Early DnD was a open-world tabletop MMORPG

This is so cool!

Trying to get into OSR and this video explains all those weird rules! I thank you!

Combine MMORPGs, 4Xs and RTS all on a tabletop and you’ve got yourself old school D&D

It's a very interesting way to run DnD that I think requires far, far more free time than I could ever dream of possessing.

This is the difference between "D&D" and "DnD"

Tried this with a group of people who all claim they want to play D&D, but can't for various reasons, nobody showed up (Multiple months in a row) other than my usual group

Great video as always. Do any OSR-style RPGs have a section explaining this style of play/DMing? I understand the style very well (I'm over 40 haha), but it would be nice to read extended commentary on it written by the writers/developers of OSR games.

As of now the D&D club I run has 19 players. I run groups of 2-6 depending on how people team up, and solo runs for thieves and druids and the like. Everyone is different levels. Getting ready to add another DM and recruit more players.

id say just an MRPG, but you right

I've started tracking days for my campaign now. One of my flaws was going as fast as possible and not tracking time, but I wanted to go slower so I printed up a calendar for Forgotten Realms. Now my players are thinking about how to better manage their time, how long it will take to get somewhere and if they can do something within that time. Not to mention as soon as holiday's show up, I can run it for the players and it shows that the world is moving on with them in it and it's made it even more engaging for our group.

This is so cool! I already re-use the same world for all of my campaigns (which means players can impact the future), but making game time move in Real Time is CRAZY! I might use that.

Would it be possible to play this way with the 5e system? I ran a game at my library once, and I’m thinking of trying to do it again. Something like this seems like it would fix a lot of the issues I had back then (players missing sessions and dropping out, difficulty finding replacements once the campaign is ongoing, etc), but my library only has 5e books, and I’ve only ever run games with the modern, narrative-focused style of play.

Any advice from old grognards here?

nah, just morpg, not massively.

I ran a couple different "open table" campaigns over the course of a couple years. While I would agree that certain aspects of it were significantly easier on the whole "Scheduling" and availability front, one thing that I didn't foresee was the difficulty with changing people's mindset towards what a "campaign" was. I would explain to people point-blank that this game world would persist continuously each session and that it was also using a West-Marches sort of thing where players that wanted to show up would need to share where they wanted to go each session... People not accustomed to that just didn't get it.

OK, old school DM... over forty years experience and literally hundreds of games...
These things you are saying are all well known to us old school 'grognards' and it never occurred to me to run games differently until I saw that 5e oddly handles campaigns differently.

In 1e, and AD&D, PCs often died. It was common practice to bring backup characters... in addition to the few characters that they typically run.

Sometimes, players made brothers and played all the brothers...
We had four DMs in my area... and we all played in Greyhawk... and events in our various games were all connected.

I'm working on a campaign that would introduce our old ways to my son and nephew and their friends... a new generation of players

Interesting we played this style at High School in after school care. I recall we were playing through one of the box box sets and there were several rival adventures parties, the evil ones would set aside gold to actually hire people to steal and attempt to kill us. Rivalries were huge part and the funny thing was that the black hand gang of thieves robbed us of more than 80% of our stuff then actually doubled crossed the party that hired them and almost killed the entire group.

This was the way I was taught to play many years ago. I had pages and pages of henchmen and backup characters just for this purpose even though we were just a small group of players. We could switch between adventures that way while one group was inactive so to speak and then switch later when ready. We also used down time for training, building strongholds, and large scale combat, just as you describe.

Love this video and I kind of expected DnD to be run this way and it wasn't when I first started recently. It was definitely a series of events and deliberate plot points. Not my cup of tea! I hope I can find a more sandboxey group eventually.

Guess 4E got it right after all.

Old school d&d is so interesting I love melding the two

I am fascinated by the idea of this style of tabletop play. I would love to try this someday with a group. Even if timekeeping seems like a bit of a pain, it keeps the players and DM engaged with the game even when they're not actively playing at the table.

Who needs to obsess over complex, optimized character builds and planning dramatic story events that'll inevitably get derailed when you've got the players consistently planning their next adventure and managing their characters' downtime? It's ingenious.

I ran an AD&D campaign in the 70s and 80s and, though I didn't have multiple parties adventuring at once, it was ALWAYS a living world running in real time. I've enjoyed playing 5e (at least, up to level 7 or so, when it becomes a superhero game, and boring), but I miss the open-world sandbox campaigns of that period.

This is why players in my campaign have spent 43 of the past 47.5 years I've been DM'ing/Playing Creating 5 Characters when they enter into My/Our Campaign. They create 1 - 3rd level character, 2-2nd level characters, and 2-1st level characters. The Guidelines for these Characters are as follows: No More Than 2-TWO Characters Of The Same Race Or Class Or Alignment. None Of the Characters May Be Of Evil Alignment. Players must participate regularly in the group for a minimum of 12 months Real Time Before Being Allowed to Play an Evil character. Alignment is Fairly Strict in My/Our Campaign. This is to be sure they are capable role-players and are able to work with the group effectively and properly before an evil alignment may be considered for a new character.

