I Started The D&D 40th Anniversay Bloghop Challenge...

But I just couldn't finish it. There were too many that would have wound up being, "See previous entry", "I don't know" or "Meh." So I'm going to turn this last post into a "What I've Learned From D&D" post.

I've never played anything other than BECMI in grade school and junior high, 1e in high school and a smattering of a few 3e sessions because my buddy needed another player. Never touched 2e, and I bought the Rules Cyclopedia but we never got a game going. I went through the nearly mandatory "D&D sucks so bad, play a real rpg" phase, but got over it. I went through the total nostalgia phase. As of right now I have no strong opinion  one way or the other about classes, hit points, armor class, saving throws or anything else. I really don't like alignments, but that's a personal preference and not anything against morality systems. If I were to play D&D again I'd likely pick Neutral and be done with it.

Looking back on my early play experiences with D&D, they're so far in the past that I really can't say how much different I play now. I was 10 years old when I started, so obviously my games were very sophisticated both in play and content. Certainly, with my love of games like Fate Core, I've transitioned to a more narrative focus - but from my perspective that's been a long-term tweaking of my play preferences and not any kind of transformation. Piecing together memories of various games, I can see that I took away from D&D an appreciation for figuring out the best way for the rules to serve what was going on within the game. Making rolls against ability scores and finding new uses for saving throws in lieu of having a skill system come to mind. The rules didn't cover every single situation, so we extended them as best as we could in a way that made sense.

Yet even those experiences, while interesting from an academic perspective, don't eclipse what D&D ultimately gave me: a common vernacular and cultural identity, and a whole hell of a lot of fun. In the end, I think the lifelong fun is the single biggest thing D&D has given me.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 5

I honestly have played very little D&D, I mostly ran it. That means that over the course of a couple years, the small group of players that I had got themselves up to whatever the maximum level was as we moved from Basic to Expert to Companion to Master (I'm not sure we ever did Immortal). However, I did play in an AD&D game where I played a Paladin named Felice who, after the class appeared in Dragon Magazine, became a cavalier. She was inspired by the iconic paladin picture, as well as another one that I can't find that I think had a fully armored female paladin on a horse (it was possibly Elmore or Caldwell).

You know the one

Felice made it I think up to 18th level or so. The DM wasn't nearly as much of a douchebag as a lot of DM's I've heard about regarding paladins. She strove to maintain her code, followed all of the rules, and stood up for what was actually right. We even had the "you find young evil creatures" dilemma, which if I remember right was dealt with by putting them in the care of the church. The debate that followed was along the lines that half-orcs could be good, so if the creatures we found - orcs I believe - were raised by the pious they could learn to control their chaotic tendencies and be good as well. Either way, Felice refused to hold them accountable for their parent's evil and insisted that she would slay anyone who hurt them (and, by that time armed with a holy avenger and probably at least +3 plate, the threat wasn't idle). For 14-15 year olds, this was pretty philosophical stuff.

The other factor about this character that probably stands out is that she was a woman, especially considering that I was a teenager. There was some disagreement about whether or not a woman could be a paladin, until I pointed out Joan of Arc (I was a moderately erudite kid). Ribbing ensued about wanting to play a girl, but the DM - who was older - okayed it. Felice was my first real encounter with "character concept". I had envisioned the character as a "her", I had inspiration from a book I was reading with a strong female character (it may have been one of the Julian May books, who did have a character named Felice, but I'm not sure), and my ability rolls had set me up for a paladin. I likely would have made a female whatever regardless. In the end, to me it didn't matter if the character was a he or a she, and I didn't see any issues with being male and portraying a female. Of course, it probably helped that she was a paladin - it allowed for me to sidestep any potentially (for my age and maturity level) squicky issues about romantic entanglements, and I'm sure that I mostly portrayed her as a dude with long hair and boobs. Miraculously, our group also dodged the bullet of any players or DM trying to introduce any problematic behaviors or situations as well - my experiences with perverted (or just plain sick) players wouldn't come until after high school.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 4

For this post, I'm supposed to tell the tale of the first dragon that was slain playing D&D.

