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Post by geneweigel on Jul 31, 2017 7:33:26 GMT -5
I just ran into someone who was at my "abandoned building games". What a trip. Saw once in 85 for 5 minutes as he was finishing a cigarette break at an intense internship he had. But prior to that I had saw this guy from 77 to 83 every other day.
I think his career swallowed him up but I don't know. It was like a real reunion but he's going off again soon so maybe I can hear a few more stories before then.
I was the DM of choice back then. He was like people played D&D at a table. Gene played D&D in the bushes.
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Post by GRWelsh on Aug 1, 2017 7:06:49 GMT -5
Career swallows a lot of people up, and eats up huge chunks of time when you're not looking. I swear I sometimes feel like a time traveller from the 20th century who just got here... A stranger in a strange time. Events of the 80s' do not seem like they can possibly be over 30 years ago...
"Doc, we have to get back to the DeLorean! It's crazy here... Donald Trump is the president. K-Pop!?! Disney owns Star Wars! Everyone's fat!* We have to fix the past, something went wrong somehow!"
*Recently, some friends of mine were looking at photos from the 70's and 80's and saying "Everyone was so skinny back then," and I had to roll my eyes.
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Post by GRWelsh on Aug 1, 2017 7:46:12 GMT -5
I miss the exuberance and unfettered creativity of the early days of D&D. We never played in abandoned buildings, but we used to hold games at odd places or times. I remember one time a friend of mine wanted to play while we waiting for achievement tests to start (you know the kind that would run all day), and so I ran a game for him on the fly, drawing the dungeon in pencil on the desk. He was obsessed with Oriental weapons like nunchucks and shuriken, and so I worked that in and among the treasure were some magical exploding throwing stars.
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 1, 2017 7:53:12 GMT -5
For me its family time thats the killer. "Can you take them?" etc.
Heh, yeah, it was some Facebook neighborhood reunion.
I saw my childhood idol and he is still living the 60's era Hell's Angel thing. Fucking weird. He didn't have the same bike and he no longer looked like Jeff Bridges in King Kong. More like Odin these days.
Then I saw this guy that I knew who was arrested for jumping the train that I warned not to do it but he was in a large group that defied my warning about the station and me and my other friend got on where I told them to get on and watched them all get taken away on the other side of the platform in horror. He laughed it off but I think that perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it.
The thing about "neighborhood reunions" is how can anyone know everyone who ever lived in one neighborhood? This was two neighborhoods so it was really weird but I knew all the faces.
My sister went to some reunion like this in the early 90's and lied about being friends with people that she never knew (she was a shut-in) to try to slow down her massive tab at the bar she was flying around that was hosting it.
"I remember hanging out with you.... and your sister was there."
Talk about a rumor chart! It was like hearing that I had this alternate reality life where my sister was pencilled into every situation.
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 1, 2017 8:06:57 GMT -5
I miss the exuberance and unfettered creativity of the early days of D&D. We never played in abandoned buildings, but we used to hold games at odd places or times. I remember one time a friend of mine wanted to play while we waiting for achievement tests to start (you know the kind that would run all day), and so I ran a game for him on the fly, drawing the dungeon in pencil on the desk. He was obsessed with Oriental weapons like nunchucks and shuriken, and so I worked that in and among the treasure were some magical exploding throwing stars. One thing to add to what your saying is the intensity of the Gygax era compared to 1986 and on was that you could literally play with anyone because it wasn't bunkered down for the forever Winter of no new content. The first time that I was turned down for a D&D game because they weren't into that shit was 1988. I was kind of flabbergasted that it all of a sudden had a negative connotation like STAR TREK fandom out of nowhere. It took me a little bit more time to realize that the player quality was down to nothing and quick games had gone the way of all flesh.
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 1, 2017 8:14:45 GMT -5
Sorry, I meant "new player quality".
For example, I'd say it was a 0.9% chance (over a hundred people being okay to stinky on average) to get a really good player off the street
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 2, 2017 5:24:36 GMT -5
In regards to people being skinny my brother and sister were two pasta sucking slobs who dodged photos every chance they got. So I could even be depicted in my bathing suit but they would hide under clothes a big coats.
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Post by GRWelsh on Aug 2, 2017 7:46:15 GMT -5
Player quality was always an x-factor, even in the early days. There were pros and cons about the ways we played then. The pros were that the sparsity of game material forced everyone to be creative, and no one felt any constraints. Games seemed so much more epic then, when people let their imaginations run wild and they weren't doing some paint by numbers thing. And that's the part I really miss. The cons were lots of inter-player fighting, backstabbing, cheating... i.e., the typical behavior of a lot of middle school and high school kids. It was not uncommon that someone, if they were getting bored, would simply attack or backstab a fellow player character. "Might as well go out with a bang," that sort of thing.
There was this one kid and his brother that everyone made fun of for being ridiculous munchkins, since they had characters like a gray elf fighter/magic-user/cleric (Glothiar Hothtar) with levels above 100 in each class. Obviously against the rules. But their games sounded epic. The brother had a fighter (Sermin) with an ultra-powerful magic sword ("Serpent") and he killed Asmodeus and briefly conqured hell! I always made a distinction between that sort of thing, and blatant cheaters, because if a DM allows something, then it's not cheating to get it. If a DM allows you to go past level limits, and get the sort of treasure that allows you to jump up all these levels... Well, maybe they just wanted to test the limits of the concept, as RJK might say. By contrast, in the mid to late 80's people were starting to play games that were supposedly more 'sophisticated' but often felt boring, restrictive and narrow in scope.
