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How Did You Learn to Play D&D?
So how did you learn to play D&D? And which edition did you start playing? Have you tried later editions? Which is your favorite?
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- hotseatgames
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- ChristopherMD
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Few years later I joined an actual group as a player and liked it a lot better. Eventually went to 3rd and for a while 3.5 before quitting. Went to other systems as both GM and player and always enjoyed those more. Nowadays the only D&D I would play is B/X (technically Labyrinth Lord) because I think simpler is better. Everyone talks about 5th being a return to the old style, but Labyrinth Lord is free and I refuse to pay WotC for repackaging the same shit every few years under a new ruleset.
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That said, most of my favorite adventures were written for 1st edition, while 2nd had most of the good campaign settings.
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I had heard of D&D, but was not allowed to play it because Satan. However, RPGs generally were fine, as long as they didn’t have demons or magic. So Top Secret, Marvel Super Heroes, etc. I played with friends. It was still pretty juvenile and pointless — powergaming, munchkinism, and using the game to act out various social dysfunctions in my peer group.
By the time I looked at D&D, I was a GURPS evangelist and thought that everything that wasn’t GURPS was dumb and “unrealistic.”
I eventually got over that unfortunate phase and DMed and played a bit when 3rd edition came out, but I still felt a disconnect between the game and what I wanted. I played and DMed a bit more when 4th came out, and that was easier to run but still kind of blah for me. Around that time I started hearing about the OSR games and thought it sounded pretty interesting — clearly old D&D must’ve had some kind of lightning in a bottle, but I never really got it. I decided to find out. I ending up reading the Grognardia blog from beginning to end, and now feel that old D&D is actually a great game.
I like lots of OSR games, but the sad reality is that there’s never enough time. If I had to choose one, I’d go with Labyrinth Lord. I think it has the clearest and most procedural rules, and played RAW, it’s a great experience.
Runners-up: Lamentations of the Flame Princess (great bizarro body horror disguised as a dungeon exploration), Mazes & Minotaurs (a what-if experiment, if Gygax and Arneson had based their game on Greek myth instead of Conan and Vance), and Dungeon Crawl Classics (why wait until level 15 to encounter planar travel and chaos gods, when you can turn the gonzo up to eleven and do it at level 0?).
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- Sagrilarus
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- Pull the Goalie
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Really a jolt to the system. It took me and my other buddy about fifteen minutes to understand that we could just walk down the hallway. "Do we have to roll to move or take turns?" We had played so many traditional games that we just couldn't understand taking actions in real time.
I still have hand-copied copies of the attack and save charts from when AD&D came out. My buddy Paul had them from his friends, I made a copy of his copy. No point in keeping them, but I can't bring myself to throw them out.
D&D was a word-of-mouth thing back then. Finding another player was rare, and special. If you overheard someone talking about the game you stopped and introduced yourself.
Before the DMG came out new ideas for magic items were like nuggets of gold. We never conceived of magic armor until the DMG came out. We had killer swords, rings, wands, potions . . . and an armor class of 6 at 10th level. DMG changed everything.
In my opinion, 2nd edition is the best overall system (haven't played 5th), but it needs Unearthed Arcana to really come alive. The additional spells alone are worth the price of the book. Forgotten Realms was good too. Got Fiend Folio for free, paid too much.
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- Black Barney
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I played and DM'd Basic then Expert then Companion then 2nd edition. By then I had a new group. My regulars until I graduated HS. We followed the modules fairly religiously. Not a lot of custom workings. Of course we were teens, so I'm sure we fudged dice rolls now and again, and ended up in fist fights about every 6 month that usually ended up in a month hiatus. But we always found our way back to the table.
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- Cranberries
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Over the next few years I bought the remaining 4 sets in that line. I always loved the rules for huge battles in the 3rd box. I spent hours poring over that, utterly fascinated by it.
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I remember my first DM adventure. It was just a dungeon crawl. At some point, they ran into a dragon with 5 heads. I had this cool description written, but they soon figured out it was Tiamat. "Again? We killed her like a few adventures ago." They killed her in like two rounds. Lol.
I didn't play AD&D till I got to college. I thought it was interesting. It was weird that there were 9 alignments instead of just 3 and that stuff like elf and dwarf weren't classes. Sadly, I didn't play it that much. Our group split up after a couple of sessions.
I didn't play again till after grad school. I went on to play 3.0 and 3.5. I think I liked either of those the best, but I will always have nostalgia for that old D&D set I played when I was a kid.
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After that I grabbed the starter box which had pre-gen characters and a few scenarios. My friends and I learned together. Not long after I had the player's handbook, monster manual, DM's guide, and tons of supplements.
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dysjunct wrote: I learned kind of a cargo cult version of RPGs in 5th grade. A kid at school drew a dungeon on graph paper, and then would DM you through it. Everything was resolved with 1d6. It was juvenile and pointless.
I had heard of D&D, but was not allowed to play it because Satan. However, RPGs generally were fine, as long as they didn’t have demons or magic. So Top Secret, Marvel Super Heroes, etc. I played with friends. It was still pretty juvenile and pointless — powergaming, munchkinism, and using the game to act out various social dysfunctions in my peer group.
By the time I looked at D&D, I was a GURPS evangelist and thought that everything that wasn’t GURPS was dumb and “unrealistic.”
I eventually got over that unfortunate phase and DMed and played a bit when 3rd edition came out, but I still felt a disconnect between the game and what I wanted. I played and DMed a bit more when 4th came out, and that was easier to run but still kind of blah for me. Around that time I started hearing about the OSR games and thought it sounded pretty interesting — clearly old D&D must’ve had some kind of lightning in a bottle, but I never really got it. I decided to find out. I ending up reading the Grognardia blog from beginning to end, and now feel that old D&D is actually a great game.
I like lots of OSR games, but the sad reality is that there’s never enough time. If I had to choose one, I’d go with Labyrinth Lord. I think it has the clearest and most procedural rules, and played RAW, it’s a great experience.
Runners-up: Lamentations of the Flame Princess (great bizarro body horror disguised as a dungeon exploration), Mazes & Minotaurs (a what-if experiment, if Gygax and Arneson had based their game on Greek myth instead of Conan and Vance), and Dungeon Crawl Classics (why wait until level 15 to encounter planar travel and chaos gods, when you can turn the gonzo up to eleven and do it at level 0?).
I had a similar journey. Dragon magazine articles helped me quickly become a better DM. After D&D, I moved on to BRP for a while, especially Call of Cthulhu.
Then I fell hard for GURPS and ran everything with it for several years, even doing extensive conversion work of adventures written for non-GURPS systems. At my peak madness, I ran a weekly GURPS Fantasy campaign for 11 players, with an average of one character fatality per week. I got to a level of mastery where I could handle up to three simultaneous sidebar discussions with players at the same time. After seven years, I completely burned out on GURPS and spend the next few years mostly just playing CCGs. I haven't played GURPS in over 20 years now, and should probably sell my large stack of GURPS books.
The thing that made GURPS a burden to run was the same thing that made it fun: the detailed and very tactical combat system. I missed that, and found something comparable in D&D 3.0/3.5.
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