On coming back to D&D, or Your personal D&D history [Long]

[reutbing0]

The coming year will mark my 10-years-of-roleplaying anniversary. What better time to return to where it all started, D&D? I can remember quite clearly how it all started. I'm part of the internet generation, so my first encounter with D&D was with a .pdf demo adventure. I rounded up some classmates to play with me and coaxed one of them into DM-ing. Of course I wasn't going to be the DM myself, where's the fun in that? I played a wizard with a quarterstaff and I found a pit trap by poking the floor with it. After I had cast my first Magic Missile, I was lost.

Then the true D&D fanaticism began. We, a group of people whose friendship was based for a large part on the desire to play Magic and D&D, started buying the rulebooks, adventures,a nd boxed sets. We played every week and these games were the highlight of our week (we didn't have girlfriends). We had fights over rules, found ridiculous magic items, and used the most horrible kits from those complete handbooks you'll probably remember from AD&D 2nd edition. We also had a DM who redefined railroading:

DM: You can't enter the city it is entirely closed off (we didn't go straight to the dungeon and there was no way our DM was going to let that happen)
Players: Why, is there a plague or something?
DM: No it's just closed off.
Players: Can we climb the city walls?
DM: No.
Players: can we at least try?
DM: No.
Players: Ehm, ok..... (maybe we should find a different DM)

Eventually we did find several new DM's, one of them being myself. I started dividing my time between playing and DMing, and I also started reading a site called Eric Noah's unoffficial 3E News rather obsessively. When 3E came out we really started to come into our own. We always felt at a disadvantage when playing 2E, there were so many books and such a huge legacy associated with that, 3E was a fresh start. Looking back, some of our best games were in these early 3E days. However, for a variety of reasons, we became disenchanted with D&D. We had become rules snobs, and were too concerned with the "right" way to play that we forgot to have fun.

We also became increasingly aware that there were RPG's besides D&D. Slowly but surely D&D represented less and less of our gaming diet. If we did play D&D, we transformed it into something that was hardly recognizable as a D&D game. We'd run D&D: Steampunk!, but without spellcasters, dungeons, and dragons for that matter. "Just D&D" didn't cut it anymore. At a certain point we stopped playing D&D altogether. We bought D&D 3.5 for posterity, but never actually played it. We did criticize D&D a lot though. While we didn't play D&D anymore, we did play everything from All Flesh Must Be Eaten to Exalted. When we ended a campaign we didn't even think of playing D&D, but dismissed it outright. Now most of those games were fun, but somehow none of these campaigns were meant to last. Something was missing. We also found that life got in the way of the game, and that preparing a game became more like work and less fun. We still met up regularly, but never actually got to play anything.

A couple of weeks ago, whilst in the character creation stages of a Nobilis game that never took off, someone in our group commented "if we were doing a D&D campaign we would have been playing already". That resonated very strongly with me, and sure enough in our last "what should we play next"-meeting our group's most vocal D&D-critic said "why don't we just play D&D". And that's what we're going to do, we're going to play "just D&D". We'll be embracing the tropes and cliches of the genre and do wat got us in this hobby in the first place. We'll swing swords, cast spells, kill kobolds equipped with crossbows, delve deep into dark and dangerous dungeons, and tell amazing stories together.

I'm giddy with anticipation, it's been a long time ago that I've looked forward to running a game so much. I'm assembling maps, rolling up hitpoints, and scouring the web for useable artwork. And the game isn't until Friday! Going back to D&D feels very good, but what feels even better is that I'll be going back to D&D with three friends who have been playing with me from the very start. We are no longer friends because we play D&D together, but we play D&D together because we're friends. That's awesome.

So, what is your personal D&D history? Have you drifted away from D&D but always found yourself returning to this game we all know and love? Am I just a sentimental sap?

 

[jdrakeh]

So, what is your personal D&D history? Have you drifted away from D&D but always found yourself returning to this game we all know and love? Am I just a sentimental sap?

The game that I always drift back to is The Window. Don't get me wrong, I like D&D, but it's not my favorite game by any means - the draw for D&D is, for me, primarily nostalgia. And nostalgia only gets me so far.

