# The End of a D&D Campaign Was the Beginning of Doom



## pming (Sep 22, 2016)

Hiya!

Two of my most favourite things in the world..._D&D_ and _DOOM_!  Been doing both for about as long as they've been around...with no end in sight of stopping.

^_^

Paul L. Ming


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## Ralif Redhammer (Sep 22, 2016)

That’s some interesting history. It would appear that in the game and the real world, Daikatana was cursed!

I gave the new Doom a try the other night, and it made me feel old. The game looks amazing, but man, did my fingers ache after playing it!


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## Alzrius (Sep 22, 2016)

_D&Doom_


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## Achan hiArusa (Sep 23, 2016)

The red indented quotes really take away from my ability to read this article.


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## Jhaelen (Sep 23, 2016)

Huh, it's really striking how closely Doom's Cacodaemon resembles the Astral Dreadnaught's head. Interesting article!


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## Lord_Blacksteel (Sep 23, 2016)

_"While most Dungeon Masters relied on the rule book’s explicitly charted styles of game play, Carmack abandoned the structure to devise elaborate campaigns of his own. After school, he would disappear into his room with a stack of graph paper and chart out his game world."
_ 
Clearly written by someone who had no idea what "most dungeon masters" were doing. 

_"It was truly evolving into an alternate world, which, like all fiction, deeply reflected their own. It wasn’t just a game, it was an extension of their imaginations, hopes, dreams. It mattered. The deepness of their Dungeons and Dragons adventure was due in no small part to Carmack. Whereas most Dungeon Masters would create small episodes that lasted for a few hours of play, Carmack’s world was persistent; players returned to it every time they regrouped."_

Sigh


_"Carmack grew increasingly distressed at Romero’s recklessness. He didn’t want to see the game he had spent so long creating get ruined. In a desperate move, he called Jay Wilbur back in Shreveport, asking him if he could fly up to Madison to reprise his D&D character and help stop Romero."
_
This sounds like another player's perspective, not one from a DM.


_"As the rules of the game dictated, Carmack rolled the die to randomly determine the strength of the demon’s response."
_
?

Don't get me wrong - this is interesting and I think the id guys have a pretty important place in video/computer gaming history but I would rather hear this interpreted by someone who understands what's being discussed. Are all of these quotes coming from Masters of Doom? 

Also - is there something new here? The article at the top is from 2013, another is from 2014, and the book is from 2003.


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## Zarithar (Sep 23, 2016)

Agreed... some of the wording irked me as well. The writer clearly hadn't met or talked to many DMs.


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## talien (Sep 24, 2016)

It's an interesting point about sandbox style games.  If you're the type of DM that lets anyone do anything and the dice determines what happens, then yeah I could totally see lobbying for a more level-headed player to try to influence another player to not "ruin" the game.  It's perhaps a bit foreign to more narrative play styles, but I witnessed it happen in my games in high school and there was definitely some "DM-lobbying" to get players to move the game in a certain direction.

That said, the quotes are definitely from a non-tabletop gamer.


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## Wicht (Sep 24, 2016)

Lord_Blacksteel said:


> Clearly written by someone who had no idea what "most dungeon masters" were doing.




That was my thought also.


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## WackyAnne (Sep 24, 2016)

Wow, how did I not see how the cacodemon was pulled so directly from that Manual of the Planes before? I may not own the book, but the number of hours I've played Doom should have stuck with me. I knew beholders had to be the inspiration, but great to learn more about the process of inspiration from D&D to Doom - although it was pretty cringeworthy how little the author knew about how D&D is really played and run.


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## Henry (Sep 24, 2016)

No, he's right - you early 90s fully-formed DMs with intricate original plots and immersive players were the exception, not the rule. For every one of you, there were ten of us Noobs who were only just getting into using the rulebooks in a fashion other than quite literal. Me, I was only just getting into not calling a DM's campaign his "dungeon" (We didn't say, "we're playing John's Campaign on Thursday", we said, "we're playing John's Dungeon, and after that Jim's Dungeon is next week". And the height of play was getting those cool Gauntlet/Belt/Hammer combos and more gold than was possible to carry by the laws of physics.

