D&D@40 Blog Hop: Day 7

Day 7: First D&D Product you ever bought. Do you still have it?

 

I know I've mentioned on this blog before that I never played Basic D&D when I was a kid. We jumped into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons right from the start, with the good old First Edition books.

 

However, that didn't stop me from exploring the Basic side of things. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the first D&D product I ever bought was the "Black Box" Basic D&D set. I followed my purchase of the Black Box with what most would probably consider a far superior acquisition: the Rules Cyclopedia.

 

Even though I bought these items, I never used them. Well, I think I did use the paper minis that came with the Black Box for some of our AD&D games, but we never used the Basic Rules. I think I'm like a lot of gamers when it comes to buying games I never wind up using. 

 

I've managed to hold on to the Rules Cyclopedia and a portion of the Black Box stuff. I still have the DM screen (seen in the picture above) with tabbed inserts, as well as the rule book and the paper minis. The box and game board are long gone, however.

I just used the Black Box paper minis for my recent roleplaying ventures with my kids. Isn't it a wonderful-strange feeling, to use some old gaming stuff from your youth with your own kids? The cycle continues...

D&D@40 Blog Hop: Day 6

Day 6: First character death. How did you handle it?

 

You know, maybe I'm just too old for this blog hop. Because I'm having a hard time remembering some of this stuff. Or maybe I just "had too much college" in my late teens and early 20's, if you know what I mean. Sadly, I remember the traumatic events of my childhood more clearly than the good stuff. Post-traumatic stress and all that. 

 

Anyway...first character death? Okay, first of all, I have to admit that my original D&D group, when I was a kid, was entirely composed of guys averse to character death. That includes your humble servant. I guess there goes the last of whatever little "OSR cred" I had, if I ever had any to begin with. 

 

Yeah, unlike a lot of gamers of the old-school mentality, the kids in my teenaged gaming group rarely let the dice "fall where they may." Yes, there was damage dice fudging. Basically, characters who got dropped to zero hit points or less were knocked out, and usually nursed back to full health faster than you could say "healing potion."

 

So our TPKs back in the day were "total party knock-outs." I guess we decided that monsters would just wander away after they put us to sleepy-time.

 

Whatever, don't judge. We were kids, and furthermore we were kids that wanted to be heroes, if only in our imaginations. And the heroes we saw in comic books, TV shows, movies, and novels didn't die. They just had "setbacks." That's what getting chopped down to 0 HP was: a setback. Sometimes a major one, as often you would awaken to find some of your cool stuff gone.

 

Anyway, I'm rambling. So, yeah, PC death was rather rare for me as a kid. I vaguely remember a paladin dying (as I've written about before, I have a soft spot for paladins). He might have been killed by another player character, actually. Other than that...it's all foggy!

One thing's for sure, I definitely handled it better than old Marcie:

D&D@40 Blog Hop: Day 5

Day 5: First character to go from 1st level to 20th level (or highest possible level in a given edition)

 

Sorry folks. I've never taken a character to 20th level/the highest possible level in a given edition. I guess I'm just a lover of low-levels! To compensate for your disappointment, here's a picture of a cute elf couple (so there's something for the ladies AND the gentlemen):

D&D@40 Blog Hop: Day 4

Day 4: First dragon you slew (or some other powerful monster)

I'm giving a trick answer to this one: the first powerful monster I slew was my fear of Dungeons & Dragons.

 

As I've written about before, my mother was once a very devout follower of the Baptist church. In her well-meaning attempt to save the souls of her children, she adopted a very hardline stance against anything the church told her was evil. This included things like rock music and Dungeons & Dragons. Our church even sponsored events such as a visit from a speaker who gave a lecture about the many insidious ways in which Satan attracts youth to the yawning pit of Hell. He pointed to the use of "backward masking" to embed messages about Satan in music, witchcraft symbolism on album covers to signify pacts a band had struck with the Devil in exchange for commercial success...and magic spells and depictions of demons in D&D.

 

You know where this is going. Sure enough, the Jack Chick "Dark Dungeons" pamphlet was part of my mom's arsenal to "scare me straight." Like any little kid (the indoctrination started before I was a teenager), I looked up to and trusted my parents without question. If my mom said something was evil and would cause me to suffer eternal torment, that was the truth.

 

Of course, as we get older, we realize (for good or ill) that our parents are indeed human, with the foibles and failings to which we are sometimes vulnerable. My mother meant well, but as I grew I came to chafe under the strictures of the Baptist dogma. I just couldn't believe that I had to live in fear of a game.

 

Still, when my good friend Pat (who introduced me to the hobby) showed me his 1E AD&D books, I remember a moment where I had a thrill of fear. Here were the books I was told were a veritable gateway to damnation! The old church training lingered for a while. But as I read through the books, played the game, and realized that I wasn't being compelled to try and cast "real spells," I left the slain corpse of the "fear monster" behind.

