The Challenges of Early D&D

Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition co-creator Monte Cook has penned a great article for The Escapist that covers many of the challenges early D&D adopters faced.

First off, D&D itself was designed not as a game, but as an adjunct to another game, the miniatures rules system called Chainmail. Further, players were told they needed the game board from an Avalon Hill game called Outdoor Survival if they wanted to play wilderness adventures. Yet most were lucky to have the D&D rules at all, let alone these other games. The game’s popularity spread much faster and farther than the actual rulebooks would allow. Many early gamers possessed only photocopies of photocopies of the rules. Others had to share rules with the other players in their game. It’s no wonder that TSR’s printings of the game sold out immediately each time they were completed.

And don’t get me started on the difficulties of finding polyhedral dice. At the risk of sounding like a story involving walking uphill both ways through a blizzard to get to school every day, two game groups might have only one twelve sided die between them that they would have to share. Others didn’t have dice at all, but bowls full of numbered chits…and they had to fight a bear every time they wanted to roll percentile dice. Maybe.