My first homebrew world was in the late 80s, and I still have the campaign bible. It was a horrendous derivative mashup of Faerun and Krynn, and my players at the time loved it. Sometimes I feel like we gamers wear the slightly too-rose tinted glasses and forget some of our campaigns we ran at age 10/15/25 were pretty damned horrible in hindsight - dosn't make them any less awesome when we were playing 'em.


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## Wicht (Sep 24, 2016)

Henry said:


> No, he's right - you early 90s fully-formed DMs with intricate original plots and immersive players were the exception, not the rule.




My early players/siblings/friends players were definitely not into complicated plots. But I was heavy into world-building, dungeon crafting and trying, in vain, to make my writing not so derivative of Tolkien. I will say that I was probably not doing all that by the 3rd grade. I think it was more 4th - 5th grade for me.

My first really good campaign didn't come till college (91-93), but I note that his campaign being most discussed was not 3rd grade but rather much later in life.


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## Lord_Blacksteel (Sep 26, 2016)

Henry said:


> No, he's right - you early 90s fully-formed DMs with intricate original plots and immersive players were the exception, not the rule. For every one of you, there were ten of us Noobs who were only just getting into using the rulebooks in a fashion other than quite literal.




Not sure who you're addressing here but John Carmack and I are less than a year apart in age. The article mentions that he started in the third grade. I assure you, that was not "early 90's" for either one of us.  By the time you get to the early 90's I expect he did have a whole lot of material since it states he was running the same world that he had started back then. The note about "disappearing into his room with stacks of graph paper" is what everyone I knew who played D&D at the time was doing - because there weren't a bunch of published campaign worlds for people to share. I'm not claiming any of them were better than any others, I'm just clarifying that's completely normal for late 70's/early 80's DM's to do. I still have notes from back then and I'm sure a lot of other people do too.


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## Henry (Sep 27, 2016)

Lord_Blacksteel said:


> Not sure who you're addressing here but John Carmack and I are less than a year apart in age. The article mentions that he started in the third grade. I assure you, that was not "early 90's" for either one of us.  By the time you get to the early 90's I expect he did have a whole lot of material since it states he was running the same world that he had started back then. The note about "disappearing into his room with stacks of graph paper" is what everyone I knew who played D&D at the time was doing - because there weren't a bunch of published campaign worlds for people to share. I'm not claiming any of them were better than any others, I'm just clarifying that's completely normal for late 70's/early 80's DM's to do. I still have notes from back then and I'm sure a lot of other people do too.




I'm addressing your and Zarithar's comments that the author mischaracterized the majority of DMs in the early 1990s; the majority of DMs then (as now) weren't running detailed, immersive campaigns, they ran as proscribed by Gygax largely, even in the 2nd edition days, and most of the time weren't more sophisticated than Flanaess or Faerun clones. From time to time I see on these forums and other venues gamers who seem to imply that lots of D&D players were doing detailed, immersive campaigns since the 1970s (I had this discussion with a guy named Diaglo a lot) but in fact the more I talk to older gamers reliving their experiences it wasn't that common. Not "didn't happen", just "not common."

There were always outliers, as Carmack and yourselves show; the kinds of people who frequent message boards to discuss D&D most often overlap this same outlier group - if campaigns on the whole are more intricate nowadays, I surmise it's because the pregens and APs are, not because the average DM has gotten way better. In the 90s (and 1980s) I was just one of the tons of players using modules, dragon magazine, dungeon magazine, and just stringing them together with not much in the way of long-term character goals, plot arcs, and original material. It wasn't until I was in my late 20s before I really caught on to some really great DM habits. So anytime I see the argument that "DMs weren't usually like that", I like to remind people that yes, yes it was -probably still is, really, if the local convention scene still looks like it did for me a few years ago.


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