Playing Dungeons & Dragons in October, 1974: "very good game."

Dungeons & Dragons was released in January 1974 in a boxed set containing three booklets sold for $10. This was regarded as too expensive at the time. Nevertheless, in eleven months the first 1000 copies sold out. A few of those original boxed sets will have sat unused by entirely uninterested recipients. Some of them will have been opened by curious would-be players who could not understand what they were looking at or who did not grasp the elusive concept of how to play this new kind of game. Some of them will have disliked it because it wasn't the kind of wargame game they wanted. Some of them will have wanted to test the game, but could not find willing players. (This is the sort of player for whom Gygax wrote rules for solo dungeon exploration in Strategic Review 1.1, Spring 1975.) All these kinds of disappointed new owners will have set their D&D boxes aside unused.

But let's suppose that about half of the D&D rules sets were put to active use by a group of players after being sold. These were the players who got the concept, or who had witnessed a live game and then bought their own copy of the rules. Half of the purchasers would make 500 gamemasters by the end of November, 1974. I think that number is probably too optimistic. But, then again, some gamemasters would also have obtained xerox copies, as we know sometimes happened when players did not want to pay the high cost, and a few gamemasters might have shared their booklets with others. So let's suppose, on balance, for the sake of the thought experiment, that there were about 500 "working gamemasters" by the end of 1974.

Let's suppose furthermore that these ~500 gamemasters (the term Dungeon Master had not yet been coined) ran D&D games either weekly or monthly. A small number of zealous players will have played more than once per week. Realistically, most players with regular jobs would not have played more than once per week. Let's suppose that D&D players averaged two games per month, although fanatical groups played more. Let's suppose furthermore that the average new gamemaster got his D&D set in the middle of that eleven-month period, at the beginning of July, when college students had more leisure time. (Realistically, sales probably increased towards the end of the period, when more people had heard about it.)

That would mean that the average gamemaster had run about just eight sessions by October of 1974. Things were just getting going. People were figuring it out.

If these guesses are anywhere near the truth, then there had been only approximately 4000 D&D sessions by October of 1974. Chances are that this is correct within an order of magnitude. This includes the badly-run sessions, sessions with gamemaster and players alike confused about the rules, searching the rulebooks for answers to questions and not finding them, and sessions where players argued about how things should be. Some of these sessions would turn players away. Some drew them into a new hobby, one they would have to fix for themselves to make it work.

This estimation excludes the first player groups before the game was published. Of course, by January '74, players in Arneson's Blackmoor game in Minneapolis and Gygax's Lake Geneva game set in Greyhawk had been running already for a few years, and they played frequently. The personal social networks of these players in the upper Great Lakes region drew many more players into the new hobby. GenCon was held in southern Wisconsin, broadening exposure to players in the region. This accounts for the later prevalence of D&D in the Midwest. There was simply more person-to-person exposure in that area.

These loose estimates are context for imagining what it was like to play a D&D game in Boston in early October of 1974. That is the date of one of the earliest surviving written reports about D&D. Its author was Mark Swanson, then a university student, who would go on to found The Wild Hunt, an APA (zine collection) dedicated to DMing. The report in question here survives in APA-L #493, a science fiction fan zine collection issued in Los Angeles in 24 October 1974.

Swanson's report was discussed in some detail by Jon Peterson in his excellent volume on the history of the birth of role-playing games, Playing at the World (pp. 487-8). Here I will give the entire text along with some new observations.

Swanson was from Los Angeles but he attended university in Boston. In this part of his "Kyth Interstellar Bulletin" zine for the APA-L of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, he describes for the fan folks back home the experience of this new game. The text was typed on a typewriter informally. I reproduce all the original typos.

He wrote this 10 October 1974.

