It's D&D's 40th anniversary. Tell me your D&D history, and what it means to you!

[cavalier973]

I remember starting with the Black Box, which was a mistake, because it was the one that introduced real spellcasting, and I accidently turned my sister into a toad. My parents were NOT. HAPPY. But we had fun until Buddy's character (also named "Buddy") got eaten by a dragon. The DM had this rule that if your character died, you had to kill yourself. Well, Buddy wasn't going to do it, and so the DM told me I had to hunt him down and kill him. Well, I sort of liked Buddy, so I killed my neighbor's dog, instead (using magic missile; it must have taken like four days, because I kept having to rest up and rememorize the spell, you know), and took its liver to the DM, who ate it and got worms. Good times.








Just Kidding.

What really happened was that I was quite interested in the game, but was prevented from playing it because some people think that stories like the above are true. I eventually purchased the 3rd Edition Basic Game a few months before 4th edition was announced. Then I bought a lot of 4th edition stuff (especially Essentials), which I play with my kids on the rare occasions I feel up to it. In fact, I pulled the game out tonight, and played a little bit with the kiddos, not realizing that it was the 40th anniversary of D&D's creation. Freaky.

We had fun, until my daughter turned her brother into a toad. She is so grounded.

 

[Shemeska]

Compared to many folks around here, I'm kinda new to D&D (and all RPGs) since I didn't actually play the game till sometime in 2000. I was introduced to it by a good friend in college (first time she invited me over she had a 3e PHB sitting on the bed in her dorm room), and with her as the metaphorical crack-dealer I joined a game shortly thereafter.

Now that was not my first introduction to the game, but only the first time I played, and the first time anyone actually explained it all to me. My first introduction was of course the 1980's D&D cartoon, and the mid-80s AD&D 'Endless Quest' books. At some point in the 80's I also did character creation at a friend's house though we never actually started a game, but I did end up buying a copy of the MM2 at the local Waldenbooks because it just looked cool. But I tucked it under my arm and didn't want my mom to see it because of all of the 'it leads children to Satan worship!' panic from the time period (and yeah, my mom did ask me 'That's not something you shouldn't have is it?'). I think that book got sold at the next garage sale we had. I truly don't know. But at least for a month or so it was amazingly awesome to look at and just get inspired by the monsters.

Fast forward a bit to 2000 again. Around the time I started playing 3e I also discovered both Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment. Both were awesome, and the latter made me seek out 2e Planescape material with the joy of a child opening presents on Christmas morning. Within a few years I'd played in a few very abortive FR games (dysfunctional group), a horrendous 'Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil' campaign (horrible DM), and a really enjoyable FR/Planescape/Homebrew mashup. I think around 2002/2003 I started running a game over the Xmas holiday with the players in that RttToEE campaign as a oneshot. Well... the "oneshot" ran for the next three years, the RttToEE game never restarted, and since then I've played in a number of 3e and 3.5 games, as well as a large amount of Shadowrun and a few other assorted systems.

In grad school, around 2004 I think, while running that Planescape campaign I started writing fiction just on a lark, and shortly thereafter started my first Storyhour here on Enworld, and a little after that I tried pitching material to Dragon magazine. The Storyhour is I think well over 1-2k pages in Word last I checked, and still ongoing (it's about 40% through that campaign now). At some point Wes Schneider at Paizo wrote a tiny bit of my storyhour fanon regarding the fate of Mercykiller Factol Alisohn Nilesia into an article he worked on in Dragon. I emailed him and then pitched a ton of stuff their way. Eventually a few things got picked up in both Dragon and Dungeon, and then once the magazine's ended their printed incarnation I started writing material for Paizo's Golarion setting, both the 3.5 and Pathfinder version. I've also done a number of 3PP things for PF as well.

Because of D&D I have an amazing hobby and it pointed me into what has been a damn fun second job at times with freelance work, plus pushing me to write more straight up fiction. Plus as it turns out, my wife and I ran across each other at an NC Gameday around a year before we were introduced by some mutual friends. She also made it into Dragon magazine herself a number of years prior to me. It has provided me and my friends a metric ton of enjoyment, many laughs, one point where I made my players actually cry at the table (and threaten to hurt me over an NPC's actions), and just been a really awesome and enriching thing in my life.

 

[Lindeloef]

Compared to many folks around here, I'm kinda new to D&D (and all RPGs) since I didn't actually play the game till sometime in 2000.

Can beat you there ^^

I started buying D&D(4e) stuff in September 2010 (easy to remember thanks to EnWorld). I watched a group streaming their Sessions online and was hooked. So I bought some Books and ran a face-to-face campaign for some friends once a month on a sunday with 8-10 hour sessions. Man I was horrible as the DM, relying on published Adventures and Dungeon Magazines. Sure we had fun, but it took a long time to get the rules right (though the monthly gaming didn't really help). I also did a lot of "Bad DMing" mistakes including Deus-Ex machina save for the party. But we had fun until half of the group couldn't make it anymore and the group fizzled out after a year.

After dipping in playing like 3 Sessions of "the Dark Eye" in a face-to-face group, I started to recruit people for an online game in 2012 (including yours truly [MENTION=20307]Jan van Leyden[/MENTION]). And that group is still going (66% of founding members are still in it).

