Admit it. Who else did this?

[wedgeski]

Just to make it more confusing, Steve "SJ Games" Jackson wrote some of the Fighting Fantasy books. According to his bibliography, he's written "Scorpion Swamp, Demons of the Deep, Robot Commando, Battle Road, and (with Creede and Sharleen Lambard) Fuel's Gold." I'm not sure all of those are in the Fighting Fantasy series, but I'm pretty sure Scorpion Swamp is.

*Wreeeennnnnch* Demons of the Deep was one of the last ones I ever bought, and so was certainly part of the FF series.

 

[Mercule]

Actually, other than the intro module in the BD&D red box, I don't think I used prepared adventures for the first couple of years I played. Even after that, they never really clicked. The "Sunless Citadel" AP was the first series of modules I ever really used much. Well, besides I6, but that's different.

 

[Navior]

I was first introduced to the game by someone who was also quite new to it at the time. He didn't understand how levels worked, so we just rolled a d6 to determine our characters' levels. Regardless of what was rolled, though, it made no difference because the "higher" level characters didn't get anything from it and were really still just first level.

Also, for the first while that I played, I thought magic missile was a magic item you could carry around and throw at people.

Many years later, I played with a DM (who was an experienced DM) who drew out all the maps in advance in miniature scale on large pieces cardboard. The maps showed all the secret doors and secret passages. On the first day of the campaign, we all commented that we could see where the secret doors were. He replied that it was okay because our characters would still have to search for them. When we pointed out that we knew exactly where to look, he responded that that was great because it meant we wouldn't waste time searching in areas where there wasn't a secret door.

 

[Chaldfont]

I'm sure my first group wasn't the only one which didn't know what the various polearms looked like (or even that they were polearms!). Obviously the glaive was that magical remove-controlled spinning spikey thing from the movie Krull.

Many of my fighting characters carried one or more of those things.

 

[Mouseferatu]

I'm sure my first group wasn't the only one which didn't know what the various polearms looked like (or even that they were polearms!). Obviously the glaive was that magical remove-controlled spinning spikey thing from the movie Krull.

Many of my fighting characters carried one or more of those things.

Don't get me wrong, I'm laughing with you, not at you. I'd totally forgotten, but we did that exact same thing.

 

[freebfrost]

I didn't have that exact problem, but I had a few of my own.

• First was the ruling that anything used as a weapon does at least 1 hp of damage. Not quite sure where I got this one, but this ended up with the infamous "Large Sack Massacre" in the kobold caves...
  
• I lost track of the almost TPKs that happened, but as the survivors inevitably retreated from a cave, they met a new batch of fellow adventurers JUST OUTSIDE who joined up with them for instant revenge! (Not even a "You look trustworthy" was needed.)
  
• The party had been cornered by berserkers at one point and were holed up in a cave behind a solid door. So, using all of my 12-year old canniness, I had a berserker try to bluff his way inside, with the following exchange:
  
  
  Berserker knocks on door.
  
  "Who is it?"
  
  "HERCULES!"
  
  "Hercules? Prove it!"
  
  The berserker smashes the door down, and subsequently loses the initiative roll.
  
  The party elf attacks, hits, and does maximum damage, killing "Hercules" in one blow.​

We still talk about that last one. :\

 

[Trahnesi]

I remember cleaning out the Keep on the Borderlands...
the keep, not the caves.
I was 8 at the time, but I figured that since it was the name of the adventure, it must be an evil place and should be rid of everyone.

I was wondering if anyone else had done that. After all, they gave stats for everything in the keep, right? If it has stats, it can be killed, right? (Kinda like all those gods in Deities and Demigods that we killed...)

My first game was as a player in KotB. My first character, who we called "Hopeless". He was a cleric, 'cause his highest stat was in Wisdom (13). We never made it to the caves - a wandering monster attack of skeletons killed us. Hopeless died trying in vain to turn them.

*Sigh*. Good times...

 

[lukelightning]

...If it has stats, it can be killed, right? (Kinda like all those gods in Deities and Demigods that we killed...)
/QUOTE]

I remember doing that. I assumed that the goal of playing D&D was to kill all of the DM's minions. If they happened to be the Abbot of the Temple or Percival the Peasant, it didn't matter.

I also thought "Keep on the Borderlands" was a command. "Why do I have to keep on the borderlands?"

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

A certain poster on these boards once told me of playing in Hommlet, and going through the village, knocking on doors. When the person answered, the PC's would ask, "What's your name?"

If the DM made up a name on the spot, the person lived.

If the DM looked it up in the module, the person died.

Oddly enough, this seemed to work perfectly.

I can say from personal experience that one of my early DM'ing revelations was realizing that how I said something drastically affected how the players perceived something. Reading the same exact description with a different inflection could cause the players to react in certain ways...

 

[buzzard]

My first experience playing D&D, we played in the Keep like others. I'm not sure if we went room by room numerically or not. What we did was roll to hit against the monsters armour class, and if we rolled higher than the AC we hit. The harder the monster the easier it became to kill them.

To think, you merely predicted 3rd ed by decades.

buzzard