[nostalgia] Looking back at the stupid crap we used to do

[der_kluge]

I was going through one of my old folders, from back when I was in high school, and I pulled out a set of maps for a campaign that I had created. I don't remember all the details of these maps, but it was probably created when I was playing Wizardry VII, so it had to do with PCs meeting technology. And I remember one map with robots on a prison wall shooting 50-cal machine guns at the PCs. Ugh, that was awful.

Anyway, I found this other map which was essentially a curved cavern with an arrow pointing to one room that said "various technical things".

Oh my god. It's a wonder anyone played my games back then.

Anyone have just completely *awful* things that you still have hidden away in ancient folders?

 

[tetsujin28]

I'm pretty embarassed at some of the attachments that Dr. Kaneda built for me. I mean, c'mon, I'm not freakin' Astro-Boy, even if I am by the ssame animator.

Oh, dungeon stuff. Did you ever do dungeons that were populated solely based on what minis you had? I remember one around '77, a first level dungeon with wraiths. Why? I had the frickin' minis, that's why.

 

[francisca]

I have most everything I ever did for D&D, except for homebrew game that I wrote up on a 3x5 notepad, prior to getting the 81 Basic set.

I have the first two dungeons I ever wrote up for D&D. Outdoor map on one side, dungeon on the other. Encounters written on some widerule notebook paper. In "RMF #1", I have marked on the map the spot where my buddy chris smacked into the wall and embedded himself, Wiley Coyote style, upon his first attempt to use his new-found Boots of Speed. He came to a T intersection, and I made him roll under his Dex with a d20. He rolled a '1', and I stuck him in the wall for d12 turns.

What I find most embarrasing is that fact that my (cursive) handwriting was better in 7th grade than it is now. Too much typing on a keyboard, I s'pose.

 

[Jeph]

The PCs were going to walk to a mine that was 4 miles away.

So I got out a pad of graph paper, and mapped out Every. Damn. Foot. of the journey.

Those were the days.
--Jeff

 

[ConnorSB]

Ahh... those were the days. My rogue spent eight hours searching a barn full of hay for some people, and becasue i specifically said "i search the hay" i somehow missed the huge trap door on the floor taht my dm claimed "wasn't in the hay."

The next pc who tried simply torched the barn and found the trap door. Notice that it wasn't his barn to torch. Did the DM care that the player just ruined a valuable store of hay? No.

Ahh... arbitrarism...

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Fortunately, I tended to lose notebooks every time I moved, which was quite often when I was younger. Between that and selective memory, I've forgotten most of the real atrocities I've attempted to subject other gamers to.

A few I can remember:

* Getting bored with my Elven Monk and mutating him into Blanka from Street Fighter 2.
* Designing a space-opera style game using mostly D&D rules with a few renamed classes.
* An "adventure" that revolved around using a couple million humanoids to destroy the town we headquartered in, just to put a stop to my stepfather's powergaming. Unfortunately, I hadn't yet realized that you need a very firm DM's hand to do such things... especially with a man who'll scribble in new items to his character sheet when you're not looking. Also, you actually have to know the setting better than your players, which is impossible when they designed it.
* Playing four Saurial Paladins in a row because the other players kept killing them.
* Cleric/Psionicists in Skills & Powers. Once I got Spells & Magic, I don't think I ever made a character that wasn't a "Cleric" of some form or another.

 

[Greyhawk_DM]

The PCs were going to walk to a mine that was 4 miles away.

So I got out a pad of graph paper, and mapped out Every. Damn. Foot. of the journey.

Those were the days.
--Jeff

Hardcore...lol

 

[Altalazar]

In elementary school - I started (and basically finished) my "Dungeon of Eternal Death" - from the old school. It was a literal dungeon - and here is the kicker - I made it have something like 50 levels and 10,000 rooms, all labled by the number. It got really silly, in the end - and I made the last level really huge, with two huge rooms - and put Bahamut and Tiamat in there to fight it out.

For some reason, I thought those two were the coolest thing in AD&D when I was 9.

In the end, it ended up being an exercise in map-making, because I never did key the rooms. The lower levels got more and more bizarre as I tried to come up with new ways of drawing a dungeon level. I also had a lot of areas with tons of alcoves and such (to get the room count up so I could hit 10,000 on the last level...)

I always liked building things - which reminds me of my other big building projects (of paper) at the time. I watched Battlestar Galactica as a kid - loved it, though I was only 7 - but what I really thought was cool was having a LOT of Battlestars - so to "help out" I drew a fleet of "reinforcements" - I drew Galactica, then I drew Galactica #2, then #3, and I kept adding sheets of paper (going "right") and drawing more, until in the end, I had drawn, on a VERY long string of papers taped together a fleet of 1000 Battlestars. Yes - in my Universe, they conquered the Cylons with ease...

 

[diaglo]

i have a dungeon with 10 levels and over 1000 rooms i plan on springing on my newest recruits.

i used it 24 years ago. i don't think they will know what hit them.

 

[Flyspeck23]

The first adventure I've ever written (at the age of 11 or 12) involved every monster from the setting (not D&D, mind you). Really, each and every monster. They'd have a conference on how to best destroy civilization.

It's a good thing that we never ran that adventure