GDW

I had a dream this morning I was playing Europa (the WW II mega board game), which was kind of odd, because I haven't played it since maybe 1991; but the even weirder part is that it's the second time this week I have dreamt I was playing it.

I don't even have a copy of any game in the series anymore. So I took this as a sign that I might want to play some serious large scale hex and counter wargaming, and thus, did a search on Ebay to find a copy of one of the Europa series of games. Being as how they are massive games, I was pretty happy when I found a few copies of some titles in the series really reasonably priced, and even a little surprised when I found some copies at right around their list price from back in the day.

I ran through three variations on the search to make certain I could net the greatest number of results- Europa, GRD and GDW (the latter two being the companies that produced the game). None of the searches were perfect, each came back with a variety of results for things I wasn't looking for- Fortress Europa (a fine game in it's own right), GRD apparently did get around to publishing their Pacific/East Asian version of the game, and a First World War game too.

I was surprised though by two things though when I did the GDW search. First, Frank Chadwick's name is attached to a whole lot of games I played when I was young and second, and possibly related, is that I played a lot more GDW stuff than I ever really realized. Traveller was my first non-D&D RPG, and while I didn't play it a lot (I didn't own the game), I have pretty fond memories of it. GDW's “Tet Offensive” and “Stand & Die: The Battle of Borodino 1941” taunted younger me from the shelves at Twilight book and Game because they looked awesome and I couldn't reasonably afford them with my 1991 salary. Command Decision was the first miniatures wargame I ever owned. Dragon Magazine insured that I would purchase and play “Twilight:2000”, it's numerous accessories and, eventually, it's second edition (and it's 2.5 edition); to this day it's the best game I never played enough of. “The Blue Max” was pretty much a guarantee for playing with my best friend Darryl's dad (Big Darryl) because of our “Dawn Patrol” addiction. “Space 1889” was maybe the coolest RPG I never bought or played, it's on my bucket list. They published Gary Gygax's “Dangerous Journeys”, which was kind of ballsy considering the vindictive giant that TSR was at the time. I read Challenge magazine after I stopped reading Dragon. I remember playing “Air Superiority” with Big Darryl too.

This is just a list of GDW products that I spotted reading through 3/4s of a page on an Ebay search. I am sure there would be more if I found an actual catalog and looked through it.

edit- it turns out that wikipedia has a list of their games here and it is even more of a trip down memory lane- "Harpoon", "En Garde" and more.

Thanksgiving Update from the Great Khan

Mongol Month hasn't been a great success for me largely due to the fact that I have been sick for most of it. Cold, followed by the flu, it's been a miserable couple of weeks; once again, I blame my kids for bringing these sicknesses home from school :) Still, I had hoped to be more inspiring for my contest over the course of the month and I have dropped the ball. I haven't even done much gaming-wise except play some Civilization 4 and design a medieval town in the Sims 2 for a D&D campaign; complete with NPCs that have interactive relationships, I don't know why I never thought of this as a tool before.

I have been reading blogs and trying to keep up with the OSR, D&D Next and general gaming news, but I just haven't been compelled to do any commenting on anything until today. Today I figured, since I have the time and I am feeling better and it's been over a week since I posted anything to my blog, I thought I'd mention a couple of things.

First- I got my free miniature from The Assault Group for “Liking” their Facebook page. I really thought it wasn't coming, that I had missed a deadline on that or gotten lost in the shuffle or something because it had been so long since I had “liked” their page for their free mini promotion; as it turns out they mailed it in September. I am guessing customs held things up. Anyway, serendipitously, it's a Mongol General miniature and he's pretty cool. 28Mm scale and way more detailed than I am accustomed to seeing in a miniature from a wargaming manufacturer. Definitely RPG standards of quality there. Maybe I just don't buy enough 28mm wargaming minis.

Second- I just found out that there is an Up Front Kickstarter running. Up Front Was Avalon Hill's Squad Leader card game. I loved that game and I am going into that Kickstarter hard. I have the original version and all of it's expansions and I have been waiting for someone to bring it back into print and expand it some more. My original has been played hard and is starting to get a bit ratty and buying just a replacement set without expansions is generally more expensive than going all in ($125.00) on the Kickstarter. If you like Squad Leader, WW II games or fast paced card games I recommend this one.

Anyway, if you are in the US and you are celebrating Thanksgiving- Happy Thanksgiving!

Another in a line of busy days...

