Self-taught

JB put up an excellent post recently asking the question: why aren't there any good guides for beginning DMs? It's a lot easier to be a novice player and get into RPGs. Alexis at Tao of D&D has taken the challenge and has made some excellent posts about the poor writing in the old TSR books, and how their need to market the game, as well as inexperience as writers, gets in the way of actually teaching. He has an ongoing series of posts, three and counting at the moment (start here). Check them out.

While I could give it my own try (I will eventually when I start releasing TS&R books), here I'm just going to reminisce a bit about my own experiences, as best I remember them, of trying to figure out the game from the books. 

I got the Mentzer Basic set for my 11th birthday, back in 1984. I'd seen the D&D cartoon, had a few Endless Quest books (plus Choose Your Own Adventure and similar 2nd person fiction game-books), and was into fantasy and mythology. I was a pretty avid reader. As the son of a librarian, I spent a lot of time at the local library as a kid. So I wasn't a complete newbie to some of the concepts around D&D. And of course I'd done plenty of make-believe play. But I was completely new to the rules and procedures of RPG play. I hadn't done any war gaming. I hadn't played any really complex board games. Video game options were limited to my friends' Atari 2600s and Colecos. I'd had one acquaintance who had the BX books sort of explain a bit about it, but he was a bit of a condescending jerk and thought I was too immature to get it (as a 10 year old when he was 12). 

Anyway, that birthday gift changed my life. 

I remember reading the Mentzer set's player introduction. There's the little tutorial where you meet Aleena the Cleric and Bargle. It gives you a bit of railroady interactive fiction and makes you roll some dice here and there. Explains some terms as they come up. 

Then there's the "choose your own adventure" tutorial. Numbered paragraphs or sections of text with CYOA type choices of section to go to lead you through a solo game. It's possible to fail. Since it's just you and the book, it's VERY easy to cheat. But again, it helps guide you through some of the game mechanics and introduces not just game terms and systems (in a watered down fashion), but also the sorts of situations you could expect as a player. 

And it worked pretty well. I got it. I think I cheated on the CYOA adventure the first time I did it, but I played it a few more times until I was able to beat it fair and square. 

So for a potential player, so far so good!

Now, after reading through the rest of the players' book, I had some better idea of the game. But I still hadn't played it, and some things didn't make sense yet. 

I moved on to the DM's book. At the beginning, there's another CYOA adventure, except this time you're supposed to lead the players through the castle dungeon as their DM. It holds your hand, and explains some of the concepts and helps get your feet wet. Again, I read through it, and the rest of the book. Not everything made sense. But I got the gyst of it. 

I ran the Castle Mistamere dungeon for my two best friends that Christmas break (2 weeks after I'd gotten the books -- I'm a December baby). I explained the basics. We rolled up characters. Todd was a fighter and Ben was an elf. We played. They should have been eaten by the first encounter, a carrion crawler. Both were paralyzed, but I misunderstood turns and rounds, so Ben's elf was only paralyzed for 3 rounds, and managed to finish off the crawler which Todd's fighter had wounded before he was also paralyzed. They loved it. 

They took on the kobolds at the ruined gate next, and as suggested, the sleep spell did the trick. I think they explored a bit more, getting to the magic beds and being stumped by the cursed one. I was inexperienced, and to be honest the tutorial didn't make it clear that I should give hints that the other bed will cure a cursed sleeping PC. 

So it wasn't perfect. But it was great fun! We kept playing. Todd and Ben both soon had their own Basic Sets. In fact, Ben also later started collecting the AD&D books (Todd and I stuck to BECMI). We ran a sort of shared campaign among the three of us...although I was most often the DM. It went on until sometime when I was in college. I ran a few games while back on break, but me going to college in a city a 6 hour drive away pretty much ended the campaign. 

So I managed to figure it out on my own (and then with help from my friends). But I didn't know many other people who played. One of my other cousins played, but other than one summer when I spent a month at my aunt & uncle's house, we didn't play together much. I don't remember if he was also self-taught, or if he'd been inducted by other more experienced gamers. I only learned recently that another cousin-once-removed (grandson of my mom's & the above uncle's second oldest brother) played. He was the age of my younger sister, but if I'd known he played I would have invited him to our games! 

My school was pretty small. I think there was only one other person I knew at our school who owned D&D besides myself and Todd, a guy named Greg. He was a few years older than us. This guy's younger brother Brian played with us a few times since Todd and Brian were good friends. But Brian never really got into it, and I never approached Greg about playing together. I had tried to get a few other classmates and friends to play. My brother played often and younger sister played sometimes. Ben's brothers (one older, two younger) also played from time to time. A few other kids would give it a try, but none stuck around. 

I hate to speculate too much about other kids. Most were just not into geeky stuff. There was a stigma. There was the Satanic Panic (which also slowed but couldn't stoop my getting into hard rock/metal music). But I'm the only person I know of from those days who I can 100% say was self-taught by the books. Maybe Greg was, too? I'm not even sure how often he played or who he played with. They were kids 3-4 years older than me, so not really in my circle. Maybe Charlie and Adam (my cousins), maybe not. I can ask Adam, but Charlie was killed in a car accident years ago. Maybe I could as his sibling Kay-Cee, but I don't know if they would remember. Kay-Cee was familiar with D&D when Charlie and I were playing it that one summer, but I don't remember if they joined in our games or not.

The old TSR books were definitely written in such a way that the game could be figured out on your own, if you stuck with it. But we did have a lot of misconceptions that took time to overcome which might not have happened if we'd been tutored by more experienced gamers. 

And even though I was in a pretty rural area, considering the popularity of the game and supposed huge volume of sales for the various Basic sets, I suspect there were other kids in my area who had the game but were never able to figure it out.