Practical Learning

"... if you look at any role-playing game from the 70s, Metamorphosis Alpha assumes you're going to draw out 24 levels of a giant starship — and there were people at the time, who were just like me, and said like I don't know how to do that.  How's that gonna work?  And then there's, um, Tunnels and Trolls, says 'Okay, the first thing that's gonna happen is, someone's gonna have to dig the tunnel.'  Map out the dungeon.  And of course St. Andre there was copying from Original D&D where Gygax says, 'Okay, somebody's gonna have to design six levels of a dungeon,' right?

"Now a kid like me was always baffled by this.  How did someone come up with all this stuff?  Because you look at professionally produced modules and you — and I think, I'm never going to make something that good.  You know.  It's always been a mystery to me.  How did all these people in the 1970s — how did they give themselves permission to just go correct things, to create things?"

 — Jeffro Johnson, BROSR

It's a gift that keeps on giving.

Metamorphosis Alpha was originally published in 1976.  The game included descriptions of 17 levels of the "Starship Warden", a 50-mile long damaged vessel.  Not 24.  17.  Most children in the days before helicopter parenting, video games, cellphones and even cable television suffered from acute and crippling boredom, which encouraged the drawing out of physical pictures from descriptions.  It's not a mystery.

Tunnels and Trolls was originally published in 1975 by Ken St. Andre.  I don't have any memories of the game before 1979, and perhaps I didn't play it often enough, but I have no memories of any text saying, "Okay, you have to dig the tunnel."  But I could be wrong about that.  In any case, it's not like we had to head off to a place with dirt with our shovels.  It's just lines drawn on paper, right?

Nor do I have any memories of Gygax saying a dungeon had to have specifically "six" levels.  I accept that Johnson's goal is to stress the difficulty of prepping the game — but again, these are just lines drawn with pencils.

While I didn't play RPGs until 1979, starting around 1970, at the age of six, I had grown remarkably adept at playing in the sand, where we would collaboratively build villages with roads, hotwheels cars, complete with small plastic garages, post offices and police stations, because these things were available and we were boys.  These villages would fill the sandbox from side to side, and then we'd collect rocks, golf balls and wooden blocks and smash these villages "from space" just before dinnertime.

By eight or nine, we were drawing our own comic strips — or in my case, making maps — as well as drawing out spaceships smashing into planets, or whatever took our fancy.  Virtually everyone's binder (a thing used to carry paper) was side-to-side illustrated, because we were punchy with boredom in school and doodling made the clock's minute hand move faster.

By eleven, we were playing playing complex wargames, having moved beyond RISK into Panzerblitz and Squad Leader; by twelve, it was rebuilding the rumpus room floor with anything we could find in order to build large battle maps, on which we move our plastic-model built tanks and miniature soldiers all-day Saturday ... before these had to be cleaned up before everyone went home.  We knew every detail about those tanks; we could rattle off engine types, range, fuel use, weight, etcetera, because we collectively owned all of Jane's Big Books of whatever ... which included scale models of cut-away diagrams of giant battleships and airplanes, which we would stare at for hours and discuss for longer.  Pffft.  Invent 17 levels of a giant spaceship?  Yeah, like we had no template for that.

Anyway, my being 11 takes me up to 1974.  It was another five years before I even heard of D&D; and after first hearing of it, I played it in a space of an hour.

I'm a little fascinated by these people talking in the present about how "in the 1970s," role-playing games were supposedly everywhere.  Um, no.  The friend who introduced me to the game had been playing a month, while the DM had been introduced to the game only three months before.  It was going like wildfire in 1979, but no one in Calgary could have easily played the game before December of 1978 ... because that's when the only game store in the city opened its doors.  So this "what people did in the 1970s" is bullshit.  Yeah, maybe some people played, somewhere, but it wasn't a widespread phenomenon and every one of those people had a wargame-obsessive background like I did.  This is a very tiny subset of the population, with a specific mindset ... the sort that would know exactly how to design 6 levels of a dungeon, or a huge spaceship, without any trouble.

I have mentioned before that I joined a campaign in 1980, run by a fellow who played with Gygax in 1974.  He passed away last year; his name was Bill Hartley.  He didn't publish any modules or get famous in any way ... but he did begin running his own game after moving to Calgary post-school.  He became a teacher, reappearing in my life as my daughter's grade nine english teacher.  That was a very funny parent-teacher interview, I can tell you.  My daughter was barely discussed.

In 1975, I'd wager that Bill was the only player of D&D in Calgary.  And as it happened, he lived just three blocks from where I lived, in a house overlooking my elementary school playground.  I can show you the house.  But as a 5th grader in 1975, I had no idea — though I probably glanced towards his house every day.  I think that's kind of funny.

Giving ourselves "permission" to make things was how the world worked.  I made my first science fair project in 1976, a working circulatory system along with quite a lot of knowledge about it.  I put forth science fair projects each year until grade 10, by which time I'd lost interest in practical science and had moved onto theatre arts.  The same year that I discovered D&D I had also begun performing in city wide events on stage ... which is a different kind of collaborative, creative effort.  I also got interested in football, in those days when I was young, raw and lean, which is intensely collaborative and a good place to wear out aggression.  But it was football or drama, and in the end drama won ... which, CTE considered, was definitely for the best.

I have no idea what kind of kid Jeffro Johnson was, but certainly not the kind that I ran around with when I was building model ships and planes, or building physical representations to display contour lines as a science fair exhibit (1.5 meters wide and 0.5 meters high, built with 5 mm sheets of styrofoam and carefully cut to represent the contoured landscape around Sylvan Lake in central Alberta), or learning how to program computers with punch cards (yes, christ, that's where I started with computers).  Long before I played D&D, I was trained to play D&D.

Make a dungeon?  From scratch?  Oh ffs.  Give me something hard.