I actually was too busy today to have too much gaming related to report other than what I got in the mail and what have been reading. I am nearly finished with "The Mongoliad", although it is only book one and I have already pre-ordered book two. I have been working a lot behind the scenes on my alt-Rome and Alt-Egypt areas in my Garnia World campaign, with my collaborators. Well, mostly I have been trying to bounce ideas off of them and getting a lot of "Yep, sure, that sounds cool.", when I was hoping for a little more thought provoking discussion. But, it's been mostly via email, so I guess I should have expected less.

I got home too late to take John to his 4th edition game too. He wasn't happy, but he took it well. I am definitely playing something here on Saturday, with whoever shows up, so that'll be good.

Anyway, here's my mail-

My wife insisted on this, and made me buy it on Father's Day. I told her if she's making me buy expensive miniatures from overseas it's put up or shut up time. She paints like a pro when she wants to, it's getting her to do it that's the killer; but she has a soft spot for animals and the cart put it over the top.

These guys I found on EBay, they're from the same line and I am sneaking them into her queue. Dead men are always useful as casualty markers for wargames, and I have several sets of ancients rules; plus they make for good encounter dressing in D&D games. I actually have more from this line yet to come.

This I was informed was worth it for the pictures alone, especially at the scandalously low price I got it for. It has clearly been sitting on a store shelf since it was printed, it's brand new.

This I only include to show my interest in reading actual histories and my studliness as a shopper, brand new $4.00 including shipping.

Games That Define Us- Great Khan Edition

Obviously, since this is an OSR blog, I feel like I should open with D&D/AD&D. I saw the ads for the Holmes Basic Set in "Boy's Life", the Cub Scout magazine and I was hooked, it took me something like a year to find a store that sold that D&D boxed set, sometime in early 1980. My next D&D purchase was the AD&D Monster Manual, then the Cook/Marsh Expert Set, followed by a Christmas present of both the AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide, this set the tone for some confused rulings over the years as a DM, since I was playing a hybrid of Holmes, the X half of B/X and AD&D, but over the years I started to fall more in line with AD&D orthodoxy, with a few exceptions. Then, in 1985, I pre-ordered Oriental Adventures and it has been almost an obsession ever since.

Chess- Chess had to make the cut here because it is one of the first thinking man's board games that I ever learned. I learned how to play when I was in second grade, just because it was one of the quite games on the shelf in my classroom we got to play during recess time when it was raining or the weather was otherwise too bad to go outside and play. I really didn't learn the game until high school though when I played regularly with my principal, who was a ranked player, and occasionally I'd even win. My real claim to fame though is that I once played chess against a guy who had played against Bobby Fischer, I met him through my buddy Darryl's dad. Totally got my ass handed to me, it was worth the experience.

Risk- Ah, Risk, the game of world conquest. You taught me that the Ukraine was gigantic and the names of other exotic places. You were wrong about the Ukraine, but I guess a game produced during the cold war wasn't going to give Russia it's due, right? This game taught me two things, basic strategy and the importance of luck. Play with good strategy, take a few chances, and hope your luck holds; I was Risk champion of my dorm. On the other hand I have been beaten by people that had NEVER played the game before, so there you have it.

Axis & Allies (The Game Master edition from the 1980s)- Axis & Allies wasn't the first in this series that I played, that honor goes to Conquest of the Empire; which we also played quite a bit; but Axis & Allies we played more and better. Axis & Allies was the better game right out of the box, even it's recommended optional rules made sense. By the time Axis & Allies hit the scene, I was already a veteran wargamer, but this managed to take a lot of wargame elements and make them accessible to the masses, like a gateway wargame.

Dawn Patrol- This should come as no surprise, since I am currently engaged in a new Dawn Patrol campaign, but it was my first and is still my favorite aerial combat game. I bought it because TSR put it out, and I was a young TSR fanboy at the time, it's taken me this long to get good at it.

Star Fleet Battles- I never really understood why this game got a bad reputation as highly complex to the point where you needed a PhD in Mathematics to play it. I am not a math guy, and I have played a lot of SFB, if filling out the energy allocation sheet is too hard for you I advise going back to remedial 4th grade math. I bought the Commanders edition boxed set the year I turned 14, since my birthday is in July I don't remember if it was before or after I turned 14. I taught myself and my friends how to play, we made a few mistakes along the way in learning, but we had it down after a few games; it says right on the box "1,2 or more players Ages 12 and older". Sure it got a little more complex with each additional boxed set (or module, which I never bought), but it was building on knowledge that you had already mastered.

