70s-80s Dungeons & Dragons - Who of you played it similar to a wargame?

[Ozreth]

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).

[HerbertTarkel]

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! )

[fred]

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??

[AndrewBeasley]

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???

[Hobgoblin]

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.

[dadlamassu]

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. 

[robh]

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.

[Hobgoblin]

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.

[jon_1066]

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.

[ithoriel]

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.

[fred]

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.

[Sunjester]

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.

[Brian Smaller]

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.

[Warren Abox]

Doing it now, when the occasion calls for it. Does that count?

[RSDean]

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.