 

[billd91]

I first heard of D&D in about 1979. A classmate of mine had a couple older brothers who played and were teaching him. I didn't quite understand what it was at the time but it lodged in my brain enough that when I next heard about it the following year from another friend (who had started playing in the local Boy Scout troop) I was interested. He got a copy of the Holmes set for Xmas that year (1980) and we would pour over it on the bus to and from school. That next summer (1981), I made up my first party of PCs and played my first adventure - with my friend as DM and me as the only player with 6 1st level PCs, names all stolen from John Carter books (Carthoris, fighter, and Tars Tarkas, cleric, survived longest). I was pretty much hooked.

Not long after that, another friend got a copy of the Red Box edition and I started DMing for him and another friend. I'd ride my bike from the boonies into town and we'd play on Saturdays. Around that time, I bought my own first D&D book, the 1e AD&D Players Handbook. I got it at Waldenbooks in the local shopping mall and ran out to the car to start reading it. Other books slowly trickled in, mostly via Xmas presents from my parents (who were pretty cool about the whole thing). In the days before I got a DMG and PCs were leveling up above 3rd level, I would look at the book in the bookstore and crib out the combat tables on pieces of scrap paper. Needless to say, I was pretty happy when the game evolved away from the attack matrices. We also encountered our first religious-based bigotry against D&D when the player who owned the Red Box edition was unable to continue playing because his church's minister convinced his parents they shouldn't allow him to play.

The groups I played with morphed a bit through middle school and high school but, no matter who I played with, we played a lot. Most weekends, sometimes on both Friday and Saturday, for 6+ hour sessions. We played a lot in the kitchen of a friend's mother's trailer because that friend took over many of the DMing duties. He was crap with some of the math, but fantastic with Conanesque adventures and portrayals of NPCs. He really helped bring the game alive for me. We also played a ton of Villains and Vigilantes in those days, some Indiana Jones, some Chill, some Star Frontiers, and some Traveller.

2e rolled around while I was in college. I was a little skeptical of it but the preview in Dragon magazine helped allay worries and I came to the conclusion 2e was a pretty good clean-up of the 1e rules (with a few exceptions like the hash job the ranger suffered compared to the 1e version). But at that point, I usually played mainly 2e with 1e materials worked in since the two were so highly compatible. I ran a lot of Oriental Adventures at the time and played a lot of Al-Qadim run by another friend.

By the time 3e was announced, I was skeptical again. The Player's Option: Skills and Powers book had been so terribly conceived (in my opinion), that I didn't think they had the mojo to make a good new edition of D&D anymore. But then Eric Noah's site came along and, as I learned more about 3e, I came to appreciate the design. By the time it finally hit the stores, I was well interested. I started running a Classic Modules campaign to see how well it handled old 1e adventures. It did admirably. Some things were different (advancement was faster, some level-expectations of adventures had to be adjusted) but things played reasonably true to the originals in so many other ways that none of us older school players minded.

When 4e was announced, I was generally excited. WotC had written a good D&D game before, I thought things could get better. But my trajectory with 4e was the opposite of the trajectory I followed with 3e. I went from being initially optimistic to being disappointed as I heard more and more about the system. By the time it was released, it was really more of a curiosity than an object of hobbyist passion. We played for a while but the magic that we experienced with 3e was thin when it was there at all and, after several months, pretty much completely gone. I decided to focus on Pathfinder for my D&D gaming since Paizo seemed so much more in tune with what I wanted as a D&D player.

 

[darjr]

Ed Greenwood on the 40th.
[video=youtube;uuFVl20FFCM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuFVl20FFCM[/video]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuFVl20FFCM

 

[Odhanan]

Here's what I had to say about it on facebook:

"It is likely that today is the anniversary of the reveal of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game in late January of 1974, the first Sunday when game designer Ernest Gary Gygax invited people to come to his house and play his and Dave Arneson's brand new game.

I always was curious and inquisitive as a child growing up between Normandy and the French Ardennes. My parents were very good to me, instilling in me a critical mind, spirit, a will to go out and be myself, answering my questions about all things, or pointing me in the right direction to find them out on my own. It'd be hard for me to say that the Dungeons & Dragons game taught me all those things. But surrounded as I was with the castles of Robert the Devil and Richard the Lionheart, inspired as I was by fantasy as well as the world around me, I think that my discovery of the game on that fateful week-end of November 1988 in Vendresse, France, where my cousin Carlos Sacré ran us through his version of the Village of Hommlet, had the effect of a lightning bolt on me, bringing all these elements into a whole that would define how I would shape both my imagination and personality from then on.

I owe it in no small part to Dungeons & Dragons to know what words like "eldritch" or "dweomer" or indeed "marmoreal" actually mean. Heck, I probably wouldn't speak English every day if it wasn't for deciphering the books on my own with an Harrap's dictionary as a young lad. I might not have plugged myself into Ancient History on the internet, might not have met Nerissa Montie at all. I might not have come to live here in Canada, nor met so many wonderful friends and played with them over the years. I wouldn't be where I am today, creating new content for those who love the game as I do, enjoying the partnership and friendship of one Ernest Gary Gygax Jr.

