Just Curious ... Hom many come from AD&D?


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Started with the red box Basic D&D rules in 1980. Moved to the Expert rules and then Companion before finally getting hte AD&D books around 1987. Played that until university when 2E came out. Bought that but didn't care for it as much (except Specialty Priests). By 1995 I had RPG burn out and Magic was all the rage and I played that until about 1999. Started a 2E game that quickly got converted to 3E when I bought the PHB on a whim. I have since slowly converted to 3.5E.
 


OD&D(1974) is the only true game. All the other editions are just poor imitations of the real thing. :D

if you want real old school, we are here.

however, you johnny-come-latelies are still welcome.
 


cmanos said:
...Anyone else remember the blue and white cover basic game?

I'm guessing you're talking about the Holmes Edition Basic D&D game, about 1977 was the first release. I have a reproduction copy from a 25th anniversary TSR set, and that's the first I had ever heard of it. Diaglo and MerrickB have vastly furthered my education since then on all the different iterations of D&D, and anyone who wants an even further education can visit www.aceum.com for a list of the 40 billion versions of D&D between 1974 and 1985. :)
 

I started seriously with 3.0 in early 2001, and had only played a bunch of nights with previous editions before that. So I guess that sets me into the minority :)
 

Got my start with 1e in 1980. Woosh. . .way back. Shortly thereafter, picked up Champions: The Superhero RPG! and Top Secret. Ahhh, the glory days!
 

DungeonmasterCal said:
There are LOTS of us here who can trace our roots to 1st Edition and beyond. I started in 1985 with 1e, myself.
Me too, all the way from Basic OD&D white box (!) to 3e, to d20 Modern, to C&C. I am still able to find some time to play, although much less than when I was a student.
 

The History of a D&D Geek

A family friend was my school-bus driver in 1981 (7th grade). He found a copy of the D&D Expert Set rulebook in his bus and read it before giving it to me. I DMed my first game with mostly invented rules, because I only had that Expert Set rulebook. (Giant scorpions were my favorite monster, and it never occurred to me to even wonder where the hell the dragons were.) For my birthday that year I got the D&D Basic Set and a couple of modules. (I still remember trying to figure out why Keep on the Borderlands didn't quite match the actual rules. I also still remember absolutely loving Palace of the Silver Princess, which was my first experience with boxed text.)

As a freshman in high school (1983), I had a paper route and most of the profits from it went toward buying AD&D books. A (soon-to-be) friend saw me reading the Players Handbook in school and told me about a shop in town called Games Galore where at least 20 players met every Saturday from 10 AM to 5 PM (and many often adjourned to someone's house to continue playing). Among the players there were Roger E. Moore, who later went on to (among other things) edit Dragon. I only gamed with him briefly, though.

The core of that group stuck together through the closing of Games Galore, finding new places to play, making many trips to GenCon (where we started out on an extreme budget in 1984, staying at a campsite in Racine), and eventually switching to 2E in 1989. It was also during this period that I discovered other RPGs, as well as tactical games like Star Fleet Battles and table games like Empire Builder. In 1990 or so, I changed cities and had to find a new group; I'd discovered Shadowrun, so that was my first group in my college town.

In 1993 or so, my disgust with 2E and its never-ending line of badly written, horrendously balanced Nosepicker Handbooks came to a head and I quit D&D. I was a member of an organized university "RPG Society" and I had an extremely healthy Shadowrun game going (at that time, it was by far the best campaign I'd run), and I truly didn't miss the mess that D&D had become.

In 1998 I moved to San Francisco to finish law school and practice. For a couple of years, my only contact with the hobby was via the Internet. In 2000 I missed GenCon (the only one I've missed since 1986), but I asked my friend who was attending to pick up a copy of Third Edition D&D. The teasers, starting at GenCon 1999, actually had me intrigued. He brought back the 3E Players Handbook, I inhaled it in about four hours of non-stop reading, and I loved it. Still do. I've had one campaign or another going strong since.
 

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