The Gilded Griffon stands at the village’s edge, deep in the unexplored frontier, its weathered stone walls are bathed in torchlight, the sign of a majestic griffon hanging above the door. Inside, the scent of roasting meat and exotic spices fills the air, while shadows dance across scarred oak tables. A grand hearth crackles, its mantle adorned with ancient weapons and relics of past adventures. Patrons from distant lands murmur in hushed tones, and a minstrel’s haunting melody drifts through the room. Behind the bar, a silver-haired barkeep watches with a knowing eye, recognizing you with a nod as adventurers looking for work.

DM: What do you want to do?

This is the moment, this is how D&D kind of started for me. Not this exact start, but it’s how I imagined it. I was 10 years old, it was 1985, I was for the first time invited to a D&D game, I had my 1st level fighter (Darius) character sheet in front of me and all I knew about the game I was about to play was that my job was to pretend I was this fighter in a fantasy world in which terrible monsters existed.

It was a magical moment, one that would define how I would spend my free time over the next 4 decades. It made me a prolific reader, it drove a lifelong passion for creativity, and resulted in the most memorable friendships of my life.

As far as the game went there was an important discovery that I would not make until nearly 40 years later about how and why this moment was not only unique but why I would spend the next 40 years trying to re-create it every time I sat at a gaming table.

See the magic of this moment is not about nostalgia, it’s not really about old-school gaming, or the OSR, or something about the “edition of the game” or game mechanics specifically either. There were many theories I and others would come up with that would try to explain this moment and why D&D back then was different than today and what has changed and why but they would all turn out to be dead wrong.

The magic of this moment it turns out was simply that, I didn’t know what was about to happen and I was not following any script filled with assumptions. There was nothing that happened before the game other the mechanical work of producing an abstract character which we knew nothing about except a race and class and maybe a name. Meaning, I had virtually no information about the game I was about to play. All I knew was that I was a “Fighter” and that meant I knew how to use weapons and armor, a generalization at best. I knew that the goal of the game was to explore the game world (somehow) and we were told by the DM that “you can do whatever you want, go wherever you want”.

The question was “Why”? Why would I go anywhere? I was instructed that as a 1st level fighter, I was not very good at fighting yet, that I would need more experience (which notably I was unsure how to get), and that the world outside of the tavern was dangerous and you could die easily.

Here was the thing, It was scary and though I just made this character, I was already quite attached to Darius. The act of writing down his name on a funny looking, but intriguing page called a character sheet had built him up in my head, he wasn’t just a “character”, he was a person I cared about and I didn’t want him to die, I didn’t want to do anything “stupid” that would put him at risk. The DM was well known for cruelly tearing up character sheets of dead characters right there at the table, we had all heard this rumor, so I knew and believed in the danger of the game.

But the DM of course did not make my life easy. He said, “You are hungry and thirsty and tired as you have traveled many weeks to get here and are low on supplies”. The DM told me that you can die of thirst and hunger and you can even die from exhaustion. So we did the natural and perhaps predictable thing, (we being a couple of my friends in similar situations with similar characters in our adventuring party) we walked into the tavern, ordered food and drink, and asked for rooms so that we could rest. It seemed logical and it was our idea, our plan, we made the decision to do that, our first act as role-players. It felt powerful, even though it was very simple.

The DM then, in the voice of the tavern keeper told us that this would cost 2 silver for the food and drink and 3 silver for a night in a room. And in that moment, that split second of pretending to exist as characters in a fantasy world, we all realized what this game was really about. We were about to spend the rest of the money we had collectively together just to eat and sleep for a day. If we didn’t get more money soon, we would probably die of thirst and hunger, it was the harsh reality of the game.

We….. needed money!

And so a purpose was born, we were adventurers, fighters, clerics, and thieves and we needed money because we were just about out of it and we had no jobs and no way to make more and so the game truly began. We were promptly approached by an old thief who had a treasure map of a ruin nearby and offered us 100 gold, not to explore it, but just to find the entrance hidden somewhere in the nearby forest. You can’t imagine what an exciting moment that was. We had a mission..ney, a quest and it felt real, it felt important. We were role-playing and it didn’t take much to get us there.

There was no session zero, no elaborate rules or explanations, no backstory writing, and no “defining” anything about what was about to happen. We relied on our natural and very basic instincts and imagination to create a game of make-believe that we would make every bit as real to us as the world we lived in. We were playing Dungeons and Dragons, a magical fantasy world of pretend, not rules.

