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<blockquote data-quote="rosing-bull" data-source="post: 6568896" data-attributes="member: 6791705"><p>Here is a long and pointless story:</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>But I still thought about D&D and I still wanted to play it.</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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 <em>feels</em> 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.</p><p></p><p>tl;dr</p><p>I didn't think I actually liked Dungeons and Dragons pre-5e but now I like it a lot.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="rosing-bull, post: 6568896, member: 6791705"] 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 [i]feels[/i] 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. [/QUOTE]
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