Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="merelycompetent" data-source="post: 4804903" data-attributes="member: 33830">For us it was pretty straight forward:Learn or die. Have fun learning, and have fun dying.I went from Basic D&D to Expert, to AD&D, then onwards. The groups I played with houseruled the heck out of the game. Everyone in the area figured out pretty early on that rolling a bunch of average stats was no fun, so point systems, 4d6 + reroll 1's + take highest 3 + assign as you like, and many other variants became the norm. We were teenage geeks and nerds. We wanted to play Conan-, Gandalf-, Chu'Chulain-, Fafhrd-, Grey Mouser-types. Not Wingnut the wussy fighter. As one DM put it: You can keep on rolling masses of 3d6, writing down the stats, and having the character suicide until you get some fun stats... or you can use this point-buy system I've been thinking about.I figure I had somewhere between 1 in 4 to 1 in 3 of my characters die before 5th level.Mostly, we learned not to do suicidally stupid things (i.e., cause and effect). We watched how others gamed and adapted their tricks and tactics. We sent out sneaky thieves to scout ahead for pit traps that would gack the MU. We guarded our rears. We ran away A LOT!! We laughed when the 14th level MU thought we were his entourage, and let a bunch of demons get in to melee range with him for a round. No more put-downs after that resurrection. The whole group cheered when my cleric, Tain, was knighted and became known as Sir Tain the Faithfully Sure. Except the DM - he was banging his head on the table because he suddenly realized I'd spent the last year of real time setting up that pun. One of my first characters, Douglas (yeah, guess where I stole the name from), was a thief and survived to legendary status - eventually becoming the Guildmaster of Thieves in Greyhawk City, faking his own death to retire, then dual-classing to a couple of other classes (long story) and becoming a walking illustration of 1E dual-classing rules follies. That was before he became a demigod vampire. Sort of. He certainly made use of the hear noise percentages at every opportunity, and saved many fellow adventurers from unnecessary damage. Yeah, sure, sometimes he didn't make the roll. But the sure way to fail is to not try... or make too much noise griping about failed attempts. Heck, there was that one time he failed to hear the ogre charging the door in Keep on the Borderlands! The MU offered to help, since the door was obviously untrapped (the thief was listening at it and nothing bad happened). The MU almost bought it then and there when the ogre came crashing through the door and tromped the thief and MU beneath it. Together, we almost made a squished multi-classed human MU/Thief. The fighter's player laughed so hard he sprayed pizza on the playroom wall. We spent most of the night trying to clean it off before my parents found out.Looking back on it, yeah, I ran into some lousy DMs and lousy players. But they were few and far between. I tend to remember the high points more than the low ones, because there were a LOT of high points. I didn't stick with groups or individuals that I didn't get along with. I also developed ways to weed out people I knew I wouldn't get along with from groups I DMed for. And I would quietly leave groups who had players (or DMs) that I wasn't a good match with.We survived by making houserules so the game was more fun, learning basic tactics and strategy, and reminding ourselves that even utter dimwit characters (Int or Wis 3) either learn from experience or die. A wise gamer I met pointed out to a young and too-by-the-book young DM (yours truly) that when the PCs run out of hit points, you can't torture them any more. So don't make them run out of hit points too soon. Pace yourself. It's not meant to be a horror house for the DM's entertainment. But if the hit points don't drop, the players will lose interest.That's how our characters survived beyond 1st level: We learned, worked with the DM, and ran away a lot.</blockquote>

Verification