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Admit it. Who else did this?

Brilliant! It's like computer games like Baldur's Gate. If someone has a name, they might be important. If they are "peasant" you can ignore 'em.

Kid Charlemagne said:
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.
 

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My favorite early goofs:

1. HD = HP I had a minotaur which was supposed to kill some PCs but of course the dwarf hit and did 6 points of damage...well the minotaur only had 6 HD so he bit it early. I am surprised it took me until then to realize the error because I now remember skeletons dying with every hit...

2. Dragon Breath I had no idea what dragon breath did for damage so when my players met their first dragon, a white of course (with just 6 HD/HP) it breathed and hit the whole party. I ruled that they were frozen for about 3 rounds. The dragon stood there while they were frozen and waited for them to thaw and kill it.

3. My first ever game I was an elf with a blink dog companion and my friend (it was his character I was playing) DM'ed. I basically followed the map to a big castle and tricked Tiamat into eating my now poisoned blink dog before eating me (this was the DM's idea of course!)
 

We never had big groups, so we'd usually have a DM PC, a PC run by the DM as an extra to fill out the party numbers.

My brother was running an adventure, and it starts with "if you will be playing in this adventure, don't read any further or it'll ruin your fun".

So, the DM stopped reading at that point, so as not to ruin his fun...
 

I started playing quite young, so my goofs were many (and quite humorous). Here are some:

1. Like the first poster, I played modules straight through from encounter 1, room 1, all the way to the end, in numeric order. The maps? Nice window dressing.

2. When Magic Users leveled up, they got the total number of spells indicated by their level, every time. Thus, for example, when a seventh level magic user hit level eight, he got an additional four first level spells, three second level spells, three third level spells, and two fourth level spells. An eighth level magic user had 44 spells!

3. I either mis-read or skipped the whole spell memorization thing, so once you had a spell, you could cast it unlmited times per day. Magic users and clerics were literally walking battleships, flinging lightning bolts, fireballs, and flame strikes every round, killing everything in their path.

4. One character in my campaign had so much gold, we stopped counting for a while and just added another zero to his total. He bought whatever he wanted by just erasing a zero. Thus, he had 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 gold. He buys a backpack? Erase a zero. A castle (he had several)? Erase a zero.

5. Encumbrance? What encumbrance? We had a half-dozen notebook pages each with lists of 10 foot poles, torches, +2 battleaxes, staves of the magi, decks of many things, you name it. When we fought stuff we'd just flip pages until we found a suitable weapon.

6. No concept of good NPCs. When we played Keep on the Borderlands, for instance, everyone in the keep was an enemy to be killed. And we killed them all and took their stuff.

7. I had a 45th level fighter.

I'll post more later when I think of them.
 



I never did the glave thing, mine was the Morning star. Thats what we called throwing stars when i lived in Okinawa, so all my characters carried pouches full of those things. It wasn't my thing but i had a DM that insisted wizards could cast the full min/max spells per level listed on the Intelligence chart, so my 1st level wizard could cast 18 sleep spells per day, KotB was a breeze.
 

Kid Charlemagne said:
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.
Bwah ha ha! Something very much like this happened in the RttToEE campaign I ran. I had several Rat Bastard moments with seemingly friendly NPC's. The players all decided that they should kill anyone with a name. "The bartender," "The blacksmith," and "The tailor" were all ok. But Tymerian, Chatrilion, and Y'dey...they were all marked for death!

On the subject of gaming gaffes...our group has generally been pretty good with the rules. The worst mistake I ever made was the first time I ever DM'd. I *really* wanted a dramatic, angsty game, so I let the bad guy escape from the final battle and execute his dastardly plan without giving the PC's a chance. Oooh, were they mad...

Spider
 

I'm supposed to be working, but this thread is hilarious.

I started playing AD&D in college, with an experienced DM, so our problems weren't quite on the same scale. However, the DM was a little lax in explaining the details of the character creation process, and since there was only one book for six or so of us to share, we missed some of the finer points. The party started off (with my character as the leader, since she had the highest Charisma!) and traveled through the dense forest. Eventually we came to a deep river. DM asks how we get across.

"In my boat!" answers one bright fellow, who had used his extra money to buy himself one at the start.
"A boat! How'd you get a boat out into the deep forest?"
"In my wagon, of course!"

A similar glossing-over-the-details issue got me when I was DMing for my younger brothers, who at the time were about 12. Their vocabularies were good, but didn't include everything in the game. One kept producing all this equipment, and finally I got fed up and asked him where he was carrying it all.

"On my pack animal, of course."
"I didn't think you had enough money to buy a horse."
"No, I didn't, so I bought a capon."

The hilarity that ensued at the thought of the poor little rooster carrying this enormous pile of stuff interrupted the game for several minutes, and was referred to often in later years, much to his embarrassment.
 

LOL Replicant2!
That is exactly what we did.
Magic Users spell progression was cumulative just like you did, we had pages and pages of stuff, and buy anything we wanted b/c too dang rich. One fella had a database (this was back in the early 80s) with his PC on his PC.

In the beginning we also rolled a d20 to determine our saving throw at first level.
 

Into the Woods

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