A Different Game

In Celebration of DIY RPG
Without reservation I can state I am an old school role-playing gamer. I believe my age alone qualifies me... I started playing White Box as a freshman college student during the 1977-78 school year. My introduction to the role-playing hobby included a lot of figuring it out on my own (with the assistance of several friends who didn't know much more than I did). Fortunately I had prior experience with wargames which was rather assumed by the authors of The World's First Role-Playing Game. Learning and playing White Box involves a lot of do-it-yourself because by design not everything needed is spelled out in those three little brown books.
White Box refers to Chainmail, which does not come with the game and to Outdoor Survival which is a board game published by Avalon Hill. I had neither. Nor did any of my gaming friends. The combat system from Chainmail is the default way to handle combat in White Box. We made guesses using our wargames experience on what Chainmail's combat system might be? We also made our own substitutions to the rules. We adopted a do-it-yourself approach from the very first game trial and that attitude stuck with us even unto subsequent editions.
We discovered the alternative combat system in White Box that uses a d20... whatever that is? I had access to percentile dice through wargaming with miniature figures, but those consist of two different colored dice (mine were red and white) each marked 0-9 twice rather than 1-20. I used poker chips marked 1-20 in a brown paper bag, I rolled a d20 and a d6 control die (on a 4-6 add 10 to the d20 roll) and finally I colored in the numbers with two different crayons (silver and white) on the red die to give me 1-10: white and 11-20: silver results.
The authors of White Box imply there is a sequence to a combat round - who goes first, when spells are cast, when movement occurs - but they don't spell it out. There is some guidance in Chainmail for these aspects, but again we were guessing what that might be? If the new game wasn't so incredibly appealing, we probably would have given up on it, but we soldiered on, filling in the gaps with our own home-brewed ideas. Our experience wasn't unique as I later learned. Many others in the new hobby were going through a similar learning process as I was to discover later in 1978 when I first attended a Gencon, then held at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside near Kenosha where I was living that summer.
There is a little bit more here than an old gamer's memories, so please indulge me a bit longer. That do-it-yourself approach to the game led each referee, being the person who interprets the game rules just like all referees do (or the judge as they were sometimes called back in the day) to develop their own unique way of playing White Box D&D. The original game books present many guidelines, suggestions really, and also leave a lot up to interpretation. I, and a lot of other folks, grew to really enjoy this game - this style of refereeing - where we are in charge of interpreting and applying the rules as we think they should be. Following the advice of author Gary Gygax, we imagined how we would like the game to be, and made it just so.
This was a singularly creative time for the hobby with lots of referees adding to the White Box game, altering things and applying the design-it-yourself principle. The Advanced Game which grew out of this situation is an attempt to codify and standardize a fantasy role-playing system to facilitate play that could be very similar irregardless of who the referee is. (Many of us who started with The Original Role-Playing Rules, however, play Advanced just like we learned to play White Box, picking and choosing, house-ruling and doing it to suit ourselves.)
As the years, and editions, and altogether new systems have come and gone, a style of play based on rules-as-written evolved. In some ways this design philosophy definitely benefits the hobby. There are many players who like to read rules, design their characters with knowledge of how the game should work, and play using a system that places limits on the freedom of the referee to make rulings by fiat. To me, this style of play differs significantly from that with which I started the hobby. Game written with such expectations are different games to me requiring a different mindset on my part as a player and as a referee. Not better, not worse, just a different kind of role-playing game.
Today I enjoy playing a variety of different games, mostly while sitting around a table among friends who also enjoy those games. I enjoy some role-playing games written with expectations that the rules as written will cover most all things that will happen in-game, and that those rules will be judiciously applied as written. I also enjoy sports games, strategy and wargames, card games and board games of many genres. And I continue to enjoy my beloved do-it-yourself White Box where rulings take precedence over rules.