Toys 'R Us has D&D, but...

[Obryn]

There were suppliments to Powers & Perils?!

I got that game on sale for $5 for the box set at K&K Toys when I was about 14. I still maintain that, on a "fun per dollar" scale, it was the best money I ever spent for an RPG. We played the heck out of that wacky, clunky system for most of a year.

Just three! And it may have been a Kay Bee that I got the supplements at...

There was Perilous Lands, which was actually a very neat setting with some adventure sites. It was kinda Eurasia-shaped, with a teensy Africa, and came with a puzzling map booklet instead of an actual map.

There was also Tower of the Lich King or something... I think it's crazy the only adventure released for the game was a high-level one, but what can ya do?

And really? You actually played it? I could never sell my friends on the system... I didn't think it looked bad back then. Nowadays, it's a bit too math/rule/table-heavy for me.


FWIW, While googling around yesterday, I found that a dedicated group still plays the game. They've even errata'd the rules and put much of it online!

Powers and Perils - Index

Oh, and speaking of Perilous Lands, here's the map.... (Very big file on a slow server)

http://abroere.xs4all.nl/pnp/lands/fullmap.jpg

-O

 

[Rel]

And really? You actually played it? I could never sell my friends on the system...

Oh sure. We had a lot of fun with it. I recall making a dwarf who got the "Giant" background during character creation and was like 7 feet tall. Also we played this game years later in college with a couple new players who had never played an RPG before. One of them was this girl who rolled a background that "one body part was absolutely perfect - the most beautiful in creation". She rolled randomly and, of course, rolled "breasts". Her roleplaying consisted almost entirely of her character bragging about her perfect breasts.

One funny artifact of the way that each skill, be it Climbing, casting a certain spell or swinging a particular weapon, earned XP separately. But you could only get XP for each skill once per encounter. We had a couple characters whose combat actions looked like this:

Round 1: I swing my greatsword at the bad guy.
Round 2: I drop the greasword, draw my broadsword and swing it at the bad guy.
Round 3: I drop the broadsword, draw my longsword and swing it at the bad guy.
Round 4: I drop the longsword, draw my shortsword and swing it at the bad guy.
Round 5: I drop the shortsword, draw my dagger and swing it at the bad guy.

I started making this guy roll perception rolls to find all his weapons after the battle.

 

[Alan Shutko]

I bought Powers & Perils (and its supplements) at Toys R Us.

Have you gotten a chance to play that yet?

 

[Alan Shutko]

And really? You actually played it? I could never sell my friends on the system... I didn't think it looked bad back then. Nowadays, it's a bit too math/rule/table-heavy for me.

We were gamely making characters until we realized that the character sheet was serious about the formulae at the bottom! I'm surprised we didn't program them all into our calculators.

 

[Obryn]

Oh sure. We had a lot of fun with it. I recall making a dwarf who got the "Giant" background during character creation and was like 7 feet tall. Also we played this game years later in college with a couple new players who had never played an RPG before. One of them was this girl who rolled a background that "one body part was absolutely perfect - the most beautiful in creation". She rolled randomly and, of course, rolled "breasts". Her roleplaying consisted almost entirely of her character bragging about her perfect breasts.

One funny artifact of the way that each skill, be it Climbing, casting a certain spell or swinging a particular weapon, earned XP separately. But you could only get XP for each skill once per encounter. We had a couple characters whose combat actions looked like this:

Round 1: I swing my greatsword at the bad guy.
Round 2: I drop the greasword, draw my broadsword and swing it at the bad guy.
Round 3: I drop the broadsword, draw my longsword and swing it at the bad guy.
Round 4: I drop the longsword, draw my shortsword and swing it at the bad guy.
Round 5: I drop the shortsword, draw my dagger and swing it at the bad guy.

I started making this guy roll perception rolls to find all his weapons after the battle.

WOW. I do remember those special attributes. I noticed yesterday that you have about a 1% chance of rolling a separate special attribute on a table whose category descriptions take up several pages - and yet will probably never be used. You could get crazy crap like Super Strength.

Somehow, I never really realized how the Expertise system would work out in play. I remember being confused over the difference between Experience and Expertise, and how crazy magic use was, though. Oh, and the combat table with "Shield Hit" as one of the possible results.

Have you gotten a chance to play that yet?

Nope! But I take it off my bookshelf once in a very long while (about as frequently as Mythus) and look through it. There's ... a lot of math. And it's more complicated than typical game-math. Like, your Hit Point Value is (S + St + C)/4, round up. Or, Character Points would be (Age x 2) + Station + 2D10. Nothing brain-breaking, but stuff you really want a calculator for.

I'm perfectly happy nowadays with my D&D variants, CoC, and WFRP2e. While there are a ton of intriguing things about games like Mythus and P&P, they're part of my gaming past now, not my gaming future.

...and maybe we should fork this thread?

-O

 

[Merkuri]

I got my first D&D stuff at a toy store. I forget the name of it, but I think it was part of the KB Toys franchise (though it wasn't named "KB Toys"). I bought two "starter kits" that had been extremely marked down.

One of them was the starter kit for AD&D 2nd edition, which was in a slim (comparatively) box that had a few manuals, maps, and dice. That was current at the time I was playing.

The second one was for an older system (not sure exactly what) but it was shoebox-sized, came with a huge game board map that was made on the same quality cardboard that board games use, tons of paperboard minis that you could cut out and fold, two sets of PC minis, one pewter and one plastic, and more dice.

I quickly figured out that they were two different versions of the game, and while I liked the version in the slim box better (it was better explained, I think) we played with the bigger box version more, just because it came with so much more stuff. Heck, I brought that box with me on babysitting trips and DM'd the starter adventures for the kids. They loved it. I'm not sure they knew what they were playing or if they ever picked up D&D afterward, but it was a way to keep them entertained for the afternoon.

Even if it's an older system, most kids are smart enough to look for more of something if they like it, and with the internet it'll be no problem for them to discover a newer edition of the game and decide which one they like better.

Whether it's 4th, 3rd, 2nd, or any other edition I think having D&D in toy stores is a great idea.