It's GM's Day! Tell us about your first GM!

[Black Dougal]

Mine was Jeremiah, he was the son of one of the woman who worked at my daycare. I was 7 he was 13 the year was 1981.

Some older kids in my apartment complex showed me all these cool "figurines" and books that caught my attention (PHB Tramp cover Moldvay Basic). I asked for D&D for Xmas. I got the books and took them to daycare and found out Jeremiah actually knew how to play.

I do not recall the 1st adventure but I know we played D&D, Gamma World, and paper football almost everyday at daycare. I also started visiting him with some other kids on the weekends as we grew up as he lived down the street and we'd play Telengard/Phantasie/Ultima and basketball while dodging his two giant Newfoundland dogs. His mother had to put up with us outside of daycare now as well lol. She was awesome, Ms Katherine. She would make sure we were fed and got outside and really helped me adjust to my parents' divorce.

We're still friends to this day. And did I need to find D&D and meet folks like him at that age. My parents had recently divorced and it was ugly and D&D and new friends were great for me. It was like a whole new world to my kid brain lol.

 

[sevenbastard]

My brother played D&D at Boy Scouts, then he asked and my mom bought him Moldvay Basic and he ran me through Keep on the Borderlands.

I was probably 6 or 7. Played Wandalf the Magic User and Gojack the thief. My brother ran two fighter NPCs.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm afraid I don't remember too much about the GM other than he was kind of quasi-hippy, and it was at NASFic75. I'd been introduced to OD&D by peering over the shoulder of a gent with what I initially took as some wargame charts at the costume competition. It was a West Coast game so, by many modern people's standards, kind of wild and wooly.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My first DM was my second cousin visiting from Canada. We'd just bought the 2E PHB and DMG, but not a Monstrous Compendium (we had no idea that was needed). My brother and I had never met her before. She was 22, and had played RPGs for years, and we didn't really understand the game, so she took us through everything about it, stayed up late writing an entire adventure for us, and then ran that adventure as long as she could before she had to go to the airport and back to Canada! Which was like, several hours. Also told us to buy an MC!

She also explained a bunch of points about how to DM to me, which were, frankly, ridiculously "ahead of their time" in retrospect, she was clearly from a more advanced-than-typical group! And she left us with the adventure and explained how it worked and how to write adventures and so on. I was about 11.

I feel like, if we hadn't got that grounding, we wouldn't have loved RPGs, because we would have just played them, not DM'd them, and frankly, all the DMs I had after her (except my brother) for a while were pretty bad (being boys my age or a little older). I ended up become the "guy everyone wanted to be DM" because I ran a game that everyone enjoyed more, and was less adversarial, but also not Monty Haul or the like, and it was definitely because of what she told me.

 

[The Soloist]

My first DM was strict on the rules. I was the only player with a 1 Hit Point Magic User. I entered the Cave of Chaos Kobold cave, and my M-U died three times within 10 minutes, killed by the same kobold. I asked if I could have 4 Hit Points to have better chances. He said no because that would break the rules. I decided D&D was a stupid game and never wanted to play again until my parents gave me the BX box that Christmas.

I was the DM for the other players of your first group, which included the above DM. They had maximum HPs at level one, and I believe we jump-started directly at level 3. That was in 1981.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

My first DM was strict on the rules. I was the only player with a 1 Hit Point Magic User. I entered the Cave of Chaos Kobold cave, and my M-U died three times within 10 minutes, killed by the same kobold. I asked if I could have 4 Hit Points to have better chances. He said no because that would break the rules. I decided D&D was a stupid game and never wanted to play again until my parents gave me the BX box that Christmas.

I was the DM for the other players of your first group, which included the above DM. They had maximum HPs at level one, and I believe we jump-started directly at level 3. That was in 1981.

Playing a first level magic-user back in the day was rough. It was a real trial by fire to get out of those low levels.

The "max HP at 1st level" concept is a good one, one I didn't come to until it was codified in the rules of 3e. But I also didn't make anyone start off with a character with 1 HP back in the day.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Playing a first level magic-user back in the day was rough. It was a real trial by fire to get out of those low levels.

The "max HP at 1st level" concept is a good one, one I didn't come to until it was codified in the rules of 3e. But I also didn't make anyone start off with a character with 1 HP back in the day.

Honestly, it wasn't easy for anyone to get out of first level. OD&D fighters only had a D8 hit points, so if you didn't have enough Con (and were playing post-Greyhawk) to boost it up, pretty much any serious opponent could potentially put you down with one hit, and there was no negative-hits margin in those days.

Honestly if it wasn't for Sleep spells and Turn Undead, I sometimes wonder if anyone would have managed it.

 

[takai]

I was 14 in the early 80s and a friend from school ran my first game for me: AD&D. I still remember the character and adventure I played. We were living in northern germany and nobody had ever heard of this game. His dad had been on a trip to the states and wanted to bring souvenirs. He went into some game shop in NY and asked for something cool. Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide and Monster Manual it was! A couple of years later we had three active groups playing the living daylights out of the system.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Honestly, it wasn't easy for anyone to get out of first level. OD&D fighters only had a D8 hit points, so if you didn't have enough Con (and were playing post-Greyhawk) to boost it up, pretty much any serious opponent could potentially put you down with one hit, and there was no negative-hits margin in those days.

Honestly if it wasn't for Sleep spells and Turn Undead, I sometimes wonder if anyone would have managed it.

True enough. Thieves also had a bad time of it, with them being terrible at the things they were supposed to do in the beginning. And with poison being save or die, being terrible at finding and disarming traps was not great for life expectancy.

 

[The Soloist]

True enough. Thieves also had a bad time of it, with them being terrible at the things they were supposed to do in the beginning. And with poison being save or die, being terrible at finding and disarming traps was not great for life expectancy.

Imagine my friend's face when he saw the thief's percentage was now spread on 36 levels in the D&D (Mentzer) Companion set. The chances of success for thief skills were even worse!

Energy Drain (losing levels) from some undead scared the sh@t out of players. They ran away if the cleric failed his turning attempts.

I love BX and still solo it from time to time, but I had to make a few house rules, to make it palatable.