It's GM's Day! Tell us about your first GM!

[Thomas Shey]

True enough. Thieves also had a bad time of it, with them being terrible at the things they were supposed to do in the beginning. And with poison being save or die, being terrible at finding and disarming traps was not great for life expectancy.

They often functioned as a group saving throw against threats that no one was liable to figure a way around (sometimes because there was no practical way around it at least at that level).

The only good thing about being the thief was you weren't going to attract the direct attention the mage would, and nobody really expected you to play front line like the fighter or cleric, so you could at least attempt the sneak-around-and-backstab thing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I
Energy Drain (losing levels) from some undead scared the sh@t out of players. They ran away if the cleric failed his turning attempts.

It was one of D&D's notorious gotchas. People cared about it because it robbed you of actual effort, long after raise dead at least mitigated risk of death.. It was sufficiently annoying it could be a stress spot between groups and their GMs.

 

[Richards]

My first AD&D (first edition) experience was back when I was a freshman in high school, I think, and my first DMs were my two cousins, who came to visit one day (they lived about an hour away) with a bunch of pre-generated PCs for us to choose from and a dungeon complex that covered two sheets of graph paper. (Each cousin had designed the dungeon on one sheet, and there was a passageway in the middle where the two halves met.) So we started off with one cousin as the DM and the other running their shared PC, and once we headed over to the other sheet of graph paper they swapped roles.

I chose a human druid as my first PC because his stats didn't suck too much. (I found out later they'd used a random generator to derive the six stats, but instead of randomly generating three numbers between 1-6 and adding them up for each stat, they just had it randomly generate a number between 3-18 - so no bell curve, just a flat plane of random numbers.) Most of the PCs we ran had some really sub-par stats, but we had a good enough time anyway that for Christmas that year, my two brothers and I got the three core rulebooks...and we were off on our gaming careers.

Johnathan

 

[GuyBoy]

Dave was a year above Phil and myself in school, back in 1977.
He'd got hold of a new game from the USA, called Dungeons and Dragons, so we rolled up two characters. I played a fighter called Aelric and Phil played a mage called Amroth. It was great (until we were killed by orcs after reaching level 3) and I was hooked for life.
Dave had a few painted miniatures, which he kept in an old cigar box. OD&D still smells like Havana to me!

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Imagine my friend's face when he saw the thief's percentage was now spread on 36 levels in the D&D (Mentzer) Companion set. The chances of success for thief skills were even worse!

Energy Drain (losing levels) from some undead scared the sh@t out of players. They ran away if the cleric failed his turning attempts.

I love BX and still solo it from time to time, but I had to make a few house rules, to make it palatable.

Energy drain was a beast back in the day. My experience was, yes, without a cleric, the best strategy was running away. The risk of losing a hard-earned level was just too much.

They often functioned as a group saving throw against threats that no one was liable to figure a way around (sometimes because there was no practical way around it at least at that level).

The only good thing about being the thief was you weren't going to attract the direct attention the mage would, and nobody really expected you to play front line like the fighter or cleric, so you could at least attempt the sneak-around-and-backstab thing.

Backstab was hard to pull off (in part made more difficult by the vagueness of the wording, and the difference in wording between the PHB and DMG information), but could really swing the tide of battle when you landed one.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I spent summers on a lake in Maine where we had a small sailing club. In 1981 we hosted a regatta for the type of boat we raced, and a father-son team came from California. The son brought his D&D stuff and DM'd a session. It was my first exposure to D&D.

Then he left, and I became DM.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Backstab was hard to pull off (in part made more difficult by the vagueness of the wording, and the difference in wording between the PHB and DMG information), but could really swing the tide of battle when you landed one.

Well, I was referring to the OD&D Greyhawk version (I drifted completely out of D&D to other games by the time of AD&D), and while you were still right about that, it wasn't that much vaguer than, well, everything in OD&D.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Well, I was referring to the OD&D Greyhawk version (I drifted completely out of D&D to other games by the time of AD&D), and while you were still right about that, it wasn't that much vaguer than, well, everything in OD&D.

A definite point, that. I first read the OD&D books when the deluxe reprints came out. I have a strong doubt that I would've been able to make sense of OD&D at all without either someone to explain it to me or the years of gaming knowledge I came to it with.

I did run a game of it a few years back, and had fun. There's a rawness and simplicity that shines through - it's easy to understand how it took off in spite of itself.