This was Dungeons and Dragons to me from 1985 well into 1995. That little gaming group was together for over 10 years and though my fighter from that first session would quickly perish in a terrible incident with a Gelatinous Cube as did many characters that followed, I will never forget him, his adventures, or any of the characters I played in Dungeons and Dragons during these years. Oddly, I never wrote a single word about them down, yet I remember each with crystal clear clarity. I remember their deeds, their adventures, how they grew into power and often how their story ended tragically in some dungeon as we (the avatar and I) pursued our ambitions in the game.

This is Fantasy Adventure, this is what D&D was and I have to be honest and this will make me sound like an old Gronard, but it was so much better, so much more fun and narrative than anything that happens at a gaming table in the modern day. A fact that would plague my group for the many years that followed.

Is it possible to learn this power?

In 1995 my group had been together for 10 years, we had played through 1st and 2nd edition AD&D and while we loved our games, like all gamers do we started noticing that there were “other games” and everyone wanted to try their hand at some new stuff. After all, we loved D&D and we loved role-playing so, doing it with other settings and rule systems sounded awesome. It sounded amazing to be a Jedi in the Star Wars universe, or a Highlander or a Star Trek Captain. The opportunities of other games were very attractive to us and we began exploring them.

For about 5 years we went through what I would call a sort of “role-playing ring around the rosy”. We played everything that wasn’t D&D you could think of. All the world of darkness stuff, various science-fiction games and every system under the sun from GURPS to Warhammer Fantasy. You would be hard-pressed to name a game my group and I didn’t try, we did it all, and nothing was off the table.

It was fun, and I really want to nail this point home here that no one was disappointed, we really enjoyed these games, but….. We all realized by around 1998 that we didn’t get together as often, campaigns didn’t last as long, people got bored and often games died when people didn’t show up to sessions, and really, the entire “magic” of D&D that kept our crew fully dedicated for 10 years prior was missing from all of these games. These games were all a bit empty, absent of the magic and wonder that we found in D&D. By 2000 we barely even played RPG’s anymore.

Then 3rd edition D&D came out and we of course got excited again. We all got back together with fresh new books in hand, everyone read every rule, cover to cover and we were ready to play, invigorated by the hopeful return to those amazing and magical D&D games which at this point were distant, nostalgic memories. There was a promise of a new golden age, a return to the wonderful world of Dungeons and Dragons that we all missed, that in our eyes was “true role-playing”, the only game that ever really gave us that intangible gaming experience.

By 2002, role-playing in our group was all but over. 3rd edition D&D, even though it was Dungeons and Dragons and felt very familiar just had no magic in it, that much was clear. There was no excitement, no mystery, and no mystical spirit in the game. The rules were convoluted and far too explicit and we argued about their abstracted representation of the game worlds living in our head constantly. These rules killed the imagination because they sought to place it with game mechanics.

In many ways, the rules of the game became the only point of any conversation about D&D between us, we no longer wondered about what D&D was, or what mysteries were hidden within its intangible imaginary words. We spent an ungodly amount of time instead trying to fix the rules as we fought among ourselves and the world (internet) over them. To put it plainly, it just wasn’t fun anymore, the year was 2002 and Dungeons and Dragons was over, it was dead and 3rd edition would create 2 decades of terrible game design that would slowly drown out any life D&D had in it. I know that is cruel to say and one might even challenge its accuracy given the popularity of 5th edition, but, modern D&D is popular in the same way McDonalds is popular. It’s a processed and manufactured game for the masses, reduced to the most basic, lowest common denominator. When I tell people about the intangible magic of D&D, they call be a Gronard, a relic that doesn’t know what he is talking about. For a time, I almost believed it.

Our group was pretty much fully disbanded by 2003 and I would not play D&D or anything else with any of those guys until nearly 2 decades later. I did continue playing with other groups myself though. As much as I enjoyed the many people I shared RPG experiences with over the years the games were simply never as good as those original AD&D experiences of the mid 80’s and 90′.

