D & D Three Point Five (Woods Edition)

When I was 11 I joined the Boy Scouts of America. I have complicated feelings on the whole matter. In retrospect it is pretty abstractly funny to go through the entirety of this huge weird program intended to produce the ideal Patriotic Man, basically succeed at all the things it put in front of me by the metrics it provides, and come out the other end as neither of those things. On the other hand, there’s a lot of regret bound up in specific memories of teen-me hiding my discomfort with the world I was participating in rather than being able to be direct about it.

The scout troop was one of my main sources of social activity, and it’s where I was introduced to table top role playing games as a hobby. Several of the other scouts were often talking about or playing them off to the side during free time at meetings or events. One of them owned a bunch of DnD 3+3.5 edition books and several books for one of the various Star Wars ttrpgs, I’m not actually sure which, and for a while I enjoyed hanging back and watching them peruse these and say incomprehensible things about them. Being an annoying book nerd kid I quickly picked up on the connections between these games and various fantasy I liked, and I expressed some interest in participating in the games. The players were pretty deep in their current campaign, so I was told I could join the next when they finished.

The timing of this introductory game was such that it started on a multiple day camping trip. The Dungeon Master and book owner of the group apparently was in a rush to pack, and the tabletop gaming paraphernalia we ended up having access to was as follows:
A 3.5 rulebook that I am uncertainly identifying as the Dungeon Master’s Guide v3.5, based on remembering specifically that the Horizon Walker appeared in it.
A D20, several D6, I think a D12 and a D4 but im less sure about those.
A lot of character sheets, not printed particularly well.
The accumulated and often contradictory knowledge of several long time players.

As soon as we had set up camp and had free time to play, all the problems of playing any table top game in the woods became apparent. The D20 kept falling into the dirt and pine needles and vegetation. It was too windy and wet to use our character sheets extensively. The sun was going down and it was a pain to set up flashlights and lamps in a way that gave everyone the ability to read the book, and the book wasn’t actually that helpful.

The game we ended up playing worked something like this:
Characters mostly followed 3.5 conventions aesthetically (I was perhaps the most bog standard conception of “Elf Ranger” you can imagine), though with intrusions by ideas from The Elder Scrolls which the DM and several of the players were recently getting into. Attempts were made to approximate the various mechanical systems of the classes involved, but the effort was swiftly abandoned due to how unfeasible that is without reference material.
There being like 8 players and various camp tasks to attend to, multiple parties of 2-3 characters tended to form and have small distinct adventures, rather than one party containing us all, even when we could all reconvene.
The D20 was abandoned after several times nearly losing it after sunset. It was replaced with a process where the DM thinks of a number between 1 and 10, and the player making a check guessing a number. Success was determined through the guessed number’s proximity to the DM’s number, modified by difficulty of task and skill of character in what was pretty much a wholly vibes based way. This would go on to be the scout troop’s favored resolution mechanism while camping for several years: no dice to lose, doable while hiking, bare minimum math, applicable to any genre we cared to play a game in.

My ranger spent most of his time stuck down a cave he fell into, trying to help a fellow adventurer locate the exit while hiding from some sort of big mean animal (I do not remember what). Despite/because of all the weird finagling to make the game happen at all, I became really interested in DMing myself. A few years later I would be given the 4e DnD core books as a christmas gift and spend a lot of time trying to get games that lasted more than a few sessions off the ground, and even more time just drawing bigass maps for these imagined eventual games. When I did get some games going they mostly consisted of myself and a close friend who in retrospect I had a huge crush on switching freely between tabletop play and just wandering around the woods near my house swinging sticks around like swords while embodying our characters like a LARP.

I don’t have a single clear takeaway from all of this. You could narrativize this as proof that game texts used as reference by new audiences don’t structure the play directly and predictably. You could just as easily narrativize this as being about how not abiding by a game text’s contents does not preclude someone from being captured by a hegemonic economic apparatus, what with me continuing to buy WotC books for a significant amount of my life. I think there are better and clearer arguments for both of those ideas. My main takeaways are that it is interesting that it happened and I think I should put that number-guessing system together into a reference document and see if it’s fun to use.