D&D General First official D&D game product you owned?

[Parmandur]

I voted 2E core but please note that at release, in 1989, when I got it, the 2E core was not PHB, DMG, MM, it was PHB, DMG, MC - Monstrous Compendium, which was a ring-binder rather than an actual book, in a deeply misguided attempt to keep all the monsters in one place (there were a number of misguided RPG and wargame products taking this approach in the late '80s). The actual 2E MM didn't get released until 1993. I was in the US with my family and we visited some old friends, turned out their kids were into RPGs too, and I was astonished when we went to the RPG store and there was this new MM - we also got Dragon Mountain (a campaign boxed set) and together both products were my first exposure to Tony DiTerlizzi's art, which completely blew me away.

#nerdfacts #akshully

Yeah, never seen the binder, but in certain ears it seems ahead of it's time, since that's sort of what digital tools allow now without the fuss.

 

[LongTimeLurker]

I11 Needle. Bought that before I had the AD&D DMG, PHB or MMI.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah, never seen the binder, but in certain ears it seems ahead of it's time, since that's sort of what digital tools allow now without the fuss.

Conceptually, on paper rather than in reality, it must have seemed like minor genius. As noted, there were other RPG and wargame products doing the same sort of thing at the same time. Because you could have a truly huge number of monsters and still have them in alphabetical order and so on.

In reality, it was hideously impractical. The binder was not high-quality, or I dunno, maybe it was for 1989, but it was rubbish compared to the ones we had in the office in say, 2008. Very often it closed ever-slightly off-centre (and once that happened once, it happened more), and when it did that, all the pages would catch, preventing you from going quickly to the right place, and sort of micro-damaging a lot of the holes punched in the pages (to fix this you had to carefully lay it out, re-open it, and very carefully re-close the mechanism, which was pretty annoying - I can still almost feel the tension of the mechanism in my hands). Because they wanted it to fit way more stuff than a book, and presumably for cost reasons, the pages themselves whilst not super-cheap or light, were not strong either. Even after just a couple of years of moderate-to-heavy usage, when the PHB and DMG were still in perfect condition (it look 8 years of heavy usage for the PHB to start to fall apart), a lot of the MC pages had got torn at the holes. We fixed them and strengthened the others with little round stickers made for that purpose, but that was painstaking and not a long-term fix. IIRC the idea of it having everything alphabetical fairly quickly fell apart too because the pages were double-sided, so instead (IIRC) you had to have sections anyway, really making the reason for its existence in the first place kind of questionable. And because it was a large, extremely heavy ring-binder (once you'd started adding stuff to it), it was far less practical to carry than a book, and it damaged the pages inherently just by carrying it around (as they exerted weight on the holes, rather than being attached by a spine more evenly and permanently).

TSR must have realized this fairly quickly, even the MM came out less than four years after the MC did. I can't remember if monster-related products switched over to a book format before that, if not it was immediately after it.

 

[GuyBoy]

Without question, I’ve done or experienced many things that matter much more....my wife, daughter, grandkids, career, helping young people succeed, travel etc.......but in terms of an actual physical “thing”, that Original boxed set is the most important “thing” I have ever received.

 

[Parmandur]

Conceptually, on paper rather than in reality, it must have seemed like minor genius. As noted, there were other RPG and wargame products doing the same sort of thing at the same time. Because you could have a truly huge number of monsters and still have them in alphabetical order and so on.

In reality, it was hideously impractical. The binder was not high-quality, or I dunno, maybe it was for 1989, but it was rubbish compared to the ones we had in the office in say, 2008. Very often it closed ever-slightly off-centre (and once that happened once, it happened more), and when it did that, all the pages would catch, preventing you from going quickly to the right place, and sort of micro-damaging a lot of the holes punched in the pages (to fix this you had to carefully lay it out, re-open it, and very carefully re-close the mechanism, which was pretty annoying - I can still almost feel the tension of the mechanism in my hands). Because they wanted it to fit way more stuff than a book, and presumably for cost reasons, the pages themselves whilst not super-cheap or light, were not strong either. Even after just a couple of years of moderate-to-heavy usage, when the PHB and DMG were still in perfect condition (it look 8 years of heavy usage for the PHB to start to fall apart), a lot of the MC pages had got torn at the holes. We fixed them and strengthened the others with little round stickers made for that purpose, but that was painstaking and not a long-term fix. IIRC the idea of it having everything alphabetical fairly quickly fell apart too because the pages were double-sided, so instead (IIRC) you had to have sections anyway, really making the reason for its existence in the first place kind of questionable. And because it was a large, extremely heavy ring-binder (once you'd started adding stuff to it), it was far less practical to carry than a book, and it damaged the pages inherently just by carrying it around (as they exerted weight on the holes, rather than being attached by a spine more evenly and permanently).

TSR must have realized this fairly quickly, even the MM came out less than four years after the MC did. I can't remember if monster-related products switched over to a book format before that, if not it was immediately after it.

Yeah, concept versus reality can be a real problem in design.

 

[David Howery]

the Holmes boxed set. Followed a couple weeks later by the AD&D core ruelbooks.

 

[Irlo]

AD&D 1e DMG. I think. My memory is hazy.

 

[David Howery]

IIRC the idea of it having everything alphabetical fairly quickly fell apart too because the pages were double-sided, so instead (IIRC) you had to have sections anyway, really making the reason for its existence in the first place kind of questionable.

ironically, with the march of modern technology, you could do that now. All of the loose leaf MC books are available from DTRPG (I think), and if you really wanted to, you could download them all, print them all out to one monster per page (some would be two sided, most wouldn't, depending on if the monster originally took up two pages or not), and with about 5-6 big binders, you could do it all. It would be an enormous expense in download fees, paper, and ink, but you could do it....

 

[Nikosandros]

My first product was the Basic Set (in Italian) from the BECMI line.

 

[Bupp]

You could've just called this thread "Tell us you're old without telling us you're old".

Mentzer red box here.