In fact, most of the time I was quite bored and have continued to be quite bored with most role-playing games since, it’s really a rare game that even marginally excites me these days even though I’m constantly chasing that dragon. I still like playing them, I still enjoy the pursuit, but more in a conceptual and philosophical way rather than actually playing. When I play, most of the time, I’m just disappointed that these games are just not as good, not as much fun and lack that intangible spirit of the classic D&D that we played for over a decade in the 80’s and 90’s.

So what really happened? What is the problem with other games? Why is there no magic, no spark, no heart in any of these other RPG including the latest and greatest versions of D&D from Wizards of the Coast? Why did Dungeons and Dragons die around the 00’s? Did it die or did I change?

Not from a Jedi..

I have contemplated this for years, I have researched, I have reflected, I have tested a wide range of theories to try to understand what was so special, what it was that was so unique and/or different that altered the experience and made it so much better in those 80’s and 90’s D&D games that I find missing in modern RPG’s and the modern RPG experience?

For a time I wrote it off as nostalgia and my age. I was between 10 and 20 years of age when I played AD&D, I’m nearly 50 now, it was during a much simpler time in my life and I just presumed that back then I just had more imagination, more energy, and more appreciation that today I lack. The game didn’t change, I changed.

It seemed like a fair and reasonable assessment, one I could accept, but…. then something magical happened. Almost like a fairy tale, as if some genie appeared out of thin air and granted me the wisdom I needed to understand and to find perspective and of course a little help from a little show, maybe you heard of it “Stranger Things”.

A friend of mine called me up, an old friend from my old gaming group and said “Hey, the old crew wants to get back together and play some D&D, we want to do an AD&D 1st edition one-shot”.

I thought to myself, holy shit yes.

I have the high ground..

In the first 30 seconds of our first session, I was back in 1985 as a 10-year-old playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. It required nothing more than the DM using the old formula, the most basic introduction and the simplest core element of D&D to bring it all back.

There was nothing to it, we made characters, essentially randomly generating them as one would in AD&D. Made some basic choices about equipment and who would play what roles, we gave our characters names and we were dropped into the game world with a very basic plot hook to “investigate the evil temple”. It all fell perfectly into place like dominos.

That moment I realized that this game had more story, those characters had more meaning and this game had more role-playing magic than everything I have done at the table for the last 20 years combined. I recall writing entire books of lore, of story, players writing 20-page backgrounds in preparation for a game, doing session 0’s, and endlessly preparing mass plots for my players and none of it compared to the simplicity of the game we were about to play. By comparison, those experiences were lifeless husks, meaningless, about the equivalent of doing your taxes for fun.

So, what was the secret? How did I go from RPG’s feeling dead inside to being back in 1985 as a 10-year-old playing and feeling Dungeons and Dragons again? What did this magical DM do to bring it all back?

Actually, it was pretty simple. It turns out, that it’s not nostalgia, it’s not age or some sort of expertise of the DM, there is no secret knowledge or method. It wasn’t even the system or an edition of the game really, though I do hold that 1st edition AD&D allows classic Fantasy Adventure to happen a lot easier. In the end it was just the simplicity of the role-playing philosophy the system brought to the forefront, plain and simple. It didn’t need to be AD&D and you didn’t need weird old-school rules, what you needed was a system that just got out of your way. That cleared the path for the imagination and allowed you to experience the world in your mind without a lot of input and rules to govern your thoughts and instruct you about what you can and cannot do.

In our game we didn’t have skills and feats and countless “buttons” to press. We had to make decisions, use our imagination, and form plans and our actions weren’t mechanical executions, they were narrative ones. This is what Fantasy Adventure was and in a sense, I feel always should be. I was filled with regret because I realized in that moment that we could have been doing this all along for the last 20 years. There was nothing keeping us from playing this way, but we got distracted and wasted 20 years of gaming out of stubbornness.

For years I had been playing every system under the sun, every game, under every DM, every format, every style, using every method you could imagine. Oddly enough, it never occurred to me to pick a system that just did a lot less, I always thought the more robust the mechanics and infrastructure of the game the more direction you had. So it was just about finding that right system that had the right balance of mechanics. It never occurred to me that the only thing that I actually ever had to do was just to apply the old Gygaxian philosophy about running an RPG, good old 1st edition AD&D thinking was all that was needed.

The feeling, the intangible quality, and the wonder of that moment that made D&D this unique, one-of-a-kind experience, it was all right there perfectly preserved and it wasn’t in rules so much as it was just a philosophy, a way to think and a method to approach the game.

