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How Did You Learn to Play D&D?

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25 Oct 2017 17:52 #256358 by Shellhead
Recently had a conversation about D&D with a player who is about 20 years younger than me. He is currently playing in a 1st edition campaign that is being run RAW (rules as written). I was curious about that, because I ran 1st edition for a year before the first edition of the Dungeon Master's Guide was published, and had to use house rules to compensate for the non-existent tables for combat and saving throws at first. I was a self-taught player, having learned the basics from the rulebook for the blue box edition of D&D. And the store owner had stripped my copy of the B1 Module (In Search of the Unknown) and replaced it with some geomorph maps and random generator sheets for monsters and magic items.

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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25 Oct 2017 17:56 #256359 by Gary Sax
Baldur's Gate 2.

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25 Oct 2017 18:12 #256360 by hotseatgames
My friend had AD&D, 2nd edition, I'm guessing. This was a red box. He also had Fiend Folio, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and later got Dragon Lance and Oriental Adventures. He was always the DM, and would house rule pretty much anything we wanted. I specifically recall that my character had Panthro's nunchaku from Thundercats.

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25 Oct 2017 18:29 #256361 by the_jake_1973
My godfather and his brother taught me and then my mom bought me the red box set. After that, I went to 2nd and then 2.5.

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25 Oct 2017 18:41 #256362 by ChristopherMD
I learned in the most awful way possible. Some friends of mine talked me into giving roleplaying a shot. AD&D 2nd edition was the game they liked to play. "Sure" I said, "I'll play with you guys". "Great, you can DM" they said. So that's how I ended up DMing in D&D before I had ever played or even read the books. Just took their word for it on the rules. Later I learned they frequently cheated at the rules and one of them would even cheat on his dice rolls. Turns out what they really wanted was to use their overpowered characters with me just throwing monsters at them to beat up. No roleplaying involved. It wasn't fun at all for me but I guess they had fun so whatever.
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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25 Oct 2017 18:57 #256363 by Shellhead
My favorite edition so far has been 3.5, but I haven't tried 4th or 5th. I played in a 3.0 campaign for a few months back in 2001, then got a better feel for 3.5 while playing the Temple of Elemental Evil pc game in 2004. When I finally decided that I wanted to run the Ptolus campaign, I bought a set of core books for 3.5 in 2010 and taught myself the ins and outs of the system over the course of the next year. Then I spent another year prepping for the extensive campaign by printing out maps and making wooden tokens, as well as reading the massive Ptolus sourcebook (672 pages).

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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25 Oct 2017 19:09 - 25 Oct 2017 19:10 #256365 by dysjunct
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?).
Last edit: 25 Oct 2017 19:10 by dysjunct.

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25 Oct 2017 19:11 - 25 Oct 2017 19:16 #256366 by Sagrilarus
I learned "Dungeons & Dragons" from the first big box, the one with the red dragon on the front.. My buddy Paul (of "running will only postpone your traitorous death" fame) had learned it over the summer in the Poconos and brought it home to teach it to us.

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.
Last edit: 25 Oct 2017 19:16 by Sagrilarus.

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25 Oct 2017 20:15 #256368 by Black Barney
2nd or 4th edition . Self taught. I ran an event for my family at Xmas. My mom was a magic user who was killed immediately by a kobolds arrow. My grandfather was a thief who fell asleep almost immediately. My grandmother was a cleric who kept trying to have sex with everything . My uncle was a dwarf fighter who fell into a sleep trap and that was that.
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25 Oct 2017 22:33 #256371 by Chapel
xmas, 1981, Basic redbox. It was taught to me by my then step brother who was a year older than me, and a certified genius. I couldn't tell you how strict we followed the rules. I was 11 years old, and don't remember all the specifics. I do know I played a fighter, and died pretty quick in the Caves of Chaos.

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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25 Oct 2017 23:02 - 25 Oct 2017 23:09 #256374 by Cranberries
My brilliant cousin Chris, who recently Left Las Vegas, taught us, and we got the basic box for Christmas in the eighties. In my memory the box was green, not red. At one point our neighbor Mike W. ran a campaign. He was a soccer jock, and gave away crap Monty Hall style, and then killed his little brother's 18th level paladin and laughed when his stuttering brother cried.
Last edit: 25 Oct 2017 23:09 by Cranberries.

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25 Oct 2017 23:20 #256375 by Ancient_of_MuMu
I bought the Larry Elmore Red Box in 1984 with the money I got from being a film extra and taught myself to play. I have a suspicion I had a friend who had vaguely taught me to play before that and it was why I had sought out the red box with my precious money.

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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25 Oct 2017 23:59 #256378 by Varys
Like several of you, I learned how to play plain D&D back in the early 80s. My friends were already into the Expert blue box when I joined. Hilariously, we all played like 6-7 characters each, and I thought that was perfectly normal. I loved the sets in that series, and I still have them and my characters in a box in my basement along with those old dice you had to fill the cracks in with the crayon that came in the box. I don't think we ever got to the black Master set though.

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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26 Oct 2017 08:50 #256383 by charlest
In middle school, sometime around 96, the huge brand new Barnes and Noble in the area had this little magazine sized book in the fantasy section. It was a Free AD&D adventure module that was just a few pages. It literally had the words FREE big and bold in the corner and I had to make sure it was actually free before leaving the store (was worried they would think I was stealing it).

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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26 Oct 2017 09:01 #256384 by Shellhead

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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