with Chainmail and with the D&D alternative combat system literally used as a wargame, among other things. These were unconnected to the ongoing D&D games. Our campaign veered into a couple of small wars, but, due to the numbers involved, we used counters rather than miniatures (as best I recall) to resolve them.
What a great post - did you go back and play this campaign / locale again (noting the blog is from 2021)?
It brought back all sorts of memories for me - hex paper wilderness terrain, I was playing a good few years later, and it was possible to get an A4 pad of hex paper - but quite small hexes I recall. I think my biggest map was a fraction of yours, I recall it on a piece of hardboard, so perhaps 2’x3’
My group loved dungeon maps - and I also really enjoyed making these. I’m now wondering do I have some of these stashed away somewhere, or have I thrown them out in one move or another…
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Interesting stuff!
This video might be of interest. In it, Matt Colville draws on Jon Petersen's The Elusive Shift to discuss the conflicting approaches that players took to early D&D, as evidenced by discussion in zines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDCQspQDchI
There used to be a great video on YouTube showing one of MAR Barker's original players staging a Tekumel game that was played out on a two-layer wargame table (above ground and 'dungeon'). In it, each player had a player character plus a load of henchmen, all represented in miniature. I think some of the players were competing rather than on the same side. Alas, it was taken down after Barker's unsavoury late-life activities came to light.
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I started in with D&D in 79 and joined an older group as they transitioned from board games to miniatures & rpg's. Essentially the older brothers moved on and the youngest inherited it all. They played Chainmail, Greyhawk and Tractics as well as D&D. They had thousands of 25mm figures for Chainmail battles which often tied back into D&D campaigns. The better ones were loosely based on Howard's Hyboria. We built economies, trading and professions into our campaigns in the early 90's. Still play the occasional game of Tractics, Battletech, Pulp Alley or Star Wars Legion. D&D for me now is all online with a group scattered all over.
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Well, I had the original books, and “Chainmail” - which very young me made use of to fight small skirmishy battles using poorly painted Grenadier lead minis (who needs silver paint? Just sand the sword shiny! o_o)
You mean you didn’t burnish the armour with a pin? :-)
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What a great post - did you go back and play this campaign / locale again (noting the blog is from 2021)?
It brought back all sorts of memories for me - hex paper wilderness terrain, I was playing a good few years later, and it was possible to get an A4 pad of hex paper - but quite small hexes I recall. I think my biggest map was a fraction of yours, I recall it on a piece of hardboard, so perhaps 2’x3’
I haven’t yet, but I’m about the retire and have more time on my hands and I’d still like to. It just wouldn’t work well with the inclinations of the current rpg group I’m in, so I would need to recruit some different players.
My _players_ used the A4 hex paper pads for their mapping, but I think I’d already started the main wilderness map before I had access to anything like that, so it stayed on wargame hexes.
The Matt Colville video was pretty good, although not much was surprising. We got out to conventions from ‘76 on, so we saw some variety in play, not to mention among the local groups.I just reread the Elusive Shift after watching the video, by the way, and would recommend it ito anyone interested in the the play culture at the beginning.
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One of the very 'wargamey' elements in the original D&D books is the "number appearing" column in the bestiary, which of course persists into AD&D. It indicates that a random encounter (in a wilderness) could throw up 30-300 orcs or bandits, for example, or 40-400 goblins. There are details of what sort of fortifications and artillery a group of orcs is likely to have, and so on.
I suspect a lot of early gamers found that baffling and just followed the note on adjusting to party size. But in the scope of a more 'wargamey' campaign (larger parties with lots and lots of henchmen, allies, etc.), it makes sense. For experienced GMs, it also works as a very quick way to populate and define a given area on a map: "... by the side of the road, you see grim totems: human and animal skulls set on stakes and daubed with vile runes. To the north, you can make an out a hill crowned with rocky outcrops, a crude palisade and a crooked tower ...".
That "area-filling" aspect of random-encounter tables wouldn't have occurred to me as a kid (I was just puzzled by the massive numbers in the Monster Manual). But it strikes me as really handy today.
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This is how we've been running more wargame oriented AD&D campaigns lately. Everybody picks an entry from the Monster Manual and rolls up a force. Drop them into a 30-mile hex, and you're most of the way done with setup.
Figuring out the best practices for execution has been a fun struggle, with several campaigns crashing and burning along the way. There just isn't much in the way of supporting or advice for this style of campaign out there in D&D land. You have to go back to Tony Bath or look at Henry Hyde's tome on Wargame Campaigns.
So far we have found that weekly turn orders delivered to a GM produces the best outcomes, and when things get too complicated for that, we build a multi-faction Braunstein event. There's always a low-key Braunstein kind of running in the background as the factions build and break alliances. Each usually has goals that aren't mutually exclusive ("I help you secure that location you want if you help me gain that magic artifact that I want.") which adds some incentive for diplomatic play.
It works really well, and makes for a great break from the usual linear narrative style play.
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This is how we've been running more wargame oriented AD&D campaigns lately. Everybody picks an entry from the Monster Manual and rolls up a force. Drop them into a 30-mile hex, and you're most of the way done with setup.
Figuring out the best practices for execution has been a fun struggle, with several campaigns crashing and burning along the way. There just isn't much in the way of supporting or advice for this style of campaign out there in D&D land. You have to go back to Tony Bath or look at Henry Hyde's tome on Wargame Campaigns.
So far we have found that weekly turn orders delivered to a GM produces the best outcomes, and when things get too complicated for that, we build a multi-faction Braunstein event. There's always a low-key Braunstein kind of running in the background as the factions build and break alliances. Each usually has goals that aren't mutually exclusive ("I help you secure that location you want if you help me gain that magic artifact that I want.") which adds some incentive for diplomatic play.
