Gary GygaxRecensioni
Autore di Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook (1st edition)
Recensioni
Night Arrant (Gord the Rogue) di Gary Gygax
These modules are typical of the early Dungeons & Dragons modules (and these are the first published ones). They have some details, but most areas are sketches, with the rest left for the Dungeon Master to flesh out properly. They are also include clip art from some of the classic TSR artists, to varying effect.
The overall affect of these modules is that they are a bloodbath, especially with the final module. There are three poster comics that tell this story, by Jason Bradley Thompson. They mix comedy with a straight-up telling of how the adventure could have happened - well worth viewing in conjunction with reading this module.
Of course, the best option would be to play these originally. I am looking forward to the opportunity to do that with my own group (leading a group of players through these).
Additional comments after re-reading in 2018:
The cover art is my very favorite. I love the mixtures of blue and green, and the horrifying picture on the back is full of everything that Dungeons and Dragons was to me when I was playing as a kid. The mystery of what a Mind Flayer is and what they do. I love almost every picture in this module, as it is so evocative.
I remember setting up a snow cave (as a kid) in my back yard and attempting to run this module - crazy.
The framework of this module is just that, a framework. There is much to be done with this module by a creative Dungeon Master.
This module requires a mixture of stealth and straight up combat. I believe that Gary says in the introduction that high level characters alone will not cut it, the module requires experienced players.
I have never run anyone through this particular module, and I can see that it will require lots of planning to do so. There are so many structures and economies going on to ensure that the players have a great experience. Again I recommend viewing the comic/map by Jason Bradley Thompson in conjunction with reading this module - it illustrates one potential adventure, with comedy.
For a beginning Dungeon Master, this module (and many other AD&D modules at the time) could be a bit overwhelming. There is a lot of text, and no real text boxes of information to be read, as the basic and expert lines had at the time (such as Keep on the Borderlands). I encountered this module very early on, before I really knew the difference between Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
Overall, I really like the way that Gary presents his material, but it does require a lot of mental agility for the Dungeon Master to assimilate, and to coordinate. For the village, the Dungeon Master needs to be aware of the many personalities in the village, and how they are connected to different powers in the region. Also, a better understanding of the geography then simply looking at the map (which is good, but also a bit overwhelming) is very helpful for a better playing experience.
The back picture on the color cover is one of the iconic pictures for me of Dungeons & Dragons, with the jovial and welcoming magic-user, and the taciturn fighter.
I am looking forward to starting another new campaign, with the module being the ground rock for it.
The dungeon stuff was strange too. He talked about dungeon levels getting boring because the party had cleared them out so the DM needed to restock them. He talked about trying to make sure that the players could NOT map the dungeon accurately.
Two strangest/funniest things:
1) This was at the end of a section describing sea monsters -
"Final Note: If sea monsters or monsters of the seas do not get a ship, perhaps it will sail off the edge of the world!"
I guess it was a kind of possible adventure hook.
2) At the very end of the book the last paragraph is entitled "Afterward" instead of "Afterword". Which is a pretty hilarious grammar mistake. But also in the "Afterward" he encourages players NOT to contact them with rules questions, but to figure things out for themselves "for everything herein is fantastic" and "why have us do any more of your imagining for you?"
Some pretty funny stuff like cursed scrolls that send you to another planet and wands that "detect meals".
It was fun and nostalgic to read this, but also quite painful. It really has the feel of someones random notes about a game that he wants to create. Things like spells that give no description of what they actually do, an "alternate" combat system, but no "initial" combat system because they assume you already play Chainmail and will be using that system. Before you even know how to roll up a character there's a section on creating magic items.
Probably the biggest problem I have with this is that there's no "example of play". He never really talks about how the game is played, so someone who had never played an RPG (and I believe this was the first one), would be totally lost. Anyway, I've always said that you should always learn how to play RPGs from people who already know how to play. So maybe Mr. Gygax was writing from that perspective.
Anyway, it's super short and was a "blast from the past". It's really cool to see that many of the ideas still exist in the newest edition of D&D more than 40 years later.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons by E. Gary Gygax
The first edition of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook, written by E. Gary Gygax, is only one of a trilogy of rulebooks necessary to play the seminal roleplaying game. My original intention was to do a review of this book alone. However, the more time I put into trying to write a review, the more I realized there is really no way to talk about this book without talking about Dungeons & Dragons as a whole. Because this single volume is only one piece of a larger encompassing game, it doesn't make any sense to just talk about one book. Therefore, this review will not focus exclusively on Player's Handbook, rather I will also discuss how the volume fits into the scope of the game, along with the other core rulebooks.
