Back in The Day!

[Marius Delphus]

... I sat down with a typewriter and laid out my own...

Likewise. The "format" eventually settled down to the point where it could be reproduced more or less by rote. (Late 70s through early 80s)

Later, I (we) discovered the Apple //c and a fairly crude word processor... hello, dot matrix printing! Still later, WordStar in MS-DOS on an IBM clone, then PageMaker on the Mac, then Windows. (Mid 80s through mid 00s)

Nowadays, Illustrator or InDesign on Windows, but I still occasionally spare a moment remembering the days when I could lay out pages letter by letter because everything was monospaced.

 

[Raven Crowking]

We had to make our own dice out of whale bone using crude flint knives!

You're lucky. We had to use chits!

 

[Wombat]

My "Back in the day" thoughts stretch back to the autumn of 1975 ... when we didn't really have character sheets (and it didn't seem to matter as many characters only last 2-3 sessions anyway, except for the really lucky ones).

The real fun I remember from those days was Mapping The Dungeon. One person in the party was always designated as the Mapper and tried to keep an accurate record of where the group had been ... and GMs went out of their way to create dungeons that were tricky to map, thus leading to many lost parties. We bought pads of 8-square-to-the-inch grid paper for mapping...

 

[Umbran]

You're lucky. We had to use chits!

Chits! Chits! Ah, that we'd had such sophistication as chits! We had to throw our younger siblings down a steep hill, and count the number of times they bounced before they came to rest, and that was the number we rolled.

 

[Marius Delphus]

You got to throw them? Back in MY day, our younger siblings threw US down the steep hill, and when they got finished counting how many times we'd bounced, we had to come back up and keep DMing for them.

 

[lin_fusan]

Geez. My parents hated me playing D&D, so it was a hassle convincing them to make copies of character sheets.

The moment we got our first computer (a 128K Macintosh!), I created character sheets with the Paint-ish program. But I had to print them on the sly so that my dad wouldn't get pissed off. (Those dot-matrix computers were loud!)

I think that's why I tend to hand-draw/write my character sheets; years to necessity.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Chits! Chits! Ah, that we'd had such sophistication as chits! We had to throw our younger siblings down a steep hill, and count the number of times they bounced before they came to rest, and that was the number we rolled.

And that's when the chits really hit the fan......

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

And that's when the chits really hit the fan......

Hence the term, fantasy role playing.

And we've come full circle

 

[EricNoah]

Back in the day, just before my older brother headed off to college, I spent days with a manual typewriter typing up the entire monster chart from the appendix of the 1E AD&D DMG, because I knew he was taking his stuff with him and I couldn't do without the monsters! I must have been about 11 or 12 years old.

 

[dougmander]

We didn't have dice OR chits back in '77. When you attacked someone, you actually grabbed a weapon and swung it at the controlling player. We had a closet full of bardiches, glaives, and Bohemian ear spoons just for this purpose. When dice were introduced to the game, many lives were saved.

Oh, the OP asked about character sheets. We drew them on paper, from scratch. Photocopiers were objects of veneration whose vital powders and unguents were not to be spent on mere game aids. And the preprinted character sheets were not economical for making characters who would probably never see 2nd level.