Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9485827" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Born in '74.  Played a little Basic when I found some 1e books at my local library- the two survival guides and the Fiend Folio.  I lucked out and found a slightly battered DMG at a garage sale.  I was fascinated by those books, they were mysterious and densely packed with ideas, concepts, snippets of lore, and some truly arcane rules.When I finally had a chance to really play 1e, however, it was those rules that seemed so especially hard to grasp.  Even with the DMG's index and having read the books cover to cover multiple times, it always felt like there was something tucked away in a random spot to throw you for a loop.I knew a few DM's who learned all the wrong lessons from Gary's <s>raving</s> writing as well.  Like the Bible, you could find support for any position buried in the DMG, but somehow the idea that the DM should be a curmudgeon and ready to rule against "those darned players" lest they overrun your adventures really caught on with them.As a result, I quickly gravitated away from DM's who insisted on gritty conflicts that required you to keep a stable of PC's on hand to replace fallen ones- I knew one guy who put skulls on his DM screen like he was a damn fighter pilot racking up kills, and another who would gleefully light your character sheet on fire and keep the ashes in a ceramic coffin he'd specially made for the purpose!  Crazy, I know.When I finally saw the 2e books, I was enticed by the colorful art and crisper presentation.  These were no longer arcane tomes of lore, however, as the writing was much more matter of fact.  They were rulebooks, and no less arcane than their predecessors- despite having read them extensively, to this day, people who played AD&D for decades can be surprised to find some little tidbit tucked away in the rules that they had no idea existed- because the game quickly outgrew it's rulebooks, despite the bewildering array of supplements available, the game existed more in the interaction between players and DM's than in it's rules to the point that no two groups of players were really playing the same game.Comparing notes with other players usually came down to "wait, what?" and "oh my DM lets me/allows...", lol.  For a long time, I made characters the completely wrong way, somehow deluded into thinking that the game and the DM would facilitate me making whatever idea I had function.  I was frustrated more often than not, because even though the books claimed you could play any character you desired, the truth was, that Fighter specialized in a crossbow with a Strength of 9 was never going to compare to their dual-wielding, 18%, plate mail wearing counterpart.Many options were just terrible, many classes didn't really live up to the promised fantasy, and it was an endless quest for newer, more powerful options.  By the time my friends started making characters with the black books (ie, the Players Option series), talking about Gnome Fighters specialized in darts making five attacks per round with split ability scores so you could dump the things you didn't care about (like carry capacity) to get the things you did (sweet, sweet bonuses), I was ready to move on.But I never lost my sense of nostalgia for the game.  Even with all the frustrations I had on both sides of the DM screen, fantasy TTRPG's were still my first love, and I always wanted to go back to that style of gaming.  Even now that I'm (begrudgingly) a 5e DM, I keep going back to older adventures, trying to adapt them for newer players- even though a lot of the time it's like trying to push a square peg into a round hole with a sledgehammer.</blockquote>

Verification