Theatre of the Mind

Theatre of the Mind

The reason for not using gridded combat and miniatures was that the game was one of imagination. All the technical stuff like rules, gridded movement and so on kicked you right out of that imagination, and out of the flow of action.

No miniatures or grid

Gary never used maps or minis: maps and minis were Dave Arneson’s thing. Gary ran games in his office, which was provided with chairs, a couch, and file cabinets. While playing, Gary would open the drawers of the file cabinet and sit behind them so that the players COULD NOT SEE HIM. They only experienced the Dungeon Master as a disembodied voice. [29]

No, as far as I am concerned miniature figurines are more of an impediment to the imagination required for RPGing than they are a help...save in combat situations. However, as RPGs are not meant to be accurate/realistic combat simulation exercises, the use of miniatures tends to cause an erroneous focus to the play. [11]

We left tabletop miniatures battles behind in favor of the RPG. When mass-combat took place the DMs I played with, as well as me personally, abstracted the battles to contests between the principal figures, did quick attrition of the ordinary forces, and then used morale to determine when one side or the other broke. The reason for that is that the players did not want to wargame thay wanted to engage in RPGing.  [11]

I don't usually employ miniatures in my RPG play. We ceased that when we moved from CHAINMAIL Fantasy to D&D. I have nothing against the use of miniatures, but they are generally impractical for long and free-wheeling campaign play where the scene and opponents can vary wildly in the course of but an hour. #1721

When we began playing D&D all the time nobody cared much about using figurines, we seldom if ever did then, although there was a considerable demand for a D&D line, so eventually Grenadier was granted the license to produce the official line for them, [11]

I am lucky to get a half-hour's prep time, so I use scratch paper and dice on the table top to indicate the position of figures. When all is said and done, the RPG is an exercise of imagination, and no embellishments need be added...although illustrations are most helpful to the GM. [35]

No screen, props, music

I seldom use a screen, but I don't leave notes in view of the players--the map sometimes, but not other written material. #2055

I usually don't use any other props, but once in a while I will slip something in if I think it will liven things up. The exploding scroll tube is a good example of what I mean. #2864

I never use music as it is already quite difficult to manage to speak and retain the players' attention. #8068

Immersion

What I attempt is to have the party behave as would real persons in a confused situation. [11]

Persistence of deeds

After reading a lot about the campaign world and style of the Great Greyhawk and Blackmoor campaigns, I've come to realize that persistence was one of the major implicit ideas that made the game world real: the idea that what happened in play with any group, changed the world for all groups.

The castle, with several groups playing in it [7] was a living thing. If one group slew monsters, plundered treasure or destroyed a wall, the monsters would be dead, the treasure gone, the wall demolished for the others. If you wasted time, some other party might take advantage of you and get to the treasure first. This experience must have made it feel much more a real place to the players, than a typical "adventure" that just provides a story around the characters. You would run into houses or keeps other players had built, could meet them sometimes even as NPCs. 

Hundreds of different players with yet more PCs adventured in city and castle, blasted buildings, created constructions, wiped out walls, closed passages, created new ones, trashed monsters, brought in others, and who can say what else! [15]

James Ward: I didn't find out until years later that Terry Kuntz set up a flunky hiring building in Greyhawk. Characters were constantly looking for flunkies to help in the battles. I hired one of those myself in a dwarf and raised him up to sixth level. Later I found out Terry's characters were hired by others and went back and told Terry about places in the dungeon that were worth raiding. [30.3]

The dungeon, city and rules were constantly changing and expanding. The OD&D rules are chock full of advise how to modify the dungeon [1] to keep things interesting. Gary (and later Rob) generally did not "reset" the dungeon by restocking the monsters and treasures for the next group -- what was gone was gone, but they modified the dungeon constantly by adding new levels, rooms, or changing existing ones or bringing in new monsters in longer-deserted regions.

When the setting was in constant use, we never restocked, just drafted new side and deeper levels, as it was assumed that the depredations of the cruel PC parties kept the monsters away in fear and loathing  [6 #3827]

When the encounter was eliminated I simply drew a line through it, and the place was empty for the foreseeable future. [2]

In later days, Gary ran his first level of the original dungeon at conventions, and his kobolds caused numerous total party kills against players only used to balanced encounters. The kobolds, in a self-reinforcing loop, got stronger from this each time, and even deadlier for the next group. Here is a detail evolution in a post from Gary [17]:

I have run OD&D games every year at several cons for the last five or so years. I start them at 2nd level and use the old dungeon levels. So far about eight parties have been taken out by some kobolds on the 1st level. New RPGers seem to have not learned to run away when in doubt. 
The first to fall used a sleep spell to get eight of the kobolds, but the six remaining ones used javelins to kill two PCs, then closed and in hand-to-hand killed all but two or the remainder of the party. One was about to kill another PC, while a second charged the m-u of the group, who turned to flee, finally. Too late, a javelin got him. Each group that died thus added to the kobolds:

1st TPK brought 12 more kobolds
2nd TPK gave them armor class of 6
3rd (near) TPK gave them all +1 HP
4th TPK added +1 damage
5th TPK added 4 2nd level and 2 3rd level kobolds
6th TPK gave them tactical manouvering and a 4th level leader
7th TPK upped AC to 5
8th TPK gave them unshakable morale

At JanCon this year the Old Guard Kobolds joined battle with a group of 8 PCs and wiped them out. I haven't decided how that will add to their combat ability, but I am considering a kobold shaman with at least two 1st level spells.