So, has anyone else had to overcome a personal religious aversion to D&D? Have you had to endure the persecution of others for playing the game? I'd love to hear from you!

D&D@40 Blog Hop: Day 3

Day 3: First dungeon you explored as a PC or ran as a DM

Contrary to the stereotype of D&D as a game focused on dungeon exploration, from my very first experiences with the game I mostly found myself running and playing in wilderness/surface-based campaigns. As a kid, we were more often tromping around the countryside seeking adventure. I guess that was just a quirk of my own group growing up. Yeah, there wasn't a ton of dungeon in our Dungeons & Dragons back then. You'd think that was counter-intuitive, right? Given the perception that dungeons are more contained, and therefore easier to run, than wilderness encounters.

 

I'm pretty sure the first real exposure I had to any dungeon of considerable size was Undermountain. I remember seeing the cover illustration (see above) and feeling a strong evocation of what some in the RPG blogosphere call "the mythic underworld." Look at the snaking corridor of arched doorways, and the shadowy creature lurking in the distance! Awesome, right?

 

Over the last couple years, since my return to roleplaying, I've made an effort to run some more dungeon encounters, but nothing approaching the underground marathons I've read about on blogs. What about you: have you ever been in a group that wasn't particularly fond of dungeon-delving when playing D&D, or at least didn't have a lot of dungeon time in general?

D&D@40 Blog Hop: Day 2

Day 2: First person you introduced to D&D? Which edition? Their first character?

 

Well, I introduced my wife and a couple friends to Basic D&D in a cabin while on vacation a while back, and posted about it here. Now, all three of them were pretty much just trying it out as a one-shot, "let's see what all this is about because Anthony is nuts about it" kinda deal. It really wasn't anything they would every really want to do again, and that's all good.

 

But last night I introduced my son and daughter to D&D through Mentzer's Red Box (see the picture above), and it was very cool, and a little surreal. I mean, when you're a kid playing D&D like I was back in the 1980's, you're not sitting there thinking "I can't wait to introduce my own kids to this game!" Well, at least I personally wasn't daydreaming about it back then.

 

Anyway, yeah, so I've been talking to my kids for a few weeks now about D&D, and finally sat down with them (my son is five and my daughter is seven) to roll up some characters and play a bit. Now, given their ages, I wasn't really a stickler for every rule, especially when it came to my son. He wanted to be a magic-user, and I didn't get too deep into the limitations of spells for a traditional 1st-level D&D magic-user. He insisted that his character had a spell that would teleport bad guys into a nearby volcano. Who was I to argue with that? I told him that the spell made him really tired to he had to rest his character (who he named Wizo Wizo) for a while after he cast it.

 

My daughter really likes Korra from the latest Avatar series, so she wanted to be a fighter (who she named Wissia). She and Wizo Wizo the wizard are young friends who live in a town called Three Streams. The town is nestled in the foothills of some mountains and is, you guessed it, surrounded by three streams (once again, see the pic above for the map I drew for them...they added in the sun and a giant they called "Crusher").

 

Well, suffice to say that my kids were really liking D&D and didn't want to stop for the night. We went to be and, in the morning, it turns out they woke up before me and my wife and broke out the D&D stuff on their own, and were playing it on their own! Ah, warms this old gamer's heart! Here's to the next generation!

 

P.S. At one point over the last couple weeks, when my kids were asking over and over what one does during a D&D game session, I tried my best to explain it to them. They sorta got it, but then I tried to make it easier on them by saying "You can also think of it like an episode of Adventure Time." I'm not so sure how good an idea that was, but since the show's creator is apparently inspired by D&D, it was the best way I could think of to encapsulate it for them and frame it in something they are familiar with...

D&D@40 Blog Hop: Day 1

OK, it's February, kids! Time for the D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge! For the full list of participating blogs, head over to d20 Dark Ages and take a look! Now, on to my Day 1 post:

 

Day 1: First person who introduced you to D&D? Which edition? Your first Character?

I know I've mentioned this before on the blog (at least in my RPG testimonial), but my good friend Pat introduced me to D&D when I was around 13 (in the late 80's), and we were pretty much best friends at the time. My mom was horrified, since she was hard-core born-again Christian. In fact, she succeeded in convincing the young me, for a while, that D&D would send my immortal soul screaming into Hell when I died. Ah yes, I was raised with a healthy dose of divine fear.

 

But Pat, a devout Catholic, didn't seem to have any church-sanctioned, parent-induced fear of D&D. And he persisted in talking to me about it, and over time I finally decided to, you know, think for myself and agreed that D&D wasn't some Satan-crafted tool for collecting souls.

 

Pat had the First Edition AD&D books with the orange spines, so that was my first version of D&D (not Basic).

 

As for my first character, I can't say I remember, actually. But I know I was fond of paladins back in the day, and I know I played a few of them in my time.

 

Well, that's all for my first post! I'm off to read some other blogs!