Up Front- The Squad Leader card game, picking on Avalon Hill title to add to the list was really hard to do, then I remembered the one we always played when we had extra time on our hands, it's quick to set up and play, even when you build you own squads with the point buy system, and it is one of the only games that I have that'll bring Lance and Darryl into the same room, although maybe not anymore, we used to have tournaments. Up Front is one of the few games I don't mind losing just because I had bad luck. Theoretically Multi-Man Publishing has the rights to it now, as part of the Squad Leader line, and they were considering making it a CCG, which would make me want them all to suffer horrible curses, but I would like to see a new edition. I have Up Front and it's official expansions Banzai and Desert War, but the cards have seen a lot of wear over the years.

Koei's Genghis Khan- Yeah, I know, it's a little odd to add a NES game to the list, and this title is really representational of all the Koei titles that were turn based war/administrative games from Nobunaga's Ambition through L'Empereur and including Romance of the Three Kingdoms; but my alter-ego here being the Great Khan, obviously I was going to pick Genghis Khan. I actually still own a NES and a copy of that game, I never play it, the battery inside it is shot so it doesn't save and I can't see leaving it on for the days that would take to complete the game. Darryl and I used to play the hell out of this game together too, in multi-player mode, usually one of us would pick England and the other Japan, since the four playable countries were Mongolia, Byzantium, England and Japan, we wanted as much space as possible between us before we had to start fighting each other.

Talisman- The 2nd edition before it got completely crapped up by the people at Games Workshop and used as yet another way to promote their Warhammer franchise, although this was sneaking into this edition too. This was a go-to game for us if we wanted to play something fantasy, fun and easy to teach/learn. I had, I am pretty sure, every expansion for this game that was released in the US except Timescape, we drew the line there. I always wanted to play in a D&D campaign set in this world, minus the out of place and silly characters. The board evoked a place that was both real and medieval, yet mythic at the same time. The only real drawback to this game was that it could get tedious after having died several times and starting over. I have played the new Fantasy Flight Games version, and while it is much, much nicer than the last Games Workshop edition, the 2nd edition still holds my loyalty, the FFG version is like a more polished, prettier version of my old 2nd edition, but it loses something in the transformation.

Warrior Knights- Have you ever razed a city to win a game? My old gaming group got in touch with the designer to ask him a few questions about the rules and our interpretations and we discovered we were doing the entire political phase wrong, apparently we were supposed to spend all of our votes on a single action. We didn't. We played a much more corrupt and Machiavellian version of the game than had been considered by the designer. We bought and sold votes, forged alliances to screw over whoever was in the lead, and fought over who would hold the wool concession. Games Workshop did a great job with this one, I hear that Fantasy Flight Games has put out a new edition, but, in the words of Lance, who has played it "It sucks. They screwed the pooch on this one". He tried it several times, just to try and get accustomed to the rules changes and that was his ultimate opinion; then he taught his Tuesday Night Gaming Group how we played the old GW version and they had a blast with it.

This was fun, maybe I'll do a part 2 that includes the games I cut from this list.

May 3rd

Not too much to report today. My dad is home from the hospital, they don't know what the problem was, or he's not telling me, which amounts to the same thing. I am sick and have apparently missed a day or two to some unknown illness where I just spend most of my day asleep and kind of queasy feeling, so that's been fun. Not. I got a couple of packages in the mail from EBay auctions that I won, because I am apparently an addict and can't help myself when I find a good bargain.

Obviously, I already have several copies of this, but one more at the table can't hurt, right?

I actually already have every single miniature from this set too, but you can never have too many pack animals, am I right?

These were just unopened Clan War cards, really cheap. I still have yet to play the game, but I can field an army for every major clan, once I actually get my painting done, and I figure opponents must be out there somewhere.

This is actually my third copy of this book, which pretty much cements the idea that if we ever play the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, it'll be the 2nd edition, because I have more Players Guides for it and lots of other stuff besides.