The problem is, I can't freaking remember. It's been over 30 years, and there's just no way.

Piecing together memories of how our adventures played out, and the fact that I got the boxed sets kind of in pace with characters levelling, I'd have to say that officially the first dragon would have been while playing through X1, Isle of Dread. There might have been a white dragon before that, but the memories are just too damn fuzzy.

Looking at this (awesome) walkthrough map, it was most likely a green dragon because that's what's shown. But it might not have been.

I mostly remember dinosaurs, lots of dinosaurs

So, this one is going to have remain a mystery for the ages.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 3

Going back to Keep on the Borderlands being part of my experience when I first starting playing D&D, the Caves of Chaos were the first dungeon that I ever ran anyone through.

This map brings back memories, but it's missing the pencil marks and crayon

The memories are pretty hazy about how it actually went down, but I do know that at the time we didn't have any real concept of "out of character" knowledge. Having run through the map so many times when we were playing D&D "wrong", my singular player knew everything pretty well - where the orcs were, where the treasure was, where the secret doors were. It was a total cake-walk, but the one thing that was different were the interactions with NPCs and monsters. I now had the notion that the other characters were supposed to be played....that they could take their own actions, that the PCs could talk to them. It wasn't Oscar-winning stuff, but it was something. This, combined with following examples from the rulebook, meant that not every monster was necessarily fought - some were tricked, some were avoided (because before we thought you had to go to every room in number order - true story!). Playing D&D right also meant that now characters were leveling up, and started us down the path of maintaining some kind of continuity. Since I was writing a lot at the time, I think this was the beginning of writing down our character's adventures as fiction, as well as taking various D&D modules and writing fictional accounts of other characters.

But the one thing that looking back at all of this has reminded me is that we really did play to have fun, rules-be-damned. There wasn't any kind of "Well, even when I was eight years old we role-played and we did everything right." Fuck no...we played using OOC knowledge, had totally stupid implausible things happen, fudged die rolls, and did damn near everything that most adults (even me) would consider "bad gaming." And we had a blast doing it.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 2

So, as I said in the first challenge post, I was "introduced" to Basic D&D by the next door neighbor kid. In a way, he's the first one I introduced D&D to properly because he was who I played with once I actually figured out what the fuck was going on in that crazy game. We replayed through Keep on the Borderlands, properly, although I don't remember what his character was. I do remember that we eventually came to the conclusion that losing characters sucked, so once he rolled up his third or fourth - an Elf I believe - he was able to get that character through subsequent sets up to Immortal. By that time I had branched out into other roleplaying games - including AD&D and Traveller. Unfortunately, divergent paths once I got into high school (plus a number of other factors) meant that I started playing with other people.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge: Day 1

I haven't touched any flavor of D&D in a number of years, but I figured that I'd throw in for this one because it would be interesting to revisit some memories.

I was introduced to D&D - specifically the Basic set - by my next door neighbor and childhood best friend, Richie. He had gotten the boxed set for Christmas (I want to say 1979 or so), but he was a couple of years younger than me and couldn't make heads or tails of it. I had heard of the game, even seen it a couple of times in the used science fiction bookstore my dad used to take me to called The Magic Door. He had never been willing to shell out the cash for the game, but I did have some experience with a number of microgames that he had bought me. So when Richie asked me to help him figure out how to play, I figured (in my 8 or 9 year old way) that I had a handle on it.

We were pretty wrong, and it took until I got my own set when I was 10 or 11 to actually figure out how to play and what was going on. In the interim, we drew on the maps and tried to play it like a boardgame. We "played" through Keep on the Borderlands over and over again. I don't remember anything about what characters we used. In all, it was a pretty abortive attempt by a 9 and a 7 year old at trying to puzzle out Basic D&D on our own.