I been hooked again, this time by a new game. The game is played basicly with paper, pencils, and a reeling mind (together with buckets of dice.) It is DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS (which someone probably introduced the LASFS to last meeting, but I'll risk it. Omelots, anyone?) In the advanced version of the game, the players take the role of various exploring/looting parties trying to return from a gamesmaster desighned castle's dungeon with treasure. The gamesmaster has a map, the players don't. The treasures are guarded by appropriate monsters (gnomes, green slime, orcs, dragons, evil wizards, zombies, giants, etc.) The deeper you go, the nastier the monsters and the bigger the treasures. As you win encounters, you gain experience, which makes you a better fighter, able to go lower. It is played as a campaign game (there are some which are over a year old) with each person performing many quests. If you are killed, you get reincarnated, with a smaller initial stake.

The basic (early) game involves wandering through a wilderness on a quest, looking for experience and treasure. It mostly involves luck and its proper use. In the basic version, the gamesmaster rolls dice to determine what you meet. The basic game also has a shockingly high mortality rate, as might be expected in places where you and your trusty henchmen (40 first life, 35 2nd incarnation, etc) keep encountering such things as evil  high priests, 300 bandits, or four balrogs, mere veterens, which is what you start as, have small chance. On the other hand, in the campaign I'll be continuing Saturaday I'm about to adventure in company with a friend who, deserted by all but 4 men and the persona of an abscent second friend, subdued two dragons, got them to market, and is now filthy rich and a second level cleric. The persona was killed by the dragons. Since he has only four men, he's financing a bunch of others while he recruits.

Your characteristics (Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Endurance, Dexterity and Charisma) are determined by rolling dice on first entrance into the game, after which you choose the profession of a fighter, magician or cleric and begin. However, there are three booklets of rules, and I will not try to repeat them here. Very good game, at least as much for the gamesmaster as for the players. Will find where you can get the rules Saturday and type it at the bottom. Me? Oh, I've got great strength and endurance, but am average elsewhere, so I'm a fighter.

After a few more notes responding to other contributors in previous issues (including Lee Gold; this is probably the first time she heard of D&D), he tacks on an addendum.

DEAD OR MYRMIDION! When I left early this morning (2 AM) I was a Swashbuckler (5th level fighting man), only 1 point short of Myrmidion (31,999 points, to be exact) and my persona was scheduled to go out on one more quest. Either I got a few points and am a Myrmidion, or I'm dead. The rules cost $10 from "Tactical Studies Rules, 542 Sage Street, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin 53147.

This report tells us a great deal about D&D in October 1974.

Swanson expected that his friends back home might have heard about the new game by the time he sent in his contribution. That suggests that he saw it as catching on fast.

His report tells us that new players in Boston were getting hooked and playing all night, until beyond 2 am. The 10th of October 1974 was a Thursday, and this college student not only played until 2 am on a night before classes, but his character remained in use after he left the session (presumably to go to bed). The other players continued playing into the early hours of the day using his character. That's why he predicts that his character is either dead or a myrmidon (a word he misspells). He would only find out later. Also, he'd be playing again in just a few days; he hints that the next game is Saturday.

The titles of character levels were taken seriously. You begin as a mere "veteran," or 1st-level fighter. In a few long sessions, though, it was possible to rise to fourth or fifth level ("swashbuckler" or "myrmidon"). There were few guidelines about the pace of advancement in the rules, leading to the single biggest discrepancy in play-styles in the early reception of D&D. Some gamemasters handed out treasures and magic items freely, leading to rapid increases in character level. Others were stingy, creating very different experiences for players. This debated issue is still alive today, although self-described "old-school" players like to think that slow advancement was the norm in the old days. (It wasn't, but Gygax wanted it to be the norm.)

Swanson imagined a distinction between a "basic" and "advanced" game. Basic, as he explains it, meant wandering in the wilderness and facing randomly generated encounters with no balance of power for encounters. He also calls it the "early" game, which perhaps means adventures en route to the dungeon.

The "advanced game" entailed dungeon adventure, which was less random. What made it "advanced"? Maybe it was the preparation of the dungeon by the gamesmaster. Was it something that the gamesmaster said to him? There were no published dungeons at this time, besides the brief model given in D&D book 3. Whatever the case, the original game did have a concept of balanced encounters built in, which was common to early D&D (and other early games like Tunnels & Trolls): the deeper you went, the tougher the challenges. This meant that players decided how much of a challenge to take on according to how deep they delved. Another debated issue was whether it was fair to put tough challenges on the first level. The consensus seems to be that it wasn't.

