It is always interesting to read stories about how different tables played the same game back in the day.
In my main AD&D 1E group most people seemed to settle into playing the same type of character over and over, usually human warriors or elf wizard types, whereas the whole reason why I preferred AD&D was the much larger variety of race and class combinations compared to B/X and BECMI. I wanted to try as many as possible, although I never got to them all.
I played several clerics and druids, often because nobody else wanted to be the combat medic. As a cleric I rarely got to use any 1st level spells other than
Cure Light Wounds (shouldn’t those spells have been called
Heal Wounds anyway?). I usually picked one of the mythological deities, often from the Norse pantheon, and occasionally I could get the DM to agree to some minor Aesir-flavored special ability in order to get away from the usual “Knight Hospitaller with the serial numbers filed off” that was the standard 1E cleric.
In retrospect we were not particularly good players or DMs. We were hack-and-slashers uninterested in urban adventures or NPC interactions, irked by puzzles and traps that offered no XP or treasure. But it is remarkable how well we absorbed some of the tactical aspects of the game inherited from D&D’s wargame roots. We always designated a marching order, with a tough character in last place in case someone tried to sneak up on us, although in practice DMs rarely tried this. Each character had a missile weapon, even if it was just a sling, in case we had to trade volleys with archers at a distance. I sometimes played female PCs who might save the day in case we ever faced harpies or nymphs who could mesmerize male characters, which never came up in real play, not even once
.
But most of all we would never dream of going into a dungeon without a decent spread of classes, including several warriors, at least one “blaster caster” mage with good damage spells, at least one thief to open doors and treasure chests, and at least one cleric for healing. So it is surprising to read that people played without clerics simply because nobody wanted to play one.
We also had a “one for all, all for one” spirit that seems to have been rare, judging by the stories here. We rarely if ever discussed any of this in a Session Zero, but it was just understood that some things were beyond the pale. Nobody really wanted to play Lawful Good, for the same reason that everybody’s favorite Star Wars character was Han Solo and not Luke Skywalker, namely that everybody liked bad boys who don’t play by the rules but get results. Yet nobody ever played actual Evil characters either, so there were no assassins or half-orcs in our games and we tended to forget they even existed. I was (predictably) the only one who ever tried a paladin, but we had plenty of rangers because we followed the Rule of Cool, and Aragorn son of Arathorn was definitely cool.
Player vs. player and even PC vs. PC was unheard of. The thief player might crack an occasional joke about stealing from the party, but we never even pickpocketed NPCs because we were scared of the town guard. This approach extended to magic items as well. We always distributed items on an ad hoc basis according to who could make best use of them. PCs would often trade or give each other items when a better one came along. For instance, a mage with a
ring of protection +1 might simply give it to the thief after getting
bracers of defense AC 5, because the mage now had a pretty good AC and the thief needed help on saving throws against the old “poison needle concealed in the treasure chest lock” gag.
When I was in sixth grade and still learning D&D from my Moldvay Basic Set, I was running a game for one player controlling a whole party, which we sometimes did because we never had enough players in our very small community (besides, we were used to the idea from playing CRPGs like
The Bard’s Tale,
Ultima, and
Wizardry). The player disliked clerics and did not want to bother bringing one along, but I argued with him and insisted that he had to have one because he needed healing spells. In protest he gave the unwanted cleric a silly name: “M&M”, like the candy
. I should have just given him some healing potions and got on with the game.
.