 

[Aeric]

My first RPG was the "red box" Basic Set. I ran that once or twice for family members (being in grade school at the time) and later in middle school I got to play once or twice. The first real campaign I played in was a multi-genre GURPS game in high school; there was no plot to speak of, just a bunch of characters from different times and worlds thrown together and exploring whatever weird stuff the GM decided to throw at us that week. I ran Cyberpunk for that group shortly thereafter.

Then there was the summer where we played Robotech.

After that was my first AD&D campaign. It lasted for about a year. Since then, I played AD&D off and on, intermixed with different games such as Rifts, Mekton, and Vampire, for about ten years.

Then Third Edition came out, and with the exception of a short-lived Mage campaign, I've played (and ran) nothing but D&D since then.

Until Third Edition came out, my gaming diet had an equal amount of non-D&D in it. Not so much anymore.

 

[Wormwood]

Play history:
5th grade (1979): AD&D
6th grade: D&D (Basic/Expert)
High School: AD&D
College: Second Edition AD&D
The nineties: White Wolf, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun
2000: D&D 3e

 

[JoeGKushner]

i actually started role playing with the Marvel Super Heroes game put out by TSR. Loved that game. Had all sorts of interesting characters and encounters. A bit of tracing and a few changes and BAM! All new characters that looked familiar.

Always interesting to see how the writers would have to change the characters to update them after some event in a comic happened.

Ah, goold old Ulric, Kurse, Thor, Silver Surfer, Hulk and others. Great stuff back then.

One of my friends noticed that the game was put out by TSR and introduced me to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Well, a version of it anyway. Good stuff.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I started playing somewhere around '78. I was 11. A friend had come back from Kansas and he and his older brother had found this interesting new game called D&D. Box set, we played through B1, my character dies in the first hour because of some living attacking shrubbery or something. Got the second set. I recall it being the red and blue, but my memory could be playing tricks on me.

Then I found the hardcovers. Bought those as money allowed (still have them all too). Moved up to AD&D 1st. At the time we figured Basic, Expert, Advanced. A solid read through of the PH disabused us of that notion. I also bough and GMed Gamma world. We played a very tactical game, not much in the way of character development. Kept playing all through Jr High and High School. Played in an Evil game in HS - hated it, and decided never to do that again.

Now while I liked D&D, and living in place where gaming choices were a little sparce, so I didn't have a lot of exposure to other games (just the TSR stuff), I had, of course, come up with a bunch of house rules, and a list of qualities that the perfect game system would have. I get to college and found a bunch of new games, among them Champions which pretty much filled my list. At this point I pretty much abaonded D&D.

A while later when 2nd ed came out, I read through it, and it fixed nothing that I wanted fixed from D&D, so I never really bough any 2nd ed rules. Got into a number of campaign settings - and as my wife and I played 1st ed D&D (with houserules) we used a number of those settings. Primariy Spelljammer, although we used some Dark Sun - a horrible place we used specifically for the purpose of letting the PCs fix all the problems with it. Hated Planescape, ignored Mystara, and Ravenloft. Got a few bits for FR - mostly Waterdeep and Undermountain that we just ported into our own world. But we only played D&D between ourself (as much out of nostalgia for the game system as anything else).

Then there was an odd set of circumstances that HERO games went through, the gameline seemed dead- or worse turned into the Fuzion system. During this emptyness of my favorite game system 3rd ed came out.

It fixed 90 % of what I though was wrong about D&D. It was also the most flexible class based system I had ever seen. To be honest the multiclassing rules with PrCs and the feat system is what sold me on it. Then to find out that the rules had been "open sourced" and any company could put out product.... that was just too cool for words. And I thought a lot of the third party stuff was as good, if not better than the stuff Wizards put out. (I loved most of the Legends and Lair line, especially the "Path of" Books; really like the Relics and Rituals books, and hoo boy look at all them monster books).

I ran a short D&D game with my current group - it went okay, but as the group is primarily HERO oriented it went over a little flat.
Then HERO came back from the dead (Thank you Steve Long and DOJ). That is what our gaming group plays in group play. But I really loved third (and 3.5) edition - it became my second system of choice. So in solo play, my wife* and I play D&D. The characters there, in group play, would be munchkin and powergaming to the max, but when you have 2 PCs (both played by the same player) a little powergaming makes it balanced to get them to run in a published module. When Unearthed Arcana described the option of Gestalt Classes, that really fit the style we gamed in.