It works really well, and makes for a great break from the usual linear narrative style play.
That sounds brilliant! I've been musing something similar, as my 'old' gaming group is scattered and meets only a few times a year, and the 'young' one has limited time because of sports and exams. I kind of like the idea of having the old-timers plus any of the other group who are keen doing a remote, political/wargamey campaign, with the younger group able to play out battles on the tabletop as they arise (preferably with deployment orders from the remote people ...).
One thing I saw online recently was talking about using straight AD&D for mass battles with a 1:10 ratio - so a PC (or a dragon, etc.) just divides his or her damage by 10 and multiplies by 10 whatever they receive (so really high-level characters can hold their own, but
more lowly heroes would be well advised to stay out of mass combat or embed themselves in a unit.
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It is interesting this thread arose at this time. A friend of mine from our very early days of RPGs just recently rejoined our gaming group. He still does RPGs while our group has diverged from them since he left it. We talked about it over a recent wargame we were playing and decided our original D&D or Champions superhero sessions were really skirmish games -- not true RPGs.
In D&D, it was always tactical. Do we kick open another door? Is the thief in position above the door? One of my magic users had a large rock her minions carried around with her so she could use it with the telekinesis spell. Every group included a Paladin so he could say, "Evil get thee hence" and not have to fight the undead rooms. So, were we really roleplaying? We did talk out our roles and interactions, but honestly, we were playing skirmish wargames even back then. The term just didn't exist as we knew it.
Great way to walk down memory lane with this thread.
Mike Demana
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One thing I saw online recently was talking about using straight AD&D for mass battles with a 1:10 ratio - so a PC (or a dragon, etc.) just divides his or her damage by 10 and multiplies by 10 whatever they receive (so really high-level characters can hold their own, but
more lowly heroes would be well advised to stay out of mass combat or embed themselves in a unit.
The rules themselves provide some guidance on that, explicitly calling for a 1:10 or 1:20 figure ratio on page 39 of the PHB. We've found that a lot of the rules in AD&D discarded over the decades come to the fore in wargame play. Hobgoblin mentioned the Number Appearing in the Monster Manual, but take a second look at the things like initiative by side (rather than by individual), weapons versus AC, and the morale rules, and a large number of spells. Spells like "Hallucinatory Terrain" and "Cloudkill" and "Massmorph" really shine in mass battles.
You might also re-read how charging works, and put that into a mass battle context. You choose between moving into combat at your normal speed and waiting until the next round to attack, or charging. You can attack on the same turn you charge - which lets you attack on that same turn - and it gets you bonus movement and bonuses to hit, but attack order is based on weapon length rather than initiative. Add in the ability to set spears against charge, and you've got a detailed system for handling complex interactions between units that runs way faster than you expect. The system is built on the old, familiar core D&D rules you already know, so you're halfway there already.
And don't discount the fun of exploring those interactions and looking for ways to exploit the old AD&D gal in new and surprising ways. We've been playing AD&D for decades, but since pushing toward more domain-level play a couple of years ago, we've had a number of "AHA!" and "wait, you can do that?" moments. If anyone here tries a battle or two using AD&D, I'd love to hear about your experience.
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The rules themselves provide some guidance on that, explicitly calling for a 1:10 or 1:20 figure ratio on page 39 of the PHB. We've found that a lot of the rules in AD&D discarded over the decades come to the fore in wargame play. Hobgoblin mentioned the Number Appearing in the Monster Manual, but take a second look at the things like initiative by side (rather than by individual), weapons versus AC, and the morale rules, and a large number of spells. Spells like "Hallucinatory Terrain" and "Cloudkill" and "Massmorph" really shine in mass battles.
Ah - very interesting! All that ground-scale stuff in the PHB is really interesting and underscores the well-thought-out wargaming underpinning of the whole exercise.
Another aspect, which arises from both the PHB and the MM, is movement. It's a gift to a wargamer that movement is given in inches all the way through. This serves to differentiate monsters types much more than by hit dice. So, for example, goblins and orcs are really only separated by the goblin's -1 to HD if you ignore movement. But goblins move just 6" (like dwarfs and gnomes) whereas orcs move 9". In a wargame-style encounter, that's really significant. And the combination of AC, HD and Movement give you a really nice set of compact wargame stats with ample scope for differentiation between troop types.
You might also re-read how charging works, and put that into a mass battle context. You choose between moving into combat at your normal speed and waiting until the next round to attack, or charging. You can attack on the same turn you charge - which lets you attack on that same turn - and it gets you bonus movement and bonuses to hit, but attack order is based on weapon length rather than initiative. Add in the ability to set spears against charge, and you've got a detailed system for handling complex interactions between units that runs way faster than you expect. The system is built on the old, familiar core D&D rules you already know, so you're halfway there already.
Thanks very much for those pointers! I had a skim through the PHB, and there are lots of interesting wrinkles in there, as you say. For example, if you have a troop of two-handed-swordsmen, you'd probably want to send them in against gnolls rather than squander their potential chopping up orcs or hobgoblins (3d6 damage vs "Large" creatures).
And don't discount the fun of exploring those interactions and looking for ways to exploit the old AD&D gal in new and surprising ways. We've been playing AD&D for decades, but since pushing toward more domain-level play a couple of years ago, we've had a number of "AHA!" and "wait, you can do that?" moments. If anyone here tries a battle or two using AD&D, I'd love to hear about your experience.
Sound advice! A couple of months ago, after reading some things on Braunstein-style games using (A)D&D, I resolved to base all my RPG-specific miniatures on square bases (I had been keeping the 'true 25' Ral Partha and Minifigs stuff on pennies), precisely to allow mass battles in games. As most figures fit onto 20mm squares, you don't use any significant RPG manoeuvrability over round bases, and you gain the advantage of being able to rank up.