(Interestingly, TSR would later distinguish between "basic" and "advanced" in reverse, in the Basic and Expert sets published in 1981. Basic D&D meant the simpler set of choices entailed in a dungeon environment, whereas Expert D&D introduced wilderness adventures. Gygax's idea of "advanced" D&D, which was published from 1977-1979, was rather a more complex but rigid set of uniform rules. This may be where Gygax, who followed A&E at this time, encountered the concept of basic and advanced D&D, even if it did not mean what Swanson thought.)

He indicates that players "win encounters." This was initially conceived as a wargame.

It's clear that Swanson had at least thumbed through the first two of the three original books, because he is able to list some of the monsters that appear in book two, and he has seen the titles and character types in book one.

His mention of "300 bandits" is probably a reference to the text of D&D book two, "Monsters and Treasure," where it specifies that if there are 300 bandits in an encounter, there will also be a magic-user as well as a good chance of an evil cleric. Also, men appear in numbers "30-300."

It is not clear how reincarnation worked in this game, but it seems that the GM allowed a character who was killed quickly to return with a slightly reduced advantage, in this case, fewer hirelings. The sixth-level spell "reincarnation" in book one would have been the source of this idea. Swanson or his GM has mistaken reincarnation at a disadvantage for a rule of the game. It seems here to be a house ruling if not just a GM's humoring of a new player who got killed off fast. Swanson mentions its "shockingly high mortality rate" due to random monster encounters in the wilderness.

Swanson thinks that his friend's second-level cleric was "filthy rich." Probably a few thousand gold pieces sounded like that to a new player, but experienced D&D players know how little value gold has in D&D worlds.

His reference to "some" games that are "over a year old" has to be a reference to lore about the earliest campaigns, such as those of Arneson and Gygax, unless it's just a mistake, because D&D had not been publicly available for that long.

Like the dungeons of Arneson and Gygax, the dungeon that Swanson encountered was situated under a castle. D&D book 3 states that "The so-called Wilderness really consists of unexplored land, cities and castles, not to mention the area immediately surrounding the castle (ruined or otherwise) which
housed the dungeons." This suggests that the rule book was taken seriously on this point. Dungeons were initially defined as being under castles, as in the campaigns run by the creators of the game.

Twice, Swanson writes Endurance instead of Constitution. This may be an early in-house usage of a more obvious term for Constitution.

We don't know where Swanson's gamesmaster learned about the game, but my guess is that he was a fellow student who had come from the Midwest. It's pretty clear in hindsight that colleges and universities were major diffusion points for D&D. College students introduced each other to the game, and when they returned home for summers and holidays, new players shared it with their old friends. This is just what happened with Swanson, who introduced the concept of D&D to LA with this report, priming fandom there for its avid reception a few months later. California was about to become a hotbed of rules innovations.

Epilogue: "changes to make the game more fun"

In the next issue of APA-L, #494, dated 31 October 1974, Mark Tepper responds to Swanson in his own zine "Ankh Ptui!" He writes,

Interesting that you have taken up Dungeon. It has been a major craze in Minneapolis fandom for the past year (nearly); I got to play it quite a bit when I was in town. The fans there base their mazes and such largely on the rule-book you cite, but frequently one will find various additions and changes to make the game more fun.

The Minneapolis game of Dungeon, an immediate spin-off of Arneson's game by players in 1974 who did not have TSR's rules but had seen or heard of D&D and made their own version of the game, was investigated by Jon Peterson here, where he provides the text of this earliest variant game itself along with fascinating commentary.

I note in closing that already within months of D&D's release, players were making changes and additions to the game "frequently" "to make the game more fun," as Tepper said. More than anything else, it is the creative adaptation of the D&D game, not adherence to standard rules, that marks the earliest phase of the hobby.

We know in retrospect that Swanson was getting on board at the beginning of the first big Dungeons & Dragons wave. He probably could not have foreseen in October of '74 that he himself would spend years of effort to make the game more fun by customizing rules, as his subsequent zines demonstrate. He was right to say that he was hooked.