Grognard Gripes

Okay, so everyone loves an old gamer griping. I don't usually get irritated about gaming history or generalizations, but I was listening to a podcast wherein the duo were describing how early games didn't have long lived characters, strong stories, or developed campaigns. They were outlining how these came along in the 80's, with the change attributed to the proliferation of more robust campaign products.

Well, no. 

We were playing long-running , narrative and character-driven campaigns shortly after 1975. As I have written in other posts, our experience was probably outside of the norm, but definitely not isolated. Were we playing or using published scenarios? No. Were we playing in large organized groups? No. Was our style of play something we saw other folks doing? Not really, but the nodes of gamers related to our node all played in similar fashions.

I think that enough folks were playing in this way that the popular and commercial expression of this style of play emerged as something viable by the late 70s. Perhaps this playstyle influenced the creation of more narrative and campaign driven games, like Call of Cthulhu, and then filtered back to mainstream Dungeons and Dragons. 

"And get off my lawn!" 😉