Wow. That would be a seriously item-heavy campaign right there.
Including cursed ones...
Wow. That would be a seriously item-heavy campaign right there.
It wasn't until the great dragon-turtle hunt began. True story.Wow. That would be a seriously item-heavy campaign right there.
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.
That's awesome
"I think the vendor sold me a busted sword, it only does 2 points of damage!"
In the 1E DMG and PHB, if I recall correctly, there are some tables of random things that have 24 items in the list. At the top of the column listing the numbers from 1 to 24, were the helpful instructions "d12, d6", implying that, in order to randomly generate one of the items in the table, one rolled a d12 and a d6. Needless to say, even when I was 11, I could see that the highest number it was possible to generate on those two dice was 18; so I was mystified how to randomly generate a number between 1 and 24 from those two dice.
It was only many, many years later that I overheard someone saying "roll a d12, and then roll a d6, and if the result of the d6 is 4, 5 or 6, add 12 to the d12 roll".
EUREKA!
Cheers, Al'Kelhar
The original Monster Manual didn't have experience point values for monsters killed. That information was in Appendix E of the 1E DMG.
In the far-right column, under "XP Value" it gives the xp base and a variable for how many hitpoints the monster had.
Example: Orc 10+1/hp. So an orc with three hit points would be worth 13 xp.
However, we thought you somehow gained hit points by killing monsters. So whoever dealt the final blow to that orc would get one hit point. If he was wounded, he regained one hp. But if he was already at max hp, his maximum hit points would go up one.
Needless to say, it was like Hackmaster where everyone was jumping around to try to get the final blow on every monster.
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.
1e PHB Fireball except said:The burst of the fireball does not expend a considerable amount of pressure, and the burst will generally conform to the shape of the area in which it occurs, thus covering an area equal to its normal spherical volume.[The area which is covered by the fireball is a total volume of roughly 33,000 cubic feet (or yards)]
Actually, 1e Fireball was the only spell where the area changed outdoors. Fireballs are very big.