Gamer ADD and AD&D

It's no secret I have a strong preference for historical settings with a bit of fantasy thrown in for flavor, usually the folk beliefs of the peoples living in the setting at the time, sometimes something a little more fully fledged fantastic or even more gonzo stuff. When I set up a new D&D or AD&D campaign I usually take and create a quasi-historical setting with a new world and all the D&D monsters and toss in some real world cultures, usually from around the same time and place, so I know how they'll interact. I have found over the years that my players prefer a more "straight" fantasy D&D world, flavored with the cultures of our Earth to an actual historical setting, although they're usually cool with a historical setting if you leave in all the D&D-isms they've come to expect- Goblins, Orcs and other Humanoids, all the PC races, flashy, destructive Magic-User spells like Fireball, et cetera; which is why the 1139 AD Cornwall campaign is working so far, no restrictions.

That said, I am walking a fine line with my B/X campaign set during the Anarchy, I've been reading a lot of stuff about medieval England; which is really just supplemental to the knowledge I already have on the subject, but I need to refresh and build up my knowledge of that specific time and place. I understand this is more for me than it is for the players, but if I am not enjoying the setting, then it will show through into my game. The players are just as happy to be playing here as they would be in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos or the Kingdom of Furyondy, as long as they still have the opportunity to explore dungeons, slay Orcs and get some gold for their efforts.

My semi-secret plan is to start another game set in the same time and place with another group and have the two games influence each other. I may expand this to include an internet based game at some point too, but I am fearful of the new technology and DMing for a group of people I don't know, so that's in my "we'll see" category. I am ambitious enough to think that this game can last long enough to have players reach Name Level and have an effect on the civil war between Stephen and Matilda, or even start a new faction if they really want to. The current game is B/X and I am pretty happy with it, although the new Adventurer, Conqueror, King System looks like something I may want to check out.

I'd also be lying if I said I didn't miss AD&D, at least a little. Those bastards at WotC managed to announce the re-release of the 1st edition AD&D books at just the wrong time. I'd just about finished reading the Moldvay Basic book and was doing a lot of comparisons anyway. AD&D has a lot of nostalgia value for me and everyone I play with, even my kids, because I started them with it. People in my B/X game were already a little wary of the whole "Race as Class" issue, then we started taking casualties and the AD&D "Death at -10 HP" rule was sorely missed. My new Schrodinger's Adventurer rule hasn't seen play yet, so we'll see how it works out.

Speaking of house rules, I am having some trouble getting new house rules to stick; people just forget about them and so do I. I love "Shields Shall be Splintered", but it's useless if we never remember it. The d30 rule only gets used every now and again, usually when Dalton remembers it and reminds one of the other players to use it, or uses it himself and sets the example for the others to follow. The only "House" rule everyone remembers to use is the unwritten, never explicitly stated, I might face a player rebellion if I revoke, "Natural 20=Critical Hit=Double Damage"; every D&D or AD&D player I have ever played with has used that rule. I see on some blogs that some DMs don't use it to inflict double damage on PCs, but I have always figured what's good for the goose is good for the gander. The only thing I insist upon is that players roll 2 separate dice for damage rather than doubling one, and that strength and magic bonuses are only added after doubling.

Anyway, now everyone is all talking about AD&D again with the impending release of the core books and I am all caught up in thinking things like "Wouldn't it be nice to add a few more Class options? Multi-Classing? More PC Races", all those little rules that drew me into AD&D in the first place. Well, that and the fact that D&D was being marketed to kids and AD&D to adults. On the one hand I know a bunch of people would be pretty happy to switch things over to AD&D, on the other hand I really want to continue the game I have going with the rules set I have. Simple is nice. I am intrigued by the play possibilities of the stronger magic. The lack of multi-classing possibilities has significantly limited the number of non-Human PCs, which I like. There hasn't been a single Halfling yet, there were three Dwarfs and they all died, and just one Elf, she is still alive. The first adventure claimed the lives of three Dwarfs and two Magic-Users, I wonder what that says about the adventure? Other than Magic-Users should avoid the front line.

Should I switch to AD&D? Lance and at least two of my kids want to, Lee Ann favors AD&D, but is open to B/X, Mona doesn't care what rules set we use, I haven't asked Dalton yet, and Audra is brand new to gaming, so it doesn't matter to her. B/X was my idea to make the game simpler and faster; I also wanted to experiment with trying out gaming like it was 1981.

I went out and did some gaming on Saturday. I played a D-Day card game with maddeningly incomplete rules, as the Allies, I suffered a marginal defeat, but I think over the course of the game I figured out what the intent of the rules were. I played a tank battle board game from Milton Bradley, I think, that was sort of like a cross between Battleship and Stratego, I defeated Lance soundly at this. I played a Gladiator game called Arena Games that Lance had been wanting to teach me for a while, I also defeated him soundly at this. I then played Seven Wonders twice and lost both times, once badly, to Lance's 13 year old daughter. These new miniatures came in the mail while I was gone.



