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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 3631746" data-attributes="member: 38357">Up until about 82 or 83 most of the games I played in you didn't even get a new character. There was a pretty large group of local kids who played at least semi-regularly, and lots of wanna-be DMs. Parties would whittle down from up to 20+ players with up to 3 characters apiece to 6 or 8 players with one each by 3rd or 4th level. Players left without characters would go off and form a new party under a different DM. If parties got too small some characters would switch campaigns and two parties would merge. Having different characters at different levels was the norm. Above 5th level Raise Dead and the like started to become somewhat available, but there where still plenty of instances where even if he body could be recovered a Raise could not be, um, raised... (or the survival % check was failed...) In about four or five years of play most (but not all) players managed to get one or two characters to name-level. Some got more, but there was a tendency for players to pit their high-level characters against one another, to see "who was best" (and not coincidentally to pool their magic items!) Also there where TPKs. Usually we where quick enough to beat feet from the bigger nasties in the dungeon that at least some of us escaped, but nothing was foolproof. High-level characters (sometimes even sixth or seventh level) where generally retired, only dusted off for special one-shot adventures, or to serve as mentors to new PCs.When I got into junior high (or at least around that time) a lot of things changed a bit. Players became more focused on individual characters and less focused on the campaign as a whole. We no longer really wanted to have our characters names mentioned to new players as being the local big-shots as much as we wanted to actually adventure with them. We also started rolling 4d6, dropping the lowest, and  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" /> arranging as desired!!! DMs tried harder to keep each PC alive, groups became smaller and much more static, and new PCs (if needed) tended to come in a level or two below the highest remaining PC. We started having more adventures at higher levels. Also the game became quite a bit less "go where you will" as DMs had specific adventures and modules they wanted to run. With that adventures became much more "level appropriate" as a DM would no longer run an adventure for "5th to 7th level characters" for a party of one 7th level MU, a 5th level Fighter, and a bunch of 3rd and 4th levels... In fact, IIRC, parties where pretty consistently at the top of the suggested levels range, which led to both an easier time in the dungeon and more magic overall, but less powerful items as well.I think the split was because we started thinking of losing a character as a "hardship" or an "obstacle". We where doing much more "real" roleplaying and our characters mattered much more to us. One time a fiend of mine was telling this story, which he had told numerous times to just about every new player to come to our table (or to anyone who would sit still for it, really): His Fighter had been helping to defend a castle from an army of goblins, and this huge, nasty, ugly troll comes lumbering up through the ranks. Most of the guys on the wall just take off, they're just about exhausted from fighting goblins all day and they want nothing to do with this monster. So, he's standing there, and he's put like a dozen arrows into the thing, with no effect, and it starts climbing up the wall at him, just digging these huge, filthy claws straight into the stone! And the player is really getting worked up here, building to the big finale, and the guy who was playing the Magic User that day (who flew down and fireballed the troll, scattering the goblins and saving the day) is there and he gets all upset... Because that's his character swooping down and explodinating the bad guys. And Fighter-guy is, of course, put off because that was our campaign. But we mostly agreed that you shouldn't be telling other characters' stories. Nowadays, I'm not so sure, but then again maybe it's just the nostalgia talking...</blockquote>

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