No Grognard I?

My last most active gaming period was in the late 90’s. Though I was online then, I didn’t really look too deeply at the gaming community on the internet. Actually, I never spent a whole time in the gaming community period, even though I had game groups on and off for decades. I was so out of the loop around 1998 that I didn’t know what edition D&D was on, or what the D20 system was, or any of that shit. When I went into a store in the late 90’s all I bought was figures and paints (and there’s another out-of-the-looper – I never referred to them as “miniatures” until recently). As far as games and books, all I saw was GURPS and Vampire stuff all over the place. I was always very fortunate to be in my own little gaming world, with player who were pretty much willing to play whatever I ran.

As a kid I hung out for a few years at a local hobby shop in Santa Monica. But as I got into my older teens, I just started thinking in terms of life being too short to be around the generally negative (at least for younger people) vibe at Aero Hobbies. Most of the guys who hung out in that moldy dump were between 5-50 years older than the teenage dudes, and most of them were pretty much self-righteous pricks who should not have been spending a lot of time around kids.

So in high school my gaming life outside that shop really took off. I found that I could generally put together a group made out of friends and friends of friends. And because of my negative experiences at that game shop as a kid, and because conventions seem to ramp up the geek factor a thousand fold, I never went to many cons or game day events. I just wanted to GM for people I knew and liked – and I didn’t tend to like about half the people I met in the gaming community. I was into long campaigns and deep character development with people I was comfy with and was willing to have in my life for years at a stretch.

When 2nd edition AD&D came out, I was not impressed. Having skills and such didn’t really phase me – in my games we had always assumed skills and proficiencies for characters. But the very vibe seemed different. It just felt like a different game. When one of my players, Terry, decided she wanted to do some DMing, I was supportive. But when she whipped out the 2nd edition, I was outraged. What the hell?

But the fact is: I was changing. Terry’s 2nd edition games were one of the only experiences I had as a non-DM player in D&D as an adult. But still, my games were moving away a bit from the cheese, and dungeons for dungeons sake. As role-play and characterization became more important in my games, a certain realism was setting in. Sure, I still liked to whip out wacky Judges Guild adventure settings, or use Arduin’s wild tables for this and that, but for the most part, my scenarios more and more were involving more mature adventure in the open air. Dealings with powerful NPC’s in the cities, travel to foreign lands – the longer my game world was in existence, the more our sessions were about the characters lives and friends outside the labyrinth, I loved to have a magical underground garden pop up now and again (the Garden of Merlin from the Dungeoneer is a much-used fave), or send the PC’s on a long adventure in the Underworld, but the classic cheese of trapped corridors filled with slime and magical statues, and hex clearing in the forest to build a keep, was in steep decline in my world. It just sort of happened.

Little did I realize that AD&D in general had made many of the same moves I had. Howling wildernesses with dungeons and other areas that made little sense were no longer held in high regard. Focus on character and high adventure seemed to be more the norm. D&D had grown up too.

When I started reading blogs about gaming late last year, I was surprised to see this big debate over “old and new” gaming. There will always be debates, but I was tickled pink to see guys like James M. at Grognardia championing the old tropes I once loved: Cubes of jelly floating around corridors like some kind of fantasy Zamboni, rust monsters, piercers, hirelings, ten-foot poles, etc. etc. etc.

I love these old tropes and in thinking about them they give me a minor thrill in only the way as an adult seeing a vintage porn you loved as a teenager could give you. Just like the porn, the old D&D cheese is fun to revisit briefly, but really just not as good as you remember it being.

James at Grognardia, sort of a self-appointed museum curator of old D&D cheesy goodness, is describing his currently ongoing campaign Dwimmermount in his blog. James practices what he preaches – his setting is fairly light on the “outside the dungeon” stuff, but satisfyingly heavy on the cliches: traps, tricks, tribes of violent humanoids crammed into caves, hirelings (something I never really liked in D&D – to me they were just Star Trek “red shirts” and I always thought a good DM could run a survivable game without them), and the proverbial ten-foot poles that you need, because one of the other tropes in the dungeons are likely to take a hand off you (think of it as using a trope against a trope – we are beyond the cheesy looking glass here, people…). James is so into his clichés, that great role-playing opportunities are missed that I would snatch up – like one of the hirelings going back to town to get married.

Shit, if you are going to go to the trouble to flesh out the “red shirt” enough so that you know he’s getting married, how about a quick encounter at the wedding, with bandits or something attacking the proceedings. *Boing* your lands outside the dungeon have sprung to life! I have thought “outside the dungeon” for so long, I immediately grab onto something like that. But that is not Grognard thinking I guess. James not wanting to do something like that, taking the PC’s out of the dungeon for something that could be character developing, is TRUE Grognard.

For the last few months that I have been back into gaming, and blogging a bit about it, I have thought of the newer, 4th edition crowd as being the aggressors in the old/new debate. But in the last few weeks I have seen some old school folk get pretty upset over nothing. Look, old is good, new is good – as long as people are willing to sit down and pretend with books and dice, then shit, we are all in this together. I don’t think the new guys are right in poo-pooing old school thought; nor do I think the old school is right in thinking that because a lot of old tropes have been abandoned the game is no longer D&D. A rose is a rose by any other name. Sure, it isn’t my D&D. Mine exists in all these old copies of the DM guide, PH, and UE I still own. I ain’t buying new ones, goddamn it. I’m Scottish, so I’m a cheapo ( That explains a lot of shit in my life, not just to my hanging on to 1st ed. for dear life).

So what about Me? I have been at it on and off for about 30 years, but I guess I am not really Grognard. Truth be told, my games these days probably unfold like most2nd, 3rd, and 4th edition games do. James’ sort of unfold the way mine did when I was 15. I wonder; if James had a D&D world that he created as a kid and still used, with decades and decades of character continuity, would he still be holding on to all the old tropes? Might his game play have evolved? I know he still might prefer those old OD&D pamphlets, but after a hundred dungeons and a thousand gelatinous cubes, would it still be the same? I think a lot of the guys who prefer to play pure old school have just had giant gaps in their gaming pastimes, probably decades. If you haven’t watched football in 25 years, you would be surprised at how much the game has changed – and you would probably prefer the old, smash-mouth gameplay. I suspect this is true with James and others outlook on D&D, although I am just assuming in James M.’s case and would love to know more of his gaming history.

A weird ass dungeon that makes little sense (Gygax naturlism or not) still sounds cool, but in game terms I would rather not play in it. Look, I still mostly use my old 1st edition books for two reasons: one, I own at least two of each book. And secondly, my players never really cared. If my players in 1992 had said “Look, either we play the new edition or we don’t play” then hell, I’d be a second edition guy. I would buy the 4th ed. Stuff if I had too – but man, for me it would be like going in reverse evolutionarily speaking. I mean, I would probably start with high adventure, and in several years have players back in senseless dungeons trying to figure out the right spell to kill an Ochre Jelly.

So Grognard I? I guess not. At least not at a Grognardia level.