quote:

http://squaremans.com/dd-0/



One thing I notice immediately. Thieves can do things. The other characters can’t. I don’t mean “there are things I can do no one else can” I mean the thief has a variety of options while the other characters each only have one. The fighter can only attack, the mage and cleric can only cast a spell, one spell. Whereas I can attack and gain bonuses from striking at someone if they don’t know I’m there. I can open locks, I can find traps, hide in shadows, move silently. Some kind of breakthrough happened between the original three books of D&D, and the Greyhawk supplement. Characters had special abilities. Anyone could attack, only the thief could do these things.

In point of fact, this would be the counter-revolution within D&D. The Thief marks the beginning of these battles, the ur-edition war. The first of it’s kind. Because there’s no reason the thief should have a “Move Silently” ability. Why can’t a wizard try and move silently?

The thief was the first character created for the dungeon. He’s not a thief, he’s a professional dungeoneer. The other characters, the Cleric, the Magic-user, the Fighting-man, had roles outside the dungeon, had roles on the battlefield. That’s where they first came from.

But the thief was adapted for the dungeon. In a sense, there should be no thief, because everyone should be able to do what he’s trying to do. If the game’s about Dungeons then all the characters should be trying to move silently, hide in shadows, etc….

[...]

We bust out the tact-tiles and Jim busts out the minis. These are real, actual minis from 1975. From Kreigspeil’s Middle-earth line. We’re playing with 32-year old painted lead.

From here on out, the process of playing is not entirely unlike the process of playing any other edition at 1st level. We all suck. None of us can fight worth a drat. Mark shows up about halfway through and now we have two fighters. Well, after we meet his character who’s been lashed to a pole and is being roasted by Orcs over an open flame. The new character introduced in the middle of the game is always in the next room, held captive by the bad guys. Thus it was handed down to us from olden times.

By the time Mark’s new character is ready, Dave’s magic user has been a slimy toad for half an hour, with another half an hour to go. He read a cursed scroll and there you are. “This is not fun” Dave reasonably states, but that’s the game. As Jim points out, “hey, if you don’t like it, I got another 10 guys waiting to play in this game.” It’s 1975 and the rules say “best for between 4 and 40 players.” Jim knew of many games that had dozens of players, though also many GMs.

It dawned on me at this point why Jim was always so surprised at the way we played D&D. Each player with one character. These days, one character is enough to manage. Back then, there were several factors pushing you toward running several characters at once. Each character could fit on a 3 x 5 card. No single character was worth a drat at low levels. If you wanted more than one thing to do in combat, you needed two dudes! Forget the fact that the magic-user got one spell for the whole combat, and the fighter gets to swing his sword as often as he wants, each had only that one option.