Man I would love to own a game shop, and just basically run a campaign like this, forever. Though DND would not be my first choice, a cross genre setting with GURPS, Hyperborea or a custom ruleset... Multiverse of awesome.

How does it work when a party spends 3 weeks travelling across the map during a session?

Well, since I started playing D&D in the mid 70's, I run exactly the kind of Gygaxian sandbox campaign you describe. And I have run games with as many as 12 players at once. I guess I am one of the Ancient Ones at this point. Lol.

Book collection showcase?

Presenting early D&D as an "open-world mmorpg' is a clear misunderstanding of what a role-playing game really is.

Does OSE have this rule?

This reminds me of an old D&D advert I saw in a 2006 magazine, where the tag line was “Your group of adventurers will never be stopped by a server crash.” featuring a guy in utter disbelief at his computer screen.

Players being responsible for their own time tables, characters and roleplay? No wonder this style died out hard

Honestly, that’s not a bad way to play at all. Saves a lot of time as well and you can have multiple games going on. I think I’ll have to adopt this in the future 😂

Playing a campaign in real time seems interesting, but making players end the session in a safe haven isn't something I'm really fond of; anyways, this makes sense with D&D's rules.

Holy shit. This is so mindblowing to me. Thank you for the video!

I loved the books by Joel Rosenberg "Guardians of the Flame". The beginning of the books had players selecting characters, and using a vote to build a cohesive group. I highly recommend everyone read the series.

Back in the 80s we did it both ways. Time could be paused. Or it continued at speed. If they were forging, it went at 2x speed. And I thought everyone had multiple characters. I’m glad I jumped out of FOMO about rules in 91. But you can find people to play the older rules

Re: the 4-50 players can also be expressed as 4-50 characters, because it was STRONGLY encouraged that each player have multiple characters. While Fred's Fighter heals up (healing took Real World Time) he might play his Cleric.

Re: the Open Table concept, yes this was simply assumed "back in the day", but now-a-days is often explicitly expressed.

Re: The "Living Greyhawk" movement is indeed multiple parties and multiple DM's all in one single shared Greyhawk.

Re: time, yes see first point above.

We always used something of a hybrid of the two time-keeping styles. When everyone is tired and the session needs to stop in the middle of an adventure, even mid-combat, time simply stops. We generally do it that way until we finish the latest delve or journey. We do downtime at that point, and the DM has enough time to pass to suit the needs of the players and the campaign. The Company of Thunder is building a stronghold, then we spend a few months of calendar time taking care of the minutia off-screen, as it were, and once the grunt work is done, we go on another mission for the king.
Multiple groups rarely run in the same world during the same period, and when it happens, they are in different regions, so the time problem isn't too big a deal. The usual outcome of multiple groups is that some people drop out, and the groups are merged into a solid group of regulars. The only time I've been part of this, I ended up with the same group that has gamed together for Almost thirty-five years.
Our main DM has a world that he created back in the earliest days of D&D. Once, while traveling overland, we encountered a nest of giant wasps. Once we were victorious, we found a nice haul of items from the dried husks of previous victims. This was the outcome of a TPK that had happened almost fifteen years prior. This is campaign milieu style D&D at its finest and most rewarding.

So did DMs actually communicate via mail or whatever to sync their game worlds? Like oh, one of your PCs defeated the boss of this keep and decided to usurp him, so now when my players go there, they will face this character instead of the original boss... Or did each DM get their own instance of the game world?

Wait, if time passes out of the game at the same rates as real life, then how does time pass while in a dungeon? What happens if you camp out in a dungeon at the end of a session?

Gary Gygax wanted a MMO Dwarf Fortress, didn't he? 🤣

the First Fantasy campaign of Dave Arneson had TENS of Players... and thier PC survived the death of Arneson...

Man I wish I could play in a game like that.

This is eye opening.

We are playing an open table campaign at my lgs right now. Except, we have a half dozen DMs, prepped adventures, one-session-archs á la West marches, and played events all happen chronologically with play, with the campaign limited to Waterdeep.

I find it somewhat amusing that I've been playing in a similar way as this since I started playing at the turn of the century at school. The world I've been developing all this time and I have been enjoying it. Most of my players don't realize that they are often finding loot and gear from previous parties and players. I've updated some stats and revised spells to fit 5e, so the world is still changing.

Odd that I do remember the time between sessions rule, and we used it in high school in the 1980s. It really created a whole life immersion concept for your character as you did think about what would my character be doing today.

As someone who's onls played 5e, im pretty interested in running an OSR style game, but i keep wondering, when does an OSR game end? In 5e it's usually after a TPK or when the plot comes to an end, the BBEG is killed or whatever. In these location based games it seems that a game just goes forever.

This is exactly how I played some 30 years ago. Our GM had another group that played more often and were more advanced. My group played far less but in the same world. Much of what we encountered was already manipulated by the group but occasionally we found something untouched by the other group. This was fun for us because we were basically able to run his adventures intended for higher level characters with our lower more slowly developing characters being more like scavengers then adventures, which we were fine with. The plan was to get the two groups together some day for an epic adventure but it never happened.