My virginity was lost at the age of 12. Not my sexual virginity, my Dungeons & Dragons virginity. That was when I was first seduced by dice and rulebooks.
The first time I ever heard of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), I was in the 6th grade, and within my circle of friends, one of the boys was telling us stories about his uncle playing this really elaborate boardgame that supposedly took days to learn how to play. That was the most vivid thing I remember about it; learning that the game was so complicated, you didn't just read a pamphlet of rules in 10 minutes, but instead you spent days learning the instructions. At that time, we didn't understand the concept of a roleplaying game. We thought it was a boardgame like Monopoly or Clue or Chess or Checkers and I distinctly remember my friends and I laughing at the stupidity of playing a game that would take so long to learn. What was the point? We thought it was crazy. What kind of losers are going to waste days just to learn the rules of a boardgame? Why would you do that? How could the game possibly be any fun if it was that complicated?
Over the next few weeks, we learned more and more about it. Players would make up imaginary characters like elves and warriors. Another player, called a Dungeon Master was like a referee or a movie director and he would run the game and play all the other roles of monsters and describe imaginary environments and so forth. Playing the whole game was kind of like a table reading of an improvisational theatrical production, with a medieval storyline, where you get to play a character that you invented yourself. That was starting to sound a lot less stupid and kind of fun! My friend sat in on a game session with his uncle and we heard all about the mythological creatures and magic and wizards and adventures and it started to sound really, really cool. Learning the rules might take a long time, but we began to understand why it was worth it. So, we decided to give it a shot. Among my friends, I believe I may have been the first or second person to buy the Basic boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons. Eventually, all of my friends played D&D, but in the beginning, I'm pretty sure there were only two of us to buy the original boxed set. We both read the rules and we figured it out and we had a lot of telephone conversations trying to understand what the rulebooks were talking about. And what the hell do you do with the crayon? By the end of the week, we tried to play that first game module, The Keep on The Borderlands, and it was awful. We had no idea what we were doing. We thought the Dungeon Master was supposed to actually read the module verbatim to the players. It was terrible. Total disaster. Wasn't fun at all. We didn't even use the crayon to color the dice. Never figured that out until months later. Instead I used it to underline rules in the rulebooks. That was a bad idea. It was a black crayon.
Yet, for some reason, we stuck with it. We didn't give up on Dungeons & Dragons even though that first game session sucked so bad. I think maybe the simple fact that we had spent an entire week reading the rules made us determined to not give up.
Like many kids back then, we didn't realize that Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) were completely different games. We presumed they were a progression: Basic to Expert to Advanced. Makes sense, right? We didn't understand that the Expert Dungeons & Dragons box set was a sequel to the Basic Dungeons & Dragons box set, but the hardcover Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks were not a sequel to the Expert set, they were in fact, an entirely new system of rules.
So, we played the Basic game.
Then we progressed to the Expert game.
Then I became the first person among my friends to buy AD&D.
In order to play a proper game of the first edition of AD&D, you needed a bare minimum of three books:
1. Player's Handbook
2. Dungeon Master's Guide
3. Monster Manual
Those three books are the staples, the foundation of the game. As their names imply, Player's Handbook is for the players. It explains how to create different types of characters and what their capabilities are within the game. Dungeon Master's Guide is for the referee and it lays out all the rules of how gameplay works from random encounters with mythological creatures in the countryside to rolling dice to determine the outcome of epic battles and swordfights. Monster Manual is a reference book for the Dungeon Master to populate his fantasy world with his choice of hundreds of fantastical beasts from orcs to goblins and of course, dragons. The first edition of AD&D ended up being comprised of over a dozen hardcover rulebooks and I owned them all. However, the other 10 books in question are all optional supplements. Only those initial three are the essential ones.
Needless to say, since D&D and AD&D are different games, when I bought the Player's Handbook, I was right back to square one. My friends and I had been playing D&D for months and I knew the rules of D&D pretty well. Because we all presumed AD&D was just another expansion, when I hit those hardcover books, I had no clue what was going on. I was completely baffled. And this time, I didn't have any other friends to bounce chapters off of. Nobody else owned the hardcover books yet. I was on my own. Slowly, I began to realize that this was a totally different game, and it was a lot better! I was really excited and I couldn't wait for all my friends to get copies of the books too. Once that happened, once all my friends had collected the AD&D books, we left the Basic and Expert box sets behind and never looked back. We were all about AD&D (an acronym which may confuse those of you in the insurance industry).
