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It's D&D's 40th anniversary. Tell me your D&D history, and what it means to you!
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<blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 6251998" data-attributes="member: 3400"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="billd91, post: 6251998, member: 3400"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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