I was old School before YOU were old school.......

 So, right.   Here is why I'm paraphrasing the wonderful words of the Tubes....Its not just that I started pretty much in 1975 with three little books that explicitly mentioned Balrogs (more on this later), Ents and Hobbits; it's not just that the only other guy I know personally that has played longer than me has a brown box that he bought from EGG on the basis of it being a chainmail expansion. Nor is it that I never needed an OSR clone* because I still own multiple copies of the original rules, and use them whenever I want to run D&D.  ...It's not even that basically, I've never liked 1E or 2E and firmly considered B/X to be kiddie sanitized marketing tools. 

Hell, it's not even relevant that I'm old enough to want to quote the Tubes on my Blog......

See, those things just mean that I'm an ancient opinionated grognard blowhard who is  ....well, opinionated, possibly undersocialized, certainly too damn sure of himself, and has been playing games since the internet really didn't exist unless you were a colossal technical geek, as well as a gaming geek -and being a gamer had nothing to do with the crude computer ported video games you played. 

Here is why I was OS before you were OS:  In the mid 1980's, back when ADD was all the rage, and the edition wars were about B?X vs ADD......

(and let me tell you, without the forums and blogs and websites, you had to work your ass off to be a divisive polarizing black-and-white-thinking shit-stirring partisan about editions.)

......my buddy and I decided that it would be really cool to run an old fashioned D&D game, using the three little books and some hunt and peck from the supplements.    And we did. For several years. We called it the Nostalgia game at first, but it was really really always the real D&D game to us.

We did this when D&D as a CONCEPT Was Barely Ten FrikkinYears Old ; Gary was still at TSR (abeit fighting with the Blumes and Lorraine Williams and on the way out).  TEN YEARS OLD

yes that's right.  Less than eight years after AD&D was on the Market, He and I were all nostalgic for the simpler retro days of D&D.  .......and that was more than 25 years ago. One quarter of a century ago we were consumed by the desire for a simpler ruleset that was less than a decade old.  We were loons. 

 He is currently posting his campaign stuff on his blog, including (so far) the campaign intro and guidelines, and the surprisingly effective set of house rules for playing my unselfconsciously gonzo OD&D rules approved BALROG. Named Nesbitt.  Read here.  I so command it.

That children, is why I Was a Punk before You Were a Punk.

*Note that I still buy them , run them and play them; and as we know, shill willingly for Swords and Wizardry. That is because I am A Hopeless Case. And they are Excellent rules.  And, well...hopeless case.  Me.  Y'know.

The Thief is not guilty, part 3

So, I wanted to post some reviews, and I noticed that a common theme was: "great, except for the idiosyncratic refusal to include the Thief class".  So, heres my final(ish) thoughts on that.

This belief in the neccessoity for exclusion of the thief is puzzling, and it seems to be part of the OSR zeitgeist; the reasons range from the thief not being in the original three books, through them being a self referential class that creates the challeneges it is supposed to deal with, through being responsible for the glut of skills and feats of later editions.  Support or rejection of this idea seems foundational to the whole bubbling stew of the OSR.  So, since the thief excluders are wrong,  guess which side I'm on?


I've discussed (ranted about) these arguments before, expressing my opinion that they are, indeed, quantifiable as the merest hooie*. To sum up:

1. the number of people who started D&D with only the original 3 book set and not greyhawk either at the same time or immediately thereafter is vanishingly small and as such, it doesn;t represent a change of direction with regard to D&D as an RPG.
2. Gary wrote Greyhawk (well, yes with others) and obviously included the thief intentionally in his campaign, and thus the gygaxian vision of D&D; QED for the purists, I think . 
3. Fighters and the attempt to de-vanilla-ize them via weapon proficiencies and skill based subclasses is, in my obviously self inflated opinion, the real cause of the skillsystems and sorcery style of play, not thieves.  Note that GG resisted weapon proficiencies for quite a while as a bad idea that would lead to skill systems.
3. Its soooooooo swords and sorcery. Plus, Bilbo.

So, anything new ?  Well, yes, and here is my core argument.  
The thief is what made D&D more than just a skirmish miniatures game. 

We all know that it began as one -and that now it isn't just one.  A main difference between a skirmish wargame and the ur-RPG is this: Skirmish games  often are at the scale of the one figure = one man, but the player is still a disembodied commander moving pieces around, and all pieces are judged by their resource value in winning the game; an RPG changes the scale to one figure = you, and you alone. Playing a single fighter was still something that one could do in a skirmish game.  Fighters killed other units, Mages were artillery, and clerics were either recovery units or specialized anti -undead killers.
The thief was a big deal because as a class it had no useful place on the battlefield of a skirmish wargame, whatsover.

Really ?  Well, almost none of the thief skillset is useful in a skirmish -playing one is a waste of time.  Scouting is irrelevant on a real sand table, especially given the rules of that time period, and swiping was even less useful. Climbing and sneaking are options, but since one cannot do anything useful, so what ? Reading scrolls ?  Play an apprentice wizard. Possibly they could eliminate commanders and such, but that was really the role of assassins, a type specifically included in the original skirmish model of D&D.

Why then, amidst all the other detail of Greyhawk, most of which could simply be additions to a skirmish game is a useless unit specifically included ?

Because the thief had every utility in the dungeon game,  and the dungeon game created the role playing experience; and also, the thief in many ways defined the nature of the adventurer.  Remember, 1973.  Fantasy models are  not what they are today.  Heroes were sneaks as much as brawlers, often antiheroesm and in many ways, that is what made them a literary character, rather than the subject of a soldierly autobiography.  They solved puzzles, got into tight scrapes and conflicts by themselves; this I see as the real genesis of roleplaying.

So, given that, we see that the thief is the character of the dungeon crawl, and from there the Urban adventure or the indoor raid.  And those are the types of settings that set D&D apart from the skirmish game.  And thus...the father of the RPG, the causus bellum, the missing link -the neccessary part of the final result. 

No thieves =no role playing games. 

So, suck it up*, Grognardia and all you reactionary revisionists* ! Apologise to the thief right now ! Take him to lunch and make it your treat; you may as well, you'll be paying for it either way .





* I say this in the most loving caring  and compassionate manner possible..;)

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ONLINE FANS

Dear god, time for a rant.  remember the funny, whimsical post about WW buying a traveller license ?  Remember ? Actually funny, right, but not overly mean or sarcastic ?

Well, over on the main Traveller Forum, the latest  obsessed Sock puppet Traveller hating attentionseeking terrible infant has managed to turn it into a very mean spirited stab at Travellers author, and gotten most of the thread dissapeared and locked. BUGGERBLOODYIDIOTICMORON !

I suppose its just as well that the Mods did what they did, but honestly......

What is it about the web that makes ATTENTION CRAVING IDIOTS just have to make sure that EVERYONE KNOWS about their IMPORTANT PERSONAL ISSUES regardless of what is going on. 

Why is this IDIOT even posting about all the things he hates about traveller on one of the OLDEST most established TRAVELLER WEBSITES ?  What, not enough attention from mommy when he was a BABY ?

OH WAH WAH I HATE TRAVELLER AND MY PERSONAL ISSUES ARE SO IMPORTANT THAT EVERYONE HAS TO KNOW AND APPRECIATE THEM PLUS MOMMY ONLY EVER FED ME FROM A NASTY COLD BOTTLE EXCEPT WHEN SHE JUST BLEW FORMULA POWDER UP MY NOSE WITH A STRAW !!!!!!!!!!!!!


Gahhhhhhhh.

Okay. Rant over. (well, probably not)