Heritage 25mm Historicals, they were Heritage and historical, I was compelled to bid, they needed a home.



Heritage Archers, same with these lads.



Martian Metals Wizard and Flunkie, you can't have too many flunkies, am I right? These are my first ever Martian Metals miniatures too.



This guy was just billed as "Wizard", the miniature itself is marked Ral Partha 1982.



These were billed as Ral Partha and Grenadier, I can attest to the Archer being Grenadier, he says so, the other guy either didn't arrive in the package or disappeared after I opened it when I got home that night.

Not pictured here are the two other guys that were inexplicably included in the package, a pair of older miniatures that I would guess are Grenadier, but I don't recognize them and they are mounted on bases that I am loathe to try and remove them from. They have a Norse/Saxon look about them, both have round shields, one with a tree on it, the other plain wood; one is armed with an axe, the other with a sword. Both are wearing chain and spangenhelms, the axeman's conical with a nasal. Both are bearded.

This book came in the mail today.



I said I was reading a lot about medieval England, this is the first book I have gotten specifically about the Anarchy. Currently I am reading 1215 - The Year of the Magna Carta, which is nearly a century out of date for my game, but keeps referring back to the previous century for comparison, which I was pretty sure it would when I bought it. King John is only two generations removed from King Stephen and the Empress Matilda after all, he is the grandson of Matilda and the Grand-Nephew of Stephen.



These miniatures came in the mail today too.



They are a variety of medieval axemen and I figured, no pun intended, that they might be useful during my quasi-historical B/X Anarchy campaign. They also have pride of place as the last things I am getting from EBay this month, as I ran seriously over budget by accidentally winning more of these miniatures than I expected to.

3e and I: Why We Broke Up

As promised yesterday, the semi-bitter story of my experience with 3rd edition D&D.

At the end of the day, I guess you just can't teach an old dog new tricks. I was the "go-to" DM for a bunch of different small groups here in Oswego county by the time 3e came out. I had been involved in the 2nd edition era with a bunch of my own campaigns and I played in a couple of fairly long running campaigns too*. Mostly my players were older players that I grew up with, or younger players that me or my friends taught how to play, so the weird proficiency checks for everything style of play that became common in the 2nd edition era** was largely absent from gaming in my neck of the woods. When players, usually newer players or rules lawyers, tried to use proficiency checks instead of playing things out I metaphorically slapped them down for it some; at best I'd give you a bonus of some sort. I wouldn't smack you for things that can easily be handled by a die roll, like say, identifying a plant or heraldry, but stuff that SHOULD be role played, like bluffing or pretty much anything that involves talking to NPCs and coming up with a story or an excuse or whatever; just making a proficiency check for that kind of annoyed me.

3e players, even my older players eventually, hated my DMing style in 3e. I couldn't just wing it and come up with a "roll a die and I'll let you know if it works" ruling on the fly, there was already a rule for whatever the PC was trying to do, and if there wasn't one you could assume that he couldn't do it. The skill checks though are what did me in. They drained the life out of the game and made every damned thing a rules mechanics issue. The players started to play the rules system instead of the game. Suddenly I had players planning their character builds out for levels in advance to maximize their potential.

Character creation was a bloody nightmare in and of itself, when the Player's Handbook comes with software for generating characters you know there's going to be a problem. Not that I noticed at first, at first I just noticed that it was pretty cool to have a unified XP chart and that feats were pretty cool for customizing your character and all the stuff that makes players happy with 3e. I kind of liked the simplification of saving throws. Then I started DMing and got the complex stuff. I hated having to remember all of the different effects for various feats that applied here, but not there, et cetera and monster stat blocks and combat rules that made everyone move around the battle board in odd ways to avoid attacks of opportunity and combats that lasted quite a bit longer than before. Oh, and the odd changes just for the sake of change, like Orcs going from Lawful to Chaotic Evil, and I hated the art; not that I was in love with the art of 2nd edition either, I just thought 3e's art really sucked. I also hated the super fast leveling, and I missed real multi-classing.

