D&D General What is your most prized Dungeons and Dragons Product?

For me, it's the white box and supplements that my wife nabbed for ten bucks at a Half-Price Books years ago.

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The bookstore didn't know what they were selling, and she didn't know what she was buying, but she knew from the instant she came home and saw my gobsmacked face that it was a big deal.
I miss the days when you could pretty much get any old D&D book for between $5 and $20. But time moves on inexorably.
 

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The PHB was 15 dollars in 1980. That price adjusted for inflation would be 57.46 dollars today. The 2024 D&D players handbook on amazon is 49.99 but it retails for 59.95. So pretty close in price anyway.
I should have specified that I was talking about the used market...I was thinking of the early 00s, when I went into my FLGS and bought the Greyhawk folio for $20. Stuff like that rather than buying books when they were new. I feel like once we hit the '10s, prices started skyrocketing on the second hand market.
 

I should have specified that I was talking about the used market...I was thinking of the early 00s, when I went into my FLGS and bought the Greyhawk folio for $20. Stuff like that rather than buying books when they were new. I feel like once we hit the '10s, prices started skyrocketing on the second hand market.
Yeah. Used goods almost cost the same as an unopened product.
 



I would like to amend/replace my previous post:

In the late 1970s, my dad came home from work (federal government) with a big black binder that could definitely stop a bullet and may well have been designed to do so. Inside were lots of cellophane page protectors, filled with photocopies of the original three OD&D books plus Greyhawk, Eldritch Wizardry and Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes.

He showed it to me once and put it away, presumably because he may have thought better about the cover of Eldritch Wizardry (hubba hubba) until I returned from summer camp having played AD&D in the sense that a kid there had the PHB and ran us through an adventure with no dice that was clearly him just vamping off the image on the cover. (We fought lizardmen and when we tried to escape, ran into various pit and crushing wall traps until I was left cowering in the dark, hiding from lizardmen until the bell rang for dinner.)

Once I came back, raving about D&D, the faucet turned on and we soon owned the three AD&D core books, both of the early Basic sets (one of which featured chits during the Great Dice Shortage) and so on.

He pulled back out the binder full of pirated OD&D materials (the photocopying probably was more expensive than the super-deluxe binder, back in those days) and we read through it as a strange curiosity, even more arcane and weird than the 1E core books.

I've never run OD&D and can't imagine ever doing so, but the original binder is a treasure, as it was my dad -- way too busy to play D&D himself until retirement decades later -- connecting with his sons by committing a bit of light theft from the federal government as part of letting his nerd flag fly.

My dad is 80 now and played Shadowdark with me twice in the last month, is eager for our next 5E Radiant Citadel game in the new year and will likely be playing Mothership with me later this month.
 
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