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

[Philotomy Jurament]

I had heard all about D&D at school, and asked my father about it. Turns out he'd heard about it, too, so he bought the Holmes basic set and read through it one evening. I remember waiting (in agony) while he created a small dungeon (The Dungeon of Kraylor) -- seemed to take him hours. Then I rolled up three characters (an elf, a dwarf, and a fighter) and had at it.

My first encounter was a single hobgoblin guarding a wooden box. I killed the hobgoblin and found a bunch of copper inside. I remember thinking that was pretty cool, but wondering where the gold was.

Later, my PCs triggered a pit/slid trap and fell into a room dominated by the web of a giant spider. The elf got stuck in the web, was bitten and died. The other two managed to kill the spider, though.

Anyway, I was completely hooked. Having my father learn the game with me went a long way towards guiding me along the rules. Even so, when I started playing with my peers we didn't worry too much about balance or consistency. In the early days, it was common to have PCs created under different version of the rules, and it didn't matter a bit. You'd have some guys come to the table with "Fighting Men" from the original three booklets, some guys with Holmes Basic PCs, some guys with Moldvay/Cook PCs, and maybe the DM was running with game with a combination of Holmes and AD&D (we treated the AD&D books as supplements to our Holmes game, at first).

Having recently gone back to playing classic D&D, again, I've found that a lot of the rules that we later considered "stupid" or "makes no sense" were actually more sound than I thought. I've mentioned this in other threads, but I think applying the 3E concept of "rules mastery" to classic D&D, and understanding the "behind the curtain" thinking for those editions makes the game a lot more enjoyable. Robert Fisher talks about some of this on his web site about classic D&D.

 

[JediSoth]

I first started play D&D in second grade with the red boxed set that had the Erol Otus artwork and B1: The Keep on the Borderlands with it. We were babysitting my friend before school and he said he'd tried this cool new game over the weekend, so I said I'd give it a try. I think this was about the same time the D&D cartoon was on, because I remember creating a fighter named "Ranger" (I didn't get at the time that the character was named Hank)'. He was the DM and took me through Keep on the Borderlands. We didn't know how XP worked, but it came with lots of cool dice that we got to color in ourselves. By the time I got halfway through the module, I had two pages worth of treasure. We didn't care how I was carrying all that, and I used a different weapon for every attack just because I wanted to try them all out...despite not knowing what half of them were.

After a couple of year, we'd moved on to AD&D and actually had a decent understanding of the rules...for pre-teens.

Ah...good times.

JediSoth

 

[HiLiphNY]

Truly a classic. *Applause*

 

[Pinotage]

Heh-heh! Excellent post!

Somewhere in a box I have a small pile of adventures that I wrote when I was ten years old. I had a look at them several years back - man was that a laugh. I still fondly remember one of my characters, a half-orc fighter called Bogron. Everybody ended up calling him Bogroll, and being the youngest in the group it too me a while to figure out what that meant!

Pinotage

 

[Odhanan]

Here's the actual page from my DMG. Alas, it was actually "staff or (bo?) stick in stomach". I know that "N" on the table means "No", but I'm not sure what the "H", "C", or "A" stand for. "Heave", "Chuck", and... I dunno what.

Would that be be "high", "common" and "automatic"?

Was a great post, buzz. No question about it!

 

[Tolen Mar]

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.

Nope. Y'see, my dad picked up the boxed set (and later 1E) while I was a tyke. He and a couple of his friends, and all of his brothers would sit in our living room once a week and play DnD. They wouldn't let me in on it, since it ran past bedtime.

However, I did have access to the books, which I spent hours poring over and learning long before I got anyone to play with. In fact, my first adventures were small groups of characters in random dungeons. Remember the random dungeon tables in the back?

My first 'group' experience was a little later in high school. It started me on a long road of elven thieves.

 

[The Shaman]

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.

No, you're not the only one - but I don't feel foolish about knowing how the rules worked.

 

[Nikosandros]

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.

I also was 12 when I started with basic D&D... I must also be a terrible geek, because I also read the rules before beginnig to play...

 

[buzz]

Thankfully, my friend explained that hit points were easy to recover - just have sex. Yeap. I had sex with everything!

Best. Houserule. EVAR.

Laid the smack down on Thor and took his woman.

Ever notice that it was always Thor? Or Zeus. They were always the key gods you had to kill.

 

[buzz]

Would that be be "high", "common" and "automatic"?

"A" for "automatic" is probably right. The confusing bit is that I have the numbers listed as both "Str" and "1d20". Which was it? The world may never know.