D&D General This and official D&D novels colored what D&D is for me.


log in or register to remove this ad

My neighbor, one of the people I play D&D with now, his first intro to RPGs was through EverQuest. When I first was telling him about D&D it was because he played that his interest was piqued and gave it a try.
It's a pretty good entry point. Even if trolls are kind of different (chonky boys instead of long and lean), so much of it carries over, especially pre-expansions.
 


Even EverQuest 1 is still limping along and putting out new expansions, all with extremely dated graphics and an interface that its devoted fans aren't bothered by.

Which is awesome for them, honestly. My old EQ1 guild is still chugging along, 20 years after I left it, providing a community for a group of friends who've been together almost 25 years now.

Project 1999 is the only way I touch EQ now.
 

I wasn't started playing D&D at the tail end of the Reagan administration, so video games really weren't a huge influence on how I played D&D. I think the people I gamed with influenced me more than anything else, then the AD&D products themselves, and of course fantasy movies like Conan the Barbarian, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Deathstalker, etc., etc.
 

Me and a friend wanted to play DDO together online but pretty sure we couldn't get on the same server, or we kept getting kicked off randomly. IDR, but it just hit me that was almost 20 years ago. I bought a Switch a few years back played it for a while, but I haven't touched it a long time. My attention span is shot nowadays
Wait D&D Online was released on Switch? I knew DCU Online was but I hadn't seen anything about D&D.
 


Playing the SSI Gold Box Game "Pool of Radiance" (1988) -> Buying the Dragonlance Chronicles (1989) -> Buying the 2e Player's Handbook (1990) was my order of indoctrination.
There is a photo that will eventually be made available to the world, if I ever decide to run for public office. It's of me sitting at my Commodore 128, wearing a Def Leppard t-shirt, mussed up hair, face covered in zits, a stack of tapes ("Weird Al", Led Zeppelin, and Iron Maiden), and playing Pool of Radiance.

It sickens me that I didn't figure out I was a stereotype until a decade later.
 

What D&D is to me was the first book I ever picked up for it (from the library), Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Subsequently, the images in the Players Handbook helped cement it in more.

I'm old so the first videogame I think about around that time is one I spent hours playing: Atari Adventure. Crude graphics yeah, but as a child it really sparked my imagination (sometimes, less is more).

I also remember staring in fascination at the older boys renting time on a computer at a local game store playing a first person dungeon crawler game (I don't remember which it was, but it was one color, maybe Wizardry or Might and Magic).

Ah simpler times. Fun though.
 

Remove ads

Top