What formed your idea of what D&D is to you?

[Mallus]

My formation period is far from over, what with only close to 26 years experience.

Same here. My idea of 'ideal D&D' was formed by the 25-or-so years I've been playing/DM. Obviously its changed over time... and will continue to do so.

Though I will say that my idea of the ideal group dynamic, what I like to call the high-trust environment, was really shaped by my current gaming group, who I've been playing with for the past 5 (wait, more? yikes!) years.

 

[1auxy]

The Red Box Basic Rules was what I started out with. Playing 3.5 and Castles and Crusades now-a-days. Still use races as classes, still use the same dungeon design symbols, still use some of those same dice...still having fun!

 

[The Green Adam]

Great topic...

I had this conversation recently with some friends...I was introduced to D&D at a fairly young age (8) by my friend Tom who was a grade younger then me. He had recieved the game as a birthday gift and was taught how to play by his older brother who already GMed.

Now, at 8 I was already reading at a high school level, watched Star Wars 5 times (my grandpa was a theatre manager), watched Star Tek with my dad every Saturday night and was ahue comic book geek. When introduced to D&D I thought the wizard 'Shazam' had struck me with his lightning bolt. It was he single most awesome thing I had ever seen.

Now, my already full-on nerd background gave me a different perspective on adventure gamng that continues to this day. Most of my players and I never enountered or developed the conditions that befall many other groups. We had:

Little to No Hack n' Slash
We were the heroes. Heroes don't needlessly kill people (Source: Comic Books, Star Trek)

Little Looting of the Bodies
Unless you need their uniforms, keys, a weapon 'cause you lost yours, Heroes rarely ever blatantly rip off the dead (Source: Comic Books, Star Trek, Star Wars)

No Random Killing NPCs instead of Talking to Them
NPCs are interesting characters with information. If heroes just shot first and asked questions later how would you ever learn the plot or have a contact you can call on another time (Source: Cop Shows, Comic Books, Most Fantasy Novels, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.)

No Min-Max/ Power Gamers/ Rules Lawyers
Whose more powerful Thor or Superman? Batman has no powers but could probably take out both. My favorite superhero is Green Lantern. Dave likes Capt. America. Dave doesn't care that I seem more 'powerful'. He wants to create a cool character. Aragorn can kick Frodo's butt yet its Frodo who goes to Mt. Doom. Make and play the character you want to play. (Source: Comic Books, Fantasy Novels)

From very early on this lead us to check out other games that were more flexible and customizable. We had a tendencey to play Supers and SciFi a lot more then Fantasy. We first learned about terms like Monty Haul, Power Gamer, Rules Lawyer, Hack n' Slash, etc. from Dragon magazine and I remember one of our guys saying,"Seriously? People do that? Why?".

Unfortunately my ideal of the perfect D&D does not exist. To me, while I wax nostalgic over the many cool campaigns I've run, D&D is far from the ideal game for my style of play.

AD

 

[Treebore]

I have yet to achieve my "ideal D&D". I am still striving. I do know its all about the fun, and I have come to realize that my earliest gaming days have the special place they do because we were far more worried about having "cool fun" than we were following the rules.

So with that realization I have chosen a rules set that allows me that "free form" nature as part of the games inherent design philosophy. This in turn allows me to concentrate on the players, their decisions, and what I need to do to make fun decisions based on what they decide to do. This also allows me to allow the "cool stuff" into my games. My players have Girdles of Giant Strength combined with Gauntlets of Ogre Power and a Hammer of Thunderbolts. My players have the Book of Infinite Spells, Staff of the Magi, Staff of Life, Invulnerable Coats of Armor, Holy Avengers, Vorpal weapons, weapons of Sharpness, Rings of Wishes, etc....

Why? Because its that crazy cool stuff that made the game fun back in the day, and it still makes it crazy cool fun today.

Plus its been fun for me, its a fun challenge to allow my players to kick butt, take names, have the super cool items, let them be rich, and still keep my games challenging with a veneer of cohesive "reality" over it. I definitely seem to have a very different view and philosophy about what is and is not broken in games than I have seen many posters talk about.

 

[Desdichado]

Part of the deal for me is that I don't self-identity as a "D&D player". I self-identify as a gamer, and I play a lot of games. For several years, I had consciously left D&D behind and wasn't even interested in D&D per se. Even though the last several years have turned that around, I still don't self-identify as a D&D player exactly. In fact, for many years, what D&D was to me was a bunch of the things that I thought were wrong with gaming; pointless hack and slashing, unremitting dungeoncrawling, arbitrary limitations, extremely gamist systems, etc. I mean, I don't think most of those things now, but that's largely because I didn't have a really positive D&D experience until 3e came out. I was very early frustrated with 1e and even B/X's ability to emulate "the fantasy experience" as I read it in novels and whatnot.

Therefore, I don't necessarily have a suite of expectations about D&D per se either. It just happens to be the game I play most frequently. And my tastes have changed significantly over the years, too. I'm sure plenty of people would say my games are "not D&D." The current game that I'm running has flintlock pistols, balloon-powered airships, no elves, no dwarves, no halflings, no gnomes, and no class that has a spell-casting progression (although I've got two hobgoblin characters, psionics, and other weirdness, I'm consciously avoiding a lot of the stereotypical "D&Disms" too. We've never been anywhere near a dungeon-like facility of any kind, and we don't even do much in the way of XP and treasure.

 

[Clavis]

I grew up in northeastern NJ in the 80's, and D&D was heavily associated with the Heavy Metal music scene. No effort was made to play down the "evil" image that D&D often had in the media at the time. In fact, most players I knew of played either Neutral or Evil-aligned PCs. Good and or Lawful aligned PCs were rare, and those who played Lawful Good characters could be ridiculed for it. PCs were out for Glory, Gold, and Girls. Typically, if you rescued a princess it was because she was hot and rich. If you saved the town from doom, you expected to be made ruler of it. The problem with Orcs wasn't that they were evil, it was that they collected the loot the PCs wanted to have. Making deals with demons and using dark magic to destroy your enemies was perfectly acceptable. The King and the clergy weren't assumed to be good people trying to help keep the land safe - they were the oppressive authorities of oppressive societies that tried to keep the PCs down. The players expected game play to be saturated with gratuitous, over-the-top violence. To this day I never run "the PCs are good and honorable people who save the world and help poor widows because it's the right thing to do" campaigns. Instead I wind up running "The PCs are amoral mercenaries and thieves who accidentally do good and get mistaken for heroes by the peasants, while actually trying to get rich and powerful" campaigns.

 

[Khairn]

Despite the fact that I started playing D&D in the late 70's, IMO my idea of what constituted a "D&D Game" was formed when playing Forgotten Realms (mid 80's), Spelljammer (late 80's) and Planescape (mid 90's). That was one of the heydays of gaming in my life, and the fantastic and iconic settings that TSR published really cemented a style of play that I would always associate with D&D. Shortly after Planescape was published I dropped AD&D altogether, but used the setting with other systems.

I came back to D&D with 3E and have played 3E campaigns in each of those settings, which really resonated as extensions of my earlier campaigns.