Wait, is THAT how that works?!

[Li Shenron]

Wait, is THAT how that works?!

Uhm... do you really need to be still young for that? Because that is my reaction pretty much every time a new Sage Advice comes out

 

[Sir Brennen]

Just stumbled upon this thread, so....

High school sophomore year, playing the Holmes boxed edition, we rolled 4d6 take out the lowest for Hit Points on character creation, just like stats, because it was just inconceivable that you might start with only 1 hit point rolled on class' regular Hit Die. Many editions later, and it looks like maybe we had the right idea

Graduating quickly to AD&D when we hit 3rd level, we somehow missed the spell memorization rules altogether. We played that casters could just cast any spell from their class list for the appropriate level. Really slowed things down as people started flipping through the PHB to find the exactly right spell for the situation during combat.

 

[Bohandas]

When playing 1e, 1” of distance was 10 feet underground and 10 yards above ground. This was his weapon and spell ranges worked. However, I mistakenly thought it applied to spell areas too. We had really big fireballs.

Wait. I thought that in early editions the radius of fireball WAS different aboveground vs. underground. I could have sworn that was a thing in the Krynn computer games

Graduating quickly to AD&D when we hit 3rd level, we somehow missed the spell memorization rules altogether. We played that casters could just cast any spell from their class list for the appropriate level. Really slowed things down as people started flipping through the PHB to find the exactly right spell for the situation during combat.

To be fair, that is WAY closer to what you see in pretty much any book, movie, or TV show about magic that doesn't have the words "Dying Earth" somewhere on the cover.

Also, I once made the same mistake playing the fantasy adventure boardgame Hero Quest

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Wait. I thought that in early editions the radius of fireball WAS different aboveground vs. underground. I could have sworn that was a thing in the Krynn computer games

Nope, 1st-3rd edition it's AoE radius was always 30 feet. As stated in the necroed thread it was only ranges that changed in 1st edition. Lots of reasons a computer game might have implemented it differently.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Nope, 1st-3rd edition it's AoE radius was always 30 feet. As stated in the necroed thread it was only ranges that changed in 1st edition. Lots of reasons a computer game might have implemented it differently.

Not quite: D&D: Fireball Through the Ages - Bell of Lost Souls

 

[Laurefindel]

I did LARP for a few years before trying tabletop RPGs. As a matter of fact, I though tabletop RPGs were cheap knockoffs versions of LARP, but without the « LA ».

then I found out LARP were trying to recreate tabletop role play, not the other way around. I was shocked.

 

[Thirteenspades]

I know a lot of us got into D&D--whatever edition--when we were pretty young. And I know that many of us, as kids, pretty foolishly misunderstood some fundamental aspect of the game.

I cut my teeth on the Red Box, which only had Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic as alignments. So when I switched over to Advanced D&D, with its nine alignments, I somehow got it into my head that they were all a single continuum from "most good" (Lawful Good) to "most evil" (Chaotic Evil).

So, for instance, Lawful Evil was still pretty good, and "more good" than Neutral Good. I was seriously confused upon reading Tiamat's entry in the Monster Manual.

I'm curious what other people's goofy rules/concepts misunderstandings were.

I actually thought that too, till I was ten or eleven.

 

[Thirteenspades]

 

[Guest 6801328]

"Wait...you're supposed to divide up the XP between everybody?"

 

[Thirteenspades]

"Wait...you're supposed to divide up the XP between everybody?"

"but I did all the work!"