Make a character, give them a name, drop him into the world and see what happens. That’s it…. that’s the magic.

The dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural..

It’s true and I have to be honest about this, it was awkward. Playing 1st edition AD&D after years of modern mechanics felt strange but It was the philosophies of AD&D that made all the difference, which in modern game design and modern gaming culture are seen as barbaric and out of date. Hell some even consider using such philosophies antimine to role-playing, as if using them somehow makes you a terrible person.

Does that mean I like THAC0? Am I fan of descending armor class or 1 gold = 1 XP? Am I ok with female characters having reduced max strength or racial ability scores?

hmmm… I want to say no, I really do. I feel like AD&D is like the dark side of the force, that lures you to it by some dark power, some evil energy that is quick, dirty, and easy to attain. That somehow by using this game I have become a lesser man… but then I think about it and realize that…. well, it’s only a game and I think that is the trouble I have always had.

You see, in around the 90’s “being a role-player” became this very serious thing. It was an identity and there was a definitive “right way” to role-play and the right way to setup an RPG campaign. You had to write a really big backstory for your character, it was absolutely paramount. Your DM was expected to take those backstories and write a massive plot with twists and turns that incorporated your backstory into the campaign. You needed to have many many books of rules and options to make sure that the players could “fine-tune” the vision of their characters. There were so many new cultural RPG requirements, things that still persist to this very day that if you don’t follow you are not really role-playing, you are not a good GM or player and, probably you should just not be playing RPG’s if you can’t follow these cultural norms. It is considered virtuous to play this way, it makes you a better person. This is the weird mindset of modern gamers.

More than that, in modern gaming it has become synonymous with using old game systems like AD&D to be a bigot, sexist and homophobic, so not only are you not a virtuous person for not buying into modern gaming cultural norms and expectations, but you are clearly an evil person if you play these old games that teach this old philosophy.

I realized recently however that this is a hobby, I do it for fun, and I think a big part of the reason why I and so many role-players feel kind of lost in finding the game is that we have created way too many rules for ourselves as barriers to entry. Both culturally and literally. I mean as players and GM’s we have far too many expectations, and place far too many demands on the games and as gamers, we demand way too many rules and mechanics to “support role-playing”, a concept that should never even be part of a conversation about the game in my opinion. We have sort of broken the spirit of the original D&D game and modern games never really tried to understand, how and what this spirit was and so it never found its way into other RPG’s. We sort of killed the magic with our own ignorance and pride.

What I want is to feel the energy and the magic of D&D, that thing that Gary Gygax and his cohorts invented not how the pretenders that followed him tried and failed to re-invent. I want to have THE D&D experience and the only way I know how to do that is with these older systems like AD&D and B/X systems which have that magical simplicity instilled in them, but I don’t think that is the only way to do it.

Today gamers and game designers are making the same discoveries and it catching on. ShadowDark for example won 4 Ennie awards, a game that instills the classic gaming philosophies and uses a modern, digestible system to do it and actually does a masterful job of bringing that magic to the table.

I am Vinz, Vinz Clortho, Keymaster of Gozer. Volguus Zildrohar, Lord of the Sebouillia. Are you the Gatekeeper?

It’s the original, it’s the classic, it’s the only true D&D experience and this is not conjecture, it’s not opinion, it’s not even objective truth, it just is AD&D and games that follow its philosophy like ShadowDark. I know that sounds like gatekeeping but it really isn’t.

To gatekeep you have to want to keep people out and I’m trying to do the opposite, I’m trying to let people in on this strangely kept secret. There is a game that exists and you probably haven’t played it, even if you have been playing role-playing games for years, even if you have been playing D&D. It’s truly a magical experience but it only exists under one philosophy, using one very specific playstyle built into the classic game of D&D. Its a very explicit act to play AD&D and games like it, it doesn’t follow any of the cultural gaming rules of modern RPG’s and lives outside of the sphere of influences on which most modern RPG’s actually function today. Modern RPG’s are not based on AD&D, they are based on 3rd edition D&D which is an entirely different thing.

For this magical, intangible experience, there is only one path, only one way and it lays between the pages of the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. It took me 40 years to realize it, hopefully, you won’t have to wait that long and thankfully that magic is finding its way into other modern games so you don’t even have to go out searching for copies of 1st edition AD&D.