What formed your idea of what D&D is to you?

[Kzach]

Ok, this is a somewhat complex question so bear with me whilst I explain.

I believe that people form an 'ideal' of what D&D is to them personally. I believe that this mostly comes from a positive early experience with gaming or through a positive continuous gaming experience.

I feel that this ideal is independent of edition or system and has more to do with who you are gaming with and the particular environment in which you gamed. From that point on, nothing can ever truly compare, whether it's objectively 'better' or not, subjectively you will always compare it to the experience which formed that ideal.

At least, that's my theory.

So I'm not looking for people to tell me 'what D&D is to them' but rather, the situation or circumstance or group with whom they formed that ideal version of D&D.

 

[HelloChristian]

Cool thread idea.

Lazy afternoons with Todd and Matt, listening to Oingo Boingo and playing Red Box Basic. Just the three of us, making our own worlds, getting through early adolescence the best we could.

For me, gaming will always be about friends who accept you without reservation and being creative in a light-hearted manner.

 

[arscott]

I can't say that I'm horribly nostalgic for my old highschool D&D games--They were fun, but I have just as much fun playing D&D today.

They definitely helped shape my definition of D&D, though. We didn't pay that much attention to the rules, and consequently, I think my understanding of D&D is very rules independant. We've got people on these boards saying things like "4e doesn't feel like D&D to me" or "3e never felt like D&D to me", and I can't help but think "what are you guys talking about? We're casting spells and fighting dragons. How is this not D&D?"

 

[megamania]

Laughing at stupid jokes and luck while relaxing from a week of work with friends. Spend the first hour going off with life then play for 3-4 hours. Every 5-6th game not even play but remineince about past games and movies.

 

[kobold]

My first experience with D&D was the summer of 1977. My best friends brother had the little white box.
We where 10 years old and playing with the big kids - you know real big kids like 13 or 14.
It was crazy awsome, I didn't know the rules and didn't care we where having a blast exploring caves and fighting monsters.
Now I get to do it all over again. My son and his friends are all about 10 or 11 and we are playing 4E, with only the loosest understanding of the rules. It still feels just as exciting, we stay up late and talk about life and monsters and how to build dungeons and if only our lucky 20 sided hadn't rolled under the couch we probably would have hit that orc.

 

[kolikeos]

What formed the 'ideal' D&D experience to me? Mostly, reading about others’ experiences on the internet. When I read about how some other person would, or has, played this and that in such a way or another I sometimes think to myself "Would have been great if we could do that in my game with my friends".
I've never played in a D&D game (or any other RPG for that matter) that today I can say was the 'ideal' experience.
I did have some shining moments as DM which I would love to reproduce, but sadly those were quite rare. Those include some in-character talk between the PCs with me only listening, a great cliffhanger which left all the players at the edge of their seats full of suspense and 2 short but fun one-shot adventures (one of them was actually a GURPS adventure).
And a few jokes made at the right time.

 

[Wombat]

Hmmm.

Probably a combination of my readings of mythology and folklore, playing Chainmail (the yellow cover edition) put out by TSR, and playing OD&D, in all of its chaotic glory...

Then a bit of playing rpgs over 30 years and talking with many people about such games

I'm not sure this nails matters down, but it is pretty close.

 

[wingsandsword]

My first two campaigns really cemented my ideal of what D&D is. They were under different DM's, with different players, but they had a lot in common and I had a great time in both. My preconceptions were laid down by hazy memories of the 80's D&D cartoon and playing a few of the "Gold Box" computer games growing up.

* Both were very "rules heavy". The system at the time for both was AD&D 2e with Skills & Powers, however 3.0 and 3.5 were certainly crunchy enough (and run better than the old 2e).

* Both made heavy use of the "Great Wheel" cosmology. One was a Forgotten Realms/Planescape campaign, the other was a homebrew campaign setting that had a major plot arc on the outer planes. Planar adventuring is the natural thing for mid-to-high level characters to do.

* The Forgotten Realms setting is the default D&D setting. Either the game itself is set there, or it's the standard setting that campaign settings are compared against by DM's and players.

* Plotting between sessions is just as important as the game itself. Whether planning character advancement choices, or spell research, or where we're going to go hunting for the BBEG next. In fact, planning your character out in detail is practically a sub-game unto itself.

* The game itself is played with friends you know and trust, and it's as much about spending time with those friends as it is playing the game. Taking a break in the middle when the pizza or chinese food shows up to watch TV and eat is A-OK and even desirable.

 

[pawsplay]

I was only eight when I encountered the Red Box set, and the image of a dragon rising above a huge pond of golden coins to battle that fighter has stayed with me. I found the picture of "demi-humans" alluring, especially the elf, and played a whole series of characters inspired by that one. By ten, I had read The Hobbit three times, and was well on the road to chewing into Edith Hamilton's Mythology, an adaptation of Mallory's King Arthur, and any book on Charlemagne I could find. Having been exposed to the film Flight of Dragons and a number of juvenile novels, I kind of liked the peculier mix of sci-fi and fantasy found in D&D, things such as infravision and real-world reptiles and dinosaurs.

In my mind, D&D was a blend of chivalric romance and "dark ages" fairy tales like Dragonslayer with quirky, sci-fi and mythological flourishes akin to all those books that have been published about creatures, from The Book of the Gnomes to Dragonology.

I came to AD&D later, and so I was already an older teenager when I delved into the Conan stories, Lankhmar, Thieves' World, and the rest of the classic swords-and-sorcery stories. I was probably too old when I read Elric... it felt a little flat to me, although I liked the world, and I was much more impressed by Moorcock's Corum stories. So the association of D&D with swords-and-socery is a later thing, but has very much shaped my view of it (and reading those stories went a long way toward explaining some things I had always found mysterious, like Zargon, the lack of overt deities in most D&D worlds, and "thieves guilds").

The Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and the rest have always been sidelines to me. To me, D&D means 12th century romance plus mythological super-heroes, living on the sunny side of a mysterious world. I once turned up my nose at Dark Sun, because of the blatant appeal to powergamers and gimmicks like "character trees," but I have since come to respect it as a very well developed classic swords-and-sorcery world.

 

[nightwyrm]

I started playing in highschool with AD&D 2nd ed. 2nd ed has all sorts of optional rules even just in the core three so we were always fiddling around with the game mechanics and seeing what works and what doesn't. Our group was mostly made up of recent immigrant from Hong Kong (weird eh?) so our games never had a problem with incorporating non-medieval, non-western fantasy things into our games. We made up mechanics to emulate animes we've seen, tried to create a Jedi class in a medieval setting when we got our hands on the psionic handbook, etc. If we thought it was cool, we tried to mimic it in our game.

So, my "idea" of D&D was never grounded in a western fantasy setting. It was always just a system that we used to emulate what we wanted to play, wherever the inspiration came from. And so I never have any problem with ToB being too "anime" or 4e's slaughter of the sacred cattle herd. My philosophy of D&D had always been: "If it works, keep it. If it doesn't, throw it out." At the end of the day, it's just a system that allows us to do cool things in our imagination and have fun with a bunch of people.