Thursday, February 9, 2023

Patient Zero

With the publication of the Dungeon Masters Guide in August 1979, Gary Gygax's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons project was essentially complete (though we would nevertheless see the publication of not one but two more hardback AD&D volumes over the next couple of years). Consequently, 1980 was the start of a period in TSR's history when the company shifted its focus to supporting Dungeons & Dragons in both its Basic and Advanced formats. One of the most significant ways it did so was through the publication of numerous adventure modules. Indeed, by dint of the sheer number of them released, adventure modules would effectively become TSR's signature products.

Among the modules published in 1980 was Harold Johnson and Jeff R. Leason's The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Designated module C1 (for "Competition"), the module is highly regarded for both its exotic Mesoamerican-inspired flavor and the cleverness of its many tricks and traps. Johnson and Leason originally wrote the module for use at the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tournament at Origins '79, hence its "competition" designation. For that reason, it includes an extensive scoring system for tournament use, as well as a strict real time limit of 2 hours to complete.

In addition, the module includes the following in its "Notes for the Dungeon Master:"
It will be noticed that encounter descriptions are divided into boxed and open sections. The boxed sections contain information which should be read to the players; the rest is information for the DM. In most cases, the same players' description is used no matter which direction the party enters from, but 2 cases require that special descriptions be read depending on the direction from which the party approaches the encounter area. The DM should be aware of this and be careful to read the proper players' description.

The players' descriptions are provided because many of the encounters require specific actions on the part of the group. Hints of what may be done are given in this text and the DM should only provide vague information if questioned. Plauers will be to see the exact contents of a room unless noted.

Unless I am mistaken – and please correct me if I am – this is the very first published appearance of the dreaded boxed text in any TSR module. 

Within the very specific context of a module written for tournament use, particularly one with a strict real time limit, the inclusion of boxed, descriptive text makes a great deal of sense. After all, it would be unfair to the players participating in the tournament if some referees were more loquacious than others in their descriptions, time being a valuable resource. Fairness would likewise demand that each group of players be given the exact same descriptions of the dungeon's rooms. Once again, I say this makes perfect sense within this very specific context.

The trouble, I think, arises when TSR, in an effort to publish a large number of modules over a short period of time, turned ever more often to those originally created for tournaments. In this way, the style and presentation of tournament modules, including read-aloud boxed text, came to be seen not as unique features of tournament modules as such but simply as features of D&D modules in general. This is especially notable in modules published for the Basic and Expert versions of D&D, but, over time, it comes to be standard even in AD&D modules.

The lasting impact of the D&D tournament scene cannot be overstated.

19 comments:

  1. past three blog posts have really resonated, having adapted these modules to first the 2nd ed dnd and then to Harn ruleset. thank u

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  2. I developed my thoughts (and disdain) about tournament style dungeon in these blog posts of mine. I am not a fan of the format and I am very critical of how it can't be scaled reasonably to cover sprawling locales.

    Reflections on the First Fantasy Campaign
    https://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/05/reflections-on-first-fantasy-campaign.html
    Minimal Dungeons
    https://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2010/08/minimal-dungeons.html

    Minimal Dungeon Redux
    https://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2018/03/minimal-dungeons-redux.html



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  3. Coincidentally, we were discussing boxed text origins on Facebook and Knights & Knaves Alehouse. Here's the info I dug up:

    ==
    I just checked the 1979 tourney versions of C1 and C2. C1 has indented and quoted text intended to be read aloud. So, although the text wasn't boxed, it was basically boxed text. C2 has text in ALL CAPS for the same effect (again, not boxed).

    So, those are the earliest two I could find at my fingertips. Neither the 1975 Tomb of Horrors nor the 1976 Tsojconth tourneys include read-aloud text.
    ==

    K&KA thread for the curious: https://www.knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14724.

    Allan.

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  4. As far as I can tell, the first inklings of boxed text appear in The Tower of Ullison, originally used as a Tournament for Winter War IV in Jan '77 - which is extremely early. It contains player handouts with a map for each room and a description for the players (for them to read, not for the DM to read to them). This appears to be an attempt to make the tournament fairer by making the experience more similar for different groups. There were a lot of attempts at the time to make tournaments fair - for example dungeons with a choice of routes, but with both routes having very similar challenges (and linear dungeons being the easiest way of achieving fairness). Quest for the Fazzlewood appears to be the first with quoted text to be read out to players, which was December '78 (Wintercon VII) so predates Lost Tamoachan by seven months. This was republished by TSR as the second half of O1 The Gem and the Staff.

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    1. I'm not at all surprised there's an adventure antecedent to Tamoachan with boxed text. However, are there any published examples of it prior to module C1?

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    2. Quest for the Fazzlewood was published at the tournament it was played at, in December '78 which is before the original version of C1 was published. Tower of Ullison wasn't published until December '79, but the tournament adventures in the seventies (the early ones at least) all clearly influenced one another regardless of when they were actually published, presumably because tournament writers also played in tournaments and the scene was quite small. The most obvious case of this is Tomb of Horrors which had a massive influence on other scenarios despite not being published until much later.

