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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 9364533" data-attributes="member: 6801845">It all started back in the late 20th century in an age long ago when memorabilia commemorating the 200th anniversary of the USA could still be found around the house.  I was friends with 3 brothers and one had gone off to college.  When he came back he brought back this brown box with rules for playing fantasy characters.  As a big fan of fantasy, sci-fi and Tolkien, here was a game where I could play a hobbit thief or a dwarven fighting man!  Yeah, the rules were pretty simple and everybody did a D6 damage with weapons, but we were hooked.  After playing that for the summer we found the basic set blue box edition and it was gaming almost every weekend.  Oddly, we played differently than a lot of people. Lethality was pretty low (except for the elf I tried to play*) with plenty of "pools of healing water" and even "resurrection roots" although I don't remember ever using the latter. We rotated DMing, using a LotR board game map as our basis.  While dungeons were a big part of play and my favorite was a dungeon I made where the corridors spelled out if I remember correctly DOOM, DEATH and DESTRUCTION.  That or the 3x5 card I handed to one of the players that had "una de podera vive" ("one of power lives" in Spanish) that woke up a lich when the player read it out loud.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f608.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":devilish:" title="Devil    :devilish:"  data-smilie="29"data-shortname=":devilish:" />  I also did my first draft of my home campaign world that I still use to this day.I continued to play off and on in college, switching to AD&D.  Fun times except for the DM who decided that his version of the SAW movies would be a lot of fun.  It included a die roll and a giant hand that came out of the wall and killed a random PC.  The fact that we each had 2 PCs should have been a warning.  My elf PC was the second PC to die, my human cleric the last of the group in a TPK when I just gave up on the stupidity.After college it was a few years before I started playing again, this time in AD&D 2E.  At first things went quite well and then our DM grew tired of DMing and rather than just admit it started to do everything he could to be annoying.  It didn't take that long before I decided to take up DMing again, to this day I DM more than I play.  I did get to play some though through Living City where I almost made a DM cry because he killed off my elven ranger.  I, of course, just laughed and explained the curse when he offered to have an NPC cast reincarnation on me.  We started sharing DMing duties and had fun with Skills & Powers, especially my barbarian who refused to ever lie.When 3E came along, I was so happy to get away from THAC0 and dice rolling weirdness. Sometimes rolling high was good, sometimes bad, not to mention negative ACs.  However, in 3E there were some brutal things like orcs that could do 4x damage with a crit that led to one of my few near-TPKs when they killed off all the PCs but the wizard who ran.  I was also active in Living Greyhawk where my elven wizard was eaten.  On the other hand, my dwarven two-weapon fighter was truly broken.  I was also part of a group that helped "break" modules play tested for our region including things like my half-orc grappler that won initiative, just ignored all the BBEG wizard's lackeys and ran to the wizard and wrestled him to death.  Grappling really was kind of broken, almost as much as the same multi-classed character enlarging himself and having a spiked chain so he had reach and anyone that came close got attacked because you triggered an AOO if you moved anywhere in a threatened area.But 3.x kind of started to fall apart at around 14th level when everyone was just kind of support for the bored player of the optimized wizard would wake up and decimate everything in a 2 mile radius on their turn.  The game could still be pretty accidentally deadly with -10 HP being dead as my elven rogue found out.So when 4E came out we embraced it, at first it felt like a breath of fresh air.  Except of course for my elven paladin when I said I didn't need healing just yet, I had only failed a single death save.  I rolled a one on my next death save and they died of course.  But I did have fun for a while and even ran or helped run a couple of game days for LFR in a major metro area.  I wasn't super happy about every PC having to follow the same AEDU structure, but I did have some fun characters. I appreciated that my cleric could both do damage (so many D12s at high levels) and heal on the same turn.  But eventually I burned out on the edition between playing and running games to 30th level.  Towards the end of 4E we were debating whether to switch to PF or go back to 3.5.  Then 5E was announced and our enthusiasm returned.  Once again, it felt like I was playing the game I had grown up with.  I started a new campaign (only 1 player out of a couple of groups wanted to continue 4E) and I've been running and playing ever since.  Of course when I had a chance to play 5E instead of DMing I jumped on the chance and wrote up a wood elf monk.  The first game, last encounter, he was hit with a critical strike and died instantly.  It felt like old times.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />*Yes, my curse of elven PCs dying started with basic.  <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" title="Man shrugging    :man_shrugging:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /> </blockquote>

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