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 2, 2017 10:08:33 GMT -5
Once pre-fabrication became standard (talk boxes) and the details that we needed (stats, keyed maps, detailed areas, etc) were replaced with bigger talk boxes and unnecessary character backgrounds then the original product era was gone. All that quick reference was replaced with stacks of over-worded books and awkward binder sheets that disintegrated within 3 years. This guy I was talking to was completely Tupperwared in that time period and missed all the bad product play that I went through. I don't like using the term "munchkin", because it carries so much baggage of promoting Williams' era's false minimalism so I will say proxy* characters, but I think he missed all that if he last played in early 83. *My dick is bigger than yours play?
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Post by GRWelsh on Aug 2, 2017 12:37:17 GMT -5
You're right about 'munchkin' as it is now a loaded term with various meanings. It was always meant to be derogatory about someone else's style of play, implying it is immature, but that is pretty subjective. I think early on it was used for players who always had to have the most powerful characters and cheated, the "mine is bigger" min/maxers, but then also got applied (wrongly I'd say) to styles of play with epic power levels, lots of treasure and magic, classic dungeon-delving, etc. as if those games are somehow more immature or passé.
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 3, 2017 13:07:31 GMT -5
I replied and completely deleted what I wrote.... <<<<BURN>>>> Anyway... something something... "high level games don't really exist" blah... blah... blah.. same old crap Just kidding! Seriously, perhaps the big difference was that back in 1982 it was all going forward and at that rate it seemed there was endless surprises coming on the horizon. Then by 1992, the movement towards any horizon ceased to exist and we were told it wasn't about whats coming instead its about things you already have which will be resold in a reworded way over and over until it doesn't make sense anymore. In a way, the successful fool (munchkin, proxy player, or whatever) disappeared because the success story disappeared from the game with all the talk-oriented product (FR gazetteers about nothing q.v. MOONSHAE, EMPIRE OF THE SANDS, q.v. ) creating talk-oriented game sessions (tavern talk, mediocre quest arcs, story time, etc).
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 3, 2017 13:42:03 GMT -5
I was reading EXPERT SET 1981 (for the other thread) and I think that I might have found "the moment" that the low level campaign started:
Weird.
Here is the Mentzer version:
In DRAGON #20 1978:
Its like maximalism didn't exist because it didn't need to. It just was one minute you're talking to single creature and the next minute there is a small battalion of 400 creatures.
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 6, 2017 9:03:01 GMT -5
In a weird fluke the other night, I was dropping my daughter off at a kid's sweet 16 party which I told her I know where that is near my old neighborhood and what do you know? Right back to the scene of the crime. I made a wrong turn so I went back by the park and ended up turning down the street right in front of the old abandoned pipe factory. To look at it now you would think it was always apartments. I stopped the car and it was: What are you doing we're late! So no time for pics. As I came down the street to the main drag thats when I realized the long gone miniatures shop was right down the street. Weird how the mind separates things.
I just wish I could go back and film it all. The secret door that led to the pipe factory directly through an old train track that was abandoned for 100 years. Then we had an elaborate secret door to gain entrance to the building that had to be maintained because their was a subway haunt that some asshole left opened and it was sealed up. So we were always paranoid. "The Dungeon" of pipes in the pipe factory's basement. The basement was sealed off but you could descend down this massive pile of old smoking pipe rejects. This was a massive complex of rooms. We were making orc miniatures with some kit my friend had by melting lead into a mold. I still have one that came out the best. The rest of the orcs that I made I think that I threw out (with all the fucked up miniature failures like how I over-epoxied the Grenadier Red Dragon).
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 18, 2017 17:59:06 GMT -5
This time warp is continuing with this class reunion insanity.
Its like people from 1982 keep talking and old memories are stirring.
It was like spending your entire childhood with one group of people then having it cut off completely at high school because the neighborhood went into full swing deterioration at the same time. Its weird how I took the D&D playing people with me even if for just a year. Weird. Everyone who carried forth a decade or more with me was a regular D&D player at one time or another.
I remember bringing my Electronic Dungeons and Dragons into school and people trying to put D&D miniatures into it as if that would unlock something. If only...
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 19, 2017 21:45:47 GMT -5
Well, tomorrow is the big night so far its 5 people whittled down from 30+. Its amazing how people's threshold for embarrassment is just being in person. Not me I'm Mr Video. I should have my own show but I'd be too critical of the value of the show itself.
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Post by GRWelsh on Oct 20, 2017 10:51:36 GMT -5
Gene, does this mean you are video recording a game tonight?
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 20, 2017 11:29:11 GMT -5
I seriously doubt that! I've never impromptu gamed in a bar before. I think with people that I haven't seen in 35 years the likelihood is even less. Then there is the "edition gap"... "You still play D&D?
"HELLS YEAH!"
"So do I!"Pulls out THE UNGENDERED PLAYER'S GUIDE TO SAFETY FOR MACRO-AURICULAR CHALLENGED FOLK: ..."Uhhhhh...."
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