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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 8192937" data-attributes="member: 508">I've been the DM for most of my gaming career, so I have a very limited selection of PCs, dating back to when I first started playing AD&D 1E, then nothing for a few decades, and only recently have I started playing in my son's 3.5 campaigns (while still DMing my own).  But here goes:Jon, human druid (AD&D 1E, a pre-generated PC I chose out of a pool my cousins had made for us to teach us the game around 1979)Bloodaxe, human fighter (AD&D 1E, the first PC I recall when my brother and I started taking turns DMing our own campaigns)Shadowjack, human fighter (he was an experiment, sticking with leather armor and trying for a high-Dex build)Trojan, human fighter (AD&D 1E, playing with my neighbor's B-52 crew, who mostly cheated their butts off, around 1988)Hondo, human monk (AD&D 1E, same B-52 crew)Skunge, half-orc assassin (AD&D 1E, same B-52 crew)   [decades pass]Sam Crow, humanoid crow gestalt ranger/rogue (sidekick to my nephew's humanoid sheep gestalt baabarian/cleric in a D&D 3.5 Skylanders campaign built specifically to teach him about D&D in 2017)Jace Syngaard, human fighter (D&D 3.5, the first PC I ever ran from 1st level to 20th, 2017-2019)Jhasspok, lizardfolk/fighter/barbarian (D&D 3.5, my current PC - 11th level and counting, 2019 to present)I chose Jon for my initial PC because he had the least-sucky stats of the pre-generated PCs; only later did I learn my cousins had used a random number generator to get a number from 3-18 for all of the ability scores instead of adding 3 random numbers from 1-6 for each ability score.  (So no bell curve, just a flat randomization.)  Despite not being thrilled with my first PC, I was intrigued by the game and wanted to learn more about it.  We ended up getting the three core AD&D 1E books for Christmas that year and quickly started our own campaigns.Playing with my neighbor's B-52 crew (when I was stationed in Minot AFB) taught me an important lesson: bad D&D was definitely worse than no D&D.  I was excited to play for the first time in six years or so but that excitement was premature:  the other players would roll their attacks and grab up their d20 before anyone had a chance to see it and they invariably always reported getting either a 19 or a 20.  They also always made all saving throws and did very near to maximum damage with all attacks.  I, in the meantime, rolled in the clear and stuck with what the dice showed.  I found the other players were actually getting mad at me for draining resources like healing because I failed a few saving throws here and there and took more damage on average than they did.  The neighbor was nice (too nice, really - he was the DM and wouldn't call his crew out on their cheating ways, but then he had to work with them day in and day out, whereas I was just a neighbor), but the others really sucked all the fun of the game out for me.  And then that was it until I started running an AD&D 2E game for my sons once they were old enough.Johnathan</blockquote>

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