In the first Moldvay post I gave a list of characteristics that made Moldvay D&D a good product for me and my friends, back in the early eighties:
- It’s simple, compared with a lot of RPGs
- It’s easy to read and well organised (compared with AD&D)
- It covers the stuff you’re likely to need as a teenage boy
- It’s robust: you can miss a lot of rules, and it still basically works
- It’s a complete game, at several different scales
- It gives you both clear boundaries and plenty of room to grow
- It’s got useful artwork
- It’s fairly random, in a lot of places
- It comes with a ready-to-play adventure
Pause to think about a bunch of thirteen year-olds trying to follow written rules to play a very complex game and some of these should be self explanatory. But in the next few posts I’d like to talk about some of the others, because I think they can help us understand in general what makes for a good role playing game.
For starters, the ‘stuff you’re likely to need as a teenage boy’. This refers to the way the game spells out exactly the kind of details we wanted to include in our games, without assuming much prior knowledge. One of the obstacles for young people playing an RPG about grown-up lives in a foreign society is that they are probably missing quite a lot of necessary knowledge. For example, a thirteen-year old is unlikely to know very much about how various aspects of weaponry, government, education and economy should (or could) work in such a world. While teenage boys might be very interested in playing a game about hand to hand combat in a pseudo-medieval setting, it might be very difficult for them to know how to go about it.
Moldvay D&D ties down the basics about the setting with specific rules covering races, equipment, weapons, armour, combat, magic and prices that enable inexperienced players to use the game in a setting that attracts them. But there is nothing about political systems, for example. How likely are teenage boys to look up that kind of information and use it?
Now a very wide range of settings might cater to players who want to deal with man-to-man combat. But for me and my peers, an undoubted part of the attraction of D&D was its promise of games that somehow resembled the adventures portrayed in Tolkien’s (then extremely) popular works. We wanted to play games about elves, dwarves, ‘halflings’, orcs, trolls, giant spiders and dragons; good versus evil; secret panels; mysterious maps and mysterious wizards who cast spells; and magic swords and being invisible. While Basic D&D can be used in many types of settings, and though it may be far from ideal for recreating Middle Earth, it definitely had many ingredients that stood out as Tolkien-fuel.
Now for grown-ups who have studied history, archaeology and economics; who have lived through decades of adult life; and read hundreds of novels across many genres, these aspects of Moldvay D&D are less valuable. It is not that they are entirely useless or uninteresting. But my friends no longer need anybody to tell them about practical differences between plate armour and ‘chain mail’, or to define exactly how much damage a ‘short sword’ should do, or how long it takes to load a crossbow, or how expensive (or flammable) ‘oil’ should be. Nowadays we are confident to make something up. And some of us have strong opinions that may clash with what is printed in any set of rules.
Likewise, we have wider tastes in fiction. We have read more and we have thought more about what makes fiction and fantasy interesting. Most of us still admire Tolkien, but we are better equipped to construct original worlds and situations of our own. We want to explore a wider range of settings and genres. And we see more clearly the shortcomings of Moldvay D&D for dealing with Middle Earth as a setting.
Part of what any group needs for a great game is the knowledge to support a coherent world.
Next: Robust and complete...
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