I've been hearing a lot of people saying, in effect, that 4E D&D admits what kind of game D&D has always been and tunes everything for that: butt-kicking tactical battle-mat kick-in-the-door, kill everything, and take it's stuff gamist play. [1] Right now I'm ignoring the later bit about what 4E does and how well it does it, and looking at the earlier bit's claims about “the kind of game D&D has always been”. I'm not convinced.

This post, right now, is sort of a placeholder. I intend to fill in my history with D&D and look at the various editions of D&D that I've got and see if they support the “the kind of game D&D has always been” remark.

As I've said elsewhere the release of 4E and the choruses of “It's not real D&D” actually got me interested me in looking back at what D&D really was, so I bought PDFs of Original D&D (from RPGNow) and its supplements and Chainmail and printed them all out and bound them in 8.5”x5” pamphlets, in more or less the original form factor. I've read Chainmail and the three pamphlets that made up the original D&D release (X, Y, Z) completely, and have scanned the others. (Oddly enough, I've still not got beyond scanning 4E.)

So, for grins and giggles, last time my local gaming group met I brought copies of the first three commercially published roleplaying games for show and tell: Original Dungeons and Dragons; Empire of the Petal Throne; and Tunnels and Trolls. (The order of the last two is debatable.)

The release of 4E and the choruses of “It's not real D&D” had actually interested me in looking back at what D&D really was, so I bought PDFs of Original D&D (from RPGNow) and its supplements and printed them all out and bound them in 8.5”x5” pamphlets, in more or less the original form factor.

Listening to the Whartson Hall Gamers playing Empire of the Petal Throne from the RPGMP3 Community Podcast rekindled my interesting in Tékumel, so I bought a PDF of it from RPGNow and printed it. (This really drove home how much bigger and better presented EPT was than OD&D. Also, how even less Politically Correct it was.)

And T&T had been in my thoughts since Ron Edwards' wrote a series of reports on his T&T game. I played T&T a bit in my youth, so I already had a copy of it, the 5th edition, so I let that stand in for the 1st edition, a not unreasonable bit of flexibility, since T&T seems to have changed much less over five editions than D&D did over 4.5 or so.

(Later: I can't imagine why I didn't bring my copy of QLI's republication of the original Traveller Books 1, 2, and 3 along, and have one of the first SF RPGs too!)

I've found that, for an abstract game that can take place just in your head, there can be a lot of tacticle fun to RPGs. Rolling dice and moving miniatures are the obvious ones, but there are others. Gaming tokens (glass “stones” ) are used by many games and gamers, either as a component of the system or informally by the gamers for marking various things. Some games, like Savage Worlds, use cards. Miniatures terrain, whether three-dimensional, printed tiles, or simply drawn or a battlemat, adds a lot, and not just to the visual aspects of the game. Cards that represent character states, like buff and condition cards for D&D, or the effects of spells, or cards that have monster or spell stats, are also neat and passing them around adds to the fun of the game. Drawing maps for the games, drawing a scene out on a battle map, and making handouts can all be tactile fun, and then handing out the maps and other handouts to players so they have the fun at looking at them and passing them around and pulling them out when they suddenly realize what they're really showing them.

All of these things can add a great deal of fun to RPGs.

The kids I game with get mentioned a lot. Right now they're my daughter and niece and nephews. I'm really lucky to have such a great bunch of kids around to play games.

L.B.

is my daughter.

My brother C.P.B. about an hour away, so his kids get to play regularly.

B.B.

is in his mid-teens and is the oldest of the bunch, which means I've been experimenting on him the longest. ( I hope it hasn't hurt too much. )

They have a much younger brother, M.B., who doesn't play roleplaying games yet, but will before too long, I hope.

D.B.

is his younger brother, and at 11 is the next oldest.

My sister C.I.A.'s kids live on the family farm, next door to me, and along with my daughter get to play the most.

T.A.

is the oldest boy.

E.A.

is his younger sister.

M.A.

is their younger brother and is the youngest of my regular gamers. He can't read yet, but has fun playing anyway.

The new baby boy is C.A., and I'm already looking forward to when he joins the gaming group.

My brother N.A.B. lives far out of state, and so his kids only get to play on summer and winter vacations when they come and visit the family farm.

T.B.

is N.A.B.'s oldest son.

O.B.

is his younger brother, and has played Buggin' with us a couple times, and will play the other games more as he gets older.

I'm going to try online gaming with a map tool and either a chat inteface or a voice interface when the kids are a little bit older, so the ones that are farther away can get to play more often.

I've run a lot of games for the kids; Fudge Bunnies and Burrows, BESM Dungeon, Toon, Buggin', D&D, Savage Worlds, and perhaps others.

My brother who lives out of state usually comes in from out-of-state twice a year, once during the summer and once at Christmas. One of his sons is old enough to play Savage Worlds these days, and since I'd given him, along with rest of the kids who were old enough, their own copies of the Savage Worlds: Explorer's Edition I wanted to make sure we got to play some roleplaying games while they were in town, especially Savage Worlds.

Running for kids is a lot different than running for adults. One of the kids is in his middle teens, but the rest of them are under 11 and one is 6. They're very enthusiastic when they're interested, but if things slow down the younger ones (literally) wander off until things speed up again. They also have sometimes have a little difficulty switching between the neat stuff that is happening and the mechanical stuff we're using to make the neat stuff happen, which can make things take longer than it should. They all enjoy it, though, and it's definitely worth doing.

Sometime I'd like to make some character sheets specifically for the younger kids who don't read very much yet, with pictures of, for instance, their sword and the dice they need to roll to attack and do damage with it.

One of my nephews is very into a particular collectable card game, and we didn't get a chance to play it this summer. Maybe at the Winter gathering.

One of the things I'm trying to do this summer is to actually run and play more roleplaying games. I play every month or so with an adult group, though that has slowed down during the summer due to scheduling conflicts, and usually play once every month or two with my daughter and my niece and nephews, but I'd like to play or run more often.

I'd like to run a game for the kids every weekend, but I figure that will be difficult to achieve. We'll see. All but one of the kids is 11 or younger, and one who plays occasionally (depending on what game we're playing) is 6; the older one is in his mid-teens. I've been playing RPGs with them (and occasionally their parents) on and off for several years, starting with FUDGE Bunnies & Burrows. Some of the kids have played when some of they were 5 years old or even younger; at that age I have the kids roll dice and handle all the rules work myself; it works great. When I run things I generally try to keep things age-appropriate for the youngest in the group. They've all played video games and are familiar with common fantasy and science fiction tropes from the games.

Over a couple of years we've played Big Eyes, Small Mouth (2nd Edition Revised) a lot, and Bugging', and D&D some, and Savage Worlds a lot. A couple of the older kids have run D&D and Savage Worlds adventures for me, one from a commercial module that was a present and another other using dungeons built with Legos and Lego figures as miniatures. We've played through BESM Dungeon and several Savage Worlds adventures (including some of the free adventures and some of the Savage Tales pdfs) and are working our way through a couple of D&D adventures.

It's hard to schedule time with all the kids together at the same time as I have free time, and there's no telling before hand when the next time we'll be able to play will be, so I tend to run adventures as short campaigns. I've never gotten to run a long campaign. BESM Dungeon and the currently running D&D adventure The Sunken Citadel (updated for 3.5E) have probably been the longest running games. I'd like to run Evernight or 50 Fathoms for them some time.

I'd also like to run more board games: I've still never played Settlers of Catan, despite having it for a couple of years.