D&D 5E My Journey to 5th Edition

[Tony Vargas]

Are most of you just leaving out your experiences with games other than D&D? Or is it really just the few who mention doing so who have tested other waters?

 

[Catwithafez]

Is everyone just leaving out their experiences with games other than D&D?

I mentioned several different games from TSR and other companies...

 

[Staffan]

My first exposure to RPGs in general was via a friend in 3rd grade. I remember that he mentioned that wizards could create walls of stone, and I thought that was awesome. The first game we played was the Swedish game Drakar och Demoner, which was originally based on Basic Roleplaying (which in turn was based on Runequest) but even that early had evolved a bit on its own.

My first exposure to D&D was via the Swedish translation of the Basic and Expert sets (the Expert set included some Companion rules as well). I didn't really care too much for that game - it felt too unrealistic, IMO. I also at some point got to look at a friend's brother's friend's AD&D books, which I didn't really understand at all because my English skills at that point weren't so good.

Around 1989 or 1990 I decided to get into AD&D, so I ordered the PHB and DMG (there was no FLGS in my home town, so I bought English-language RPGs by mail order). Since I had seen the 1e DMG before, I "knew" the basic stats for monsters were in there, so I wouldn't need the Monster Manual (or rather, Monstrous Compendium) quite yet. That was a mistake, because the 2e DMG had no such thing. Eventually I got the Monstrous Compendium and, at some point, Forgotten Realms Adventures. Yes, I got that before the FR boxed set. I thought it was cool, but didn't get to play it much.

Pretty soon, I saw an ad in the mail order catalog I was ordering from about Dark Sun, which seemed incredibly awesome. I bought that and the Complete Psionics Handbook, and that got me going for real. Somewhere around this point I also got involved with a proper gaming club, and spent a lot of time playing RPGs - often both Saturdays and Sundays, and perhaps Friday evenings as well. Not just AD&D of course, I also ran a lot of TORG, and was a player in quite a few other games.

Later I went to college and got involved with my current gaming group, give or take a few. For various reasons I had to move away from them a while, and during that period 3rd ed was released which was great. I eventually moved back some time after 3.5 was released, and we had great fun with that a while.

4e turned out to be a disappointment, so we moved to Pathfinder. Now 5e is out - one of the group is still running Rise of the Runelords (anniversary edition) in PF, and I've started running 5e.

 

[neobolts]

Are most of you just leaving out your experiences with games other than D&D? Or is it really just the few who mention doing so who have tested other waters?

I mentioned a few other systems in passing in my original post. The big difference was that those systems were mostly one-and-done campaigns in a system, while D&D has been my main focus with countless campaigns (easily 90% of all tabletop RPGing I've done). The closest thing would be the Paladium System, where I have played full campaigns in Heroes Unlimited and Rifts, and dabbled with Paladium Fantasy and TMNT & Other Strangeness.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I mentioned a few other systems in passing in my original post. The big difference was that those systems were mostly one-and-done campaigns in a system, while D&D has been my main focus with countless campaigns (easily 90% of all tabletop RPGing I've done).

Interesting.

I think the important part of my 'how I came to 5e' story was probably that I started with, moved on but came back to D&D. While I started with Basic & AD&D in 1980, I tried other games early on (Gamma World, Top Secret, Traveler, RuneQuest, Interlock, d6 Star Wars, Battletech, GURPS, etc), and finally started playing Champions!/Hero System quite heavily later in the 80s, and added Storyteller (particularly Mage: the Ascension) in the 90s. By '95 I had given up on D&D entirely. It wasn't until 3.0 that I reluctantly tried D&D again, and not until 4e (and the oWoD folding and the 6th ed of Hero losing me) that I was really back to D&D as my primary system. From there, I was just along for the ride again through the Next playtest and 5e release.

Now I'm running 5e, trying out FATE and taking a hard look at 13th Age, while I finish out existing 4e campaigns.

 

[rosing-bull]

Here is a long and pointless story:

I came into D&D with 3rd edition. It was something I'd heard about a lot in passing -- mostly from television shows and just general rumors about its existence -- and had always wanted to play. I suppose my very first experience was through the Baldur's Gate CRPG, which I adored, followed by the Salvatore dark elf novels, which I now loathe with an intense and perhaps needless passion.

But I remember being 12 or so and finding the original 3.0 starter box -- which, if I remember right, was actually titled "Dungeons and Dragons Adventure Game" -- at the local Walden Books. I was so excited when I found it there, sitting on the shelf, it seeming like this mysterious and mystical reality in a box, just waiting for me to explore it. I really had no idea what the game even was, and I was really confused to find out that it was only made by one publisher -- I guess I had always assumed it was its own genre or something. I ran to find my mom and begged her to buy it for me. She, being a good mother and a lovely woman, did so, though I do recall a slight roll of her eyes, though that detail might be a later invention.

