I don't know how I ever managed to game as a kid

[Kerune]

My older cousin had showed us how to generate a d20 roll with a d6 and a d10 and as I recall we pretty much ran combat as a contest of d20 rolls. If the monster rolled high we lost a hp. If my brother or I rolled high the monster died.

Wow, this reminded me of a time before I got my own boxed set. It must have been almost 30 years now (based on my age lol) and a friend invited me to play this roleplaying game. I said 'Ok." and ended up at this big table with about 8 older guys in a strange house.

I knew NOTHING about the game and these guys told me nothing. They asked me some questions like "You want to be big and strong right? You want to be the guy who holds my gear right?" and soon I was rolling a D20. Every so often I'd roll to them saying "Yay he hit it!" to "Should he lose an eye or hand?". Eventually I stopped rolling and and 2-3 hours went by without a roll. I asked why I hadn't rolled and got an answer like this "Oh, you died and got eaten by the Troll! You can stay and watch us play if you want?"

I noticed no one else died and after a couple game sessions "watching" I decided DMing my own game was the way to go! All I remember is wondering "What does a 2 mean? Is a 7 good?". The scary thing, is that to this day I have always DM'd more than played.

Those guys messed me for up LIFE!

K

 

[Drowbane]

Ahh, memories! D&D was so fun back when none of us had any clue as to what we were doing!! (it still is, but still )

 

[jmucchiello]

I'm feeling my geek at the moment because I didn't experience the above. I was a voracious reader and geek that I am actually read the rules before attempting to play. I'm not the only one am I? Now I'm feeling all foolish about it.

 

[Eosin the Red]

Great Read!

LMCLAO!

I was too poor to actually buy anything in them days. Instead I cracked a box open and looked through the rules after a friend suggested that we "run each other" in a D&D game. (Run each other meaning that we both played and GM'd at the same time).

I knew that somehow I had got it wrong or the book was wrong cause 4 hit points just didn't cut it. Instead, everytime you got healed it added to the overall hit points. Thankfully, my friend explained that hit points were easy to recover - just have sex. Yeap. I had sex with everything! Laid the smack down on Thor and took his woman. My hit points knew no limit, plus I liked the hammer! But hey, when you are 7th level with 5,190 hit points whipping out Thor's hammer or Excalibur (depending on need), what isn't fun (we got more chicks that way).

I still don't know which of us was the little sicko. Him for instagating the "hit point rules" or me for revelling in them.

 

[blargney the second]

Great post, buzz

It's funny how little balanced rules matter when you're a kid!
-blarg

 

[shilsen]

I'm feeling my geek at the moment because I didn't experience the above. I was a voracious reader and geek that I am actually read the rules before attempting to play. I'm not the only one am I? Now I'm feeling all foolish about it.

Nah! Many of us actually taught ourselves to play by reading the rules. Of course, I was 24 when I did that, which may have been a factor.

 

[Imruphel]

Wonderful post, buzz!

Please save it for posterity before it's eaten by the next board crash.

 

[jmucchiello]

I was 12, Shilsen. I'm feeling awkward among geeks here. I guess this is why I also don't have any stories about 130th level characters or adventuring with hundreds of artifacts in my backpack.

 

[Bront]

Nah! Many of us actually taught ourselves to play by reading the rules. Of course, I was 24 when I did that, which may have been a factor.

I was 7 when I did it. Though, technicaly, my father helped teach me the rules as well.

He wrote an AD&D (1st Ed) Character Generator program on the C64 that worked well enough for me to make my own party of 6 and run them through a game of random encounters myself.

I was a huge fan of rangers, mostly because I read the Ranger Rick magazine, and in Ultima 4, my character was a Ranger after answering the questions (And the character's name was Bront, which is where I get my user name from).

 

[Bront]

I was 12, Shilsen. I'm feeling awkward among geeks here. I guess this is why I also don't have any stories about 130th level characters or adventuring with hundreds of artifacts in my backpack.

I have those stories! mostly because the GM was off by a factor of 10 on how much XP it required to advance every level beyond whatever the highest level listed was in 2nd Ed.