Even though in his home campaign, his group of 5th level characters then finally killed the buggers, he argued that this had been an alternate version of the castle, and bringing in the best from history, the Old Guard Kobolds with all the above advantages and with the shaman added show up in the first level of the published Castle Zagyg [7]. Essentially the idea here is the same -- even over years of play: what happened happened, and will be part of the world.

Another example is that the home game group, real-world decades later, found the hidden level where Erac had perished, and revived him. 

In the words of the author of  blog of holding: I’m still not sure what player skill is in OD&D, and I still think it has something to do with battle tactics, trapfinding procedures, and gaming the DM. But I’m also starting to think it has something to do with respecting the gameworld as a world.

Variety for Campaign Longevity

Variety in challenges and activities

Gygax believed the key to an enjoyable game was variety in activities: 

• fights and action ("roll-play"), 
• talk and interaction ("role-play"), and 
• problem solving and exploration 

Fixation on a single aspect of the RPG form makes for tedious play to my thinking. All combat, all exploration, all yakking, all problem solving, all any single thing is downright dull. Balanced play is about half of the favored aspect, with the others having lesser time in the adventure session--sometimes hardly any, although they should then dominate a near-future session. #6459

Forget the business about role-playing. It is as boring as rule-playing and roll-playing are when made the focus of the game. Notice that I stress game, as that's what is the main operative word in the description of the activity. The majority of persons engaged in RPG activity love to go on dungeon crawls, so the ToH was designed to challenge the best of that lot. #2359

As false to the game form as the pre-scripted "story," is play that has little more in it than seek and destroy missions, vacuous effort where the participants fight and kill some monster so as to gain more power and thus be able to look for yet more potent opponents in a spiral that leads nowhere save eventual boredom. So pure hack and slash play is anathema to me too. [36]

What he thought to be a detraction of the fun was

• focus on and arguing over rules ("rule-play")

Over some decades of gaming, the creation of some number of RPG systems, I have come to the point where I prefer a rules-light system [...]. I do not like to rule-play, and as a GM I find long lists of stats and the like tedious. Such things tend to get in the way for my style of play, including as a PC. While I do enjoy plenty of roll-playing (after all I am a military miniatures player too), centering the game on combat seems fatuotous to me. I want a game that facilitates all of the elements of the RPG. #535

Most people enjoy roll-playing and role-playing, but rule-playing is a complete bore #8523

He felt that discussing rules was never enjoyable, and a focus on rules only limited the imagination. It is focused on artificial simplifications that never can do a situation believable justice. It also is less likely to be objectively resolved in a stress sitution for the characters. In my opinion, the best way to resolve these issues is to have the DM make a call, accept it, take a note of it, and research it after the game to agree how to handle it going forward if it comes up again. 

Variety in Adventure Type

There also was variety in the environments -- mixing up dungeon delving with wilderness exploration, with city adventure and intrigue.

Mix up the adventure settings so that play is not always in the same dort of place. A town adventure leads to a wilderness trek, that brings the party to a subterranian setting for example. From there they might have a waterborne or aerial mission.  #6966

Variety in Genre 

Beyond even the kind of adventures, when people got bored with the medieval fantasy he leavened it with adventuring in other genres -- from Science Fiction or Planetary Romance on Barsoom or Vance's Planet of Adventure, to settings inspired by movies like King-Kong, or books like Alice in Wonderland, even to adventures in contemporary New York City. In this, the backdrop stayed the medieval fantasy campaign, but he had about one session in ten with such other environments, to keep it fun. 

Spot in in regards to having PCs adventure in different environments. I believe that keeps them, and the GM alike from growing complacent, or bored. Ernie's PC read a curse scroll and got sent to Barsoon--ERB's Mars, of course.  #1842

Actually, the scope need not be restricted to the medieval; it can stretch from the prehistoric to the imagined future, but such expansion is recommended only at such time as the possibilities in the

medieval aspect have been thoroughly explored. [1, Introduction].

These days, rather than breaking the versisimilitude of the world by doing this, I'd rather just play some other system for variety. In our student days, we alternated D&D with Call of Cthulhu, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And even back then there were Traveller, Boot Hill and so on.