Today, I am celebrating, remembering the many games, the many laughs, the dice rolling, the role playing, as I work my way through our latest manuscript. This is a preview of what is to come, intended as an exclusive for those who attend the Gary Con Gaming Convention a few weeks from now, using some of the materials I once came up with in my advice to build the mega-dungeon, but retooled to work in concert with The Hobby Shop Dungeon and campaign, and expended upon in concert with my friend and writing partner.

This is a fitting way to celebrate I think, and I can't help thinking about Gary as I do so, typing away at his machine, as Ernie described to me more than once, giving birth to a framework that would soon allow millions to have fun and explore the realms of their own imaginations.

So, here's to you, Dungeons & Dragons. Happy birthday, old friend. To the many years of fun games that are now past, and to the future, many bright years yet to come."

 

[Lord Mhoram]

My D&D journey started back in the summer of '77 with the Holmes basic. I was 10, and the summer between my 5th and 6th grade. My best friend who's family moved to Kansas and back brought it with them. His older brother was the GM. My mage type died in a hedge I think.

I purchased Gamma World, and ran that for a short while, then picked up the Hardcover AD&D books. I was hooked, and it became my primary hobby. Reading Dragon magazine, tinkering with rules, creating characters. I was aware of Boot Hill and Top Secret, but was not into Westerns and Spy stuff, so I never played them.

That was the extent of my gaming - D&D and Gamma world for years. I also enjoyed Battlesystem.

Then I went to University in '85. Found Rolemaster, Ringworld (oh I wish I still had that set), and most importantly HERO system. HERO fit my approach really well, then D&D moved into second edition. A lot of things I liked were gone (Monks, Demons, Devils) and a lot of stuff I really didn't like were still there (Level limits and other things). So I pretty much ignored 2nd edition rules. We played HERO, and my wife and I played our houseruled AD&D.

As an aside - if it wasn't for D&D/gaming I never would have met my wife. She got into D&D about the same time I did, and started HERO in '81. We met because she was GMing the game I joined in late '86.

I bought my favorite published setting ever - Spelljammer, and the Waterdeep/Undermountain stuff - but kept using our houseruled AD&D. While we game in a group every week that is HERO, the wife and I do solo play of another system, more often than not D&D. It went that way for years, then 3rd came out. I was skeptical given my reaction to 2nd. Then I read the multiclassing rules, and pretty much decided it was for me. I played it until 4E came out, played a little of that, stopped, then started up with Pathfinder (I just found the edition that was right for my tasted).

So D&D has been around in my life for 37 years, in one way or another, and led me to this hobby, which has become a lifelong passion.

Happy 40th.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

I came aboard in '83 with a Moldvay Basis Set, which I ordered by accident. I wanted to order Dungeon - The Board Game, but entered Dungeons & Dragons on the order card. Formerly, I had only read in a German boardgame magazin about this curious RPG thing, but couldn't make heads nor tail from it.

After reading the basic set I was hooked and decided that having human fighters, and mages, and thieves, but only one type of dwarf or elf was stupid. The next order card listet the AD&D DMG and asked for an adventure suitable for beginners. Imagine my terror when no rules whatsoever about charcter classes, and races, and stuff were in the DMG. Time for the next order card.

Since then I learned:

• Players are a lazy bunch who don't share my interest in all those new games.
• Bookshelves can hold only so many RPG books.
• I'm a terrible businessman.
• My mind can only hold so many game systems.
• I can live without playing, but not without running a game.

Happy Birthday, D&D! My present to you is a year full of RPG sessions.

 

[William Ronald]

I first began playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1980, with some classmates from high school. My first character, Saruk, was a monk and the adventure was a bad rip off of the Lord of the Rings. Still, I had fun and continued gaming.

Over the years I have met many friends through gaming and got to meet such people as E. Gary Gygax, Monte Cook, and Erik Mona at conventions. I have sent characters through many adventures, from 1st level to epic levels. One character even had a history of some 20 years in campaign time. (The joke was that he was so old he did not just know everything -- he knew everyone.)

Currently, I am doing some GMing for Pathfinder Society. I am pleased to say that I see a lot of younger people getting into gaming and I think that our hobby has a bright future.

So, let me thank E. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Monte Cook, Zeb Cook, Erik Mona, Lisa Stevens, James Jacobs, Tracy Hickman, Margaret Weiss, and so may others whose works I have enjoyed. Let me thank all those I have gamed with over the years. Thank you for your time, your friendship and many good memories. Here is to 40 years of Dungeons and Dragons, in all its myriad incarnations. I look forward to the next forty years --- and more!

 

[rjclark]

D&D 40 years old

I have been playing D&D in many forms since 1973, and the game had actually been out for a few months. I haven't been able to stomach 4th edition, and am looking at the new version with trepidation. But I'm still playing. I'm 57 now, and there have been times when it's been my only stress management. I've seen what role playing can do for kids, and it's always positive. It encourages reading, independent thinking, thinking outside the box, some social skills, like communicating with others. I hope I have a group to play with till the day I die.