Currently the two characters I run, that my wife GMs are 5th level gestalt and I am having a blast, and she is enjoying Gming.

*I met my wife when she was GMing a game when I moved into the area and got into the game. Been happily married (and gaming together) for 16 years.

 

[was]

I started playing when I was 23, after I left the military and started college.

 

[StupidSmurf]

The same friend who turned me on to the Narnia Chronicles and Dr Who, among other things, was also the one responsible for turning me on to D&D. His name was Bill, and his brother was the DM. Bill and I each rolled up three characters, and after that first session, I knew that not only did I want to keep playing this game, I wanted to make up something to run OTHERS through it!

So, I bought the D&D boxed set, you know, the one with the red dragon sitting on a pile of treasure, and a warrior and a wizard are walking in on him. That was in 1978.

And my first group was an all-female group of players, four co-eds who lived downstairs from me. After a few months of using the boxed set, I bought the Monster Manual, then the Players Handbook, then finally, the DMG, in that order.

So I played AD&D until, what, 1987? 1988? Whenever they began putting out 2nd Ed for playtesting. My RPGA group was one of the playtest groups for AD&D 2nd Ed. So naturally, we switched our campaign to 2nd Ed. and played it till it turned to Third Edition in 2000. Played it until it turned to 3.5.

And yes, I still have all of my books

 

[Oryan77]

I heard of D&D growing up but I knew nothing about it. I always had that fantasy bug in me though. From 1988-1990 I used to draw caverns on paper with encounters in the picture. I would run classmates through them and they would tell me which direction they go in my pictures and I'd show the next sheet of paper with that encounter on it. Around 1990 while I was in the 8th grade, I created a dice rolling fantasy game and used pictures from a fantasy Sega Master System game as the PC's portraits. I did the same type of thing with sheets of paper but this time players got to role hitpoints and damage with dice. I stopped playing that in Highschool and the summer after I graduated I met a bunch of new friends who played Dark Sun and had me roll up a PC. I was immediately hooked. A year later I bought all of the Planescape boxsets, knew nothing about the planes or what a prime world was, and just jumped into running a game in Sigil. I had no idea what I was doing, I barely knew the rules for DM'ing, and half of my friends only lasted a couple of sessions because I was so bad

We stopped playing shortly after and never played again for 7 years. I just got back into DM'ing (PS again) 2 months before 3.5 came out. I then scrapped my 3.0 stuff and bought all the 3.5 books. I was determined to be a good DM and I think I'm going strong now. If only I had known about D&D back in the 80's, my skills might be so much better now

 

[Wombat]

Let's see...

I started off with D&D in 1975. By the time it switched to AD&D, I dropped out. This would be, what?, 1979/80 for me; then I moved on primarily to RuneQuest, with small forays into Traveller (along with two attempts at Chivalry & Sorcery ... never got even a darn branch enchanted... and some other runs of Paranoia).

1984-88 were the Wilderness Years -- I played a few hands of AD&D, about a dozen of GURPS, and created a LOT of rpgs in my head, but otherwise was a Good Boy and did my college work.

Late in 1988 I was drawn back in. Golden Heroes was the game, but swiftly moved to Cyberpunk. Then came Ars Magica -- this held me in good stead from about 1990 to 2000, with occassional trips into other games (Over The Edge, for example).

In 2001 I was casting about to find some people to start a game and found ... almost no one. I tried with Ars Magica, with Over the Edge, with several other games and got no response. Then I put up my shingle for D&D 3e -- I had been given a copy of the core books for Xmas. Immediately I had a waiting list. I ran through several variant and three campaigns from that time until now -- Faceless Statues, By Their Deeds, and Tales of New Mavarga. D20 & its variants (especially Arcana Unearthed) held sway again, though heavily house-ruled to bring them around to being the kinds of games I wanted to run.

Here in 2005 I have convinced my gamers to give Ars Magica a chance, though we intend to do a side game of Iron Heroes. So one "intellectual game", one "hack-n-slash" ;-)