The hunt for DM Zero

Or: on spontaneously generating DMs.

tl:dr; trying to backtrack the ‘origins of the scene’ that I started playing in finds we were apparently a collective of spontaneously generated DMs who all figured it out from books.

This started with a call with an old pal from back when I first started gaming, and we got onto the topic of whoever taught us how to DM? We chased the rabbit’s tail around and expanded it out to other friends of ours that we remember being among our first DMs, the answer we came back with was no one.

This was early 90s, hinterlands of Ireland. For those not from there, this was pre-Euro and the punt/pound exchange rate and postage was a mild-to-serious choke on getting your hands on any gaming material and we were the literal end of the line. Nonetheless there was a pretty decent TTRPG gaming scene that sprang up and I was curious as to how and where we all figured out how to DM.

What prompted me to ask was the view that appears to be widely held, particularly in OSR spaces, that people learn DM’ing by watching others then playing – an apprenticeship model. You watch the person that knows how to do it and then get going. A strong thread within this is that you learn ‘how to DM right’ by playing with folk who have played with folk who have learned from the wellsprings of the hobby – be it Gygax or Arnesons table or the convention play of the era. The claim is that there are schools of play that you learn by being at a table of that school and then off you go and replicate that, that DM’ing is an oral tradition of sorts.

The Elusive Shift goes into detail on their being from the very early days a West Coast scene, and East Coast scene which had more or less spontaneouly developed independently of the Lake Geneva origins of the game. My question was whether any of us in hinterland Ireland in the 90s had learned to DM from an external source or had we effectively recreated this spontaneous generation process?

All this with the caveat that I do not recall any of us saying ‘X really knows how to DM, we should do it like them’ – we may have pulled tricks and tips from one another but it was a more ‘shared craft’ environment than a master and apprentices one, so even if someone was bringing in the wisdom from the wellsprings of the hobby it was not given greater weight than our own homegrown ideas and practices.

I came to TTRPGs through HeroQuest then Fighting Fantasy books through Black Box and then AD&D. I started DMing with that as the foundation and had never had someone show me how to do it. I had run a bit before I ever sat to an ‘external’ table – I think at GaelCon ’93 I played an AD&D table – and that was the first time I had sat to like someone else running the game. I recall not being terribly impressed, and leaving thinking I could do at least as good or better and wandered off; definitely not a ‘I have been inducted to the true ways, I must now replicate this’.

There were two ‘groups’ within that original core gaming gang – one group that was late secondary school (late teens) and one that was early college (early 20s) – that had originally met up through Magic: The Gathering and then came together for saturday gaming sessions at a local hotel. Of maybe ~ 20 folk there were eight I would count as the ‘core’ GMs.

Of the younger gang –
I got gifted the D&D black box after playing Fighting Fantasy books and Heroquest; then got AD&D books and figured it out from there
One also entered via Heroquest and from there to other Games Workshop stuff and onward to TTRPGs. Interestingly he has customising Heroquest to be more than just hack-em-up dungeon crawling as the start of his journey
One also started from D&D Black Box – building from Dragon Warriors books from the local library
The last of my core gang says I got him into it. Realises now it is all my fault and pondered sueing me for his terrain addiction. Eeep.

Of the older gang we irregularly played with
One started with Heroquest and then went via the D&D branded “choose your own path” adventure books to D&D Black Box.
Another got the red box – which puts them as the elder amongst us
The last ventured over to the actual Orc’s Nest in London to get their books – but still took them home and learned from them there.

We had figured out there was something out there and got the box sets or books and figured it out from there, then we learned from each other. We arrived at “wrap some rules around make-believe” – adjudicated storytelling which broadly maps to the trad school. We were running AD&D, World of Darkness, WHFRP, Shadowrun and Conspiracy X without system massively influencing our approach – beyond the risk assessment of how problematic it was to get in a fight (high in WHFRP, Con X, not so bad in D&D or WoD). This would suggest that “tell an epic tale” wrapped in some rules was the goal more than narratively-enriched wargaming/boardgaming was our main understanding of this thing.
I find it particular interesting that we got spontaneous convergent evolution, even in our very small environment, of multiple people arriving at broadly the same place even before we started comparing notes amongst ourselves and particularly never talked ‘theory of DM-ing’ except very obliquely in comparing one game to another. Certainly never to the level of comparing ‘schools’ of D&D play because D&D was ‘trad’ style, as far as we knew there were no other ways to do it.

The highly-proceduralised OSR approach, the death-trap dungeon classic approach with hirelings, neo-trad character lead – I have no recollection of any of those getting a look in. I recall hearing, years later of immersive Nordic-LARP style being followed by Vampire the Masquerade players and all this predated the development of story-games. Does this suggest that classic/OSR are in fact the cultivated versions of D&D? Left to grow wild, you get trad?

Moreau Vazh on Taskerland just wrote “ORIGINS: On Lost Cultures of Play” which talks to a very similar feeling from the French/Swiss scene – they identify an wholly separate (and now lost) “Games of Atmosphere” school which was separate but similar to Trad. I do not think we came up with anything quite so distinct but fascinating that they have a similar experience of games scenes springing up and looking like trad style.