As soon as I got home I called up my best friend Jared, who I think was just as excited to finally have D&D as a I was, and invited him over to play it. Being a 12 year old who came to the fantasy genre through video games -- particularly the Diablo games and the aforementioned Baldur's Gate -- the rules were so inspired, so elegant and mind-blowing -- "You roll against a number to attack and then roll again for damage to be subtracted from hit points? That makes so much sense!" -- that I felt like I'd found the holy grail of my adolescent existence. Finally I had found Dungeons and Dragons. Finally I could live in fantasy world, unbound by the constraints of video game design: the world was limitless and we could do anything.

But that starter box was confusing as hell. Each adventure just plopped you in a one to two room dungeon with little explanation. There were no role playing encounters and there was no sense of world building, geography or context. It was just kind of like a boring board game. And playing as the DM with just my one friend wasn't very interesting. And to add to that, the recent change over from 2nd edition to 3rd was confusing. I didn't understand why there were two different sets of books and two different boxes, and I couldn't figure out why the hell the box had so little in it and required books -- books?! for a board game? -- which led me to eventually stop playing it after the first couple included adventures.

But I still thought about D&D and I still wanted to play it.

My school district had two separate middle schools that were both funneled into the same high school. Both middle schools had a gifted class, and the same teacher taught the classes at both schools -- in the morning she taught at my school and then in the afternoon she taught at the other school. I was in said gifted class, so when I got to high school I knew some of the kids from her class at the other school, since we had gone on field trips with them, and I knew that a few of them played D&D. And thus in high school I decided to try the whole Dungeons and Dragons thing again.

This was my first time playing 3rd edition proper. In hindsight I ignored a lot of it -- something one might have been able to do with older editions, but something that didn't really work with 3rd. Skills were boring and complicated so I ignored them. Feats were in a similar boat. I never used spells because I was too lazy to read the descriptions and remember what they did. I was the DM for this, mind you, so I think some of my players didn't really appreciate my not even really playing the game. In hindsight, what I wanted wasn't what 3rd edition was. I wanted something simple that I could do on the fly and that wouldn't bog me down in math, which has never been my forte. We still had fun, and luckily several of my players ended up being people with no experience with D&D, so they hardly noticed or cared. My more serious-minded friends were irritated, but whatever. We had a good time.

I don't actually remember any of the specifics of my high school campaign, other than there being a crashed alien ship and an excessive amount of expository dialogue that everyone yawned through. And that eventually they went to Sigil for no reason. I think I found the game frustrating, actually, since I didn't give a damn about combat and had little interest in learning more than a few pages of rules -- not even approaching something like "system mastery." We ignored 3.5 entirely when it came out, since we were happy with the books we had and the game we were playing and, again, it wasn't like I even cared about the rules.

When college came around I made new friends and got involved in a few D&D games, but they always fizzled out. Though a couple of the guys I played with then are the guys I play 5e with now, which I appreciate. As with the past, I thought about D&D a lot in those years, but played significantly less than I would have liked to have, and by the time I moved on to 3.5, the new edition was just around the corner. I do remember that in addition to 3rd we played a little of the Warcraft d20 game and may or may not have played a session or two of Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved, both of which were games I liked a lot for breaking out of -- or at least fiddling with -- the standard D&D tropes and aesthetic.

4th edition came out about two years into my undergraduate degree, and my memories of it are significantly less vivid and significantly less magical. This is due in part to a couple of things, one of which was just that I was older and my brain had become more fossilized and less prone to flights of fancy, and the second of which probably relates to 4th edition as a game and it's apparent inability to excite, wow or inspire me. When the new edition was announced I was so excited. I was giddy with anticipation, just like I'd been when I first discovered 3e in middle school. I bought all of the books on day one and I evangelized the hell out of the game. The player's handbook seemed bizarre, even though I was excited about it, and the powers system seemed overly artificial and no particularly inspiring. Still, I intended to DM instead of play a character, so I could look past that, and the encounter building and monster design was way more fun than 3rd. I devoured the core books and invented all kinds of ideas for grand campaigns, a couple of which we actually began to play, but none of them went anywhere. This was also the first time I tried any of the organized play options at the local stores, which all had mixed results, but really provided me some of my most amusing memories regarding the game -- though that is almost entirely due to some of the, uh, more eccentric folks who'd show up to play. Eventually I decided that 4e was not for me. It was too gamey, too combat focused and too strict in its design goals and intent. Following six months or so of trying to like the game, I gave up.

It was around this time that I had a growing interest in older editions of the game, and bought most of the 1e books, the Rules Cyclopedia and the old red and blue basic boxed sets. Most of that, aside from the RC, was out of a desire to "collect," for whatever reason, and though I still have my 1e books I have never played them and probably never will. I did, however, try out the Rules Cyclopedia for a few games, which felt like an incredible breath of fresh air after the musty, stale and over-complicated rulesets of the past couple of editions. After 4e the older, simpler game felt liberating, with minimal prep -- in fact, for most of those sessions I did zero prep at all -- and we had probably some of the most fun we'd ever had with the game just being sociopaths, robbing the town, accidentally getting the innkeeper eaten by 4d6 wolves and making elaborate plans to steal the Goblin King's gold. There were no great plots, no pre-scripted moments of denouement and no perfectly balanced encounters. It was utter madness and it was a lot of fun.