Reading the AD&D rulebooks was truly kindling the tinder of my imagination. The magical aspect of roleplaying games is that once you read the book to understand the rules, you constantly go back to reference the rules. Simply reading about imaginary spells and monsters and magical items would set the wheels in motion. I'd start to visualize different plots and scenarios and ideas for characters and villages and storylines and dungeon maps and treasures and who was guarding those treasures and why. Over the years, I literally invented dozens of AD&D characters that I never even used in the game. Dreaming them up was just as fun as playing a campaign with them.
The game itself, and the joy of playing it, occupied my time for years. All through junior high, and well into highschool, AD&D was a huge part of my friendships and my fondest memories. During the 6th grade, instead of staying out on the playground during lunch, my friends Jerry Jarzabek, Chip Reynolds and Keith Riggs would sneak back into the school, so we could play AD&D for the lunch period. We had all night gaming sessions with Ted and Chris Smith and Aaron Reitz and Mike Rozack, where we had sleepovers and quite literally played all night until the sun came up. Those evenings are sepiatone Polaroids of cozy sleeping bags fluffed thick as summer clouds fogging the floors among piles of dice and rulebooks. Grand adventures and crazy schemes and silly plots and scary battles and thrilling characters and epic conclusions.
Back in 1983, Player's Handbook was unquestionably one of the most important books of my junior highschool days. One that I read over and over. One that shaped and informed my social interaction, enriched my imagination, and educated me in new ways to appreciate mathematics, history, geometry, spatial relations, cartography, illustration, and storytelling.
Thankfully, those original three AD&D rulebooks were reprinted in 2013, allowing for an entirely new class of 6th graders to start playing the roleplaying game that started all roleplaying games. The original. The venerable. The immortal. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
Pick up a copy for yourself. And don't forget to buy the dice. Don't worry, these days, the numbers are already colored in. No need for the crayon anymore.
"The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules."
- Gary Gygax
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EricMuss-Barnes | 4 altre recensioni | Mar 22, 2015 |
EricMuss-Barnes | 4 altre recensioni | Mar 22, 2015 | 
While escapist fantasy and adventure (especially the adventure) is all fun and good, and the fact that one can experience multiple near death experiences without actually running the risk of actually dying (though there are always players that throw tantrums whenever something bad happens to their characters) is a thrill in itself, the one thing that I love about roleplaying is the fun and the laughter that we as a group of friends have in the afternoon or evening when we get together to roleplay. Obviously, now that I am 700 kms away from my fortnightly roleplaying group that is something that I am going to miss, but I guess that is the price you have to pay for levelling up (not that I really have the time to dedicate to a fortnightly roleplaying game anymore, though I do play Euro-games once a month).
As I mentioned, there are always going to be those people that take roleplaying just that little too seriously, and I guess that is one of the things that I really don't like about these books, and that is that they tend to be serious and simply lack the light hearted comedy that can come out of a really well run game. To those people, I would suggest that they lighten up and accept the game for what it is, a game. Yes, this world may be harsh, but one thing that I have learnt from years of roleplaying is that if your ambition in life is to create the most powerful character that you can create, then I am afraid that you are focussing all of your energy in the wrong direction. You seem to know what it takes and what is required to get to the next level, as is dictated by the rules, but why not take that energy out of the game and put it into the real world. Yes, granted, there are no rules about what constitutes leveling up, but guess what, the wonderful thing about the real world is that you can set your own goals, and not big ones, but small ones, and when you achieve that goal, you can jump up in joy, claim that you have reached the next level, and then aim for that next step to level up again.
Hey, for all you know, by the day you die, you might actually become that level 300 street bum that you have always dreamed about (but I suggest that you try not to become a fighter and base your success on the number of people you have killed).
1 David.Alfred.Sarkies | 2 altre recensioni | Feb 28, 2014 |
David.Alfred.Sarkies | 2 altre recensioni | Feb 28, 2014 | Questo sito utilizza i cookies per fornire i nostri servizi, per migliorare le prestazioni, per analisi, e (per gli utenti che accedono senza fare login) per la pubblicità. Usando LibraryThing confermi di aver letto e capito le nostre condizioni di servizio e la politica sulla privacy. Il tuo uso del sito e dei servizi è soggetto a tali politiche e condizioni.