A quick observation here; when I finally made the switch to 3e D&D I was DMing for two different groups of players. Why two groups? Because each group contained some of my friends, but all of my friends don't play well with each other; there were also some scheduling issues since people my age were 30-ish when 3e came out. Mainly it was the A-Team and the B-Team though, that's how I thought of them at the time anyway. By the way, you should never let that slip either. The A-Team consisted of two guys that I had regularly played 2nd edition AD&D with for most of it's run, we also played wargames regularly for the same period (everything from Titan to ASL); one guy that was the cousin of one of those guys and also a pretty hardcore AD&D player and wargamer; and a married couple the husband had been an old AD&D player in the 1st edition era, a member of my old group actually, and a wargamer from way back then too, but the wife had never played any RPGs. The B-Team consisted of three guys that were in college, but had been playing 2nd edition for a few years; the younger brother of one of those guys that was still in high school, and had played mostly CRPGs; my wife, who has played a lot of D&D over the years, but isn't a "rules" person; and one old buddy of mine that I had been playing D&D and other RPGs and wargames (including the really complex ones like Star Fleet Battles, he was a Romulan lover) with since I was in 7th grade.

Actually, because of all the set up necessary, this observation really wasn't all that quick. My observation was that the wargamer heavy group took to the new rules a lot easier than the more casual group of gamers. All of them really liked the idea of customizing their characters, except maybe my wife, who really customizes her characters through roleplaying them; but it took longer for even the combat monster in the B-Team to start figuring out how to exploit the rules and rape them best to his advantage; that was a sad day for me. He once played a Fighter in 2nd edition game that had aspirations towards being a Bard. In that same campaign my wife played a Cleric that had always wanted to be a Fighter, but was forced by her family and her natural ability into the church. He used to write songs and poems about her character between game sessions or even during them he'd whip off little snippets of poetry. That would never happen in a 3e game. Those games were all business, working out tactical advantages and using every skill and feat to their synergistic best.

But what irked me the most was the damned skill checks. Suddenly the power behind the game was taken from a godlike DM and given to a set of books, and with those books came rules lawyers who would milk every drop of advantage they could out of every possible skill point and feat. Dragon magazine even ran a column for a while in the 3e era teaching you how to build super bad-ass characters by exploiting the rules; that's just not right. Pretty much overnight, after we converted to 3e, without any fanfare and really without anyone noticing, we all just stopped roleplaying all together. I blame the skill checks for that too.

What's worse is that I know it wasn't the players and it wasn't me, it was the game, 3e killed all the roleplaying and turned D&D into pretty much just a fantasy tactical miniatures skirmish game, and a fairly complex one at that; I know because I dumped D&D shortly after the 3.5 conversion, I only ever bought the 3.5 PH and DMed briefly in the 3.5 era before I realized I wasn't having any fun any more; I dumped D&D and bought into HackMaster and we played it and everyone had fun. People roleplayed their characters. We played through combat encounters without the use of miniatures. People once again laughed and had a good time at my table. HackMaster 4th edition was AD&D cranked up to 11.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't 3e, it was me. Pathfinder sales and Paizo's nearly fanatical fan base are clear evidence that 3e was, and still is, a fun game; and I had a lot of fun playing it from time to time. I didn't like the extra workload it placed on me as a DM. I didn't like the power it stole from me as a DM. We just weren't a good fit, irreconcilable differences.


*Although one of them was run by Luddite DM/Old School Prophet Steve S. who ran a 1st edition AD&D game during the 2nd edition era. We all thought it was quaintly eccentric at the time. He said "I already bought this game, these books still work."; whatever, I just liked the break from DMing all the time and he was an engaging and quirky DM. Sadly prone to sudden burn out though, three times his campaigns just ended abruptly.

**Yes, I am well aware, especially since I am running a 1st edition AD&D OA game right now, that non-weapon proficiencies were introduced in 1st edition AD&D, they were kind of a mess there and didn't see much use outside of OA from what I saw. 2nd edition made them pretty much standard issue and made the system work better, separating them out from the weapon proficiencies (if only someone had thought to call them skills, eh? Much less cumbersome than non-weapon proficiencies). Splatbooks proliferated them and made super non-weapon proficiencies and redundancies and I always thought that Player Characters got kind of hosed on the number of NWPs they got based on my own number of skills at the time, I grew up in farm country, next to the woods near a river and Lake Ontario, by the time I was a teen-ager I could swim, sail, fish, hunt, farm, cook and a bunch of other stuff in the PH, not counting the stuff I learned in school, like a foreign language and math and literacy. Now I figure it must have been a game balance issue, but I still give out background skill packages in systems that use skills.