Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaculata" data-source="post: 6778964" data-attributes="member: 6801286">[ATTACH]72435[/ATTACH]My first introduction to D&D probably started by playing the board game Hero Quest, and later we moved on to a sort of home brew light version of D&D 2nd edition, called Elemental Quest.Elemental Quest was as cliche as you can possibly imagine. It was all about defeating the ominous Lord Dark and his evil army, by collecting the various elemental crystals to create the only weapon that could defeat him, or something along those lines. We were very young, so my memory is hazy. What made Elemental Quest quite interesting, was that we also made our own custom clay figurines. We made up all of our own monsters, and then spend a lot of time molding them and painting them. Of course they looked nothing close to the sort of miniatures that we use today. But still, it was an awesome army. If one of the adventures had a big dragon at the end, then we started making a big dragon out of clay first.We then moved on to 2nd edition, and played that for quite a long time. I don't remember much of the campaigns that we ran back then. But eventually 3rd edition came out, and at first we were kind of hesitant. This is the first time we started feeling that WotC was just releasing new versions of the game just to sell more books... although this is only partially true. Yes, its true from a purely business point of view. But there was also much to improve on the game. And so once we started actually playing 3rd edition, we never looked back. Stuff like the tac0 system (hopelessly convoluted), and the reverse armor class (which never made any sense!), or all the countless saves (rod, staff, wand, petrification, -ugh). Once we started on 3rd edition, the whole game felt much more accessible and streamlined. It kind of surprises me today when people look back at 3rd edition, and think that the rules are so overly complicated.... no they are not. Not in comparison to 2nd edition! And 3.5 improved a ton of stuff as well, so we easily made that switch. We maintained an entire book with all the details of our home brew 3.5 setting, along with any drawings that we made during the sessions (be it maps, or just funny drawings of characters and situations). We would often switch DM's, and so each DM would add new cities and characters to this ever growing world. We wrote everything down, to keep things consistent. We made sure that if the players ever returned to a certain city, in someone elses campaign, that the city would still have the same ruler as before, with the same appearance. An interesting detail, is that the dark skinned war mongering Kooghan were first introduced as villains in the campaign of one of our DM's, and I would later bring them back as an allied pirate faction in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?473727-Pirates-of-the-Emerald-Coast-%283-5%29-continues" target="_blank">Pirates of the Emerald Coast</a>.When fourth edition came out, we again had that same feeling that we had before. Only this time around, the feeling was more justified. By now we had piles upon piles of 3rd edition books, and 4th edition really didn't seem all that great in comparison to 3.5. And so we ignored it... and apparently a lot of other players did too, because 4th edition didn't do so well. We continued with 3.5, until eventually I moved, and had to find a new group to play with. After a few years in a new city, I found a group of old larp friends, and we started a new 3.5 campaign. I ran a brief monster campaign with them (the players played a Troll, Frost giant, Mindflayer, Succubus and Fairy). We also played a Call of Cthulhu campaign called The Evans City Conspiracy, in which the players had to deal with a city that was slowly moving further in time, and would eventually be sucked into another world. For this campaign, I tried out something new. I gave all the players black envelopes, which contained a list of secrets. They had to choose one secret (or make up their own), and keep that secret from being discovered by their party members. The penalty would be sanity damage. This added an exciting feeling of paranoia to the game, where one player would know what is going on, but he would not be able to tell his fellow players.We also tried out some campaigns that didn't work so well. We tried a World of Warcraft campaign, a Star Wars campaign, and a Mech Warrior campaign. Most of these campaigns failed because we had a few players that just weren't working for the group. It was a hard decision, but I was the first to decide that it just wasn't working. So we formed a new group, and left the troublesome players behind.Meanwhile we also started playing a 2nd edition campaign with an old role playing buddy of ours (we had to fill in the gap of the missing players). This guy is a great storyteller, but he had not moved on to 3rd edition yet, and he had all the 2nd edition books. We figured we might as well play a bit of 2nd edition for old times sake. He came up with a really cool evil campaign, in which our group of 3 players all played the parts of powerful evil witches, who had been world destroying entities at some point in the past, in some fragment of reality. It quickly got very complicated, with lots of cosmic powers, gods and demons, and multiple versions of our characters across different realities. Awesome stuff really. But this is just around the time when I started up my 3.5 pirate campaign, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?473727-Pirates-of-the-Emerald-Coast-%283-5%29-continues" target="_blank">Pirates of the Emerald Coast</a>. And once this old buddy of ours got used to 3rd edition, he decided that he wanted to convert his evil witches campaign to the 3.5 system too. Much like we did many years ago, he noticed that 3.5 simply played much better than 2nd edition. We also got a buddy of ours that had never played D&D before into playing the pirate campaign, and he has remained with the group ever since.The pirate campaign is really where I stepped up my game as a DM, I think. It is the first time that I made the game a real sandbox adventure. It is all about naval combat, aquatic adventures, and random events. It is a world that is constantly in motion, with dozens of random encounter tables, vast volumes of text that detail every country and city in great detail. And an intriguing plot full of twists and turns. The players are completely in control of their adventure. I'm just the evil storyteller, who constantly throws in surprising twists, and engages them with complications. The world is ever changing, based on the choices of the players. And we even expand the game itself, by including new rules for base building, custom lists of weapons, items and ship upgrades, new spells, new monsters, and even new rules for alcohol. Every npc also is a fully fleshed out character, with his/her own backstory, and secrets.Meanwhile one of my friends also started his own home brew 3.5 campaign, with the idea of points of light in an otherwise dark world. What made this campaign very interesting, was the idea that our first couple of sessions were just our characters as kids growing up together. We started out without a class, and then slowly grew into our classes. We also didn't roll for our stats, but used the Three Dragon Ante tarot to determine our stats randomly. This was an important step to get all of us out of the min-max mindset. Its not about having optimal stats. It should be about role playing.We started out in our home village, and then slowly started expanding the map by exploring, spreading more light in doing so. Places that we liberated from evil, became important strongholds and wells for resources. This good friend of mine borrowed a lot of the ideas for random encounters from my pirate campaign, and I borrowed a lot of ideas from his. We are constantly inspiring each other, and stepping up our game. And yet the two campaigns feel completely unique. Its been a while since we've played this campaign, but we should continue it at the start of 2016.Now 5th edition has been released. Most of us have looked at the books, and we like what we see. We all have our opinions about it, but it is mostly positive. But I don't think we'll be switching soon. We just have way too many 3.5 books, and it works just fine for us. So for now, we play <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?473727-Pirates-of-the-Emerald-Coast-%283-5%29-continues" target="_blank">Pirates of the Emerald Coast</a>, and you can follow our adventures right <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?473727-Pirates-of-the-Emerald-Coast-%283-5%29-continues" target="_blank">here</a>.</blockquote>

Verification