But like all of the iterations of the game I had tried, it was too clunky and too unbalanced regarding squishy mages and clerics without a single spell at level 1, and eventually we stopped playing. And I stopped caring about D&D all together. I entertained the idea of playing other RPGs, particularly Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard, and we even tried once or twice, but nothing ever came of it. Table top RPGs kind of vanished from my mind. I had cooler things to think about and more important things to worry about.

I heard of 4e essentials in passing, seeing the books at bookstores, but didn't care. Then the 5e playtest showed up, which surprised me, and which I looked at out of a vague curiosity. I was pleasantly surprised by the return to a simpler style of game with a stronger emphasis on world and adventure, but still had little interest. I never tried the playtest and I don't think I even looked it beyond the initial version they released. D&D was still pretty much dead to me, and I expected it to remain so.

But then, for whatever reason, I bought the 5e starter set when it came out. I had no intention or plans to, I just saw it and bought it on impulse And I was floored by what I found. They really had made D&D into what I wanted it to be, almost inexplicably. Almost out of nowhere. Without my ever having voiced any complaint to them or to anyone else. They made the game I wanted, seemingly against all odds, and it was great. I got hyped up like I hadn't been since I was a kid. I got some of my old friends together and tried the Lost Mines of Phandelver -- which resulted in a TPK (our only one ever) in the first dungeon, but whatever. It was a good time. And they came back with their own characters to pick up where the doomed party left off. I bought each of the core books as soon as I could, and my (10 page long, for some ungodly reason) review of the Player's Handbook is still the number 2 review for that book on Amazon. 5e was exactly what I wanted: it had the mechanics there if you wanted to use them, but you were free to ignore them whenever that was more convenient, and the game is streamlined and intuitive. I do think it's the best iteration of the game thus far, and definitely feels the most right to me. For the time being, it seems like my relationship with D&D has been a long and rocky journey that has finally reached the promise land, and that's pretty cool.

tl;dr
I didn't think I actually liked Dungeons and Dragons pre-5e but now I like it a lot.

 

[billd91]

I started with the Holmes basic edition. A friend got it for Xmas about 1980 and talked it up with me on the bus to and from school. Played my first D&D game summer 1981 running 6 PCs in a game with just me and my friend as DM. Shortly thereafter, I was recruited to DM for other friends, one of whom had the Red Box Basic.

Shifted to 1st Edition AD&D piecemeal. I first got the Players Handbook at Waldenbooks at the mall. Grabbed mother's car keys and went to sit out in the car with it, starting to read it cover to cover. Incorporated it into the game I was running. Until I got the DMG, however, I would crib the tables on scrap paper from copies in bookstores so we could have the PCs keep advancing. Eventually ended up DMing a lot, though trading off duties from adventure to adventure, with friends in middle school and high school.

About halfway through college, 2e appeared. Picked up a copy for the gaming club at the college (I was an officer in it and had part of its budget). Liked it so I bought myself one. Ran a hybrid 1e/2e game (mainly because the 2e ranger kind of stunk). Played that right through to 3e's release.

I was skeptical of 3e as news of it started circulating on gaming listservs. I was grateful for WotC saving TSR and having a progressive online policy, but I didn't like the Player's Option changes and was concerned that a new full edition wasn't where the game should go. But Eric Noah's news site turned me around and my friends and I largely embraced 3e. Picked up 3.5 when it came out largely because we were unsatisfied with the ranger (again, what is WITH that class and its redesigns?).

When 4e was announced, I was optimistic because 3e had won me over. I didn't think most of the complaints aimed at 3e and its math were anything close to an insurmountable problem and, as more news about 4e came out, I came to realize that its cure was worse than 3e's disease. Two friends in the main group I was in were enthusiastic so we gave it a try with one of them running. After 9 months or so we dropped it for the grind and fiddlyness of play with powers and statuses. By this point, I had shifted to Pathfinder for the D&D version I preferred to run and otherwise interact with and, once WotC declined to renew the Star Wars license, I thought I was done with WotC.

Then came the announcement that a new edition was in the offing and they were heavily consulting the customer base about all sorts of issues of D&D and what it means to play D&D. And WotC ultimately won me back as a customer with 5e serving as a rules-lighter form of D&D to complement my rules-heavier Pathfinder group.

All along the way, of course, other RPGs came up. We went from Champions to V&V, dabbled with FASERIP Marvel (before deciding it kind of sucked), and back to V&V. Have also mixed some more Champions and M&M in more recent years. Played Classic Traveller (before it was called "Classic") then MegaTraveller before dumping it when TNE radically changed its direction and lost Digest Group Publications' support. Played Chill, Call of Cthulhu, Star Frontiers, Top Secret, James Bond 007, Gamma World (bizarre), a little Talislanta, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, It Came from the Late Late Late Show, Recon, Feng Shui, Legend of the Five Rings, and others I am no doubt forgetting. But, though we would revisit a number of these games (particularly the superhero ones), D&D of some variety was (and is) always the primary game.