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    3. Interesting. Shrine was the first time I recall seeing text boxes, but I studiously ignored whatever "tournament scene" existed back then so missed Tower and Quest completely.

      My dislike for both text box script and tournaments of all kinds has only increased over the years. Having to run Magic and Warhammer tourneys for work throughout the 90s really ingrained a hatred of the format and the people who play it in me.

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  5. Wansn't Tower of Ullison published by Judges Guild? Not sure when.

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  6. Two major reasons for many early modules being tournament modules.

    First, they had a large number of tournament modules handy to publish. TSR published theirs, Judges Guild published others, and others self published the modules they wrote for their own use at conventions.

    Second, the tournament scene was absolutely vital to the convention scene at that time, as an outgrowth of miniatures tournaments. Lots of players making the jump from minis to D&D also made the jump to D&D tournaments.

    And part of the very reason for the existence of AD&D was to enable TSR to run national tournament circuits by standardizing the system that had become so divergent through differing rulings in local groups that it was very difficult to port a character from group to group let alone from a local group to a regional convention tournaments.

    And TSR planned to make big bank on the RPGA and tournament scene.

    So the existing tournament modules fed into the official game modules to standardize player and DM expectations of what they would find at a tournament also standardized the very concept of the D&D/AD&D module.

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    1. I guess I should be thankful our local community never really adopted tourney gaming of any kind (RP or miniatures) until Magic came along. I'm quite sure I wouldn't be a gamer at this point if my early years in the hobby had be saddled with tourney play and the type of behavior it encourages in people.

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    2. Interesting. Dick. Of what behaviors? Such as metagaming, rules lawyers, min/maxing systems? Is this what you write of? we ignored these tournament sections too. of course we were between 8-12 years old when we read these modules. If i remember rightly, were there not correspondences about these tournaments in Dragon magazines? Id imagine that magic card games and minis would attract similar competitive personalities Dick?

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    3. please allow me to add; it is quite remarkable to see so many industry 'insiders' from the early days of this hobby posting commentary. i just love it!

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    4. Fransico: IME tourneys bring out the worst in people, regardless of what type of game. Outright cheating, intimidation, appalling sportsmanship, stealing from the other players - and in RPGs, rules lawyering pettifoggery, metagaming, and shameless spotlight-hogging to boot. And it only gets worse when there are prizes or money on the line. I had one Magic player attempt to frame another for theft between rounds, and he might have gotten away with it if another player hadn't seen his sleight of hand.

      Not everyone succumbs, and you can sometimes have a perfectly pleasant tourney where nothing goes awry - but I've seen all of the stuff I've mentioned during tourney play, sometimes multiple times, where I can count on one hand I've seen any of it during "casual" play.

      The fact that some tourney players adopt a sneeringly superior attitude toward everyone outside their community doesn't help, either.

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    5. this checks! having seen how people can get hyper competitive. thank you Dick for sharing your experiences inre to these things

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    6. Dick: THIS. All this!

      I was a huge fan of MageKnight and HeroClix when they first came out. Hell, I was their biggest supporter when I worked at Scrye and then went to work at WizKids. I ADORED those games.

      Then the Tournament Scene took over and ruined it. You couldn't even play a casual game in a store without some tournament schmuck coming in and ruining it somehow. I should have known that would happen, as it happened with Magic and ruined Magic for me, too.

      I was lucky with AD&D. I was still too young to go to many conventions, and when I did, I did not get involved in the tournaments. I was too interested in trying many different games with different game masters rather than getting tied down to a two to four day tournament.

      But I did have the misfortune of having to deal with an AD&D tournament-style player years later. He had played in and won a bunch of tournaments ages ago, and as he cut his teeth on that style, he never changed. Ended up destroying every game he joined in the local gaming circles. Took over the party, ran it like he was the boss, ran it like a squad, and told players what their characters were going to do. Very sad. Nobody wanted to play anymore if he had to get involved, so all the local store open games either left the shop, went to closed players, or shut down entirely, which killed new player acquisition at that shop.

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  7. As an 11-year old kid first coming into the gaming scene in 1983, I found the boxed text to be an invaluable resource as to how "all of this stuff was supposed to work." Even if you never use a word of it, boxed text can be a pretty good time-saving aid to running a module. I have played in some "Homebrew Only" games that were utter crap, and some more or less by the book pre-published module run games that were awesome. I guess mileage may vary.

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  8. Published in 1980... hmm, that kinda fits the timeline. I don't recall whether I'd gotten into the Choose Your Own Adventure books or D&D first that particular year, but there was a close enough overlap in massive popularity where my gaming group were regularly swapping CYOA paperbacks after that day's dungeon crawl.

    TSR must've surely known about the books by then, and so I have to wonder if the inclusion of module text boxes wasn't their way to lure in CYOA readers (or even a form of 'competition')?

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  9. Tournament or not, putting words in the mouths of PC's (here, Rhialte the barbarian) is a boxed-text sin way beyond the usual telling them how they feel.

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    1. right! yes Roger then you simply become an actor within a script no?

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